And now for something completely different.

When I started this site, I had intended to include coverage of the changing media landscape and it’s affect on the country and society. I grew up loving broadcasting, TV and radio, and when other kids wanted to be doctors or whatever, I very specifically wanted to be a late night TV host. I had the good fortune to know quite a few people who worked in local TV and radio when I was younger, however, and let’s just say that my love for broadcasting was overridden by my love for actually making a living wage.

But I will connect broadcasting, the future of media, Formula 1, and the future of democracy! I promise!

Follow @KevinYeaux.com on Bluesky

As you know if you are also an F1 fan, Apple took over U.S. broadcasting rights for F1 this year from ESPN/Disney. This past week was the second race of the season in China, and overall I would judge Apple TV positively. American F1 fans had two options previously to watch the sport: ESPN aired Sky Sports UK simulcasts of F1 sessions on their cable channels, along with occasional broadcasts on Disney-owned corporate sibling ABC. Fans that wanted more options could subscribe to F1TV, the sport’s owned-and-operated streamer, which cost around $100 a year for full access to all sessions, 4K stream quality, and onboard cameras along with a separate commentating crew and on-air pre-and-post show talent. Apple kept F1TV alive in the U.S. and primarily airs their content on their Apple TV main app, as well as providing access to the Sky Sports commentary and feed.

Nonetheless, the move of a (albeit in America minor) sport to streaming only signals another death blow to traditional broadcast TV, at a time when media consumption continues to splinter. One major concern for F1 fans and those of us who want to see the sport continue to grow is exposure. The previous ESPN deal allowed F1 to be viewed on cable (which just under half of American households still subscribe to) and occasionally on broadcast TV, which exposed the sport to people who had maybe never seen it before or only heard of F1 from the popular Netflix reality show Drive to Survive. The Apple deal isn’t unusual internationally - the UK, the spiritual and literal home of F1, has the sport behind a significant paywall through a Sky Sports subscription. But that can be done with a very popular sport, like we do with much of the NFL in America, and not so much with a sport that is relatively niche but growing like F1 is in the U.S.

There may yet be solutions to that for Formula 1. Already, Apple has announced a deal with Netflix to air the Canadian Grand Prix to their subscribers. I would not be surprised for Disney (which has a historically close relationship with Apple) to announce a deal for some of the American races and/or the famous Monaco Grand Prix to air on ABC, free-to-air, as they did when most races aired on their corporate sibling ESPN. If those don’t materialize, it will be a strong test for whether we are truly in a post-broadcast era: can F1 increase their viewership behind a paywall based on social media clips and on-demand streaming races?

There is a bigger societal impact to the move away from linear television broadcasting and towards algorithmic on-demand streaming services. There have been hundreds of articles bemoaning the loss of “water cooler TV,” when people would all watch the same few TV shows and discuss them the next day. Truthfully that still exists - most people are getting their streaming recommendations from other people, after all - but what is missing is the ability to discover and see things you normally wouldn’t watch. To be exposed to sports or TV or news that you wouldn’t self-select. To those of us that grew up loving broadcasting, the curation is part of the charm. It’s also part of what binds a society together. Not that we are all watching the same thing, but it’s that people are getting exposed to music and cultures other than what they normally select.

The controversy around the Super Bowl halftime show is an example of this. There were some that freaked out because they are right-wing agitation professionals and that’s just what they do. Yet others genuinely aren’t used to seeing or watching anything that doesn’t instantly agree with them and their worldview. In a previous decade making fun of (or grousing about) the Super Bowl halftime show was a tradition itself, now people simply tune it out and view their own. And that’s for one of the few major TV events that continues to dominate the national stage.

On a darker note you can also take President Trump’s announcement of the war on Iran. During the last major war two decades ago, President Bush dominated national TV with speeches and the national TV networks covered the war in prime time. With this war, Trump issued a video statement on his own social media service in the middle of the night. Americans are freer than ever to curate their own exactly tailored TV and radio broadcasts, with only the information they want to hear and tuning out the news or culture they don’t. That is allowing some to be more polarized and live in an alternative universe, and more significantly it is causing many Americans to be able to tune out the news altogether. It’s also bad in other ways beyond information silos. Without trusted media sources, for example, it becomes harder for many people to assess the truth.

Take weather broadcasting, for example. One trend as local news stations face massive cuts is for major broadcast meteorologists to go it alone and launch their own YouTube and websites. With far lower overhead, they can provide more live-saving weather content without the constraints of a typical TV station. This has been a success story moving away from traditional media to continuing local journalism in the new era. But they also are on an even playing field with YouTube grifters - often not meteorologists at all - who get massive views on playing up model runs for clickbait. It’s easy to see who to trust right now as many of these meteorologists came from local TV and have a brand themselves, but in ten or twenty years, will the average person who goes on YouTube to learn about the snowstorm they heard about know how to differentiate between them?

Media literacy is often brought up as the answer to this, and I don’t disagree. Right now there is a massive lawsuit against social media companies, which has often been compared to the lawsuits against the tobacco companies in the ‘90s. I’m not taking a side on that case: I broadly think the issue isn’t social media but the people behind the keyboard. But just as the Tobacco Master Settlement of the ‘90s forced the cigarette manufacturers to spend billions on education campaigns about their products, if there is an analog, perhaps funding a nationwide school-level campaign on media literacy would be a positive outcome. Of course as a libertarian, I then get into the second-order implementation issue: who would actually create the curriculum, and would you trust this government or the social media companies themselves to do it?

As a product, I do think there are improvements that can be made to the streaming services as well. Ironically one of the best streaming services for this is HBO Max, which continues to air HBO’s linear content through both cable and the streamer. So you can tune into HBO and watch whatever is on. But as soon as a show starts to air on the linear stream, it goes live on-demand as well. Apple would be well suited to this as well, their Apple TV service has a smaller back catalog and a few live sports like F1, soccer, and baseball. They could do their own 24/7 sports network (which they do ironically with Apple Music 1 on their Apple Music service) and still have the on-demand component as a best of both worlds scenario. Each major TV network has an associated streamer (ABC/Hulu, CBS/Paramount, NBC/Peacock) that sorta does this, except in most cases the content isn’t available same day or live streams are restricted due to cable and broadcaster contracts.

I’m not of the opinion that live, linear TV broadcasting has to die nor should it. It’s part of a national and societal identity. That doesn’t mean it has to force conformity in any way, actually the opposite: social media and streaming, rather than it’s intention to create and platform new voices to everyone, puts many Americans deeper in an information silo. In the end, there will be platforms that recreate what was successful about mass media of old while adapting to on-demand and niche content that still allows a wide audience to get a window into the world together. It probably won’t be the media conglomerates of yesterday, and it won’t be the social media algorithms of today, but it will be something new and will be a part of what comes out of this era of America.

It’s a bad year for non-interventionists.

For the second time in three months, what would normally be a presidency-defining military conquest has become a weekend story. Iran’s longtime near-messiah-like Supreme Leader Khamenei is dead, as are senior officials throughout the Iranian regime. With that comes the complicated headlines when a dictator is overthrown. Like with Maduro, and going back further to leaders like Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, there should be no equivocation about the evilness of their regimes - and no false equivalencies between those absolute dictatorships and our troubles in the west with authoritarian populists.

Many within the media and in non-interventionist circles are pointing out the disconnect between the president’s campaign message of “no new wars” and having launched more new wars than any president since Bush. You could write that off as simply a Trump lie - another of hundreds. But this is a little different than his out and out lies. It’s become very clear throughout the second term foreign policy that Trump sees a “war” as something different than what you or I might see it as. Trump sees a “war” as a military occupation, a boots-on-the-ground combat operation. Many non-interventionists and anti-war candidates flocked to Trump as one of the most vocal modern opponents of the Iraq and Afghan wars that dominated the 2000s, but it was not the war that Trump criticized. It was how it was carried out. Many of us pointed out that Trump’s criticism of the Bush-era wars were not that we went in the first place, but that we didn’t fight hard enough, we didn’t exploit them for their natural resources, and we tried to build a democracy rather than focusing mainly on stability.

This is the essence of a cohesive Trump Doctrine. America has the military might to push other countries into doing what we want. Unlike the old adage of “speaking softly and carrying a big stick,” Trump believes in using the stick of our military to threaten and coerce traditional allies and enemies alike into getting what he wants. Sure, this is not exclusive to Trump, much of the Cold War was fought the same way. The difference with Trump is that because he doesn’t care about the rule of law, he doesn’t care about (or particularly like) democracy, he has vastly increased authority and is taken more seriously than previous presidents. And in his mind, this is a good thing - they were “idiots,” he is the only one who is willing to act to “defend America.” He is an authoritarian, and he is unfortunately far from alone in seeing the ability to single-handedly make decisions without political or popular input as an advantage of authoritarianism.

The Trump Doctrine has other advantages politically and strategically for him. Unlike the nation-building Bush Doctrine, Donald Trump doesn’t want to invade countries with hundreds of thousands of American troops. Like in Venezuela, surgical strikes to take out leaders is used to eliminate those opposed to him and threaten those that remain. He doesn’t care if the remaining government is still a horrific dictatorship, as long as they obey him and what he wants. That makes stability much easier than Bush’s ill-fated attempts at building multi-cultural democracies in the Middle East. It also makes the wars seem much farther off and irrelevant to Americans. Bush’s approval ratings began to tank as more and more Americans were sent to Iraq, because the war touched everyone. Trump is banking on Americans seeing the “wisdom” of his strategy, eliminating household named enemies like Iran and Venezuela without mass American casualties.

Ironically the modern president with the most similar viewpoint on military strikes was Donald Trump’s arch nemesis, Barack Obama. Obama similarly campaigned as an anti-war candidate, and was criticized heavily from the left and libertarians for stepping up bombing campaigns across the Middle East, opening a new front in Libya, and the infamous drone strike campaign. However unlike Trump, Obama at least paid lip service to the rule of law and Congress’ war authority. While many (including myself at the time) criticized him for not seeking Congressional authority in Libya, he did seek authorization for a potential campaign against Assad in Syria after the dictator crossed his self-described “red line” by using chemical weapons against rebelling Syrians. Congress never approved that authority, and Assad continued in office for another decade.

The right-wing press saw Obama’s failure to do anything as a capitulation, a sign he was a weak-kneed leader who refused to defend America. Never mind the authorization he sought was voted down primarily by the right (including, to be clear, libertarians and non-interventionists which I supported). This is the key difference between the Obama and Trump Doctrines. While they both relied on targeted military operations against specific targets instead of wholesale nation-building, Trump has little care for international agreement, or his own constitutional restrictions in war authority. This advantages him, since other nations now know that he can and will use the American military to get what he wants. They can not rely on the slow and hesitant Congress to hold up potential action.

There will be those who read this as a defense of the “Trump Doctrine,” and that is not the case. As I wrote after the Venezuelan invasion, war authority belongs to Congress because in a democracy, war authority belongs to the people. Trump didn’t seek support from the American people to commit the country to two separate military interventions, and early polling shows the American people (that are aware of what’s going on - a separate issue in our fragmented media world) largely oppose him in this endeavor. But if he ”succeeds” (even short term) with Iran, he won’t stop with Iran and it is important to understand how his administration is thinking about their own military actions.

As I wrote back then, being a non-interventionist can easily slip into defense of incumbent authoritarian regimes around the world, and I can’t stand that lack of nuance among some particularly on the far-left and far-right libertarian world. You can support the Iranian people’s fight for freedom, the Venezuelan people’s fight for freedom, etc. without supporting a military invasion or decapitating strikes. I came into libertarianism through anti-war activism in the late 2000s, and I still fundamentally belief that the issue with using the military and violence in favor of “democracy and freedom” is that when chaos and violence occurs, it’s very hard to stop and rarely does freedom and democracy win out of the fog of violence and chaos.

