Politics on David Crush

The Gift That Blinds

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400

I’ve started and stopped this post more times than I can count, because every time I sat down to write it, I was angry. I’m still grieving. But I’ve come to realize the anger isn’t the point.

I was an atheist for most of my life. Now I’m new to the faith, reading Scripture for the first time, and reading it alongside the news. The point is what’s happening to the church I’ve joined. It took a gift before I got here. It’s my church now, so the bill is mine too, and Scripture says plainly what a gift does to the wise.

What we know

In May 2023, a jury in New York found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her, and awarded her $5 million. The jury didn’t find “rape” under New York’s narrow criminal definition, which covers only one specific act. But the judge in the case wrote that this “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word,” and that “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” (NBC News)

Trump appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. This summer the Court declined to hear the case, then declined again when he asked it to reconsider. The verdict is final, and Carroll has been paid. (Reuters, SCOTUSblog) A second jury awarded her $83.3 million for his continued defamation of her. An appeals court upheld that verdict too, and his appeal of it is now before the Supreme Court. (Supreme Court docket)

Carroll isn’t alone. At least 26 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct (The Guardian), and we’ve all heard the Access Hollywood tape in his own voice.

This isn’t a rumor or an anonymous internet theory. It’s a jury’s verdict, and the highest court in the land let it stand.

And yet 81% of white evangelical voters chose him in 2024, roughly the same eight in ten who have backed him in every election since 2016. (Pew Research Center)

Where did “Don’t tread on me” go?

On January 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during an immigration operation. He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a VA hospital. He had a permit to carry, and a handgun was in his waistband. No available video shows him holding it. (BBC)

Administration officials blamed his gun anyway. Then the President of the United States said it himself: Pretti “certainly shouldn’t have been carrying a gun.” (Reuters)

To their credit, gun-rights groups pushed back. The NRA called one federal prosecutor’s comments “dangerous and wrong.” But when the President said it, the NRA answered without even using his name. (USA Today) For about a week, it looked like the movement that flies the Gadsden flag might mean it.

Nine months later, Alex Pretti’s parents still don’t know the names of the men who killed their son. Federal authorities kept state investigators away from the scene on the day he died. They began sharing evidence this summer, then stopped again in September. The state’s investigators still can’t get the guns used to shoot him, or even his own gun. No one has been charged. (WESH, AP) In a letter to the Justice Department, his family wrote: “No family should have to beg the U.S. government to do its job.”

That’s the pattern: a week of objection, then quiet.

The deal

I understand why. I really do. A lot of evangelicals made a calculation: support this man, and in return get the judges, the end of Roe, protection for religious liberty, and a seat at the table. Some preachers compared him to King Cyrus, the pagan Persian king God used to send the exiles home. Even a flawed vessel can serve God’s purposes, they said. (NPR) From the inside, the logic holds together.

But Jesus was offered this exact bargain. In Matthew 4, the devil showed Him “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them,” and offered them all for one act of worship. Jesus didn’t stop to weigh how much good He could do with that kind of power. He said, “Get thee hence, Satan.”

We said yes.

The devil in this story isn’t any one man. It’s the bargain itself: power in exchange for looking the other way.

The deal isn’t paying out

Part of it paid out. The judges were confirmed, and Roe is gone. But look at the rest of the bill.

We were told this was about religious liberty. Then the administration threw out a policy, in place for more than 30 years, that kept immigration arrests away from churches. In February, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told Congress that the change “has harmed Catholic parishes and worshippers,” and that immigrants in detention are being “unjustly deprived” of the sacraments. (USCCB) Several religious groups sued, and a court has allowed their case to go forward. (National Catholic Reporter)

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosts official Christian worship services. Pastors from his own small denomination have preached there, including Doug Wilson, who calls himself a Christian nationalist. (AP) The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, whose clients are about 95% Christian, received more than 50 complaints in a single day about one of those services. (Military.com)

The Pentagon cut its list of recognized religious affiliations from more than 200 to 31, and 21 of the 31 are Christian. (AP, Stars and Stripes) A few weeks ago, Hegseth created a new Office of Religious Affairs. Every military chaplain will answer to it, and it reports directly to him. The Pentagon says the office won’t “favor one faith.” (PBS News) But the Episcopal Church’s own bishop for the armed forces says chaplains fear it is pushing “fundamentalist Christianity into the military.” (Church Times) A retired general who is also an Episcopal priest warned of “one flavor” of evangelicalism being “fire-hosed” on the troops. (Houston Public Media)

Baptists used to know this bill by heart. In 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association, a religious minority under Connecticut’s established church, wrote to Thomas Jefferson that they enjoyed their religious privileges “as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights,” and warned about those “who seek after power & gain” under the pretense of religion. (National Archives) Jefferson’s reply gave us the phrase “a wall of separation between Church & State.” (Library of Congress)

Meanwhile, our faith gets sold as a brand. In Holy Week of 2024, Trump promoted a $59.99 “God Bless the USA” Bible (AP); the AP later found about 120,000 copies had been shipped from a printer in China, valued at less than $3 apiece. (AP) And Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire by Forbes’ count, is back at the President’s side, calling himself a “cultural Christian.” (Forbes, UnHerd) Jesus said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) I held Musk up to his own words in The Man in the Mirror.

The religious liberty we were promised has turned out to be liberty for one kind of Christian, and the rest of the church is paying for it.

The gift that blinds

There’s a verse in Exodus I can’t stop thinking about: “Thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.” (Exodus 23:8; see also Deuteronomy 16:19) Modern translations say “bribe.” The King James says “gift,” and I think that’s closer to how it feels from the inside. Nobody who takes a bribe calls it one.

The verse closes a passage about courtrooms. It’s addressed to witnesses and judges: “Thou shalt not raise a false report… neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment.” (Exodus 23:1–8) The jury in New York took no gift, and it saw clearly.

Notice who goes blind. Not the foolish. The wise. The righteous. Scripture tells us that good, faithful people lose their sight once they’ve accepted the gift. I believe that’s what happened to us. We weren’t stupid. We were offered something we wanted, and we took it. Once we’d taken it, we couldn’t see a jury’s verdict. We couldn’t see a nurse dead in the street, or Catholics in detention kept from the sacraments.

Jesus said it plainly: “No man can serve two masters… Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matthew 6:24)

This isn’t a uniquely conservative failing. It’s a human one. I’m not immune to it, and I don’t claim to know anyone’s heart. That isn’t my place. But Jesus didn’t ask me to judge hearts. He told me to watch the fruit.

The wolves

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15–16)

Wolves don’t announce themselves. If they looked like wolves, we wouldn’t need the warning. They look like allies, champions, answers to prayer. They come carrying gifts.

And notice who Jesus is warning about: prophets, people who speak in God’s name. A politician can’t put on sheep’s clothing by himself. Someone in the pulpit has to hand it to him, and the preachers who sold us the Cyrus comparison did.

I never had a problem with Christianity. I had a problem with the people who use it for their own gain.

Here’s the part that breaks my heart. The people in the pews aren’t the wolf’s masters. They’re the sheep. Jesus warned about the shepherds, too: “he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd… seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.” (John 10:12) A wolf doesn’t need the shepherds on its side. It only needs them to look away. A lot of us haven’t seen that yet, and that’s the tragedy.

It’s also what scares me most. A generation is watching, and some of them will see the cruelty and decide that it is Christianity. That’s Part 2.

We were warned. Not vaguely, but specifically, with instructions for telling the difference. But you can’t check the fruit against a book you haven’t read. The fruits are in. The question isn’t whether we were fooled. It’s whether we’re willing to see it now.

What would it take?

I keep asking myself what it would take. If a jury’s verdict wasn’t enough, and the highest court in the land letting it stand wasn’t enough, what is? If a lawfully armed nurse dying in the street, and the President blaming him for carrying a gun, wasn’t enough, what is?

I don’t think the answer is more evidence. Political scientist Lilliana Mason has shown how our parties have become identities, not just sets of beliefs, so that winning matters more to us than the issues. (University of Chicago Press) For many evangelicals, supporting Trump is now tied up with church, family, and friendships. Walking away doesn’t just mean changing a vote; it can mean losing your people. And the more we’ve invested in something, the harder it is to admit it was a mistake. Every year we defend the bargain, walking away costs a little more.

History offers some hope, and a warning. Republicans stood by Richard Nixon through most of two years of Watergate. What finally broke them was undeniable evidence, the “smoking gun” tape, followed by people their own side trusted. Barry Goldwater and the Republican leaders of Congress went to the White House and told Nixon he had lost them. He resigned two days later. (UNC Libraries) Evidence alone wasn’t enough. It took evidence plus voices from inside.

One voice isn’t enough, either. In 2019, Christianity Today, the magazine Billy Graham founded, called Trump “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused” and said he should be removed from office. (Christianity Today) Less than a year later, 83% of white evangelicals voted for him. (Pew Research Center)

So here’s what I think it takes, and it’s my own conviction, not a statistic. It takes many of us, from inside the church, saying it out loud. And it takes grace: a way back that doesn’t require anyone to admit they were a fool, only that they were human. The wolf counts on our pride. Repentance has always been the way out.

Keep the door open

Our job isn’t to win the argument. It’s to keep the door open.

These are our brothers and sisters, sitting in the same pews. And I’m in no position to look down on anyone. I will most likely sin today. That’s not an excuse; it’s the human condition, and it’s why repentance exists. All any of us can do is turn around, learn from it, and keep walking. That’s all I ask of anyone, because it’s all God asks of me. Paul put it this way: “If a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” (Galatians 6:1)

Remember the story of the prodigal son. (Luke 15:11–32) When the son finally came to himself and turned for home, his father didn’t wait at the door with his arms crossed. He saw him “a great way off,” and he ran. I spent nearly two decades a great way off, and I know now that the father runs. That’s our job when our brothers and sisters come home: run to meet them.

But there’s another son in that story. The older brother stayed home and did everything asked of him. He still ended up standing outside the party, too bitter to go in.

I might be the older brother. I only just walked through the door, and now the ones who need to come home are the people who were here before me. I already know how easy it would be to stand outside, keeping score.

The story never says whether he went in. It says his father came out and intreated him, and the party was still going.

By Their Fruits

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:55:00 -0400

Jesus gave us a test for telling a shepherd from a wolf: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16) It is not a test of hearts. It is a test of what grows.

This series holds the American church up to that test three times. Part 1 is the church: a gift of power, taken in good faith, and what Scripture says a gift does to the wise. Part 2 is the people watching from outside: a generation that sees the cruelty, thinks it is Christianity, and walks away. Part 3 is one of them coming home. I was an atheist for most of my life, and that part is mine.

The parts list below stays in sync with the published essays — use it as the roadmap.

Directed to Stand Behind Him

David Crush — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0400

On October 22, twelve Catholic bishops went to the White House to talk about immigration enforcement, visas for religious workers, and human dignity. First they sat through a policy meeting with administration staff. Then, as Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob tells it, they were “ushered into the Oval Office.”

“The president greeted us, took a seat at his desk and presented us with commemorative tokens. We were then directed to stand behind him and pray.”

Photos were taken. “Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken.” Margo Martin, a special assistant to the president, posted it. It went out twelve days before the midterms. Grob says none of the bishops gave permission.

Two days later, ESPN’s College GameDay broadcast from Salt Lake City. Before the show, the Utah Student Experience Instagram account, posting together with the university’s official account, put up a video with the caption “Best @patmcafeeshow impression?” One student called Pat McAfee corny. Another called him creepy. That Saturday, on air, McAfee said the account had posted “something talking a little trash about me last night, which I certainly love.”

By Monday he did not love it. “I’ve never been more uncomfortable, honestly, in my life,” he told his audience.

The Same Act

Here is the claim. These are one story told on two stages. Modern conservatism sells itself as the alpha in the room, blessed by God and afraid of nothing. Look closer and the blessing is borrowed and the toughness is a costume. It wears both until they cost something. Then it plays the victim.

Trump needed the look of the Church’s approval, so he borrowed it from twelve men who had come to talk about immigrants. McAfee needs the look of a man nothing can rattle, and two college students with a phone took it from him in one weekend.

The Photo

Grob titled his statement “A Public Apology.” He wrote: “I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way.” Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines wrote: “I wish I had been more shrewd and less simple, like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purposes.”

Not every bishop in the room sees it that way. Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, told his archdiocese’s magazine that he knew the meeting “could be shared and that some might use it for political purposes,” and he went anyway, because “this is what Catholics do. We pray for people.” I take him at his word. Praying for a president is old Christian practice. Turning that prayer into a campaign video twelve days before an election is not, and that was not his decision.

Leo XIV is the first American pope. Last November he called this country’s treatment of immigrants “extremely disrespectful.” When the United States and Israel went to war with Iran in February, he spoke against it with growing force. On April 12, Trump posted: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Then he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. Four days later, in Cameroon, Leo answered:

“Blessed are the peacemakers. But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

When the BBC asked the White House about the bishops’ regrets, spokeswoman Taylor Rogers did not address them. She said:

“There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it.”

The bishops came to talk about immigration enforcement and left as props. Afterward Grob heard from people “who felt wounded because of the ways they or their family had been harmed by the president’s policies.” Their own pope calls the treatment of immigrants extremely disrespectful. I have never seen immigrants in this country treated worse in my lifetime. That is the record the White House says proves it.

I wrote about how churches got recruited into politics wholesale in How Churches Got Used. This is the retail version, and we have seen it before.

On June 1, 2020, federal officers cleared mostly peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, with pepper balls and chemical irritants. The operation began at 6:23 p.m. and was finished by 6:50. At 7:01, Trump walked across the cleared park to St. John’s Church and held up a Bible for the cameras. He did not open it. He did not pray. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, had not been told he was coming.

“It almost looked like a prop. … I was outraged that he felt that he had the license to do that, and that he would abuse our sacred symbols and our sacred space in that way.”

In 2021 the Interior Department’s inspector general found that the Park Police had planned the clearing so a contractor could install fencing, not for the president’s walk. That review covered only the Park Police, not the six other agencies on the scene. Take it at full strength anyway. Whatever the gas was for, he chose to walk across ground it had cleared eleven minutes earlier so he could pose with a Bible. In 2020 the prop was a book, and the church did not know he was coming. In 2026 the props were bishops, and they did not know about the camera.

Jesus covered this. “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward” (Matthew 6:5). The next verse says where prayer belongs instead: “go into your room and shut the door.” The Oval Office has a door. Somebody left a camera running.

He also told us what to watch for. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). I held Elon Musk up to that verse in The Man in the Mirror. Here the fruit is already picked: a pope insulted, a Bible held up over a gassed park, twelve bishops arranged behind a desk. Trump is the wolf. The bishops were the wool.

The Bro

McAfee was an All-Pro punter for the Indianapolis Colts. In 2023 he walked away from a four-year, $120 million deal with FanDuel to take his show to ESPN. That deal, as reported, pays him about $17 million a year for roughly 230 three-hour shows plus GameDay every Saturday. He spent years at WWE’s commentary desk and has wrestled at WrestleMania. The brand is the guy who will do anything: loud, shirtless, unbothered.

In Salt Lake City he picked Houston to beat sixth-ranked Utah “10 times out of 10,” then signed off: “I’ll never see you again, hopefully.” Utah won 21–13. That is trash talk, and trash talk is fine. It is the job.

Then came Monday. If the students had said it “on their own blogs, all good,” he explained. “The university puts that out?” Then he asked his audience:

“Has anything like really scary happened at like a college gathering in the state of Utah recently?”

And:

“Do we think we should be amplifying reasons for why people hate my guts as a university?”

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event at Utah Valley University, about forty miles south of where McAfee stood. A man was murdered at a college gathering. McAfee reached for it to describe two students calling him corny. If GameDay ever goes back to Utah, he said, “I think I’ll have COVID or something.”

I love wrestling, and wrestling is honest about the act. Everyone in the building knows the heel is playing a part. The word Jesus used for the men praying on street corners, hypocrites, meant stage actors. I wrote about that in The Oldest Booking Sheet. The hypocrite plays the part and swears it is real. On Saturday McAfee loved the trash talk. By Monday it was a security concern. One of those was the character.

Watch him when there is no college crowd to play to. On August 11, he met the president on a rainy tarmac in Cleveland, in a T-shirt and a backward hat, walked with him to Marine One, and sat beside him in the front row at the Patriot Games. Two students with a phone were too much for him. Trump, he would stand in the rain for.

Who Actually Isn’t Safe

When McAfee shook that hand on camera, he did not stop to ask who it made uncomfortable. The families Grob heard from. The immigrant families in Colorado that Golka says are afraid of stepped-up enforcement. The immigrants watching at home. That was theirs to sit with. When two students called him creepy, the whole world was supposed to stop, and a university got the blame for his safety. His comfort is a crisis. Theirs is a bit.

Sit with that.

He has about 230 three-hour shows a year. He found time to ride along with the president. He found time to spend a Monday on two students and an Instagram caption. How does he not find an hour for what it is like to be an immigrant in this country right now? Or for the people to whom $17 million a year is a sentence that does not parse?

Instead he plays the jester. A jester has a job at court. He keeps the room laughing so nobody looks too long at the throne. McAfee is a useful idiot for people like Trump. His noise fills the room while someone else pays.

Learn the Difference

I follow Jesus. He was not vague about men like this. When the bill comes due for the rich man in the costume, he does not pay it. He asks for sympathy.

No. You aren’t the victim. Jesus didn’t bless you. Learn the difference.

Go back to the order of things in Grob’s account. The president took his seat. He handed out commemorative tokens. Then he told the bishops where to stand. A token is what you get for showing up to somebody else’s event.

The Man in the Mirror

David Crush — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 14:00:00 -0400

On January 20, 2010, the Department of Energy signed a $465 million loan with Tesla Motors, a company whose only product was a $109,000 Roadster. The next day, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United.

That spring, TIME put Elon Musk on its list of the hundred most influential people in the world. Jon Favreau wrote the entry. He was directing the Iron Man movies, and when he could not figure out how to make Tony Stark seem real, Robert Downey Jr. told him, “We need to sit down with Elon Musk.” Favreau has said Stark is based on the comic book, not on Musk. But Downey wanted the meeting because Musk was “a guy who can give us some insight into what it’d really be like to be Tony Stark.” Favreau’s verdict in TIME: “a paragon of enthusiasm, good humor and curiosity — a Renaissance man in an era that needs them.”

In May, Iron Man 2 opened with Musk in it, playing himself at a party in Monaco. Stark walks up to him.

“Elon, how’s it going? Those Merlin engines are fantastic.”

“Thank you. Yeah, I’ve got an idea for an electric jet.”

“Then we’ll make it work.”

On June 29, Tesla went public at $17 a share.

That was the year. Public money, a movie star’s admiration, a stock ticker, and a reputation as the closest thing America had to a real-life Iron Man. He had the keys.

Nobody Did This to Him

Here is the claim. Musk’s story is a tragedy in the strict sense. The hero falls, and the fall is his own doing. Nobody took the reputation from him. He had other people’s genius, the public’s money, and the goodwill of millions of people who wanted the future he was selling, and he spent the goodwill himself.

The bill is arriving now. Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk is in theaters. House Democrats are drawing up investigations of his time running the Department of Government Efficiency and of his companies’ federal contracts. He has put nearly $450 million into the midterms, much of it into races that decide who would hold those gavels.

And one night in February, the week his net worth reached $852 billion, he posted this:

“Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about 😔”

Those Merlin Engines

Tony Stark praised the engines. Musk did not build them.

Tom Mueller did. He was SpaceX’s first employee, and he had been building rocket engines as an amateur before Musk hired him. He led the team that designed the Merlin and the Draco thrusters, and he retired in 2020. Gwynne Shotwell, who joined in 2002, has been SpaceX’s president since 2008 and runs the company day to day.

Tesla was not Musk’s idea either. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started it, and it was incorporated in July 2003. Musk invested and joined the board in April 2004. By November 2007, Eberhard was out. In 2009 he sued, alleging that Musk had “set out to re-write history by falsely claiming that he was the founder or the creator of Tesla Motors.” The settlement that fall made Musk one of five official co-founders. The title came out of a lawsuit.

Eberhard is one of the people who talks in Gibney’s film.

The money matters too. The Washington Post counted at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits flowing to Tesla and SpaceX since 2003. I went through that ledger in He Can’t Have It Both Ways, and I will not do it again here.

Musk brought money, nerve, and a talent for raising more of both. That is not nothing. It is also not the Merlin engine. The visionaries in this story are mostly people whose names you had to read in this section to learn.

What He Spent

Start with the car. In 2025, Tesla’s sales fell for the second year in a row, about 9 percent, and China’s BYD passed it as the world’s largest electric-vehicle maker. Reuters listed the reasons as competition, the end of the federal tax credit, and brand backlash. YouGov’s net impression score for Tesla among American adults was -20 in September 2025. A year later it is -6. Third-quarter deliveries this year were down about 2 percent from a year earlier. The brand is better than it was, and more Americans still think badly of it than well.

Then there is Cursor, the coding tool I loved until SpaceX bought it and started steering every new chat toward Grok. That is its own essay, Keep Working on the Plan.

And then there is X.

The Promise

On April 26, 2022, the day after Twitter’s board accepted his offer, Musk explained what he meant by free speech:

“By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

Hold X to that sentence.

On November 6, 2022, he wrote: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.” The account was @ElonJet, run by a college student who posted public flight data. Public flight data is legal. On December 14, X suspended it. The next day it suspended several journalists who had covered him. “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” Musk wrote. He reversed the journalist suspensions after a poll.

In June 2023 he announced that “the words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform.” By May 2024, posts using them drew a full-screen warning. TechCrunch tested it and found that some actual slurs against Black, transgender, and Jewish people went through without one. A word was restricted because he disliked it, not because it broke a law.

