“In approximately 95 AD, John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation. This, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

So opens the first section of my new feature for The New Republic, entitled We Need To Talk About The Apocalypse, which explores just how much influence end times prophecy has over American domestic and foreign policy right now. The short answer, I'm afraid, is “more than one might like.” A longer answer answer: one third of Americans—not conservatives, not Christians, but all Americans—either partially or fully agree with the statements “The US Government should declare America a Christian nation” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” These beliefs are linked with Christian Nationalism generally and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) specifically: an apocalyptic movement that believes God has restored the offices of apostle and prophet to help us move rapidly into the end times and bring to fruition God’s plan of a fully Christianized earth and, eventually, the Second Coming.

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Getting the secular world to take an apocalyptic Christian movement seriously is very, very difficult. This is a movement that travels around the world to exorcise “temporal spirits” that exert demonic influence over population centers, that believes in prophecy and miracles and magic. Whether they're right or wrong does it matter: enough people believe these things, the effects are very real. To paraphrase a very old blog, however: you may not believe in the apocalypse, but the apocalypse believes in you.

To report this story, I attended the Intercessors for America’s Rededicate America conference on July 3rd and 4th — not be confused with Rededicate 250, the government-sponsored prayer revival on the Washington Mall way back in May (which I also went to). The similarity between these names is no coincidence: the themes and even speakers overlapped considerably. Point is, I spent Fourth of July weekend in the Museum of the Bible to learn God’s past, present and future designs on America. I learned that the Great Awakening led directly to the revolutionary ideas of individual rights and religious freedom, that the planting of a cross in Jamestown created an unbreakable covenant with God that grants Him dominion over the entire country, and that we can reclaim God's country from the demonic left by doing things like celebrating Thanksgiving, using money with “in God we trust” on it, and constant intercessionary prayer, which eschews the traditional humble request prayer model in favor of commanding God to do tricks on command like an especially powerful Golden Retriever. We also received prophesy from Cindy Jacobs herself, perhaps the most prominent modern-day prophet in the game, heard a glowing report of TPUSA’s hyper-successful fundraising in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and watched a live performance of American Idol contestant Danny Gokey that included a music video about being imprisoned by scary trans antifascist clowns (look up “makeup” if you want to watch it, I refuse to provide a link).

Anyway, it's not exactly a cheerful article, but I do think it's an important one and I'm happy it's out before the election. Please check it out if you would like to.

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And with that…I'm off. If you watched the AMA, you already know I'm about to go off grid for a month, starting tomorrow and ending on October 21st. No phone, no Internet, no news, just the wilds of [REDACTED], a wood stove, and a mountain of books about the world we live in. I'd intended to have a bunch of Substacks ready to fire off in my absence, but that did not happen. I'm burned out in a way I've never experienced in roughly three decades of workaholism, and frankly there's nothing like watching someone die horribly at 60 to provide some perspective on what is and is not worth fighting through. I'll be back at the end of October, (hopefully) refreshed and ready to go just in time for the midterms. Keeping my schedule clear and my Frontier GoWild pass close at hand.

Speaking of which: if any news happening happens over the next month that you think I should probably read about when I return to the world, please leave a comment with a link. I'm already bracing myself for the sheer volume of horrors likely to transpire before I again check a phone.

The wilds are calling. Please read the article if you would like to, and take care of yourselves. See you in a month.

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The AMA is up! Enjoy me fucking with technology for 5 minutes before answering questions and making some pretty big announcements.

About those announcements: I should probably make them in writing as well.

I’ve been pretty open about my financial struggles on this newsletter. It would be extremely fucked up of me to be open about them in only one direction, and so I am pleased to announce that my financial situation has changed thanks to an inheritance. I do not have “fuck you” money—not even close—but I do have “I can pay my rent” money, and I really cannot overstate what a relief this has been. I knew money troubles were weighing on me a lot, but did not realize the extent of it until those worries were lifted. No more juggling between bank accounts to scrape up exactly enough to make rent every month. No more figuring out which bills could lapse another month. That stress ate my time and energy, as it eats the time and energy of millions. There is no reason, in our world of plenty, that anyone should experience that anxiety—I’ve done the math. That’s a subject for another day.

You may have noticed that the site’s paywall is down—monetization continues, but the content is available to both free and paid subscribers. From the start, both here and on social media, I have explained that I paywall my articles because this Substack is how I pay rent. If you have, at any point, been a paid subscriber, please know that I meant that literally—you kept me inside, and I will always be grateful for your support. And because I meant that literally, I have now made this entire newsletter free.

If you are a paid subscriber, I would certainly love it if you continued to be a paid subscriber—as I said, this isn’t “fuck you” money and, like everyone else, I enjoy compensation for my labor. If, however, you were a paid subscriber based on my dire financial straits, or if you need that money for some other purpose, I both understand and support the decision to go back to free subscriber status. Thank you, again, for helping me get through the most dire financial situation I’ve ever experienced.

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After a months-long hiatus, it’s finally AMA time again. We’ll be doing it right here on Substack on Thursday, August 20th at 8:30 PM ET/5:30 PM PT. I’ll be making a big (good!) announcement and then answering any questions you might have about whatever.

(If you can't make that time slot but still want in on this, never fear: the replay will be posted both on here and on YouTube after the fact)

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If you have questions, there are three good ways to send them:

1. Post them in the comments

2. If you received this as an email, hit reply and lay it on me

3. Submit questions anonymously at NGL

   (Note: I lost access to the old NGL when I switched phones so this is a different link than in previous AMAs: if you sent a question to the old link in the last several months please resend and I'll answer it)

See you there!

Laura

Print Version

Here are some pictures you should see:

You can make great money without a college degree, but the odds are never in your favor; those with degrees still earn, on average, twice as much as people without one. Unfortunately, this key component of upward mobility has become very, very expensive. Tuition skyrocketed for three decades, then stabilized at obscenely high rates from 2018 to 2024. Now, under Trump’s careful stewardship, the cost of a college degree is spiking once again: students saw increases of as much as 10 percent in 2025. Tuition aside, students have to eat. A study by Temple University found that 59 percent of college students have experienced food or housing insecurity. Fourteen percent have experienced homelessness. Black and indigenous students experienced these problems at 75 percent. It’s hard to do well in classes when you’re hungry.

Thankfully, Our President is taking decisive action to help kids attain the kind of education that will allow them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

I am, of course, referring to the Patriot Games.

The Patriot Games, for those who do not obsessively follow the Trump administration’s every move, was an athletic competition in which 100 kids between the ages of 14 and 17 competed for two $125k scholarships—one for each of the two state-approved genders—courtesy of Trump’s Freedom 250 bribe pool. To volunteer as tribute, all these kids had to do was fill out an application with their social media handles and a video submission that answered questions like “What does being an American mean to you?” and “Describe a moment when you felt especially grateful to be American.” Those selected then travelled to Geneva, Ohio for three days of games at the Spire Olympic Training Facility, which is where I found myself on Tuesday, August 11th, a few hours before the finale took place.

A word about tickets to this finale, which were free and which I applied for immediately after receiving their first offer on July 30th. The administration would send six more messages about tickets over the next 12 days, with increasing frequency as time went on. “URGENT: 2026 Patriot Games Finale Registration Closes Soon,” an August 5th email blared. Two days later, they made a surprise announcement: Trump himself would make an appearance at the Games. What more incentive could you need to fly into Cleveland, Ohio and then drive an hour to Geneva to watch high-schoolers duke it out for a college scholarship?

Throughout this entire period, the Patriot Games schedule remained static: doors open at 3:00 PM and close at 6:00, event starts an hour later. At 9:40 AM on the day of the finale, however, we received a dramatically revised schedule. Doors would open at 10:00 AM—20 minutes after this schedule hit our inboxes—and close at 4:00 PM. Those who arrived before 2:00 PM would have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tour the facilities where the rest of the competition took place. First come, first served. Entrance not guaranteed.

I received this letter somewhere in Iowa while fueling up a car stuffed to the gills with boxes, bags, and a table that absolutely should not fit in the back of a Toyota Corolla and which took me half an hour to tetris in there. I’m driving a bunch of stuff from Portland, Oregon to New York City and I had the trip planned down to the minute. If everything went well, I would hit Geneva at exactly 3:00 PM. Since there’s no way to move that timeline up without triple-digit speeds, I figure one of two things is about to happen:

1. I'm not going to get in

2. So few people have signed up for tickets that they're trying to create false urgency, then get a head count at 4 to see if they need to recruit bleacher fillers

As I pull into Spire Academy several hours later, it becomes immediately clear that Scenario #2 is the winner. The ticket lists two overflow lots for latecomers, but the main one is half-empty. All I have to do is get past the bomb-sniffing German Shepherd inspecting every vehicle: something I have never encountered in five years of attending right-wing events. MAGA is having a very chill time, folks. They’re fine.

I park and walk to the entrance—which, one hour before doors allegedly close, looks like this:

I walk through security and follow the directions of a cheerful young volunteer to the enormous rectangular Olympic Training Center, where I am not asked to present my ticket and where I park myself on the mostly-empty bleachers to gaze upon the American Ninja Warrior training course that would determine which of eight finalists would receive a scholarship and which would go home with a participation medal.

We’d been told to wear jerseys and shirts from our home state, but most people opted for MAGAware or TPUSA shirts instead. Of those in state shirts, nearly all were repping the Ohio State Buckeyes, which makes sense, since who other than Ohioans would travel to Geneva for such a dubious competition? As with most Trumpy events, the vast majority of attendees were Gen X. They were also—and you are going to be shocked to learn this—almost entirely white.

I settled in for three long hours of waiting. The reception was abysmal, but Spire Academy had wifi, which you could use if you agreed to content surveillance. In the name of live-posting the event, and against my better judgment, I accepted. The people behind me declined. What if some foreign country had infiltrated the event and set up this wifi to gather information on American patriots? This logic boggles the mind, but I put it to you: who’s stupider, the people who declined surveillance for a silly reason or the fool who clicked yes for a mediocre one?

Bored, I asked the people next to me to watch my seat and went to grab some snacks from the merch/concessions area at the entrance. I passed on a Chick-Fil-A sandwich and popcorn in favor of something caffeinated or at least full of sugar. For some reason, Trump events exclusively have Pepsi products, and I’m sorry to be this person but I would rather drink bleach than a goddamn Pepsi, so I contented myself with a root beer and a bottle of water.

The merch area next to the concessions was shockingly barren for a Trump event. The man at the display rack told us we could get our state flag custom-printed on the sleeve of the beige sweatshirt unless we wanted Ohio or California. I asked him about this, and he told me the logistics people just ordered 40 of every state. For an event in Geneva, Ohio. Of course.

Behind the bleachers, an astro-turf field stretched from end to end of the enormous rectangular building, half-shrouded in darkness. As I cracked my root bear, the kids began running onto the field, each in a patriotic jersey numbered between 1 and 100, which did not remind me of Squid Game at all. They sat in a semicircle around a folding table loaded with treats and several adults in white track suits. One of them issued some sort of instruction, then began asking questions and tossing treats to whichever kid answered correctly.

