Elizabeth Strout shakes the world, hard, with one line of dialogue in her latest novel, The Things We Never Say. I’m not sure I wanted this shaking. Watch how perspective slips around through this single sentence, until the heart-stopping crash:

“When this lunatic was running for president the first time, your mother and I would watch their party’s debates, and one night he said about one of his competitors onstage with him—or maybe he said it afterward, I can’t remember—but at some point he said, ‘He looks like a girl,’ and what I remember, Rob, is that every time afterward—every time—I saw that other man I saw him as a girl.”

Is that it? That’s it, I think. That’s why the country is Trump’s, and why it brims with hate. Somehow, way back in the Republican primary debates, we were sentenced to live in his cranium, behind his eyes, and now we see as he does, we see with his contempt.

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My son Ben’s friend Declan at Delaney Hall this week

Will we have a youth uprising in the U.S.?

I don’t mean a set of campaigns focused on idealistic goals. A real youth coup. A movement that mobilizes the young of all races, genders, classes, and even ideologies to protest the old.

These bacchanals look romantic in retrospect. They blend private longing and public possibility; they are emotive, fierce, unfocused, cathartic, festive, erotic, twisted. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven,” wrote Wordsworth in “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement”—before expressing horror at what the Revolution wrought. The holy agenda of a youth movement, following Baudelaire, is to shock the bourgeoisie.

But blissful activism can turn violent and druggy, and feature horrifying sexual abuse, notably child rape. (See: May 68 hero Daniel Cohn-Bendit.) Heed it well, ye youngs: Boomers began in a youth movement.

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Dope lost at the pro-doping Enhanced Games

This piece originally appeared in The New Republic.

Here and there, it was a good week for humanity—or “magnificas humanitas,” as Pope Leo XIV calls us poor featherless bipeds.

On May 25, the pope published his encyclical letter “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” It made a stern but loving case against AI fatalism, reminding humans of our intrinsic worth and cautioning against seeking transcendence in tech rather than grace.

But the human person got another boost in late May. It came from a less holy figure too: Peter Thiel, net worth $28 billion.

As the founder of omnipresent MAGA AI surveillance machine Palantir and longtime student of the Antichrist, Thiel didn’t mean to help out humanity. Benevolence is not his strong suit. He’s out to live forever and build a master race. But by failing to make the case for transhumanism with his much-hyped Enhanced Games, a pro-doping sports event, Thiel accidentally showcased what’s magnificent about humanity.

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“Avoid the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data.”

— Pope Leo XIV, MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The cultural trauma inflicted by AI may determine the future every bit as much as AI itself.

For two years, the public story of AI was a middle-class romance, characterized by the seduction of provincials by fawning chatbots. Some 30 percent of American adults admitted they’d formed intimate bonds with AI in 2025.

But this year has become the year of human-robot death-match, as youth-led anti-AI activism has superseded antifa as the inchoate movement that most terrifies law-enforcement agencies. A report by the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau obtained by WIRED and published this week foresees widespread social upheaval. “The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity.”

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Cornel West

Having discussed at length the sinister and fatuous ideas that sterilized American minds during the long intellectual Dust Bowl of neoliberalism, I keep promising to give you some of the good ones. It’s high time. We were deprived of numberless interesting philosophies because of the broadly successful efforts to shunt real intellectuals off the main stage by the global kleptos who prefer reheated fascism to actual mental challenges. I will finally make good on this promise.

The following ideas come from the humanities and social sciences, fields that don’t stake claims to absolute truth, unlike science or pseudoscience or microeconomics or god help us “business.” From the social sciences, I have excluded mainstream economics, which, in 1969, having suffered from acute physics envy after conservatives were left high and dry by the thrilling poetry of Marx and Keynes, started awarding themselves the Nobel in “Economic Sciences,” and thus graduated out of the debate, irony, dialectic, grace, collegiality, humor, and good faith of the great eternal philosophical discourses; pretended thenceforth to be math; and began anointing as infallible high priests blowhards with Epstein ties (Larry Summers, et al.).

The good ideas I will put in bold and call theories, lest they be mistaken for pieties. The first such theory comes from philosophy, notably the homegrown American philosophy of pragmatism.

Pragmatism’s modern exponents include Cornel West and the late Richard Rorty. Pragmatism is deeply American. It involves, above all, a hard separation of ecstatic private religion and communal public responsibility. Private religion can mean houses of worship, if you like, but also poetry, dialects, self-invention, kinks, and the spontaneous or diligent crystallization of one’s being in language or art. Public responsibility includes the forming of solidarity with a broad base of your fellows to reduce suffering in the world. No effort is made by the pragmatist to marry her private and public projects. To paraphrase Matthew 22:21: Render unto the soul the things that belong to the soul, and unto the community the things that belong to the community.

