What bothers me most about (relatively) smart people is they often deny dumb people exist.
Maybe their wit affords a life where they never have to shop at Wal Mart.
Maybe they are just smart enough to live in a place where no one smokes or has custom car audio.
But if you’re a (relatively) smart person born and still living near the hoi polloi, on a near daily basis you see what hell ensues when dumb people get their way.
Now the world sees too.
So many smart people refuse to call people who refused to vote for Harris what they obviously are.
This attitude is insufferable. It's insufferable because it's both superior and false. Are there dummies among the MAGA? Of a certainty. At a higher rate than among the Democrats? I don't know, but I wouldn't need too much evidence to be convinced.
But plenty of quite intelligent people voted for Trump! If you bother talking to them, they have reasons why. In my experience, most of those reasons boil down to "the Democrats are much worse, and ultimately want to subject the rest of the country to their unquestioned rule, and a lot of what they want to do is idiotic."
Also, I found it a little odd that the original article mentioned that 97% of entertainment is for dumb people...but seemed to think that the nerds who want to run things are the smart people...but quite a bit of entertainment is aimed at those nerds (look at, for example, the entire Disney catalog of the past 30 years, which has gotten progressively more and more targeted at those nerds and their fellow travelers). It's a bit of a contradiction.
Intelligence is useful, but without humility and wisdom to guide it, its outcomes are indistinguishable from idiocy.
“But plenty of quite intelligent people voted for Trump! If you bother talking to them, they have reasons why. In my experience, most of those reasons boil down to "the Democrats are much worse”
Imagine having this conversation and concluding, “That person was QUITE INTELLIGENT!”
Shut up. Please. I beg you. Stop publicly sharing your thoughts.
It's not hard to imagine. I don't judge people stupid on the basis of a point of disagreement. I may think they are wrong, but I know them well enough to know that they are, indeed, intelligent. Smart people are wrong on a fairly regular basis.
Back when I was more conservative, a very liberal friend recommended that I read The Bell Curve. The often- (maybe always-) neglected conclusion to the book was a surprisingly leftish observation that human and legal rights are not predicated on intelligence. Dummies are people too, and our complex society, especially its legal system, is utterly opaque to them. The system seems arbitrary and hostile. That’s a real injustice and a real problem.
Looks like we are are going to get all the bad consequences of tariffs, pissing off our allies, divestment in American goods, loss of credibility, economic downswing- without getting any of the (minor) benefits like building up some domestic industry and extra revenue. Next time they’ll want to tariff harder to show you how it really works.
Our most hopeful scenario is that Trump will tank the US economy as all dictators do and finally puncture his cult's love of him. When his polling gets down in the 20s maybe his enablers will see an incentive to turn against him. Not saying this will happen - Trump is quite good at claiming he's winning while he's losing and his state media helps enormously by repeating the lies.
Extremely enjoyable piece, just feel compelled to point out that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t present at the Constitutional Convention, and probably a good thing he wasn’t.
The mass of smug and condescending analysis is so great here it bends newscycles into closed Einstein rings. I like it. This attitude is so closed off and perfectly at home with itself it is a singularity of self regard. Pauleen Keel had a better effort at attempting to see outside of their own bubble than this. I want to hang it in the Louvre and walk by it to see exactly what cultural energy drove millions of Americans to pull the lever for Trump yet again, and this time along an ever expanding array of coalition drawn from every walk of life that votes.
Truly, you can file this one under "Columns to be read with one hand on the keyboard and the other hand stroking my superiority complex".
You can feel however you want about it, but voting for a moron for president just to stick it to people who you don't like is the same as voting for someone who doesn't know how to fly as the pilot of a plane just a stick it to that condescending pilot with all of his knowledge of elevation and flaps and whatnot. Unfortunately, all of us are on the same plane.
Just do a sentence diagram of what you just wrote and take a look at every word in it. "Moron" "just to stick it". This whole plane thing welded on at the end. You can picture this being a line from AOC during her sure to occur Presidential run and it sounds a lot like what Democrats ran on just this last year, and it is exactly the kind of self absorbed logic of someone who has all the answers. Embrace a little doubt man. Pretend like you are wrong about something and play it out in your mind. Democrats are getting clobbered up and down the spectrum of voters, states, regions and branches of government. Why is there still a debate over "Well we should double down on the insults and really give them both barrels of our disgust with them"?
