Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has been in the news since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. When New York Times columnist Ezra Klein eulogized Kirk in the Times’ pages, honoring him for practicing politics “the right way,” Coates responded critically in the pages of Vanity Fair. The two, who are friends, sat down for a one-on-one meeting of the minds that has been praised, panned, and picked apart across both legacy and social media.

It was an interesting discussion, if not a terribly productive one. Throughout it, Coates bears the hallmarks of somebody who has mostly failed to do his homework on Charlie Kirk, preferring instead to repeat what have become predictable bromides about how violence is bad, but…

No, of course, he doesn’t think Charlie Kirk deserved to be shot. He just also thinks that Kirk was hateful and awful, and used his hatefulness and awfulness as ways to promote himself and his cause.

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But the bones of the Klein/Coates showdown have already been picked dry, and I’m not especially interested in giving them another going-over. Instead, I wish to remind readers that Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man whose worldview and, as we’ll see, daily habits have been shaped by dynamics of race and violence, has built his career by being as unhelpful a contributor as possible to keeping this discourse focused on peace or resolution.

Coates is a great writer. He crafts strong, if sometimes purply sentences, and he makes his arguments clearly and forcefully. He takes his time with his words, obviously choosing them very carefully, and I’ve always found charges that he is a ‘hatemonger’ or a despiser of white people difficult to accept, especially when evaluated next to writers (of whom there are many) whose racial animus bubbles much closer to the surface.

The essay that catapulted him to prominence, ‘The Case For Reparations,’ is compelling, evenly argued, and one that I suspect far more critics have responded to than have actually read with any care.

Still, Coates’s impact on America’s efforts to heal racial divides and reduce violence leaves much to be desired. If he is a deep thinker, he is not a wide one. He has essentially one point to make, and that one point acts as the lens and the filter through which all other points are run.

Coates believes that years of racial subjugation and prejudice created conditions that have conspired, and that still conspire, to limit black performance in American life. ‘The Case for Reparations’ walks readers from slavery, through Jim Crow, and forward to red-lining and systemic wealth depression targeted at black Americans, but from which white Americans were spared. He doesn’t spend much time disputing performance gaps between America’s racial communities, opting instead to explain them. He does this by crediting for them forces which are, if not insurmountable, at least very difficult and complicated to surmount. And certainly, not ones we should expect to be surmounted anytime soon.

He’s hardly alone in this. What I just articulated is more or less the view of every left-leaning American, and quite a few right-leaning ones also. Coates is neither wrong to point this out, nor off-base in his assessment of the scale of historical injustice.

Where he errs is in his rigidity. Coates isn’t just committed to his preferred narrative, he’s committed to it to the exclusion of all other narratives, or even suggested narratives. He is a hammer for which everything is a nail. And nowhere is this tendency of his on better display than during a conversation in which he participated at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, 2015.

Coates sat for a moderated discussion with then New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, the subject of which was ‘Is Violence a Function of our Culture?’ I watched it at the time it was first broadcast and despite my having been a culturally very progressive person at the time, it rankled me. So much so that I remembered it often through the woke years and went to revisit it in the wake of Coates’s Ezra Klein sit-down.

The whole thing is instructive, but if you’re short on time, just watch the last exchange, starting around the 54 minute mark. We’ll also be discussing it later.

For context, Mitch Landrieu, a white Democrat, was a mostly successful post-Katrina mayor for New Orleans. He made a dent in crime, and built trust in the black community by cracking down on police corruption and removing confederate monuments. He was well into his mayoral tenure at the time he spoke with Coates, who was himself weeks away from publishing his best-selling memoir Between The World And Me.

Landrieu wasn’t, and still isn’t, a major player in the Democratic Party. He served as Joe Biden’s “infrastructure czar,” wrote a book about confronting America’s racial history as a white southerner, spent some time as a CNN analyst, and advised on both the Biden reelection campaign and later the Kamala Harris campaign. He was a successful man at the time of his Aspen Ideas Festival appearance, but it was Coates’s star that was truly on the rise.

Landrieu had a lot to gain from this appearance. He would serve another three years as NOLA mayor, and had he been able to enlist to his cause the man who was a few weeks off becoming America’s preeminent black public intellectual, he could have reasonably expected great things. This was a big opportunity for Landrieu, not just for his personal profile, but for his project. Coates had the ear of the nation, and Landrieu had a good story to tell. If they could find common ground, it wouldn’t have been hyperbolic to describe the discussion in which it was reached as a turning point. For the speakers, for New Orleans, and possibly for the nation.

It didn’t quite go that way. Everything was perfectly amicable. No real sparks flew until the end, and at few points did Coates and Landrieu openly disagree. But despite careful, persistent attempts, Landrieu was never able to knock Coates off his narrative, or force him to step outside his ideology. He was never able to get Coates to accept the invitation he was extending to the world of a real mayor, overseeing a real police force, protecting real streets, plagued by real violence.

Coates was in the clouds. Landrieu, stuck firmly on the ground, tried repeatedly to tug at Coates’s balloon string and pull the writer back to earth. The whole talk is a dance of Landrieu trying to yank Coates in a direction that might actually be actionable or productive, and Coates flitting out of his grasp again and again. Landrieu is having a conversation with Coates. Coates seems to be more in conversation with himself.

Again you should watch the whole talk, as both men have interesting things to say. We’ll zero in on just a few segments.

It begins with Landrieu making an impassioned case for the urgency of the problem. Almost every night in his city, young black men were killing one another. And no, it was not a case of, “well, isn’t everyone killing one another?” It wasn’t. Most violent crime in the Big Easy was confined to a handful of neighborhoods, and the victims were overwhelmingly young, black males (95%), most of whom knew each other (88%). Landrieu called this a “culture of violence.”

Coates responded with an extended anecdote about his childhood, in which he describes the choices he had to make daily in service of avoiding violence being done to his person. How he dressed, who we traveled with to school, what route they took, where he sat in the lunchroom - all of these choices reflected a need to simply stay intact.

It’s a somewhat strange story, in that what Coates thinks Landrieu and the audience should take away from it, or how it represents any kind of rebuttal to what Landrieu just said, is somewhat mysterious. It might sound profound…to someone only just learning that violence, and the threat thereof, is a problem particularly in black communities. But since Landrieu had just finished making the very same point himself, it isn’t clear why he needed to be instructed on this.

Still, Coates was impacted deeply by this part of his upbringing - an upbringing made all the more stark by the dichotomy between it and the images of peaceful, white families he saw broadcast on television shows like All In The Family and Leave It To Beaver:

“And I was struck by the gulf between the world in which I live and the world that America projected out to the rest of the world. And so I knew, you know, as an African American, as a member of a minority population, that these sort of rituals that we went through, that I think the mayor could call a culture of violence, but I would call a culture of self preservation.”

How is a culture of violence different from a culture of preservation [against, one presumes, violence]? Isn’t this a bit like complaining that a boxing ring doesn’t harbor a culture of punching, but rather one of trying not to be punched?

The audience, it should be noted, is eating out of Coates’s hand as he tells this story.

It’s quite a frustrating exchange, and one that mostly sets the tone for the rest of the event. Landrieu has just invited Coates to join him in building meaningful consensus. When Coates ignores the invite, Landrieu is undeterred. He doesn’t care what we call this - what words we use - he just cares what it is, and what can be done about it. Coates is unmoved.

To Coates, hundreds of years of oppression isn’t something you can merely undo. He actually says this directly at one point, making clear that however long Landrieu has left on his term as mayor, it can’t be enough to move past the past. Black Americans already have done, and are doing, everything realistically within their power to stem the tide of violence plaguing their communities. What more could they do?

This too is discouraging, and not just because of the defeatism on display. If really true that the black community is doing not only its best but the best, doesn’t somebody else need to pick up the slack? Couldn’t that somebody be, for instance, a white mayor of a 60% black city? A city with an ethnic makeup not dissimilar to Coates’s native Baltimore?

Throughout their parley, Landrieu reminds me of an oncologist begging desperately for a consultation on a sick patient. Rather than agree to it, Coates would rather talk about the dangers of smoking. To Mitch Landrieu, crime and violence are acute ailments. Treatment is not only possible, it’s his job to offer it. To Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re chronic conditions. Dangerous and regrettable, yes, but a long time in the making, and not sicknesses for which a mayor or anyone else has the medicine.

By the end, it’s clear that Landrieu is getting pretty frustrated. He’s been mayor of an unusually dangerous city for five years, he’s making progress but not enough, and he’s got the opportunity now to bend the ear of one of the most respected, celebrated, and listened-to writers in the business. And he can’t make headway. Every time they get close to a point of material agreement, Coates punts the conversation back to the philosophical. Any time Landrieu wants to explore a solution, Coates insists they revisit the cause.

After an hour of this, violence is starting to feel less like a problem Coates doesn’t think Landrieu can solve, and more like one he won’t allow him to, at least not in this discussion. Perhaps all this “culture of violence” business was veering too close to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” rhetoric (this despite Landrieu having emphatically rejected that framing). As exclusively as Landrieu is forward-focused, Coates looks to the past. Landrieu is waiting with a mop. Coates is saying “but look at all the mess.”

In the final minutes, things get heated. Coates is on the heels of having actually espoused a clear, albeit controversial policy; letting lots of violent criminals out of prison. Landrieu responds.