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Auld Lang Syne

Stephen Colbert is just a good guy. He has a warm heart and clear vision. He also has the right enemies. I’ll miss his show, and I’ll never forgive the people who captured CBS, took it to Vichy, and killed it.

Twenty-four years ago, in 2002, I wrote a piece about Stephen Colbert for Slate. He was then a cub reporte…

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This piece first appeared in The New Republic.

When the memory-holing of Joe Biden’s successes gets too stupid, I consult the October 19, 2024, issue of The Economist. That’s the cover that declared Biden’s post-pandemic economic turnaround “the envy of the world.” The American economy, the richly detailed article went on, was “bigger and better than ever”—ever—and “has left the rest of the rich world in the dust.”

That was a cool 18 months ago. But then came this innocent question: “Will politics bring it back to Earth?” America’s pervy politics did not disappoint. Back to earth the economy plummeted—and then lower still, into the current Trumpian basement. As of late April, Americans feel worse off economically than we have in the last 25 years.

Remember when 16 Nobel Prize–winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, signed a letter warning that Donald Trump would fire up inflation? “Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” they wrote. “Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.” They were right. But that was the summer that God was stumping for freshly felonious Trump. Screw the brainiacs. JD Vance waved away their predictions in his vice presidential debate with Tim Walz. Economists, Vance said, “have Ph.D.s, but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom.”

Vibes, then. Hunches. Vance added, “We’re going to get back to that commonsense wisdom so that you can afford to live the American dream again.”

And so, just weeks after both the Economist report and Vance’s dismissal of all of economics, American voters put Trump back in the White House, where in short order he crashed the U.S. economy like a SpaceX rocket.

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Intellectual fraud Diederik Stapel. People still cite him.

Back in Obama days, Diederik Stapel was a Dutch psychologist of enormous clout. But he got rich and famous by inventing studies. Just making them up. On the upside, he told The New York Times after he got caught, he is tall, charming, and handsome.

The ruling class loved Stapel’s studies in those days. The entirely fake research told the neoliberal world, which was then drunk on market fixes for social woes, what they longed to hear. That racism could be averted if public spaces were tidied up. That individuals could overcome selfishness if they changed their diets.

Happily, these nifty tricks that could be shared like gummies on Facebook were backed by Stapel’s science. What’s more, they were published in Science. Science science science. Truth. To read them was to feel relief. No need for the tedium of democracy or racial justice, or some larcenously expensive investment in public health or education.

Stapel made it all up. He didn’t just fudge data. He didn’t do his experiments at all.

Unlike most American frauds, Stapel didn’t counterpunch when he was exposed. He admitted everything and collapsed in despair. “I have fallen from my throne — I am on the floor,” he told the Times. “I am in therapy every week. I hate myself.”

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The other day I spoke to Greg Sargent at “The Daily Blast” about MAGA as an end-stage cult. The evidence that we’re at an end? The monuments. They recall the statue of an Egyptian pharaoh that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about in his great 1817 sonnet “Ozymandias.”

Trump turns 80 in two months. He’s polling at 36 percent. Popularity is fickle, and health, mental acuity, and life itself are leaving him. This is terrible news for a tyrant. Without his mind or the confidence of the American people, Trump and his hangers-on are making ever more outlandish moves to shore up his authority. Having fallen short of every measure of human merit, Trump can, in his monuments, at least, seem undefeated and deathless. The hope is to set him quite literally in stone.

The plans are pharaonic in scale—more than pharaonic. The Arc de Trump is designed at 250 feet tall, kitted out with a gold-winged Lady Liberty, four un-American gilded lions, and a flock of hideous 24-foot golden eagles. It would stand twice as high as the Lincoln Memorial. It would cost $100 million, some from American taxpayers.

The plan is despised by the people of the United States. The Trump-toady Commission of Fine Arts received more than 1,000 comments on the proposal. “One hundred percent” of respondents opposed the project, said Thomas Luebke, the commission’s secretary.

But—did you hear how big it is? And how immortal?

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Get ready with me while we talk about Ashley St. Clair.

Ashley St. Clair is a gonzo MAGA influencer turned gonzo ex-MAGA influencer who is also known for having mothered a child with Elon Musk in 2023. She is a college student. She is 27.

For the last few months, St. Clair has been posting to TikTok about her escape or exile from the MAGA carnies. She sums it up this way: “I became a cringe MAGA influencer for 8 years before I found my brain.” Now she is ready to “talk about my experience within this machine of MAGA” and “speak about the inside of a system that nobody else is.”

Though she makes serious reference to having renounced her previous creed and making earnest amends, St. Clair is mostly conducting her multipart exposé with Catskills-style comedy. She’s well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher’s manner, manicures, and nasality.

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There are unseen forces that act, there is a spiritual realm, and we are subject to those forces for good and bad. — Tucker Carlson

Why are so many men so dazzled by Donald Trump? This, rather than any query into Trump himself, may be the question of our time. It’s certainly the question for Tucker Carlson, my longtime nemesis, who has at last turned on Trump.