Follow @KevinYeaux.com on Bluesky

Well, that escalated quickly.

President Trump’s brazen invasion and self-described “kidnapping” of Venezuela’s dictator is one thing I didn’t have on my bingo card for 2026, I’ll admit. Gone, apparently, are the months of persuading the public before a major military offensive. Dick Cheney must be looking up at us, pissed: he didn’t even need to lie about their evidence of weapons of mass destruction. You can just do what you want, apparently. He may as well have sold naming rights: called it Operation Iraqi Freedom brought to you by Halliburton.

I’m not an expert on Venezuelan politics, and I won’t pretend to even begin to guess what comes next. What I can say is that whatever comes next, we now own it. If we end up backing the remaining Maduro regime in exchange for oil rights, we own the absolute and devastating betrayal of the Venezuelan pro-democracy opposition. Apparently all because of the Nobel Peace Prize - literally. If we commit troops on the ground to keep order, keep a favored regime in power, or defend the oil rights we somehow believe we have, we will unbelievably, after just four years since leaving Afghanistan, be back in an occupation and land war. And if we do nothing, bury our heads in the sand, and Venezuela falls apart, we will own that too.

This is the crime that happened, from the American legal and democratic perspective. The oft-maligned statements by Democratic leaders about not being notified sound like whining to both defenders of Trump and those who want to call for his ouster. And that’s because Jeffries and Schumer can’t message to save their lives. But the Founders designated Congress in Article I to declare war for a reason. The War Powers Resolution strengthened, not weakened, Congress’ role after decades of it being eroded after World War II. These laws exist precisely to prevent a president from single-handedly committing the United States to a massive, region-changing conflict without so much as a debate.

We can’t take back what Trump decided to do on Friday. We can’t hand Maduro back and say “oopsies.” If Congress decided today to impeach and convict Trump and Vance and end this mess, we’d still have to figure out how to handle Venezuela moving forward because it already happened. Without a debate, without popular support, just one man deciding for us all. That’s exactly what is not supposed to happen here. When opposition figures appear on media this week, they should not be talking about “notifying Congress” or the War Powers Resolution. Low information voters will simply roll their eyes, that’s just bureaucracy. What they should be talking about is that Donald Trump promised no new wars, no nation building, and instead he committed American troops to a new occupation without asking the public - which he is constitutionally required to do. He violated the constitution, and he did it because he knew it would be unpopular to break campaign promises to his own voters.

There are videos of Venezuelan people both in the country and in the U.S., ecstatic that Maduro is gone. I certainly can’t blame them. Maduro and Chavez before him were totalitarian dictators that exploited genuine economic and political concerns in the country to enrich themselves and create a totalitarian police state. Trump has made clear concern about democracy and civil liberties played no part in his decision to remove Maduro - he has said it’s about revenge for their nationalization of American-owned oil assets, and I suspect also because he believes it will allow him to more easily deport Venezuelans who are in America. His shoving aside of the pro-democracy opposition in favor of Maduro’s deputy leader and existing government, at least for now, is another sign of how little he values or cares about democracy in Venezuela.

The likely opening of an ongoing conflict or occupation in Venezuela, and potential expansion of American troops across the hemisphere, opens up another question I often get about non-interventionism. I became a libertarian during the height of the Iraq war. Anti-interventionism has been a key foreign policy component of most of the candidates I’ve worked for. And yet I’ve also been critical of some “anti-interventionist” libertarians for their blind spot towards Russia and China.

“But Kevin,” I have literally been asked this week, “how can you oppose ‘freeing’ Venezuela if you support arming and supporting Ukraine?”

I do not support direct ground and air involvement in Ukraine, generally speaking, but I do support material and military support for the besieged country. It is becoming clearer and clearer that China and Russia see a world in which they control their regions either directly or through military and economic blackmail. This would result in an expansion of illiberal authoritarianism that poses the biggest threat to human liberty since the forced expansion of communism. Too many libertarians are afraid to admit or say that, either because they harbor pro-Russian sympathies through “alt-media” depictions of the country as anti-American imperialist or anti-“left”, or because they are too afraid of what that would commit America (and Europe) to militarily.

And I understand the latter. Deeply. I advocated for the significant shrinking of the DOD budget back in my younger years, when our wars were the main disrupting events on the world stage. Unfortunately those disastrous wars on our part helped set the stage for Russia and China’s parallel playbook. Russia is not only a threat to Ukraine remaining free and democratic, but is flexing their (limited) military muscle against the democratic nations in eastern Europe as well. China is a clear and present danger to free Taiwan, and has been a malevolent force in Asia and Africa for decades now.

As we used to say, non-interventionist is not isolationist. It is in fact the interventionists that have isolated us. Our proactive military and intelligence intervention in foreign countries throughout the Cold War had the effect of propping up dictators, driving much of Asia and Africa into the hands of Russia and China’s influence. And can you blame them? In the context of 2026 it might seem crazy that the ruling party of Africa’s most important and liberal democracy defends Russia, but given that the Soviets supported them in their fight against Apartheid rulers financed and backed by the West until it became clear their government wouldn’t survive, it makes much more sense.

Non-interventionism shouldn’t mean eschewing alliances, when they are defensive and pro-democracy and human freedom in nature. This is controversial in non-interventionist circles, in which many historically are anti-NATO. Yet an alliance which projects defensive strength and reduces the chances of an invasion of a democratic nation by another shouldn’t be controversial. But again, interventionism has led to NATO’s core mission stretching from defensive to offensive in the previous few decades, atrophying their support and strengthening Russia and China’s PR campaign against it.

Those of us who preach non-interventionism must speak and work against our own government’s efforts to destabilize democratic countries and alliances, such as our increasing and unignorable threats to Greenland and Denmark. I believe that we should eschew intervening militarily in authoritarian countries, such as Trump’s comments about militarily supporting anti-regime protestors in Iran. I hope beyond all hope that those protestors finally end the horrific Iranian government, and the way to guarantee that fails is to allow it to become an American-backed coup.

We should also make clear that non-interventionism doesn’t have to mean allowing Russia and China to carve up the world, to take over democratic countries through force or otherwise. It can mean defending Taiwan and Ukraine, arming Europe, and keeping a new Cold War from turning hot. It also means preventing the American government from becoming an authoritarian superpower, and that starts right here at home. Donald Trump promised non-intervention - he was lying. We knew throughout the last decade that he was lying, he proved it in his first term, and many libertarians and non-interventionists naively believed him. A decade later, they are now learning how wrong they were.

I usually hate writing article titles. I feel goofy when I write them, like I’m trying to think of something that will catch attention on a newspaper when in reality, it’s going to appear on a Facebook feed between an AI-generated ad and someone complaining on a group about a car wash. Not this time: I wrote this title before actually writing the article. I think this describes how a lot of people have felt for the last few days, as the remnants of America’s first amendment has unraveled in very public fashion.

Someone was shot and killed for their speech. That should not go forgotten, nor should it be excused for any reason. It’s not a new phenomenon in our violent country’s history, either. I am not going to go into much about the events of last week here, for reasons that are probably obvious and will be explained further down. But it would be wrong of me to talk about the power of state to restrict speech without making clear that violence and mobs can also restrict speech, and that the role of the state is to protect individual rights to free expression. I hope that Americans can see our legal system work and bring his shooter to justice.

The role of the state is not, however, to restrict speech itself. The country’s history has been littered with attempts at doing this, only for either the courts or public opinion to bend toward greater individual freedom. What we are seeing today is not a “threat” to free speech, like we might have said at times earlier in this administration. We are seeing a wholesale end to free public political expression. For much of the last week, Republican governors, state officials, congressional representatives, and the Trump administration has publicly and privately demanded the firing of people who were deemed to have been disrespectful about the terrible events of last week, and have been talking about plans to target liberal institutions and organizations.

In January, the day before the inauguration, I wrote about the threat to our civil liberties that would come not directly from state violence or incarceration (though Trump is certainly not ruling that out) but from private actors, companies, and universities complying with the Trump administration to reduce speech and activism that opposes his government. Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening today. To be clear: this is not individual companies or groups of people choosing, by themselves, who to associate with. ABC/Disney did not choose, through their own concern, to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Their affiliate groups were threatened by their regulator! It is the clearest example of the state restricting freedom of speech as we’ve seen in decades.

The chilling effect of this is serious. People with the “wrong” views, those that run counter to the state narrative, those who believe in crazy things like the Constitution, human liberty, equality under the law, are already being run out of mass media out of fear of angering the administration, and are beginning to face personal consequences for participating in public social media. I’ve been a (very minor) public figure when it comes to politics my entire adult life, and I have never felt actually concerned about writing or publishing something. But none of us know where or who will report someone for “thoughtcrime,” and that’s a huge weight on everyone’s chest - an elephant, if you will.

Let me say upfront that I believe we should get rid of the midterm elections. No other major western democracy does a regularly scheduled national election every two years. It’s a big reason we are unable to solve many of our biggest political and policy issues, and it fails to seriously check the presidency, instead it’s a primary reason for the continuous growth of the power of the executive branch.

All that being said, we have the midterms and it’s unlikely we are getting rid of it constitutionally any time soon. Last week, both major parties stumbled into a rare good idea: to explore having a midterm political convention. DNC chair Ken Martin was apparently exploring the idea at the committee’s August meeting, in between doing dumb policy fights that a party national committee has no business dealing with. Someone ran to Donald Trump with the idea, who is now also interested in forcing the RNC to do the same.

Given that the midterm elections are more likely than not going to occur in the middle of the biggest electoral crisis of our lifetimes, with pro-Trump forces likely being deployed in major Democratic-dominated cities and attempting to suppress turnout, it’s actually pretty surprising that both parties seem to have accidentally stumbled upon a good idea. People complain about American voter turnout, but presidential turnout is right in line with much of the democratic world. What we are awful at is turning out in state, local, and midterm elections. Part of that is because we have too many damn elections, but without clear national candidates and party campaigns, the interest level of low-information voters is simply not going to budge.

Of course the party national conventions serve an actual legal function in presidential years, legally nominating the presidential ticket and formally starting the presidential campaign. (Thus my constant response to the complaint that our elections are too long: typical presidential conventions are the first week of September, giving us a two-month campaign, again only slightly longer than most European parliamentary campaigns.) This convention wouldn’t have that same importance, since each state nominates their candidates throughout the spring and summer. But it will function as the primary function of a modern convention anyway: to be a campaign launch, get free media, and frame the argument. I’d go a step farther and argue for debates between the main House leaders and thus Speaker candidates.

There are arguments against this, particularly that it will nationalize local races. Democratic House candidates in red districts are probably not going to look positively on a prime time address by more polarizing national Democratic figures. Incumbent Republican House members, defending against a negative mood in the country, will find it even more difficult to run against Trump if he’s delivering the keynote address. But these races are already nationalized… even reasonably informed voters are not watching House debates on local PBS stations, and everyone that is has already made up their mind who they are voting for. National conventions will at least be honest about what the Congressional races are: parliamentary elections that barring absurd gerrymandering are won and lost based on the national mood.

Good morning from Memphis International - though I have long believed you don’t get to call yourself an international airport if the only place you fly to is Toronto. I’m flying into D.C. today for ISMA’s Liberalism for the 21st Century conference.

One of the challenges of resisting popular authoritarianism is comprehending what an average person can do within their community to combat it. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by either state force (and it’s not lost on me that I’m writing this in a city currently occupied by federal forces) or, more subtly, by what feels like the sheer force of popular support for much of what Trump and his allies are doing. This doesn’t necessarily mean numerical support - Trump and his policies are deeply unpopular - but rather the rabid and vocal support from a significant minority of Americans.