Landrieu: Criminal justice reform is really important, and we should do it. But this is how criminal justice reform works: you come forward with an idea, the folks on the other side say ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t,’ you go to the state legislature, you go to Congress, you talk about it for two or three years, and then eventually you either get it done or you don’t get it done, and then in the meantime, 40 people a day are killed on the streets of America. Here’s my problem: I don’t talk in platitudes, I don’t talk in philosophy, I don’t talk about the black community or the white community, I talk about Joe or Jamal that’s gonna get their head blown out tomorrow. My life is immediate. So I guess what I want to know it–

Coates: My life is immediate though!

*Crosstalk*

Landrieu: …but as a mayor, as a mayor.

Coates: But I’m an African-American male, living in an African American community with a 14 year old son. It’s as- it’s immediate for me too.

And then:

Landrieu: There is an immediate, catastrophic epidemic that needs to be erased…If the cavalry’s not coming to save us…what are we in the community gonna do tomorrow, tomorrow, as fathers, as sons, as coaches, to change the way that we reconcile the differences that we have. That is really about–

Coates: But see, you’re not gonna do anything tomorrow to change that.

Landrieu: Well that’s not true.

Since we were at the advent of what we now call woke when this talk was staged, it seems reasonable to evaluate it through the woke lens. And I think this helps to explain our problem.

Landrieu is a guy with his sleeves rolled up. His literal job is to solve the problem of endless violence on his streets. He has to be effective. Coates just has to be right. But not only does this distinction earn Landrieu no points, and no benefit of the doubt from the crowd, it’s Coates who is considered the obvious authority. Of course he is. All one need do is note the skin tone of each man and that’s just…kind of that.

Coates knows of what he speaks. Coates is the expert. Coates has the real investment.

Perhaps it requires actually being a writer, as I am, to understand how astonishingly arrogant and misguided this is. We sit behind keyboards. When we die, our lives are not measured in deaths prevented, or criminals locked away, or jobs attracted, or neighborhoods made safe. Our metrics are simply how many seals clapped for us, and how hard.

But Coates being presumptuous on behalf of my profession is not what bothers me here. Coates doesn’t really bother me here. I just think he’s wrong - something I think of a lot of people. His clapping seals are the ones on my nerves. Here’s how they recorded their views prior to the talk:

To say that the deck was stacked against Mitch Landrieu from the jump would be a comical understatement. Listeners had their minds made up, there’s no indication he was able to sway them, and now, 10 years after this exchange, we’re still fundamentally arguing about the same things, in the same ways.

A writer being wrong is only a problem to the extent that they are persuasively wrong. And we all ultimately own our persuasions. The audience for this talk, and Coates’s audience more broadly, is a class of well-heeled NPR-listeners, who more than anything, just want to be told stories they find validating. Politics for them isn’t just about what politics can do, it’s about how it can make them look. When those things are in conflict, there’s a predictable way they lean. The people who buy Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books don’t just buy them to read them - though probably a lot of them do - they buy them to carry them, cover-side out, outside their backpacks or briefcases, always ensuring their arm isn’t obscuring the title.

The psychologists out there may be detecting a note of guilt here, and as well they should. Didn’t I just get done saying that I first watched this talk, and was first bothered by it, more than 10 years ago? Where was my essay then? The answer, of course, is that I didn’t have the balls to write it then. Being a white person who criticized people who weren’t white, wasn’t the done thing. I was unwilling to pay the social cost for stepping out of that line.

But it’s about the most patronizing, disrespectful thing a person could do to pull punches when a few deserve to be thrown. Feeling like I can’t criticize you is the surest sign I could give that I don’t really consider you my equal. I wasn’t honoring Coates then by keeping my thoughts about him to myself, I was patting him on his dear little head and saying, “nice job, sport” for handing me macaroni art. I don’t owe Coates any apology for writing this. I owe him one for having had these thoughts for 10 years without writing them.

Doing that then would’ve sent me afoul, not of Coates, but of the army of head-nodders making sure they always had one of his hardcovers on hand, just so it could sit at the top of the pile on their coffee table. It was their approval, not Coates’s that I sought, and their judgement I feared. But as much as we own our persuasions, we own our cowardices too. Mine should never have been triggered by such morally vapid and intellectually sleepy people. And for that I’m sorry. Not to them - f**k them. F**k them, all the way to spring training. I’m sorry to Coates, who deserved better engagement for his efforts.

Coates would go on to stardom, of course, becoming one of the best-selling black authors of the decade and a voice of his generation. And how has he used that voice? At nearly every turn, he has used it to distract from progress, pulling focus instead to cause (though I expect he views the former as unachievable without an understanding of the latter).

Black victims of crime are not suffering from a curable disease, so much as they represent symptoms of an incurable one. Race relations aren’t fixable, they’re perennial. The damage isn’t a mess to be mopped up, just one to be observed, lamented, and occasionally blamed on the appropriate party.

Even “The Case for Reparations,” which was mostly just a lengthy call for Congress to pass HR 40, which would have studied reparations, concludes with this passage:

“John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

We must wrestle with these questions, not answer them. Ask what is owed, not decide. This has been Coates’s entire career. This is his one magic trick.

A mayor tries to engage him on ending a cycle of pointless slaughter, and he balks; that’s the wrong focus. A liberal extends a hand of friendship across the aisle to honor a slain conservative, and up pops Coates to wag his finger.

But what if America isn’t, as Coates thinks, “looking away?” What if it’s looking forward? Looking beyond? What if America has simply grown weary of trying to answer for a past it can’t change, and has decided instead that that most problematic of goals - a solution - is a more worthy pursuit than yet more recriminations?

So long as Ta-Nehisi Coates, and those in his mold, remain uncontested in their issuing of these non-prescription prescriptions, we may never find out.

Some thoughts on Trump's Nobel snub.

Just some thoughts on the state of things.

A long rundown of things Charlie Kirk did and didn't say.

In education, we talk a lot about product vs. process. If your kindergartner comes home with a beautiful piece of artwork, worthy of being displayed in the front hall, odds are very good that your kindergartner didn’t really make it. Their teacher made it. Your kindergartner just sort of helped. That’s what we call product-oriented instruction.

However, if your kindergartner comes home with a piece of art that aggressively sucks ass, and that looks like it was made by, well, a kindergartner, it’s a good bet that your kid really made it. And that their teacher is one who believes that the artistic process holds more instructional value than its outcome.

Politics is like this sometimes too.

Ink Blots

There’s nothing really new about political Rorschach Tests. Example: Trump tosses some red meat to his base, his base devours it in orgasmic frenzy, and the left has a conniption fit over the very same material. Swap out Trump for Obama, dial your time machine back a few years, and you see the same thing. Over and over. It’s a feature, not a bug, of tribal political landscapes. We all see what we want to in the ink blots.

But a weird thing is happening on the left that is, I think, both newer and more worrisome (if you care about the left). Lefties keep finding themselves the subjects of political Rorschach Tests without appearing to know they’ve signed up. Increasingly, they’re lab rats, rather than volunteer participants.

As recently as a few years ago, a leftist who rage-shared a Trump video could be expected to caption it with something like, “CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW MANY DEMONIC FASCISTS VOTED FOR THIS???” Now, they’re more like to lead with, “This is so scary,” or “I’m so sad for my country,” and leave out their awareness of the offending material’s appeal to folks with different politics and priorities.

Has anyone else observed this? Is it just me? I’ll warrant, it’s a very fine line, and maybe I’m making too much of the distinction. A lot of this is just down to the accelerating balkanization of social media - X going right, Bluesky going left, and all that.

Burying the lede just a bit deeper, I noticed this trend when I started to see the following chart shared approvingly by both liberal white women, and also by people who think liberal white women are ridiculous. Both considered it a dunk. A gotcha.

Party politics is zero sum. Both sides can’t win. They certainly can’t both win at the same time by playing the exact same hand. Here, the well-educated liberal white ladies considered this table validation of their brilliant correctness, while conservatives took it as evidence of the liberal white ladies’ cognitive inadequacy. Both groups banked a W, both took a victory lap, and both went home smugly satisfied.

That’s odd, right?

A more recent instance of this dynamic materialized when Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, shared a video to his X feed of Venezuelan deportees arriving from the United States to be incarcerated at El Salvador’s mega-prison, CECOT. The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. That’s all cognates, so I trust you to work out the translation for yourself.

For today, we’re going to focus on the politics of this more than the policy. But as we do that, we need to keep in mind that the policy implications here are profound. And that their profundity is fueling the intense political reaction.

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At issue isn’t just the controversial decision to house these men outside the United States (we’ve been down a similar road with the Guantanamo detainees) and it’s not just the Trump administration’s decision to use irregular legal tools to do it (The Patriot Act was more radical and than the decision to use the Alien Enemies Act in a novel way). What exploded so many brains was the Trump clan’s bold defiance of a federal judge’s order to turn the plane carrying these detainees around, and their subsequent gloating in the aftermath.

This is not a mere news blip over which people are flipping out. There’s plenty of meat on this bone. We’re just going to have to tupperware most of it for later.

It’s interesting to me that the fuming Trump critics who shared Bukele’s video, typically invoking their rage and fear at what it represented, appear to have missed something quite important: how enjoyable the film’s target audience was going to find it.