People continued to trickle in well after the doors allegedly closed until, by showtime, the stands looked mostly full if you squinted and didn’t look at the half-empty bleachers just behind the beginning of the course—and I do mean half-empty; the event coordinators herded the audience into the right half only for the cameras. Several people from my section were recruited to move to the VIP bleachers at the middle of the course so the place didn’t look so desolate. With creative editing and camera-work, this event might actually look packed.

I was very skeptical as to whether the big man himself would show up, but I was wrong; as the thrum of a helicopter filled the stadium, the man next to me told me Trump was supposed to arrive by chopper. A few minutes later, the announcers confirmed the rumor: Trump was in the building and would lead the eight finalists onto the field himself. “I guess that means they won’t be running,” I posted: the last thing to get past those infernal metal beams before the wifi gave out completely. I turned my attention to the monitors above our heads, which began to play footage from earlier in the event: a bizarre mishmash of sports that included a T-ball bunt and throwing footballs at moving targets. The kids went all-out. $125K is a lot of money.

At last the event began. The 92 non-finalists marched onto the field, state flags held aloft, then ditched them and marched past TPUSA-style pyrotechnics1 to take their seats inside the Presidential box and above it. Shortly thereafter, Trump himself walked onto the field, followed by eight kids like so many ducklings. All eight finalists were white. Five of them were blonde.

Trump walked to the large platform at the middle and surveilled the applauding crowd, then saluted as the National Anthem began to play. What he was saluting, I could not tell you: not a single American flag in the place, not even the monitors above my head. I guess the Star-Spangled Banner does not yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Then again, I think we knew that already.

The Ninja Warrior course had two tracks; the semi-finals for each state-approved gender would consist of two side-by-side races, followed by a final run between the victors to determine the winner. At the end of it, two of these kids would walk away with something every kid should get: an education that won’t bankrupt them or leave them battling food insecurity. A game against hunger, if you will.

All the kids did well. Three fell off the course, but got up and finished anyway—not Ninja Warriors rules, but I respect the commitment. At the top of the final obstacle (the infamous 14-foot Warp Wall, but with rock climbing holds to make it easier), the two contestants hugged it out, every single time. They’d been on the same team for the tug-of-war event that secured their place in the finals, one of the girls told the announcer. They all wanted the best for each other.

The girl’s final was close. The final race for the boys—spoiler alert—was not. This clean-cut blonde boy from Utah (whose name, I kid you not, is Rockwell) pulled ahead of the Florida boy early and widened the gap until his opponent fell off an obstacle in his haste to catch up. Rockwell reached the top, slammed the buzzer, and celebrated…but by the time his opponent reached the top, his smile was gone. Florida was grinning and tearing up as they hugged but Utah looked serious, nervous. It’s dangerous to project emotions onto someone from a bleacher seat, but it sure looked like the weight of the thing that had just happened was bearing down hard on Rockwell’s shoulders. Because he’d won, someone else had lost.

I found the Patriot Games somewhat hard to watch. There was no second place; if you ain’t first, you’re last. Crueler things have happened, of course, than falling just a few seconds short of a college education. Maybe these kids have families who can afford it, I don’t know. It still got to me. I wish there’d at least been second place.

When interviewed, the winners of the semi-finals and finals almost all thanked God for their victory—not in an Oscars way, but an “all glory to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” kind of way. The crowd liked this very much, and one suspects the powers that be selected for this specific genre of religiosity.

Trump spoke during halftime and again just after the finals: two brief interviews with an ESPN host in high gold heels and a red dress. Doubtless the whole thing was a welcome change of pace for our President: no questions about Iran, or Israel, or the economy, or the reflecting pool, or the $900 million ballroom: just sports and sycophancy. “What teams do you think will do well in the NFL this year?” Trump lists off a few teams—the Patriots, the Rams, the Giants. “Great analysis, Mr. President.”

When all was over, the eight finalists stood up on the platform and Trump presented the two winners with an enormous gold trophy and a novelty check, which the announcer instructed them to hold aloft for the cameras. Pyrotechnics and confetti erupted as the crowd cheered, YMCA played, Trump did his little dance…and it was over.

Other articles—the kind that actually feature quotes from attendees instead of vibes and observations—suggest that many spectators came out primarily to see the President, which might explain the tension in the air as everyone filed out. Or maybe that’s just me. I’d driven 38 of the last 51 hours to make this event in time, I was very tired, and malaise was creeping in. Oh well. Nothing that a tall boy, a Chipotle burrito, and 10 hours of sleep can’t cure.

Nothing of great significance happened at Trump’s Patriot Games. Two kids got what the announcer correctly described as “life-changing money,” 98 kids got medals and memories that were hopefully good, a couple thousand people sat in some bleachers and listened to Trump talk about football for a few minutes, no one got seriously injured—at least, as far as I know. The corruption was garden-variety, the Christian Nationalist overtones no worse than usual. Just another day in dystopian America.

The thing that disquieted me the most, oddly enough, was a trash can—the one in the picture at the beginning of this article. Beneath large print that reads TRASH ONLY, an AI-generated picture of a girl looking nobly to the side with a background that appeared to be a colosseum on fire and the words “2026 Patriot Games.”

And maybe I’m reading too much into things but idk, you tell me:

The Hunger Games jokes came in thick and fast from the moment the administration announced this event, and you could dismiss the Hunger-Games-inspired trash can as a troll….but for whose eyes to see? Not the press: there was no way to apply for credentials, which implies an invite-only situation. Not the attendees, (almost) all of whom presumably support Trump.

It really feels like the administration watched the Hunger Games movies and was like, “this is cool. We should do this.”

Desperation as entertainment. Then again, what isn’t? Gambling addiction is skyrocketing thanks to legalized sports betting and online casinos and total ad saturation, and you would not believe how many cannabis billboards I saw driving cross-country to this event—or maybe you would, since every state that’s legalized it has pot shops on every corner now. I smoke up and play poker and think these things should be legal….but not on your phone, and not as a soporific in this era of increasing economic despair. We had UFC on the White House lawn and Hunger Games in Ohio and maybe we’ll get our own colosseum someday, but is there really a need for it when we’ve all become gladiators on social media? We’re angry, we’re strung out, and over 40 percent of Americans believe the future will be even worse. The American dream of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was always out of reach for most people, but at least it was a good dream. Now, the dream is: get lucky. Win big. Escape the Matrix and exploit everyone beneath you. No one’s going from grocery clerk to CEO in 21st century America. Those days, to the extent they ever existed, are over.

Desperate people make for good entertainment. They make good subjects too. People barely hanging on aren’t going to take risks, speak out, or unionize, especially if they’ve become convinced that AI can replace them. It’s hard to think straight when your cortisol is high, when you spend so much of your time worrying about making rent or staying out of the hospital. Desperation is good business, and business is booming.

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Little America has many things. You can buy a dreamcatcher with a skin drum where the string usually is, painted with a wolf or a horse or some other creature of this land. You can buy a children's chapter book about an indigenous boy and his adventures, or a painted cattle skull. You can buy a card game --the kind that are good for road trips, from an age before iPads were a thing. You can buy a tiger puzzle in the shape of an actual tiger. You can buy a T-shirt with the penguin cartoon character next to a "Straight Outta Wyoming" graphic and the words "Little America" below it all, which I bought for $24. How could I not? It's pure, uncut Americana, and my love of this particular genre of kitsch exists in that horseshoe area where irony wraps around into earnestness.

You can buy every kind of junk food at Little America, including flavors of popcorn that are an affront to God himself: rootbeer float, strawberry-banana, blueberry. You can buy turquoise jewelry, because it is a law that every store in the Western states must sell turquoise. You can buy an Alice in Wonderland clockwork house that allegedly makes a sound when you press on the first stair. I did not press the stair. It is 1:30 AM, and I do not want to terrorize the poor, lonely overnight clerk.

I am at Little America because I am driving from Portland, Oregon to Geneva, Ohio to watch Trump’s Patriot Games finale live. It calls to me with a siren wail that I tried and failed to ignore. I do not have time to waste looking at penguins and clockwork houses. I need to be sleeping or moving. I am barely going to make it as it is.

But of course I look. I look at all of this, every time I drive through here. It's this strange little oasis that time can't touch, a place the zeitgeist overlooked. With the sole exception of two small chud stickers, nothing in this sprawling gift shop/restaurant/convenience store is at all political. Yes, yes, I know: everything is political, the dubious indigenous souvenirs and books are political, I know. I know. But I also know that you know what I mean. You'd never know there was a culture war brewing. That's rare in Wyoming. Frankly, it's rare everywhere.

This Emperor Penguin stands guard over a tiny slice of a country also rapidly succumbing to the elements: preserved here, like the penguin, against all odds. A world of nice things, pure things, corny kitschy things that exist for no other reason than to make someone happy for a little while. Earnest Hemingway wrote a short story entitled "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and things don't work out so well for people in that story and yet this is what they wanted. This is what they hoped to find. A clean, well-lighted place.

I should not be writing this in the parking lot of Little America. I should be catching the hour of sleep I intended to grab before hitting the road and resuming my journey to the Hunger Games. Really, it's an excuse to stay here a little longer. A few extra minutes under the protection of this animal spirit. This lingering reflection of something gone forever.

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Note: the original version of this post stated that Flannery O’Connor wrote “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” except thanks to phone autocorrect it was “Flannery O'Connell” for that illusive double-blunder. The extremely tired author regrets these errors and thanks the people in the comments who pointed them out with such gentle politeness.

Audio Version

The trouble started shortly after I occupied the deserted Department of Justice booth at the Great American State Fair and began to charge my cell phone.

I don’t know how long the Department of Justice booth sat empty before I got there, or who stripped it bare of everything save three folding chairs, a scuffed card table, and a battered backdrop held in place with three neon yellow sandbags. But I know administrations who use subtext, and they’re all cowards. I audibly gasped when I discovered it, then muttered “no fucking way” as I fumbled for my phone and snapped several photos.

Then, for a time, I moved on, for there were many more departments to explore.

Most pictures of the Great American State Fair taken during the lead-up to July 4th show a vast, near-empty stretch of the Washington Mall with two long, low buildings on each side. The mall wasn’t empty on July 4th—that was always going to be the day most people flew in to visit, and the lawn was plenty crowded that day.

Everything, else, however, was even worse than it looks in pictures: smaller, dingier, sadder. Film cannot fully replicate the experience of walking towards an Arch that looks quite normal, only for the wrongness to gradually become evident as you approach: badly-stapled canvas that highlights rather than disguises poor construction, smudges and divots and foam oozing out of the cracks. You may already know that the neoclassical arches and bas reliefs on those long low buildings are actually just canvas stapled onto the side of structures halfway between a trailer and a tent, but you cannot experience the disquieting failure of that optical illusion to shift with you as you walk rapidly down the center of the Mall. It feels like some amateur video game designer inserted his childish rendered buildings into physical reality.

