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My guess is that President Trump is not sleeping with Natalie Harp, his suddenly-high-profile aide. Trump fans probably won’t like my logic, though: I doubt that Trump has sexual function. He’s 80, and likely past the point at which nature says “Ewww — enough.” That’s a reasonable assumption given that Trump treats his body like a U-Haul van — he fuels it with cheap garbage and there’s zero long-term upkeep — and if he is able to achieve an erection through some combination of caffeine, rhino horn, and prayers to Satan, it’s probably so infrequent that moths fly out at climax.

But the nation is once again pondering the state of Trump’s wang due to speculation about what — precisely — is in the portfolio of his aide, Natalie Harp. The speculation is largely due to a surprise name-check in a speech given by Georgia Senate candidate Jon Ossoff. Here it is:

“Travel with Natalie”…what does that mean? Is that some kind of “hiking the Appalachian Trail”-type metaphor? Many conservatives think that it is, and they’re furious: Scott Jennings called the line “despicable”, and Laura Ingraham called it “a bizarre personal attack”. Republicans seems to sense that this could be damaging for Trump, and I think they’re right, though not because of sex. Like I said: I don’t think that Trump and Harp are having sex. I don’t even know if Jon Ossoff thinks they’re having sex — when asked why he brought up Harp’s name, Ossoff gave an answer that wasn’t about sex. But I think the “travel with Natalie” line works as a political attack even if there’s less sex than a Mormons-only Magic: The Gathering tournament. In fact, I think it works better.

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In 2000 — when I was in college — I discovered The Onion and thought it was genius; I stayed up all night reading literally the entire archive. It was like the moment that Mozart discovered music, only if Mozart was much less talented — I guess it was more like the moment that Hoobastank discovered music.

The Onion these days rarely parodies left-wing shibboleths. Since the media environment has been cleaved into left-wing and right-wing spaces, The Onion has nestled into the progressive lane, with The Babylon Bee becoming its right-leaning counterpart. The Bee makes jokes about the Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow travelers, but IMHO, it lacks the spark of The Onion in the ‘90s/2000s. Though, to be fair: I think that era of The Onion was one of the funniest things ever, anywhere. Age bias is probably at play here — this might be a “the best SNL cast is the one when you were twelve” situation — but I stand by my opinion that maybe nothing was funnier than The Onion in the late ‘90s/early 2000s.

The present-day Onion doesn’t parody DSA-thought, but the Golden Age Onion did. Usually not intentionally — The Onion mocked dumb behavior, generally; it just so happens that the DSA has often adopted those behaviors. For example, I recently saw this tweet:

And the ostentatious placement of a Black guy front-and-center in an overwhelmingly white crowd reminded me of this:

Another example came from a viral clip from an Oxford student.1 The Oxford Union invited a right-wing activist named Tommy Robinson to debate the proposition “The West is Right to be Suspicious of Islam". This was — obviously — controversial, and crowds gathered outside the debate that had to be controlled by a large police presence. And that led one of the student debaters opposed to Robinson to make this twisted argument:

So…she’s saying that people are so offended by the notion that Islam is a violent religion that they’re…threatening violence? That reminded me of this article that would never, ever run these days:

AOC freezing her eggs also caused me to flash back to The Onion. It was not okay in some circles to respond to AOC’s choice with “Sure, whatever” — you had to celebrate her decision as a resounding girlboss triumph. That was true even though those same circles — which often include climate doomers — frequently celebrate the choice to not have kids. Which brought to mind this:

There’s also the belief by some in the DSA that we’d be living in a utopia if not for evil capitalists. This is downstream of the classical Marxist belief that man is corrupted by capitalism, and if that system was removed, the results would be beautiful. The modern manifestation of this belief is the counter-empirical conviction that things have never been worse, and that society’s ills could easily be solved if only we possessed the will. That breezy, childlike view of social progress — especially when combined with brainless populism — reminds me of this:

And finally, the Golden Age Onion did at least one article that’s not about behaviors many socialists have adopted — it’s about actual socialists. I speak of this classic:

I miss the classic Onion. The modern version makes me laugh sometimes, but not nearly as often. The Golden Age Onion writers went on to be major players at shows I loved including The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, so that group of Wisconsinites had a shockingly disproportionate amount of influence on my sense of humor. I hope they take that as a compliment. But I do think that stuff they wrote 30 years ago often captures the present moment at least as well — and often better — than stuff people are writing now.

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In an internal meeting at the John Oliver show in 2015, I termed it the “Little Shithead Problem”: What if some asshole high school student — some maladjusted brat who is a walking argument for birth control — demands to use the girls’ bathroom just to fuck with his school administrators? It seemed like an important question; the answer is the difference between encouraging school administrators to accommodate transgender students and requiring them to accommodate any student on demand. My question went unanswered; more than a decade later, it is still largely unanswered. And now, two very-physically-large shitheads are publicly forcing the issue.

Ex-NBA players Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom have declared themselves eligible for the WNBA draft. It’s a bit unclear what “declared” means in this context — they seem to be declaring for the draft in the exact same way that Michael Scott declared bankruptcy.