This isn’t really a new phenomenon either. If we consider that the members of what we once called the “intellectual dark web” were at the vanguard of the great woke pushback, we might also take note of how many of those guys owe their fame and status to the people who hated them the most. Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Nicholas Christakis; these guys were obscure, mostly unknown college professors whose rough treatment at the hands of woke mobs made them all virally sympathetic. So it’s not a fresh observation that the left’s inability to control its outbursting often hurts its causes.

But in the case of the Bukele film, something that should have been glaringly obvious didn’t seem to be: Bukele wanted everyone to see this.

This wasn’t some phone video that took Youtube by storm. This was an expertly-choreographed, professionally-shot, big-budget advertisement for El Salvador’s hardcore approach to criminal justice. It’s got danger music and everything!

This wasn’t for Salvadorans, who do not need to be sold on their leader’s greatness. This was created to show Americans a different, supposedly better way to handle dangerous criminals. We can be sure of this because Bukele’s post about it was in English. Which is actually not the language they speak in the country he leads. The thing is basically a giant Trump ad. And with the good help of a great many leftists, 10s of millions of people (so far) have watched it.

The whole episode was a corollary to the Streisand Effect, but on meth. It’s like if you somehow managed to round up the membership of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and trick them all into passing out shots in bar parking lots.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether the left hasn’t lost its grip on the politics of immigration and deportation.

We might treat immigration as an sub-issue that exists under the wider umbrella of crime. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s upside down. Maybe criminals are more conceptually similar to immigrants - to a foreign ‘Other’ - than my framework credits. Whatever the correct ordering should be, I find it useful to consider these things as two sides to the same coin, and as related, in terms of how both left and right react to them.

Media Matters

Discontent on the right has been brewing for a good while. Social media - X especially - is awash in videos of brazen criminals committing brazen crimes while looking effortlessly happy doing so. An entire subgenre of this content centers masses of border jumpers, waltzing past land barriers as if invited to do so.

Statistics can’t touch this stuff. Nobody is swayed by being told (correctly) that both crime and border crossings are down. Even if the folks insisting this were considered credible (which they are emphatically not) no chart or table could ever resonate as powerfully as something you can watch in live action.

Liberals may prefer to avoid this type of content, but they are every bit as susceptible to its influence. The 2020 slaying of George Floyd caused a nationwide eruption of riots and angry protests, all aimed at redressing the supposed epidemic of police violence against unarmed, black Americans. The raw numbers were quite out of proportion to the intensity of the public outcry, however. The year Floyd was killed, in a nation of nearly 700,000 sworn officers of the law, about 18 unarmed black people were killed by police. Which is less than half the number of police officers who died by violence during the same period.

The correct number, in both cases, should of course be zero. But based solely on the data, unarmed Americans in 2020, of any color, had about as much cause to fear being killed by police as they had cause to fear being killed by their pets. Point being: rightoids are not the only folks capable of getting one-shotted by a disturbing internet video. We all have this tendency.

Three things are universally true here: 1) viral depictions of true crime lead to outsized concern for the prevalence of such crime, 2) both left and right are vulnerable to having their minds bent by this content, and 3) those affected typically want to punish the forces they hold responsible. On the left, that’s usually cops or white people. On the right, it’s non-white folks, and of course, it’s immigrants. Perception will always trump reality, and will always leave members of blamed groups vulnerable to harsh retaliation, which is what we’re seeing now with immigration.

Floyd was something of a Rorschach test all on his own. When conservatives learned of his extensive criminal history - including an incident in which he’d held a gun to the abdomen of a pregnant woman whose home he’d broken into looking for drugs - both Floyd and his honorers on the left became highly unsympathetic. It didn’t seem worth it to righties to bend out of shape in response to such an obvious menace being removed permanently from society.

Liberals saw it quite differently, and considered the conservative fixation on Floyd’s history an outrage in and of itself. Floyd’s character wasn’t the issue, his unlawful killing was. Floyd had served his time for those other crimes. Those debts were paid. The day he died, all he’d done was try to buy smokes with fake money and struggle when confronted by police. Not great things to do, but not things for which we execute people.

Product & Process

Five years on from Floyd and we’re still having effectively the same fights. Conservative supporters of Trump’s decision to deport five suspected (and undocumented) members of Tren de Aragua are concerned with who the men are, what they’ve done, and how to get them out. Liberal critics are concerned with how the system has dealt with them.

In other words, Trumpers are focused on the product. Libs are focused on the process. It certainly isn’t the case that liberals want violent, Venezuelan gang bangers who entered the country illegally to set up camp. They just want an orderly method, one they can trust, to assign guilt and handle expulsion.

Trump supporters are coming from a very different place. They don’t view this in abstract terms. They see violent thugs who don’t belong in America anyway, and they couldn’t give two hoots over how they’re made to leave, or where they end up, so long as they get gone.

The left fears that if Trump can hopscotch over due process for these men, he’ll expand the power to cover native-born criminals. Then perhaps native-born non criminals? Annoying activists, Dem donors, Rachel Zegler!

I’m inclined to applaud this skepticism from critics. It’s certainly warranted here. We really do not want a system in which Trump or one of his goons can just disappear people they don’t like by punting them into Central American prisons. That’s f*****g insane. But this is also a political setup, and Dems are walking right into it.

Trump is bamboozling the left into helping him grease the skids for his immigration and speech crackdowns. He’s testing them out first on the least sympathetic people imaginable, knowing full well that the left will take the bait. If we want to restore normalcy, we’ll need to be more discerning and less flappable in how we freak out about this stuff, and we need to choose carefully what, specifically, we want to be freaking out over. We’re on quite solid footing with the process argument (this is a bad process). But we’re being tricked into making an utterly ridiculous argument over product: these poor gang bangers should have gotten to stay in the promised land.

It’s not like this is some next-level political psy-op either. This is basically what Ronald Reagan did when he used “welfare queens” to attack public benefits. But in Reagan’s era, we had the “Reagan Democrats” to bridge the gap between the two sides, and of course, the “welfare queen” was just a meme that Reagan made up to rile up his base. In this case, the people being argued about are very real, and the moderate Dems have been spooked out of pushing back too hard against the identity goblins in their own party over what codes as an identity issue.

Innocence Narratives

Hollywood absolutely loves stories about the falsely accused. It’s an enormously popular trope. So much so that it’s given people who lack firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system the impression that the criminally charged are basically as likely to be innocent as guilty. This is wildly untrue.

If cops have arrested somebody on suspicion of being a criminal, the overwhelming likelihood is that this has happened because the person is a criminal. And since crime is rarely something a person just dabbles in once, when cops see a criminal history, they assume, with usually good reason, that they’re on the right track.

Anyone who watches television can recite the Miranda warning: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you…and yadda.” What I suspect fewer people know is that Ernesto Miranda - the subject of that case - was a lifelong scumbag. He was a deadbeat burglar and rapist who was put back in prison after his conviction was initially overturned, because even without his supposedly coerced confession, the evidence against him was so overwhelming. When paroled, he’d gained status as something like a famous outlaw, and even went on to sign autographs for other ne’er-do-wells until he died in a bar fight at the age of 34.

Miranda’s story is sadly much truer to life than better known stories like To Kill A Mockingbird. Even guys who actually do get shafted by the system are rarely choir boys. Clarence Earl Gideon (of Gideon’s Trumpet) was a thief and a drifter. Reuben Carter (of The Hurricane) was rarely out of trouble with the law. And you may want to dodge entirely the rabbit hole that is the actual conduct of the Central Park Five…

The checks we build into our system to give innocent men and women recourse to defend themselves are, in actuality, far more likely to be used by guilty men and women to gum up the system and try to get themselves back to the streets. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have these checks! We must have them! But the left’s failure to see American crime with the steely eyes it demands is letting the right run circles around us, and remain quite viable politically while doing so.

The Case of Jasmine Mooney

I’ve argued before that while technically a crime, we should think of illegal border crossings more like speeding or jaywalking and less like robbery. And even if you disagree, you should be highly disturbed by this story about Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian actor whose apparently lawful attempts to secure a work visa landed her in a Kafkaesque hellscape of indefinite detention that should shame any citizen claiming to belong to a civilized nation. From her account:

“When we arrived at our next destination, we were forced to go through the entire intake process all over again, with medical exams, fingerprinting – and pregnancy tests; they lined us up in a filthy cell, squatting over a communal toilet, holding Dixie cups of urine while the nurse dropped pregnancy tests in each of our cups. It was disgusting.

We sat in freezing-cold jail cells for hours, waiting for everyone to be processed. Across the room, one of the women suddenly spotted her husband. They had both been detained and were now seeing each other for the first time in weeks.”

This is - no other words for it - f*****g sick. And not ‘sick’ in the good way, like how the kids use it.

I don’t know if what happened to Mooney was a consequence of intentional cruelty, incompetence, or both. But as an American, it embarrasses me. And I suspect I am far from alone in that. I don’t think even the hardest core MAGA-hatters voted for Trump because they thought he’d twist the knife in a Canadian actor best known for her role in - I s**t you not - American Pie.

Is a big part of this racial? You bet. The architects of this crackdown have a particular image in mind of who they mean to target with it, and it is not cute white ladies from Canada. That will make Mooney’s case a vastly more useful rallying point, by the way, than the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. Which, I know, ouch.