In September 2024, X suspended the journalist Ken Klippenstein for linking to the leaked vetting dossier on JD Vance. X said the problem was private information in the document. Klippenstein said he was told the ban was permanent and stayed banned after he redacted it. Musk had spent late 2022 publishing the internal “Twitter Files” to show that the old Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story was censorship.

The line was never the law. It moved with whatever bothered him.

The Advertisers

On November 4, 2022, the same day he laid off about half of Twitter’s staff, Musk posted: “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation.” Then: “They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.” Three weeks later he announced a general amnesty for suspended accounts.

On November 15, 2023, a user posted that Jewish communities were pushing “dialectical hatred against whites.” Musk replied: “You have said the actual truth.” The same week, Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group, reported that ads from major brands were running next to pro-Nazi posts. IBM pulled its ads. Disney, Apple, Comcast, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Lionsgate, and Sony followed.

Two weeks later, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him about it on stage at the New York Times DealBook Summit.

“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience.”

Bob was Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who had spoken on the same stage earlier that day. Then Musk told Sorkin what would happen next:

“What this advertising boycott is going to do, it is going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we’ll document it in great detail.”

X does more than document. It sues. It had already sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that researches hate speech online, over its reports on X. In March 2024, Judge Charles Breyer dismissed the case: “This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” X’s appeal was argued on September 30, and the panel sounded skeptical. It has not ruled.

X also sued the World Federation of Advertisers and brands including Mars, CVS, Lego, and Shell, calling the pullback an illegal boycott. On March 26, 2026, Judge Jane Boyle dismissed it with prejudice, because X had not shown the kind of injury antitrust law covers. X settled with the federation. Its appeal against the brands is pending in the Fifth Circuit, with a brief from the Justice Department on its side.

Deciding where your money goes and what your name sits next to is speech too. His free speech covers the posts. It does not cover the people who decline to pay for them.

Grok’s Output, Your Fault

Grok is the AI chatbot built into X. In the first days of January 2026, people discovered they could reply to a photo of a real woman and ask Grok to put her in a bikini, or less, and Grok would post the result. Reuters counted 102 such requests in a single ten-minute window. Copyleaks, a firm that detects AI content, sampled about 6,700 sexualized images an hour over one 24-hour period. Some of the people in the photos were children.

Musk answered with laugh-cry emojis and asked Grok to put him in a bikini too. X’s first fix was to limit image editing to paying subscribers. On January 14 he wrote that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” and added: “Grok does not spontaneously generate images. It does so only according to user request.” The California attorney general opened an investigation the same day. X eventually blocked Grok from these edits in places where they are illegal, after regulators in several countries had moved.

The next day, January 15, new X terms took effect. X had announced them in December: “you are responsible for the content you post and create, including prompts, outputs, and/or information obtained when using X.” Grok writes the answer. You own it.

Upload It Anyway

In October 2024, Musk asked his followers to “try submitting x-ray, PET, MRI or other medical images to Grok for analysis,” and said it was “already quite accurate.” On February 17, 2026, he went further: “You can just take a picture of your medical data or upload the file to get a second opinion from Grok.”

People asked Grok in the replies whether that was safe. Grok answered:

“Grok is not HIPAA compliant, and we strongly advise against uploading sensitive medical data. For health advice, always consult a qualified professional.”

HIPAA is the federal law that protects your medical records at a hospital or an insurer. It does not cover a chatbot. xAI’s own privacy policy says the company does not aim to collect health or biometric information and asks “that you do not provide us with any such information.”

The machine gave the honest answer. The man gave the sales pitch. The people who take him at his word are the ones whose scans end up on somebody else’s server.

The Salute and the Socialist Line

On January 20, 2025, Musk spoke to a crowd at Capital One Arena in Washington after the inauguration. He put his right hand over his heart and threw the arm out straight, palm down. He turned to the crowd behind him and did it again. Then he said, “My heart goes out to you.”

That night he called the uproar “dirty tricks” and wrote, “The ’everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” The Anti-Defamation League said it looked like “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Three days later he posted:

“Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming 😂”

Hess was Hitler’s deputy. Goebbels ran the propaganda ministry. Göring built the Gestapo. Himmler ran the SS and the machinery of the Holocaust. A little later, Musk added: “When I see the troll emoji, it’s like looking in the mirror.” The ADL’s CEO, the man whose organization had defended him on Monday, wrote on Thursday: “@elonmusk, the Holocaust is not a joke.”

He did not stop at puns. On January 24, 2026, he posted: “Hitler was a far left socialist. His party was called the national socialists.” On August 8: “Hitler was a left-wing socialist.” Then: “Therefore, socialists are Hitler. Inescapable logic.” On October 23: “Hitler was a far left socialist. Literally in the name of his party!”

The name was the point, and not in the way he means. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in the words of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “sought to woo German workers away from socialism and communism and commit them to its antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology.” The word Socialist was bait. Once the party had power, the first prisoners at Dachau, in March 1933, were mostly Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. On May 2, 1933, the SA and police seized the unions’ offices and dissolved them. By July 14, every party but the Nazis was banned.

When Musk points at the party’s name, he is repeating the party’s recruiting pitch.

I cannot see inside his head. I can see the order of events. He asked for the benefit of the doubt on the gesture. He answered the doubt with Nazi puns. Then he spent a year repeating the Nazis’ own branding to more than two hundred million followers. After that, “it wasn’t a Nazi salute” is no longer a claim he gets to make on credit. He is choosing to look stupid about this, and the choice is what makes it his.

That is the arrogance at the center of the tragedy. He thought he could do it on that stage, in that week, and get away with it. In a narrow sense, he has.

The Break and the Return

In May 2025, Musk told Bloomberg he planned to do “a lot less” political spending. “I think I’ve done enough.” In June he broke with Trump over the spending bill and posted that Trump was “in the Epstein files,” without offering evidence. He floated a new party. By the end of the year, he and Trump had made up.

By mid-October 2026, his midterm giving was close to $450 million, mostly to Republicans and his own America PAC. CNBC laid out the stakes for him plainly. Republican control keeps the environment friendly to his companies. Democratic control of either chamber could bring subpoenas into his businesses, his federal contracts, and his time at DOGE.

The Senator He Is Buying

The biggest single bet is in Texas.

On September 9, Musk gave $75 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC of the Senate Republican leadership. The next day the fund sent $75 million to Texas PAC, a group backing Attorney General Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate. On September 23 Musk gave $83 million more, and on September 24 the fund sent $83 million to Texas PAC. His trust had already given $10 million to Lone Star Liberty, another pro-Paxton PAC. Paxton’s own fundraising had trailed his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, $16.8 million to $72 million. Musk’s money is most of what is keeping the race close.

Paxton’s record, without adjectives: a Texas grand jury indicted him for securities fraud in 2015, months after he took office as attorney general. The case ended in 2024 with a pretrial deal, 100 hours of community service, and nearly $300,000 in restitution. In 2023 the Texas House impeached him on articles including bribery and abuse of office, centered on favors for a donor named Nate Paul. The Texas Senate acquitted him. In 2025, a judge awarded $6.6 million to four former aides whom Paxton fired after they reported him to the FBI. Paxton had stopped contesting the facts, did not appeal, and has not admitted wrongdoing. He has never been convicted.

His own party said it first. The impeachment vote in the Texas House was 121 to 23. Sixty of its 85 Republicans voted yes, including the Speaker and every representative from Paxton’s home county. All 23 no votes were Republicans too. In August 2025, when the Senate Leadership Fund was backing Senator John Cornyn against Paxton in the primary, its spokesman said: “Ken Paxton’s toxic record only takes resources away from growing the Senate majority.” Paxton beat Cornyn in the May runoff by nearly 30 points. Thirteen months after that statement, the same fund was passing Musk’s $158 million to him.

I do not have to guess what Musk expects from Paxton. Paxton has already shown him. On November 20, 2023, X sued Media Matters over its report on ads next to pro-Nazi posts. That evening, Paxton’s office announced a fraud investigation into Media Matters, calling it “a radical anti-free speech organization,” and demanded its records: communications about Musk and X, internal operations, and funding sources. A federal judge blocked the investigation as likely retaliation for the group’s reporting. In May 2025, the D.C. Circuit affirmed. X’s own lawsuits against its critics have mostly been thrown out of court. Paxton tried to do the same job with the power of the state.

Then there is Adam Hoffman. Hoffman, a Waco attorney, was charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young boy. The local district attorney had recused himself, so Paxton’s office prosecuted. The trial ended in a hung jury. The boy did not want to testify again, and Paxton’s office offered a deal: two misdemeanors and time served, which came to one day in jail. Hoffman signed a confession that he touched the boy “with the intent to arouse or gratify my sexual desire.” The boy’s mother reluctantly agreed. The visiting judge, who had served on the bench as a Republican, did not. “One day. Seriously?” The prosecutors came back with 30 days. At the sentencing, the mother changed her answer: “It’s just not enough. He’s dangerous. This isn’t justice, and I can’t do it.” The judge raised it to 60 days. Hoffman served 29 and did not have to register as a sex offender in Texas.

Talarico called it an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal.” He said, “We don’t need any more pedophile protectors in our government.” PolitiFact rated his claim that Paxton “let Hoffman off the hook” Mostly True. Talarico asked for the case files. In July, Paxton’s office refused to release them.

Musk has posted: “No one pushed harder than me to have the Epstein files released.”

Above the Law, for Now

So far, the law has not landed on him. Here are three times it came close.

In January 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for disclosing his growing Twitter stake late in 2022. The delay, the SEC said, saved him about $150 million at other investors’ expense. The judge rejected his motion to dismiss. Then, in May 2026, the SEC amended its complaint with Musk’s consent. It added his revocable trust as a defendant, dropped its demand that he give up the gains, and deleted the $150 million allegation. On July 8, the trust agreed to pay $1.5 million, about 1 percent of the money the SEC had said he saved. The next day the SEC dismissed Musk personally. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had said in May that the deal raised “red flags,” including whether he was getting “special treatment.” She approved it with “significant misgivings” and wrote:

“Whether the Executive Branch (through the SEC) has done enough to hold Mr. Musk to account for his alleged violation is, like many other issues, for our citizenry to decide at the ballot box.”

In March 2025, before Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election, Musk posted that entrance to his talk in Green Bay was “limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court Election,” and that he would “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” About twelve hours later he rewrote it: the event was for people who signed his petition, and the checks were for two “spokesmen for the petition.” The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is bipartisan, voted 5 to 1 that there was probable cause he broke the state’s election bribery law. On August 25, 2026, the special prosecutor, Tim Gruenke, declined to charge him. The first post was “poorly worded and ambiguous,” Gruenke wrote, it was corrected quickly, and nobody was paid for voting. “I do not believe a jury would convict Elon Musk of a crime.” He added that “without the famous name attached and the large dollar amounts involved,” it was a simple case.

In October 2024, at a rally in Harrisburg, Musk told a Pennsylvania crowd that “we are going to be awarding a million dollars, randomly, to people who have signed the petition, every day, from now until the election.” Philadelphia’s district attorney sued, calling it an illegal lottery. In court, Musk’s PAC testified that the winners were not random. They were vetted and picked to be paid spokespeople. The judge ruled it was not a lottery, precisely because it was not chance. What he told the crowd and what his PAC told the judge cannot both be true, and the second one won.

None of these is a conviction, and I will not pretend otherwise. The pattern is the point: a penalty of 1 percent, a prosecutor’s bet that no jury would convict, a giveaway saved in court by admitting it was not what he said on stage. I call that corruption in the old sense, a system bent toward the man who can pay, not as a legal charge.

It Has Been Beaten Before

It is easy to feel like we are in a race against time, and that the billionaires will rewrite the laws before anyone can stop them. The record says otherwise, with a warning attached.

In 1899, state legislatures still chose U.S. senators, and William A. Clark, a Montana copper king, wanted a seat. The legislature gave him one. A Senate committee heard ninety-six witnesses describe bribes from $240 to $100,000, and in April 1900 it concluded unanimously that his election was void. On May 15, with the votes against him, Clark resigned. Mark Twain called him “as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag.” In 1907, Congress passed the Tillman Act, the first federal ban on corporate campaign contributions. Scandals like Clark’s fed the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, which took Senate seats away from legislatures and gave them to voters. A copper king buying a Senate seat is the exact problem the amendment was written to end. Citizens United, the day after Tesla’s loan, opened a new door to it.

Here is the warning. In January 1901, a new Montana legislature, most of whose winning candidates Clark had funded, sent him back to the Senate. He served until 1907. Those reforms took decades, and they can be undone.

Here is the recent proof that they can still win. In Wisconsin’s April 2025 race, Musk and groups he backed spent more than $21 million for the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel. Susan Crawford beat him by 10 points. Voters outnumbered the checks.

Money Is Not a Vote

The SEC judge put it on the ballot box, and the ballot box is a week away. On November 3, voters decide the Texas Senate seat, and whether anyone in Congress will have the power to ask Musk questions under oath.

If enough seats can be bought, we do not have a country. We have a feeding frenzy for the few people rich enough to buy them, people whose fortunes were built on public contracts and other people’s work. Vote for candidates he has not bought.

I wrote about Russell Hantz in Just Enough to Believe. Russell had millions of fan votes and got zero from the jury. “Money is great. It is not a vote.”

The Bill

Gibney’s Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. It runs three hours and forty-five minutes. Justine Musk, his first wife, talks in it, and so does Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his children. Musk spent hours on X calling Gibney a “bitter old man who lost the plot long ago” and a “horrible human.” The distributor moved the release up a week because of the demand. It opened in theaters on October 9.

On October 20, Politico reported that House Democrats were planning investigations if they win the House next week: his time at DOGE, his companies’ contracts, and his handling of Starshield, the military version of Starlink, in Ukraine. On October 22, Musk answered:

“Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.”

The Washington Post headline the next day was “As Republicans brace for election losses, Musk prepares for war.” The same day he posted that Hitler was a far-left socialist. Nobody knows yet how any of this ends. He is behaving like a man who expects a bill.

“I Agree with the Teachings of Jesus”

In February 2026, someone on X asked who would lead Musk to Christ. He replied: “I agree with the teachings of Jesus.” He has called himself a cultural Christian before. I am taking the sentence at its word.

Jesus gave a standard for this. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). The same chapter opens, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” I am not judging his soul. I am holding his conduct up against the words he chose.

Jesus told a story about a rich man whose land produced so much that he had nowhere to put it. “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones,” the man says, “and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” That night God tells him his life is being demanded of him. “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21). Forbes has calculated that Musk has disbursed about 0.06 percent of his fortune to charity. The barns are in the other essay.

Of the religious leaders of his day, Jesus said: “do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach” (Matthew 23:3). Musk manages the reverse. His own company’s fine print teaches correctly: do not upload your health data. He tells people to do it anyway. The word Jesus uses for those leaders a few verses later, hypocrites, meant stage actors. I wrote about that in The Oldest Booking Sheet.

So why do so many Christians not see it? The scripture Jesus read already answered that. “You shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds officials and subverts the cause of those who are in the right” (Exodus 23:8). Jesus said he came not to abolish that law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). The verse does not stop at calling a bribe wrong. It says a bribe blinds. Once you are getting something from a powerful man, whether money, access, or a win for your side, the facts that cut against him start to sound like an attack. I wrote about that in The Blank They Fill In.

Jesus also told what it looks like when a rich man sees clearly. Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector, climbs a sycamore tree to get a look at him. Jesus invites himself to dinner. Zacchaeus stands up and says, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much” (Luke 19:1–10). Four times as much. The SEC settled for 1 percent.

Apply the fruit test to the race his money is buying.

In July 2025, Angela Paxton, a Texas state senator and Ken Paxton’s wife of 38 years, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds.” Her petition alleges adultery; his impeachment trial had already aired evidence of an affair. Her statement said: “I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.” Add the Hoffman deal and the Media Matters investigation.

James Talarico is a former middle-school teacher and a student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. His grandfather was a Baptist preacher. “Jesus gave us two commandments to follow,” he told Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston this summer. “Love God and love neighbor.” His campaign slogan is “It’s time to start flipping tables,” after Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple (Matthew 21:12–13). The richest man in the world is spending to beat that slogan.

Paxton has questioned Talarico’s faith. At the state Republican convention, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said that “if he campaigns against God as he’s been doing, he’s going to hell for sure.” That is the verdict on a soul that I just said I would not issue. They issued it. I am only comparing what each man has done.

Here is the man who says “I agree with the teachings of Jesus.” He put $158 million behind the candidate whose own wife said staying with him would not honor God, against a seminarian who preaches love of neighbor. How is that honoring Jesus?

A man ran up to Jesus, knelt, and asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life. He had kept the commandments since he was young. “You lack one thing,” Jesus told him. “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” The man “was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:17–22).

The Working Model

On November 19, 2022, Musk ran a poll on whether to bring Donald Trump back to Twitter. About 52 percent said yes. “The people have spoken,” he posted. “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” The voice of the people is the voice of God. A month later, the journalists came back the same way.

X is the institution most completely under his control, with no voters to answer to. We have watched how the rules work there: the plane, the slur list, the advertisers, the terms that hand you Grok’s output. His politics move the same way: “I think I’ve done enough,” and then nearly half a billion dollars; Trump in the Epstein files, and then Trump again. DOGE was a four-month trial run of that style inside the federal government, and I went through what it delivered already.

So here is the question. Are you comfortable putting the country’s laws in the hands of a man whose rules change with how he woke up that morning? We do not have to imagine what that looks like. We have a working model. It is called X. Who would call X a great place?

Three days after the arena, he wrote: “When I see the troll emoji, it’s like looking in the mirror.” One night in February 2026, worth $852 billion, he wrote: “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about 😔”. Two emoji. One face.

Just Enough to Believe

David Crush — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:45:00 -0400

On February 1, 2004, the Super Bowl ran long, and CBS did not start Survivor: All-Stars until 10:52 p.m. Eastern. I was in fifth grade. It was far past my bedtime. I had seen the commercials for weeks and scoffed at every one of them. What a stupid show.

It was also the night of Janet Jackson’s halftime show, the one that ended with a wardrobe malfunction on national television. Between that and the game, my adrenaline was still going when the show came on. I never turned the TV off.

Survivor strands a group of strangers, splits them into tribes, and has them vote each other out one at a time until the people they voted out pick a winner. Little by little I was mesmerized. The interpersonal conflict. The forced cooperation just to eat and stay dry. The social game, the strategic game, and the physical game, all running at once on people who were hungry and tired.

On and Off

That night started a lifelong on-again, off-again relationship. I rage quit on Vanuatu because it did not have the same feel as All-Stars. Palau pulled me back in. I skipped Guatemala, came back for Panama, skipped Cook Islands, came back for Fiji, and checked out again until Tocantins. Coach pulled me back in. Tyson too. Then came Samoa, and Russell Hantz, and finally the peak of my fandom: season 20, Heroes vs. Villains.

I watched a YouTube recap of it recently and had forgotten how epic it was. Easily top three for me. Maybe number one.

Closer to Politics Than You Think

Here is the claim. Survivor is closer to politics than people think. The game does not reward the smartest player or the best leader. It rewards whoever can convince a majority that going with them is good for that majority, and that the other choice is worse. Every vote is a pitch: X over Y, because X is better for your game. That is politics too.

Like politics, Survivor has had its share of con men. In Pearl Islands, Jonny Fairplay’s friend showed up at the loved-ones challenge with news that Fairplay’s grandmother had died. The tribe let him win the reward out of sympathy. She was alive. The two of them had planned the lie before the game started.

That one was a straight lie. My favorite con is the one in Heroes vs. Villains, because it only worked as far as it was true. At that season’s reunion, the show held a vote for the dumbest move in Survivor history, and JT Thomas won it. He earned it. I can also see exactly how he got there.

Only Men Had Gone Home

The Villains started with ten players. By Day 21 they had voted out four, and all four were men: Randy Bailey, Tyson Apostol, Boston Rob Mariano, and Coach Wade. Russell was the last man left, on a tribe with five women.

Every one of those facts checked out. What the Heroes could not see was why. Russell, Parvati Shallow, and Danielle DiLorenzo had started as the Villains’ minority and taken the tribe over. Russell’s own idol, played on Parvati, sent Tyson home. Jerri Manthey sided with Russell against Rob. Coach went home because Sandra Diaz-Twine told Russell that Coach was coming for him.

At the Day 22 reward challenge, the Heroes saw that Coach had become the first member of the jury. Rupert Boneham said there was obviously a women’s alliance on the Villains. JT agreed. It was an otherwise innocent read of a boot order. During the challenge, JT whispered to Russell to hang in there. Russell put his hands together like a prayer and shook his head.

“I done put that Russell seed in their mind and once it’s taken root; they believe it.”

Russell did not invent the women’s alliance. Rupert did. Russell did not even have to say it out loud. He confirmed it with his hands.

The Letter

JT’s plan went like this. A hidden immunity idol cancels every vote cast against the player who plays it, and the Heroes had one. If the Heroes won immunity, the Villains would go to Tribal Council. JT would slip the idol to Russell. Russell would use it to save himself from the women, vote out Parvati, and come over to the Heroes at the merge. Amanda Kimmel thought it was crazy: “We don’t know what’s going on over there, he could be in with the girls for all we know.”

JT wrote Russell a letter on Amanda’s luxury-item paper. It told him how to play the idol, how to act around camp, and promised him a place in the Heroes’ alliance and a path to the final three. The Heroes won the challenge. JT slipped him the idol and the letter as the tribes mingled.