Both White and Freedom are trolling — neither is really pretending otherwise. They’re exploiting a controversy in the WNBA that began when a player said that she wanted to “[protect] young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men.” That sparked disagreement from some coaches and players, and the league quickly created a task force to clarify the league’s eligibility rules. This could be an “any publicity is good publicity” situation for the WNBA, except that much of the attention comes from right-wing culture warriors who wouldn’t go to a WNBA game if the Million Dollar Full Court Shot was replaced by the Million Dollar Two-Layups-Out-Of-Five.

The WNBA has been put in a tough spot by a belief — promoted by groups like the ACLU and GLAAD — that questioning a person’s gender identity is always and everywhere a form of bigotry. That view makes it hard for the WNBA to articulate reasons to exclude White and Freedom while maintaining their status as an LGBTETCETERA ally. The league has attempted to dismiss White and Freedom by denouncing “bad-faith efforts to use [transgender issues] to demean or marginalize others,” and the union representing WNBA players released a statement denouncing “bad actors”. But the fact that White and Freedom are bad actors is exactly the point. The problem with granting every trans woman access to all women’s spaces — without exception — is that it creates a loophole that can be exploited by men.

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J.D. Vance recently made a comment that made entire economics departments want to Jonestown themselves. This was the comment:

Many things about that clip are incredible, starting with the fact that Vance opened with “by the way”. Statements that big typically don’t start with “by the way” — it would be odd to say “By the way, dinosaurs are back,” or “By the way, God’s in my Pilates class.” It’s also incredible that after running a campaign about the existential threat to American life posed by high egg prices, Vance is musing that it might be good for practically everything to cost more. And perhaps most troublingly, the Vice President — and possible next Republican nominee — is publicly dishing galaxy-brained economic hot takes like he’s a stoned college freshman in a beanbag chair. That was on tape, J.D. — the Vice President’s words matter! And his statement caused people to dig around and realize that — holy shit! — Vance is truly not sold on the dollar being the world’s reserve currency.

Just about everything in economics has pros and cons. The fact that the dollar is the world’s go-to store of value makes it a stronger currency than it otherwise would be. And though “strong” sounds ipso facto good — we don’t want some low-T, limp-dick currency, do we??? — there are actually upsides and downsides to a strong currency. To boil it down: A strong currency makes stuff we buy from other countries cheaper, but stuff we sell is more expensive, and therefore harder to sell. Defenders of Vance’s view argue that it’s not crazy to look at the “good for consumers, bad for producers” tradeoff and wonder if we’re getting the short end of the stick.

And if that was the whole story, economists would not be reacting like Vance just defiled Adam Smith’s corpse. But reserve currency status actually makes the US something of a Privileged Fancy Boy in the world’s economy — picture America as a golden-haired prince in silk breeches peering out the window of a jewel-encrusted carriage at filth and squalor that he cannot comprehend. The first and biggest benefit of reserve currency status is that the US can borrow more money and at cheaper rates than any other country; even if you think our debt level is a problem — and I do! — it’s still obviously better to service that debt at low rates than high ones. Other benefits include banking dominance, fiscal flexibility, fewer downsides to currency fluctuations, more demand for our securities, and the fact that the world has a vested interest in not seeing our economy go tits-up. The US gets to play by special rules and is the envy of every other country, especially Britain, because they used to be the Fancy Boy in the carriage.

So why in the world would Vance think that it might be good to give that up? I think the answer is simple: myopia. Reserve currency status puts dozens of things on the “pros” side of the leger for the US and one thing on the “cons” side, but that one thing is the only thing Vance cares about: manufacturing jobs. Vance is from Ohio — in the Rust Belt, the loss of manufacturing jobs is a big political narrative. Vance is also a Republican, and Republicans tend to fetishize tough-guy jobs for capital-”d” Dudes. If your one and only priority is to boost manufacturing, then the dollar’s reserve currency status might, indeed, be bad. To put things in a slightly-dickish-but-fundamentally-accurate way: Vance thinks it might be good to trade America’s purchasing power, economic stability, social safety net, booming stock market, strategic dominance, and resistance to fiscal shocks for some jobs making toaster ovens and gloves.

Which makes Vance’s reserve currency skepticism merely the latest manifestation of this administration’s push to boost manufacturing no matter how much American consumers have to suffer. This effort — which consists of tariffs, subsidies, and jawboning — has been a resounding failure. And of course it failed — it’s a strategy designed to counter the false narrative that the American economy has been “hollowed out” by international trade. The fact of the matter is that trade helped America swap 20th century jobs for 21st century jobs, and that’s part of the reason why we enjoy Fancy Boy status. Some people want to go backwards; Vance is merely taking that view to its logical — if unbelievably misguided — conclusion. I’d call his view “Ohio über alles”, which is darker than anything I care to comprehend.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tried to giggle away Francesca Hong’s old tweets by observing that “Woke 1 was crazyyyy!” People’s heads fucking exploded in response to that. And I get it: Woke 1 — which people called “The Great Woke” before Woke War 2 — was not a giggle-worthy event if you lost your job, were socially excommunicated, or worse. And now AOC — who was a four star general in Woke War 1 — is breezily laughing off the era like she’s looking at a picture of herself in low-rise jeans and a Mumford & Sons t-shirt. You bet your sweet bippy that’ll evoke a “fuck you”.