But while race factors into the politics here, it’s not the whole shebang, and it’s not the only thing that makes Mooney’s case different. Mooney, if we believe her story (I do) was acting in good faith, trying to comply with the rules of our immigration system. When told she’d erred, she tried to fly back to Canada on her own dime, but was instead incarcerated on ours.

There are no metrics by which this qualifies as good policy. It’s pitiless, pointless, and expensive. The other women with whom Mooney was locked up had mostly all overstayed visas, which is at least something they might reasonably have known they did.

Now, I have overstayed visas. The notion that we should be lengthily imprisoning people for doing it is utter madness. At most, it warrants a modest fine and greater scrutiny on future visits. But if the idea here is to get tough on violators of all flavors, Mooney doesn’t even belong in that category. Which makes her case a useful one for pushing back, even if the racial dynamics give us the ick.

Libs are on point when we argue that designing a callous, Byzantine system that steamrolls due process, will quickly lose us control over who gets victimized by it. But if we ever want our politics to be digestible again, we need to start thinking about this in the micro, rather than just the macro. Because this isn’t a first year law school seminar. We’re playing with live rounds, aiming them in the direction of real people, who occupy the real world, not just a textbook page. And no, I’m not just talking about the detained and deported, I’m talking about crime victims.

In the real world, there is a pretty f*****g real difference between a Canadian performer who wants to come to America to work in the wellness industry, and a murderous vato who wants to come to America to exploit, terrorize, and kill people. Clarence Darrow might have regarded them as functionally the same. But friends, a significant majority of us are not Clarence Darrow. And should not pretend we have his job.

This isn’t my way of saying that I think Trump is right. I don’t. I think Trump is behaving very dangerously, and it strikes me as entirely plausible that we might only be on the edge of a much more significant crackdown on those he finds undesirable, their speech, and on the people who just sort of look like them.

But that makes it all the more important that we understand what resonates with normal-ish voters, and what reads as high-minded faffery.

What Trump is doing is mostly, for now, popular. And in control of all three branches of government, he can do it without meaningful oversight. To stop it, and stop him, we need to make it unpopular. And that is just not going to happen by crying crocodile tears over hoodlums who belong exactly where they’re ending up.

Politics & Policy

Another word on the El Salvador angle: I’m glancing over a lot of this because there’s a door-stopper book’s worth of material to cover already. I need to save some of it for future posts or this one is going to become even less manageable than it is now.

But some complicated aspects of this case made CECOT an appealing destination to throw these guys, and for reasons other than just Trump and Bukele wanting to flex. The men sent to CECOT are all from Venezuela, which is key, because Venezuela does not maintain formal diplomatic relations with the United States. They won’t accept our deportees from their country, but they will accept them from El Salvador.

Prison vs. detention center is largely a difference without distinction, except in terms of who goes to each place, and how they get there. Sending a criminal to prison, according to US law, requires high evidentiary standards to be met, and due process to be observed. Holding an undocumented immigrant in detention requires none of that, and neither does deporting them. Of course, merely sending somebody home is one thing. Sending them to a notorious prison, in a foreign country other than their own, with hardened criminals, and after no official determination of guilt, is quite another. Trump & co. are sidestepping these quibbles by blaming Venezuela’s obstinacy and saying they weren’t really left a choice.

I call b******t, but make of that what you will. However, it does give Trump’s move the veneer of necessity, at least to his supporters. And liberal critics should learn about the diplomatic dimension before getting puffed up and stepping to Trumpers over this. If social media is any indication, they mostly aren’t doing that.

The plan is to hold these men in detention at CECOT for roughly one year - this could vary - while their status can be assessed. El Salvador was an obvious choice because Bukele is openly pitching Trump on sending more American prisoners to his hellholes as a cost saving mechanism (and presumably, to scare straight any would-be banger considering taking up the colors). That’s a complicated question all on its own, and one about which I have very mixed feelings, but we’ll have to save it for another day.

I won’t claim that threading this needle is going to be easy. Take the case of Javier Garcia Casique, a gay hairdresser from Maracay who thought he was being deported back to Venezuela when ICE nabbed him, but has instead ended up in CECOT with the gangsters. Casique’s family insists he has no gang ties, in which case, tossing the poor guy in CECOT was a barbaric and unjustifiable move.

So what do we do about it?

I submit that we have to use cases like this to push for tweaks to the system rather than for its full upending. A full upending isn’t going to happen right now. Trump is too popular, and he (somewhat credibly) thinks he has a mandate for this. I think we may need to follow the guidelines laid out in the serenity prayer. We should accept the things we cannot change, be courageous in trying to change what he can, and be crystal f*****g clear about the difference.

Since nobody - actually nobody - wants violent criminals who’ve illegally entered the United States to be able to stay there, maybe we swallow, for now, the Trump team’s harsh tactics in going after them, and focus instead on reinserting checks to make sure we’re not snaring ordinary, decent folks in the net. Maybe we let them play a little rough with the bad guys so that we get some rhythm on helping the not-so-bad guys; the ones who just overstayed visas, or petitioned for asylum incorrectly.

Yes, there are broad, systemic concerns here. I do not need to be convinced of that. But we will make zero headway in addressing any of them if the folks driving this think we’re a bunch of bunny-hugging dipshits.

It sucks, but it’s true: Trump won. And he won by promising to do exactly what he’s doing. The silver lining with him though is that he isn’t ideologically wed to anything. If he thinks what he’s doing is unpopular, he’ll pull back (as he seems to be doing with DOGE). If he only thinks he’s owning the libs though, he’ll lean in hard.

Writers of fiction will know well the tipping point at which a short story is in danger of becoming a short novel, and needs to end before that can happen. That’s where this piece is now, so I’m going to leave it here. But this won’t be the last time we discuss this topic, or the last lens through which we view it.

I’ll say up front, this is mostly a thought experiment. A musing. Do I really think this will happen? S**t, I don’t know. I hope not.

But I think it would be better if Trump’s detractors began planning for it, rather than assume a level of stability that doesn’t really exist anymore in our government. If we’ve learned anything from recent history it’s that the American system depends on good faith participants acting in concert to uphold it.

Does anyone really think we have that right now?

I’m not an historian, a lawyer, a politician, or even all that smart. I’m just a snarky writer that a handful of readers think is funny. I’m a jumped up shitposter, basically.

And I’m here to spoil your Monday. Or, if you like Donald Trump, maybe I’m here to make it.

You can count me among the small cadre of commentators who think the Signal-gate thing was largely a distraction. For those just joining us, I’m discussing the recent scandal in which Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a chat thread in which some of our government’s most powerful military and intelligence personalities were discussing an imminent strike on Yemen.

Yes, obviously, it’s funny that high level government functionaries included a journalist in their deliberations over war plans, even if I don’t think the war plans themselves were especially amusing. (In my view, if we’re going to be isolationists, let’s be isolationists. If we’re not going to let Ukraine drag us into a conflict, we shouldn’t be letting Israel do it either.)

But they left me off the Signal chat, so I didn’t get to weigh in 🙁

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I also thought the lack of marching orders was funny. And interesting. Trumpers seemed to fall into three camps, at a time when they all should have been bunkering down in one:

1) Goldberg is a traitor who leaked classified intel!

2) It’s no big deal because no classified intel was leaked!

3) It was a psy-op; they included Goldberg intentionally, duh!

Very, very quickly, I’ll run down why each of these is bull pucky, but then I want to move on, because Signal-gate isn’t really today’s focus. In reverse order:

3) Sure, okay, I’ll buy the targeted leak angle. But if that’s what they were doing, they’d have done it such that they didn’t all come out of it looking like idiots. There’s really no percentage in looking like an idiot, especially when you’re trying to project enough strength and mettle to scare the Houthis into backing off Red Sea shipping lanes.

2) Yes, it’s a big deal, and yes, the intel was classified, whatever b******t excuse they’re spinning now. Pete Hegseth made clear that they had a high-level target in sight, and this was before the strike was carried out. If you’re a high-level Houthi target, you probably know you are. So if Jeffrey Goldberg goes to print, and you see it, you might think, “now would be a good time to go hang out somewhere else for a few hours.” If something like this had happened under Obama or Biden, does anyone seriously think all these Republicans would be parsing the meaning of the word “classified?”

1) This one…actually, maybe. As in, the administration could absolutely go after Goldberg for printing this. I think they probably will. Doesn’t make it fair or right, and doesn’t make their case any less bogus, but since “he’s a traitor!” is something they can manifest into accuracy, it would be foolish to dismiss this possibility.

And this is a good segue into what I actually want us to be talking about right now. Because even Trump’s angriest critics still don’t understand the reality through which they’re living right now. If you haven’t spent significant time in an authoritarian state, you might be forgiven for looking at the American landscape right now and thinking, “Golly, we are getting dangerously close to losing our democracy…”

Oh, my sweet, summer babies. Your democracy is already gone.

Signal-gate is out of the headlines. At the time of this writing, neither the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, nor the Washington Post has a top story about it. Nobody cares anymore. Of course they don’t. It’s boring. Trump’s not interested, the guys who did it aren’t sorry, nobody’s going to resign or be punished over it, so what is there to report?

This is how it works with dictators. When you assume full power, you assume full responsibility. When that becomes embarrassing, like when there’s been an obvious screw up, you can either make somebody fall on their sword, or you can just give everyone the finger and move on.