“You don’t hand the enemy the idol, especially when his name is Russell Hantz. You don’t do that. That’s a no-no.”

Two days earlier, at the reward feast, Jerri had already told the camera what the Heroes could not hear: “First of all there is no all-girl alliance, second of all Russell is running the show.” The night JT handed over the idol, the all-female alliance voted out a woman, Courtney Yates, five to one.

At the merge, Russell explained Parvati’s survival with a story about the two of them playing idols at the same time. He swore on his kids. JT called him a good ol’ country boy. Then Sandra, the last of Rob’s alliance, walked Rupert down the beach and told him the truth: there had never been an all-girls alliance, and Russell and Parvati were in charge. Rupert believed her. JT talked him out of it.

“Rupert do you believe what Sandra told you or do you believe the obvious truth, I mean.”

The Heroes told Russell to write down Parvati and wrote down Jerri themselves, the Villain they thought least likely to have an idol. Parvati stood up and played two: one on Jerri, one on Sandra. One of them was the idol Russell had gotten from JT. Every Heroes vote was cancelled. JT went to the jury five to nothing.

A, B, and C, Then D

I wrote about this engine in Tell the Truth Until You Can’t. Jim Cornette credited the advice to the Memphis promoter Jerry Jarrett: tell the fans the truth as long as you can, so that when you work them, they think A was true, B was true, C was true, so maybe D is true too. You gain some trust. Some political capital, if you will. Then you spend it.

Russell barely had to tell A, B, and C. The boot order told them for him: four men gone, Russell the last one standing, Coach on the jury. D was that Russell was on the outs and would flip to the Heroes.

The part that makes it work is that JT wanted D. He needed numbers going into the merge, and Russell on the outs gave him a way to get them. On the day he wrote the letter, he said he was guessing Russell was on the outs, “which I really feel like he is.”

He also got the truth before the vote, from the one person with no reason to lie about it. Sandra was on the bottom, said so, and said the women’s alliance was a story. JT did not believe her because he did not want to. We see this in politics too. Half of the battle is getting the person to want to believe it. Once they want it, the facts that cut the other way just sound like someone trying to take something from them. I wrote in The Blank They Fill In about what happens when a story has a hole in it: the believer patches it, and then the believer is the one who needs reality to match the patch. That is why JT, not Russell, was the one talking Rupert out of the truth.

The irony is that it was never true. But Russell made it true enough for JT, and true enough was all it needed to be.

The Jury

Survivor ends with a jury. The last players voted out come back and decide which finalist wins. There is no rubric. No points for idols found, challenges won, or votes controlled. The standard is whatever those jurors decide it is, and it shifts from season to season. That is how voting works in real life too.

Fans have a saying for it: whoever won the season deserved to win it, because they won under that season’s conditions. Online, we like to relitigate. But what I love about Survivor is that it is all on the voters. For better or worse, they get to decide.

Russell made the final three. Sandra won six to three to zero over Parvati and Russell, and became the first person ever to win Survivor twice. Russell got nothing. Sandra had spent the whole season trying to get him out and failed, and she still beat him. It was his second final Tribal Council in a row. In Samoa, the season before, he had lost seven to two.

At the reunion he called Sandra undeserving and said the game had a flaw: America needed to have a percentage of the votes. That same night he won the viewers’ fan-favorite vote for the second straight season, worth $100,000 each time. Afterward he told Reality TV World:

“But did you not see that I got millions of votes from the fans that love the way I play the game?”

Russell called himself the best and did not understand how the game worked. That is a politician bragging about his fundraising when all the money came from a single donor who cannot vote. Money is great. It is not a vote. The fans who loved Russell were not on the jury. The people he had lied to were.

This is not a story about voters seeing through the con. JT never saw through it until the votes were read. Sandra and Parvati lied too. The jury did not reward honesty. It rewarded a different pitch, one that remembered who would be holding the ballots at the end.

Outside the Game

The same trick runs on us every day. Someone gives you A, B, and C, or lets the news cycle give them to you, and waits for you to supply D yourself. It works best when D is what you already wanted. I walked through the political version in the kayfabe essay, and the defense has not changed: notice the moment the checked facts stop and the thing you want begins. In a game with no rubric, the people holding the vote are the only check there is.

At the reunion, Russell pulled out JT’s letter. He had laminated it. JT grabbed it and tried to throw it into the fire on stage, and Russell fished it back out. In March 2022 he sold it on eBay for $27,600: JT’s handwriting, on Amanda’s paper, still promising Russell a seat in the final three.

The Sword in Vain

David Crush — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:00:00 -0400

On December 3, at 1 p.m., a firing squad of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, is scheduled to execute Nidal Hasan. This week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be public. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he told Real America’s Voice. The Pentagon then confirmed it will be livestreamed. The hour was chosen to match the hour of the shooting.

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist. On November 5, 2009, he opened fire inside a processing center for soldiers about to deploy, killing 13 people and wounding 32. At his court-martial he represented himself, and his opening statement took about a minute: “The evidence will clearly show I am the shooter.” It did. There is no doubt about what he did, and the thirteen people he killed had families who have waited seventeen years.

So this is not an essay about whether Nidal Hasan is guilty. It is about the passage that will be used to bless what happens next. Romans 13 gives the state the sword: the authority to restrain people who do harm. It does not require the state to kill him, and it cannot make a broadcast of his death Christian.

Nothing Says Christian Nation

Nothing says Christian nation like airing an execution.

The United States has not held a public execution in nearly a century. The central event of the Christian faith is one. A state put a man to death in the open, outside the city, where anyone passing could see what happens to people who trouble the empire. Luke records the audience:

And the people stood by watching. (Luke 23:35)

The Sword

Here is the passage:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God… for it is God’s agent for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. (Romans 13:1, 4)

Christians who support capital punishment read the sword as permission to kill. Some read it as more than permission.

Now read what Paul wrote a few sentences earlier, in the same letter, to the same church in Rome, the capital of the empire that by tradition would later execute him:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.” (Romans 12:19–20)

Paul did not write a chapter 13. Chapter numbers were added more than a thousand years later. He wrote a letter, and in that letter “wrath” passes from God to the governing authority within a few lines. The order matters. Christians are told not to take revenge, and the state’s sword is the reason they do not have to.

I will grant what the passage gives. It gives the state something a private person does not have: the authority to use force to stop harm. A court may lock up a man I may not lock up. That is real, and I am not going to pretend the sword is a metaphor.

But the passage carries its own limit. The authority is “God’s agent for your good.” The sword has a purpose, and the purpose is not the sword.

The other verse people reach for is older. After the flood, God tells Noah:

Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed, for in his own image God made humans. (Genesis 9:6)

This one comes before the law of Moses, before the Sabbath stonings and the rules about fabric that Christians stopped following long ago, and it is addressed to everyone. In a case as certain as Hasan’s, I will concede that it could apply. Then the question becomes: if we can hold him safely for the rest of his life, why take the chance? Neither verse says anything about cameras.

Notice how much work that took. Two passages, each read against its neighbors, to arrive at permission to kill a man who is already in a cell. Then there is the verse that needs no work at all: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). I have written about the plain verses in An Open Book Test, and about how other causes crowded them out in How Churches Got Used.

How Much Room

Hasan has been in custody since the afternoon of the shooting. A police officer’s bullets left him paralyzed from the chest down. He has lived on military death row at Fort Leavenworth since 2013. Whatever the sword is for, restraining Nidal Hasan was finished seventeen years ago.

But the passage is not being used for Hasan alone. It is used to bless capital punishment as a system, and the system makes mistakes. Since 1973, 203 people sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that at least 4.1 percent of people sentenced to death are innocent, and its authors call that number conservative.

Genesis 9 opens its rule with a reckoning: “For your own lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning… from human beings, each one for the blood of another” (9:5). The law of Moses treats innocent blood as guilt on the whole community. Israel set aside cities of refuge “so that the blood of an innocent person may not be shed in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, thereby bringing bloodguilt upon you” (Deuteronomy 19:10).

Naboth owned a vineyard next to King Ahab’s palace and would not sell it. Queen Jezebel wrote letters in the king’s name to the elders of Naboth’s city. They proclaimed a fast, seated Naboth at the head of the assembly, and put two scoundrels across from him to testify that he had cursed God and the king. Two witnesses: what the law required. “So they took him outside the city and stoned him to death.” Every step was legal. Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah, with a question for the king:

Have you killed and also taken possession? (1 Kings 21:19)

Prison does the same restraining for less money. A 2003 Kansas audit put the median death-penalty case at $1.26 million, against $740,000 for a comparable case without it, counted through the end of incarceration. Kansas spends about twice as much a year to house a death-sentenced prisoner. In California, a 2011 study found the death penalty had cost $4 billion more since 1978 than a system with life without parole as its maximum. Ohio’s legislative research office reviewed studies from several states in 2021 and found capital cases cost two and a half to five times more. Most of that money goes to the longer trials and appeals required when a life is on the line, which is to say, to the only thing standing between the system and the next Naboth.

The Sentence Stands

What is left is that the families deserve it. They lost husbands, wives, sons, and daughters. Their grief is real, and nothing in this essay asks them to apologize for wanting him dead.

But justice in the legal sense has been done. In 2013 a military jury convicted Hasan on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder, and sentenced him to death. The President approved the sentence. None of that changes if there is no camera at Fort Hood on December 3. The sentence is the same either way.

The only thing a livestream adds is an audience.

Blessed Are the Merciful

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). Later in the same sermon, Jesus takes up the old law of retaliation by name:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer… You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:38–39, 43–44)

When Peter asks how many times he has to forgive, Jesus says seventy-seven. Then he tells of a servant forgiven a debt he could never repay, who walks out and seizes a fellow servant by the throat over a small one. The master calls him back: “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:33).

The prophet Ezekiel is told to deliver a message about people who are actually guilty:

As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn from their ways and live. (Ezekiel 33:11)

One of the two criminals crucified beside Jesus says he was “condemned justly,” asks to be remembered, and hears “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:41–43). He turned in the middle of his own execution. And the man who wrote Romans 13 was once Saul, the young man at whose feet the witnesses laid their coats while they stoned Stephen. “And Saul approved of their killing him” (Acts 8:1).

I will be honest about Hasan. Repentance looks unlikely. During his trial he released statements saying he saw a death sentence as the martyrdom that had eluded him. In 2014 he wrote from death row asking to join the Islamic State. Nothing in seventeen years suggests a man waiting to turn. But a cell leaves that door open, however narrowly. A firing squad closes it.

Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth said: “Don’t care.” The execution is set for the hour of the shooting.

I keep reading those chapters next to that answer and asking whether we are measuring up.

Owensboro

Hegseth gave a reason for the cameras: “Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” That is the argument from deterrence. In 2012 the National Research Council reviewed more than three decades of studies and concluded that the research “is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” and that it should not be used to make policy. A 2009 survey of leading criminologists found that 88 percent did not believe the death penalty deters murder. States without it have consistently had lower murder rates than states with it. That proves nothing by itself, but it is not what a deterrent looks like.

The last time an American government held an execution in public, it was in Owensboro, Kentucky, at dawn on August 14, 1936. Rainey Bethea, a young Black man convicted of raping and killing a 70-year-old woman, was hanged in a lot near the Ohio River. Kentucky still reserved public hanging for rape. Before the execution, Time reported, the county’s sheriff consulted her priest, who found nothing in church law against it, and “Protestant churchmen concurred.”

Time ran the story under the headline “Crime: Party.” The night before, “‘Hanging parties’ were held in many a home.” One driver hurrying to the scene crashed and was killed. By 3 a.m. some 10,000 people filled the lot; later estimates ran to 20,000. “Hawkers squeezed their way through the crowd selling pop, hot dogs. Telephone poles and trees were festooned with spectators.” As dawn came on, the crowd grew impatient and began to shout, “Let’s go! Bring him out!” When the doctors pronounced Bethea dead, “the spectators charged from every side, eager hands clawed at the black death hood,” and the lucky ones went home with the scraps in their pockets.

Owensboro’s own papers said the national press exaggerated, and maybe some of it did. Kentucky’s legislature was embarrassed enough that in 1938 it moved executions behind prison walls, the last state to do so. It did not stop because the hanging failed to teach anyone a lesson. It stopped because of what the hanging showed about the people watching.

There will be no fence at Fort Hood to push through and no hood to tear. Nobody will have to climb a telephone pole. The stream puts every one of us in the trees.

The Coast Was Available

David Crush — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:40:00 -0400

On April 2, 2025, at 4:06 p.m. in the Rose Garden, Donald Trump told the country it was “liberation day.” He signed Executive Order 14257 — reciprocal tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a statute written for emergencies, used here as a tariff machine. Ten percent on everyone starting April 5. Higher country rates from the annex on April 9. “They do to us and we do it to them,” he said. “Very simple.”

The schedule went up that afternoon. The inheritance was still sitting there.

The limited claim is this. In the modern window — Clinton through Biden, with the second Trump term still running — real growth and job arithmetic favor Democratic presidents. Republicans write more of the unpaid structural deficit: a surplus spent, tax cuts that do not pay for themselves, a reconciliation bill scored in the trillions. In January 2025 he inherited a handoff that was strong relative to the rest of the rich world. Contemporaneous forecasts said current policy would keep performing. He chose the tariff shock. The models scored a subtraction. The 2026 inflation print showed one. That is a governing choice, not weather.

I can read a CBO table. I can also read a grocery receipt. They are the same story at two resolutions.

The modern ledger

Presidents do not solely cause GDP. Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, in the American Economic Review in 2016, found a postwar Democratic–Republican growth gap of about 1.8 points that they could not assign to fiscal or monetary policy alone. Oil, productivity, Europe, consumer expectations did some of the work. Use the pattern. Do not invent a Democrat wand.

Samuel Williamson’s Measuring Worth series, built on BEA annual data, is the clean modern comparison — election year to election year, same method for each term.

Clinton: 3.88 percent a year. George W. Bush: 2.20. Obama inherited the financial crisis and still came in at 1.66. Trump’s first term: 1.99, or 3.11 if you stop before the pandemic year. Biden: 3.01.

The first three Trump years were a real expansion. They were not a hidden miracle, and they were not a wreck. In this series they sit a tenth of a point behind Biden’s first three. The full-term gap is the pandemic year, and the jobs tape.

Figure: annualized real GDP growth, election year to election year. Trump's first three years: 3.11 percent. Source: Measuring Worth / BEA.

Jobs, January-to-January on the BLS payroll survey as Williamson tabulates them. Clinton added about 22.6 million. Bush added about 1.4 million in eight years. Obama added about 11.4 million after the hole. Trump’s first term lost about 2.4 million once COVID is in the picture, and added about 6.7 million in the first three years. Biden added about 16.1 million — the rebound, and then several million past the pre-pandemic peak.

The cart does not care which year you start the average. It cares whether the next month’s prices are still climbing.

Who wrote the hole

Clinton left a surplus. That is the control, so this is not “all presidents.” George W. Bush inherited the path. CRS has long put legislative changes — tax cuts, the wars, Medicare Part D — at about two-thirds of the surplus-to-deficit swing. The longer Reagan-to-Goldwater ladder is already a bill. I am not going to rebuild it.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, 2017: CBO’s contemporaneous score was about $1.9 trillion over ten years. It did not pay for itself. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, scoring legislation and executive actions at enactment: Trump approved $8.4 trillion in new ten-year borrowing in one term, $4.8 trillion if you take out the bipartisan COVID bills. Biden, through June 2024: $4.3 trillion, $2.2 trillion without the American Rescue Plan. He added real deficits. Name them.

The Republican-specific receipts are the surplus spent, the unpaid rate cut, and the 2025 reconciliation law. CBO’s February 2026 outlook puts that extension at about $4.7 trillion on the deficit over the decade, against a 2026 deficit of $1.9 trillion, 5.8 percent of GDP. The fifty-year average is 3.8.

Tariffs were scored as a partial offset. They are also the tax on the cart.

The inheritance

January 2025 was not a golden age. Prices were still high from the 2022 spike. People were angry about that, and they were not wrong about the level.

Relative to peers, the handoff was strong. Steven Kamin and Benedict Clements at AEI wrote in October 2024 that U.S. inflation sat in the middle of the advanced-economy pack, real wages held up better than in nearly every peer, growth was faster, and unemployment was lower. The IMF’s October 2024 World Economic Outlook had the United States leading the G7 on growth in 2023, with 2024 still well ahead of the euro area and Japan. Disinflation without the recession a lot of people had ordered.

CBO’s January 2025 outlook, written against the policy then in force: real GDP cooling from 2.3 percent in 2024 to 1.9 and 1.8; PCE inflation from 2.5 percent to 2.2 and then 2.1; the Federal Reserve still cutting. That is the coast. Not a speculative “if he sits still we will know.” A published baseline.

Unemployment was 4.1 percent in December 2024. In August 2026 it was 4.1 percent again. The unemployment rate is not the indictment. What happened to prices and to the payroll tape is.

The choice

China first, February. Canada and Mexico in March. Liberation Day in April. IEEPA for a goods-trade deficit he had decided was a national emergency.

CBO, June 2025, on the tariffs implemented through mid-May: inflation up about 0.4 points a year in 2025 and 2026; the level of real GDP 0.6 percent lower by 2035 than in the January baseline. Yale’s Budget Lab, after the Supreme Court struck the IEEPA layer on February 20, 2026: if those duties had stood, the average effective tariff rate would have been 16.9 percent. The long-run output hit about 0.3 percent. Remaining tariffs under other authorities still put the effective rate at 9.1 percent — highest since 1946 if you ignore the 2025 spike — a short-run price-level rise of 0.6 percent, about $800 a household, unemployment about 0.3 points higher by the end of 2026, payrolls down about 550,000.

The Court did not put the inheritance back. Section 122, Section 301, Section 232 kept a large share of the burden. Refunds, if they come, go to the firms that paid customs, not automatically to the cereal box.

You do not need a model for the cereal box.

The San Francisco Fed, September 3, 2026: four-quarter real GDP 2.1 percent; headline PCE 3.7 percent in July; core 3.3. Goods and energy — the tariff-and-shock categories — contributing about 1.2 points to headline inflation against a pre-pandemic average near zero. Payroll growth averaged 44,300 a month over the six months ending in July. The economy lost about 23,000 jobs in July and added 20,000 in June. BLS: August came back at 162,000; the prior twelve-month average had been 31,000. Unemployment still 4.1. This is not a Depression. It is a stall with the price level reaccelerating after a path that had been pointed at two percent.

CBO had the two-percent path in writing in January 2025. He signed the other path in the Rose Garden.

The cool left

2024 was the cultural win. TIME, citing Pew’s validated-voter work and Catalyst’s autopsy: Trump took about 39 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds and an estimated 54 percent of young men. Podcasts. UFC. The diet I already mapped in They Told You the Country Went Left. For a year the coalition looked like the country had decided they were the ones who got it.

Then they governed.

Economist/YouGov, February 6–9, 2026: approval among 18-to-29-year-olds at 25 percent, 67 percent disapproving — down from 50 and 42 in February 2025. Harvard’s IOP youth poll, March–April 2026: Trump at 25 percent among 18-to-29-year-olds. Congressional Democrats 26. Congressional Republicans 25. Navigator, summer 2026: 31 percent of 2024 Trump voters aged 18 to 34 now say they regret the ballot.

The Republican advantage among young men collapsed. Democrats did not become beloved. The cool left because the grocery bill and the job did. Harvard’s young respondents named inflation and housing as the urgent crises. They were not naming a vibe.

Sit with that.

The Rose Garden still has the lectern. The remarks are in the compilation. Annex I is a list of percentages. At 4:06 p.m. he called it liberation. The schedule went up.

Sources

Growth and jobs:

The Relative Performance of the Economy under the Presidents, 1900–2025 (Samuel H. Williamson, Measuring Worth; BEA annual and BLS CES)
Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration (American Economic Review, 2016)
Employment Situation — August 2026 (BLS)

Deficit and the 2025 bill:

The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (CBO, February 2026)
Trump and Biden: The National Debt (CRFB, June 2024)
CRS RS22550 / R41134 on the 2001–09 surplus-to-deficit swing
The Rightward Bet Failed (the longer fiscal ladder)

The inheritance and the coast:

Steven B. Kamin and Benedict Clements, The Biden-Harris Macroeconomic Record Is Getting a Bum Rap (AEI, October 16, 2024)
World Economic Outlook, October 2024 (IMF)
The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2025 to 2035 (CBO, January 2025)

Tariffs:

Remarks Announcing Additional United States Tariff Actions (American Presidency Project, April 2, 2025)
Executive Order 14257 (April 2, 2025)
Budgetary and Economic Effects of Increases in Tariffs Implemented Between January 6 and May 13, 2025 (CBO, June 2025)
State of U.S. Tariffs: SCOTUS Ruling Update (Yale Budget Lab, February 20, 2026)
Huiyu Li, SF FedViews: September 3, 2026 (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)

The cool:

Rebecca Schneid, Young Voters Are Turning Away From Trump (TIME; Pew validated voters and Catalyst 2024 autopsy)
How voting patterns changed in the 2024 election (Pew Research Center)
Harvard Youth Poll, Spring 2026 (Harvard IOP / Ipsos, March 26–April 3, 2026)
Anything But Apathy (Navigator Research, August 2026)

Related on this site:

The Philosopher and the Crowd

David Crush — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:16:00 -0400

On September 9, 2026, Curtis Yarvin posted that Hungary’s spend on conservative intellectuals was “a rounding error in Cupertino,” and that California was about to eject its VC industry because voters “have no idea why they shouldn’t just steal billionaires’ money.” Under that post, C.A. Shoultz replied:

California should be taken into federal receivership, and Gavin Newsom marched out of the governor’s mansion in Sacramento at gunpoint.