Can anyone provide a case for the Democrats, a vision, a proposal, that is only positive in nature and doesn't mention Trump or Republicans once? Can someone make this case with the realities of life as we know it, not as "well this doesnt make work now but once we research the new tech Im sure it will turn out fine" about something like The Green New Deal? How about these fired federal employees. I see many sob stories, but I dont see anyone with a plan to hire them back, without just adding more defecit spending, which is the thing the general public is desperate to bring to an end. I could go on but this collective temper tantrum and constant freakout is the Democrats basically begging to go the way of the Whig party.
Yeah, I'm going to keep calling people who thought that Trump was good for the country morons. Because I'm not running for office so I'm not trying to win their vote. I'm just trying to say true things. And a true thing is that anyone who thought that Trump was going to do something positive for our country is a moron. And you can call it hubris, but every measure thus far has been going in the wrong direction since he took office.
Yes. Raise the minimum wage, fight price gouging monopolies, support our allies, Stop wage theft, citizenship for dreamers, get money out of politics, cap cost of insulin and other drugs, build computer chips in U.S.A., more teachers, more public transit, Clean energy, and much more. FYI Biden did most of those.
Democrats in disarray, i.e. their normal resting state, is not a valid reason to support a narcissistic neo-führer. Joe Biden did in fact do yeoman's work in getting the country pointed in the direction of supporting middle and working class people after Tramp's first oligarchic regime. Governing is difficult and complicated, and it's incredibly easy to attack those that do it due to the complexity of turning ideals into concrete reality. Especially when all of the mass media channels are owned and operated by the oligarchic billionaire class. Those who have the actual means of tipping the scale toward their own interests, and away from anything that might empower the great middle. I feel pretty confident Bernie Sanders would have been president by now if the will of the people had true expression.
I have always thought one of the best things for Trump was left of center condescension and smugness. Trump is viscerally hated by about half the country, but I think the democrats did a phenomenal job of…talking voters into voting Trump. South Park’s smugness episode, where Prius drivers smelled their own farts because they were so impressed with themselves, and a fog of smug nearly destroyed San Fransisco, was incredibly on point.
And if the problem is voters (or dumb people voting), then representative democracy and self government have conceptual issues. Half the population are by definition below average.
Here's the newsflash: representative democracy is conceptually problematic (allowing "the poorly educated" to choose leaders based on WWE style marketing). We're living through it's downside now. Things aren't looking too good at the moment.
This aside about deficits would hit harder if the House Republicans didn't just pass a budget resolution that takes deficits meaningfully higher than the trajectory they were on during the Biden administration.
Respectfully, I find it somewhat astonishing that you don't realize Trump is running a pro-deficit administration. In some ways it makes the author's point for him. Clearly from your vantage point it's easy to detect the "smug and condescending analysis", but how is it that you simultaneously fell for this administration's lie that deficits are going to be reduced? Does this not make you pause and wonder what exactly *you* might be missing?
The fact that Trump (on the cultural/class dimension) annihilates all the right people who his base want to see humbled (smug woke egghead elites), while at the same time his actual economic policy preferences accomplish almost exactly the opposite of what his base wants, IS the entire problem here. It's very concerning that people are so easily distracted by feeling triumphant over these cultural/emotional victories that they don't even notice how poorly he's advancing his policy promises.
Honestly, shouldn't you feel mad and betrayed that Trump & co. are actively trying to distract you with these microscopic (but emotionally validating) DOGE cuts, from the fact that they are widening deficits significantly? You know they think you're too stupid to notice, don't you?
(FWIW I liked your first comment, the closed Einstein rings one. This is the right critique.)
Jeff is right that bad things happen when the idiots are in charge.
But bad things also happen when the smart people who are convinced they're smart people are in charge. Periodic reminder to google "The Best And The Brightest."
On one hand, we owe thanks to the many Republicans who burnt careers thwarted the crazy things Trump did.
On the other, in the same alternate-history way I say we'd be better off if Trump won in 2020, if they had let some of those things go through, the country may have touched the stove and learned its lesson.
"the Constitutional Convention was run by holier-than-thou smarty pants like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Our process stacks the deck against people who are already flummoxed by banking"
Jefferson and Madison didn't really understand how banking works either, and they established a political movement that dominated American politics for like 50 years!