Pete Hegseth was unlikely to be made to take one for the team. His appointment to SecDef was too controversial. Even though Trump has never been shy about firing those who displease him, for him to admit so soon that he made a mistake with Hegseth would weaken him. He doesn’t want to do that, he doesn’t have to do that, so he’s just…not going to do that.

Power means never having to say you’re sorry.

When Trump says he’s not joking about a third term, it’s because he’s not joking. He’s going to do it. He’ll serve for life. Democrats will be very angry about it. Some Republicans too, probably. They’ll yell and scream and pull their hair and they’ll make lots of threats. But they won’t stop him. They don’t have the determination. He does.

He thinks, credibly, that if he ever leaves office, he’ll get thrown in jail. Those are the stakes for him. How about for you? Are you willing to spend your life in jail to get him out of power? I suspect you’re not really. And I suspect he’s counting on that.

One of the reasons the 20th Century was such a shitshow of war and revolutionary activity is because, just objectively, life sucked quite a bit more back then.

There was very little air conditioning, for one thing. It was technically invented in 1902, but didn’t become common until the mid-century. In Europe, a lot of people still don’t have it. So people were uncomfortable a lot of the time. Add to that the heavy, scratchy clothing everyone wore, no washing machines, and limited choice in detergents or fabric softeners and people would have been itchy and smelly to a much higher degree than is common today.

There was no Netflix either. In fact, there was no color TV of any kind for most people until well into the 60s. You couldn’t order Thai food to your door. You probably couldn’t order Thai food at all unless you lived in Thailand. Social mores were much more rigid, so you probably weren’t out dating a lot or otherwise having much fun. You certainly wouldn’t have had apps to help you do it, which is another thing: no internet! Your world would have been comparatively quite small, especially if you didn’t live near a library.

I am really not being facetious. We live in a time of plenty. Of impossible abundance and comfort. Relative to our ancestors, we have it uh-mazing, and we know it. We’re all basically Caesar now.

So when you weigh the idea of forfeiting all that (by going to jail forever or dying) in service of trying (probably fruitlessly) to depose some a*****e grifter who has quite a bit more to lose than you, by virtue of his having quite a bit more to begin with, it’s hard for me to take seriously the idea that many will actually risk it all to stop this guy. Much more likely, he’ll f**k around, he won’t find out, and he’ll die of old age in a decade or two in the Lincoln Bedroom, at which point, Don Jr. or Eric will take over, or if we’re very, very lucky, Ivanka.

But that’s it, guys. That’s the future. That’s how this plays out.

If it sounds like I don’t care, that’s not quite true. I’ve just accepted it. It’s like snow. I’ve never understood why people complain about the snow. If you complain, you have exactly the same amount of snow, you’re just sore over it, when you could be out skiing or making snow angels.

If you want to keep letting Donald Trump live rent-free in your head though, be my guest. I evicted the prick, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Anyway, as promised, here’s how Trump will make it work. Here’s how he’ll stay when you want him to go.

I should note again here that I am not a legal or constitutional scholar. If you are, and you think I’m full of it, please say so in the comments. I’d love to be proved wrong.

But I don’t really think case law, precedent, or textual originalism matter here. This administration has already made clear that they don’t care what any court says anyway, which means that however legally wrong I am, or Trump is, we’re still right back where we started; he’s not leaving until he’s made to leave, and nobody’s really going to make him leave.

Anyway the *two terms of four years each* standard comes from two, different places in the US Constitution.

Article II, Section I says the following:

“He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years…”

And the 22nd Amendment says:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…”

Article II says more than that, of course. So does the 22nd Amendment. But none of what else is said in either passage is germane to the question of how much time an individual can spend as President of the United States.

And that’s it. Those 25 fragile words are all we have to give us the idea that an individual (strictly speaking, a man; Article II either says “person,” or uses he/him pronouns) can only hang out in the Oval Office for 8 years.*

*Actually, that’s not quite right. A person could do just under 10 years and still be in compliance with 22. If they served less than two years of a term to which somebody else was elected, they’d still be eligible to run twice more.

But do you really think a determined, audacious autocrat couldn’t fiddle with those 25 words to argue that they say something other than what we think they say? To buy him some more time?

Circumventing 22 would be the easy part. It only says Trump can’t be *elected* more than twice. But he doesn’t need to get elected again if he never leaves office.

And the four years thing from Article II? Psh.

“I interpret this as meaning, ‘a Term of four years at least’ or ‘four years or more’ or ‘four years to start with.’”

Either a friendly court says yes to that, or it says no and he ignores it. Whatever. It’s all she wrote. The 20th Amendment says the terms need to begin and end on January 20th, but it says nothing about their length.

The courts move slowly. And they do not have the US military at their command to enforce their will. If the executive chooses not to act in good faith, there are serious limits to what can be done about it.

The no election thing would definitely be a sticking point, but ultimately possible to overcome. Trump’s got the Republican party captured. Nobody in it is remotely strong enough to stand up to him. If he tells them they’re not holding a presidential primary, they’re not holding a presidential primary.

The Democrats still will, of course. But with no opponent, and no buy-in from Republicans, they’ll look tough for a day, defiant for a week, and ridiculous for the rest of the season. At a certain point, the political and media class will accept that there isn’t really going to be a general election for president, and they’ll stop covering the Democrats’ nominating process with any seriousness.

Trump will announce well in advance his intention to ignore any electoral college result, or he’ll f**k with the electors themselves, or he’ll coopt red state secretaries of state into refusing to certify. Maybe he’ll do all of the above, and maybe he’ll find some novel way to approach this that I haven’t thought of. Doesn’t much matter in the end because we arrive at the same place: he digs his heels in, we don’t stop him, and he gets to stay on as president.

Oh, and don’t underestimate the Overton Window. Trump is already talking about this, and he’s only been back in office for two months. By the time it’s general election season again, this discourse will have been 100% “normalized” (to borrow the left’s favorite/most toothless word). We’ll see the train coming from a mile down the tracks and there won’t be one, damn thing we can do to stop the crash.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong! It’s happened before, like in this post where I argued that DOGE would be nothing to write home about. That piece aged like discount bread, and maybe this one will too. I don’t have a crystal ball, I just read the tea leaves like the rest of you, and this is what I see in them.

However... The left has been wrong about a great many things over the last 10 years, but Trump’s dictatorial tendencies has not been one of them. He is exactly who, and what, they think he is.

I’ve been taking some flack lately from fellow lefties about how I’m always beating on them, and not spending enough time going after Trump. The reason for that is that with such a useless and loathsome opposition in the Democrats, Trump is going to be able to do most of what he wants without meaningful pushback. My bet (and his) is that folks will tolerate even the destruction of American democracy as long as they never have to listen to woke people again.

What are a few thousand deported exchange students if it’s okay to say “that’s gay” and “r*tarded” again? Basically, either we get our house in order or we lose the keys to it altogether. I’m trying - I promise - to help us get it together.

There is still time to prevent this outcome. That I don’t think it will be prevented, isn’t to say its prevention is beyond the realm of possibility. Trump could, a bit like last time, become very unpopular. That would change things. Another, more popular Republican - or even, if God wills it, a Democrat - could rise up in his place.

But I think - and I’m kind of, maybe serious - that this is the road we’re on right now. And it leads to Trump 4 Life. Cry about it if you need to, but crying isn’t going to change anything.

The last time I wrote about the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni metadrama, my take was a typically middle-of-the-road, above-the-fray admonishment to look at the big picture.

My thesis was that the saga was so interesting because it cast us - web dwellers in the cheap seats - as judge, jury, and [career] executioner. One of the last things I said in that piece was effectively, “we’ll see what happens when the other shoe drops.”

Well, it’s dropped. And now this is a whole new kettle of trout.

Before, I was vacillating. I read Blake Lively’s complaint to the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) and was revolted by what appeared to be Justin Baldoni’s disgusting on-set behavior. Then I read the previews of what would become Baldoni’s haymaker of a counterpunch and started to doubt Lively’s version.

It was shaping up to be a real head scratcher of a he said/she said.

Then, a few weeks ago, Baldoni and his legal team released, as promised, a website featuring not just his own lawsuit, but a studiosly documented timeline of the events in question, replete with a treasure trove of personal texts between the stars at the center of the scandal.

And holy s**t, guys.

This isn’t a he said/she said at all anymore. It’s a he said/he can prove it. Because he has receipts.

This writer now also feels like a moron who can’t update his thinking. Here was, I thought, yet another example of a shitty, media man making life unpleasant and icky for the women in his orbit. It was supposed to be a near-impossible rarity for an accusation like Lively’s to be revealed as weaponized horseshit, but that now seems to be exactly what it was.

Just to play it safe, I’ll offer the same disclaimer I did last time: lawyers are paid to make their clients look good and their opponents look bad. Baldoni’s website is a masterful example of this. Justin Baldoni comes across as the most innocent victim ever to be victimized by anyone, and Blake Lively comes across as a deceitful witch from actual Hell.

This is obviously the website’s intention, so we need to exercise a modicum of caution before swallowing the hook, line, and sinker all in one gulp here.

But the receipts, man. The receipts.

Lively’s lawsuit didn’t really have those (and as we’ll see, what ones it did have lacked important context). Baldoni’s timeline appears to have Lively dead to rights.