That rabid and vocal support has created a force multiplier for Trump’s red-hatted minority of MAGA supporters across the country. There has been much discussion about major institutions complying with the Trump administration’s wishes, whether legally required or not. Some of this is due to the coercive nature of the state’s regulatory authority and its potential for abuse (another topic on which libertarians have long argued and are now being proven right). However, a significant portion of the reduction in widespread institutional resistance between the first and second terms can be attributed to an acceptance that this is what the American people want. Trump won the popular vote, media outlets that were previously Trump-friendly have become mainstream, and there is an idea that those who have consistently resisted Trump are now the outcasts, the odd ones out.

In vast areas of the country, this feeling is amplified by the fact that most people simply don’t encounter individuals who express different political opinions. I’ve long argued that the American tradition of “polite conversation,” avoiding topics like religion or politics with people who might hold different views, has hindered our ability to form well-informed opinions and comprehend diverse perspectives. This has been paired a long-standing trend of people living in communities that align with their political beliefs, further isolating themselves.

I’ll share a story from my time working on campaigns. In 2016, I was a door-to-door campaigner for a super PAC supporting a Republican presidential candidate. I was canvassing a suburban Des Moines street when I met an older lady, likely in her 70s or 80s. She was nice enough, but she told me quite bluntly that Barack Obama had stolen the 2012 election. Now my job was to gather voter intentions, not persuade people, but I found this conversation amusing so I decided to ask her more about it. She began pointing to every house on the street and claimed that all of them had voted for Mitt Romney, so there was no way there were enough votes across Iowa to elect Obama.

In her mind, this street represented a diverse and representative sample of Iowa voters. However, in reality, I had canvassed almost every door, which meant that almost all of them were active Republican voters who were likely to caucus. Therefore, they had voted for Romney. Of course, there were probably Obama voters on her street, but I’m willing to bet they didn’t advertise their support with signs or engage in political conversations. Consequently, she assumed they simply didn’t exist and that support for her political side was overwhelming.

Trump supporters have no issue with making sure you and everyone else is aware of their political beliefs. They wear MAGA hats, Trump t-shirts, and even put “I DID THAT” stickers on private property, despite Trump’s apparent opposition to graffiti. While their actions may be obnoxious, they seem to be effective. Low-information voters perceived a significant surge in support for Trump and opposition to Biden in their communities, leading them to believe that this represents the public sentiment.

On the other hand, liberals and libertarians often struggle to be as vocal about their messaging. During the No Kings protest in June, I was pleasantly surprised to see many familiar faces from around town. I proudly display my opinions and libertarianism, and no one seemed surprised to see me. However, I’ve also been repeatedly told by people I know from my job, the city I’ve come to know, and other sources that I’m one of the few anti-Trump voices they encounter regularly and trust. While that’s a kind thing to say, these individuals interact with people daily in their communities who oppose Trump and popular authoritarianism, but those people choose to keep their opinions private.

There are numerous reasons for this, all of which are understandable. You’re not going to see most pro-democracy activists with the level of obnoxious political messaging as you see on the MAGA side, and that’s okay. There are more effective and positive ways. The key lies in the significance of our presence. Pro-democracy activists should actively participate in city council meetings, zoning meetings (a lesson learned by YIMBYs over the years), school board and library meetings, and community events, farmers markets, and fairs.

Instead of solely focusing on flyering or persuasion, our primary objective should be to offer assistance and support. During my time working with a presidential primary campaign in 2012, the state leadership spent a lot of time mobilizing volunteers to various events. They provided opportunities to assist in tasks such as cleaning up, setting up tables, and generally being helpful. Churches that had members involved in the campaign extended their invitation for us to help at fairs. We did this not to hold up signs or talk about the candidate, but to raise visibility and make awareness that involved, positive people in the community supported this person. It encourages people to pay more attention to our message. It makes it more challenging for MAGA attacks on democracy and democratic activists to gain traction, since the public knows the people they are attacking instead of them being a faceless, nameless enemy. Additionally, it helps low-information voters recognize the genuine choices available in their communities. It also serves as an excellent recruitment strategy for individuals disillusioned with politics, demonstrating that it is not solely about shouting and chasing down voters.

This will necessitate a few things. Without a primary opposition leader in the U.S., our messaging needs to be clearer and more concise. Democrats and anti-Trump activists are struggling to find messaging that rivals MAGA’s “I did that” campaign, and I don’t have a solution for that. I’m an on-the-ground guy, not a marketer. Individuals can contribute, and I encourage everyone to get involved in their communities, but it’s more effective for organizations. If I were to run a county Democratic or Libertarian Party right now, I’d be actively participating in events and ensuring my logo is prominently displayed. Currently, the GOP holds a monopoly on local political discussions in huge swaths of the country, and the local parties that are active primarily focus on political events and campaigns. However, simply showing up every election and hoping for the best doesn’t work when you’re a minority ideology, as liberalism and libertarianism unfortunately are in most of the country.

Subscribe now

Author’s note: my apologies for a long gap in publishing, I was moving and my computer doesn’t work when it’s over 100F outside due to budget cuts, but I hope to be back to a regular cadence soon.

Also I will be attending the upcoming Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in Washington, D.C. next month, feel free to reach out on Bluesky if you will be there.

For what it’s worth, I still don’t think there’s any sort of “client list” or other extremely damning information in the unreleased Epstein files. However the actions of the Trump administration in the last week, from refusing to release any additional relevant information to lashing out at his own base, have made me question that assumption a bit. This is, without a doubt, a case of Trump’s base turning on him to an extent not seen since the immediate aftermath of January 6th, and this time the call is coming from inside the house. The ecosystem of right-wing podcasts, news channels, and online brainrot factories that backed Trump’s message throughout his sojourn in opposition are not letting up on this issue.

It’s unclear what would be more damaging politically at this point, if the DOJ is hiding information damaging to Trump in the files, or if there were nothing in the files at all. I’d still be skeptical about any substantial damage to Trump if anything came out of this about him. His relationship with Epstein is well known and documented. Trump has been accused of (and held civilly liable for) sexual assault, and admitted on tape to groping women in the now-famous October surprise tape. Trump’s right-wing ecosphere can wash away any sins it seems, and I’d find it hard to believe this would be the thing that would credibly bring him down. Not impossible - I’ve never seen the base this angry at Trump and Trump this angry at the base - but I can’t allow myself to imagine that could actually happen after all this time.

If there is credible evidence of wrongdoing by people other than Epstein and Maxwell, I hope it comes out though a proper and legal channel. Often forgotten in this political melee are the actual victims of, by all accounts, a horrific sex trafficking operation. We should also be cautious about releasing evidence from an investigation on individuals who were not themselves indicted. This is something that has traditionally been opposed by liberals and libertarians alike, as it undermines due process and the presumption of innocence. I want to take down Trump too - and believe it’s a core requirement of our continued liberal democracy - but we can’t sacrifice our liberal democratic values in response.

Let’s think about the more likely scenario then. The White House hasn’t released any additional information about the Epstein case because there isn’t any additional information about the Epstein case. They used the conspiracy to motivate potential voters because it perfectly matches their message - they are evil, they are out to get you, your children, even the straight frogs. Just who is on the Epstein client list changes depending on the audience on the left or right - sometimes it’s the Obamas and the Clintons, sometimes it’s Trump and a bunch of billionaires, and if you get a conspiracy nut with a bipartisan flair, it’s probably all of them - the illustrious “elites.”

Accusing your political opponents of wide-ranging crazy conspiracies, particularly involving children as victims, is nothing new or unique. Accusing an entire group of “elites” and institutions of being in on it is also not new. It happened in Germany - I’ll let you guess the time period - and it’s happened in populist-led uprisings across the world. It’s a hallmark of an illiberal movement, a way to get people who might not understand or care about the cultural or economic arguments they make to get behind them by building on a natural mistrust of institutions, the wealthy, the powerful, and the elite. But at it’s core, there must be a cover up. There must be a conspiracy of the all powerful, the people that make decisions that ruin your life. That is the core conceit of populism writ large - the elites, the rich, the powerful are evil.

It’s telling that even among the MAGA base that is upset at Trump, they are not upset at him because they think he might be in the Epstein files. For the most part, they concede that he probably is. There’s lots of photos and evidence that Trump and Epstein had a close relationship, and the Trump-aligned talking point is that they were both running in similar circles so of course they knew each other. They are upset because they think that Trump is not brave enough to reveal the conspiracy. They voted for him to take down the “elites” and now he is “protecting” them.

Because the worst possible outcome for the populist right is not that there is horrific evidence about Trump’s behavior in the files - it’s that there might not be proof that their own political enemies are evil, after all.

In the last few years, in the small city I live in, we have had a growing crisis. Thousands of people have flooded in, overcrowding the streets, dramatically spiking the cost of housing, most of them not working for a living. There have been lots of concerned citizens meetings, the city has created an affordable housing commission to try and navigate the housing crisis caused by this influx of people.

Who are these migrants, renting our housing, raising our costs?

They are out-of-state college students coming to study (and party) at the local university.

I’m not joking - the local housing crisis is all most locals can talk about, especially those of us who rent and are working on leases for the fall right now. My own rent has increased $900 in the last three years, $500 this year alone. So I’m not being facetious when I talk about the problems that increasing migration has on a city, nor am I blind to it.

Now think about how differently we address the issue when it’s (mostly wealthy) Americans moving within the country instead of migrants from another country. Yes, Americans have free movement rights within the country - as long as you’re not in Ron DeSantis’ “Free State of Florida” during COVID, that is. But no one is accusing groups of freshmen from California of “eating the cats,” and relatively few are arguing for more restrictions on allowing people to move here. Instead housing builds are increasing, and the city is reasonably working to improve and increase public infrastructure to accommodate.

I do believe that there is no fundamental right of a state to restrict migration in or out of their borders. That is not a popular sentiment, and it is not likely to win me a seat in Congress, I get that. Waves of anti-immigration sentiment, particularly in Western Europe, started with the fallout from the wars in the Middle East in the last few decades and America has always had complicated feelings about our immigrant population. And that is not to argue that large migration influxes don’t cause issues - and they can, no matter where the migrants are coming from, internally or externally. Here’s one thing I can tell you, though: you’d much rather live in the city or country that is growing and attracting migrants, than the one that is shrinking and losing them. (That’s something I fear America as a whole is about to discover.)

Believing that people have a fundamental human right to migrate where they want doesn’t mean governments can’t regulate some aspects of immigration. Yes, migrants coming into the country should be documented. Yes, we should maintain the ability to restrict certain extreme cases of criminals, high-risk terrorists, etc from entering. Yet we have to be mindful that even these fundamental limitations can and are being misused, as evidenced by the State Department canceling visas due to pro-Palestinian writings. Our northern neighbors having long imposed restrictions on even foreigners with past DUIs from entering Canada, which is a poor policy and deserves criticism as well. Libertarians are often criticized for rejecting any regulations, but as I often argue, when others see how regulations can help first, we see how they can be misused.

America already has strict migration restrictions. Ask anyone who has ever immigrated here through the legal processes. It is expensive, difficult, and most Americans would be shocked by how hard we make it. We have this horribly difficult process because loosening it is not politically popular. And yet it doesn’t work. The entire reason we have a huge underclass of “undocumented immigrants,” mostly people who overstayed travel or work visas, is because people are going to do what’s best for their family.

We can try and restrict migration here all we want, but as long as we have a need for migrant labor, people will come here with or without permission. You can build whatever fence you want: ask the UK and Australia - literally islands, mind you - about their undocumented migrant issues. Creating a much more permissive system that allows people to come here legally, be documented, settle, and contribute to civil life without fear of arrest and deportation is the only solution that will work long term.