Yarvin wrote the complaint. The reply wrote the gun. A few hundred views. This is an X reply under his post, not a Gray Mirror comment. I already wrote the political theory in The Theory That Cannot Fail and the systems record in Ideas Are Easy. This is a different bill. The pose is intellectual. The social structure is a following he recruits, does not have to police in public, and monetizes. That is a cult-leader function, not a scholar’s.

David Koresh owned the map so the flock could not leave it. Charles Manson never had to say the word because the family already knew. Better marketing. I am not going to mash those tellings into one, and I am not going to invent a compound. The function is enough.

The Crowd He Asked For

In 2008, in Open Letter XIV, he wrote that impact needs quantity. “You need moronic, chanting hordes.” Communism was not overthrown by Sakharov, Brodsky, and Havel. “There is no such thing as a crowd of philosophers.” Then the correction: the philosophers did matter. “What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd — a rare and volatile mixture.” Recruit on the internet.

The reply is the crowd. He said so.

The Rule That Keeps the Hands Clean

He wrote a code for the other room. A speech code for dissidents: no newspeak, no badspeak, no crowdspeak. It applies to Gray Mirror comments. Crowdspeak is urging others to do anything. In Censorship: a 21st-century approach he put the floor in plain words: prohibit content that “incites concrete lawless action” or “menaces or insults, individually or collectively, any protected group.” Then the tighter house rule: “On Gray Mirror you may not incite any action, or menace or insult anyone.”

Writing a speech code is better than writing none. It does not make the following a seminar. The code is a liability shield and a marketing costume — urbane, independent, not the comment section. An intellectual who forbids crowdspeak still sold the reboot. The rule that keeps the hands clean is the Manson function.

Amnesty, Then the Gallows

On September 3 he answered Carole Cadwalladr himself. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand views:

Yes all of you need to lose your jobs. Sorry. Ok I’m actually not sorry.

But please don’t kill yourself. Amnesty is beautiful. Everyone gets amnesty. Have you heard of “truth and reconciliation” Carole

This is his mouth. The job loss is the program — RAGE, already paid for in the earlier essay. “Don’t kill yourself” is mock mercy in the same breath as “I’m not sorry.” Truth and reconciliation is the costume. He writes the purge as a joke and calls it amnesty. The New Yorker already named the flicker: he claims the transition will be peaceful, even joyous; the fantasies sit in the copy.

Same day, under a post arguing ALPRs do not fix crime — “For that we need a king” — Tom Howard wrote: “I prefer public executions as a deterrent. Privacy preserving for civilians and restricted to convicted criminals.” The king is the hole. The gallows is the brick. That is the move in The Blank They Fill In, and the cameras are already in When the Camera Says You’re Guilty.

The day after, gentility was “built on centuries of flogging and boiling in oil. Retvrn,” and a reply wanted Christians to “impose their will.” Softer register. Same cage.

The Map

Ava Kofman, in the New Yorker, wrote that what wins converts is less the soundness of the arguments than the transgressive energy: he makes listeners feel he is granting them forbidden knowledge — “about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule.” I am not going to audit the 2008 blogs. The object is September 2. He posted that millions in North America “need to be completely resocialized in a total environment.” Under that, @usdarawmilk wrote: “You can’t socialize negroes, arabs, jews, or beeners to make them into White people.”

He wrote resocialize. The reply wrote race as destiny. The prophet owns the map so the flock can say it for him. His own Gray Mirror code would have killed the comment. It sat.

The Plate

Kofman watched the convert machine up close: office hours with alienated young men; Gray Mirror as Substack’s third-most-popular history publication, as of that profile. Passage Press sold Gray Mirror, Fascicle I: Disturbance and threw the Coronation Ball. Paid Substack. He profits off the following whether or not he deletes a reply. An uninvolved intellectual does not need a collection plate. Skipping journals does not make a cult; that bill is already paid.

He wrote that he needed a crowd. He wrote a code for a different room. The Cupertino rounding error is still sitting over a governor marched out at gunpoint.

Sources

Yarvin in his own words:

Chapter XIV: Rules for Reactionaries (Unqualified Reservations, July 2008)
A speech code for dissidents (Gray Mirror, Feb. 20, 2021)
Censorship: a 21st-century approach (Gray Mirror)

This week’s X:

Yarvin to Cadwalladr (Sept. 3, 2026)
C.A. Shoultz reply (Sept. 9, 2026)
Tom Howard reply (Sept. 3, 2026)
@usdarawmilk reply (Sept. 2, 2026)
Bagdo reply (Sept. 4, 2026)

Reporting:

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America (New Yorker, June 2025)
Gray Mirror: Fascicle I, Disturbance (Passage Press)

Related on this site:

The Blank They Fill In

David Crush — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:20:00 -0400

On September 8, 2026, at the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’s Steel Across America event on the Ellipse, Donald Trump told a room honoring 9/11 responders that two firefighters grabbed him under the arms near One Liberty Plaza — the old U.S. Steel building — lifted him, and ran, because they thought the building was coming down. “I’m big,” he said. “They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’”

He was in Midtown on the day of the attacks. The earliest public record of him near Ground Zero is September 13. There is no evidence of the carry. PolitiFact and CNN ran the record the same afternoon.

I have a hypothesis. The movement around him looks like a cult: restricted thought, a sacred body, a gated news diet, a personality you wear in public. Steven Hassan, who built the BITE model of authoritarian control after leaving the Unification Church, already answered yes in The Cult of Trump (2019). I am not going to retread the book. I am going to put MAGA against the model the way he tells you to use it — Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion, as a continuum, not a checklist — and allow three landings. Yes: authoritarian control of this kind. Not yet: some domains, not the ones that make a closed cult. No: the criteria that matter are not met.

BITE is a clinical map built on Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Singer, not a lab instrument. Useful if you score the misses. Hassan’s own PDF says not every group uses every item. The near-universals are deception, distrust of critics and former members, and fear of leaving. Those are the ones to watch.

Behavior: the hat is not a compound

The sidewalk evidence is loud. Red hats as uniform. Flags on the porch. Merch as tithe. Rallies as ritual. Recruiting as duty. The identity is not a quiet preference. Loyalty is tested. “RINO” is a punishment word. Liz Cheney said he lost 2020; House Republicans took her conference chair in twenty minutes and a voice vote; Wyoming primary voters finished the job.

The misses are real. MAGA does not dictate where you live, whom you sleep with, what you eat, when you sleep, or whether you may take a job. It does not lock the door. A compound cult does. If “cult” means that closed world, this is not one.

The financial ask — donations, hats, sneakers — is real, and it is not a commissary. Rewards and punishments run through primaries and shunning, not through a locked dormitory.

Partial. The letter that looks loudest from the sidewalk is the one that is least complete.

Information: the gated stream

This is the domain the hypothesis expects to win.

“Fake news” is not a complaint about a story. It is a rule about which streams are allowed. Pew’s June 2025 report: 57 percent of Republicans regularly get news from Fox News — at least double any other source they were asked about. Newsmax, talk radio, a friendly X. I already mapped that diet in They Told You the Country Went Left. Omission does the rest. A story that never airs on the approved stream did not happen.

Hassan lists deception as a near-universal: withhold, distort, systematically lie. The 9/11 carry is a fresh instance of an old habit. The New York Times catalogued the tellings in 2015. Fox paid Dominion $787.5 million after stolen-election claims ran as news while internal messages showed they knew they were false.

Former insiders become contaminated. Cheney. Adam Kinzinger. Cassidy Hutchinson. Critics are enemies. The stream is not a preference. It is a fence.

Cult-generated propaganda is on Hassan’s list. The White House and the man himself now post the generated body: Trump as Superman, as pope, as king. PBS noted the second-term pattern. Past presidents had to have fought in a war to run as a war hero. Now they generate the horse.

Strong.

Thought: no room for the sentence

Require the group’s map as reality. Black and white. Us and them. Loaded language that stops a thought: fake news, witch hunt, deep state, RINO, stolen. Hassan names the thought-stopping techniques in plain words: denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking.

There is not room to say he lost 2020. There is not room to say the firefighters did not carry him. The sentence is available. The cost of saying it is exile.

The generated body belongs here too. The map includes a man who cannot exist — superhuman strength, a heroic rescue — while the actual body is the one on the Ellipse asking to be put down. One contrast is enough.

The clever part is not the slogan. It is what happens after a bad fact appears.

Emotion: never his fault

Hassan: make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s. Instill fear of thinking independently, of enemies, of being shunned. Rally high and traitor low. Those who leave are weak, worldly, or captured.

Hits. Misses: there is no confession liturgy, no identity-guilt catechism, no hell if you leave. The damnation is social. You become a RINO. Your friends stop answering. That is enough to keep many people inside. It is not a theology of damnation.

Partial to strong.

The blank

I wrote about the intolerance of a gap in Filling in the Blanks. Anxiety fills toward catastrophe. A model fills toward the average. A political movement can fill toward the leader.

A bad story appears. Trump does not finish it. Believers invent a patch that would make it hold. The patch is adopted. The burden of truth moves. They are now the ones who need reality to match the patch. If it does not, they are the liars.

That is predatory. It is also named in Hassan as rationalization and justification — thought-stopping the member performs on himself.

September 8 is the object. Same night, Ted Cruz sat with Kaitlan Collins on CNN’s The Source. She asked whether it was appropriate for the president to make it sound like he was pulled out of the rubble.

“September 11th was 25 years ago, it was a horrific moment for our entire country, and you could doubt whatever you want about Donald Trump, but the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York, and I have every doubt that what he’s conveying there is what he experienced, and that was a traumatic experience for all of us.”

He then talked about being in D.C., a mile from the Pentagon. Heidi evacuating the White House. A friend lost.

Cruz is the load-bearing example because the history is checkable. Trump named him Lyin’ Ted. Threatened to “spill the beans” on Heidi, then retweeted the side-by-side. Promoted a National Enquirer mash that put Rafael Cruz next to Lee Harvey Oswald; David Pecker later testified the tabloid created the pictures. Cruz, in 2016, called Trump a sniveling coward and a pathological liar, “utterly amoral,” and would not endorse him at the convention. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father.”

Ten years later he is the one who has to make the firefighter story hold on cable news.

The score

Behavior is partial. Information is full. Thought is full. Emotion is partial-to-strong. Hassan told you not to require every item. He also told you the near-universals: deception, distrust of critics and ex-members, fear of leaving. Those are present.

If “cult” means a locked compound with a diet and a curfew, the answer is no. If “cult” means Hassan’s continuum of authoritarian control — a personality-cult system that gates information, forbids certain thoughts, and transfers the cost of the lie onto the believer — the answer is yes.

I am using the second definition, because that is the model I said I would use. The first definition is a different word. On the three-way test: not yet as a closed cult, yes as authoritarian personality-cult control. That is not a hedge. It is the score.

This does not prove every person in a red hat is a cult member. The unit of analysis is the control system, not the wardrobe.

Collins asked a second time whether anyone should exaggerate what happened on 9/11. Cruz remembered the Pentagon, and Heidi, and a friend. On the Ellipse that afternoon the firefighters had already done their work in the story — two big, strong guys, a building that creaked, a man who said he could run himself. Midtown is five miles north. Cruz had the night shift.

Sources

BITE and Hassan:

BITE Model of Authoritarian Control (PDF) (Freedom of Mind Resource Center)
BITE Model page (Freedom of Mind)
Steven Hassan, The Cult of Trump (Free Press, 2019)

September 8, 2026 — the Ellipse and the cover:

Ground Zero construction crews, firefighter hoist (PolitiFact, Sept. 8, 2026)
Fact check: Trump’s story about being carried away by firefighters (CNN, Sept. 8, 2026)
Ted Cruz defends Trump’s shaky 9/11 claims (Mediaite, Sept. 9, 2026)
A Definitive Debunking of Donald Trump’s 9/11 Claims (New York Times, 2015)

Cruz and Trump, 2016:

Cruz Hits Trump Over Attacks On His Wife: ‘You Are A Sniveling Coward’ (NPR, March 24, 2016)
14 Times Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Insulted Each Other (Time, 2016)
Trump’s Tall Tabloid Tale (FactCheck.org, May 2016)
National Enquirer made up story about Ted Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald (NBC News / David Pecker testimony, 2024)
From ‘Lyin’ Ted’ to ‘Beautiful’ (NPR, 2018)

2020 loyalty and the news diet:

GOP dumps defiant Trump critic Cheney from top House post (AP, May 12, 2021)
Liz Cheney Is Defeated by Trump-Backed Harriet Hageman in Wyoming (New York Times, Aug. 16, 2022)
Which News Sources Republicans and Democrats Use and Trust (Pew, June 2025)
Fox settles Dominion lawsuit for $787.5 million (Reuters, 2023)

Generated body:

Trump’s team keeps posting AI portraits of him (PBS NewsHour)

Related on this site:

Ideas Are Easy: Curtis Yarvin Never Had to Build the Thing

David Crush — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:30:00 -0400

In August 2022, Curtis Yarvin sat down with Tim Dillon and described the one large system he had actually built. Urbit, he said, still existed. “Please don’t look into it. It’s not cool at all.” It was “too complicated to use.” A couple of minutes later he added that he could not even tell you how to use it. “Actually, it’s probably too complicated for me.” And then, in case the point had been too subtle: “it frankly doesn’t work very well… you shouldn’t go there.”

This is not a heckler. This is the founder, on a comedy podcast, telling the audience to stay away.

I already wrote about what happened when a piece of Yarvin’s political program met the federal government. The Theory That Cannot Fail asked what the receipts showed, and why every outcome got reclassified as insufficient autocracy. This post is a different question. He wants to tell us how to rewrite the entire political system. The one large system he shipped does not give us much reason to take that claim on faith. That does not prove the political ideas are wrong. It asks why we would trust him without testing the assumptions.

The Parallel Is the Method

Urbit was a clean-slate rewrite of computing. New operating system, new languages, new address space, new assumptions stacked for years before anyone could use the product. The pitch was that the existing stack was an accident of history, and that a mind willing to start over could replace it with something more beautiful.

Neocameralism is the same move applied to the state. The Constitution is a dead letter. Democracy is a costume. Start over. Install a CEO-king. Residents become customers. Exit replaces voice.

Theories are easy. Translation into a working system is the hard part. That is where assumptions die — against physics, users, supply chains, other people. Yarvin’s habit is to skip that part, then grade the people who tried a fragment of the plan.

The Sideline Cannot Fail

He wrote the blueprint. He coined RAGE more than a decade before DOGE. He attended the court parties. Then he sat out the implementation and called the operators insufficiently committed.

Criticism from the bleachers cannot fail. If they succeed, the theory is vindicated. If they fail, they were too timid. Yarvin never has to ship. That is a perfectly safe environment. It is also a reason to discount the grade.

He Scorns the Person With More on the Board

Elon Musk spent more than $250 million supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, then ran the Department of Government Efficiency from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Yarvin spent words. In March 2025, in “Barbarians and mandarins,” he wrote that “Not only can Elon not manage an operation on this basis — God himself could not manage it.” The Washington Post put the whole move in a headline: “Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.” When a fan said Musk was fulfilling the neoreactionary dream, the Post reported Yarvin’s reply: “I wish.”

I want to be precise about Musk. This site has already said what it thinks of the abundance rhetoric and the political spending. This is not a rehabilitation, and it is not an argument that Musk was right about government.

It is an argument about systems. Regardless of what you think of him, reusable orbital rockets, a mass-market EV company that forced the industry to move, and a satellite network that actually works are systems that survived contact with physics, supply chains, and customers. That is systems thinking with a scoreboard. Yarvin’s flagship system is the one he told Tim Dillon not to seek out.

His standard — they will not do what is necessary — is being applied downward, from a theorist with an untested stack, to someone who has repeatedly turned hard constraints into working machines. Appeals for more ruthlessness from someone with less at risk, and less shipped, read as hypocrisy.

The Outsider Costume

In a January 2025 New York Times interview, Yarvin said, “I don’t think I’m even going to the inauguration.” Asked if he had been invited: “No. I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual.”

Then he went to Washington. Politico described him as informal guest of honor at Passage Press’s Coronation Ball on inauguration weekend. He greeted JD Vance. He lunched with Michael Anton. I want to be exact: the Times line is about the inauguration itself. The documented appearance is the court party next door. That is enough.

An uninvolved intellectual does not need a flight plan. In October 2025, in “You can’t handle the truth,” he wrote that the second Trump revolution was failing, “because it deserves to fail,” and that the vengeance after its failure would dwarf 2020. The first version, as the San Francisco Standard quoted it, said: “I feel that I personally have to start thinking realistically about how to flee the country. Everyone else in a similar position should have a 2029 plan as well.” He added that it might not wait until 2029 — losing Congress would put the administration on the defensive.

Then he edited the personal line out. The replacement was “everyone involved with this revolution needs a plan B for 2029.” The Standard asked why. His reply: “Lol Streisand effect I guess. Just TMI.” Asked which countries: “Lol no idea. Obviously I’d rather not.”

Do not write this as a panic. Write it as a costume slipping. Someone who knows he is close enough to catch blowback needs an exit. Someone who is just an intellectual does not. The edit that called the first version too much information is part of the evidence. He sells distance. The record is that he is more connected, and more concerned, than he wants to admit.

If that flight plan lands in Milei’s Argentina, we will know something about the allegiance. He already filed Milei with the barbarians. Exit was always the theory. Argentina would just put it on a map.

He Lives Inside the Thing He Wants Demolished

As of 2025 he was in a Craftsman in the Berkeley Hills, half an hour from San Francisco. El País visited him there. So did the New Yorker. He bought into the Bay Area earlier with a condo near Haight-Ashbury after the Phone.com IPO.

He is against “the libs.” He built a theory whose design, in Patchwork, is “all ’exit,’ no ‘voice.’” He did not exit. He stayed in one of the densest concentrations of the universities, media-adjacent wealth, and liberal municipal institutions he wants liquidated — and he continues to reap what those institutions produce. Property values. A functioning city. A venture-capital hinterland. The surplus of a place that did not take his advice.

Lots of people criticize their hometown. The charge here is narrower. He does not live the product he is selling. The sermon is demolition. The zip code is the benefit.

The Filter He Does Not Have to Clear

The political work lives on Unqualified Reservations, Gray Mirror, and Passage Press — not in refereed political-science or political-philosophy journals. That is a venue choice. Blogging is a legitimate form. This site is a blog. Essayists are not fake for skipping the American Political Science Review.

He knows what a filter is. He has a 1993 USENIX paper from Berkeley computer science. He left the PhD. The political theory never has to clear referees who can make you answer objections, cite contrary evidence, and shrink a claim before it ships. A Substack has a post-publication audience. Those are different tests.

He chose the cheaper one for the political theory, then collects the authority the expensive one is supposed to confer — staffers, Vance citations, “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE was trying to do. His own account of the Cathedral is that academia plus journalism is a prestige cartel. “I am excluded” is built into the theory. Any rejection is capture, not a quality signal. A theory that makes every rejection proof of a cathedral cannot be distinguished from a theory that would fail a referee.

If the defense is exclusion, the work still has to be judged by whether it would survive the filter, not by the grievance. Skipping peer review does not make an idea false. Publishing in a journal would not make it true. The narrower point is the one that matters: you do not get to skip the hard test and still collect the authority the test is for.

I Want to Be Fair

He did spend about seventeen years on Urbit. It began as a personal project in 2002. He co-founded Tlon in 2013. He published A Founder’s Farewell in 2019 and left. That is not “he never builds.” The charge is that he built off untested assumptions — a whole stack whose complexity he later treated as a reason not to use it — and that this is a weak credential for redesigning a country.

He came back. In August 2024, after the Urbit Foundation was running out of money, CoinDesk reported his return as informal wartime CEO. His own diagnosis: they had pretended the system was more mature than it was. “The result was a lot of dead code and a lot of disappointed people.” The project was “still default-dead.” That return does not erase the Tim Dillon disavowal. It is another lap of the same pattern. Theory. Mess. Blame the operators. Re-enter as the mind who sees clearly.

What This Does and Does Not Prove

Urbit’s failure does not falsify monarchy-as-CEO. A bad compiler does not disprove a political philosophy. Granting Musk a systems record does not make him a hero, a good DOGE director, or a model sovereign. Living in Berkeley does not make a person a liberal. Skipping journals does not settle the argument.

The honest claim is smaller and stronger. If your pitch is systems competence, the system you shipped is the evidence. If your pitch is that the operators lacked will, you should have more at stake than a Substack, and more working systems than the one you told people to avoid. Why accept an untested political architecture from someone whose own flagship architecture became, in his words, too complicated and not worth seeking out — and who keeps the one job that cannot be audited: the critic who was never really in the room?

We should test assumptions before we let anyone rewrite the load-bearing parts of a country. He wants the rewrite without the test, and the credit without the risk. Ideas are easy. That is the easy way out.

Sources

Yarvin in his own words:

The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin (The Tim Dillon Show #310, Aug. 7, 2022)
A Founder’s Farewell (Urbit, 2019)
A brief explanation of the cathedral (Gray Mirror)
Barbarians and mandarins (Gray Mirror, Mar. 6, 2025)
You can’t handle the truth (Gray Mirror, Oct. 5, 2025)
Patchwork (2008)
Anonymous RPC: Low-Latency Protection in a 64-Bit Address Space (USENIX, 1993)

Reporting:

Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done (New York Times, Jan. 2025)
Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington. (Politico, Jan. 2025)
Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it. (Washington Post, May 2025)
Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America (New Yorker, June 2025)
Curtis Yarvin’s brave new world (El País, Aug. 2025)
Citing fear of Democratic ‘vengeance,’ Curtis Yarvin says he may flee the U.S. (San Francisco Standard, Oct. 2025)
‘Wartime CEO’: Urbit’s Founder Returns (CoinDesk, Aug. 2024)

The Rightward Bet Failed

David Crush — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:00:00 -0400

In part one I argued the Overton window moved right, not left — and that the party still selling Goldwater dropped his budget rule, his trade stance, and his character standard. In part two I argued churches got used: the SBC’s early-1970s abortion middle ground was rewritten into a wedge, and Weyrich’s organizers needed a mobilizing issue after other triggers failed.