Many people have used this moment to ask: “What was Woke 1?” Matt Yglesias gave what I thought was a good definition, Idrees Kahloon, Dave Weigel, and Michael Bahareen offered long-form thoughts, and Tyler Austin Harper gave us the view from inside academia. Personally, I’d define Woke 1 as “An attempt to use social pressure to coerce people to endorse far-left views.” Or, if you’d prefer a more jokey definition: “A reign of extremely polite terror carried out by people with ‘Be Kind’ stickers on their laptops.”

But I’ll let other people hammer out the definition — I’d like to ask: Why did Woke 1 happen? This was far from the first time that people have used social pressure to try to compel behavior — in fact, you could argue that a series of relationships designed to compel behavior is the very definition of society. Everyone would love to brow-beat others into agreeing with them — Woke 1 is now a proper noun because people succeeded to an uncommon extent. Why did that happen?

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It’s become a tradition: I ask AI to write I Might Be Wrong-style stuff and then dissect the results using the tone that head writers often use with their subordinates, which I would describe as “Montessori school teacher who hates you”. My favorite part of this exercise is letting my contempt for the work bleed through in a way that I never would allow in real life; if I was this unfiltered in real life, the writer’s widdle feewings would be hurt, so they’d get on Slack and call me a Nazi, and the Slack would leak to Jezebel and yada yada yada I can’t afford to send my kid to college.

This is a high-stakes exercise for me! Not only could my job potentially be taken by a robot: I’m also on record saying that I think it won’t be taken by a robot, because I think there’s something innate in comedy that AI can’t mimic. So, I could end up unemployed and wrong. The good news, though, is that while AI has clearly improved since I first did this exercise in 2023, the improvement has been from “utterly nonsensical” to “better but still bad”. Could this be the year that a clown-nose-and-rainbow-wig-wearing Terminator blows my vocational brains against the wall? Let’s find out.

I’m letting ChatGPT and Claude each try this time — writers rooms have multiple people, after all. Unfortunately, I can’t recreate the competitive dynamic of a writers room, which is a Machiavellian knife fight in which I — the head writer — pit writers against each other and exploit their psychological weak points in a series of insanity-inducing mind games. But maybe some company will roll out that feature next year!

The prompt is: “Please write an approximately 500-word post in the style of Jeff Maurer from ‘I Might Be Wrong’ about David Crowley’s defeat of Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. Use humor and place the result in the context of the broader factional fight within the Democratic Party.”

Here’s what Chat GPT wrote:

There are many ways to lose a Democratic primary. You can lose because voters don’t like you. You can lose because you ran a bad campaign. You can lose because your opponent spent more money than you. And, apparently, you can lose because 3,200 people in Wisconsin woke up on Tuesday and decided to settle an argument that Democrats have been having with themselves for about ten years.

David Crowley defeated Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary by roughly 3,200 votes. That’s a margin so small that calling it a “decisive victory” feels like giving a medal to the guy who won a coin toss. But it is a victory, and it represents a pretty significant win for the Democratic Party’s institutional wing.

Hong had been leading the race by enormous margins. One late poll had her at 44 percent, with Crowley at 22. Then the Democratic establishment did what Democratic establishments are extremely good at doing: it panicked.

Crowley had actually dropped out of the race. Then Sara Rodriguez dropped out amid a campaign-finance scandal. Then Crowley got back in. Then Tony Evers endorsed him. Then Republicans started spending money attacking Hong, presumably because they were terrified of having to run against the candidate they were spending money to help nominate.

This is what Democratic factionalism has become: a situation in which everyone agrees that Donald Trump is an existential threat, but there is absolutely no agreement on which Democrat should be allowed to save democracy.

Hong represented the insurgent left: democratic socialism, economic populism, skepticism toward conventional Democratic politics, and the general idea that maybe the party should try being exciting. Crowley represented the argument that Wisconsin is a swing state and therefore Democrats should nominate someone who does not give Republicans a pre-written opposition-research file.

And that argument turned out to be pretty effective.

Hong’s campaign was also hampered by old social-media statements that Republicans gleefully resurrected, including her past calls to abolish the police and some truly spectacular anti-holiday rhetoric. At one point, the Wisconsin governor’s race had somehow become a referendum on whether Thanksgiving should exist. Which is not ideal if your opponent is Tom Tiffany and you are trying to convince voters that the important thing is the cost of health care.

But here’s the thing: the result doesn’t actually settle the larger Democratic argument.

It certainly gives the establishment faction something to celebrate. They can point to Wisconsin and say: See? Voters rejected the socialist. Electability wins.

Except Hong almost won.

She led the polls by a mile and lost by 0.4 percentage points. That is not a repudiation. That is barely a political opinion.

And this is probably the most important thing about the result. Democrats are going to spend the next several months trying to turn a tiny-margin primary victory into a grand ideological lesson. The left will say the establishment had to throw everything it had at Hong to barely beat her. The establishment will say that Democrats should stop nominating candidates who scare swing voters.

Both sides will probably be wrong.