And no, that’s not popular right now, evidenced by the fact that we’ve tried immigration reform for decades. It never passes because no one wants to be honest with the public. Voters generally wants less immigration, except for the immigrants they know. Some are okay with immigrants who do low-skilled jobs they don’t want to do, others only want “high-skilled” workers (often those that look like them, you’ll find). Politicians are still too afraid to be honest with the public: the only immigration reform that will work is reform that makes it easier to come here and work. That will lead to more immigration, and that is a good thing.

I hope you’ve spent the weekend brushing up on your fine motor skills.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is in charge of the current five-year plan, this week addressed concerns that an effective 50% tariff on imports from China, our largest high-tech manufacturing partner, would raise costs on consumers and cripple the economy by saying that Americans will be happy once we bring those manufacturing jobs to America.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not a super huge fan of assembling my own iPhone. Nor am I particularly enthused about a career in a job that literally involved nets to prevent people from jumping to their deaths. But Howard Lutnick is, as is Donald Trump and the entire administration.

There is a lot to the tariff policy, and no one goal. Donald Trump is an economic buffoon who prior to becoming president was a caricature of a rich businessman. He has argued for decades that America was getting screwed by countries with large trade imbalances. I’m not going to get into the details of trade “deficits” and how they are a complete non-issue, I’ll leave that to other great resources like Cato and AEI. But it’s clear that Trump believes in tariffs and always has. Tariffs also give Trump massive power in the economy, requiring other countries and companies to come to him and beg for exemptions. There was a time when Republicans would see government interference in the economy as a negative, but today it’s seen as the default and obvious choice to have one man deciding what Americans should eat, buy, and manufacture.

One of the biggest tariff goals, though, is to “create American jobs.” And this is a tough one, because it transcends partisanship. Left-wing politicians long argued against big free trade deals, from NAFTA to TPP, on the basis that other countries would “steal” American manufacturing jobs. That frustration helped led to the election of Barack Obama, who opposed NAFTA in 2008 but like many progressives found the light on free trade when they actually had to build and maintain a strong economy. That switch, and Clinton’s perceived openness to free trade agreements, helped narrowly elect Donald Trump the first time. The “hollowing out of American manufacturing” is a constant theme in election campaigns for literally as long as I’ve been alive. It should be no surprise that a true believer like Trump will win the voting base that believes America doesn’t manufacture anything anymore.

The reality is different, however. America manufactures a lot. Cars, housing, appliances, furniture, medical supplies, weapons - heck, we are GREAT at weapons, like that’s kinda our thing! What we have lost are lower cost, commodity items that tend to be lower revenue and have lower paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs associated. American manufacturing is expensive, largely because despite the common image of America, we are a high-wage, high-income economy. Part of the political fetishization of manufacturing jobs is the fact that kids coming out of school can get a factory job and make a middle-class income, in many cases much higher than what someone leaving college with a bachelor’s degree would be making.

Side note: That’s a false belief. While it’s true at the entry level, we know that American with college degrees make much more over a lifetime than those without, and manufacturing and labor jobs are hard work. The refrain being told to high schoolers that “you can just go into the trades and make more money than going to college” is frankly really detrimental to kids and our society as a whole, and shouldn’t be seen as a binary choice. The soft skills you learn in higher education are just as important in the trades as hard skills, and result in more successful tradesmen and careers.

What is the end result of a Trump industrialization policy? Put aside all of the other negative aspects of this week’s tariff announcement. If Trump succeeds at bringing widespread, low-skilled manufacturing back to the country, who benefits? The administration would tell you Americans would, and they should suffer through the pain to get these jobs back. But in a time of low unemployment, who will work them? We are making legal and illegal immigration here almost impossible. Much of the low-wage jobs, like slaughterhouses and meat processing, is already done using immigrant labor of various legality. So with less immigration to the U.S., those jobs will have to be filled as well as these new manufacturing jobs.

The answer is obvious: the Americans currently working higher-wage, higher-skilled service jobs. Given the administration’s continuous destruction of higher education, and the forced decoupling of the other western democracies from the United States, it seems clear that there is a future where instead of being a high-wage, highly educated service industry country - long taught as a goal of developed nations to achieve better economic outcomes and standards of living for their people - we will go backwards to a middle-power, middle-income manufacturing nation.

So better sharpen those repetitive motor skills this weekend. The factory with all the nets around the buildings will be hiring soon.

Do you feel liberated yet?

It’s been ten weeks.

I’ll be the first to admit that as dire as I believed a second term Trump administration would be, things are going much, much worse than I thought it would this early on. An unelected edgelord investor is illegally remaking the federal government in his image, under the incorrect guise of saving money and cutting bureaucracy. The economy is sputtering, which Trump claims is a necessary correction but in reality is a response to his economically illiterate on-again, off-again tariff and protectionist plans. The federal government is taking over and attempting to control the behavior of state-run public schools, colleges, and companies. Far from being “the party of small government,” the Trump-run GOP is expanding the federal government to control every aspect of our lives they believe we, as individuals, do wrong.

None of this is surprising. This was not a secret - Trump has been talking about remaking America into a more insular, less free, less prosperous nation for his entire career and certainly for the entirety of his 2024 campaign. Trump has surrounded himself in this term with extremely online nationalists who believe that the world is a zero sum game, and in order for America to “win” others must suffer. Even if those “others” are Americans themselves.

I wrote in October that while it warmed my little libertarian heart to see Kamala Harris campaigning on “freedom,” freedom has never turned out to be a popular or winning message in America. In general, most American voters see themselves as free as they can be, and associates any further push for freedom to mean allowing “the others,” whatever out or marginalized group they are afraid of, to gain more power and therefore cause “a ruckus” as our Secretary of State would say. It’s been a continuous challenge for broadly liberal politicians, from progressives to libertarians, to figure out how to message that more freedom for everyone means more freedom for YOU as well. It’s one they are rarely successful at but need to figure out quickly in the coming years weeks.

The reason I went on a spiel about freedom in this country is that Americans’ freedom has been drastically restricted in the last ten weeks, whether they all yet realize it or not. I haven’t written much since Inauguration Day partially due to time and work, and partially because there is so much happening it’s hard to focus on one issue. I wrote about the threats to DEI last month. That is itself a threat to freedom. Companies and individuals cannot, under the Trump EOs, safely implement diversity and inclusion programs without facing some threat of federal government retaliation, from loss of government contracts to spurious discrimination investigations by the DOJ. It doesn’t mean you’ll be thrown in jail for celebrating Pride Month, but it does and is causing companies and individuals within them to hesitate before doing or saying anything that could be seen as “promoting DEI,” which generally refers to being a decent and understanding person. That should be terrifying that in America we have to second guess ourselves lest we face retribution from our government, but ten weeks into the Trump administration there we are.

There is a much more sinister, and visible, threat to freedom right now of course and that is the abductions (for lack of a better term) of visa holders by the federal government. Multiple international students, in the U.S. legally on student visas or permanent residents, have been detained and imprisoned for the “crime” of speaking out against the Israeli war in Gaza. To be clear, these people were not even accused of supporting or aiding Hamas. Marco Rubio made clear that they were simply “participating in [pro-Palestinean] movements,” and therefore subject to removal. It wasn’t even that they had their visas revoked though - they were purposefully arrested and detained in very public, authoritarian ways, agents with masks on grabbing them off the street, no different than a public kidnapping, designed to inflict maximum fear in the population.

Not only will you potentially be thrown out of the country for saying something unpopular, but you will be removed from your family, thrown in any one of many dangerous and deadly prisons, and in some cases not even deported to your home country. They are not citizens, but they are still subject to proper due process, to their habeas rights, and yes, still have free speech rights, every bit as much as American citizens do. And if you take any comfort that they have so far only targeted non-citizens in the anti-speech and the horrific anti-Venezuelan round ups, the old saying about “first they came from the communists, but I did not speak up because I was not a communist” starts to ring a bell.

I’m not here to make any value judgement on the opinions of the students arrested, I have kept my opinions on the Israel-Gaza war to myself and don’t plan to change that. There are a lot of other issues associated with the attack on student visa holders, including that it will destroy a lot of higher education programs and ultimately severely harm our economy if people are no longer willing to come to the U.S. to learn and work. But no matter what Marco Rubio says about their opinions’ affect on American foreign policy, I don’t think you can watch the videos of those being grabbed off the street and be confused about who in that video is anti-American.

I’m tired of losing words to political extremists. I’ve seen many people who would have considered themselves “libertarian” a decade ago who now identify as “liberal” or “classical liberal” and while I don’t myself use that term, I understand those who do. Despite what many people believe, libertarianism is a big tent. I consider myself a moderate libertarian, and there are left and right wing libertarians as well. Many of those on the right are indistinguishable from Trumpists, and those tend to be the most vocal and politically active. The concern is that when you describe yourself as a “libertarian,” people have an assumption about what you believe and who you are. Depending who you surround yourself with, “liberal” has a less negative connotation. For me, as someone who lives in the South and mainly floats in the center-right, it’s much easier to reclaim the definition of “libertarianism” than “liberal.”

I bring that up because there is an intersection of libertarianism and another newly controversial term: “DEI” is basically on it’s deathbed given the Trumpists’ redefinition of the term as a “racist, anti-white” screed. Even people I would consider actual libertarians use “DEI” to refer to any number of things that do not reflect the actual practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion in American life. A core belief of libertarianism is individual liberty, that people have freedom and opportunity based on their individual existence, and not based on their membership in any group. The left often criticizes libertarianism for this, arguing that our belief in individual liberty makes us turn a blind eye to societal racial inequity. That’s a fair criticism. American libertarianism has a nasty history of using small government and property rights to excuse away racism, segregation, and only finding their principles when opposing plans to use government force to address those inequities. Rand Paul famously got tripped up on a question about whether he’d support the Civil Rights Act. Far-right Libertarians inside the Libertarian Party groused about then-presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen’s use of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” during the 2020 George Floyd protests, which is particularly ironic given the entire point of libertarianism is opposing violence against citizens by the state.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are largely implemented at the workplace level, and mainly in private companies. They are voluntary decisions, made by companies in the belief that breaking down barriers, bias, and communicating to all demographics in the company would help them retain the best talent, make better products and services, or just because it’s the right thing to do. There was no law mandating “DEI,” and the worst excesses that opponents bring up - hiring based on race or gender - is illegal and never happened. For libertarians, at worst DEI policies are decisions private companies can make based on their rights as individuals and companies, just like they can choose not to participate or work there if they don’t like them. At best, they are positive, voluntary steps that people can choose to help implement to make their companies better. The great irony, of course, is that it is the “small government,” “pro-business” right that has attempted to ban DEI by making it legally difficult for private businesses to have DEI departments or programs. Not exactly libertarian, is it?

I was spurned on this topic this morning by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who fresh off insisting that his standard is planes aren’t supposed to crash into each other (good to know!), continued the racist lie that DEI programs somehow may have contributed to the Wednesday tragedy at DCA. He continued the Trump Administration official line, that “they want the best people in the job,” regardless of their ethnicity, gender, background, etc. That’s a good line, and one that resonates with most Americans, who agree. Unfortunately, it’s a complete lie. The Trumpists absolutely does not want the best people on the job, and absolutely do care about their race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation. Otherwise they wouldn’t be working overtime on X to blame a young woman military pilot who died in the crash, calling her an example of “DEI policies.” (Strangely they don’t mention anyone else who died in the accident as an example.)