Those poorly-rendered trailer/tents have identical doors. The doors lead into small rooms, and those rooms contain multitudes. You might find yourself in the midst of the Small Business of the Future Art Competition, where kids can express themselves in crayon, put their parents’ information on the back, and potentially win what a booth attendant described to me as “a coin or something, I don’t really know.” You may get an opportunity to photograph yourself next to a giant stuffed bear, or a buffalo, or a ‘50s stand microphone with Elvis shaking his hips in the background. You might stumble upon the Dowdle Puzzle room, which sells jigsaw puzzles of folksy representations of every major American City—and also a George Washington quote, illuminated like a Medieval manuscript, about how important it is for our government to be Christian.

One of the stranger experiences at the Great American State Fair is stumbling on small, unexpected islands of normalcy within this sea of MAGAficafion. The opportunity to take a picture with a stuffed bear at a West Virginia picnic table, a Louisiana trivia contest, a Colorado white-water rafting game. The DC Metro’s enormous and lovingly-crafted exhibit inside three full-sized subway cars on a mock-up railroad line, filled with cool facts about its history and utility. It’s not a very exciting exhibit, but it’s an apolitical celebration of an American achievement, which is probably why Freedom250 chose to place it far away from everything else, hidden from the fair’s main drag by one of those faux-neoclassical tent/trailer things and an enormous Christian revival tent.

Some of the more boring state departments, like the Passport Office and Housing and Urban Development, also deliver the practical, informative, slightly boring displays one might expect. But then there’s the Department of Transportation’s exhibit which, aside from a few generic platitudes, revolves entirely around former Road Rules contestant and current Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s Great American Road Trip initiative. There’s the Department of Education, which exclusively displays floor-to-ceiling propaganda banners from private far-right institutions that present their version of American history, plus QR codes where you can learn more. I wrote about one of those groups, Patriot Academy, way back in 2022 after attending their Constitutional Self Defense course, which combined intensive handgun training with classes on the biblical origins of our Constitution.

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What shreds remain of institutional normalcy serve only to highlight the weirdness of everything else. No free C-SPAN ruler with portraits of all 45 past presidents on the back can compete with the Christian/American Flag slash fic in the middle of the American Made exhibit, or the red baseball cap for sale the Freedom 250 merch room with “America Is Back” emblazoned across it in Trumpian script. Everyone, including the booth attendents, takes it for granted that everyone there is Republican.

The Best Laid Plans

The Great American State Fair is very easy to make fun of, and there are many hilarious articles that do a fantastic job of lampooning its many absurdities. I needed a different angle to make this trip worthwhile, and when the DC State booth attendant handed me the fair’s novelty passport, I thought I'd found it. I would visit every state/territory booth, describe them, and rank them. I would give out fake awards, like:

Most Wholesome: West Virginia

Most Sponsored by Perdue Chicken: Georgia

Most Clearly Constructed At Gunpoint: Washington DC

Most Hot Guys Teaching Middle America How To Salsa: Puerto Rico

And, despite stiff competition:

Most Fuck You: Oregon

And that’s what this whole article would be, I guess, if things hadn’t gone completely off the rails around 8:00 PM.

July 4th, 2026 was the hottest on record for DC; 103 degrees of swamp heat, with humidity that squashes you into the pavement and a sun that kicks you while you’re down there. But around 6:30 PM, the clouds started to roll in. A violent gust nearly knocked my phone out of my hand. “On the bright side,” I posted as the sky continued to darken, “perhaps we will all be struck by lightning.”

One thing that definitely required lightning at that point was my phone—tame lightning, but lightning nonetheless. The only equipment left in that deserted DOJ booth, aside from that table and chairs, was an abandoned extension cord eager for some enterprising hand to slam a charger into it. My enterprising hand. I took over the Department of Justice, commandeered their electricity, and waited for my phone to recover

Maybe five minutes after I got comfortable, the speakers outside crackled to life with an announcement that would run on loop for at least an hour and a half. Due to inclement weather, the Great American State Fair was “temporarily postponed.” All attendees must exit the fairgrounds and seek shelter, either in their cars or the surrounding buildings. Check social media for updates.

Like most people inside these fairgrounds, I’d already waited an hour beneath the sledgehammer sun to get screened by TSA-lite, and I was still salty about them forcing me to throw away my nice G-2 pen. If I left and they reopened, I’d have to wait in an even longer line and might not make it through in time. Meanwhile, here at the Department of Justice, I had electricity, a roof over my head, a bag of Sour Patch Kids the security personnel missed while attempting to sabotage my ability to write things down, a notepad, and the backup pen they’d missed: all the basic necessities of life. Why leave before they made me?

By the time a fair employee found me and gently, professionally, yet firmly asked me to leave, my phone was up to 45 percent, which would have to be enough. Yet outside my hiding place, hundreds still remained. They too had waited in that line, and saw little point in leaving for a storm that would be just as active outside the fence as within it. It was the only rational choice. This is Trump's America, and rule-following is for suckers and losers. Why not stay put, get a little wet, and guarantee a spot for the fireworks in a few hours? It’s the same decision I’d made inside the DOJ, and I made it again beneath that darkening sky.

And so, for an hour and a half, we stood around, joked about free showers, and gaped at the fighter jets that continued to buzz the fairgrounds every few minutes despite the worsening weather. Every plane, that whole day, instantly transformed me into a five-year-old again. BIG PLANE!! BIG PLANE!! BIG PLANE DOING BARREL ROLLS!!!! Then the savage birds would vanish into the great wide sky and I would remember that my country is dying. Come back, fighter jets. Come back and make me five again.

We hung on until 8:00 PM, and honestly I was starting to think we might make it all the way through…until I saw the flashing lights and heard the wail of sirens. Protest flashbacks as a line of motorcycle cops began to herd us wayward attendees ahead of them like so many lost sheep: down the length of the mall and into the funnel of the Western exit.

It was at this point, as the cops began to escort us past the throng of thousands of people already pressed against the gates, waiting to be admitted; as discontented rumblings began to surge up from the rag-tag crowd of holdouts, as the first drops of rain began to fall, that events began to go pear-shaped.

Here’s the thing: the announcement told us to shelter in our cars, but most fairgoers did not drive in—in fact, we were encouraged not to because of parking limitations. It told us to seek shelter in nearby buildings, but all those buildings are either museums or government buildings and it is 8:00 PM on a national holiday so no, that wasn’t happening either. It told us to check social media for further updates, but the fair’s accounts had not even acknowledged the closure, never mind provided additional information. And we’d been explicitly told that the closure would be temporary. Why would anyone go home?

The only place for these tens of thousands to go, realistically, was the streets outside the event, which is exactly what happened: a crush of bodies clustered at the entrance points and choking off traffic for blocks. Everyone is just as exposed to the elements out here as we were in there, except now we are angrily bunched together with nothing to do but endure the storm and stew about the stupidity of it all. The National Guard clusters in groups of four and five at the outskirts of this throng, but they are brutally outnumbered by thousands of disgruntled fairgoers.

These ingredients can only make a few things, and none of them are good.

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It will never not be hilarious to watch the Right begin to realize they're on the wrong side of the police. Motorcycle cops drive through the crowd, sirens blaring, in an attempt to keep a path open for the continuous parade of ambulances necessary to extract people as they collapsed from dehydration or stress or physical exertion. An LRAD system begins to shout unintelligible orders in our general direction, all while the people the LRAD is yelling at are cheering the police. “Why are we clapping?” the man behind me asks. No one bothers to reply

No one knows when or where the gates will open, but most of us have been through security already and we know how slow they are. The only way any of us are getting back in before the fireworks start is to get to the front of the line by any means necessary. The rain begins to fall in earnest; tension swells and crackles through the crowd. A bearded millennial nearly comes to blows with a smooth-cheeked Gen-Zer who starts imperiously shouting orders and unilaterally attempting to direct traffic. The cops are also still shouting through the LRAD, but we still can’t understand him. Perhaps they are worried about hurting the eardrums of their MAGA brethren.

All I can say, as someone who’s attended countless left-wing protests, is that it must be nice. If the left even considered blocking traffic to this extent, the entire city would smell like tear gas and the New York Times would have already written at least two op-eds about this Not Being The Right Way To Do Things. Instead, ambulances creep through this crowd at a snail’s pace, sirens blaring, as the rain soaked us to the skin.

The crowd grows ever more restless, and starts to condense and pulse with those dangerous little shoves that can become an all-out stampede with the slightest provocation. Someone calls for a medic and a drunk gentleman responds with an attempted chant of “USA!” He is quickly shushed.

The pressure behind us has pushed me into the ambulance’s path and I squeeze backwards as the side mirror passes within inches of my nose. The moment it moves past, the crowd packs into the space behind the vehicle and moves with it down the road. The rain is getting worse. How many people are aware of the danger we’re in? Not enough, I fear. I move with the crowd and brace for impact.

The next surge is driven by forward momentum instead of panic, thank God, and we advance several yards down the street. A cheer goes up— the gates must be open, and we’re the ones moving forward! It seems the assholes—the ones who blocked the street, who followed the ambulance, who refused to disperse—will be first into the breach, first through those gates, first to secure a coveted spot beneath the obelisk and relax for the rest of the evening. The crowd sings God Bless America as it shuffles forward, pressed together like penguins in an Antarctic winter storm.

Eventually, the forward movement stops. The rain is growing heavier. A few people have umbrellas, which is very nice for them and much less nice for the people beside them, who are periodically drenched as the rain runs off the sides. I am one of these people, but it’s fine; I have reached that zen stage where I cannot possibly get any wetter, and I am abuzz with adrenaline and schadenfreude. This situation is absolutely miserable, and I’m having a wonderful time.

Renewed hope from our forward momentum has left the crowd exuberant. A drunk man behind me begins to shout. “THIS IS AMERICA! I CAN FUCK ANYTHING I WANT TO! ANY TIME! BAAAAABY!!” He is yelling for the sake of yelling and not at a specific person, and so it is very funny, or at least I find it so. Eventually, as the rain grows heavier and we fail to move forward, his performance takes a maudlin turn. “I CASHED OUT MY RETIREMENT TO BE HERE! FUCK TRUMP!! I AIN’T SEEN HIM ONCE!!” He’s still joking, but there’s truth within that tone shift.

A nearby man begins to complain about how CNN keeps saying no one is here and what liars they are, malicious lying liars who love to lie, just like they did with the “mostly peaceful protests” of 2020. In the dog world, we call this displaced aggression. “You should watch Dan Bongino,” he tells a nearby woman. She asks the question I am bursting to ask, more politely than I would have asked it: if he's such a great guy, why did he leave the FBI and return to podcasting instead of providing insider proof of the conspiracies he spreads? Bongino always said he’d leave after a year, the man insists, which I don't remember him saying before his tenure ended, but that could be the Trump Derangement Syndrome talking. “Wow, it takes a lot of courage to step away like that,” the woman replies. I am grinding my teeth like Don Jr at 4AM. Or 4PM. Or whenever.