This discounts a specific form of cognitive ability that Trump and others have in spades. Sh!t-talking. And they are in the 99th percentile. They have a rhetorical ability to always get the upper hand through personal insults—which may surely be an overcompensating advantage over their other cognitive weaknesses. Nonetheless, in a spectacle-driven political process, like middle-school or modern vibe-based leadership paradigms, masters of the poison tongue are the “smartest” in the room. And the democrats keep playing this game, thinking that their “joylessly joyful” and now “smartlessly smartful” vibes will somehow win the day. No. This is professional wrestling. America needs an Ultimate Warrior who can rhetorically outcrazy these heels and yet also turn around and actually work the ring and wonk out and ensure a functioning bipartisan government built around the ticky-tacky constitutional guardrails. And yes, this will require a sort of old-school “masculine” ruthlessness toward both internal AND foreign threats to democracy, which some woke sects of the Left will view as existentially threatening. (Personally, those parts of the left are equally as dunderheaded with policy and rhetorically-driven, they just direct personal insults at groups and use an academic-sounding lexicon)
Anyone who has worked directly with an entrepreneurial CEO understands this. They can be impulsive and then quickly correct. But inaction is simply not in their DNA.
And the front-row kids who have every excuse why something cannot be done, or over-noodle on small risks are usually the first fired.
They definitely do not care about credentialism either.
I worked for a hedge fund that hired the #1 graduate from Harvard Med School to be a biotech analyst. He lasted about 6 weeks.
Absolutely! There's this great organizational psychology book by Howard Schwartz called Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay, which gets at this precisely. The classic case study of smart and well-intentioned people acting like dunderheads is the Challenger Disaster. To summarize Schwartz's framing, when organizations are oriented around an "infallible" guru, the organization becomes incapable of grappling with day-to-day information-based decision-making. And instead, the organization makes decisions based on ideology that puts the guru's wishes and whims in the best possible light. And even a vibe or a sincerely humane social value such as "equity" can be given the guru treatment. In the case of the Challenger, the "Teacher in Space" program became the ideological center of technical decisions. Instead of grappling with the high-stakes reality of space flight, NASA became oriented around making decisions that would maintain the fiction of the ideological goodness of launching a non-astronaut (with the goodly heart of a teacher) into space. And like you say, those that warn of disastrous outcomes over "small" technical risks, are either fired or ignored. And frequently, there's enough prior "success," that the organization can tell itself that those risk-adverse eggheads are wrong. Afterall, the Challenger had 9 successful missions before it exploded.
I don’t know, guys, maybe we ought to rethink the “Trump the idiot moron” theme. It’s becoming embarrassing, continually flapping around screaming how an idiot moron is using Al Green’s cane to beat us like a ketchup-filled pinata. Wouldn’t it be more ego-satisfying to chant, “as valiantly and brilliantly as we try, we just cannot defeat Trump the evil super genius.” At least then we could bear our wounds and defeats proudly, overwhelmed by a worthy opponent, rather than wailing we are losing our lunch money and underwear to an idiot moron.
After their well thought out display of “why we can’t be trusted to govern” at the joint session of congress, it’s clear that they have yet to plumb the depths of that embarrassment. Back in the olden days of a couple years ago, when most of the media carried their water, it was for easy them to think of themselves as the smart people.
100%. This is what I was consoling myself with on election night. No more effective way to invalidate MAGA's ideas then to try them out. Not the ideal approach, but given where we are, the primary silver lining I see.
IMO, the blitzkreig approach to DOGE is to weed out the activists who were going to sabotage his administration, the DEI / environmental activists who add no value, and to dismantle the funding for the democrat party / NGO apparatus that funded and astroturfed the Great Awokening.
Nothing about this is "dumb." It is addition by subtraction. It is the smart thing to ensure his administration is successful.
If you listened to Trump's interview with Joe Rogan, he admitted to being naive about people's staffing recommendations and also the bureaucracy.
Just like Saint Barack kicked the Finance Bros to the curb and raided the banks via fines, the DEI apparatus and the pusillanimous diplomats are about to suffer the same fate.
One of the funniest Maurer columns I’ve read…I almost said one of the “only” funny columns but that would be assholeish. Reichelt ought to be a verb btw. “It was an easy layup but he totally Reichelted it.” Snappy.
wait but no how do I get to Netflix you never said
I just hope, by the time Trump is finished, we’re able to climb out of the crater.
What bothers me most about (relatively) smart people is they often deny dumb people exist.
Maybe their wit affords a life where they never have to shop at Wal Mart.
Maybe they are just smart enough to live in a place where no one smokes or has custom car audio.
But if you’re a (relatively) smart person born and still living near the hoi polloi, on a near daily basis you see what hell ensues when dumb people get their way.