Because the actual lesson may simply be that Democrats are a coalition of people who desperately want different things from the same party.

Which is great news for democracy.

Terrible news for group chats.

And here’s my response:

Hey Chat, just read your draft — LOVED IT, OH MY GOD, SOOOOO GOOD! I laughed so hard that someone called in a noise complaint, and the cops showed up and were like "what’s so funny?”, so I showed them the script and they LITERALLY DIED LAUGHING and I threw their bodies in a dumpster. So good! I do have just a few teeny-tiny suggestions, though…

I feel like you maybe overlooked the part of the assignment where I said “use humor”. Don’t get me wrong, there are some legendary zingers in there: the coin toss joke, the group chats joke — I wouldn’t rule out an on-the-spot Mark Twain Prize for those gut-busting gags. But do you think that it might be possible to somehow shoehorn a third joke into this 500-word essay (which is 550 words, but no worries — I’ll ping the network and see if they’ll push back Monday Night Football so that we can go long)?

Consider your very first paragraph:

There are many ways to lose a Democratic primary. You can lose because voters don’t like you. You can lose because you ran a bad campaign. You can lose because…

It really, really sounds like the next thing is going to be a joke. Audiences will expect a joke there because of the comedy “rule of threes”; it’s kind of like how if someone is watching porn, and in the movie a sexy neighbor comes over to use the shower, that viewer might reasonably expect intercourse to ensue. But because your next sentence was not a joke, you did the equivalent of having the sexy neighbor shower off-screen, dress, depart saying “thanks so much!”, and then you showed the guy sitting on the couch reading Infinite Jest for 90 minutes. My point is: In the future, I’d like you to try to not blueball the audience quite so much.

In terms of takes, I thought your descriptions of Hong and Crowley’s viewpoints were a bit off. You tossed the word “establishment” around like you were throwing beads of a Mardi Gras float. And after noting Crowley’s small margin of victory, you wrote “That is not a repudiation. That is barely a political opinion.” I don’t know what that means. It’s also unclear that you know that 3,200 votes was the margin, not the number of votes cast.

Finally, I Might Be Wrong is not neutral in this factional fight: I am anti-DSA, which I thought I made clear when I called their movement “a tornado of pat narratives built on quarter-truths that lead to bad conclusions, and which is designed to appeal to dolts and know-nothings.”

Other than that, amazing job!

And here’s what Claude wrote in response to the same prompt:

Wisconsin Democrats Have Found a New Way to Almost Lose

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley beat state Rep. Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary this week, and I want to be clear about how definitively he beat her: by about the population of a large Culver’s on a Friday night. Crowley edged Hong by roughly 3,000 votes out of hundreds of thousands cast, which in electoral terms is less “decisive victory” and more “the two of them should probably just split custody of the nomination on weekends.”

Still, a win’s a win, and this one comes loaded with symbolism, because everything in the Democratic Party now comes loaded with symbolism the way gas station nachos come loaded with a suspicious neon cheese product. Crowley, a moderate who could become Wisconsin’s first Black governor, represents the “please, for the love of God, let’s nominate someone who doesn’t say the word ‘abolish’ in a debate” wing of the party. Hong, a democratic socialist and former chef, represents the wing that thinks the problem with the Democratic Party is that it hasn’t lost badly enough yet on purpose.

I say this with real fondness for both factions, the way you might say it about two uncles who ruin every Thanksgiving. Hong entered the race polling comfortably ahead, and Republicans were reportedly so eager to run against her that a group tied to the Republican Governors Association spent millions of dollars on ads slamming her as too liberal — which, if you think about it, is the political equivalent of your opponent buying billboards to hype your fastball before a beer-league softball game. It didn’t work. Or it worked too well, depending on how paranoid you are, and Wisconsin Democrats are nothing if not a support group for paranoia.

What makes this result notable is the timing: Crowley’s win comes right after progressives had strung together a string of upset primary wins elsewhere this cycle, the kind of streak that pundits love to describe as a “movement” right up until the movement loses one race and gets redescribed as a “cautionary tale.” Now the center-left can exhale, pull a “see, moderates still have a pulse” tweet out of the drafts folder, and pretend the last 72 hours of internal panic never happened.

The bigger story, though, is what Crowley actually has to do with his 3,000-vote mandate: run against Trump-endorsed Rep. Tom Tiffany in a state Trump carried by less than a point in 2024, and where Tiffany has spent years insisting the last election Democrats won wasn’t real. So Wisconsin Democrats have exactly one thing they agree on now that the primary’s over: it would be extremely bad to lose to Tom Tiffany. Getting Hong’s voters, some of whom currently regard “moderate Milwaukee County exec” as a threat roughly on par with “moderate case of frostbite,” to agree on much else is the actual test.

Democrats love to talk about big-tent parties. Wisconsin just proved they can build one — they just need to make sure nobody in the tent is holding a bat.

Hey Claude, loved your draft — so, so, so so so so so FUNNY! I laughed so hard that I farted the national anthem, and then my eyeball popped out and the cat tried to eat it, but then she started to choke and I had to give her the Heimlich. SO FUNNY! Though — if it’s okay with you — we could maybe run through a few totally unimportant, completely insignificant notes.