This is where the left, center, and libertarians, allow the right to control the narrative. The immediate response to Secretary Duffy’s statement about wanting the “best and brightest” should be why, then, did they shut down the DEI department in the FAA? Why are they working overtime to eliminate any mention of “diversity” from any government website? Isn’t that their stated goal? To find the best and brightest no matter what their background? By blaming “DEI” and using it as a code word for “minorities,” they are making clear that only the people that look like them should be in government and leadership. But they are not called out for it by the people that matter. They are not asked why we shouldn’t be including everyone, diversifying the federal workforce. Why every American shouldn’t get the same opportunity to contribute to their nation. Make them answer that question - and call them out for bullshit when they claim that standards were lowered or diversity contributed to disasters. Jake Tapper, to his credit, did try to softball a criticism to Duffy this morning on CNN, asking how “DEI” could be the culprit if a large number of people didn’t get through the FAA academy, indicating that standards were kept the same? Duffy skipped right past that inconvenient truth, but the more they are asked this question, the more low-information voters will see how thin their criticism of “DEI” actually is.

And that is the fight that actually matters. Low information voters elect presidents, they elected Donald Trump a second time. They didn’t pay any attention to the fact he was promising to raise taxes on everyone through tariffs, that he was promising to take away programs they relied on. They probably never saw more than fifteen seconds of a speech from Trump or Harris during the whole election. They only saw quotes on Facebook, clips on TikTok, and voted accordingly. The more the media and we as a country allow the Trumpists to control the narrative, the harder it will be to get Americans to pull out of the economic and social death spiral we are currently in.

I spent my last full day before the new administration at a funeral. Life sometimes has a way of writing poetry the mind cannot conceive of.

I have a particular affection for finality and ominous goodbyes. In February 2022, in the hours leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz read a text she received from a source, which read “you are likely in the last few hours of peace on the European continent for a long time to come.” Set against the dark backdrop of early morning Kyiv and knowing what was about to happen, it was about as foreboding a moment I’ve seen on live television in years.

Today is a day of finality. A few times over the last week I’ve been asked by personal friends what I think the next few years will look like. I answered with that quote from Martha Raddatz. Not because we are facing the immediate and deadly threat that Ukraine was that night, but because today is likely to be the freest, most cohesive, most democratic, and most prosperous the United States is going to be for a generation. Tomorrow at noon we will not see massive changes right away, and much of Trump’s stated plans will not come to pass. That we know from his first term. Life will go on for most of us. But things will get worse.

Subscribe now

Tariffs and protectionist policies will hurt jobs, make goods more expensive and harder to get. Corruption and nationalism, combined with decreased household wealth from tariffs, will make America a worse place to invest, which continues a negative cycle on the economy. His hand-picked agency heads are already openly talking about targeting anti-Trump media, companies, and institutions, which will make speaking out against the government dangerous for those who want to keep their job. Schools and higher education will come under particular pressure as federal funding is targeted away from topics deemed “controversial” and schools pressure their faculty and students to restrain themselves. All of this will put the democratic order in immense danger. Subverting democracy using force is nearly impossible in America due to the complicated multi-jurisdictional nature of our elections. Subverting it using pressure from a compliant media, government, and employers (threatened by corrupt government regulators) is possible, and the emergence of modern autocratic Russia is a warning sign of how this might happen.

I know, I’m being a bummer. That’s the reasonable worst case scenario. But to be clear I think some level of that is going to happen no matter what. Particularly when you consider that immigration and tariffs are shared goals among many in both major parties. Already the Democrats assisted in passing the Laken Riley Act in the House, which subverts due process for some immigrants charged, but not convicted, of low level crimes. Biden supported targeted tariffs and kept many Trump-era tariffs in place, and worked with the GOP on nationalist follies like banning TikTok. Local and state governments are restricting freedom in society already, from banning porn, to locking down libraries, and making public schools near impossible to manage and teach. The rhetoric around trans people is downright frightening, and both the feds and state governments continue to turn the screws there as well. This is all unrelated to Trump but the symptom of a conservative base unmoored by even needing to pretend to support freedom and democracy anymore.

To be clear, I think the role of libertarians, liberals, and those opposed to Donald Trump’s autocratic vision is to oppose every inch towards it. That doesn’t mean you have to oppose 100% of everything. During Trump’s first term I supported the GOP’s tax reforms, the repeal of government-mandated net neutrality, and many changes to the regulatory system. And if Trump’s team proposes similar smaller government changes in a legal and democratic manner I’ll support those too. But for his worst impulses, for his attempts at remaking the United States to serve him, extract as high of a political cost as possible for every change and every executive order. Elevate every tragedy he causes - he wants the chaos, give it to him. Blast it on Red Note or whatever the kids are using now, go on Joe Rogan and tell him about it. I don’t care. The only way you stop the slow march to autocracy is by using your voice, your power, your vote while we have it. Trump is not the first democratically-elected leader to harbor autocratic and corrupt ambitions. What stopped previous attempts, from Nixon to Yoon in South Korea, is public and political pressure and outrage drowning out their ability to do so.

This is also not to say that the America that exists on January 19, 2025 was perfect in any way. As someone who grew up as a libertarian activist, I don’t think I can be accused of downplaying our country’s past and current human rights and civil liberties record, our economic challenges, or the shortcomings of our democracy. I have fifteen years worth of writings, tweets, and actual campaign work to prove that. America is, as the saying goes, a work in progress, and the version of libertarianism that always attracted me is a forward-looking, optimistic, progressive vision of a freer society for all, not a reminiscing of the past. I still believe and support that. I still think America can and will come out of this dark era. I’m just not under the illusion that it will be tomorrow, that it will be easy, or that the American public wants a freer society by default. A dangerously high amount of them don’t right now. That’s on us to figure out how to sell freedom, democracy, and economic prosperity against the simplicity of autocracy and blaming others.

I don’t even use TikTok. I don’t like any of the new short-form clip sites including Shorts, Reels, etc. It doesn’t fit how I watch video. If it were up to me we’d all be watching linear broadcast television like God intended. And while I’m a radical supporter of the first amendment, if the option existed to amend the constitution to outlaw vertical video I’d head the campaign. But in banning TikTok, ostensibly because of their ties with China, America is doing what we saw so often during the Cold War and again during the War on Terror - losing our own moral ground to ward off theoretical “threats” that usually only exist in politicians’ minds. In the process, they drive away our allies.

Earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled that the law requiring TikTok to divest it’s U.S. division to an American company or face a ban by January 19th was constitutional. The incoming president argues that TikTok shouldn’t be banned, despite being the president who initially started the attempt at banning it during his first administration. The outgoing president did what Biden’s administration is best at - making a hash out of things - by being in favor of banning TikTok, signing the legislation into law (hey at least they actually legislated something for once!), and now trying to back track on the law’s ban. As I wrote on Bluesky earlier this week, Trump shouldn’t have won but man it was good to see Biden’s team lose.

Subscribe now

I’m not going to get into the legal issues around TikTok because my law degree is from the University of Twitter, which is now so defunct I think I can now get my loans forgiven. There are some fantastic resources from actual lawyers and experts including Cathy Gellis, who I’ve been following on this since she appeared on a podcast as the sole voice of sanity regarding this case months ago. The TikTok case, no matter what ends up happening on Sunday, does show how inept both parties are at dealing with China.

Red Note, a Chinese domestic app that looks to be a bit like Instagram or Pinterest, topped the App Store charts after TikTok influencers flocked to it as a retaliation against the American ban. Honestly, that is hilarious and actually a very good protest (and one the Chinese government is particularly not keen on either, as they do not want a bunch of Americans interacting with their citizens). In response there have been pangs of frustration among leaders - why would these kids go to an explicitly Chinese app that isn’t even a TikTok replacement rather than using an American app? Why are they so comfortable with China, even making fun of having to “say goodbye to their Chinese spy?”

There is an argument, which I am sympathetic to, that these very online younger generations are less opposed to autocracy, something we see across the age range right now unfortunately, due to a perceived lack of functioning of democratic economies. This is of course rubbish, since millennials and adult Gen Z as wealthy or more than any other generation at their age, but that’s not the perception. I would argue, however, that these kids understand, as seen by the Chinese spy meme, the bias that exists on TikTok. Just like someone who watches CCTV would understand that there is a Chinese government bias. There is another argument, which is that China bans all of our social media companies, why shouldn’t we ban theirs? I’m sympathetic to this as well, but historically we haven’t done that. We allow CCTV to exist in America, we allow RT to exist. Foreign governments and companies have a first amendment right to speak to Americans, and Americans have a first amendment right to participate positively or negatively with these channels.

More importantly, like we see with the Trump rhetoric around Greenland and Panama, when we ignore our liberal democratic principles to try to stave off autocratic governments, we end up with the worst of both worlds and pushing our allies towards China. In both cases, Trump argues that an encroaching China threatens American interests in those countries, a fact which he’s not entirely wrong on. China’s soft power and economic development has been a topic of concern for decades now. But it’s unclear how threatening to invade and seize a country’s sovereign territory is supposed to drive them back to being allies with America. The opposite is true: Beijing can promise to protect them from American bullying and protect their sovereignty, even while meddling in their internal affairs and slowly removing their sovereignty themselves through economic constraints, not TV bullying as Trump does.

I’ve written before that historically, rigid oppressed societies don’t last. The longest surviving governments are those that are relatively free and open. The role of the government can be to educate on TikTok’s ownership, show how it is manipulated by their owners, and to argue with China for better access for American social media. But banning something entirely, even if it’s a negotiating ploy, is far beyond what should be acceptable to Americans, and we shouldn’t be surprised when cynical people start to see less of a difference between the autocratic government in Beijing and ours when we start pulling back on those freedoms.

The majority House Republican caucus appears certain to reject a last-minute spending deal that would keep the government open through March and fund disaster relief, among other priorities. Speaker Mike Johnson is now looking for a “Plan B” (which I previously thought he opposed) to try and prevent a government shutdown the weekend before Christmas. I have plenty of well-documented issues with our budgetary process, and believe that libertarian-leaning politicians who try and shut down every spending bill are doing themselves more harm than good by preventing a proper annual budgetary process, which lead to these massive omnibus spending bills that get put to a vote at the last minute.

Subscribe now

The most interesting part about this entire exercise this afternoon, however, was not the spending bill failing. We’ve seen plenty of that over the last decade and a half, even when, like today, the party that tanked the bill was in fact that party in power. The most interesting part was what happened afterwards. J.D. Vance, who I am occasionally reminded is actually going to be vice-president in a few weeks, tweeted the transition team’s official joint response:

The weirdest part of this is that J.D. Vance tweeted it. It’s got elements of Trump tweets in there, but usually Trump will not cede the spotlight to someone else. Why did he send it out and not Donald Trump? In fact, Trump hasn’t tweeted in four days, last posting this important bit of presidential transition communication:

So it’s time to go back in time and do our favorite 2017 activity: Trump White House Kremlinology!

These big spending bills are always unpopular with the Republican base, poisoned against them since Obama’s era due to obstructionist tactics. Yours truly was involved in that, having worked for and with organizations who pushed that on the base, so I've witnessed it firsthand. (One of many mea culpas about my time in GOP opposition in that era.) Still, a government shutdown now would be embarrassing and poorly timed, especially during the transition. It would be difficult to blame Biden and the Democrats, as the bill is unable to pass the GOP-majority House.

Trump’s team obviously want this thing passed and done so they can get settled back in before having to worry about another spending bill. As we saw in 2017, it’s unlikely that anyone outside of Rand Paul or Thomas Massie would oppose any spending requested by the Trump White House. Mike Johnson broke many of his own preferences with dealing with spending bills to get this to the floor, and is now getting the full Trump treatment being blamed for it. I don’t doubt what Vance wrote about wanting the debt ceiling expansion to happen under Biden, even if that is a brazenly hypocritical thing to say (“we know we have to raise the debt ceiling, we just don’t want to do it.”)