Her husband too (yes, I’m afraid I am here to ruin Ryan Reynolds for you, and trust me, I’m as disappointed about it as you are).

So without further throat clearing, I present you with:

Blake vs. Justin - Part II: A Drama In Five Acts

Act I - Bosom Buddies

I’m going to try to avoid quoting extensively from the emails and texts that support the key events in Baldoni’s timeline. There’s really no reason for me to, since you can go read all of them yourself for free. I’ll caution that it is a deep rabbit hole - it’ll be several hours out of your life, anyway - but it’s worth at least skimming the document just to get a sense of how it works.

Baldoni’s legal team has laid out a comprehensive sequence of the events that led up to (and were featured in) Blake Lively’s CRD complaint. For each major plot point, the receipts are posted just below. So when Baldoni and Lively are described as having had a pleasant conversation via text message, you can read the conversation itself just after reading about it.

It’s important to remember that Baldoni and his squad are fighting a war on many fronts. Each act of our drama will serve as a counteroffensive on a specific one of them. Act I, which is, in a lot of ways, the juiciest, serves as a refutation of Lively’s explosive allegations that Baldoni and Jamey Heath, his partner at Wayfarer Studios, sexually harassed her.

Outside of Act I though, the sexual harassment is almost an aside in this yarn. It’s more of a subplot than the main story, which is much more about: creative control and promotion of a major motion picture, a trek through the muddy swamp of professional public relations, and a $¼ billion lawsuit against America’s paper of record.

In Act I, Lively and Baldoni are great friends, excited to be working with each other, and excited about the work they’re doing. Baldoni clearly understands that this is his big break, and is thrilled to have landed an A-lister like Lively to star in his project. Lively seems genuinely excited to be on the team, and the pair get chummy to the point of being kind of saccharine.

They swap novel-length texts gushing about how wonderful the other is. They crack jokes, they banter, they stay up late, they talk obsessively about the project, they even come pretty close to flirting (though nothing Baldoni released crosses any real fidelity lines - both are married).

These two people are fast friends, and clearly enjoy a strong professional partnership. You could imagine Matt Damon and Ben Affleck texting each other like this during production of Good Will Hunting (if texting had been a thing at that time, and if Damon and Affleck were big, gooey mush-balls).

There’s not a smidge of disagreement or rancor. It’s sort of the opposite. Baldoni can’t believe his good fortune in having an actor of Lively’s stature on board, and he bends over backward to accommodate her at every turn. None of what Lively wants is unreasonable at this stage, and she appears to love every inch of the art they’re creating together.

Lively’s sick? OMG, take all the time you need to recover, I hope you’re okay, and here’s my personal holistic health coach, at your service.

Lively is given time off for family: OMG thank you sooooo much.

Lively has an idea about a scene? OMG I loooooovve it.

Baldoni finished a scene? OMG you were soooooooo amazing.

Lively feels insecure about her looks? OMG you are perrrrrrrrfect. Don’t worry about one single thing.

It goes on like this. And on. And on. It’s kind of gross actually. Through most of Act I, the pair are contorting themselves into pretzels to kiss the other one’s ass.

What’s most significant though is that a number of events that took place during this period would ultimately be covered in Lively’s CRD complaint, but with a wildly different spin.

The holistic health coach, for example, was later reimagined as a weight-loss specialist deployed to “fat-shame” Lively. This is hard to countenance in context. While Lively’s CRD complaint offered no glimpse of them, all of Baldoni’s texts to Lively that addressed her weight and appearance were…whatever the literal, exact opposite of “fat-shaming” is.

Another of Lively’s complaints would be that Baldoni used the word “sexy” in reference to her while discussing her wardrobe for a particular scene. Lively would go on to say that this made her feel “ogled and exposed.”

But their surrounding exchanges make it pretty darn clear that this was part of a broader discussion about Lively’s worries over her wardrobe in general. Namely, that it was insufficiently “sexy” (a word she used first in messages to Baldoni). So to regard this as anything other than a director following up on a previously voiced concern seems a real stretch.

Bottom line, is it possible that Baldoni overstepped his mark on occasion? Sure, I guess. Their texts to one another don’t prove he didn’t (though they do expose some major distortions and omissions on Lively’s part). But Lively offers nothing to back up any of what she’s alleging.

The New York Times would end up trying to on her behalf. But the closest their piece - which is now the focus of Baldoni’s lawsuit (more later) - came was another context-free snippet between Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, two of Baldoni’s PR hands. In it, Nathan writes, “He doesn’t know how lucky he is right now.”

This was in reference to Lively’s allegation that Baldoni had ad-libbed an unscripted kiss/grope in front of witnesses. At face value, it looks like the PR team expressing relief that Baldoni had gotten away with his bad behavior. Thought the rest of their internal communication spells out plainly that they a) didn’t believe Lively, b) regarded *The Truth* as Bladoni’s single most powerful defensive weapon, and c) were only relieved because both of them knew how potent an accusation like that, even a false one, could be.

Act I of this saga seriously pushes the limits of the “no such thing as a perfect victim” excuse, which is reliably trotted out anytime a public allegation looks to have major holes in it. Was Lively being sexually harassed by her co-star? She sure as hell wasn’t acting like it. But we aren’t supposed to trust our instincts on that, or our own lying eyes. Maybe she was just an imperfect victim. Whatever really happened though, no fair reading of these exchanges would cause any neutral party to conclude that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were anything more than friendly colleagues on great terms with one another.

Until they weren’t.

Act II - Trouble In Paradise

The line between Act I and Act II of our story is a very blurry one. To the extent we have an inciting incident, it’s probably an April 12th, 2023 meeting at Lively and Reynold’s NYC penthouse during which Baldoni is shown Lively’s rewrites of the movie’s iconic “rooftop scene.” Baldoni’s first serious misstep appears to have been waiting an unacceptable period of time before expressing his adoration for Lively’s edits. Lively sends him a long, rambling, weirdo message afterwards that could, kinda/sorta be read as a threat but is mostly just cringe.

In it, Lively compares herself to Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones and references her “few dragons” (understood to be her husband, Ryan Reynolds and Lively’s bestie, popstar Taylor Swift). Whether this actually was a threat or just Lively being weird, Baldoni gets the message and promptly falls all over himself to praise her and thank her for her wonderful work.

Act II is long, but it’s worth following in full. You should go read it all. It takes what felt like an ancillary issue in the first rounds of reporting on this and places it front and center; Lively’s gradual but complete theft of Baldoni’s film. A slow-motion steal, happening right in front of his face.

Lively and Baldoni were, at surface level, still on good terms. But bit by bit, piece by piece, Lively was assuming control. She’d already caused budget-busting delays in the schedule, had already catastrophically overspent on wardrobe, and was now making serious (and bizarre) demands that had to be complied with in order for her to agree to finish shooting.

We have multiple perspectives here. Not just Lively and Baldoni’s exchanges with each other, but an increasingly worried production team trying to come to terms with what Lively was doing, and trying to figure out how to counter it. At every stage, they came to the reluctant conclusion that what they could do was…sweet f**k all.

Lively held all the cards. They couldn’t afford her causing any more delays to filming, if she walked from the project, they were screwed, and if she failed to promote the project (as she would threaten to do multiple times) they were equally screwed.

I don’t think any commentator or observer realized how serious this actually was until Justin Baldoni launched his website. Lively was sidestepping editors, getting assistant directors fired, dodging the intimacy coordinator, and generally terrorizing the production staff. She demanded access to the raw footage they’d shot, and forced a renegotiation of her contract that allowed her, with editors of her own choosing, to make an entirely new cut of the film.

When Baldoni’s director cut screen-tested better with the film’s target demographic, it didn’t matter. Lively wanted her version in theaters and threatened to sink the whole ship if she didn’t get her way. Baldoni is still credited as the film’s director, but the version that made it before audiences was only partly his work.

And again, he could do nothing. He just had to take the punches. When Lively started shutting him out of the film’s promotion and press events, same thing. Wayfarer Studios really had no recourse. They were in too deep, and Lively had too much clout, especially when she started wielding her uber-famous husband as a kind of gladiator to beat Wayfarer into submission. Baldoni was trapped. He had no choice but to ride it out, hoping that audiences would like what they saw anyway and that all would be well.

The key takeaway from Act II is that Lively’s control needs were very real, and her takeover of the film, total. Her initial complaint made it appear that accusations of her being an overbearing diva were fundamentally retaliatory, i.e. that Baldoni had just concocted this narrative to make her seem like a b***h after she accused him of misconduct. But the receipts make clear that that causation is wrong. Lively was already wresting control of Baldoni’s passion project away from him before the more serious allegations were ever given voice.

In a typical he said/she said situation, one of the things investigators - professional and amateur alike - look for is whether the accusations are backed up by what the accuser was saying to others at the time the events supposedly took place. So a person claiming to have been the victim of an assault is more likely to be believed if they can show that they mentioned the assault to friends and family around the time it happened. In this case, Justin Baldoni and his team were openly fretting about this, all the while it was taking place, even when his texts to Lively were still friendly. If he’s lying about Lively’s takeover of the film, the lie had a very elaborate setup.