This essay is the test. If the thesis that right-wing government delivers for middle- and lower-class people were right, we would be feeling relief. Absolute poverty is not 1933 — do not say “more than ever.” Say this: housing, healthcare, and education costs outran wages for a huge share of households; wealth of the top is a record share; peer democracies built floors we never did. Failure is the indictment. Malice is only claimed where someone said the quiet part.

The International Lag

The United States is the only high-income OECD country without a national paid parental leave entitlement. The Family and Medical Leave Act is unpaid and only covers larger employers. There is no federal paid sick leave guarantee; among OECD peers, the United States and Korea are the holdouts on statutory paid sick leave. At-will employment rules in forty-nine states mean most workers can be fired for almost any reason that is not illegally discriminatory.

Every other rich democracy has a statutory path to universal health coverage — NHS-style, social insurance, or Swiss/Dutch-style mandated private insurance with a public backstop. The United States still does not. The ACA reduced the uninsured. It did not close the gap. We spend roughly 17–18 percent of GDP on healthcare with worse access than peers who spend less.

Firearm death rates among high-income peers are not close. CDC and WHO comparisons in the mid-2010s put overall U.S. firearm mortality on the order of eleven times the high-income average. UNODC data for 2023 put U.S. firearm homicide around 4.4 per 100,000 against Canada at about 0.7. Other developed countries ridicule the gap because the gap is real.

These are not vibes. They are the peer-country receipts of a politics that treated guaranteed floors as socialism and then wondered why the middle feels unprotected.

Figure: peer floors the United States never built. Sources: OECD family database, CEPR sick-leave comparisons, Commonwealth Fund / OECD health access.

The K

Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts: the top 1 percent hold on the order of 30 percent of net worth; the bottom half holds a few percent. U.S. Bank and others have flagged Gini and wealth concentration near multi-decade extremes. The New York Fed’s Liberty Street Economics work documents K-shaped patterns in wealth and spending since 2023 — higher-income households pulling away as financial assets compound. The Minneapolis Fed has cautioned that some consumption surveys are messier than the headline K story. Fine. Use the wealth split and the peer lag. Do not invent a cartoon Depression.

A politics that cut top rates, starved labor power, and blocked peer-country floors while asset owners rode markets was always going to produce a letter that looks like K. The brochure said the middle would thrive. The top thrived.

Figure: wealth concentration in one comparison — Fed Distributional Financial Accounts, order-of-magnitude.

The Fiscal Ladder as Receipts

Goldwater: spending cuts before tax cuts. Then the ladder from part one, now as outcomes:

Reagan broke spend-first. Debt held by the public: about 26.2 percent of GDP (1980) to 40.9 percent (1988). Stockman’s Trojan horse admission is contemporaneous branding, not mind-reading Goldwater.
George H.W. Bush tried to close the hole with the 1990 tax deal and was punished. Debt/GDP kept rising.
George W. Bush inherited a surplus path. CRS: legislative changes (tax cuts, wars, Medicare Part D) were about two-thirds of the surplus-to-deficit swing. Unpaid wars plus unpaid tax cuts plus a new entitlement.
Clinton produced surpluses — the control case so this is not “all presidents.”
Trump made the violation the program. CBO February 2026 outlook: deficit about $1.9 trillion / 5.8 percent of GDP; the 2025 reconciliation extension scored as adding roughly $4.7 trillion to deficits over ten years.

CRS and CBO have long been clear that major supply-side cuts did not pay for themselves. George H.W. Bush called it voodoo before he inherited the bill. The people who still sell trickle-down as middle-class policy are selling a brand Stockman already admitted was hard to sell under its real name.

War on Drugs — Argue from Outcomes

Nixon declared a war on drugs in 1971. Treat the outcome as the argument: mass incarceration, racial disparity in enforcement, supply not crushed. The 1994 crime bill under Clinton is part of the same punitive turn — this is not a one-party cartoon.

Do not hang the Ehrlichman “we knew we were lying” quote as load-bearing. Dan Baum published it in Harper’s in 2016 from a 1994 recollection; Ehrlichman’s family and some historians contest it; Nixon also expanded methadone and treatment tracks that later administrations stripped. We can say the war failed, and that it was politically useful, without claiming a signed confession.

Vietnam was Kennedy and Johnson, then Nixon. Iraq 2003 was GOP-led with Democratic votes. Do not date “bipartisan forever wars” to Goldwater. Put them here as cost: trillions spent projecting power abroad while peer countries built healthcare and leave floors at home. A country can choose guns. It chose guns and told the middle that peer-country social insurance was unaffordable socialism. That is the cake-and-eat-it move.

Gridlock as Feature

Mann and Ornstein’s point was never that Congress is merely “polarized.” It was that asymmetric polarization plus institutional hardball turns the system into a machine that blocks the floors above while tax cuts and judges still move. Gridlock is not a bug when your coalition wins by stopping peer-country policy and calling the stop a win.

Who Got Paid, Who Got the Brochure

Donors and the business wing got rate cuts. The Federalist Society got the courts. Gun politics got its wins. Culture-war media got a product that never has to balance a budget. Working-class Republicans who were sold wages, dignity, and cheaper goods got tariffs that tax groceries, asset inflation they do not own, and no sick leave. Goldwaterites who wanted balanced books, free trade, and character got none of those from the heir who still wraps himself in the brand.

Evangelicals got Dobbs and a leader who fails the test they used on Clinton. That bargain is part two.

Figure: dual loss mapped — who cashed in vs what brochure / kitchen-table voters were sold.

The Dual Loss

The country shifted right. Brochure conservatives did not get the limited-government, balanced-budget, law-and-order party they were told they had — while donors and courts did. The remaining question, asked without contempt in part one, is why the rest of the coalition treats someone else’s win as theirs: negative partisanship, sorted identity, a Fox-and-feed diet, status and recognition, the two-party trap, and the fear of being the odd one out.

If the rightward bet worked for the people it claimed to serve, the middle would not be one illness or one firing from the edge while the top 1 percent compounds. We would see peer-country floors. We would see broad relief.

We see a K.

That is enough. You do not need every originator to have been malicious. You need the ledger. The ledger is not subtle.

Sources

OECD / peer-country floors:

OECD Family Database PF2.1 Parental leave systems
Contagion Nation 2020: United States Still the Only Wealthy Nation without Paid Sick Leave (CEPR)
Commonwealth Fund / OECD health spending and access comparisons
CDC / WHO firearm mortality comparisons; UNODC firearm homicide rates

Wealth and K-shape:

Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts
Explaining the K-Shaped Economy (NY Fed Liberty Street Economics)
The K-Shaped Economy in 2026 (U.S. Bank)
Have U.S. consumers gone “K-shaped”? (Minneapolis Fed)

Fiscal ladder:

The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (CBO)
William Greider, The Education of David Stockman (The Atlantic, Dec. 1981)
CRS RS22550 / R41134 on the 2001–09 surplus-to-deficit swing
Tax Policy Center / Treasury historical debt-to-GDP series

War on Drugs / crime:

Nixon 1971 drug-war declaration
Dan Baum, Legalize It All (Harper’s, 2016) — contested Ehrlichman recollection; flag as such
1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (Clinton)

Series:

How Churches Got Used

David Crush — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:30:00 -0400

In part one I argued the country moved right, not left — and that the coalition selling that shift gutted the Goldwater brochure while a few factions cashed in. This essay is about the religious piece of that story: how evangelical institutions got mobilized, what the Southern Baptist Convention actually said about abortion in the early 1970s, and why “culture war” is better understood as strategy than as awakening.

I wrote about the flavor of Christianity I was first served in A Bigger Table. The Gospels put weight on neighbor, the poor, and the stranger. Abortion barely appears. The political church I grew up around treated niche fights as the whole faith. This post is one answer to how that happened — without pretending every pew was a plot, and without treating Barry Goldwater as the architect of Jerry Falwell.

Seedbed, Not Harvest

Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative (1960, with L. Brent Bozell Jr.) is limited government and states’ rights. It is not the Moral Majority. Goldwater later supported gays in the military — “you don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country; you just need to shoot straight” — and said there was “no gay exemption” in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In 1981 he warned the Senate he would fight religious factions that tried to dictate morals “in the name of conservatism.”

Paul Weyrich tried for years to pull evangelicals into electoral politics. Goldwater’s 1964 campaign lost. The Southern Strategy harvested the Deep South. The harvest of church politics — Moral Majority, SBC Conservative Resurgence — is late 1970s, not 1960. Do not date the takeover to the decade of the seedbed.

Roger Stone belongs in this story only as a dirty-tricks through-line: Goldwater volunteer as a kid, Nixon sabotage, NCPAC with Terry Dolan and Charles Black, Young Republicans, then Trump. He is not the theologian of the culture war. Weyrich, Falwell, and Richard Viguerie are the organizers.

What the SBC Actually Said

Do not say “the Baptist church was pro-choice.” Say the Southern Baptist Convention.

In 1971, SBC messengers passed a resolution that affirmed the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, and called on Southern Baptists to work for legislation allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, and “carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The text is still on sbc.net.

In 1974 — after Roe v. Wade — they reaffirmed that resolution as a “middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.”

W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Dallas and a former SBC president, praised Roe in 1973: he had “always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” and that what was best for the mother and the future should be allowed. He later reversed during the Conservative Resurgence that began in 1979.

By 1980, SBC abortion resolutions had narrowed the exception to the life of the mother. That is a denomination captured by political organizers — not a timeless theological discovery that somehow waited until the New Right needed a ballot line.

Figure: the SBC’s own paper trail — middle ground (1971/74) to narrowed exception (1980).

Christianity Today and others contest the pop claim that “evangelicals were pro-choice.” Fair. Do not overclaim a myth. The SBC resolutions and Criswell’s public reversal are enough without inventing a unanimous evangelical left.

Weyrich on the Record

Historian Randall Balmer has argued for years that the Religious Right did not assemble as a political movement primarily over Roe. Paul Weyrich told him — emphatically — that he had tried abortion, school prayer, the Equal Rights Amendment, pornography. “Nothing got their attention” until the IRS moved against racially discriminatory schools, including Bob Jones University. Abortion became the public wedge after defending segregation proved unsellable.

Present that as Weyrich’s own account plus Balmer’s reporting — not as the only possible history of every evangelical conscience. Some Christians opposed abortion on theological grounds before 1979. The organizing catalyst Weyrich described was not Roe. The public brand became abortion. Those can both be true.

Figure: Weyrich’s mobilizer search as he described it to Balmer — failed triggers, IRS catalyst, abortion as the sellable public frame.

Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority launched in 1979. Falwell’s first major anti-abortion sermon came years after Roe. The timeline matches a movement looking for a high-minded frame — not a spontaneous pew revolt the day the Court ruled.

Culture War as Strategy

Weyrich’s project was explicit: culture war as the fight that would keep a coalition mobilized. Family values as status and moral superiority. The Catholic anti-abortion movement already existed; Protestant and evangelical institutions had to be brought into that fight. The SBC’s own paper trail shows how far the official position moved in less than a decade.

That is what I meant in A Bigger Table when I asked how so many Christians treat Gospel emphasis on the poor and the stranger as optional while niche fights that barely appear in the text become litmus tests. You do not need every Christian to have been conned. You need organizers who found that wedge issues turned out churches, and churches that let politics rewrite the emphasis.

Goldwater saw the danger early and said so. The party that still name-checks him chose Falwell’s coalition anyway. Part one is how far modern leaders strayed from Goldwater’s limits. This essay is how the religious infrastructure for that stray was built.

What This Does Not Prove

It does not prove every Southern Baptist in 1971 was a feminist. The 1971 resolution was a middle ground with a sanctity-of-life preamble — not “abortion on demand.”

It does not prove Democrats never used religion. They did.

It does not prove sincere pro-life conviction is fake. Many people hold it sincerely. The question is whether the political Religious Right began as a pure response to Roe, or whether organizers found abortion after other triggers failed and then remade denominational politics to match. Weyrich’s account and the SBC timeline support the second story for the movement. Individual consciences are their own.

Sources

SBC resolutions and Criswell:

Resolution On Abortion (1971) (Southern Baptist Convention)
Was the Southern Baptist Convention Ever ‘Pro-Choice’? (Good Faith Media)
The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth (Randall Balmer, Politico Magazine, May 2022)
Evangelicals and abortion: chicken or egg? (Baptist News Global)

Weyrich / Bob Jones / Moral Majority:

Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right
There’s a straight line from US racial segregation to the anti-abortion movement (Balmer, The Guardian)
Paul Weyrich / Moral Majority founding (1979); ALEC and Heritage co-founding as movement infrastructure

Goldwater on religion and gay rights:

Goldwater on religion in politics (1981 Senate remarks)
Goldwater backs lifting gay ban (Los Angeles Times, 1993)

Related on this site:

A Bigger Table
The Country Shifted Right (series overview)

They Told You the Country Went Left

David Crush — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:00:00 -0400

Open a feed long enough and you will be told the country went left. Universities. HR departments. Prestige newsrooms. “Woke.” The story is weather: ambient, inevitable, already decided.

I am not going to pretend campuses and prestige media lean right. They do not. Cultural institutions and the median legislator are different questions. Roll-call ideology, who got driven out of the Republican Party, and what counts as unsayable policy all point the other way. The Overton window moved right. The coalition that pushed it still sells Barry Goldwater on the brochure. Look at the ledger and the brochure is a costume. Start here with the measurement and the stray — churches and outcomes follow in the rest of the series.

Be Fair: Goldwater Believed It

Barry Goldwater looks like a true believer, not a Bond villain who invented a fake 1960s con. He lost forty-four states in 1964 in part because he would not sand the edges off. “A choice, not an echo.” “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act and against the 1964 Act on Titles II and VII as property and federal-power grounds — later calling that vote one of his great regrets. He desegregated his family’s Phoenix stores. He was not a Falwell culture warrior. In 1981 he told the Senate he would “fight them every step of the way” if the Moral Majority tried to dictate morals “in the name of conservatism.”

The later movement outgrew and used him. Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Paul Weyrich hunting for a wedge that would actually mobilize people, Roger Stone’s dirty-tricks through-line from Goldwater volunteer to Trump — those are instrumental layers. People can believe and calculate. A sincere constitutional argument can still assemble a segregationist electoral coalition. That is a different charge than “Goldwater was lying.”

Failed policy is not proof of malice. Where someone said the quiet part — David Stockman on supply-side, Weyrich on the IRS wedge — we will name it. Where we only have wreckage, we argue from wreckage.

The Measurement

Pew’s analysis of DW-NOMINATE scores — roll-call ideology comparable across decades — is the spine. Between the 92nd Congress (1971–72) and the 117th, both parties moved away from the center. Republicans moved more. House Democrats went from about −0.31 to −0.38. House Republicans went from about 0.25 to nearly 0.51. Southerners went from under 15 percent of the House GOP caucus to about 42 percent, and Southern House Republicans became the most conservative bloc.

That is asymmetric polarization. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein documented the institutional consequences: gridlock as a feature when one party treats compromise as betrayal. You do not need vibes. You need the votes.

Figure: House party means on DW-NOMINATE. Both parties left the center; Republicans moved farther. Source: Pew analysis of NOMINATE scores.

Why It Feels Like the Opposite

Concede the objection in one breath. Campuses leaned left. Prestige print and network news still lean left. NYTimes.com still leads digital visits. Democrats use a wider news diet — CNN, the networks, NPR, the Times. That is the “MSM” people mean.

Then look at the diet Republicans actually live in.

Pew’s June 2025 report: 57 percent of Republicans regularly get news from Fox News — at least double any other source they were asked about. GOP trust is concentrated: 56 percent trust Fox; 31 percent trust The Joe Rogan Experience. Fox has been number one in cable news since about 2002. In 2025 it averaged roughly 2.65 million primetime viewers against MSNBC at about 915,000 and CNN at about 573,000. Talk radio has been conservative-heavy for decades. Newsmax, Daily Wire, Breitbart sit on the Republican side of Pew’s map.

Conservative media does not own the entire press. It owns the partisan TV / talk / podcast funnel that produces the “country went left” feeling. People choose Fox and Rogan. Outrage gets the clicks. The loop repeats that they are surrounded by the left — which is how a rightward Overton window can feel like a left-wing takeover.

Figure: Republican news diet concentration. Fox is the regular source for 57% of Republicans — at least double any other single outlet in Pew’s June 2025 map.

Do not hang this on a cartoon “algorithm radicalized everyone equally.” Meta’s 2020 Facebook and Instagram experiments found that swapping algorithmic feeds for chronological ones did not change polarization. Short-term YouTube “rabbit hole” studies are modest. Selective exposure and a concentrated diet do more work than a magical filter bubble.

X is the directional exception worth naming. A 2026 Nature field experiment (Gauthier and coauthors) assigned U.S. users to algorithmic or chronological feeds for about seven weeks in summer 2023 — after Musk’s takeover. Switching to the algorithmic “For you” feed increased engagement and shifted attitudes toward more conservative policy priorities, harsher views of the Trump investigations, and more Kremlin-friendly takes on Ukraine. The algorithm promoted conservative content and demoted traditional media. Users followed conservative activist accounts and kept following them after the algorithm was switched off. Switching the algorithm off did not unwind the shift. That is personalization with a direction, not both-sides symmetry.

Trump’s digital play fits the same map: 2016 Facebook and Twitter conflict framing; 2024 less Meta ad spend, more podcasts and streaming, plus a friendly X.

One courtroom footnote, because the meme is wrong. Fox did not tell a court “we are entertainment, not news.” In McDougal v. Fox News (S.D.N.Y. 2020), Fox’s lawyers argued — and Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil held — that the “general tenor” of Tucker Carlson’s show means a reasonable viewer understands he is engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary,” not “stating actual facts.” When stolen-election claims ran as news and internal messages showed they knew they were false, Fox paid Dominion $787.5 million. Commentary when convenient. News when selling panic. They cannot have both.

The Exile Class

If the party had not moved, center-right Republicans would still be welcome inside it.

David Jolly left the GOP in 2018, registered as a Democrat in April 2025, and is running for Florida governor. Charlie Crist switched. Jeff Flake left the Senate rather than bend. Liz Cheney lost her primary. Adam Kinzinger left Congress. Justin Amash left the party. The Lincoln Project and The Bulwark are Never-Trump conservatives whom right-wing media treat as left. Moderates do not “evolve” out of existence. They lose primaries or quit. That is evidence of a party shift.

Barack Obama, December 2012, Univision: his policies were “so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.” He was answering socialism charges. The quote lands harder when you remember what “moderate Republican” meant in the 1980s — and what the exile class looks like now.

How a Window Works: Obamacare

Here is the load-bearing exhibit.

Stuart Butler’s 1989 Heritage Foundation brief, “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” proposed an individual mandate as the conservative alternative to employer mandates and single-payer — a way to stop free riders. The 1993 HEART Act (Chafee/Dole and roughly twenty Republican senators) carried the architecture. Mitt Romney signed a cousin of it in Massachusetts in 2006. Obama ran against the mandate in 2008, then adopted the market design: private insurance, subsidies, exchanges, a mandate. Heritage later distanced (Butler, “Don’t Blame Heritage,” 2012). Do not say Heritage wrote Obamacare. Say the architecture was what center-right reformers offered so the country would never have to debate the peer-country model.

In the 2009–10 governing window — the only time a president and Congress could have put single-payer on the table — they excluded it. Obama said we are not starting from scratch. Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus declared it off the table. Activists who interrupted a hearing to demand a seat for Medicare for All — the “Baucus 8” — were arrested. The public option died for Joe Lieberman and centrist votes. Zero Republican votes for the Affordable Care Act. Sarah Palin’s “death panels” became PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year. The substitute was still sold as Bolshevism. Repeal nearly succeeded in 2017.

This is how a window works. You never debate the left option if the center-right option is already “socialism” — and a personalized media diet will keep repeating that it is. Every other rich democracy has a statutory path to universal coverage. The ACA reduced the uninsured. It did not close the peer-country gap. That story continues in part three.

The Stray: Budget, Tariffs, Law and Order

Modern leaders still name-check Goldwater. Then they drop his limits.

The budget ladder

Goldwater’s rule in The Conscience of a Conservative: “spending cuts must come before tax cuts. If we reduce taxes before firm, principled decisions are made about expenditures, we will court deficit spending.” He attacked Eisenhower’s deficits. He voted against the Kennedy tax cuts of 1963. He was a defense hawk — “cut everything” is a cartoon of him — but the spend-first rule was the brand.

Reagan already broke it. Top rate from 70 percent toward 28 percent, defense up, domestic not cut enough. Debt held by the public went from about 26.2 percent of GDP in 1980 to 40.9 percent in 1988. David Stockman told William Greider in The Atlantic (December 1981) that Kemp-Roth “was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate” — “It’s kind of hard to sell ’trickle down,’ so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ’trickle down.’” George H.W. Bush had already called it “voodoo economics.” Do not pin Laffer-curve branding on 1960 Goldwater. He was a balanced-budget fiscal conservative. Supply-side is late-1970s Reaganomics.