The woman, who is slightly more in touch with her emotions, remarks that it seems very silly to have kicked us out of the fair for safety reasons only to have us gather outside in far less safe conditions, and I express my agreement. She pauses, then speculates that perhaps there was a credible threat that forced them to clear the fairgrounds—a threat they kept quiet so as not to alarm anyone. “This feels like bureaucracy to me,” I reply, and the conversation ends amicably.

Operatic music swells suddenly from the stage just beyond us huddled masses. The event is getting started and yet here we stand: drenched and dehydrated all at once, tired after a long hot day. That earlier ebullience is completely gone. Two men start shouting a few rows behind me, and then punches start to fly. The crowd screams for the police. “They’re grabbing women, they’re peeing in public!” someone shouts. The National Guard wades in to grab them as the crowd chants “Fuck him up!”

Minutes later, as Bohemian Rhapsody begins to play, a nearby woman collapses. The National Guard rushes forward once more, and she is limp in their arms for what seems like a dangerous amount of time before half-regaining consciousness. The Guard extracts her, which seems to be the only way out of the crowd at this point. We’re too packed in to go back, and the front hasn’t moved in a very long time.

Someone starts shouting that people to the right of us are moving, but that the gates in front of us are blocked. “Move right!” he shouts, and the crowd lurches dangerously in that direction, but there's no spirit in it and anyway he’s wrong: no one is moving, we’re all trapped here together. A cry goes up: a chant of “Open the Gates!” Inside, Axl Rose is crooning: “It's hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain.”

Despair washes over us. My poor phone is at 6 percent power and falling fast. There’s no getting out of this crush without getting arrested or passing out, and I’m not particularly keen on either thing. This is my life now: forever sweating through my rain-soaked shirt in the DC swamp, surrounded by sweaty, furious MAGA. Over the speakers, Ave Maria begins to play.

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An eternity later, we have pushed forward to the point where we can see the large, cheerful banner over the main entrance: “Welcome to SALUTE AMERICA.” Below it, the security checkpoint is deserted: no lights, no personnel, no movement. “Tell us what’s happening! Give us a SITREP!” someone shouts at one of the National Guardsman standing ready to retrieve the next inevitable casualty.

The Guardsman hesitates, then points past the gates and down the street in front of us with a sweeping motion. “The only gate that’s open is way the shit down there!!” he shouts.

It can’t be! All this time, all this misery! The crowd’s voice rises in a furious chant: “LET US IN! LET US IN!” The first strains of “God Bless the USA” provokes a whole new level of despair: This is the song Trump always plays before walking out and we are MISSING IT. “Our tax dollars paid for this!!” someone screams.

A resigned calm briefly settles over the crowd as the song finishes. Silence…and then that unmistakable Trumpian cadence. The few scattered cheers fade into silence as the awful truth sinks in. The reverberation is too much. We can hear his voice, but not what he is saying.

The crowd erupts in a primal, howling BOOOOOOOOOOO!, which morphs into one final, desperate chant: “LET US IN! LET US IN!”

“Open the gates, retard!” someone yells as the chant fades out. But nothing happens. We have exhausted all options, and the rage fades into emptiness. These people cannot be mad at Trump for long, and nothing else remains.

As the incomprehensible Trump noise washes over us, people start talking to each other about their home states, their jobs, their hobbies: anything but the situation at hand. A nice older gentleman tells me about the mountains he climbed in his youth. A young man who kindly lent me his charging brick when he saw my phone die tells me about his internship in Maryland. The Dan Bongino fan introduces himself with a friendly smile. We shake hands.

Every now and then, some word or phrase from Trump rings out comprehensibly from the babble of reverb. Per my scribbled notes: “Liberty…precious like never before…safe and productive than ever before…everybody watching, everybody watching.”

“You know what we want to watch?” a woman behind me says. We've missed the Trump speech: fine. But at least there will be fireworks, the greatest fireworks anyone has ever seen: 850,000 of them, all across the sky for over half an hour…as soon as Trump stops talking

Our President was scheduled to begin his big speech at 9:00 PM but didn’t actually start until 11:15, perhaps because he feared a lightning bolt from God would strike him down, perhaps because he disliked the idea of speaking to a soaked and empty field. He'd promised to give a long speech, “just to show I can,” because nothing broadcasts health and vitality like insisting you’re strong enough to stand for a couple hours. But it's so late. Surely he'll cut things short. There's not a lot of July 4th left.

And he does cut it short—but not short enough. The clock strikes midnight. A new day begins. America’s semiquincentennial Independence Day is officially over.

Independence Day is not a complicated holiday. Fairs, barbeque, entertainment: all nice, all ultimately optional. The only thing that absolutely has to happen is the fireworks…and Trump fucked it up because he couldn't stop talking.

At last, several minutes after midnight, he wraps up. The music begins to play. This is it. It's finally here: the moment all this suffering pays off.

Now friends, this has been an article full of schadenfreude.

We've all had a good time here.

What if I told you the best was yet to come?

What if I told you that, after four miserable, soaking, desperate hours, our view of the fireworks was.......this?

What if I told you that at no point along the entire length of this particular line of thousands, which stretched for blocks and which I walked on my way out, did anyone have a better view than this one?

What if I told you that, by the grand finale, the smoke was so thick that the fireworks were just a bombed-out orange glow: an artificial fog of war brought home by a bone-deep scorn for reality. Of aesthetics. Of everything but the biggest possible number.

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Now look: I bear the individual people in that line no ill will. Everyone I spoke to during that hour of Trump blabbering on was very kind. They wanted to see fireworks. I'm sorry they didn't get to see them.

But also? Now their independence day matches my independence day.

I love this country. It's got a lot of problems, but it is my home and I want it to be good and I think it could be good. I love this country so much it hurts, and I wanted to celebrate our 250th Independence Day too. And the administration has made it so clear, throughout this whole event and every moment leading up to it, that they don't consider me, or anyone like me, to be a real American. I showed up, but my sort was neither invited to nor welcome at this DC celebration.

This has been the most spiritually bankrupt celebration of anything I've ever seen and that's it, that's our 250th. We don't get to go back and redo it, this one's in the books: Temu Arch, cheesy architecture, horrible displays, AI everywhere. Far right propaganda. Jokes at our expense.

So I am very sorry to the individuals who wanted a nice thing, but I wanted a nice thing too and instead I got this. And maybe, when you don't celebrate the whole country—EVERYONE who belongs here and lives here, even the people you don't care for—the celebration should go to shit and every single person should be miserable.

I posted something very much like that above as I walked back to my hostel, and as I did, the sky opened up and really, truly poured. God knows people who use subtext, and he too thinks they're cowards.

But the rain stopped eventually, because rain can't last forever. It never does. The 250th is over, well and good, but there are many July 4ths in our future, and they do not have to be like this one.

Here's a video I took just before the clouds rolled in while riding the Washington Mall Merry-Go-Round—the one left over from the World Fair, back when we could still do shit as a country. If you squint, you can almost see the celebration that should have been—and which we will someday have for real.

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Unlike most of the things I write, this article has a heavy visual component. I highly recommend skimming the print version and checking out the embedded videos and pictures. Here are a few of the most important ones:

…

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(Please forgive the background mess and poor quality video on my end; this was recorded in a guest room on about 2 hours of sleep)

If this interview makes you want to read the book, you can (and should!) purchase it wherever fine books are sold.

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I've written about it for Slate Magazine, and you can read it here if you would like to. Click through to learn more about the many fun activities on offer, including:

• Periodically revving a Ram truck until the tires burn off and the air fills with thick, acrid smoke

• Watching the UFC Middleweight Champ get detained by cops

• Competitive line-jumping

• Giant Western Sausage

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(At time of writing, this article is unpaywalled. If that changes, please let me know in the comments!)

EDIT: seems it's been paywalled, but archive.org is a friend to all

Derrick Lewis, one of the fighters fighting at UFC 250 tonight, once took off his shorts post-fight, revealing black compression boxer briefs. When asked why, he simply replied: “my balls was hot.” Never in my life have I related so much to a sentiment that does not apply to me at all.

I'm at the second day of UFC Freedom 250 Fan Fest in DC and it's so goddamn hot I'm not even sure what to say about it.

I'm here writing for Slate. “But Laura, didn't you say you were done with legacy media?” I did. Then I had a huge story about joining ICE and conditions changed in a big way for me as a freelancer. So here I am, still trying to figure out the future.

It's too hot to write, too hot to think, too hot to be alive. This morning, the first of my two Slate articles dropped: this one about why I’ve loved MMA so much for the last two decades and why I'm so angry about what Dana White and Donald Trump have done to it. You can read that article here.

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It's so hot. I pray for the sweet release of death. Hell could not possibly be hotter than this. More tomorrow.

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On the afternoon of May 2nd, three ICE agents broke Chidozie Wilson Okeke’s car window. Okeke, a Nigerian man who overstayed his tourist visa, refused to cooperate—who would cooperate at this point?—and so one agent moved to drag him from his car while the other pointed a taser at close range. He demanded a lawyer. Then the assault began, and all he could do was scream. “Somebody help me! They are killing me!”

The DHS claims they had to beat Okeke until he required medical attention because their victim attacked ICE agents and tried to hit them with his car. I don't mind being lied to at this point, I kind of expect it, but why must it always be the same lie? It’s a flex. The truth matters so little at this point that the lowest-effort falsehood will suffice. Lest you somehow doubt: here’s a video taken by a Brooklyn resident that shows Okeke doing neither thing.

What happened to Okeke in Bushwick last month has happened to hundreds of thousands since Trump took office. Violent, extralegal abductions are an everyday part of life in America now, which is great news for the Trump administration, because it gets them that `much closer to their end goal: mass acceptance of violent, extralegal abductions.

We do not have to like these abductions to accept them. We can hate them, even protest them, as long as we think of them as normal. Mosquitos on a hiking trip. Rain on your wedding day. Police beating the hell out of people they consider subhuman.

Speaking of which: ICE would really, really like you to believe there’s no real difference between their agents and your local cops, because if you start thinking of their violence as cop violence, their violence becomes normal. The DHS can’t get through a single press conference without loud and outraged assertions that ICE aren’t armed paramilitary thugs, but rather good, hard-working law enforcement agents protecting and serving the American people. Which American people? Oh, you know the ones.

As with most abductions over the last few months, ICE had Okeke out of his car and into the back of a van within minutes of initiating the abduction. ICE agents have to move quickly to avoid confrontation with outraged residents who do not accept their abductions as normal and are willing to put their bodies on the line to stop them. If these ICE agents had shown even a little bit of restraint, our story would end here. No DHS statement. No national coverage. Just another day in America.

Restraint has never been ICE’s strong point, though, which is why they beat Okeke so badly that he had to go to the hospital. Now they had to wait around for discharge. Three thugs in ill-fitting armor, hanging out at Wykoff Hospital; sore-thumb visible as the sun went down.