Act III - Public Relations & Inside Baseball

Act III of our tragedy is boring but important. Remember that the crux of Lively’s CRD complaint, and the charge in Meghan Twohey’s explosive New York Times article, was that Baldoni and his hired hands orchestrated a “smear campaign” intended to destroy Blake Lively’s reputation. The receipts here largely consign that claim to the slag heap.

Some necessary backstory:

Wayfarer Studios had contracted a PR outfit called Jonesworks to help them through the production process. Jonesworks, for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with either Blake Lively or Justin Baldoni, was in the midst of significant internal turmoil. A spat between Jennifer Abel, who’d been dispatched to handle the Wayfarer account, and Stephanie Jones, the Jonesworks boss, boiled over until Abel tendered her resignation, effective at the end of the contract. From this point on, Stephanie Jones was mostly sidelined, and Jennifer Abel became the main PR contact working with Wayfarer.

Jones emerges as something of a villain in this act, and her “erratic,” “hostile” behavior became important when she broke a fragile ceasefire around the time of the film’s release. At that point, Lively’s takeover was complete, Baldoni was relegated to the sidelines and Wayfarer’s only concern was getting film through its first few weekends without a media shitstorm. Jones, not having been much of a presence until now, fired a very unhelpful shot into the opposing camp, then complained bitterly about her own sidelining when the Wayfarer team got mad at her.

The point is, the escalation of hostilities during this period was not the fault of Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, or anyone working closely with them. Rather, it was one rogue idiot from his PR team acting unilaterally without being clued into the wider strategy. The supporting documents in this chapter all emphasize how much Baldoni and Wayfarer didn’t want things going to the next level, and were doing something like the opposite of conducting a “smear campaign.”

At several points (more on this in the next chapter) Lively started getting bad press - referred to as “organic” throughout the timeline (meaning, not the result of PR hacks planting stories). Baldoni checked in with the Jonesworks people repeatedly to make sure they weren’t the ones orchestrating it all (they weren’t, according to what he was told).

In fact, it all became kind of an inside joke. Baldoni had recently hired Melissa Nathan, of The Agency Group PR (TAG) - a dedicated crisis management firm famous for having represented Johnny Depp. Their strategy was defensive and preparatory: they wanted to be ready to go in case Lively/Reynolds went nuclear. But until that time, they were carefully holding their fire. Lively, helpfully, kept doing their work for them by putting her foot in it (again, more in Act IV).

Lively’s CRD complaint has Jennifer Abel saying to Melissa Nathan, “He [Baldoni] wants to feel like she [Lively] can be buried,” and Nathan responding, “You know we can bury anyone.” Nathan’s ominous reply actually made it into the New York Times’s headline when they wrote about this. Ouch. Caught red handed, right?

Well, not really, as the context demonstrates. Yes, TAG was compiling what, in politics, we’d call “opposition research.” That’s what they’d been hired to do. If Lively turned the big guns on their client, they were prepared to discredit her. But the name of the game at this stage was deescalation, and trying to hold the truce. They could bury Lively, yes. But they were trying very hard not to have to. There was too much risk of an open battle hurting the film, and losing everyone money.

In fact, every supposedly incriminating quote reprinted by the New York Times to bolster their “smear” narrative has this dynamic attached. The spinmeisters are preparing for a media war, but it’s a war they’d rather not have to actually fight.

After the “We can bury anyone comment,” we also get, from Nathan, “...but you know when we send over documents, we can’t send over the work we will or could do because that would get us in a lot of trouble. We can’t write we will destroy her.”

Okay, quick piece of advice here: anytime you find yourself typing the words, “We can’t write…” stop writing! Whoever said, “Don’t type anything you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing printed in the New York Times,” was onto something. Actually don’t.

But check the grammar. “Can.” “Will.” “Could.” All of the really *bad* quotes are written like this. Future tense. Subjunctive mood. Hypotheticals. They were gearing up, not launching an offensive.

Anyway, in Baldoni’s version - backed up by multiple receipts - Stephanie Jones made a hamfisted attempt to reinsert herself and reestablish control over her agency’s relationship with Wayfarer Studios. She contacted a reporter from the Daily Mail after having been specifically asked to stay out of it, and it threatened to massively heighten the tensions.

Basically, she was that old archer on the wall at Helms Deep who let go of his bowstring and shot his wad too early.

Anyway, after one round of especially bad press for Lively, Abel joked via text to Nathan, “You really outdid yourself with this piece 🙃,” and Nathan responded, “That’s why you hired me right? I’m the best.”

In Lively’s complaint, the little upside-down face emoji at the end of Abel’s text was omitted. It’s a small thing, but without it, it looks like two spin doctors cavorting over trying to ruin an innocent starlet. With it, it makes pretty clear that they were having a laugh in celebration of organically bad press for their opponent.

Many of the quotes in Lively’s complaint, and in Twohey’s piece, have a similar extra-contextual meaning. On their own, they’re damning. But if you see what else the players were saying to each other at the time, they become pretty innocuous.

Act IV - The Promotion

A short act here, but another significant one. Central to Lively’s complaint was the charge that Baldoni and The Agency Group were orchestrating a press and social media campaign to destroy her. As Baldoni’s supporting documents make clear though, Lively was doing this damage to herself, without any assistance from the other side.

After having already pushed Baldoni out of the film’s promotion (the chronology is vital to understand here) Lively and her team set up a series of misguided, tone deaf promotional events to try to sell the picture. Baldoni and Wayfarer had always been careful to play up the domestic abuse angle, and to treat the marketing with the appropriate reverence. Lively didn’t follow suit.

Instead of solemnity, Lively & co projected a cutesy, fun-loving vibe, staging press events that featured the gang making floral arrangements (Lively’s character in the film is a florist), sewing patches onto clothing (???), and encouraging fans of the book to bring their friends to the movie and “wear their florals.”

It didn’t go over well.

Lively had already been getting shaky press after a series of bizarre, somewhat combative interviews, and this didn’t help. DV survivors spoke out, expressing their disappointment and feelings of having been let down. It escalated, and one has to think that Baldoni would’ve been loving it all, were it not for this unfortunate narrative’s potential to hurt the film’s performance in cinemas.

Rather than take victory laps, Baldoni, after ensuring that his own PR squad wasn’t responsible for the bad press, took to Sony, the film’s distributor, to voice his concerns about the discordant attempts to promote it. This is all time stamped, so we can clearly see that Baldoni was alert to the problem, and reaching out to correct it, days before it fully landed on Lively’s radar

This would not stop Lively from ultimately blaming Baldoni for the bad tone of the marketing.

In one of the saga’s weirdest episodes, Lively and Reynolds - who were no longer on speaking terms with Baldoni - tried to force him to accept blame for the poor promotional tactics by drafting a letter on his behalf that put the responsibility squarely on him. They then tried to strongarm him into signing it (Baldoni refused).

It represents a shocking twist in the story by the time we learn about this, because by this point, Baldoni and his lawyers have already walked us through the downright sociopathic ways in which Lively and Reynolds had attempted to screw this poor guy, and the extent to which he’d just rolled over for it. After all that, they wanted him to eat extra s**t for decisions they literally hadn’t even allowed him to make?

Act V - Meet the Press

The film did well, and after its first few weeks in theaters, everything seemed to die down. The peace was illusory though. Things had just gone dormant. Because Megan Twohey of the New York Times (the legendary #metoo reporter responsible for taking down Harvey Weinstein) was working on an exposé.

I don’t know a thing about libel cases except that they’re very hard to win in court. Baldoni is alleging journalistic malpractice to the tune of $250 million, which struck me as insane when I first read it. But whether or not a court will agree, Baldoni’s moral case against the Times seems strong. It really does look like Twohey uncritically accepted Lively’s version of events, set out to help her crush Baldoni, and paid grossly insufficient attention to what would have been exculpatory information casting Baldoni in a less nefarious light.

I’m well outside my wheelhouse here. I don’t know enough about the law, journalistic ethics, or IT to know whether Twohey or the Times are in actual trouble. But my layman’s opinion on this is that, whatever the ultimate ramifications, what the Times did to Justin Baldoni in this case was…a really shitty thing to do.

On the morning of December 21st, two hours before the deadline they’d given Wayfarer Studios to offer comment, Twohey’s piece went live, along with the full text of Blake Lively’s CRD complaint. It was a Christmas bombshell of epic proportions. Lively would follow the NYT’s salvo with another lawsuit filed in federal court specifically addressing the sexual harassment complaints.

Justin Baldoni looked pretty well cooked. His agency dropped him as a client, talk of his “cancellation” was swirling hard, and career recovery felt impossible. But you’ll recall that Lively’s reputation was imperfect, irrespective of how Hollywood bigwigs were going to react. Power-agent, Ari Emannuel, just the other day, went on a podcast bragging about having been the guy to drop the ax on Baldoni (or, “Bologna,” as he hilariously called him). Anyway, the mob stopped short of sharpening the pitchforks on Blake’s behalf. The torches were not immediately fired.

As Baldoni and his team started to speak out, a plausible counter narrative took shape. Twohey, it now seemed, had not been in possession of all the facts, largely because she hadn’t really been interested in obtaining them. Timestamps on some of the art in her NYT piece go back days before Baldoni was ever approached for comment, and some of the text appears to have been archived on the web as far back as October of that year.