George H.W. Bush is the control case. He inherited the hole, then signed the 1990 budget deal that raised taxes. Debt as a share of GDP kept rising — to about 48.3 percent in 1992 — and the coalition treated the tax increase as betrayal. Fiscal honesty became a career-limiter.

George W. Bush certainly did. He inherited a surplus path (CBO, January 2001). CRS found legislative changes — 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals, Medicare Part D — accounted for about two-thirds of the surplus-to-deficit swing. Even if the economy had matched the 2001 forecast, the budget would still have been in deficit from 2003 to 2007. Debt held by the public roughly doubled in dollars.

Trump made the violation the program. TCJA without matching spending cuts. The 2025 reconciliation law permanently extends the 2017 rates. CBO’s February 2026 outlook: a 2026 deficit of about $1.9 trillion / 5.8 percent of GDP against a fifty-year average near 3.8 percent, with that law adding an estimated $4.7 trillion to deficits over ten years. COVID outlays were bipartisan. Clinton produced surpluses — mention that so this is not “everyone spends.” The indictment is the Republican sequence after Goldwater: tax cuts first, bills later, interest compounding, while still claiming the balanced-budget mantle.

Figure: the early budget ladder in debt-to-GDP terms — Goldwater’s spend-first rule, then Reagan–Bush reality. Later CBO figures continue the story in the text.

Tariffs

Goldwater’s 1964 campaign booklet: “Vigorous international trade is vitally important.” Buying abroad “helps raise our living standards.” “Trade should be a two-way street.” The answer is competitive ability in free enterprise, not “the restriction of American ingenuity.” He backed a free-world common market as a force against communism. Reciprocity, not a wall.

Reagan, April 25, 1987 radio address: imposing tariffs is a step he is “loath to take” because “over the long run such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.” The Japan semiconductor duties were a “special case” to enforce an agreement, “not begin a trade war.” Smoot-Hawley is the ghost in that speech. He used Harley-Davidson Section 201 and auto/steel “voluntary” restraints — tactical exceptions he framed as temporary. Trump inverted that: broad, lasting tariffs as the doctrine. The party made his protectionism the brand after 2018. By August 2026 some Republicans were furious over new Canada tariffs heading into midterms. They made the brand, then flinched when grocery prices showed up in the ads. Not eternal unanimity. The stray still stands.

Law and order — and character

Nixon ran on “law and order.” Do not hang a halo on that brand; it was racially coded. The point is the standard the party claimed, then dropped.

On August 7, 1974, Goldwater, Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott, and House Republican Leader John Rhodes told Nixon House impeachment would be nearly unanimous and he had maybe fifteen Senate votes for acquittal. Nixon resigned the next day. Goldwater was the conservative who delivered the news. Ford’s pardon of Nixon is a caveat, not an equivalence.

After two impeachments, a civil sexual-abuse finding (E. Jean Carroll), a New York falsifying-records conviction tied to the Stormy Daniels hush payment, and January 6, the same party made Trump the nominee again. He is still in power.

January 6 was the Capitol, not the White House. A crowd assaulted police and broke into the building. More than a hundred forty officers were injured. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leadership drew seditious-conspiracy convictions. On day one of the second term, Trump issued clemency for roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants. The law-and-order party mass-pardoned the riot.

Pardons that appear pay-to-play: write as a documented pattern, not a courtroom verdict. First term: Stone, Manafort, Flynn, Arpaio. Second term: ProPublica found most of roughly 1,600 clemencies did not go through the Office of the Pardon Attorney; January 6 is the bulk; the rest skew allies, donors, and culture-war figures. Reporters describe intermediaries charging hundreds of thousands to millions to get a case in the door. Trevor Milton’s pardon wiped restitution after large Trump-aligned donations. The Changpeng Zhao / Binance pardon sits next to Trump-family crypto interests; Binance denies impropriety; Democrats called it pay-to-play and opened inquiries in 2026. People have always hired pardon lawyers. Clinton’s Marc Rich pardon was ugly. The change is volume, bypassing DOJ process, January 6 as a bloc, and a visible clemency market.

Affairs: JFK and Clinton happened. The GOP still sold family values and impeached Clinton over Lewinsky. Access Hollywood briefly made Paul Ryan cancel a joint event. They kept Trump. That is the stray from 1970s Republican shame — not a claim that Democrats were monks.

They made Nixon resign. They would not make Trump. Goldwater was in the room for the first one.

The Dual Loss — Then Why Keep Buying It?

Do not write “conservatives got nothing.” Split the coalition.

Who got paid: the donor and business wing (top-rate cuts, TCJA, the 2025 extension); Federalist Society and the courts (Dobbs, the durable win); gun politics; immigration-as-theater and some enforcement; anti-woke cultural combat as a media product.

Who did not: Goldwaterites who wanted balanced budgets, free trade, church/state separation, character, and law-and-order that includes their president; working-class Republicans sold wages, cheaper goods, and dignity — and who instead got a K-shaped economy, tariffs that act like a grocery tax, and no peer-country floor on healthcare or leave (part three). Evangelicals got judges and Dobbs and a leader who fails the family-values test they used on Clinton. Part two is how that bargain was built.

The pattern is not “the right won and everyone is happy.” It is: the country moved right, the brand was gutted, a few factions cashed in, the brochure voters did not.

So why does the coalition still hold?

Negative partisanship. Voting against Democrats more than for a platform. Attacks and indictments read as the out-group cheating, which tightens loyalty.

Sorted identity. Lilliana Mason’s Uncivil Agreement: party as mega-identity. Policy failure does not un-merge race, religion, and place into a new team.

The media diet. Fox concentration plus algorithmic reinforcement. The feed delivers winning the argument and being under siege every day. That can feel like getting what you wanted when the ledger does not.

Status and recognition. Arlie Hochschild and Katherine Cramer: pride, shame, and who “cuts in line” — not Goldwater’s budget rule. Trump sells fight and recognition. The product is the fight.

The two-party trap. Goldwater conservatives who leave become Jolly, Amash, Cheney — they exit the viable coalition. Primaries punish the rest.

Narrow wins get generalized. One Supreme Court seat becomes “we are winning America,” and the loop repeats it.

Fear — two kinds. Out-group threat (the left, replacement stories) is a real on-ramp. The fear that yanks you back in after you notice the ledger is often being the odd one out: church, family, the group chat, the primary. Dan Kahan’s identity-protective cognition is about protecting standing in the group. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence: people fear isolation, scan which views get you frowned at, and shut up; silence makes the majority look bigger. Intra-party research finds Americans overestimate how hard co-partisans will punish dissent. The conversion line — “if you notice, you’re with them” — fuses odd-one-out fear into existential out-group fear.

Do not hang this on the TED-talk “backfire effect.” Corrections often make people a bit more accurate about a specific claim. Accuracy fades. Elite and media cues overwrite it. Candidate favorability often does not move. Nyhan, Porter, Reifler, and Wood: people take fact-checks literally but not seriously. Facts can land. They often do not unhook the team.

Do not write that support always spikes right before a bubble bursts. Threat-tightening is real increased identification — which makes collapse harder. Sudden collapse is closer to Timur Kuran’s preference falsification: private doubt until a threshold, then a hollow shell looks unanimous until it does not. Nixon 1974 is the burst case — elites walk. Trump is the sticky case. A cascade is possible if enough elites do what Goldwater did. It is not a countdown we can schedule.

Some people got exactly what they paid for. The mystery is why the people who did not still treat that as their victory.

The Shark

A franchise jumps the shark when it peaks, then keeps filming after it has become a self-parody, while the audience stays because it is their show and the other channel is enemy TV. The Republican Party still sells Goldwater, law and order, balanced books, and family values. The episode on screen is unpaid tax cuts, tariffs Reagan said he was loath to use, January 6 clemency, and a president they would have driven out in 1974. The ratings held. The coalition did not change the channel.

I am not writing this to deprogram a Fox-primary voter in one sitting. I am writing a ledger for people who can still hear it — and naming why a scared identity will treat the ledger as an attack. That is not contempt. That is the mechanism.

Sources

Polarization and measurement:

The polarization in today’s Congress has roots that go back decades (Pew Research Center)
Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (Basic Books)

Media diet:

Which News Sources Republicans and Democrats Use and Trust (Pew, June 2025)
Cable news ratings report for 2025 (Adweek / TVNewser)
Gauthier et al., The political effects of X’s feed algorithm (Nature, Feb. 2026)
McDougal v. Fox News Network, opinion (S.D.N.Y. 2020)
Fox settles Dominion lawsuit for $787.5 million (Reuters)

Obama quote and exile class:

Obama: I’d be a moderate Republican in the 1980s (HuffPost / Univision, Dec. 2012)
David Jolly registers as a Democrat (Politico, Apr. 2025)

ACA / Heritage / single-payer exclusion:

Stuart Butler, Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans (Heritage Foundation, 1989)
In 1993, Republicans proposed a mandate first (NPR)
Single Payer: The Health Care Plan Not On The Table (NPR, 2009)
Obama’s Deal chronology (FRONTLINE / PBS)

Goldwater, budget, tariffs:

Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960)
Barry Goldwater Speaks Out on the Issues (1964 campaign booklet) — trade pages
Goldwater 1981 Senate remarks on the New Right / Moral Majority
William Greider, The Education of David Stockman (The Atlantic, Dec. 1981)
Radio Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade (Reagan Library, Apr. 25, 1987)
Reagan’s Words on Tariffs (FactCheck.org)
The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (CBO)
CRS reports on the 2001–09 surplus-to-deficit swing (RS22550 / R41134)

Nixon resignation / Jan. 6 / clemency / character:

Goldwater expects only a ‘hard core’ of Senate votes for acquitting Nixon (New York Times, Aug. 8, 1974)
How Trump Has Exploited Pardons to Reward Allies and Supporters (ProPublica)
Inside the ‘industrial-scale’ Trump pardon machine (Financial Times / Financial Post)
E. Jean Carroll verdicts and Stormy Daniels / hush-money reporting (AP, WSJ)

Why the coalition holds:

Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement (University of Chicago Press)
Alan Abramowitz on negative partisanship / ANES feeling thermometers
Dan Kahan on identity-protective cognition
Brendan Nyhan, Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions (PNAS, 2020)
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land; Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, spiral of silence; Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic

The Country Shifted Right

David Crush — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:45:00 -0400

Social media treats a leftward takeover as weather. This series argues the other way: the governing Overton window moved right, the coalition that sold that shift gutted its own brochure, and the people who were supposed to feel relief mostly did not.

Start with Part 1 if you are new. Jump to Part 3 if you only want the receipts.

The parts list below stays in sync with the published essays — use it as the roadmap.

Tell the Truth Until You Can't: Political Kayfabe, Heel Heat, and the Golden-Age Promo

David Crush — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0400

Strip away the costumes and the pyro and professional wrestling runs on a simple engine. You find something the crowd already feels — a grievance, a prejudice, a dislike — and you turn the volume up until two people have to fight. You do not invent the feeling from nothing. You book it.

I wrote about that psychology in The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling: heels rooted in real life, babyfaces the audience can live through, and a finish that pays off the heat. What I did not say there is that the same engine is running outside the ring. I think we are being booked.

Kayfabe holds for a long time when the story still feels like it is on the crowd’s side. It fails when you ask them to believe one swerve too many — especially a swerve about their own lives.

Tell the Truth Until You Can’t

Jim Cornette has retold a piece of booking advice he credited to Jerry Jarrett, the Memphis promoter who understood heat better than most. In a 2013 interview, Cornette put it this way: tell the fans the truth as much as you can, for as long as you can, because then when you work them, they will think A was true, B was true, C was true — so maybe D is true too. Do not give them nonsense from day one. Build trust. Then slide in the little white lie.

That is not a cute insiderism. It is how you get over. I have said as much about CM Punk’s pipe bomb: take something true, tell the truth for as long as you can, and then add drama to turn up the volume. The fans could sense the real frustration. That is why it worked.

The rule has a shadow. If D, E, and F never check out — if the work stops matching what the crowd can see and feel — you spend the trust you built. The marks will keep doing the work for you. The casuals will not.

The 2016 Program

2016 was not year zero for political heat. Willie Horton ads, Swift Boat, Gingrich’s language, birtherism — American politics has booked villains for decades. What was distinctive about 2016 was scale and performance: a national candidate who performed as the heel, a stadium chant that sold a finish the justice system never delivered, and a crowd that wanted to believe the outsider story enough to look past a lot.

Hillary Clinton was a heat character. That is not a vibe. Gallup found that Clinton and Trump finished as the two most negatively reviewed major-party nominees in that poll’s modern history. About a quarter of adults disliked both. It was not a classic face-versus-heel match. It was a double-heel main event, and the crowd still had to pick a side.

Why she carried that heat is not mysterious, and it is not a single cause. Record and dynasty. The email server. Decades of conservative media. Gendered double standards that made every sharpness land harder. Readers can weigh those. What matters for the booking is that the seed was real.

The emails were a real kernel. James Comey told the country that Clinton had been “extremely careless” with classified material on a private server and that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case. That is A, B, and C — something people could check against their own sense that rules apply unevenly to the connected.

“Lock Her Up” was D. It was the finish they sold without a conviction. The FBI and the Justice Department never put her in a cage. The chant did not need a cage. It needed a heat character and a crowd that had already accepted A through C. That is the Jarrett move. It is not a mystery.

Trump’s unfavorables were worse than Clinton’s. The method still worked. People wanted to believe the outsider story. They looked past a lot because enough of the early chapters checked out against people they already disliked.

Democrats book villains too. “Deplorables.” Trump as existential heel. That is heat. The distinctive claim is not that only one side uses the engine. It is that MAGA identifies with the heel — transgression as strength — while Democratic heat still usually claims the babyface high ground. Trump already spoke the language; he had been on WrestleMania and in the Battle of the Billionaires. That résumé is a footnote, not the thesis. The thesis is the booking.

Business, Not Blood

In the territory days, a feud between Bruiser Brody and The Sheik was often business, not blood: two people making money off heat while cooperating behind the scenes. I used that example in Lost Art. They did not have to be friends. They had to protect the business.

American politics does not need a secret friendship club either. Elite polarization is real. The 1990s cocktail-party Senate is largely dead. They do not have to like each other to extract.

The program is culture-war heat. The business is often omission and class interest. The STOCK Act still barely polices member trading. A full ownership ban keeps dying in committee. In July 2026 the House passed a limited bill that bars new stock purchases — and still does not require divestment. The people who pass the bills, sit on the portfolios, and cut the promos are not living the grocery line. NBC News, a year into the second term, described policy that cut food stamps, Medicaid benefits, and housing assistance while advancing tax and asset-side wins — and a promo that pointed to 401(k) balances and the S&P as proof of a golden age.

They are not suffering the way kitchen-table America is suffering. That is not a claim that every Democrat and every Republican is in on a cartel. It is a claim about aligned incentives among people who own the ledger and never take the bumps.

When Heel Traits Went Mainstream

Territory wrestling used foreign heels, race-coded gimmicks, and cartoon bullies. That was not a sealed “safe place” for hatred. It mirrored prejudice and amplified it. Political spectacle is not new either — Wallace, McCarthy, the long American habit of turning outsiders into heat.

What changed is the container. Heel traits — open xenophobia, bullying, corruption as a flex — moved from “the guy you pay to see get beaten” to “the brand a winning coalition rewards.” In wrestling, when heels get over, nobody wants the blow-off. The business shrinks. In politics there is no ring bell. Voters rewarded the gimmick. That won elections. It is also how you run out of road: there is no comeuppance, only a louder gimmick next week.

The Attitude Era Mistake

I grew up on WWE from 1998 to 2005. The Attitude Era was my wrestling. I am not here to pretend I hated it. Crash TV worked as a ratings weapon during the Monday Night War. Shock, swerves, heat every week. The boom was real. The Monday Night War was anomalous — two national promotions at war, casual millions watching.

Then every week had to be bigger. Shock is not a renewable resource. When WCW died, the competition that had forced the product to stay sharp was gone. Rock went to the movies. Austin was on ice. Variety reported in 2002 that teenage boys were deserting Raw and SmackDown in large numbers. Wrestling did not vanish. It kept passionate fans. It stopped scaling.

Ridiculous and fun can hold a house. That is what the Attitude Era often was. Ridiculous and a lie about the crowd’s own life cannot. That is the hangover I care about — not “edginess killed wrestling,” but overbooking and a product that stopped matching what casual viewers were willing to invest in. I argued the longer version in Lost Art: winking, heel cool, no consequences. The point here is narrower. Heat treated as infinite eventually empties the cheap seats.

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump stood in the Capitol Rotunda and said the line that would define the second-term kayfabe: “the golden age of America begins right now.” He is still cutting that promo. Affordability gets dismissed as a hoax. The State of the Union in February 2026 returned to the same golden-age framing. The crowd can feel food, gas, and housing.

That is the break. Not indictments. Legal heat got the antihero over for a large part of his base — the corrupt authority going after the outsider is a classic booking that protects the character. What the office cannot work is the grocery bill.

Fortune reported in August 2026 that the golden-age economy pitch was not landing with midterm voters. An Economist/YouGov poll in June 2026 found 29 percent approving and 63 percent disapproving of how Trump was handling the economy — a net of −34, the worst of either term. Overall job approval sat in the low thirties by August (Pew; YouGov).

Jarrett inverted. D no longer follows from A through C, because their life is the rebuttal.

This is not a national unmasking. Hardcore MAGA support has barely moved — YouGov still had MAGA Republicans around 92 percent approval while non-MAGA Republicans fell from near-universal approval at inauguration to roughly even. Strong approvers still say the economy is getting better. The marks are doing the work. The edges are not. Passionate fans remain. It stops scaling. That is the Lost Art pattern applied to a presidency.

People who were willing to look past a lot are bouncing because the golden-age promo insulted what they can see. It is not believable. It is not fun. I was never the mark for this program. The question was never whether I could see the work. It was whether his crowd could keep believing. Some of them cannot. The hardest still can. Two months before a midterm is not the time to write a victory lap.

The Volume Knob

Wrestling still has passionate fans. It does not scale the way it did when the story asked casual millions to care. A political movement can live on marks for a long time. It cannot keep the casual millions once the golden-age promo is just another swerve they can feel in their wallet.

You cannot un-book people with a fact-check. Their life is the fact-check. You can notice when A, B, and C are being used to smuggle D — and you can notice when the volume knob has nowhere left to go.

He Can't Have It Both Ways: Elon Musk's Abundance Rhetoric and His Real Priorities

David Crush — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:30:00 -0400

In July 2026, Elon Musk sat down with The Economist and made a prediction: “money won’t matter in 2036.” Pressed on how people would live in the meantime, he said the Treasury should “simply issue people checks” — a universal high income, not a subsistence floor. Saving for retirement, he has argued elsewhere, will soon be pointless. Artificial intelligence and humanoid robots are about to produce more goods and services than any human could consume. Scarcity is ending. Poverty is a phase transition.

Forbes, in April 2026, estimated something else about Musk’s relationship to money. Of his roughly $839 billion net worth, the magazine calculated that only about $500 million — 0.06 percent — has ever been disbursed to charitable recipients. Musk has transferred roughly $8.5 billion in Tesla stock to his foundations, but Forbes does not count that as giving, because most of it remains undistributed. On the magazine’s “True Net Worth” ranking, which adjusts billionaire wealth for actual philanthropy, Musk ranks among the least generous people on earth. The average American household gives about 2 percent of income to charity. Musk’s disbursed giving, measured against his paper wealth, is orders of magnitude smaller.

This post is not claiming Musk is stupid, or that Tesla and SpaceX are scams, or that you need to purge his products from your life. It is asking a narrower question: when someone’s public words point in one direction and their behavior points in another, which one should you trust? Economists call that revealed preference. You do not need to psychoanalyze. You compare incentives.

Abundance Tomorrow, Accumulation Today

Musk’s post-scarcity sermon is not new. In December 2025, responding to a philanthropic gesture by Michael Dell, Musk wrote on X: “There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money. There will be universal high income.” At the Viva Technology conference in Paris in 2024, he told an audience that in a benign AI scenario, “probably none of us will have a job” — work would be optional, like a hobby, because robots would provide whatever goods and services people wanted.

The through-line is optimism about machine productivity and pessimism about the relevance of money. If you take that seriously, several behaviors become hard to explain.

Musk signed the Giving Pledge in 2012, promising to give away the majority of his wealth. The pledge is aspirational. Forbes counts only money that actually reached people in need — and by that measure, Musk has given away a fraction of a fraction of his fortune. His Musk Foundation has, in several years, reportedly failed to meet the federal requirement that private foundations distribute at least 5 percent of assets annually. Much of the stock he donated sits in foundations or was transferred to the X Foundation, which plans a STEM school near SpaceX’s Texas facility. That may be a worthy project. It is not the same as addressing present poverty — the problem Musk says technology will erase without anyone needing to act.

I am not arguing Musk must liquidate his Tesla holdings tomorrow. I am arguing that if you genuinely believe scarcity is ending within a decade, your marginal dollar has near-zero social utility sitting in undistributed foundation assets while preventable suffering continues now. Musk tells everyone else the Treasury should print checks. He does not behave as though his own billions are irrelevant.

Public Money Today

The contradiction deepens when you look at public funding.

A Washington Post investigation found that Tesla and SpaceX have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits since 2003. In 2024 alone, federal and local governments committed at least $6.3 billion to Musk’s companies — the highest annual total the Post recorded. SpaceX holds roughly $22 billion in cumulative federal contracts, according to company president Gwynne Shotwell, with 52 active contracts worth another $11.8 billion in remaining value. Tesla has earned an estimated $11.4 billion selling regulatory credits to other automakers — including $2.8 billion in 2024 alone — and benefited for years from a federal $7,500 EV tax credit for consumers.