Word of ICE’s presence spread quickly through group chats. All across the city, hundreds of residents dropped their Saturday night plans and travelled to Wykoff Hospital to do what they could to thwart the abduction.

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Al (not her real name) was among the first to arrive on scene. An agent inside one of the unmarked ICE vehicles idling outside the hospital preemptively pepper sprayed the first person in her group as they sprinted around the building towards his SUV, which made it clear they were in the right place. “People were moving stuff in front of the vehicles and standing in front of the vehicles,” Al said. “We didn’t want to let the agents leave with someone.”

As Brooklyn residents poured onto the scene, an undercover police car drove by with lights flashing. “They rolled down the windows and it turned out they were NPYD.” New York is a sanctuary city, which means the cops legally cannot help ICE. “We were like, we don’t care about what you’re doing. So we let them go.”

A second unmarked car with flashing lights drove past a few minutes later. This one contained an agent, and so residents moved to block that car as well. The agent kept driving. “He was going pretty slow, so people were slow walking and pushing back on the vehicle,” Al says. “A lot of the people who were on the scene at that point kind of got pulled with that car.” Al remained behind to block the initial vehicle, which saw its chance to escape and also began to drive slowly away. That original group continued doing what they could to block the van’s departure as they moved with the vehicle down the street.

Al remembers looking behind her and seeing a swarm of New York police officers descend upon the protesters surrounding the second vehicle just down the street. They began to violently clear a path for Trump's secret police. She turned her attention back to the moving SUV in front of her. Minutes later, that swarm reached her.

“Suddenly I hear more noise really close behind me,” she said. “There were like 10-20 NYPD officers right behind us with that first van. They were ripping people off of the cars, just grabbing people by the shoulders, by backpacks, by whatever they could, and just throwing people into other cars, into the street. I remember being grabbed from behind and thrown down in between some cars.”

Al picked herself up and got back in front of the vehicle. Once again, the police grabbed her. This time, they didn’t let go.

“I just remember my glasses got thrown off and they did something to my face. I have a bunch of bruising on my cheek and forehead, and my face is all scraped up, but I don’t fully remember what happened. Somebody had to tell me in jail that there was something on my forehead.” Al said. The NYPD would arrest eight other people before the night was over.

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To hear the DHS tell it, the biggest problem their patriotic agents face on the mean streets of your average American city isn’t massive popular resistance, but the unspeakable barbarism of sanctuary laws. This obsession seems odd, since sanctuary city laws haven’t exactly thwarted their efforts thus far. Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis are all sanctuary cities, and yet these cities deployed no on-the-ground protection for their residents as ICE disappeared tens of thousands of them in broad daylight. Only civilian action has meaningfully thwarted these kidnappings so far.

And yet, the DHS is correct to fear sanctuary laws. They might not stop ICE abductions, but they do stop abductions from becoming normal. Real hard to argue you're a federal police agency when local police can’t work with you. Hard to argue that only Soros-funded radical blue-haired lunatics object to their remigration project when city governments are telling their people that ICE agents are lawbreakers, not law enforcers: an outside paramilitary menace whose violence should be resisted.

Sanctuary laws broadly reflect the will of the American people, in and out of the cities they target. Sixty percent of Americans disapprove of ICE’s current mission. Only 39 percent are certain the agency should exist at all; fully half of all Americans want ICE abolished entirely. Little wonder that the majority of Americans support active civilian resistance: 59 percent believe anti-ICE demonstrations are “mostly legitimate protests.”

These numbers are very similar to anti-cop sentiment at the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests—with one important exception. Approximately two-thirds of Americans believed that cops treat Black people less fairly than white people and that civilians should be able to sue police officers for excessive force. Even larger majorities favored police reform measures like civilian oversight boards and abolishing chokeholds.

And yet, despite this near-univeral outrage, 73 percent of respondents wanted police budgets to either stay the same or increase. The VAST majority of Americans opposed defunding the police, and outright abolition was as fringe as it gets. BLM succeeded in raising awareness and stoking justified outrage, but never managed to shake the public perception that the police are normal. Their violence is unfortunate, perhaps there should be reform, but cops do a lot of good and we should keep them around….right?

All ICE has to do to become normal is convince the public that their violence is equivalent to police violence. They don’t have to become more popular. They don’t need widespread public buy-in. They need people to say things like “well yes, they go too far, but obviously we need ICE to protect us from violent illegal aliens. The answer is body cameras, anti-mask laws, and all the other things the Democrats proposed when they shut down the federal government over ICE funding.”

Once ICE becomes a necessary evil in the public’s eyes, residents like Al and others who actively resist their activities become pro-crime agitators. Dems distance themselves from ICE resistance for all the reasons they’ve distanced themselves from BLM. Thinkpieces in major media outlets start talking about how whistles disrupt the peace, blocking traffic endangers neighborhoods, and filming is basically doxxing. All these things become The Wrong Way To Fight This.

ICE agents are worse than cops, who are plenty bad already. Letting the NYPD through was absolutely the right call, and it’s the call most residents are making across the country. To protect our friends and neighbors, the public must continue to see ICE and the cops as distinct, separate agencies.

Unfortunately, a lot of cops don’t see things that way.

By the time the NYPD arrested Al, hundreds of residents stood outside Wykoff hospital. Many of them documented clear, direct cooperation between ICE and the cops throughout the night. This video compilation, which comes to us courtesy of Freedom News TV, shows New York’s finest talking to ICE, shutting car doors for ICE, and physically assaulting residents so ICE could get away, all in direct defiance of New York City law.

Police cooperation with ICE in defiance of city governments doesn’t just undermine sanctuary city laws; it boosts ICE’s credibility as a law enforcement agency. When ICE agents and the NYPD stand side by side, target the same people, and crack the same heads, ICE violence becomes police violence. ICE targets become dangerous criminals. And civilian opposition becomes pro-crime agitation.

When the residents on scene confronted the NYPD about their direct violation of New York City law, a police captain named James G Wilson was kind enough to respond honestly:

Wilson: [Mamdani] is temporary. He’s expendable. Who’s Mamdani? He’s nonsense.

Protester: He’s your boss.

Wilson: Not my boss. He’s total nonsense. He’s an embarrassment and total nonsense. Not my mayor. All Democrats, no: waste of human race.

James G Wilson is not some random beat cop. He was the executive officer for the 94th precinct, which covers the neighborhood of Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Greenpoint residents elected Mamdani by a 50-point margin, which means that Wilson apparently believes most of the people he allegedly protects and serves are a “waste of human race.”

Wilson has not been fired for insubordination, or placed on administrative leave, or punished in any financial way—it would be highly abnormal if he were. Instead, the NYPD has transferred him to the communications division, where he continues to draw his six-figure salary.

One might expect Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be upset about a police officer defying city law and calling him expendable. Instead, Mamdani distanced himself even from the decision to transfer Wilson. He also denied that the NYPD violated sanctuary laws that night. “I want to be very clear that there was no prior coordination or planning between the NYPD and ICE ahead of this incident,” he stated at a press conference three days later. “NYPD officers were not dispatched to the hospital to participate or facilitate an ICE operation. Rather, they were responding to 911 calls regarding a protest outside of the hospital.”

It is illegal to block traffic, as hundreds of Brooklynites did that night. It is also illegal—unconstitutional, even—to abduct people, deny them due process, and imprison them in concentration camps (and there is truly no other term to describe the places they end up). Laws are words written on paper, nothing more; they only work when a critical mass of people decide to follow them. On paper, jaywalking is illegal. In practice, everyone jaywalks and the cops don’t care unless they’re trying to get you for something else. The actual rules that govern us aren’t determined by what’s legal. They’re determined by what’s normal. Blocking traffic to thwart an ICE abduction is a profoundly, unequivocally moral action. No law on earth can change that fact.

The NYPD could treat active resistance to ICE like jaywalking, and we should be outraged when they don’t. “I feel like people in New York have gotten so used to NYPD’s violence that it almost feels natural, or explainable, or excusable,” Al said. “They could literally do nothing. Ideally they’re being more supportive of responders and actual New Yorkers and community members who are concerned about what is happening to our neighbors. But they could literally just do nothing.”

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May 2nd was not the first time the NYPD has helped ICE get away from rapid responders. “We saw this in February when ICE moved from Bushwick to Clinton Hill. We saw this at Canal street,” E, a Brooklyn resident active in rapid response, told me. “I think that what we saw on Saturday and the direct collab between NYPD and ICE leaves a lot of questions for our elected officials to think about.”

Mamdani has good reason to tread lightly when it comes to the police. James G Wilson’s claim that his mayor is “expendable” wasn’t just some random asshole mouthing off, but an accurate description of how cops deal with elected officials who make them angry. Law enforcement officers often respond to laws they don’t like by quiet quitting, then arguing the reforms they hate have hobbled law enforcement and empowered criminals. Police unions are big spenders in local elections, and can make or break reelection campaigns. When all else fails, they mount vicious harassment campaigns against politicians and district attorneys that defy them.

Mayors and city councils across the country have tried to reform the police forces allegedly under their control. A recent academic article suggests the issue may be our insistance on pretending the cops operate like cops. “American police forces undermine local democracy by encroaching upon the decision-making powers of city officials in ways that resemble militaries in fragile democracies.”

Here’s the thing about association: it goes both ways.

We accept cop violence as normal thanks to a collective fiction in which police forces enforce the law at the behest of our government. This is fundamentally untrue. The Supreme Court has ruled that police are under no obligation to protect and serve the people. Some people join the police force out of an honest desire to protect and serve anyway, and some even manage it against all odds. But entrenched cop culture actively corrodes everyone inside it. We are seeing the fruits of that corrosion on our streets.

If these institutions continue to openly align themselves with ICE in defiance of our elected officials, people may start to see them as a corrupt paramilitary force that feels entitled to flout the law. In this scenario, ICE doesn’t become law enforcement in the eyes of the public. Law enforcement becomes ICE. Something that ought to be abolished, so we can build something that actually protects and serves the people.

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Video of NYPD helping ICE: https://www.youtube.com/@FREEDOMNEWSTV/videos

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Can we talk about praise music real quick?

I am told that God created the heavens and the earth. He created the birds in the air and the fishes in the sea. The piranha. The Great White Shark. Those freaky angler fish guys. God created the platypus and the capybara. Ever see a giant redwood? God's work also.

And you're telling me that God—that awesome, creative, sadistic cosmic freakazoid—wants to hear the exact same chord progression over and over? The soft and sexless tenor of a soft and sexless man? The gentle crooning of a generically attractive woman with long hair and heavy make-up? Sorry: I don't buy it.

To each their own I guess. All I know is that, around hour 7 of Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, the praise music began eating into my skull. The hell-hot DC sun didn't help any, nor did the $18 half-charred, half-raw personal pizza I'd eaten few hours earlier. Or maybe it’s the devil in me. Who can say.

“Do you believe we're all sinners?” a woman in a long sundress, white with blue flowers, asked me earlier in the day as we stood in the long, slow line to get into the event.