There’s nothing remotely unusual about an investigative journalist putting the pieces of an article together before finally publishing it, and there’s nothing unusual about waiting until the last minute to ask a subject for comment. But Lively was cast by Twohey as the sympathetic protagonist in this story, despite a mountain of compelling evidence that she was anything but. In light of the full facts, Twohey’s behavior on the ramp up to her article’s publication looks less like thoroughness and more like the setup of an intentional hit job.

Turned Tables & Missing Pieces

When Twohey’s piece dropped, I was firmly on Team Blake. Then I got shaky when Baldoni sounded defiant in hitting back. Now, I’m so firmly on Team Justin, it’s hard for me to imagine anything changing my mind.

For me to be convinced that Justin Baldoni has been anything but the undeserving victim of a power-hungry, two-faced, dastardly duo, it would have to be revealed that the documentation he’s offered to support his side of the story was straight-up fabricated. Or at minimum, incomplete. He released it all on February 1st though, and so far, no such claims have been made.

Meanwhile, Lively and Reynolds look to have gone to ground (with one, terrible exception). Public opinion has thoroughly turned on them, and even their bff, Taylor Swift, has been suspiciously silent on the matter. Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, publicly promised a lawsuit unlike any other. On this, he seems to have delivered in spades.

I don’t really know what to say about all this in terms of its broader implications. Some have tried to paint the saga as a refutation of #metoo fever, but I’m unconvinced. #metoo saw its share of well-deserved takedowns, and some of what looked like collateral cultural damage. But I don’t recall any #metoo story as nuts as this one.

Really, again, unless Baldoni has simply forged these documents, he wasn’t just the victim of a dubious accusation. He was the victim of a well-structured, carefully executed plot to steal his movie, wreck his career, bankrupt him, and forever destroy his reputation.

Why? Seriously, what did the guy do to deserve this?

In every exchange, even the ones in Lively’s complaint (as soon as context is applied) Justin Baldoni comes across as a f*****g angel. As a man so kind, so generous, and so great to work with, you just kind of want to give him a hug. To do to this poor b*****d what Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds did to him is the moral equivalent of lowering a brand new puppy onto the sidewalk and stomping it to death with a pair of stilettos.

Again: why?

Fans have their theories. Did Baldoni and Lively have an affair? Did they almost have an affair? Does Lively want the rights to the It Ends With Us sequel, It Starts With Us?

It’s certainly plausible, in my view, that the stars’ onscreen romance could have spilled off the screen. I was an actor once upon a time, and I can’t even count the number of relationships I’ve seen made or broken by dramatic chemistry. S**t, my wife and I met onstage. Now that I think on it, I’m not sure I’ve had a single serious relationship that started anywhere else.

So sure, maybe Baldoni and Lively were doing the dirty. Maybe this is all a deflection to either keep the truth from Ryan Reynolds (not to mention Baldoni’s wife). Or maybe it’s about quenching Ryan’s thirst for vengeance against he who planted upon him the horns of the cuckold. It’s hard to know.

But there are two missing pieces in this, and I think their absence is conspicuous. Based on the text exchanges, Baldoni doesn’t appear to have done anything to cause Lively to turn on him. At one point, they’re fine. At the next, she’s lodging complaints, making ridiculous demands, and generally scaring the s**t out of everyone. Turns that sharp don’t usually happen without a catalyst, and it’s just not clear what caused this relationship to sour so profoundly.

On the other hand, the bust-up didn’t happen all at once. Which maybe argues against such a catalyst. But the alternative then is that this was a snow job from the jump. That every gooey, sappy word Lively wrote to Baldoni through the whole process was just a misdirect aimed to give him a false sense of security. Obviously, I know that some people really are that evil. I just really didn’t think that Blake Lively or Ryan Reynolds were going to be two of them. They always seemed so cute and nice!

Another gap in the narrative is the lull between the film’s launch and Meghan Twohey’s NYT boom being lowered. Twohey’s a crack reporter, so maybe I’m wrong here, but it strikes me as unlikely that she scooped this one herself. At minimum, it feels like Lively and Reynolds were eagerly cooperating with her piece, and I get a much stronger vibe that they probably shopped it to her in the first place.

Example from Twohey, re the competing versions of the film:

“In the end, Sony and Wayfarer went with Ms. Lively’s cut, and she got a producer credit.”

Ha!

I wonder how Twohey would have covered the Kennedy assassination.

“In the end, JFK had a bad time in Dallas, where a spectator expressed his disapproval.”

The full story of what actually happened here is so insanely sexy and newsworthy that Twohey’s omission of it can only be explained by her being lazy (which she is not) or by her having been co opted.

Lively had to take extraordinary steps - threatening, withholding, cajoling - even to make her cut of the film. She wasn’t hired as a producer, she wasn’t hired as a director, and she wasn’t hired as a writer. A leading actor demanding access to raw footage in the way she did was regarded as unprecedented by the Wayfarer team. She badgered Sony into letting her make her version, letting her take extra time to do it, then ultimately releasing it despite its relative underperformance with focus groups, all by promising to walk away from the table and leave everyone in the lurch if her terms were not met.

When she was done, a producer credit wasn’t enough to satisfy her. Lively bullied Wayfarer Studios into writing her a letter of recommendation to receive a mark from the Producers’ Guild of America (PGA). This is a serious industry distinction, one not taken lightly, and Wayfarer didn’t want to recommend her since she hadn’t, according to them, done the work to warrant it. Lively wasn’t speaking to Wayfarer except through intermediaries at this point, but Wayfarer regarded their eventual decision to acquiesce to her “unreasonable and cold hearted” demand as their having fallen victim to “extortion.” (These are the actual words used by Wayfarer head, Jamey Heath in a venting letter he sent to his attorney about what Lively had just forced him to do.)

Effectively, Lively had stripped these guys down, bent them over, beaten them across the ass with a paddle, and was now insisting they say, “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another?”

Now, try telling me, with a straight face, that that isn’t a more interesting and newsworthy version of events than Twohey’s “In the end, Sony and Wayfarer went with Ms. Lively’s cut, and she got a producer credit.”

Either Meghan Twohey set out to intentionally make her piece more boring, or she didn’t try very hard to get the other side’s (much spicier) narrative included.

But my real point here, again, is why? Assuming that Lively and Reynolds made a call to Twohey, what did they think it would accomplish? And why bother with the CRD complaint at all? It’s not like they needed the money they’d get from winning or settling.

Opening fire on Justin Baldoni exposed them to all manner of counter litigation, not to mention increased press scrutiny. And they had to know he could produce receipts to defend himself because Lively had most of the receipts too. They were on her damn phone!

One possibility is that they never really intended to fight the CRD complaint in court. That leaking it to NYT was the whole point of the exercise. If so, it was an incredibly stupid (and potentially costly) move.

Claims made in legal filings are generally covered by what’s called litigation privilege. Essentially, if I tell people that you like using your stilettos to stomp on puppies, you can bust me for slandering you. But if I sue you for using your stilettos to stomp puppies, I’m covered, even if the charge is b******t.

Litigation privilege has limits though, and one of them is that it does not reliably cover republications of legal complaints. The exact rules vary from state to state, but there’s a case to be made that by leaking her CRD complaint to the New York Times (if indeed she did), Lively opened herself up to a libel suit in the event she couldn’t substantively defend her claims.

Maybe they thought Baldoni would go down without a fight, or maybe they thought his cancellation would be so swift and total that his ultimate reaction wouldn’t matter. But one wonders if Lively or Reynolds still think this was worth it. They already had what they wanted. Lively got the movie, got the credit, got her co-star frozen out, and could have just moved on. If they hadn’t needed to make sure Baldoni stayed on the mat, they probably could have gotten away with everything.

Conclusions?

Unless some mitigating details come to light - and it’s hard to even imagine what they could be at this point - Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds belong on the same moral plane as Ted Bundy, Queen Mary I, and the bad guy from the first Beethoven movie (ifkyk).

I’m broadly against the practice of “cancellation” except in cases where the IRL behavior is so horrendously inexcusable that I actually can’t take in the artwork anymore without its having been tainted by the artist. And I have extremely loose standards on this. My list is basically Bill Cosby, and….no actually, it’s just Bill Cosby. That’s really it. That’s where the bar is for me. That’s what you have to do in order to make me stop enjoying your otherwise enjoyable art.

At the risk of sounding callous, actor Michael Jace murdered his f*****g wife, and I can still watch his scenes in The Shield without really thinking about it. Picasso was a scumbag to women, Kevin Spacey was a scumbag to men, Lizzo was a scumbag to her staff, and Michael Vick was a scumbag to his pets. I know all this. And I have no trouble gazing at ‘The Old Guitarist,’ replaying The Usual Suspects, rocking out to ‘Juice,’ or watching Falcons highlights. Willingly depriving myself of these pleasures because they were offered to me by bad people always seemed like punishing me for something somebody else did.

But yikes. I just don’t know after this. It’s hard for me to imagine Deadpool or The Town hitting right after knowing what I now [think I] know.

Unless I turn out to be way wrong here - and I’ll say so if that happens - then seriously, f**k Blake Lively. And f**k Ryan Reynolds.

F*****g dicks, man.

Stay tuned, I guess.

Racism And Orange Juice (Seriously, Stay With Me). What if the left had promoted orange juice as aggressively as anti-racism?

When Donald Trump got reelected, I made what amounted to a series of New Year’s Resolutions - call them New Term’s Resolutions.