What stuns me, though, is how cowardly Donald Trump is. He lost this bill because his assortment of grafting groupies, led by Elon Musk, started tweeting against it. The more jello-spined among the House GOP began responding, the Fox News base-train started rolling, and only then did Trump come out against it. Then he had his hapless vice president-elect tweet a statement claiming that they had concerns with the “Democrat” elements of the bill but sullenly admitting they do need to pass a continuing resolution of some kind, pretty please. Trump didn’t immediately put out a statement though, and when he did he seemed to tank the whole effort - threatening Republicans who vote even for a “clean CR” without extra riders needed to help pass the bill with a primary in 2026 unless they also pass a debt ceiling increase, mirroring the statement Vance put out. He did this because he understands something many who look at the Trump-era GOP from the outside don’t: this isn’t a Trump cult.

It’s popular to say that Trump runs the party like a cult. Anything he does is popular, right, and the party can change its opinions on issues on a dime. The truth is a lot more complex. The Republican Party is, like the Democrats, not run by one man, one TV network, one ideology. It’s run by a bunch of activists and donors and voters, who decide what the priorities are. It’s easy to blame Trump, blame Murdoch, blame Bush (I believe you should always blame Bush). In reality, there are plenty of examples where Trump himself has changed opinions to match the party, as opposed to the more widely-documented examples of him changing the party. He was pro-choice before running for president. Most notably, he of course started Operation Warp Speed, which led to the creation of the initial COVID vaccines, something which he clearly wanted to be a part of his legacy but has ignored and gone the other way on as his voter base became more anti-vaccine. More recently his administration seems to be moving to the far-left on processed food, sounding more like an elite EV-driving Whole Foods shopper than the president who invited a championship football team to dine on fast food during a government shutdown.

There is a misconception that his voters won’t ever abandon him, and on behavior or corruption issues I think that’s right. I disagree that his voters won’t leave him on ideological grounds - it’s just that he is a good enough politician, with few ideological moors other than immigration and tariffs, already popular among his base, to sail in the direction he feels he needs to. That does give outsize influence to others like Elon Musk, who commands a slightly different ideological group of nutjobs and weirdos (we call them the New Blue Checks) who right now attach themselves to Trumpism. There is no guarantee that they will remain on Trump’s side, and today’s actions seem to indicate that Trump understands that threat.

Note: in transparency, the original version of this article was written before Trump put out a statement urging the House Republicans to pass a CR with a debt ceiling increase, mirroring Vance’s statement. One paragraph has been updated as a result since it happened literally an hour after publication.

Last night, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad added “#OpenToWork” to his LinkedIn profile picture, a stunning fall for a middle eastern strongman who has fought tooth and nail over the last thirteen years to hold onto power. The Syrian civil war began as one of the original “Arab Spring” uprisings, turned into a fundamentalist insurgency, then an all-out war against ISIS, and finally ended up a simmering international proxy battle. As recently as last year, Assad was considered to have sort-of won the war, with regional governments beginning to normalize relations with him after leaving him for dead earlier in the conflict. The speed with which rebel forces, led by former al-Qaeda offshoot HTS, consolidated territory and the collapse of the Syrian government’s own military, surprised most outside observers.

There is a lot to be said about what comes next in Syria. Rebel leadership at least outwardly appears interested in a peaceful consolidation of power, the different forces involved in the civil war are navigating how to extract themselves (and failing that, bombing each other), and there will be a lot to watch over the coming year in Syria. I, however, do not typically write about the goings on of a middle eastern civil war. I’m more fascinated at how much the Syrian war has dominated politics particularly in Europe.

Subscribe now

The Syrian civil war was not the longest running or deadliest in the world in recent times. Myanmar, Sudan, and multiple other conflicts in Africa have been longer running and more violent in some aspects. But Syria’s location and relative proximity to Europe, and the impact of coming at the end of a decade where America and Europe were singularly focused on anti-terrorism campaigns in the Middle East, meant that this war took on an outsized impact on politics and society in the west.

The two most obvious examples are Europe’s refugee crisis and terror campaigns inspired by ISIS. Over 6 million Syrians are estimated to be refugees outside of the country as a result of the conflict, and a significant amount of those ended up in the EU. Europe’s image of itself as a tolerant society, welcoming of others, was challenged by the sudden increase in immigration. Right-wing and populist parties tapped into public discontent with refugees, a discontent formed by some real-life events and by common anti-immigration tropes we’ve seen for centuries.

Tied to that was a campaign of terrorism in the middle part of last decade in London, Paris, and across Europe by terrorists inspired by ISIS during the height of it’s political power in Syria and Iraq. Europe’s political Overton window moved much farther right as a result of these dual crises, coming just years after the 2008 financial crisis and debt crisis. The drumbeat of news about Syrian, Assad, and the fight against ISIS dominated politics for years, and continued as the war simmered over the last few years. The Ukrainian war became the focus, of course, taking place in the continent and launching another round of refugee concerns as well.

It was the Ukrainian war which likely contributed to Assad’s downfall as well. Russia heavily backed the Syrian government’s military, and with Russian resources heavily starved due to the invasion of Ukraine, Assad was clearly cut loose and given a ride to Moscow rather than continue to try and use Russian military equipment and soldiers when Putin needs them elsewhere (like fending off a highly-embarrassing Ukrainian incursion into his own country). There are no doubt many African dictators, who have formed military alliances with Russia against Islamic rebels in their own countries, that are looking warily at Syria and what their own futures hold.

It’s worth noting that aside from just generally being stunned last night that Assad was so quickly removed from power, I enjoyed the almost exasperated relief that many on BlueSky and others felt about a dictator being removed from power. At first I felt the need to be cynical. HTS and other rebel groups are not supporters of liberal, secular democracy. From Egypt to Tunisia to Libya, we have seen post-Arab Spring states either turn to new dictators or collapse entirely. Still, I’m pulled back from my cynicism by two things. One, today has had a steady stream of videos from Syrian government prisons of civilians being released, including women and children. The Assad government earned it’s reputation of fear among the population, and that reputation started long before the 2011 uprising. This is a net good today, no matter what comes next.

Second, its an important reminder that dictatorships almost always fall. Maybe not as quickly as you want them to, maybe not peacefully, and maybe only to be replaced with another authoritarian. But the Soviets and their empire fell, the Nazis and their satellite states fell, Assad has fallen. Authoritarian regimes are not as stable as they like to think they are or may appear from the outside - and yes, I do think that even seemingly stable authoritarian countries like China and the oil-rich Gulf states will face political upheaval in the future as well.

That’s not to say that what comes after Assad won’t be bad. It may in some ways be worse. I don’t think that’s a reason to defend a murderous, torturous dictator. Richard Nixon once defended the Shah of Iran and said that he wasn’t ruthless enough, because what came after him was worse. This attitude should surprise no one coming out of Richard Nixon, and ignores that part of what enabled a successful revolution by the Ayatollahs was the violent and repressive regime he ran. So it’s okay to be relieved at seeing a bad dictatorship fall, and it’s okay to be cynical about what comes next.

I don’t want to spoil the results of the 2024 election in case you recorded it, but Americans decided they’ve had enough of democracy, thank you very much. Much of the recent two weeks has been focused on blaming whatever segment of the Democratic Party you don’t like, and in my case, blaming the voters. Still, Trump is coming (as is Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz, Elon Musk, and some Fox News morning show host to run the military) and so are the million of articles about what the Democrats, and lowercase-D democrats, can do to preserve democracy.

The first thing we can do is say that maybe the voters have a point. People like me will point out we have never lived in a more prosperous, free, or healthy time in history—and while all of that is true, the fact that voters, even Harris voters, don’t feel that way shows that there is a massive failure among liberal (and libertarian!) messaging and a major issue with information siloing. I’m not sure how you fix that, but they are right about one thing: the current democratic system in America is not working. Congress is ineffectual, having ceded much of their legislative responsibilities to the executive and judicial branches. Trump supporters, and Trump himself, wants the Senate to give up its constitutional duty to advise and consent to appointments. Few pieces of legislation actually pass and what does are usually one or two massive bills passed through budget reconciliation to avoid a filibuster.

I’ve had this as one of my personal pet projects for many years, and now seems like a good time to annoy everyone else with it. We should get rid of the midterm elections. Specifically, we should amend the constitution to change the House terms to four years, the Senate terms to eight years, with half of the senate up every four years. Have these congressional elections concurrent with the presidential term, so that America moves to having federal elections every four years instead of two. We are an outlier in major democracies for having legislative elections so often. Australia and New Zealand do have three year terms - but are often debating moving to a four year term. Most other major democracies have four to five year terms, at least when collapsing coalitions don’t bring early elections.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. These folks can’t legislate to save their lives and you want to give them a longer term? Well, yeah, and especially given that many of us are hoping for 2026 to restrain Trump, I get that attitude. But part of the reason Congress can’t legislate is the constant pressure to run for re-election. Tough votes are to be avoided at all costs. Party leadership knows they are only two years away from another election. In majority, that means they have to be careful this term, because then they can keep their majority and fix all the country’s problems next term. (Hint: “next term” never comes.) In minority, all they have to do is block everything the majority wants to do and they’ll have their shot next term. Rinse and repeat until we eventually default… or end up with an autocrat as president.

In many longer-term parliamentary countries, it’s common for the first year or so to be when tough, big legislation is passed. Leaders have several years to make those reforms work, alleviate public anger, or adjust course. Then they get judged on the results: either it worked, or it didn’t. And there are examples of this working out for incumbent parties. The most obvious is the UK Conservatives, who implemented a painful austerity plan in their first term coalition government in 2010-2015, faced massive protests, and terrible polling. They were eventually re-elected in a majority government in 2015.

We have an example of the opposite in the US, and that is the Affordable Care Act. Arguably the last big piece of permanent government reform (the Trump tax cuts were temporary - how cute), the ACA cost the Democrats their congressional supermajorities from the Obama landslide. If you weren’t politically active at that time, and I was on the Republican side, it’s hard to overstate just how polarizing “Obamacare” was at the time even among people who knew nothing about politics. It must therefore be an annoying irony to those that lost their seats in 2010 that eight years later, the GOP would suffer a significant House defeat in the 2018 midterms after attempting to repeal the ACA. Such was the turnaround of public opinion on Obama’s health reform that when Speaker Mike Johnson made clear in the closing weeks of the election he wanted to massively change it, there was significant blowback that the Trump campaign was unhappy with. Since then, there has been a dearth of reforms on either side of the aisle. It’s a third rail no one wants to touch, even when there are real needs to be addressed.

Now if you’re libertarian or conservative minded, you might be saying “see, why do we want to make it easier to pass legislation, inaction is better than bad legislation.” I think this is one of the biggest and most dangerous myths to pervade mainly libertarian circles. There is tons of legislation happening in this country, it’s just all coming from the White House, government agencies, and the judiciary. Congress abdicating their legislative responsibilities hurts small government libertarians as well. There is no political appetite for reforming Social Security and Medicare, the biggest contributors to the federal deficit, and there never will be if Congress will get turfed out less than a year after passing any reform. Cuts are unpopular and the public doesn’t really care about the deficit. The only way you’re going to see significant cuts is if Congress believes they can sell them to the voters, and that’s hard to do if they have no time to sink in.

That brings me to the other big criticism of this sort of thing: what about the ability for Congress to be a check on presidential power? This brings us back to 2026, after all I too want there to be an anti-Trump majority in Congress to stop Trump’s worst excesses. As it is, though, Congress doesn’t serve as an effective check on the White House anyway. Their inability to pass legislation, and worse, their continual transfer of legislative power to agencies and the executive branch, means that even in a divided government, they are not taking back power from the president because that would require making tough decisions. It’s much easier to get re-elected focusing on what the president did, and not defending what you did.