“Absolutely,” I replied emphatically. It was a follow-up question to whether I'm a believer, which I’d visibly struggled to answer. That hesitation was a clear opening for proselytizing, and I have no one to blame but myself for not having prepared an answer for this very predictable question.

The other woman in this conversation was a missionary. Her and her husband have spread the good word globally for over three decades, most recently in Laos where they've finally gained permission to open a rehab clinic. Her benevolence shone through as she explainined to me that Christ had taken all my sin upon himself at crucification. The debt has been paid. God loves me that much.

It's really important to understand this belief if you want to understand American evangelism. How can a follower of Christ believe that Trump—the thrice-married philandering hedonist, the rapist who groped Miss Teen USA contestants and partied with Epstein—is our most Christian president? Same reason they can forgive their faith leaders for lapsing into homosexuality or cover up child molestation within the church: we are all sinners, but Christ has redeemed us of our sin. All we have to do is believe. God will take care of the rest.

This missionary has dedicated her life to helping people. A lot of hardcore Christians are like that: good people who can’t imagine taking advantage of God’s forgiveness in that way. They are grateful to be relieved of the burden we all carry and eager to bring that same relief to the rest of us. I refuse to set that burden down, and I suppose that means I’m going to hell. At least there won’t be praise music there.

Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving was a taxpayer-funded event at which “Americans of every background across the country prepare[d] for the nation’s 250th birthday with Scripture, testimony, prayer, and rededication of our country as One Nation to God.”

This nine-hour prayer revival featured two Catholic bishops, a single rabbi, a million Protestant faith leaders and the administration’s most zealous minions. I confess I didn’t listen very closely. It’s a bit of a blur, really: speech, speech, praise music, speech, praise music, speech…the brain rebels after a while. There’s only so many times you can hear the specifically evangelical pronunciation of the word “Jeeeeesus” before the mind starts to wander. Besides, there are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see. A Noah’s Ark play structure with a huge cross nailed to the mast. An enormous Freedom 250 merch tent selling baseball caps for $40 (where are the profits going? Who knows!). A free TPUSA button that says WIVES SUBMIT, HUSBANDS LOVE, CHILDREN OBEY.

Cannot emphasize enough that your taxpayer dollars paid for this event.

Your tax dollars also paid for this enormous stage on the National Mall, and I have never in my life seen anything that so perfectly encapsulates this moment in our history.

“Rededicate America” implies an initial dedication, which is the point of this event: a propaganda blitz to convince us that American government was always Christian government. Speakers were relentless on this point. The framers were Christian, they told us. Abolitionism, with its core belief that every human is equal in the eyes of God, was a fundamentally Christian movement. Pastors led the civil rights movement, and their congregations mobilized to march, boycott, and ultimately defeat Jim Crow. That's just history. You can't dispute the facts.

And I’m not going to dispute any of those things. There’s some revisionism in here, but sure: let’s round up. America's framers did often invoke God in their rhetoric and defense of human rights, though many were deists and would have despised charismatic Christianity. People of faith have been central to every subsequent human rights struggle in this nation, though many other groups joined in those fights as well. That’s all true.

Here's something else that's true: every single one of these movements directly challenged the state. All were considered subversive. All were criminalized. And all were opposed by the Christians in closest proximity to power. A state-backed religion could never have accomplished any of those things.

The deeper argument here is that freedom can’t exist without religion. Again and again, Sunday’s speakers reminded the crowd that our rights come from God, not government, and I could not agree more. Call it God, call it natural law, call it whatever you want: governments exist to preserve our inalienable human rights, not bestow them. They belong to us by birthright. They can be violated, but never taken away.

I have some notes, though. First: if I were affiliated with the Trump administration, I’d probably avoid reminding people that rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. Second: I can’t imagine a better argument for keeping church and state separate than the one where our rights stem from a higher power:

IF: government = religion

AND: religion = source of human rights

THEN: government = source of human rights

QED.

The majority of people who attended this taxpayer-fueled revival believe that merging church and state will make religion stronger and government less powerful. The dream of a godly government, guided by biblical principles. The architects of the plan know good and goddamn well that’s not how things would go down. They want to eliminate the church as a power base for resistance and turn government itself into a state religion.

Here’s the thing about praise music: it flattens God’s creation into something saccharine and sterile. The lyrics explicitly invite us to offload all this world's complexity and ugliness onto God the Father and trust him to sort everything out while we bliss out on his love. Standing on the National Mall with hands outstretched and a beatific smile, swaying as we mainline Christ: God’s perfect lambs, juicy and delicious. The approach strips agency and watchfulness in exchange for the ultimate evangelical virtue: an unshakeable belief that Father will keep his children safe.

But good fathers don't want their children to need their protection forever. Kids are supposed to grow up, venture into the world, and take responsibility for their own lives. The love between parent and child endures, but becomes something deeper and more complicated than blind worship. God created us in his own image. Failure to self-actualize is a rejection of his will.

Bad fathers, on the other hand, keep their children weak and dependent so they can maintain full control. From the grifting televangelists who fleece their trusting flocks to the fascists gnawing on the wires of American democracy, those who lust for power want their victims as young and inexperienced as possible. Evangelical churches are rife with abuse of all kinds: not because most evangelicals are bad people, but because any ideology that makes a virtue of blind trust and helplessness is ripe for exploitation.

It’s very important to the Dominionist types that you see their side as God’s side, and people mostly let them have that framing. But few things have ever been more anti-Christ than Christian Nationalism. They twist faith into a framework of submission, flense agency from the human spirit until it cries out for orders to follow, and burn the bible on their altar of earthly power. Christian Nationalism is an attack on religion itself. No atheist ever hurt God’s cause so much.

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Donald Trump is a loser—not in a playground-insult sense, but a definitional one. Trump is a thing that loses; it is his function and his purpose. He is a finely-tuned machine that turns victory into defeat. He is enshittification made flesh.

For 79 long years this virtuoso has honed his craft, and we are blessed to witness his magnum opus. His unprecedented fecal achievement makes Trump Steaks look like a culinary success, Trump! The Game like a cherished family pasttime, and his Atlantic City casino bankruptcies worthy of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Only a few in history have ever matched it.

America isn’t just losing the Iran war in a conventional sense, we’re losing it fractally. A fractal looks the same no matter how far you zoom in or out, and so does this war. From every angle and on every level, the Iran War is an unmitigated, world-bending catastrophe, each aspect somehow stupider than the last.

Let us zoom in on an obscure little branch of this Mandelbrot Disaster. Let us talk about Oman.

Eye of the Storm

Last year, Rest of World tapped me to write about Oman’s space program. I will not bullshit you, dear reader: before this assignment and the three weeks I spent there, I was almost completely unaware of this country’s existence. So were most of the people I know.

Oman, as it turns out, is a country on the Arabian peninsula that sits south of Saudi Arabia and east of Yemen. You won’t find any ski slopes in their deserts, no man-made island resorts off their coasts. Structures like Burj Khalifa aren’t just absent, they’re anathema: the Sultan has forbidden all skyscrapers in favor of traditional architecture. It’s a quietly ambitious nation, with a fierce pride that neither seeks nor requires outside affirmation.

This nation’s geopolitical strategy is as ambitious as it gets for a country in the heart of the Middle East: authentic neutrality. Somehow, they have pulled this off. The country’s majority Ibadi Muslim sect, which sits outside the Sunni/Shia conflict and values both tolerance and hospitality, helps explain their success. Since the strategy’s inauguration in the early 70s, Oman has worked hard to be a friend to all and an enemy to none. The Switzerland of the Middle East, some call them. An oasis of peace in a war-torn region.

Oman uses their unique position to help forge connection and host peace negotiations within the region. They’ve facilitated dialogue between the Saudis and the Houthis, mediated talks between Iran and Iraq. They worked behind the scenes for decades to establish peace between Israel and other Middle Eastern nations. And, most importantly for our story today, they have long served as neutral ground for negotiations between Iran and the USA.

The country gets results. When American backpackers inadvertently wandered into Iranian territory during a trip through Iraq, Oman helped negotiate to get those hikers home. The country has faciliated prisoner swaps between the two nations. Most crucially, Oman mediated Obama’s 2015 nuclear treaty, in which Iran agreed to dial back their nuclear program and the US agreed to lift sanctions (which brought Iranian uranium enrichment to zero before Trump torpedoed it and reinstated sanctions in 2018).

You may have noticed that the United States is not currently negotiating with Iran in Oman. JD Vance is instead flying back and forth to Pakistan: a notably unstable nation with a long history of sponsoring our enemies and the perennial silver medalist of the yearly “Nuclear Power That Shouldn’t Be One” competition, right behind North Korea. This year, they’re going to have to settle for bronze. America has silver pretty much sewn up and may be going for the gold before the year is out.

America is currently testing Pakistan’s patience instead of Oman’s because, for Trump, a country without enemies apparently reads as a challenge. Our president is working hard to alienate a country whose geopolitical and economic importance has never been greater…and Iran is doing its best to take advantage.

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The Art Of The Heel

It is spring of 2025. Trump is ratcheting up his anti-Iranian rhetoric. Also, though, he wants that sexy Nobel Peace Prize, so he sends Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Oman to broker a deal. The American and Iranian delegations refused to meet directly, so Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Al-Busaidi, served as both mediator and go-between. Four times, negotiations stalled; four times, Al-Busaidi got them back on track.

And then, on June 13th, Israel launched an attack on Iran. Eight days later, Trump joined in with Operation Midnight Hammer and “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Negotiations were over. The delegates went home.

It is February of 2026. Trump and Netanyahu are once again ramping up rhetoric against Iran, which apparently managed to totally rebuild their totally obliterated nuclear program in a matter of months—very impressive. Once again, American and Iranian delegations arrive in Oman to attempt a nuclear deal.

On February 27th, Al-Busaidi announced that a nuclear deal was within reach. Not only had Iran agreed to cease stockpiling weapons-grade uranium, he said, they agreed to degrade all current uranium stockpiles and allow IAEA inspectors to certify compliance. “This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama's time. This is something completely new,” Al-Busaidi said: an obvious yet skilled attempt to stroke Trump’s ego. “If you cannot stockpile material that is enriched, then there is no way you can actually create a bomb.” Details would take time, the foreign minister said, but “the big main issues, components that really are the main areas of concern, I think that can be agreed tomorrow.”

Hours after Al-Busaidi’s statement, the bombs started falling. “We sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried,” Trump declared in a pre-recorded statement on Truth Social. “But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.”

“I am dismayed,” Al-Busaidi tweeted in the early hours of what America promised would be a lightning-fast war, over before you know it, definitely not a quagmire. “Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer.” The foreign minister would spend the next two weeks repeatedly trying to get the United States back to the negotiating table. The Trump administration rebuffed every attempt.

Finally, on March 18th, Al-Busaidi publicly broke his silence in an op/ed for The Economist. “The question for friends of America is simple. What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement?” he wrote. “America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth.”