Now the world sees too.
So many smart people refuse to call people who refused to vote for Harris what they obviously are.
Thank you.
This attitude is insufferable. It's insufferable because it's both superior and false. Are there dummies among the MAGA? Of a certainty. At a higher rate than among the Democrats? I don't know, but I wouldn't need too much evidence to be convinced.
But plenty of quite intelligent people voted for Trump! If you bother talking to them, they have reasons why. In my experience, most of those reasons boil down to "the Democrats are much worse, and ultimately want to subject the rest of the country to their unquestioned rule, and a lot of what they want to do is idiotic."
Also, I found it a little odd that the original article mentioned that 97% of entertainment is for dumb people...but seemed to think that the nerds who want to run things are the smart people...but quite a bit of entertainment is aimed at those nerds (look at, for example, the entire Disney catalog of the past 30 years, which has gotten progressively more and more targeted at those nerds and their fellow travelers). It's a bit of a contradiction.
Intelligence is useful, but without humility and wisdom to guide it, its outcomes are indistinguishable from idiocy.
“But plenty of quite intelligent people voted for Trump! If you bother talking to them, they have reasons why. In my experience, most of those reasons boil down to "the Democrats are much worse”
Imagine having this conversation and concluding, “That person was QUITE INTELLIGENT!”
Shut up. Please. I beg you. Stop publicly sharing your thoughts.
It's not hard to imagine. I don't judge people stupid on the basis of a point of disagreement. I may think they are wrong, but I know them well enough to know that they are, indeed, intelligent. Smart people are wrong on a fairly regular basis.
Back when I was more conservative, a very liberal friend recommended that I read The Bell Curve. The often- (maybe always-) neglected conclusion to the book was a surprisingly leftish observation that human and legal rights are not predicated on intelligence. Dummies are people too, and our complex society, especially its legal system, is utterly opaque to them. The system seems arbitrary and hostile. That’s a real injustice and a real problem.
Dummies absolutely are people. But they aren't people who should be in charge.
Well, the reign of Unfettered Trump will learn ‘em up! Dummies will suffer most under his kleptocratic reign.
But yea. They definitely are people.
Unfortunately, dumb ideas, even when implemented are always going to have the "true communism has never been tried" excuse.
I wish I had a counter argument to this but I don’t.
Looks like we are are going to get all the bad consequences of tariffs, pissing off our allies, divestment in American goods, loss of credibility, economic downswing- without getting any of the (minor) benefits like building up some domestic industry and extra revenue. Next time they’ll want to tariff harder to show you how it really works.
Our most hopeful scenario is that Trump will tank the US economy as all dictators do and finally puncture his cult's love of him. When his polling gets down in the 20s maybe his enablers will see an incentive to turn against him. Not saying this will happen - Trump is quite good at claiming he's winning while he's losing and his state media helps enormously by repeating the lies.
Extremely enjoyable piece, just feel compelled to point out that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t present at the Constitutional Convention, and probably a good thing he wasn’t.
The mass of smug and condescending analysis is so great here it bends newscycles into closed Einstein rings. I like it. This attitude is so closed off and perfectly at home with itself it is a singularity of self regard. Pauleen Keel had a better effort at attempting to see outside of their own bubble than this. I want to hang it in the Louvre and walk by it to see exactly what cultural energy drove millions of Americans to pull the lever for Trump yet again, and this time along an ever expanding array of coalition drawn from every walk of life that votes.
Truly, you can file this one under "Columns to be read with one hand on the keyboard and the other hand stroking my superiority complex".
You can feel however you want about it, but voting for a moron for president just to stick it to people who you don't like is the same as voting for someone who doesn't know how to fly as the pilot of a plane just a stick it to that condescending pilot with all of his knowledge of elevation and flaps and whatnot. Unfortunately, all of us are on the same plane.
Just do a sentence diagram of what you just wrote and take a look at every word in it. "Moron" "just to stick it". This whole plane thing welded on at the end. You can picture this being a line from AOC during her sure to occur Presidential run and it sounds a lot like what Democrats ran on just this last year, and it is exactly the kind of self absorbed logic of someone who has all the answers. Embrace a little doubt man. Pretend like you are wrong about something and play it out in your mind. Democrats are getting clobbered up and down the spectrum of voters, states, regions and branches of government. Why is there still a debate over "Well we should double down on the insults and really give them both barrels of our disgust with them"?