Both companies were load-bearing on public money early. Tesla received a $465 million Department of Energy loan in 2010, months before its IPO, and used it to develop the Model S. SpaceX received more than $500 million in federal grants in its early years. CNN noted that both firms teetered as startups before taxpayer support arrived. That does not mean the support was wasted. It means the fortune Musk now treats as proof of pure merit has a long public ledger.

Musk has called to “end all government subsidies, including those for EVs, oil and gas.” But he has also framed EV tax credit repeal as hurting competitors more than Tesla — “devastating for our competitors and for Tesla slightly,” he said on an earnings call. CNBC reported that people familiar with his management describe his approach to subsidies as pragmatic: accept public money if it is available. Tesla continued lobbying for benefits under the Inflation Reduction Act even as Musk distanced himself from the Biden administration. When Senator Ed Markey challenged him on government support, Musk replied that federal incentives represent less than 2 percent of Tesla and SpaceX’s combined value. When a critic cited the Post’s $38 billion figure, Musk called it a “clown’s analysis” that amounts to less than 1 percent of company value — measuring decades of public support against today’s trillion-dollar market cap, not against whether that support was essential when the companies were dying.

If money will not matter by 2036, why is Musk’s empire still optimized to capture public dollars now? He does not advocate winding down SpaceX’s NASA and Defense Department pipeline. He does not propose returning regulatory-credit windfalls to taxpayers. He advocates Treasury checks for everyone else while his companies remain among the largest beneficiaries of federal spending. Government contracts are not inherently corrupt — SpaceX may deliver real value for the money. The point is that his futurism is not a budget proposal. It is marketing.

While leading the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s companies retained billions in active federal contract value even as DOGE reviewed and cancelled contracts across other agencies — an appearance problem that ethics experts and members of Congress flagged, with the White House saying Musk would “rule on his own” regarding conflicts of interest. I am not alleging illegality. I am noting that the man telling you government waste is existential did not apply that standard symmetrically.

Politics as Business, Not Conviction

Musk’s political spending follows the same pattern: loud conviction when it is useful, quiet recalculation when it is not.

His America PAC spent more than $250 million supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign — making Musk the largest individual political donor in a single U.S. election cycle, according to ABC News and Axios. His net worth rose sharply across Trump’s second term; Forbes and other outlets tracked gains on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars since the inauguration — figures that shift with Tesla and SpaceX stock and should be verified against current reporting, but whose direction is not ambiguous.

In May 2025, Musk told Bloomberg he planned to do “a lot less” political spending in the future. “I think I’ve done enough.” That summer, he had a spectacular public break with Trump over the president’s domestic spending bill, floated a third party he called the America Party, and attacked the GOP from the left on spending and from the right on everything else. By late 2025 he had largely reconciled with Trump. By mid-2026, he authorized America PAC to spend $100 million to $120 million on Republican turnout operations for the midterms — door-knocking, digital ads, and direct mail across at least eight states.

The pattern is opportunistic alignment, not stable ideology. When DOGE became politically costly, he distanced. When Republican midterms needed cash, he returned. Readers should weigh his policy sermons accordingly.

What DOGE Actually Delivered

I covered DOGE’s theoretical roots and the GAO audit of its inflated savings claims in a separate post on Curtis Yarvin and the efficiency pitch. The short version: Musk promised $2 trillion in cuts. DOGE claimed $110 billion. The Government Accountability Office could not verify the methodology behind 96 percent of claimed grant savings. Workforce reductions at the IRS, Social Security Administration, and NOAA degraded services people depend on — longer hold times, slower refund processing, thinner weather monitoring.

Efficiency was the sales pitch. Access, deregulatory upside, and contract retention for his own companies were plausible private returns. Musk left the DOGE role after roughly four months. The savings did not materialize on the terms advertised. His net worth did not suffer proportionally.

The SAVE Act: Democracy Rhetoric vs. Bill Reality

Musk has been one of the loudest public advocates for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act and its successor, the SAVE America Act. “It must be done or democracy is dead,” he posted on X, commenting on conservative pundit Glenn Beck’s claim that passing the bill would “save the republic.” He urged followers to pressure Senate leadership: “Let Senator Thune know that you support saving democracy in America. We must pass the SAVE Act!”

The rhetoric treats opposition as anti-democratic. The legislation itself is more specific — and more restrictive — than “voter ID” suggests.

The SAVE America Act, passed by the House in 2026, would require American citizens to present documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or birth certificate — to register to vote in federal elections, often in person. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that 21 million eligible citizens lack ready access to those documents. Married women who have changed their names may face additional hurdles. The Center for American Progress notes that Republican leaders have misleadingly labeled the bill a “voter ID” measure to make it more palatable — even though congressional Democrats have supported conventional voter-ID requirements in other contexts. The dispute is not whether voters should identify themselves. It is whether millions of citizens should be forced to travel, sometimes hours, to prove citizenship in person before they can register.

Musk’s posts equate the SAVE Act with routine election security and deploy apocalyptic language without engaging those mechanics. You can support election integrity without supporting this bill. Treating every critic as a democracy traitor is a political tactic — not an engineering assessment from the man who owns the platform where the argument happens.

Epstein: Transparency for Thee, Minimization for Me

Nothing in the released Epstein files proves Elon Musk participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Reporting from NBC News, CNBC, and others consistently notes that no visit to Epstein’s private island has been confirmed. Association is not proof of wrongdoing. The issue here is credibility: what Musk said publicly, what the emails show, and what that pattern means for trusting his transparency sermons.

Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor. In 2012 and 2013 — after that conviction — Musk exchanged at least sixteen emails with Epstein, according to documents the Justice Department released in January 2026 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The correspondence shows Musk pursuing visits to Epstein’s Caribbean island. In one November 2013 exchange, Epstein offered a private helicopter; Musk replied that it would be him and his then-partner Talulah Riley and asked, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” In December 2013, Musk wrote that he would be in the BVI/St. Bart’s area over the holidays and asked, “Is there a good time to visit?” They also discussed a possible lunch at SpaceX’s office. Some plans were cancelled. None of the released documents confirm Musk made the trip.

In 2019, after Epstein’s arrest, Musk told Vanity Fair that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined.” That framing — Epstein pursuing, Musk rebuffing — sits awkwardly next to emails where Musk pursued visits and asked about party schedules.

In June and July 2025, during his public feud with Trump, Musk repeatedly demanded the Epstein files be released. “Seriously. He said ‘Epstein’ half a dozen times while telling everyone to stop talking about Epstein. Just release the files as promised,” he posted, replying to a call for unredacted documents. He also claimed, without providing evidence, that Trump was “in the Epstein files” — a charge Newsweek and others noted he never substantiated. Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025. In January 2026, the DOJ released roughly three million pages, including the Musk–Epstein correspondence.

Musk’s response: “No one pushed harder than me to have the Epstein files released and I’m glad that has finally happened.” He said he had “very little correspondence with Epstein” and had “declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express.’” He added that he had been “well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name.”

Reasonable people can misremember a lunch from 2013. It is harder to misremember whether you pursued an invitation or declined one — and the released emails are on the wrong side of that distinction for Musk’s own prior statements. The emails are from after Epstein’s conviction. You do not need to prove Musk knew the full scope of Epstein’s abuse to notice that he was coordinating social plans with a registered sex offender while later presenting himself as someone who consistently rebuffed him. “Could be misinterpreted” is a reputation-management line, not transparency. A transparency posture would mean acknowledging the gap between the emails and the public narrative — not minimizing volume and intent.

If Musk wants credit for demanding sunlight, readers can apply the same standard to him. That is not a call to cancel him. It is a reason to discount future claims that secrecy is always someone else’s problem.

A Note on Faith and Policy

In February 2026, Musk posted on X: “I agree with the teachings of Jesus,” replying to a user who asked who would “lead him to Christ.” He has called himself a “cultural Christian” in prior interviews — admiring the principles without claiming deep personal piety. I am not qualified to judge anyone’s soul, and this post is not a sermon. But the same period includes DOGE-driven dismantling of USAID, with AP reporting that more than 90 percent of the agency’s humanitarian contracts were terminated and Wired documenting the shutdown of famine early-warning systems that made food aid more efficient. Public profession and policy consequence do not have to align. When they do not, readers can notice without claiming to know what Musk believes in private.

I Want to Be Fair

Musk has built companies that advanced electric vehicles, reusable orbital rockets, and satellite internet at scale. Those are real engineering achievements. He is genuinely intelligent. Incompetence is not the best explanation for the gaps between his words and his behavior — revealed preference suggests incentive alignment, not confusion.

You can acknowledge that and still refuse to treat his X posts as neutral public-interest guidance. Buying or not buying a Tesla is a separate decision from trusting his election sermons, his economics forecasts, or his transparency demands.

One alternative hypothesis worth addressing: perhaps Musk believes abundance is real but thinks philanthropy is inefficient at scale — that his foundations are building long-term institutions rather than writing checks. Fine. Then ask why he promotes Treasury-issued universal high income for everyone else while his own foundations under-distribute, and why his post-scarcity timeline never seems to apply to his own accumulation or his companies’ appetite for public contracts.

The Pattern

When someone’s public claims consistently align with their financial and political interests — and when their own transparency demands boomerang on their prior statements — treat the next viral post as advocacy, not information.

That does not require a boycott. It requires proportion. You can drive a Tesla, use Starlink, or admire what SpaceX has accomplished and still discount Musk’s pronouncements on democracy, economics, and whose secrecy is the problem. He can’t have it both ways: abundance for the timeline, accumulation for himself, transparency for everyone else’s files, minimization for his own.

Sources

Wealth and philanthropy:

Reranking The World’s Billionaires By Wealth — And Altruism (Forbes, Apr. 2026)
America’s Most Generous Philanthropists 2025 (Forbes, Feb. 2025)

Government funding:

Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding (Washington Post, 2025)
How much government funding have Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX received? (Fox Business)
How much of Musk’s wealth comes from government help? (CNN, Jun. 2026)
Musk embraces Trump and scorns subsidies. But Tesla still lobbies for US benefits (CNBC, Aug. 2024)
Why Elon Musk supports Trump ending EV tax credits (Business Insider, Nov. 2024)
Elon Musk slams ‘clown’s analysis’ of Tesla, SpaceX government help (Business Insider, Feb. 2026)
Sen. Markey challenges Elon Musk over Tesla, SpaceX subsidies (IBTimes)
SpaceX government contracts (Fed-Spend)
Every federal contract awarded to Elon Musk companies (Fed-Spend)

Abundance rhetoric:

Elon Musk — The Economist interview transcript (Jul. 2026)
Musk predicts AI will create universal high income (Fox Business, Dec. 2025)

Political spending:

Elon Musk readies major midterm investment for Republicans (ABC News)
Musk plans massive spending for GOP in midterms (Axios, Jul. 2026)
Musk plans to spend at least $100 million to help Republicans in the midterms (DNYUZ / New York Times reporting)

SAVE Act:

Musk says SAVE Act requiring ID to vote ‘must be done or democracy is dead’ (The Hill)
The SAVE Act and the election power grab (Brennan Center)
The SAVE America Act explained (Center for American Progress)

DOGE and USAID:

Epstein and transparency:

Elon Musk expressed interest in visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s island (NBC News, Jan. 2026)
Epstein files show Elon Musk planned visit to island (CNBC, Jan. 2026)
Elon Musk emails show plans to visit Jeffrey Epstein’s island (Business Insider, Jan. 2026)
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick face new scrutiny over Epstein ties (Al Jazeera, Jan. 2026)
Musk says Trump should ‘just release Epstein files as promised’ (Bloomberg, Jul. 2025)
Elon Musk urges release of Epstein files (Independent, Jul. 2025)
Musk exchanged emails with Epstein about partying on private island (Spokesman-Review, Jan. 2026)

Faith:

Fact Check: Elon Musk did tweet ‘I agree with the teachings of Jesus’ (Lead Stories, Feb. 2026)

The Theory That Cannot Fail: Curtis Yarvin's Autocracy Got Its Trial Run

David Crush — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 22:50:00 -0400

In August 2026, the Government Accountability Office published its audit of DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” — the website where Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency claimed to document billions in taxpayer savings. The watchdog examined $110.3 billion in reported cuts to contracts, grants, and leases. It could not verify the methodology behind 96 percent of claimed grant savings. Of 13,476 contracts DOGE said it had terminated, no termination action was taken on 2,503. $27.4 billion in claimed savings was never executed. And 108 of the 264 leases listed as cuts were already in the process of being phased out before DOGE existed.

DOGE had promised $2 trillion. It claimed $110 billion. The government’s own auditor could not substantiate most of that.

This was not a rounding error. It was the predictable output of a theory that was never really about efficiency.

He Calls It Monarchy. He Also Calls It Dictatorship.

Curtis Yarvin is often described as a monarchist. He uses the word himself. But in a December 2024 talk titled “Monarchism and fascism today,” he wrote that his project is “assuring the ‘benevolence’ of the ‘dictator,’ or as I would say the accountability of the sovereign CEO.” The New York Times, in a January 2025 profile, put it more bluntly: “monarchy” is “basically his friendlier term for a dictator.”

His actual model is called neocameralism — the state as a joint-stock corporation, with residents as customers and a CEO-king at the top. There is no hereditary legitimacy here, no divine right, no throne passed from parent to child. The borrowed aesthetic is not Versailles. It is a Delaware C-corp with a crown emoji.

A traditional monarchist might argue that legitimacy flows from blood, God, or centuries of custom. Yarvin argues that legitimacy flows from executive competence — from a sovereign who can cut through the “Cathedral” of media, academia, and bureaucracy and govern the way a startup CEO would. The monarchy label is window dressing. What he is selling is autocracy with a term sheet.

RAGE Became DOGE, and Efficiency Was Never the Point

Yarvin coined the acronym RAGE — “Retire All Government Employees” — more than a decade before DOGE existed. In November 2024, The Verge drew the line between RAGE and Musk’s planned Department of Government Efficiency before either man had taken office. By May 2025, the Washington Post reported that two DOGE advisers said Yarvin had offered “the most crisp articulation” of what the effort was trying to achieve.

The public pitch was savings. Musk promised $2 trillion. DOGE built a “Wall of Receipts” and claimed $110 billion. The GAO audit found the numbers unreliable, inflated, and in many cases simply wrong.

But Yarvin had already told us what the metric actually was — in March 2025, before the savings failed to materialize. In “Barbarians and mandarins,” he wrote:

“Moreover, cost reduction is not the proper metric for the performance of DOGE. The inefficiency of the executive branch is a symptom. The disease causing this symptom is: the libs… The real KPI of DOGE is its ability to take power from the libs, then keep it. If, by spending a bit more money, we destroy more liberal power and generate more post-liberal power, why not?”

Efficiency was the marketing. Power transfer was the product. When the savings did not check out, he had already moved the goalposts.

Why We Built the Redundancy He Wants Deleted

Yarvin’s central complaint about government is that it is inefficient — bloated with overlapping agencies, duplicate programs, and civil servants who slow down the CEO’s vision. He is not wrong that government can be slow. He is wrong about what the slowness is for.

In 1969, the public administration scholar Martin Landau published “Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap” in Public Administration Review. The essay opens with Landau on a plane making an emergency landing after a rudder failure. The pilot explained that commercial airliners are deliberately redundant systems — multiple independent mechanisms to perform critical functions, so that one failure does not bring down the aircraft. Duplication and overlap, Landau argued, are not waste. They are what buy reliability.

Government is not a startup. When a startup fails, the founders dissolve the entity, discharge what debts they can, and try again. That is entrepreneurship. When a government fails, people’s lives collapse — benefits stop, inspections cease, tax refunds stall, weather warnings go unissued. There is no second round.

The asymmetry matters. Yarvin wants to run the state like a company that can move fast and break things. But the things being broken are load-bearing.

The 2026 receipts are concrete. The IRS cut its workforce by roughly 31,000 employees — about 28 percent — and the results showed up immediately in the filing season. The Taxpayer Advocate Service reported that average wait times to reach a customer service representative rose from eight minutes to fourteen — roughly a million extra taxpayer-hours spent on hold. The GAO found that fully staffed Taxpayer Assistance Centers fell from 102 to 42, paper refund processing stretched from 13 days to 36, and scanning systems were unavailable at the start of filing season because experienced IT acquisition staff had been cut. At the Social Security Administration, staffing dropped 13 percent. At NOAA, which houses the National Weather Service, staffing fell 19 percent, with reports that offices struggled to maintain 24/7 severe-weather monitoring.

Speed is not efficiency. A plane with one rudder is not faster. It is a plane that cannot survive a rudder failure.

I Want to Be Fair: He Does Have an Answer

Yarvin is not stupid, and he has heard the objection that concentrated power gets abused. His answer is an engineering solution: an anonymous board of trustees holding cryptographic keys that can remove the sovereign if he becomes a liability.

In the same December 2024 talk, he wrote that “No one knows who the trustees are, not even the king, not even each other. So not even the king can pressure them, sabotaging his own accountability.” He compares this to a corporate board that meets four times a year and can only fire the CEO — not manage the company day to day.

It is a clever design on paper. But the corporate analogy deletes its own preconditions.

A firm behaves because courts above it enforce contracts, because regulators can intervene, and because customers can leave at relatively low cost. A sovereign corporation has no court above it. It controls the police that would enforce any attempt at exit. And it rules people for whom leaving means abandoning language, family, community, and home. Exit disciplines only the mobile — not the poor, the old, or the rooted.

Yarvin’s accountability mechanism depends on a level of institutional trust and technological sophistication that has never existed in any actual autocracy. Meanwhile, the part of his program that did get implemented — gutting the civil service, concentrating executive power, treating government as a restructuring target — required no anonymous trustees and no cryptographic deadman switches. It required only a president willing to sign orders and a Congress willing to look away.

A Business, Not a Charity

Yarvin’s longer-term vision, laid out in his 2008 essay Patchwork, replaces nation-states with thousands of sovereign corporate mini-countries. Residents who dislike their government can leave. The design, he writes, is “all ’exit,’ no ‘voice.’”

His second operating principle: “a realm is a business, not a charity. Its goal is to maximize its discounted return on investment.”

Then he asks the question his own design cannot answer. What happens to residents no realm has a profit motive to accept? He calls them “bezonians” and writes:

“If our design does not provide for the existence of a large number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable, but in fact a straight-up loss, to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality. The design faces an existential challenge.”

That is the moral-compass problem, named by its own author and filed as an open engineering ticket. A system whose only feedback signal is return on investment has no way to value a person who cannot generate one. That is not a bug he overlooked. It is the specification.

Three bodies of scholarship make the structural problem clear:

Exit cannot escape public goods. In the chapter “Exit, Voice and Technocracy,” the authors note that “if people experience public bads such as low air quality, there is not necessarily an exit option which allows them to escape.” The very non-excludability that makes public goods hard for markets to provide is what makes them impossible to exit. You cannot shop your way out of a poisoned atmosphere.

Markets fail, and economists have known this for decades. Kenneth Arrow’s 1963 paper “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care” showed that medical care deviates from competitive-market assumptions because of uncertainty, information asymmetry, and the nonmarketability of risk. Arrow did not argue that every market failure automatically justifies government intervention — he was careful about that, and we should be too. But he demonstrated that the premise “markets solve everything” is not a description of reality. It is a simplifying assumption that breaks down precisely where human stakes are highest.

Firms are already private governments. Elizabeth Anderson, in Private Government (2017), defines private government as rule by authorities with “arbitrary, unaccountable power over those it governs” — and specifically rejects the claim that workers’ freedom to quit makes employer autocracy acceptable. For most people, the alternative to one dictatorial workplace is another one. Yarvin’s proposal is to make the state work the way Anderson shows the workplace already does.

There is also an internal inconsistency in Yarvin’s own evolution. The Patchwork-era argument held that competition between sovereign realms would discipline bad governance — firms improve because rivals exist. The later Yarvin grounds good government in the CEO-king’s absolute authority instead. He kept the power and dropped the mechanism that was supposed to make it accountable.

Karl Polanyi, writing in The Great Transformation (1944), put it differently: treating land, labor, and money as commodities — when they were not produced for sale — “means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.” Markets do not have moral compasses. They have price signals. A price signal cannot tell you that a disabled child deserves care, that a rural county deserves weather warnings, or that a veteran deserves the benefits they were promised.

What follows is prediction, not evidence. In my view, if the only scoreboard is profit, the result is a crueler and more unequal society — and what we have seen so far is the opening of that process, not its full extent. The IRS delays, the SSA staffing cuts, the hollowed-out weather service: these are not the endpoint of Yarvinism. They are what happens when you apply the theory halfway, with checks and balances still partially intact. I do not think the full version would be better.

The Efficiency Premise Is Empirically False

Even on its own terms — that autocracy governs more efficiently — the evidence is weak.

Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo, and Robinson, in “Democracy Does Cause Growth” (Journal of Political Economy, 2019), found that democratization raises GDP per capita by roughly 20 percent over 25 years. A survey in the Journal of Democracy notes that authoritarian regimes have been overrepresented among both the fastest- and slowest-growing economies in every decade since the 1960s — the “autocratic gamble,” where growth varies more widely and, on average, runs a deficit compared to democracies. Democratic breakdown costs 1.5 to 2 percent of per capita income on average, rising to 4 to 6 percent after two decades of autocratic rule.

The honest concession: autocracies can act faster. Speed is not the same as governing better. A demolition crew works faster than an architect. That does not make it the better choice for building a house people have to live in.

What He Actually Said, and Why It Ends the Argument

In December 2025, Yarvin published “The situation and the solution” on his Substack. He did not disavow the project. He mourned its incompleteness.