Al-Busaidi told the truth as he sees it. America and Israel’s attack, he wrote, was “a shock but not a surprise.” Iran’s retaliatory strikes against allegedly American targets in neighboring states, while “deeply regrettable and completely unacceptable,” were also “probably the only rational option available to Iranian leadership.”

Like many analysts, Al-Busaidi believes America allowed Israel to drag it into this war against its own national interest. These two countries’ objectives, he argues, are incompatible. Israel “explicitly seeks the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and probably cares little about how the country is governed, or by whom, once this has been achieved.” Only a protracted campaign with American boots on the ground could possibly make that happen. (I wrote something similar a few weeks ago).

America, on the other hand, wants “a decisive end to nuclear weapons proliferation in the region, secure energy supply chains and renewed investment opportunities.” Al-Busaidi and Oman also want these things. Only peace in Iran and a return to bilateral negotiations can make those things happen. “It will certainly be difficult for the Iranian leadership to return to dialogue with an administration that twice switched abruptly from talks to bombing and assassination,” Al-Busaidi acknowledged, but he saw no other way.

Trump, to my knowledge, never responded to any of these points. Why would he? America was winning, is winning, and presumably will stay winning for however many years this farce drags on. You can tell that we are winning by the press conferences we keep having to explain how hard we’re winning—you know, the way a winning person might.

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Dire Straits

Here are the most geopolitically important 1.5 paragraphs in Al-Busaidi’s measured yet impassioned plea for peace:

The effects of this retaliation are felt most acutely on the southern side of the Gulf, where Arab countries that had placed their trust in American security co-operation now experience that co-operation as an acute vulnerability, threatening their present security and future prosperity.

For Gulf states an economic model in which global sport, tourism, aviation and technology were to play an important role is now endangered. Plans to become a global hub for data centres may need to be revised.

Oman has the smallest oil reserves of any gulf nation. Their wells are expected to run dry around 2040, which means the country has just 14 years left to transition from a petrostate into literally anything else. To accomplish this, Oman has bet big on agriculture, ports, and the tech industry. Agriculture requires fertilizer, which requires oil. Tech companies want geopolitical stability. And ports? Ports…are complicated.

Oman has three deep-water ports that sit just outside the Strait of Hormuz. These ports are connected to modern and well-maintained roads that allow for land transport of oil. Gulf states and ships alike are beginning to use these ports to circumvent the strait. From a purely economic standpoint, this development is fantastic for Oman.

Given time for supply chains to adjust, these Omani ports could make Iran’s blockade less effective long-term, which may explain why, in the first days of this war, Iran bombed all three ports. That was not so great for Oman and, while Iran later apologized, the unspoken threat of further strikes remains.

Speaking of blockades: Iran only controls one side of that strait they’re blockading. Guess who sits on the other side?

At first glance, it looks like the UAE controls the strait, but look again. The tip of that peninsula jutting into the strait is an Omani enclave. Keep in mind that national waters extend 12 miles from a nation’s coastline, and that the Strait of Hormuz is just 30 miles across at its narrowest point.

For Iran, Oman is a lot more than a convenient place to host discussions. This is a country that can make or break their plans. Oman lays claim to half of that strait they’re blockading and offers the most convenient alternate ports. Neutrality just won’t cut it anymore. Only a partnership will do.

On April 6th, Iran released a 10-point plan for peace through intermediaries in Pakistan. This plan contained the now-infamous “toll both” proposal in which Iran would, in perpetuity, collect about $2 million from each ship that traverses the strait. That revenue, Iran claimed, would be split evenly with Oman.

Two days later, Oman announced it had no intention of collecting any tolls, which would violate both Omani trade agreements and the Law of the Sea. The agreement would also have meant the end of Oman’s geopolitical neutrality and the beginning of a rogue state era.

Oman is in a precarious position. Any partnership with Iran opens the door to American military action, while remaining neutral and keeping their ports open invites Iranian military action.

One more time with feeling, Mr. Al-Busaidi:

Arab countries that had placed their trust in American security co-operation now experience that co-operation as an acute vulnerability, threatening their present security and future prosperity.

Last Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araqchi traveled to Oman’s capital to meet with both Al-Busaidi and the Sultan himself. “The Foreign Minister expressed appreciation for Oman’s responsible approach in facilitating diplomatic processes,” Iran’s ministry of foreign affairs stated in a press release. “He further emphasized Iran’s determination to safeguard friendly relations with Oman and other countries in the southern Persian Gulf region.” According to Axios, however, their talk centered largely around the Strait of Hormuz itself. PBS reports that Iran once again tried convince Oman to go halfsies on that toll.

I didn’t have a great time in Oman. If I could do that trip over again I think would do better, but I failed to gain the access my editors and I wanted. The authorities who run the space program were very concerned about a hit piece, and the possibility of positive coverage seemed to mean very little to them. Oman’s culture is friendly, sure, but they are looking out for number one just as ruthlessly as any other country. Neutrality has paid dividends for them so far, and they’ve taken full advantage of the resulting peace to build infrastructure and modernize the nation. What happens if American friendship solidifies into a liability with no upsides? If Trump continues to snub their leadership and Iran continues to court it?

I’m not saying Oman changes their position tomorrow, or next year, or ever—navigating impossible situations is their specialty, after all. What I am saying is that Trump is a loser. He’s losing this war. He’s losing the global economy. And if Oman manages to maintain its neutrality, it will be despite Trump’s best efforts to lose that too.

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Here’s the map referenced in the recording:

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Here’s what I went with:

If you too are curious about What Is To Be Done: How To Take Action in Horrifying Times, you can get my take on the answer with the recorded version of that lecture, which includes a hefty Q&A at the end. Please…well, “enjoy” may be the wrong word, but, you know. Check it out, if you would like to:

Watch the Lecture

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The earth is full of light, which means the stars are hard to see. I’ve only truly witnessed them in two places: Khost, Afghanistan and Stanley, Idaho. You see why the ancients named it the Milky Way when it’s blackout dark like that. A band of light, and each light is a star, and that’s only what we can see.

Those stars were there long before we were born and will be there long after we die.

The ocean is younger than the stars, but still unfathomably old. Its rhythm gave birth to us, that back and forth energy combining in just the right way with just the right molecules to create something that reproduced. Something that persisted. And that tiny barely-alive thing, over billions of years, became us. And someday we will die and life will continue. The planet has had mass extinction events before and life has continued in some form. Life will continue to continue. There is simply too much of it to stop.

The trees are younger than the ocean, but the big ones, the ancient ones, were here millennia before our civilization began. The oldest tree alive that we know of is a 4,850-year-old bristlecone pine that lives somewhere in the Inyo National Forest of California. Most people don’t know which one it is. There was an older one, but someone cut it down in the 1960s, and so the tree people have kept this one secret to preserve it. It’s very sad that such measures are necessary, but also beautiful that the tree people have done this, and that no one is upset. We would rather keep the tree safe and know it’s there than see it for ourselves. Nearly every person understands the need to protect this tree; only a handful would ever dream of hurting it. We have named the tree Methusela. We name trees, that’s something we do as a species.

There may be an older tree somewhere in those same mountains, but the last man who knew its location died in 2013 and left no clues behind. Core samples show that it was over 5,000 years old. It is likely still out there, growing in the forest, surrounded by birdsong and squirrels and the wind whistling through the branches of its ancient neighbors. This lost tree is about as old as the concept of writing. All of recorded history spans that tree’s lifespan. We rise and fall, but it endures.

There are astronauts in space right now. They are about to be farther away from earth than any human has ever been.

The people in space are driven and talented, they might be the best of us, and they are also just people. They look like people you know. You can and should watch them speak to ABC in this video. It’s wonderful. They are so happy to be in space.

We did that. Every single person who pays taxes helped make this happen. So many people worked so hard, for so long—not just on the Artemis rocket, but on getting into space at all. From the ancient people who gazed up at the moon and wondered what it was, to the astronomers who charted its course with stone tools, to the scientists who hypothesized and tested and hypothesized again, to the physicists who figured out how to break free from earth’s orbit, to the first madman to strap himself into a rocket and blast himself into the unknown, knowing he would either get to space or die or both. Millennia of discovery behind this one perfect moment.

The news anchor asked the astronauts if they had any message for our divided, fucked planet. You’ve heard part of the quote probably, but maybe you haven’t heard the whole thing. Here it is:

“Trust us, you look amazing. You look beautiful. And from up here, you also look like one thing. Homo Sapiens is all of us. No matter where you’re from, or what you look like, we’re all one people.

You know, this mission—one of the things that’s amazing about being around, and just being an astronaut serving our countries at this time, is that we get to to give ourselves a mission that we can hold onto. To say: “Hey, look at what we did” for the rest of our lives.

We call amazing things that humans do moonshots for a reason. Because this brought us together and showed us what we can do when we put—not just putting our differences aside; when we bring our differences together, and use all the strengths to accomplish something great.

And so this mission will give us one of those that we all can remember and hold onto for the rest of our days. And so I hope people will tune in, and give us a chance.

I write about politics, allegedly, and there’s certainly been no shortage of those recently. There are a lot of things I should be writing about, and I will. But today, I would like to take a moment to appreciate the miracle of the universe we live in. The absolute beauty of the reality we occupy. We live, we suffer, we die, and we are part of something so enormous, and we are no less important because we are so small and our lives so brief. We are not visitors to this wonderful place. We do not stand apart, gazing at the majesty of the cosmos from some remove. We are the cosmos, and always have been. We are part of a beautiful legacy, and that legacy will continue long after we are gone.

We cannot forget, in the midst of all this ugliness, how valuable and precious life is. How wonderful to see the world, the planets, the galaxies. How lucky we are to taste the air, to be alive, to see the trees and the stars and the buildings our human ancestors built, from the cathedral of the Manhattan skyline to the cliff dwellings of Colorado. We’ve met dogs. We’ve met cats. We’ve seen animals Herodotus could only dream of. We’ve met each other. Good people, bad people, everything in between. There have been moments of beauty. There have been moments in your life when all the world seemed good.

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Part 1

Yesterday, we talked about the Very Clear Objectives Trump and friends have laid out for our “excursion” to Iran. With that fiction out of the way, let’s talk about the actual reasons we’ve decided to start the world’s stupidest war. They are, I’m afraid, very stupid, very misguided, and/or very downright evil. Like, cartoonishly so.

Let’s get into it:

1. The Neocons

When the neocons occupy your “least awful” spot, you know you’re in for a bad time.

We know what the neocons want because they got it, good and hard, from 2001 to 2021. We are hearing those same arguments again, which I will now explain with all the dignity and respect that they deserve:

I will say this much for neocons: at least the outcome they claim to want is good. The Taliban were monstrous. Sadaam Hussein tortured and oppressed his people. Ayatollah Khamenei was a theocratic tyrant who murdered tens of thousands of protesters. There’s an appealing logic to “Khamenei is bad, therefore killing Khamenei will make the world a better place.” Surely the people of Iran will rise up and…you know. Do something. Take over the government with the weapons they don’t have, displace the Revolutionary Guard, establish Jeffersonian democracy. No way Iran could possibly end up as a failed state or with someone even worse at the helm, right?