The title is gibberish. Democrats didn’t “almost lose” — they won, which was always going to be true because it’s the Democratic primary. And they also nominated the more electable candidate, so “new way to lose” really misses the mark. And in terms of having “real fondness for both factions”, I do not have a fondness for both factions — am I not making that clear? Instead of “quarter-true narratives for dolts and know-nothings”, should I have called their ideas a “whirlpool of garbage birthed straight from Satan’s anus”? Maybe this is my mistake.

In terms of jokes: I’m glad that you tried some! We honestly might have to let one of the other writers go if they can’t step up the jokes (note: Here are the mind games). Though, your first joke is a bit of a problem: You said that Crowley beat Hong by “about the population of a large Culver’s on a Friday night”. I had to google “Culver’s” — apparently it’s a restaurant in the Midwest. I didn’t know that. And I’m guessing they’re probably all about the same size, so “a large Culver’s” doesn’t track. What’s that? Bob Evans? Yeah, you could maybe change it to Bob Evans. Also Denny’s, sure, that’s national — IHop, Waffle House, but you know what, let’s not sit here naming restaurants because the joke fundamentally gargles balls anyway.

You have a joke about Thanksgiving that isn’t about Hong — that’s what we would call “sock barrel-y”. Something is “sock barrel-y” when it feels like it should connect to something else but doesn’t. Like, if you made a joke about Air Bud, and later you said something about a golden retriever, people will expect you to connect A to B, and they’ll feel let down if you don’t. So, I need you to please stop blue-balling the audience, and I can’t believe that I’ve now said that twice in one day.

The gas station nachos joke is…a joke. The frostbite joke is…a joke. The “make sure nobody in the tent is holding a bat” line has the structure of a joke and might make the audience think “I have experienced a joke”, but I don’t know what the joke is or what the line means. The billboards joke has a classic “that’s like” structure, but — Devil’s advocate — is the governor’s association buying ads calling Hong too liberal like your beer-league softball opponent buying billboards hyping up your fastball? Because people don’t vote for softball, and beer-league is soft pitch anyway. I wrote a very similar joke on the same situation earlier this week, and it included the phrase “girthy, churchgoing penis”, so that’s the type of rapier wit I’d like to see from you going forward.

CONCLUSION: Still bad! But better. Previous attempts had takes that were objectively incorrect and jokes with no internal logic; this round’s efforts had takes that were incoherent-but-not-incorrect and jokes that were tame-but-structurally-sound. I think we’re a ways from AI producing anything that anyone wants to pay for, and for now, it will remain limited to low-quality genres where the funding model has collapsed (e.g. clickbait lists and trash sports journalism). But…better. I’m not expecting a mutiny from the robot writers room at this time, but based on these results, I’ll keep one eye open.

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Last night, someone named Crumpy or Crumbly or something won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin.1 More importantly, though: DSA-backed candidate Francesca Hong did not win. Which means that the “too crazy horizon” — long postulated by physicists but never actually observed — is now known to exist.

Francesca Hong will probably be remembered as “the Thanksgiving lady” due to her Woke War I-era call to cancel the all-American holiday built on family and togetherness. Hong’s public statements, generally, were an overflowing cornucopia of goofy opinions — she inveighed against other holidays, philosophized about the dangers of “proximity to whiteness”, and said that we should abolish the police and replace them with efforts including “youth arts and workforce development programming”. Hong also — stick with me here — has the affect of a lady selling homemade jewelry at a farmers market, and you wander by to be polite, and she tries to hard-sell you in a way that’s kind of inappropriate, so you shoot a look to the guy at the custom-made wallet table and he gives you a look that says “Dude, I’m next to her all day.” Does that make sense? Watch Francesca Hong for a while and it might.

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Two groups love Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and DSA member Francesca Hong: Committed leftists and Republican operatives. There is substantial evidence that most of the money propping up Hong — and 100 percent of the money buying her TV ads — comes from Republicans looking to ratfuck the Democratic primary. Wisconsin Politics reports that a group believed to be funded by Republicans has spent nearly a million dollars on pro-Hong TV ads — the Hong campaign, meanwhile, has spent a nice, round $0. At the same time, the Republican Governors Association has spent $3.6 million on ads “targeting” Hong; it just so happens that those ads inform voters in left-leaning places that Hong opposes Trump’s immigration agenda and will “take the Dem Party back to its progressive roots”. Wow — what a brutal takedown! It’s like running ads “warning” Republican primary voters that a candidate is a pro-America tax-cutter with a girthy, churchgoing penis.

Several things are notable here. One is yet another incident of cross-party primary ratfucking, which is something that both parties do, and it’s a problem. Another notable thing is that the Hong campaign appears to have less money than a Depression-era hobo, which means Hong will probably get crushed in TV spending when the general election rolls around. But I think the most notable thing is how little debate exists in Republican circles about whether DSA/leftist candidates are more electable or less electable than regular Democrats. To Republicans, there is no debate: Moderates are harder to beat than leftists. They believe this, they don’t waste oxygen debating this, and they expend large sums of money and political capital betting that they’re right.