There is no guarantee that Congress and the White House will be won by the same party, either. While this has been fairly common since 2000, it was quite uncommon in the last few decades before that. The Senate would now be elected in every state every cycle, since 50% of the seats will be up every cycle, and that means no more “bad maps” excuses for each party. And while it’s unrelated, I’m not a fan of removing the filibuster or the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, and that will also still require some level of bipartisan negotiation on legislation.

Now, this would require a constitutional amendment, which hasn’t happened in thirty years. Convincing the public that we should let them vote less often will not be popular. I’ve long argued we have so much democracy in the US that it leads to worse, and less democratically-representative outcomes (like electing judges, state treasurers, and even coroners in many states). I understand that’s not a popular position. Still, however Trump’s second term ends, it will likely be very chaotic and there should be an appetite at ensuring that this outcome doesn’t happen again. Fixing our current system of government to make it more effective should be on the table.

A few quick notes this evening on two developing situations in Germany and Ireland. Two countries which I don’t explicitly cover, but Germany in particular will be relevant in a Trump-era NATO and EU. (Ireland has fun political party names, which is also the only reason I occasionally follow Finnish politics.)

Chancellor Olaf Scholz beendete his coalition agreement with the Free Democratic Party after now-ousted finance minster Christian Linder published a paper where he reminded everyone, including the FDP’s eroding base, that the FDP is, in fact, a liberal party, and urged cuts to taxes, welfare, and climate regulations. Not surprisingly, the other members of the coalition, Scholz’ ruling Social Democratic Party and the Greens, were less than enthused. DW reports that after that stunt and after Linder rejected an alternative proposal from Scholz to plug the hole in the nation’s budget (apparently, some nations do that), Scholz fired Linder and the FDP from the coalition.

The German economy is struggling, and polls show the SDP down to around 16% of the vote, with the Greens down to 12%, both down significantly from their 2021 share. The FDP has fallen even more, from 11% to 4% in recent polling averages, while the center-right CDU has recovered into the 30s. AfD, the far-right party, sits in second in the popular vote polling at 18%. Unless Scholz can reach an agreement with the CDU to maintain his government - with the CDU at nearly double the SDP’s vote share that seems unlikely - he will likely head to an election in the New Year. Assuming they do, all eyes will be on the steadily increasing AfD vote.

Ireland will be heading to the polls on November 29th for their first election since the pandemic. The two dominant parties of Irish politics, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, have been in a coalition together since 2020. At that election, left-wing Sinn Féin won a plurality of the popular vote for the first time in almost 100 years. As a result, the two parties have been trading off who gets to be Taoiseach, much like a recently divorced couple with joint custody of the labradoodle. Who knows, maybe this year will be the year I start covering Irish politics.

In other news…

Speaking of Ireland, apparently the government is not only mandating that students don’t have their phone on them during class, they are actually funding mandatory national phone pouches. Which seems like a good use of taxpayer money.

Meanwhile in Australia, PM Anthony Albanese has been denying allegations that in opposition and in a previous government he called airline Qantas’ then-CEO to request free upgrades, including when Albanese was transport minister with regulatory authority over the airline. The claim carries particular concern because just last year, Albanese’s government blocked Qatar Airways from additional flights into Australia, which critics say was an attempt at protecting Qantas.

Election losses happen. I spent my entire teenage and college years working on election campaigns, starting in 2009. A few won, most lost. If you can’t take an election loss, you can’t learn from it, see the progress, then you won’t last. My political career ended on November 8, 2016 - when Donald Trump won the presidency. It was clear the fight we expected over the future of the GOP wouldn’t materialize and the party would coalesce around Trump and his strongman populism, and there would be no room for dissenting factions as during the Bush/McCain/Romney era when libertarians were able to carve out a small but vocal minority in the party. So while I felt the personal loss of losing 2016 and realizing that night my career path I had been working on since I was a teenager was being blown up before my eyes, nothing prepared me for last night.

I knew Trump had a significant chance of winning this election. I even wrote an article warning that Harris was losing and Trump could win the popular vote. I don’t think I believed that when I wrote it - it was more hyperbole - but I didn’t go into last night with my eyes closed. The polls were close, they historically understated Trump support, and Biden was an unpopular incumbent. What became clear as the night went on, though, is that I didn’t myself believe Trump could win. In my gut, I never accepted that was a possibility or thought about what that could mean because I didn’t believe it would happen. Americans were sick of the chaos, sick of Trump’s complete domination of our politics. He had his 47%, for sure, but some of that are people who will never vote anything other than Republican even if they nominated Bernie Sanders due to a clerical error.

When it became clear that Harris was underperforming in Wisconsin and Michigan, after losing Georgia and North Carolina, I shut down. I am usually the one who powers through everything, disasters, deaths, emotional setbacks. I’m not a very emotional person, and I have a “power ahead” personality. I lead a sales team for a living (it’s like politics but they pay you more!), I have to drive the energy literally every day. I couldn’t move off my couch for almost an hour. I didn’t stick around to watch Trump’s acceptance speech. I still haven’t watched it, actually. I love elections, I love speeches, I love watching elections and how it’s covered by the media. That’s pretty much the basis of my entire Twitter account for the last seventeen years. I haven’t turned on the news today. I am taking what I think the kids call a “mental health day,” though I would roll my eyes at myself if I said that out loud.

The Trump win is not just another win by another candidate I didn’t like very much. There are many, many reason why I think Trump is a danger to Americans. His stated tariff plan would explode inflation and kill jobs. His deportation plan has the potential to be the biggest single human rights disaster since Japanese internment in WWII - and in that context, it seems almost inappropriate to mention it would be a horrible for the economy too. His anti-trans rhetoric looks set to explode bigotry - or worse - against an already vulnerable group of Americans and potentially undo decades of progress on civil rights. His education plans have the explicit goal of ensuring that kids don’t learn in school - going to far as to advocating for direct election of principals, destroying the already fraying American education system and putting our country at a massive disadvantage globally. Removing taxes on tips will drive nearly every customer-facing American job to tipped wages. All this is in Agenda47, Trump’s own detailed policy book, and is not even touching Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s own blueprint for how they want to change the federal government.

Trump may or may not do these things. He has been famous for talking about major plans and then getting talked out of them. But Trump did do much of what he wanted in his first term, and that was with a team around him that at best was protecting him from himself and at worst was largely incompetent. He has had eight years now to remake and rebuild the party apparatus in his image, and the Republican cadre of bureaucrats and functionaries who carry out the work of governing are all now Trump acolytes. Trump can and will use the force of the federal government to ensure compliance. Take his constant threats to punish broadcast networks like CBS and NBC by threatening their FCC licenses. While current law would make threatening the affiliates’ licenses difficult, the FCC has wide mandate to regulate broadcast television. A Trump-dominated FCC could make doing business hell for local affiliates and network-owned stations which don’t play ball, which can make them think twice about covering embarrassing or negative stories. Trump’s tariffs and the power of the regulatory state can similarly drive other big companies into compliance, and we have already seen major newspapers not endorse candidates out of fear of angering the president-elect. America has the real danger of becoming a captured state - much like South Africa is still trying to build itself out from.

But even if Trump doesn’t use the levers of state power to benefit himself, a remarkable turn of events, there is a fundamentally more damning and long term consequence that has already occurred. A majority of Americans chose to elect a man who just four years ago tried to overturn the results of the last election. Trump was never held accountable for the January 6th insurrection attempt. The Republican senate, which could have, without serious political consequence for the first time, ended Trump by impeaching him in 2021, chose not to do so. The federal cases against him look set to be dropped by the Trump DOJ upon taking office, and it is unlikely any state cases will succeed given the mess of a case brought in Atlanta was the best shot at that. The American voters opened the door to any wanna-be dictator for life, including Trump, that there will be no serious consequences for attempting to subvert the rule of law and democracy. This isn’t just a “oh that’s a bad look” situation. It is not hyperbole to say that the era of a peaceful transfer of power at all levels of government are probably over, for at least a generation. I hope I’m wrong, and that Trump is an aberration and he or his chosen successor will go peacefully in January 2029, but I find that hard to believe.

America under Trump again is a less stable country, a poorer country, a harder country to live in for everyone. A place where people do not want to move to, a place where people do not want to stay. Jobs will be less plentiful, goods will be more expensive. Businesses will shy away from the risk of an unstable, captured federal government. Trump’s America is not the “indispensable nation,” its a renegade sideshow with nuclear weapons. It’s not lost on me that the America Trump wants to build is best mirrored by Russia under Putin, whose consolidation of power in the 2000s looked much like the paragraphs above.

I wish I had an answer for what we can do about it. As I wrote a few weeks back, Americans like to talk about freedom, but they don’t like to vote for it. The truth is that most Trump voters either want an authoritarian government because they believe democracy has not served them, or they don’t believe these things will happen. The vast majority are in the latter camp, and those are our friends, neighbors, family. We can be angry at them - I am extremely angry at them - for voting away our country. If we want to have a chance at getting out of this, however, we will need to extend an olive branch to them. There will be elections in 2026 and 2028. They will be extremely difficult, with Trump’s administration using every lever they can to ensure they win. The earlier a strong, diverse, anti-Trump coalition can win in Congress and take back the White House, the better. The longer Trump and the Trumpist GOP controls the federal and friendly state governments, the more the institutional rot will make it difficult to ever return America to being a liberal democracy again.

I do want to share two articles written by people I admire elsewhere on the Internet. They helped me process yesterday’s events. The first is a rundown on thoughts from liberal/libertarian (he gets into that) author Jacob Grier, who approaches yesterday from the same libertarian-leaning perspective that I do. I share his criticism of modern libertarianism, but he also talks about the media environment and international contexts - after all, most Western nations’ incumbent governments have fallen since 2021, it just so happens our opposition was a fascist madman!

The other is a scathing and viscerally angry post by Ken White, better known as Popehat. Let me be clear that when I say it’s “scathing and viscerally angry,” that’s a compliment. I wholeheartedly endorse his admonishment to not simply roll over and let Trumpists take over this country:

Trump won; opposition to Trump lost. People will want you to abandon your believes because of that. They want you to bend the knee. Screw them. Evil has won before and will win again, and it’s not an excuse to shrug and go with the flow. It’s going to get harder to stand up for decent values. You will face scorn, official suppression, even violence. That’s not enough reason to stop.

These are dark times. There is no yesterday anymore, no coming back. The America of the ‘90s, the America of the ‘00s (which we thought was rough!), the America of the ‘10s, will all be seen as the good old days. Before a global pandemic and before America voted away our stability, democracy, and sanity. If you didn’t sign up for saving a country, well too bad, we’ve all been drafted. Let’s work hard now to save it peacefully, before we lose the flawed but beautiful country we’ve all called home for good.

Over the last few weeks, Trump’s share of the vote has trended up while Harris has declined from her post-DNC highs. A nominee falling from their convention bump is not surprising, of course, but arguably the race has centered back to roughly where it would have been had Biden stayed in the race (a fact that Biden world seems happy to remind political reporters on background). That doesn’t mean that Trump will win - I’m not crazy to predict a winner right now, with three weeks still to go - but in terms of U.S. elections, which tends to trend in one direction or another most cycles, this is about as close as we get.

There are disadvantages that Trump has to deal with. One is that he’s a known quantity. He’s been in politics for over ten years now and running as a nominee for the third time, something we haven’t seen in over fifty years. There aren’t really a large group of voters left who, today, are deciding between Harris and Trump or Trump and staying home. His votes are locked in and his increase in polling share reflects that. Most people don’t tune into elections until the last few weeks. Harris has more room to grow, and has the money and resources to target those voters.