Can anyone provide a case for the Democrats, a vision, a proposal, that is only positive in nature and doesn't mention Trump or Republicans once? Can someone make this case with the realities of life as we know it, not as "well this doesnt make work now but once we research the new tech Im sure it will turn out fine" about something like The Green New Deal? How about these fired federal employees. I see many sob stories, but I dont see anyone with a plan to hire them back, without just adding more defecit spending, which is the thing the general public is desperate to bring to an end. I could go on but this collective temper tantrum and constant freakout is the Democrats basically begging to go the way of the Whig party.
Yeah, I'm going to keep calling people who thought that Trump was good for the country morons. Because I'm not running for office so I'm not trying to win their vote. I'm just trying to say true things. And a true thing is that anyone who thought that Trump was going to do something positive for our country is a moron. And you can call it hubris, but every measure thus far has been going in the wrong direction since he took office.
Yes. Raise the minimum wage, fight price gouging monopolies, support our allies, Stop wage theft, citizenship for dreamers, get money out of politics, cap cost of insulin and other drugs, build computer chips in U.S.A., more teachers, more public transit, Clean energy, and much more. FYI Biden did most of those.
At this point we need revenge, too.
Democrats in disarray, i.e. their normal resting state, is not a valid reason to support a narcissistic neo-führer. Joe Biden did in fact do yeoman's work in getting the country pointed in the direction of supporting middle and working class people after Tramp's first oligarchic regime. Governing is difficult and complicated, and it's incredibly easy to attack those that do it due to the complexity of turning ideals into concrete reality. Especially when all of the mass media channels are owned and operated by the oligarchic billionaire class. Those who have the actual means of tipping the scale toward their own interests, and away from anything that might empower the great middle. I feel pretty confident Bernie Sanders would have been president by now if the will of the people had true expression.
I have always thought one of the best things for Trump was left of center condescension and smugness. Trump is viscerally hated by about half the country, but I think the democrats did a phenomenal job of…talking voters into voting Trump. South Park’s smugness episode, where Prius drivers smelled their own farts because they were so impressed with themselves, and a fog of smug nearly destroyed San Fransisco, was incredibly on point.
And if the problem is voters (or dumb people voting), then representative democracy and self government have conceptual issues. Half the population are by definition below average.
Here's the newsflash: representative democracy is conceptually problematic (allowing "the poorly educated" to choose leaders based on WWE style marketing). We're living through it's downside now. Things aren't looking too good at the moment.
This aside about deficits would hit harder if the House Republicans didn't just pass a budget resolution that takes deficits meaningfully higher than the trajectory they were on during the Biden administration.
Respectfully, I find it somewhat astonishing that you don't realize Trump is running a pro-deficit administration. In some ways it makes the author's point for him. Clearly from your vantage point it's easy to detect the "smug and condescending analysis", but how is it that you simultaneously fell for this administration's lie that deficits are going to be reduced? Does this not make you pause and wonder what exactly *you* might be missing?
The fact that Trump (on the cultural/class dimension) annihilates all the right people who his base want to see humbled (smug woke egghead elites), while at the same time his actual economic policy preferences accomplish almost exactly the opposite of what his base wants, IS the entire problem here. It's very concerning that people are so easily distracted by feeling triumphant over these cultural/emotional victories that they don't even notice how poorly he's advancing his policy promises.
Honestly, shouldn't you feel mad and betrayed that Trump & co. are actively trying to distract you with these microscopic (but emotionally validating) DOGE cuts, from the fact that they are widening deficits significantly? You know they think you're too stupid to notice, don't you?
(FWIW I liked your first comment, the closed Einstein rings one. This is the right critique.)
Jeff is right that bad things happen when the idiots are in charge.
But bad things also happen when the smart people who are convinced they're smart people are in charge. Periodic reminder to google "The Best And The Brightest."
Dunning-Kruger: IT’S A COOKBOOK!
On one hand, we owe thanks to the many Republicans who burnt careers thwarted the crazy things Trump did.
On the other, in the same alternate-history way I say we'd be better off if Trump won in 2020, if they had let some of those things go through, the country may have touched the stove and learned its lesson.
"the Constitutional Convention was run by holier-than-thou smarty pants like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Our process stacks the deck against people who are already flummoxed by banking"
Jefferson and Madison didn't really understand how banking works either, and they established a political movement that dominated American politics for like 50 years!