For a lot of neocons with actual power, the whole “bringing democracy to those yearning to be free” thing is a fig leaf. War is good for the economy, and they wish to drink Iraq/Iran/Venezuela’s milkshake. But whatever. Stock market’s in freefall, gas prices are doing the opposite of that, and Iran’s completely predictable closure of the Strait of Hormuz combined with a now-inevitable long-term drop in LNG production (which we’ll get to in a minute) is a real buzzkill even for war profiteers, surely.

But neocon delusions cannot explain GWOT II because there are no neocons in positions of power within the administration—not really. Marco Rubio probably comes closest, and even he was careful not to call for regime change outright. Trump’s will-he-won’t-he bullshit about regime change (see yesterday’s chart) is calculated to reassure the doddering former establishment that Iran is business as usual. Just another battle for the hearts and minds of the poor benighted people of…wherever.

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2. GWOT 2: No Quarter

On the opposite end of the spectrum we have Pete Hegseth, who has spent the last three weeks yelling at the media for talking about dead soldiers and shouting things like “We are punching them while they’re down, and that’s exactly as it should be,” or “They are toast and they know it.” Say what you want about Pete Hegseth, he has more discipline than most: our Secretary of War has mostly kept both hands above the lectern despite clearly being on his third week of priapism. Someone should probably call a doctor.

Unlike the neocons, Hegseth knows how stupid and awful the Global War on Terror was — he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantry officer. Anyone who actually fought in those wars walked away with one of two conclusions. People like myself walked away knowing that the problem with GWOT was the mission itself. You cannot bring freedom and democracy at the barrel of a gun. Our efforts to do so destabilized an entire region, killed almost a million human beings and disrupted the lives of untold millions more. People don’t like being told what to do, destroying their infrastructure wins neither hearts nor minds, and any faction too weak to gain power without our help is also too weak to keep it when we leave.

Hegseth’s camp, on the other hand, believes we lost the War on Terror because we weren’t brutal enough. In his own words: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” In this version of history, we lost GWOT because we weren’t allowed to shoot back at people who fired rockets at us. We didn’t crush the enemy, so the enemy took over after we left.

Hegseth isn’t entirely wrong. Our rules of engagement did tie our hands. They did sometimes prevent us from killing the people trying (sometimes successfully) to kill us. But we would have lost just as hard—harder, even—if we’d gone all-in on the old ultraviolence. You cannot brutalize a country into submission long-term, it simply does not work. You are either committing to a forever war so your boot can stay planted on their neck, or you are spending blood and treasure to create a new generation of implacable enemies.1

Hegseth wants revenge, I think, and his desire to kill is wholly incompatible with any kind of liberation for Iranians. “We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” he said on March 13th, and I am not the first person to point out that “no quarter” means killing the wounded and refusing to accept surrender. Fewer people noticed Hegseth’s 60 minutes interview, which I think is far worse: “The only ones who need to be worried right now is the Iranians who think they’re going to live.”

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Speaking of which…

3. The Israeli Dream

You’ve seen the Marco Rubio quote. Everyone has seen the Marco Rubio quote:

We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

Rubio went on to claim he never said this, but he did say it. We cannot talk about the war in Iran without talking about Israel, despite that subject being more of a minefield than the Strait of Hormuz six month from now.

The United States has agency. Israel did not make us do one of the dumbest things this country has ever done, regardless of how much pressure they applied. Israel is also our partner in this war, and what they do clearly affects what we do. There are individuals in our government who align with Israel’s objectives and push that agenda here at home for a variety of reasons. None of this is code for The Jews. We are talking about a nation-state, not a large group of individuals with a wide variety of thoughts and feelings.

Netanyahu summarized Israel’s objective on Day 1 of this war: “The goal of the operation is to put an end to the threat from the Ayatollah regime in Iran.” Ending that threat could mean a lot of things, and one of them, according to Netanyahu on that day, was to free the people of Iran from their oppression:

You, the people of Iran, and the honorable Iranian army, are not our enemies, and we are not your enemies. We have a common enemy — the murderous clique of Ayatollahs that seized control of you through the oppressive forces of the Revolutionary Guards…this is your opportunity to establish a new and free Iran. Take your destiny into your own hands. Lift your heads, raise your eyes to the sky. Our forces are there, pilots of the free world, coming to your aid.

Beautiful words, right? He repeated them on March 11th, and again on March 17th. What a wonderful thing to do for the Iranian people. Truly a beacon of light in the region.

Here are some other words, from a cable from Jerusalem reviewed by the Washington Post. From the article:

If large numbers of Iranians return to the streets, Israeli officials say “the people will get slaughtered” because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s principal military force, “has the upper hand,” according to the cable. The document’s authenticity was verified by two State Department officials.

Despite the grim forecast, Israeli officials said they hoped for a popular revolt and urged the United States to prepare to support protesters if that happens, according to the cable.

Narges Bajoghli, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, sums it up this way: “One of the ways of achieving [the fragmentation of Iran] is creating more opportunities in which the guns of the state get turned onto the population…The goal is not creating a liberal democracy for the Iranian people. It’s widening the chasm between the society and the state.”

Israel can say all the words it wants; we see what they are doing. The Nation reports that Israel is targeting Iranian border guards along the Iraq border, which would make it easier for separatists to smuggle weapons into Iran. They’ve targeted the building where Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one of the opposition’s few viable leaders, is currently under house arrest. Their goal seems to be complete destruction of Iran’s leadership class, regardless of political affiliation; they’ve killed at least 70 of them so far.

Trump, in his weird way, has repeatedly admitted what a problem this all is:

Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. So we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So I guess you'll have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we're not going to know anybody.

Israel is also striking Iranian infrastructure—not military targets, or even their military-industrial complex, but their ability to produce oil and natural gas (which is the thing that keeps them fed). These strikes started on March 8th, when Israel hit oil storage facilities in Tehran. Here is a video of what that looked like:

This video is straight out of Dante’s Inferno. It is a nightmare. This is what it looks like when you give a city of 9.8 million people health conditions that will afflict them for the rest of their lives.

On March 19th, Israel took things a step further with their strike on the South Pars gas field, the liquid natural gas (LNG) facility that supplies most of Iran’s domestic energy. In retaliation, Iran bombed Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility. Qatar supplies 20% of the world’s LNG. Iran just knocked out 17% of their production for at least three to five years, which means that 3.4% of the world’s LNG supply is gone for the next three to five years.

This is so bad, guys. This is catastrophic to the point where even Trump had to distance himself from the strike, sorta:

“ NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar - In which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”

God help us all.

All of these developments are bad for Israel, by the way. Much as America’s repeated efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East have failed, so too have Israel’s repeated attempts to destroy their enemies through targeted strikes on their leadership. As the CIA predicted, Khamenei’s replacement is even more radical and hard-line than the deceased Supreme Leader. As former senior Iran watcher at the State Department Alan Eyre explained to the New Yorker:

“[Mojtaba Khamenei] is ‘Putin light’ in clerical garb, and his appointment marks the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the beginning of Iran as an I.R.G.C.-dominated police-military-security state.”

A forever war with Iran is terrible for Israel, but great for Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces jail time for various crimes the second he leaves office. It’s also great for his closest friends in America—the apocalyptic evangelical death cult doing everything it can to push us into the end times.

4. The Apocalyptic Evangelical Death Cult

I am a (NCO rank withheld) in our unit. This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be “afraid” as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

That’s a quote from a letter to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which received over 200 similar complaints from 50 different military installations.

This story, shocking as it is, is unfortunately not surprising. People inside the Trump administration tend to view Israel through the lens of biblical prophesy. “[The Jewish people] have returned [to Israel]. For God’s promise is eternal, and it is perfect, and his word is always true,” Marco Rubio proclaimed during a visit to Israel last year. Elise Stefanick, Trump’s onetime pick for UN ambassador, believes Israel has “a biblical right to the entire West Bank.” Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, told Tucker Carlson that it would be fine if Israel took all the land promised to them in the Bible, which stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Jonathan Larsen, who broke the MRFF story, also reports that Pete Hegseth regularly attends a weekly prayer group led by Ralph Drollinger, who believes that “Until Israel returns to the whole of the land, you don’t start the eschatological [end times] clock towards the return of the Messiah.” That’s the same Hegseth who has robust ties to Doug Wilson, an apocalyptic theocrat who does not deserve to be from Idaho, the most beautiful state in the union. Lotta that going around, unfortunately.

None of the people just quoted are Jewish; all of them are Christian. They don’t love Israel out of the goodness of their hearts, but because Israel has to exist for Jesus to return. The most relevant chapter seems to be Matthew 24, in which Jesus describes the lead-up to the Second Coming. Here are some quotes:

⁷ For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

⁸ All these are the beginning of sorrows.

⁹ Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.

¹⁰ And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.

…

²⁹ Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:

³⁰ And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

There are a lot of different opinions within the evangelical community on what, exactly, this (and the Book of Revelations) means. But everyone agrees that Israel has to exist for Jesus to come back, and that a bunch of wars have to happen as well.

This sounds crazy, I know. It sounds crazy because it is crazy, and yet end-times fervor is an enormous driving force within the American government. Evangelicals see Trump as a messiah figure, and Trump loves being seen that way. I have been to a lot of conservative events over these past several years, from CPAC to TPUSA to Lincoln Day Dinners in the wilds of Idaho, and every year the Christian overtones grow stronger. Every year I hear more about how these soldiers for Christ are engaged in a spiritual war against the forces of darkness, and those forces of darkness are you and me. Liberal left-wing lunatics. Trans rights are at the center of our evil plan, by the way: a perversion of God’s way, a direct attack on His creation. We aren’t just wrong. We are destroying the very concept of virtue on purpose, because we are literal demons. They believe this. They’re starting to act on it.

It’s enough to make you miss the neocons.

What Happens Next?

I’ve been working on this damn thing for two weeks: a combination of personal shit, countless rabbit holes, and general despair as everything grows worse and worse. Trump has declared victory, demanded allies open the Strait of Hormuz for him, declared that he doesn’t even care about the Strait of Hormuz, declared victory again, and is now threatening to either bomb or take over Kharg Island if the Iranians don’t open that strait he doesn’t care about. Iran has obviously told him to get fucked, so we’ll find out shortly whether he was bluffing or whether he’s going to order all those Marines he’s sent to the area to go boots on the ground and make everything even worse.

(update: Trump is now saying he’s had great negotiations with Iran and is postponing the Kharg strike, Iran says that no negotiations have taken place and they have no interest in talking; no doubt by the time you read this something even stupider will have happened. Who can keep up anymore)

We are in the middle of a worst-case scenario that makes land war in Asia look downright clever. Trump’s flirted with worst-case scenarios so many times over the last decade, only to pull back at the final minute. This time, it’s probably too late.

I wish I had a happier note to end on. I’m sorry.

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