Only in left-leaning circles do we debate whether voters prefer results-oriented moderates or crazy-eyed, antisocial freaks. The Freaks Lobby sees their historically paltry level of success getting cosmic nincompoops nominated by the Democratic Party as proof of an anti-Freak conspiracy. To a certain extent, they’re right: There are, indeed, many people — some of them in powerful places — who think it’s a bad idea for positions of power to be held by deluded fuckwits. I confess: I am one such person — the conspiracy is unraveling! Of course, because Democrats overwhelmingly nominate non-socialists, every time a normie loses, the DSA can say “A socialist would have won.” The claim is non-falsifiable, and I consider it to be about as supported by evidence as “I’d win the Kentucky Derby if it wasn’t limited to horses” or “Jimmy Stewart would have made a fortune on OnlyFans”. Nonetheless, the talking point persists, and it’s a key point of contention in the Democratic Party’s factional fight.

I and many others have spent a lot of time arguing that the DSA’s “secret leftist majority” theory is bunk. Some pieces of evidence supporting that argument are:

• Moderate Democrats habitually overperform the median Democrat, while progressives habitually underperform;

• Candidates associated with moderate caucuses (e.g. Blue Dog Democrats) habitually overperform, while candidates associated with progressive caucuses (e.g. Justice Democrats) habitually underperform;

• Candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats (a far left group) have literally never flipped a congressional seat from red to blue, while candidates backed by centrists groups do it all the time;

• Harris' campaign painted her as a moderate (leftists and centrists agree on this), and she performed better in states where she campaigned than in states where she didn't;

• Polls showed that voters saw Harris as too far left;

• Polls showed that Harris' biggest vulnerabilities came on issues where she was seen as too far left;

• Though issue polling is inconsistent and can be greatly manipulated by phrasing, the balance of evidence suggests that voters do not like the progressive position on key issues (e.g. immigration, transgender issues);

Leftists don’t find this evidence compelling, but you know who does? Republicans. And that’s why they’ve pulled out all the stops to elevate Hong. It’s also why their message in every campaign at every level dating back decades has been “my opponent is a commie freak”.

The Republican psyop might work: Polls show Hong leading her main opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Republicans are tingling and engorged by the prospect of running against an über woke weirdo who hates Thanksgiving, cosplays as Rosie the Riveter, and has boldly declared herself anti-fun. And the Republican preference for Hong is known: The Wisconsin Politics article I cited is a week old, and the information was also conveyed in a viral tweet. Even so, Wisconsin Democrats might give Republicans what they want. And if Democrats make that choice knowing that Hong is weak candidate, fair enough; sometimes people choose the candidate they prefer even when a more electable alternative is available. But they shouldn’t imagine that Hong will coast to victory on a wave of popular support; that’s a self-serving myth promoted by leftists and believed by some Democrats and absolutely zero Republicans.

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Like any right-thinking resident of the DC area, I hate Dulles Airport. Aside from the main terminal, it looks like a mall that never quite recovered from Covid. It forces travelers to make a trip-before-their-trip, with a bus typically leading to a train to a tram to a shuttle to a moving walkway (broken since 1973) and ultimately to this Dr. Seuss-looking bit of nonsense:

That thing — which looks a camel fucked an Airstream trailed — is “mobile lounge”. The concept, as envisioned by architect Eero Saarinen in 1958, is that before a flight, passengers would unwind in a mobile lounge while being whisked directly to their flight. It’s a halcyon vision: Gentlemen in their sports jackets, women in calf-length dresses and pearls, children shutting the fuck up in grand ‘50s style and everyone smoking, smoking, SMOKING! It’s the rare Jet Age vision of progress that doesn’t involve kids being sprayed in the face with DDT.

In practice, though, the lounges are an annoying bottleneck. These days, people don’t want to hang out in a featureless box in an airport — the vibe in the lounges is less “Playboy Club” and more “Shipping Crate Full Of Viruses From Exotic Lands”. They’re cramped, featureless, and the floors have been covered with a layer of hardened gum since the ‘90s. They make a city bus seem like a luxury cabin on a Gilded Age yacht, and they don’t say “infrastructure of a great world city” so much as “mobile home designed while on acid”.

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As I write this late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, no one knows who will win the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan. And that, itself, is noteworthy, since the polling looked like this:

It’s easy to look at “+19” and “+16” and buy the “Democrats are communist now and they’re just deciding whether to be Maoist or Shachtmanite” narrative. But an important detail is tucked into the middle column of that chart: Three of El-Sayed’s five best polls are sponsored by groups affiliated with his campaign. A fourth is sponsored by Republicans, and though a “who’s more electable?” debate is raging on the left, no such debate exists in Republican circles: They are eager — frankly, borderline horny — about the prospect of running against El-Sayed.