I’ve said for the last few weeks that the Harris campaign is losing, because they are. Their messaging has been boilerplate “doesn’t Trump say crazy stuff,” mixed in with pointing out that Trump is very unpopular with establishment Republicans that most Americans don’t know or don’t like. (Trump, to his credit, has the strongest comeback on that issue, arguing that unlike Biden/Harris, “I fire people.”) It feels like October 2016, when Clinton’s campaign would run TV ads of kids watching Trump speeches and imploring Americans to do the right thing, something which Americans can under no circumstances be trusted to do.

On that note, as a libertarian, I love that one of the major parties is running on “freedom” and “minding your own damn business,” unfortunately as generations of libertarian politicians will tell you, that is not a popular position in modern America. People want freedom for themselves, but that does not typically extend to their neighbors.

So if I had a billion dollars and three weeks to spend it, here is what I would do.

Positive messaging - Break with Biden

Biden is unpopular. You can argue to the cows come home about the importance of investments from the Inflation Reduction Act or about the economic virtue of breaking up Google, whatever. I’d disagree with you on both counts but that’s a fight for another day. People blame him for the costs of everything rising. I would point out that wages have outpaced inflation for a while now but the message of “I did that!” is baked in. In addition, it doesn’t really matter how good the economy is, voters always feel the economy is bad. No amount of charts are going to change that. Have you ever looked at your bank account and thought “yeah, I’ve got enough money?” Everyone feels they are about one rung lower on the economic ladder than they should be and it’s the president’s fault.

The Harris campaign has done a terrible job at explaining how she would be different than Biden on economic issues, despite having some material differences on issues like tariffs which we’ll get to below. Trump blankets social media ads with “NO TAXES ON TIPS” (which of all policies to steal from Ron Paul why steal one of his worst?) and bringing jobs back to America. They are economically illiterate but everyone knows them.

Harris has tentpole economic plans too. She wants to give $25k to first time home buyers for down payments, and go after “price gouging” (whatever that happens to mean), and more optimistically, increase new home construction. She talks about them on the stump, but TV and social media ads rarely focus on them. Most voters couldn’t tell you her economic plan, and that’s a huge missed opportunity. As long as the campaign doesn’t prioritize her policies, she will get tagged with Biden’s.

Negative messaging - what is Trump going to do?

Ironically, the Harris campaign found two extremely successful lines of attack early on - Project 2025 and tariffs. Harris’ characterization of tariffs as a national sales tax is brilliant and should be in every TV ad. Call him “10 Percent Trump.” Show grocery costs with a 10%+ import tariff. Explain how much less people will be able to buy. Don’t give an inch. This is one area she is naturally different than Biden, so take advantage of that opportunity. The one thing everyone should know about Trump is that he is going to purposefully raise the cost of everything.

The second attack should be on Trump’s immigration policy. This is a bolder stance that has a bigger risk associated. Immigration has been Harris’ Achilles heel. A majority of Americans have depressingly dark views of immigrants, which I believe comes from literally just not knowing very many Central/South American immigrants. Turn it around on Trump - what would it mean to deport every immigrant Trump’s administration deems illegal? How would that affect everyone’s every day lives? Raids on homes and businesses, military checkpoints across the country, citizens in detention facilities for years until they can get to trial to clear their name. That’s the reality of what a mass deportation program would look like. Harris has to make the case that this is unworkable and undesirable and that it would effectively freeze America for years (which it would) and affect them.

I’ve always felt that Biden & Harris’ best attack on Trump was that he was the candidate of chaos. Most people want to be left alone and not hear about politics every day. Biden won as the ”normal” candidate, but inflation meant that Americans had to think about him every grocery trip. They saw the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the losses in court when he tried to make unilateral changes to laws. Harris has to show how she will be different economically while going after Trump on his most vulnerable aspects - not just what he says, but what it means if he gets his way.

I decided to start writing more long form content starting with the UK election, mainly because I think the complicated results require a bit more explanation than I can give on Twitter. Also, I just finished a master’s degree and need to come up with a reason to keep using the rest of my Microsoft Word subscription before they disable my school email. I mainly cover the Anglosphere - my French is ne pas bien - so while I fortunately don’t have to write about Marine Le Pen, I did once have to read Nigel Farage’s book, so have some sympathy.

By this point, you’re aware of the top line story of the week: Sir Keir Starmer has ended fourteen years of Conservative rule by doing the impossible: getting the Conservative Party to spend eight of the previous fourteen years imploding in on itself to the point that one of their leaders lost a rotting competition against a vegetable. With a majority larger than the entire parliament of some countries, Starmer has already begun delivering results - at least, if you consider putting three Brits at the start of their home Grand Prix “delivering results.”

So what did we learn?

THE GOOD NEWS (if you’re Keir Starmer) - there is no shortage of reporting about Starmer’s frail popular vote mandate. We’ll get to that below. But let’s start with the obvious - the guy has a 400+ seat caucus. He’s reshaped the Labour Party in his “don’t call it New Labour” image, and even if he faces some backbencher revolts over the next five years, he’s got enough of a majority to push through his manifesto. Which, despite grumbling from the left, is quite ambitious, including increasing health funding, a publicly-funded energy company to compete in the electric market, and cracking down on crime. At Starmer’s rowdy 5 AM victory speech, he stressed that it will take time to deliver the “national renewal” he promises, clearly concerned about the fickle nature of modern democracy that punishes any long term thinking. But Starmer has set achievable, actionable goals - promising actions that are within a government’s wheelhouse, without promising to change society. He’d be a great mid-level manager.

THE BAD NEWS (if you’re Keir Starmer) - Okay, let’s talk about the legitimate concern Labour should have coming out of this election. This is the national popular vote for 2019 and 2024:

• Conservatives - 43.63% to 23.7%

• Labour - 32.08% to 33.69%

• Liberal Democrats - 11.55% to 12.22%

• Scottish National Party - 3.88% to 2.52%

• Brexit/Reform - 2.01% to 14.29%

• Greens - 2.61% to 6.39%

There’s plenty of debate about First Past the Post and the spread of votes that led to this result. Obviously winning a massive majority while having a flat vote increase (outside of Scotland, where most of the Labour increase came from the SNP) means electoral reform is not likely to be a top issue for the first term of Starmer’s government. Generally when I’m reporting election results on Twitter, I will do a regular update on national popular vote even in non-proportional countries where the national vote doesn’t matter. I think it’s still an interesting data point. On Thursday, it was clear that the national vote was going to be so disconnected from the seat count that I didn’t bother.

Still, Starmer’s massive majority came from the collapse of the Conservative and Scottish National Party vote and the split of right wing votes between the Tories and Reform. One underreported story is just how much of a saving grace Nigel Farage standing down in Conservative target seats in 2019 was to Boris Johnson, enabling him to win his historic fourth-term majority. But Labour will see real pressures from the right and left and with less than a third of the popular vote, their political mandate is not nearly as strong as their parliamentary one.

SHIT, FARAGE IS HERE - Believe it or not, Nigel Farage has never served as an MP in the UK parliament. He’s tried, many, many times. He literally got in a plane crash trying to be elected as an MP. But on Thursday the good people of Clacton, best known for sending us Douglas Carswell as UKIP’s sole elected MP (who, in case you are wondering, now lives in Mississippi and writes “anti-woke” children’s books about how great America is), elected him, one of five Reform MPs who will turn up to Westminster in a few days. Farage served most of his time in Brussels in the European Parliament - and surely he will be disappointed in the absolute downgrade in facilities he will encounter in Westminster!

Let’s be clear. Reform’s 14% of the vote and five seats are not the Canadian 1993 style wipeout and takeover of the traditional Conservative Party that Farage himself wanted. Reform’s five seats will rarely get speaking time in parliament, and are completely inconsequential in terms of government given Starmer’s majority and the fact that the Conservatives avoided extinction. Farage himself didn’t seem that interested in running this time, believing that Donald Trump really needed his help (spoiler alert: he didn’t), only to come in mid-election and take back over the party he started. The vote share isn’t even a massive surprise: in 2015, pre-Brexit, UKIP (Farage’s previous party) won 12% of the vote.

That’s not to say that Reform can be safely ignored. Farage used to argue that UKIP was not a single-issue pro-Brexit party, they also had many populist and right-wing government ideals. David Cameron took a bet that without the central issue - secession from the EU - UKIP’s vote share would collapse. He was right, for a while. UKIP’s vote share did collapse in 2017 and in 2019 pro-Brexit voters largely supported the Conservatives under ally Boris Johnson. With Brexit now secured, the other issues in UKIP’s plank, primarily immigration, continues to dog the Tories (and to a lesser extent, Labour).

THE LEFT ISN’T (TOTALLY) DEAD - much of Starmer’s early tenure as Labour leader involved fights with the Labour left, who were supportive of previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer made a point, even at his victory speech and in video ads, of his work to deliver a “changed Labour Party.” While there has not been as much of a splintering on the left as on the Conservative’s right, this boiled over to challenges during Labour’s preselection of candidates for this election. Jeremy Corbyn, the aforementioned former Labour leader who led the party to it’s worst result in decades in 2019, was expelled from the party and stood as an independent.

He was one of several leftist independents who won in Labour constituencies, some where centrists had been preselected over the preference of the more activist local party membership. Even an incumbent wasn’t immune, with shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth losing his seat on the evening he should have been promoted to government. Most of them have been animated, like young leftist activists in many countries, by the war in Gaza and their frustration at Labour’s position on the issue. The Greens also saw a significant increase in their vote share, in fact taking the largest increase in vote share aside from Reform.

OH YEAH, THE TORIES - it’s hard to say there’s good news for the Conservatives, but honestly there is. They weren’t wiped out. Some of the worst poll projections had them as low as 60 seats, some polls had them third in the popular vote below Reform. Some had generations of potential Conservative leadership wiped out. That didn’t happen, but it shouldn’t cushion what was an absolute cataclysmic event for the party. They lost nearly two-thirds of their caucus, a huge portion of their cabinet, and more than that, the Conservative Party infrastructure just seemed to give up during this election. They will have to navigate opposition being squeezed on all sides - from the right by Reform and from the center by the resurgent Liberal Democrats. Unless Labour’s internal divisions re-emerge in government, it seems hard to see the Conservatives recovering enough by 2029 to be able to form government. But then again, that was said in 2019 about Labour, too.

SO WHAT ABOUT THE CENTER-RIGHT? The Tories have shown again that center-right governing parties seem incapable of managing their populist wings without being either taken over (like in the US and Canada) or splitting, like what happened here. From my perspective as someone on the non-populist/liberal center-right, hopefully the lesson being learned here is that trying to appease the populists with “tough on immigration” gimmicks like the disastrous Rwanda plan and mandatory national service for young people is a fool’s errand, and instead figuring out how to message a broadly liberal/center-right governing message to the population that feels most aggrieved and attracted to populism is the only way these traditional governing parties will recover and avoid the fate of the French center-right.

WELL THAT WAS FUN. I love British elections, of all election nights I commentate on they are probably my favorite. From the candidates standing on stage, overnight counting, and Elmo running against the sitting Prime Minister, their election night is a made-for-TV advertisement for Britain that money couldn’t buy.

—

WHAT’S NEXT? I hope to do more long form writing like this, I haven’t done it in years outside of an academic setting and something about sitting back with a cigar, a glass of whiskey, and a fire writing my thoughts about a far away election really appeals to me. (For transparency, my wife does not permit me to smoke cigars, I’m drinking water, and the fire is a YouTube stream. I’m not allowed to be that cool.) There’s no shortage of topics, with South Africa’s perilous coalition government, Trudeau’s leadership on a knife’s edge, and a left-wing pro-Gaza revolt in the Australian Labor Party right now. Oh, and apparently America is having some sort of election. I can’t promise anything, but until next time.

Meanwhile, follow me on Twitter @KevinYeaux and on BlueSky @KevinYeaux.bsky.social