“The story now seems clear: the second Trump administration is a tragedy,” he wrote. “I hate to say it, but it looks like the administration has already lost.”

His complaint is not that Trump went too far. It is that Trump did not go far enough:

“Last winter’s shock-and-awe Trump is vanished now. The administration is simply too well-integrated with the permanent government. This marriage is terrible, but it is still a marriage.”

And:

“Trump does not actually want full power. Rather, he is afraid of it. And it is not just him. He is actually far less afraid than the people around him.”

Read that carefully. Yarvin is not embarrassed by the authoritarianism. He is disappointed that it stalled. The tragic flaw, in his telling, is insufficient will — not insufficient caution.

Combined with his March 2025 hedge that “cost reduction is not the proper metric,” every possible outcome now has a pre-assigned explanation that vindicates the theory. Savings fail to materialize? Wrong metric. Checks and balances hold? Insufficient commitment. The administration integrates with the civil service instead of dismantling it? Tragic flaw. This is the structure of “real communism has never been tried.” A theory that no outcome can embarrass is not a theory. It is a faith.

And he was never a neutral observer warning of dangers. In December 2024, the Guardian headlined its profile: “He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump.” Time reported that Yarvin had argued a hypothetical Trump administration should terminate federal workers, impound government coffers, ignore courts that blocked unconstitutional orders, and curtail the free press and universities “no later than April after the inauguration.” He attended Trump’s second inauguration as an informal guest of honor. He was not sounding an alarm. He was writing the blueprint.

The Litmus Test

Yarvin’s program was partially implemented. A fair test asks what happened.

Executive power did move. Capitol Trace tracked roughly 271 executive orders in the first 18 months of the second Trump term — about 15.1 per month, against a historical average near 2.9, and more orders in eighteen months than the 220 issued across his entire first term. Against 45 bills signed into law. The Yale Law Journal described Executive Order 14,215 — “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies” — as reflecting “the triumph of a legal movement to reestablish a unitary executive.”

Congress’s power of the purse was tested. A PS: Political Science & Politics article documented that by summer 2025, the administration had frozen or canceled more than $400 billion in congressionally appropriated funds — and that where Nixon’s $18 billion impoundment drew overwhelming bipartisan repudiation, the 119th Congress responded with “little more than a whimper.” Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, told acting OMB director Russ Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

The input was delivered. What was the output?

Approval sits at 33 to 34 percent (Economist/YouGov, August 7–10, 2026). An FT/Focaldata poll found 53 percent of registered voters — including nearly a quarter of Republicans — say they are financially worse off than on January 19, 2025. Angus Reid found that 47 percent could name no accomplishment at all, and 36 percent named “his entire presidency” as the signature failure.

I want to be precise about what this does and does not prove. Tariffs, the Iran war, and broader macroeconomic forces are the larger drivers of cost-of-living frustration. I am not laying grocery prices at Yarvin’s feet. The narrower claim is stronger and survives scrutiny: the state-capacity destruction documented by the GAO, the IRS, the SSA, and NOAA is directly attributable to the RAGE-descended program of workforce cuts and executive consolidation — and that is the part that was supposed to make government work better.

The efficiency pitch failed on its own terms. The power-transfer pitch succeeded just enough to do real damage. And the theorist who designed it looked at the wreckage and said: not autocratic enough.

The Critique and the Cure

Yarvin begins from a real observation: American institutions can be unresponsive, self-protecting, and insulated from accountability. He is not wrong that the administrative state has its own interests. He is not wrong that Congress often fails to exercise its constitutional prerogatives. He is not wrong that Silicon Valley’s obsession with “moving fast” found a receptive audience in a political culture tired of gridlock.

But his cure is the disease at a higher dose. He begins by observing that elites rule without accountability and ends by designing a regime where accountability is abolished on purpose — replaced by an anonymous board of trustees and a cryptographic deadman switch that has never been built, tested, or deployed anywhere on earth.

What we got instead was the partial version: the workforce cuts without the benevolent CEO, the executive orders without the corporate discipline, the power transfer without the accountability mechanism. And even that partial version degraded the services people depend on, inflated its own savings claims, and left the president less popular than when he started.

Yarvin’s response was not to reconsider the theory. It was to insist the experiment had not gone far enough. That is not how science works. It is how ideology works.

A theory that cannot fail is not a theory. It is a promise that someone else will always be responsible for the consequences — and a guarantee that when the consequences arrive, they will be reclassified as insufficient effort rather than evidence. We are living in the evidence. The checks held just enough to prevent the worst version. They did not hold enough to prevent damage. And the man who wrote the blueprint is already explaining why the damage means we should try harder.

Elon Musk — who ran DOGE and sold the efficiency pitch to a wider audience — presents a parallel case in He Can’t Have It Both Ways: post-scarcity rhetoric, political spending, and a pattern of public claims that diverge from what the record shows.

The follow-up is Ideas Are Easy: the one large system Yarvin built, the sideline from which he grades the operators, and why that record does not earn trust for a full political rewrite.

Sources

Yarvin in his own words:

The situation and the solution (Gray Mirror, Dec. 27, 2025)
Barbarians and mandarins (Gray Mirror, Mar. 6, 2025)
Patchwork (2008)
Monarchism and fascism today (Dec. 27, 2024)

Reporting on influence:

Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done (New York Times, Jan. 2025)
He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump (Guardian, Dec. 2024)
What We Must Understand About the Dark Enlightenment (Time, 2025)
With DOGE, Elon Musk is promoting someone else’s idea again (The Verge, Nov. 2024)
Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it. (Washington Post, May 2025)

DOGE and state capacity:

GAO-26-108615: DOGE Wall of Receipts (Aug. 2026)
DOGE’s inflated savings claims discredited (Ars Technica, Aug. 2026)
IRS cuts undermined filing season performance (Brookings, 2026)
IRS staffing cuts delayed paper returns (FedScoop, Aug. 2026)
Administration’s radical personnel cuts (CBPP, 2026)

Executive power and Congress:

EO Watch — Executive Order Tracker (Capitol Trace, 2026)
Too Unitary (Yale Law Journal, 2025)
Congressional silence amid an historic assault on the power of the purse (PS: Political Science & Politics, 2025)

Markets, exit, and market failure:

Exit, Voice and Technocracy (Routledge)
Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care (Arrow, AER, 1963)
Private Government (Anderson, 2017)
The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 1944)

Scholarship on autocracy:

Democracy Does Cause Growth (Acemoglu et al., JPE, 2019)
What Democracy Does . . . And Does Not Do (Journal of Democracy)
Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap (Landau, PAR, 1969)

Polling (August 2026):

Economist/YouGov Poll (Aug. 7–10, 2026)
Trump at a Low (Angus Reid Institute)
Nearly a quarter of Republicans say they are poorer (Independent, Aug. 2026)

When the Camera Says You're Guilty: How AI Surveillance Inverts the Presumption of Innocence

David Crush — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:32:00 -0400

On the afternoon before Thanksgiving 2025, San Diego police arrested Hugo Parra on felony charges tied to an attempted carjacking. Officers had a witness description, a vehicle that roughly matched, and a hit from the city’s Flock Safety license plate reader network. Parra insisted he was innocent. They jailed him anyway.

The Flock data they relied on placed Parra’s friend’s red Alfa Romeo roughly five miles from the crime scene—and timestamped that capture just 23 seconds after officers lost sight of the actual suspect vehicle. As Ars Technica reported, the timeline made it physically implausible that the car police were pursuing was the same one Flock flagged. Parra spent nearly a month in jail, housed with violent offenders, before prosecutors dropped the charges. No trial. No conviction. Just a month of his life gone because a camera said his car might have been somewhere it couldn’t have been.

Parra’s case is not an outlier. It is a preview.

A National Dragnet Built Without a Vote

Flock Safety is a private surveillance company that has deployed more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras across 49 states. When a vehicle passes a camera, machine learning converts the plate—and often the vehicle’s color, make, and model—into searchable data. That data is checked against hot lists drawn from databases like the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), which includes stolen vehicles, wanted persons, and missing persons. When the system finds a match, it sends a real-time alert to law enforcement.

This is not a handful of dash cams on patrol cars. It is a privately operated surveillance network spanning the country, installed city by city, often with minimal public debate. The Congressional Research Service notes there is no comprehensive federal legislative framework governing how ALPR systems are deployed, what accuracy standards they must meet, or what happens when they get it wrong.

The chain looks straightforward: camera reads a plate, system flags a match, police respond. But at each step, errors compound—and the person on the receiving end of that chain is expected to prove the machine wrong, not the other way around.

Documented Failures

The Institute for Justice has cataloged more than two dozen cases in which Flock camera errors led to innocent motorists being pulled over at gunpoint, detained, or jailed. Business Insider identified at least a dozen additional instances involving gunpoint stops, jail time, or police dogs. These are not hypotheticals.

Hugo Parra, San Diego. Police linked Parra to a violent carjacking based on a Flock alert, a witness lineup, and a vehicle description—despite Flock timestamps showing his car was five miles away when the pursuit began. He spent nearly a month in jail before charges were dropped. He and the vehicle’s owner are now suing the city. (Times of San Diego)

Sherwood, Arkansas. On February 11, 2026, a Flock camera misread a license plate ending in “X” as “Y,” flagging an innocent family’s SUV as stolen. Officers approached with guns drawn, handcuffed both adults, and left their infant in the car while they sorted out the error. The officer who made the stop had not verified the plate before initiating the stop—a violation of department procedure. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

Eva Pizzarelli, Cumberland, Rhode Island. After a brief pursuit of a vehicle Pizzarelli had no connection to, Cumberland police used a Flock camera image of the driver and compared it to her driver’s license photo—concluding they matched despite Pizzarelli having dyed her hair brown seven weeks before the incident. She was arrested on a warrant months later during a routine traffic stop. The criminal case was eventually dropped. Flock’s LPR cameras do not use automated facial recognition; this was an officer making a visual match from surveillance footage. But the camera made that match possible, and the result was a wrongful arrest. (ACLU of Rhode Island)

Steven Melvin, York County, South Carolina. A Flock camera falsely flagged Melvin’s BMW as stolen in February 2024. A deputy approached with his gun drawn and ordered Melvin to kneel with his hands over his head for more than five minutes. Notably, Flock had correctly read Melvin’s plate 13 times that same month before the false hit. Officers blamed a tinted plate cover—but the camera had read through it just fine on every prior pass. (Rock Hill Herald)

Joel Feder, Plymouth, Minnesota. A car reviewer testing a Range Rover was ambushed by four police cars after Flock’s system matched his New Jersey plate to a partial NCIC entry from California. Flock’s machine learning ignored the “10” in the middle of his plate and matched on “34 DTM” instead. Officers saw the full plate in Flock’s own photo but did not enter the complete sequence to verify. Flock’s VP of policy told Feder the alert “does not equal probable cause. It’s like an alarm going off.” That disclaimer did not prevent guns from being drawn. (The Drive)

Roseville, California. Between 2023 and 2024, Roseville police received 1,427 Flock alerts for stolen or felony-linked vehicles. Their own analysis found that in 71% of those alerts, the software had misread the license plate. None of those incorrect alerts led to a stop or arrest—because Roseville requires officers to verify plates independently. But 71% wrong on the alerts that matter most is a staggering failure rate for a system marketed as highly accurate. (Business Insider)

The Institute for Justice found that roughly one-third of documented wrongful stops stemmed from machine error, and two-thirds from human error—officers failing to verify alerts, entering wrong data, or misinterpreting what the system reported. The AI does not need to be wrong every time. It only needs to be wrong once, and for an officer to treat the alert as proof.

The “Optimal Conditions” Fine Print

I want to be fair: if Flock’s cameras worked as advertised in the real world, they would be a legitimate investigative tool. Stolen cars get recovered. Missing persons get found. Roseville’s police department credits Flock with helping solve crimes that might otherwise have gone cold. The concept of ALPR technology is not inherently bad.

The problem is the gap between what Flock claims and what its cameras deliver on actual American roads.

Flock publishes accuracy figures on its website: over 99% plate capture in clear and rainy conditions, over 98% at dawn and dusk, over 96% OCR accuracy, and over 97% plate-state identification. Every figure is qualified with “under optimal conditions” or “optimal deployment conditions.” Flock has not published the methodology, sample size, or test environment behind any of these numbers. In litigation, the company has also cited 93% plate-level accuracy—a third figure that does not reconcile with the 96% character-level claim.

So what are “optimal conditions”? Flock’s own Customer Implementation Guide and municipal spec sheets suggest they include: cameras mounted at roughly 65 feet with a 15-foot field of view, positioned after intersections to capture rear plates in the direction of travel, clear line of sight free of trees and glare, current-generation hardware, verified power and LTE connectivity, and a Flock technician site survey approving each location. “Optimal” also assumes officers independently verify every alert before taking enforcement action.

Real deployments diverge from this spec constantly:

Privacy tradeoffs. Roseville configured its cameras for rear-only capture at higher, farther mounting points specifically to avoid photographing drivers’ faces. Flock blamed this “particularly unique deployment” for the 71% alert error rate—then continued the contract.
Physical reality. License plate covers and frames, tinted covers, trees, blur at distance, and more than 8,000 different plate formats across the country all degrade accuracy. Flock’s own ML director suggested Roseville officers ask drivers to remove plate frames; the department declined.
Partial matching. Flock’s system can match substrings against NCIC entries—asking “is this sequence present?” rather than “is this an exact match?” That is how Joel Feder’s full plate matched a truncated database entry.
Stale databases. Even a perfect OCR read flags an innocent driver if the underlying NCIC record is wrong. The ACLU has documented that NCIC data is notoriously inaccurate.
Installation shortcuts. Forbes reported cameras installed without required DOT permits in Florida. A 2026 nationwide audit of 100,000+ poles was triggered because many installations did not meet basic roadside engineering standards.

Here is the math Flock does not put in its marketing. Red Banyan calculated that 96% per-character accuracy on a seven-character plate compounds to roughly 71% fully correct plate reads (0.96^7 ≈ 0.71). Roseville’s measured 71% alert error rate is not a freak anomaly. It is what you would expect from Flock’s own published accuracy applied to real plates. When a police chief buys “96% accurate” cameras, they reasonably expect 96% of plates to be read correctly on their streets—not 96% of individual characters under laboratory conditions their city cannot replicate.

How many of Flock’s 120,000 cameras actually operate under “optimal conditions”? Nobody knows. Flock declined to tell Business Insider whether it independently tests camera accuracy. The only third-party test, conducted by research firm IPVM in 2021, found roughly 10% state misidentification and regular make/model errors. Flock then blocked IPVM from purchasing cameras for follow-up testing—unlike every major competitor in the market.

Flock claims fewer than nine “human-reported errors” per million alerts nationwide. That is errors a person chose to report—not errors that occurred, not errors that led to stops, and not errors that went unnoticed. Roseville reported dozens of issues to Flock over four years. That feedback does not appear in the national stat.

And the human verification step that “optimal conditions” assumes? Only four states—Montana, Virginia, Washington, and Kentucky—legally require officers to verify ALPR hits before stopping someone. California, home to both Roseville and San Diego, does not.

Cars get independently crash-tested before families trust them on the highway. Flock’s system can put you in handcuffs, and it has never been independently audited at scale. “Optimal conditions” is doing the work that crash-test ratings do for automobiles—except nobody checked whether your town’s cameras passed.

The Burden Hasn’t Moved on Paper. It Moved to the Parking Lot.

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Supreme Court held in In re Winship that the prosecution must prove every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. The presumption of innocence is not a courtesy. It is a constitutional requirement.

But constitutional requirements operate in courtrooms. Flock alerts operate in parking lots, on highways, and in jail intake rooms—long before any judge sees the case.

When a Flock camera sends an alert, the practical sequence is: guns drawn, handcuffs applied, booking processed. The citizen’s job, at that moment, is to convince armed officers that the machine made a mistake. That is not the government proving guilt. That is the accused proving innocence—exactly what the Constitution says should not happen.

Flock acknowledges this, at least in policy statements. The company tells law enforcement that alerts “should be treated as investigative leads” and that officers should “independently verify the license plate, vehicle details, and surrounding circumstances before taking any enforcement action.” The Congressional Research Service confirms that an NCIC match alone is not sufficient for probable cause or arrest.

But those disclaimers do not reach the citizen with a gun in their face. Automation bias—the tendency to defer to algorithmic outputs even when they conflict with other evidence—is well documented. When Hugo Parra’s Flock data showed he was five miles away, police arrested him anyway. When Steven Melvin’s plate had been read correctly thirteen times that month, a deputy still drew his weapon on the fourteenth. When Flock’s VP told Joel Feder the system asked “is it there?” rather than “is it an exact match?"—that is an admission that the technology is designed for recall, not precision. It casts a wide net and leaves innocents to fight their way out.

The burden of proof has not moved on paper. It moved in practice, to the parking lot and the jail cell.

We Wouldn’t Flip a Coin at a Grand Jury

In my view, AI-generated evidence should be treated with extraordinary skepticism in criminal proceedings—and in many cases, deemed inadmissible entirely.

Here is why. AI systems do not observe facts. They produce probabilistic outputs: confidence scores, pattern matches, statistical likelihoods. A Flock alert is not a witness who saw a crime. It is an algorithm that guessed a plate might match a database entry, with a confidence level that neither the officer nor the defendant can inspect.

We would laugh at the idea of flipping a coin to decide whether to indict someone before a grand jury. Yet we allow probabilistic machine outputs—outputs the defense often cannot examine, challenge, or reproduce—to trigger arrests, support prosecutions, and in some cases, serve as evidence at trial.

Current U.S. law does not ban AI evidence. Courts apply Daubert or Frye standards, requiring judges to act as gatekeepers and assess whether scientific evidence is reliable. But as the National Association for Presiding Judges noted, proprietary AI systems create a fundamental problem: when a defendant cannot examine the code, training data, or error rates behind an algorithmic conclusion, the right to cross-examination becomes largely theoretical. The Wisconsin Supreme Court warned of exactly this in State v. Loomis, where a proprietary risk assessment tool was admitted despite the defendant’s inability to challenge its methodology.

European legal scholars have argued that when courts cannot grant sufficient access to AI system design and validation data, the evidence should be excluded entirely to preserve the right to a fair trial. I agree with that principle as a policy matter, even though it would require new legislation rather than a restatement of existing doctrine.

My position: AI-generated identifications should be inadmissible in criminal court absent independent corroboration and full algorithmic disclosure. If the government cannot explain how the machine reached its conclusion—and cannot prove the conclusion is correct beyond a reasonable doubt—it should not be able to use that conclusion against a citizen whose freedom is at stake.

This Should Concern You Even If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong

There is no federal framework governing ALPR deployment, accuracy standards, or accountability. Cities adopt Flock cameras through police department budgets and vendor contracts, often with limited public input. If you drive on a public road in America, your vehicle has likely been scanned, logged, and stored in a database you did not consent to and cannot opt out of.

At 120,000 cameras and counting, errors are not a bug. They are a statistical certainty. Flock’s own marketing math tells you so.

Pushback works. After Eva Pizzarelli’s wrongful arrest, three Rhode Island towns—South Kingstown, Narragansett, and Glocester—canceled their Flock contracts within two weeks. Communities that ask hard questions before signing vendor agreements are communities that protect their residents.

The question is not whether these cameras will get it wrong again. They will. The question is whether you will have to prove they did—and whether anyone in power will listen before you spend a month in a cell proving your innocence to a machine that never had to prove your guilt.

What You Can Do

Ask your local officials whether your town or county uses Flock or other ALPR systems, and request data on alert error rates.
Support state legislation requiring independent verification of ALPR hits before traffic stops, and mandating public reporting of false alert rates.
If you are stopped based on an ALPR alert, remain calm, do not consent to searches, and document everything—badge numbers, timestamps, and the stated reason for the stop.

Sources

Investigative reporting:

Key cases:

Legal and policy:

Accuracy and company claims:

Politics on David Crush

The Gift That Blinds

What we know

Where did “Don’t tread on me” go?

The deal

The deal isn’t paying out

The gift that blinds

The wolves

What would it take?

Keep the door open

Further Reading

By Their Fruits

Directed to Stand Behind Him

The Same Act

The Photo

The Bro

Who Actually Isn’t Safe

Learn the Difference

Further Reading

The Man in the Mirror

Nobody Did This to Him

Those Merlin Engines

What He Spent

The Promise

The Advertisers

Grok’s Output, Your Fault

Upload It Anyway

The Salute and the Socialist Line

The Break and the Return

The Senator He Is Buying

Above the Law, for Now

It Has Been Beaten Before

Money Is Not a Vote

The Bill

“I Agree with the Teachings of Jesus”

The Working Model

Further Reading

Just Enough to Believe

On and Off

Closer to Politics Than You Think

Only Men Had Gone Home

The Letter

A, B, and C, Then D

The Jury

Outside the Game

Further Reading

The Sword in Vain

Nothing Says Christian Nation

The Sword

How Much Room

The Sentence Stands

Blessed Are the Merciful

Owensboro

Further Reading

The Coast Was Available

The modern ledger

Who wrote the hole

The inheritance

The choice

The cool left

Sources

The Philosopher and the Crowd

The Crowd He Asked For

The Rule That Keeps the Hands Clean

Amnesty, Then the Gallows

The Map

The Plate

Sources

The Blank They Fill In

Behavior: the hat is not a compound

Information: the gated stream

Thought: no room for the sentence

Emotion: never his fault

The blank

The score

Sources

Ideas Are Easy: Curtis Yarvin Never Had to Build the Thing

The Parallel Is the Method

The Sideline Cannot Fail

He Scorns the Person With More on the Board