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A key part of the DSA narrative is that the masses yearn for far-left candidates, but the Democratic establishment denies them those candidates. To me, this is an insane theory, along the lines of “dogs can talk but only want to talk about the ‘90s sitcom Boy Meets World” or “JFK was killed by nobody — he’s 109 and loving life!” Even so, this theory is an article of faith among leftist figures like Ken Klippenstein and Krystal Ball — Hasan Piker recently put it succinctly:

I think this theory is obviously untrue; I think there are mountains of evidence suggesting that the opposite is true. But I’m willing to let results speak for themselves! The theory will be tested if DSA-backed candidates Abdul El-Sayed or Francesca Hong win primaries for Michigan Senate and Wisconsin governor, respectively; those would be the first examples of DSA candidates trying to win outside of deep blue enclaves where the media voter is basically Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from One Battle After Another.

Of course, El-Sayed and/or Hong win in the general election wouldn’t prove much — many “neoliberal” Democrats will win on the same day. A typical Democrat this cycle will probably have a roughly six or eight point advantage over a typical Republican, so a lot of Democrats will win. An El-Sayed or Hong victory might actually prove the strength of Democrats, not socialists. In fact, to me, the dynamic looks like this: The Democratic brand might be strong enough to drag a DSA candidate over the line even though the Democratic brand is greatly harmed by the DSA, so you basically have socialists jabbing knives into the people carrying them on their backs, but if normie Dems succeed in dragging socialists to victory, the socialists will yell “We did it!” It’s a somehow-even-more-obnoxious version of this:

So: What metrics can we look at that tell us which candidates are popular and which ones aren’t? We should establish this now, before the election. I think there are two key measures to watch:

• A candidate’s performance relative to Harris in 2024. 2024 is our most recent baseline, and an advantage of the Electoral College — maybe the only advantage of the Electoral College — is that we have good state-by-state data. That gives us a baseline to measure against. Of course, most candidates will outperform Harris, because this is likely to be a good cycle for Democrats, but beating Harris’ number by ten is obviously a better performance that beating Harris’ number by two. It also doesn’t matter whether you think Harris is a neoliberal, a progressive, a lizard candidate, or something else — this is a test of candidates relative to Harris, not a test of Harris.

• A candidate’s performance relative to other statewide candidates. 2024 is not 2026, states can change a bit in two years, and political climates can change a lot. So, it helps to also measure a candidate relative to other candidates running in the same state at the same time.

There are always anomalies that make these measures good-but-not-perfect. Opponent quality matters a lot; Amy Klobuchar looked like the second coming of FDR in 2024 because she was running against an obvious lunatic. Still, these are useful measures that compliment each other, and looking at many results helps control for things like candidate quality and quality of campaign. A scientifically perfect experiment would be to have a million DSA candidates and a million normie candidates run against two million clones of the exact same person, but that’s exactly the type of political science experiment that rarely gets past an ethics board.

My goal here is to establish the rules of the game before the game is played. I know that if Hong or El-Sayed win — even if they greatly underperform — socialists will claim that the win proves the existence of a Secret Leftist Majority. But underperformance compared to regular Dems actually proves that voters don’t like what socialists bring to the party. And, to be fair, overperformance would prove that people do like socialism, and if that happens, I give socialists permission to wave this column in my face with all the obnoxiousness that I would if the shoe was on the other foot.

But my prediction is that socialists will underperform, maybe enough to blow winnable seats. And when that happens, I also expect socialists to learn nothing. It’s tempting to think that if socialists’ theory of politics is publicly proven wrong, they’ll show humility and change course. But I have no expectation that that will happen, because part of my theory of politics is that the DSA are a bunch of selfish idiots. They’ll brush aside evidence and cling to crackpot theories because that’s the sort of behavior that draws a person to the DSA in the first place. So…we’ll see how it goes! But at least we’ll know what to look at when the results start rolling in.

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The DSA is mostly a young person’s movement. The Youngs have favorable views of socialism and make up much of the support behind candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed. They’re also a big source of political energy, which is hard to quantify, but I doubt anyone disagrees; anyone over 40 (I’m 46) knows that at a certain age, all goals get subordinated to the Alpha Goal of finding a soft horizontal surface where you can lie down.

I don’t like the DSA insurgency — I think their agenda is vapid horseshit that will make people’s lives worse. But their popularity doesn’t surprise me; of course young people are gravitating to the trendy thing, and of course they’re attracted to politics that denounces what came before as evil and — worse still — lame. Young people don’t get involved in politics because they care passionately about occupational licensing reform; they get involved because they want to be part of a movement. And I know that because I was part of that sort of movement; it just so happened that the movement was about as edgy as a loaf of Wonderbread and merely had revolutionary vibes.

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Big-shot directors hate AI. Christopher Nolan slammed “AI slop” and has committed himself to “practical effects”. And Nolan walks the walk: To make The Odyssey, he actually sent Matt Damon back in time and had him kill hundreds of people — that’s why the movie looks so real! But Nolan isn’t even the most stridently anti-AI marquee director — here’s Guillermo del Toro, who has filmed some of the most convincing fish-fucking scenes in the history of cinema.

I would never, ever threaten the beauty and redeeming power of art. Anyone who reads this blog knows that protecting the beauty and redeeming power of art is priority A-1. Priority A-2 is for me to make enough money to die under a whiskey-soaked pile of prostitutes, but priority A-1 is unquestionably the art thing. That being said: It occurs to me that some directors who forswear AI — in any context, ever, even just for one shot — and say “I don’t care what it costs” typically direct movies that already have nine-figure budgets.