I wish he’d been asked this question more directly in the recent interview with him in The New York Times.

As I’ve written before, the world’s catastrophe is not Trump so much as the legions of people who act in his name. Psychiatrists sometimes speak of sociopaths like Trump as “patient-makers.” For every Donald Trump there are a half-dozen people like Tucker who end up acting out, despairing, or going to therapy because they’ve had the grave misfortune of encountering him. Trump and his ilk are thus cash cows for shrinks. These men’s addled children, wives, coworkers, and underlings will, when addled enough, beat a path to the therapist’s door.

Trump types then become specters that haunt therapy, looming large in the anguish and misery of a therapist’s paying clients. Trump surely haunts other people’s therapy this way. He’s haunted a session or ten of mine.

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1978: Consumer confidence low. Outfit confidence soaring.

Consumer sentiment in the U.S. nosedived in April—from 53.3 in March to a failing grade: 49.8. Ugh. This is the lowest it’s been since 1978.

For those keeping count, 1978 was malaise days. We were ill at ease. That’s when we elders, then children, were stuck in the wayback of AC-free, ashtray-equipped Dodge Colts, while our slender moms sat in gas lines, smoking Merits.

If your license plate ended in an odd number, you could gas up on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. If even, you braved the lines on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. (Gas stations were closed on the Sabbath.) Our Colt was G0562. So my stagflation-Carter-malaise memories are all from MWF.

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Does Claude know what a grave is?

This article first appeared in The New Republic.

Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, has a lot to answer for. Let’s start with this. Given that Anthropic took such a seemingly principled stand against the use of its AI in lethal autonomous weapons, why did the U.S. military use Claude to attack Iran with … lethal autonomous weapons?

Specifically, why was Claude embedded in the Pentagon’s Palantir-developed command-and-control platform and used to simulate battlefield scenarios, assess intelligence, and, most disturbingly of all, identify targets for airstrikes on Iran?

“I want to be honest,” Claude might say, if I were to ask. “This is a very astute question, Virginia.” But I can’t take Claude’s oily frankenprose anymore. So I’m not going to ask it anything.

Fortunately, Shane Harris, the Pulitzer-winning journalist, braved Claude’s glazing and posed a version of the question. Two weeks ago, he told an audience in Amsterdam that he’d asked the bot: “Claude, how do you feel about the U.S. military using you to select targets?”

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Of the many ways deconstruction was defined in the 1990s, the definition on today’s cultural main stage never came up. Deconstruction is a critical dismantling of a person’s understanding of what it means to be an evangelical Christian.

This kind of deconstruction, as defined on Desiring God, is not just in vogue now; it’s in use. It’s getting a popular workout as no literary critical term ever has before it.

My favorite deconstructing evangelical is Carter Brown, a mutual of mine on TikTok. A longtime evangelical and thrice Trump voter, she is in the thick of passionately losing her religion and politics, as she reads, listens, travels, inquires, organizes, finds solidarity, and above all kaleidoscopically changes—in real time and in public.

Carter’s Instagram bio says this:

As I deconstruct 🩵
I shed who I was out loud 🌀
Wings bloom as I speak 🦋

How stupefyingly interesting that the 90s scareword “deconstruction,” which was supposed to be nothing but hot French air, turned out to be a practical skill for both self-liberation and collective political action.

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Good news. A crisp new episode of Omnishambles is out. The topic: those devilishly intriguing Iranian Lego videos. The channel releasing them may have been banned on YouTube, but Cy Canterel and I go deep on the mean cartoons that are soaking the Trump brand in an acid bath. Please join the Omnishambles channel to get each new episode in your inbox, alw…

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Budapest Bacchanal

Ain’t this a kick in my American head. “Illiberal democracy”—the form of government that Viktor Orban claimed he brought to Hungary—turns out not to be a contradiction in terms.

The headlines about Orban’s glorious defeat in Hungary on Sunday prove it. They all note that Orban belonged to the far, far, Trump-Putin right. That’s the illiberalism. But they also emphasize that he conceded defeat. That’s the democracy.

NYT: Orban, Beacon to the Right, Concedes Defeat in Hungary’s Election.

CNN: Trump ally Viktor Orbán concedes landmark defeat

Washington Post: Orban, ally of Trump and Putin, concedes election defeat

So it seems possible that you can have electoral democracy without liberalism. You can, as Orban’s Hungary did, vest power in the people by way of elections while also slashing civil liberties and violating human rights. What do you know?

This is a significant discovery for Americans. Because if illiberalism can be voted in and voted out, maybe that’s what we will do here.

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An AI ghost girl on Jeffrey Epstein’s island

This article first appeared in The New Republic.

There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.

It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”

The strongest entries in the series are produced by an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iranian government accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.)

An AI ghost baby and AI ghost boy in Hiroshima, Japan

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