This discounts a specific form of cognitive ability that Trump and others have in spades. Sh!t-talking. And they are in the 99th percentile. They have a rhetorical ability to always get the upper hand through personal insults—which may surely be an overcompensating advantage over their other cognitive weaknesses. Nonetheless, in a spectacle-driven political process, like middle-school or modern vibe-based leadership paradigms, masters of the poison tongue are the “smartest” in the room. And the democrats keep playing this game, thinking that their “joylessly joyful” and now “smartlessly smartful” vibes will somehow win the day. No. This is professional wrestling. America needs an Ultimate Warrior who can rhetorically outcrazy these heels and yet also turn around and actually work the ring and wonk out and ensure a functioning bipartisan government built around the ticky-tacky constitutional guardrails. And yes, this will require a sort of old-school “masculine” ruthlessness toward both internal AND foreign threats to democracy, which some woke sects of the Left will view as existentially threatening. (Personally, those parts of the left are equally as dunderheaded with policy and rhetorically-driven, they just direct personal insults at groups and use an academic-sounding lexicon)
Anyone who has worked directly with an entrepreneurial CEO understands this. They can be impulsive and then quickly correct. But inaction is simply not in their DNA.
And the front-row kids who have every excuse why something cannot be done, or over-noodle on small risks are usually the first fired.
They definitely do not care about credentialism either.
I worked for a hedge fund that hired the #1 graduate from Harvard Med School to be a biotech analyst. He lasted about 6 weeks.
Absolutely! There's this great organizational psychology book by Howard Schwartz called Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay, which gets at this precisely. The classic case study of smart and well-intentioned people acting like dunderheads is the Challenger Disaster. To summarize Schwartz's framing, when organizations are oriented around an "infallible" guru, the organization becomes incapable of grappling with day-to-day information-based decision-making. And instead, the organization makes decisions based on ideology that puts the guru's wishes and whims in the best possible light. And even a vibe or a sincerely humane social value such as "equity" can be given the guru treatment. In the case of the Challenger, the "Teacher in Space" program became the ideological center of technical decisions. Instead of grappling with the high-stakes reality of space flight, NASA became oriented around making decisions that would maintain the fiction of the ideological goodness of launching a non-astronaut (with the goodly heart of a teacher) into space. And like you say, those that warn of disastrous outcomes over "small" technical risks, are either fired or ignored. And frequently, there's enough prior "success," that the organization can tell itself that those risk-adverse eggheads are wrong. Afterall, the Challenger had 9 successful missions before it exploded.
Im not dumb yor dum
I don’t know, guys, maybe we ought to rethink the “Trump the idiot moron” theme. It’s becoming embarrassing, continually flapping around screaming how an idiot moron is using Al Green’s cane to beat us like a ketchup-filled pinata. Wouldn’t it be more ego-satisfying to chant, “as valiantly and brilliantly as we try, we just cannot defeat Trump the evil super genius.” At least then we could bear our wounds and defeats proudly, overwhelmed by a worthy opponent, rather than wailing we are losing our lunch money and underwear to an idiot moron.
But that's the point. Democrats aren't losing to him. They're losing to a coalition of morons. And unfortunately, that's a big coalition.
They did in fact lose to him in a very big way. Like him or not, he rubbed their noses in it and they came out looking the worse for it.
After their well thought out display of “why we can’t be trusted to govern” at the joint session of congress, it’s clear that they have yet to plumb the depths of that embarrassment. Back in the olden days of a couple years ago, when most of the media carried their water, it was for easy them to think of themselves as the smart people.
100%. This is what I was consoling myself with on election night. No more effective way to invalidate MAGA's ideas then to try them out. Not the ideal approach, but given where we are, the primary silver lining I see.
IMO, the blitzkreig approach to DOGE is to weed out the activists who were going to sabotage his administration, the DEI / environmental activists who add no value, and to dismantle the funding for the democrat party / NGO apparatus that funded and astroturfed the Great Awokening.
Nothing about this is "dumb." It is addition by subtraction. It is the smart thing to ensure his administration is successful.
If you listened to Trump's interview with Joe Rogan, he admitted to being naive about people's staffing recommendations and also the bureaucracy.
Just like Saint Barack kicked the Finance Bros to the curb and raided the banks via fines, the DEI apparatus and the pusillanimous diplomats are about to suffer the same fate.
One of the funniest Maurer columns I’ve read…I almost said one of the “only” funny columns but that would be assholeish. Reichelt ought to be a verb btw. “It was an easy layup but he totally Reichelted it.” Snappy.