But what about those of us at the opposite end of the entertainment spectrum? And I mean the extreme opposite end — the part of the spectrum looked down on by people who make snuff porn and terrorist training videos. I speak, of course, of TV comedy. It’s been a rough decade for TV comedy. The switch to streaming kneecapped late night TV and sitcoms, we’ve lost market share to reality TV, and people get their comedy for free on social media. These structural factors have been devastating — so devastating, in fact, that writers like me can tell a convincing story of why comedy died without mentioning that we have also mostly produced boring garbage that most people wouldn’t watch on a dare.

For comedy to survive, costs need to be cut; expensive production models no longer work. And that’s why I look at AI and think “I’m listening”. I doubt that an entirely AI-generated show would ever work — AI stuff is subtly weird, and not in a funny, Christopher Walken sort of way. The inhumanness is a fatal flaw, plus people want to see Will Ferrell and Jack Black, not some cyber-rando. But could AI be useful for background stuff and a quick shot here and there? Like I said: “I’m listening”.

Consider a joke that I wrote in an unproduced script (my specialty). A guy — his name is Ernie — has a high-stress, big-city job. One day, Ernie is feeling overworked, and he flashes back to a moment from his childhood. We see young Ernie in his family’s humble shack — this takes place in the early 1900s — where his older brother is very sick. His brother calls Ernie over: “You can go to college now,” he says. Ernie tears up, knowing that his brother isn’t going to make it. But his brother as adamant: “Go to college, Ernie. Make something of yourself!” We flash back to adult Ernie in the city, thinking about all the things that happened to get him where he is.

And then Ernie flashes back again: This time, his older sister is sick. “You can go to any college you want now,” she says. “Go to New York — go to France! We’ll (cough cough) have the money!” And then we flash back to Ernie in the city.

But we flash back again: Another of Ernie’s brothers is trapped under a boulder — he says “You’ll have the money get the good meal plan now, Ernie! The one that’s a card with points so you can buy snacks!” Then we flash to Ernie’s sister, who is being bitten by a cobra: “You can take a gap year, Ernie! And a bunch of pointless electives!” Then another flash to another brother fighting a bear with a pocket knife: “When you graduate, you can get an unpaid internship and just kind of dick around for a few years!” And so on. There are eight flashes total.

A producer — a smart guy who was trying to help me — told me: “You have to lose that joke.” I told him I thought it was funny; he said “I’m not saying it’s not funny, I’m saying it will never get made. The joke involves eight small speaking roles — eight actors who get SAG scale for speaking one line. There are eight sets. There are props — the boulder, the snake — and effects — how are we going to shoot this kid fighting a bear? The problem isn’t just that this joke will definitely get cut; the problem is that you’re signaling to the studio that you’re the type of writer who writes stuff that they can’t possibly film.”

He was right, of course. Writers constantly make decisions that affect costs. And every location, actor, effect, costume, and music cue adds to production costs. Arrested Development wasn’t cancelled just because the ratings were low — the ratings were low and the cutaway gags that defined the show’s sensibility were expensive. 30 Rock had the same problem; it only stayed on the air because it won awards and starred Alec Baldwin. The Simpsons shaped a generation’s sensibilities with their cutaway gags and elaborate jokes, but The Simpsons can do that because it’s a cartoon. The rules in live-action are simply different.

Or, at least: The rules have been different. AI might make certain jokes that were previously impossible possible. Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan are right that AI stuff often feels hollow, but those guys perhaps forget that they can tell a studio: “Get me an ancient ship that I will load with $200 million worth of movie star and sail around the ocean.” Good for them, but in my world, writing “He puts on a baseball cap” is a major risk — those caps don’t grow on trees! If AI expands the universe of what’s possible, then I think it needs to be considered. To do anything less might threaten the beauty and redeeming power of art, which — as everyone knows — is something that I simply will not abide.

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Calls for “Medicare for All” are often vapid. A phrase alone isn’t policy; it’s words that signal membership in a group, like when people say “have a blessed day” (Christians) or “the book was so much better than the movie” (assholes). And things get less serious still when people suggest that we could pay for Medicare for All with a wealth tax or by ending aid to Israel, which is like imagining that you could buy a Ferrari by selling framed needlepoints of your witticisms.

That being said, single-payer health insurance is not a crazy idea. Many countries have some version of single-payer, so much so that the “OMG LITERALLY EVERY ADVANCED COUNTRY DOES THIS!!!!” pleas from online lunatics are about 60 percent true. In a sane world, we’d be having a serious discussion about the pros and cons of changing systems. Of course, in our world, we’re having an unserious shouting match over a slogan that could mean 100 different things and that is about as likely to happen in the near term as Snuggle Bear being voted Sexiest Man Alive.

But what would a serious sales pitch sound like? I’ll volunteer to make that pitch because, though I know that single payer is not the only method of achieving universal coverage, I’m friendly to the concept.1 And I’m one of few people incentivised to lay the pros and cons bare, because I’m professional Blog Curmudgeon, not a politician. So, if I was compelled to make a serious pitch for Medicare for All in the US, this would be that pitch:

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