“What’s the score?” I asked one of the moms.

“Oh, we don’t keep score,” she told me, patently horrified. “It’s not about winning, it’s about teamwork and having fun.”

“Right,” I nodded. “Sure.”

“Thirteen-to-two!” my brother shouted the second the car doors were closed. “We kicked their butts!”

It turned out, the kids kept score all right—meticulously. So, too, did many of the parents, even though they’d have sprinted naked across the soccer field before admitting it.

That was a turning point of sorts. We spent the next forty years dismantling scoreboards, softening grades, soothing hurt feelings, and pretending effort and achievement were the same thing. We handed out Capri Suns and trophies to every kid who showed up to play. “As long as you try your hardest, you’re a winner,” we chirped. “Every child is extraordinary.” “Failing grades damage self-esteem.” “Gold stars all around!”

So it’s weird and shocking to see Harvard—a university that filters students through one of the most brutally competitive admissions processes in America—suddenly and violently trying to overcorrect. To address what the Ivy League staple is now calling “grade inflation,” they’re installing caps on scholastic excellence. Specifically, beginning in fall 2027, no more than 20% of students in any one class can earn an A—regardless of their actual performance.

HARVARD: “Yeah, we accidentally gave out too many A’s, so instead of grading accurately or fairly, we will now mathematically ensure some deserving people cannot receive one. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

Apparently we skipped directly from “everyone gets a trophy” to “actually only a fixed percentage of you are allowed to be excellent.” Hunger Games rules. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Harvard’s decision to cap collegiate gold stars at 20% came after a report revealed that more than 60% of grades awarded to students were A’s. Which, admittedly, is a little ridiculous. If everyone is getting an A, the grade itself stops meaning much. Fair enough.

But there are really only three possible explanations for the math here: Either Harvard is admitting an unusually large concentration of genuinely exceptional students, the coursework is no longer particularly challenging, or professors have become too lenient in their grading. Those are the only real options. But instead of addressing any of those highly complex possibilities directly, Harvard chose a fourth, spectacularly counterproductive strategy: withholding recognition.

One has to wonder: how will these precious and rare academic honors be distributed? If fifty students in a class of one hundred answer every exam question perfectly, does the professor just start drawing names out of a tote bag? Are A’s the new class guinea pigs, where kids have to take turns taking one home? Do students who got straight A’s in previous semesters have to give some back? Can you imagine seventy students storming every professor’s office after every grading period demanding to know why their objectively perfect work didn’t make the cut?

Yale—Harvard’s Ivy League arch-nemesis whose grade distribution looks suspiciously similar—is now considering adopting the grade cap as well. Not because it’s a swell idea or anything—but because if Harvard gets stingy with their top honors and Yale is still doling them out like Costco free samples, a Harvard A will invariably carry more weight than an A from Yale.

HARVARD: “We’re jumping off a bridge.”
YALE: “Dammit. Put on your monogrammed life vests, everyone.”

Here’s a crazy thought: If work deserves an A, give it an A. If it deserves a B, give it a B. If the fourth-year economics final could be aced by any elementary school kid who’s ever run a lemonade stand, maybe it’s time to raise the intellectual bar. When a student turns in a paper that’s got ChatGPT’s fingerprints all over it, perhaps do not reward it with a perfect score and a smiley face.

How is it that “make the coursework more challenging” or “quit handing out A’s like glow sticks at a rave” never entered the chat? Instead, Harvard has chosen the airline-upgrade model of scholastic achievement. “Congratulations! Your work was outstanding, truly. Unfortunately, this semester’s first place cabin is already full. Please enjoy this complimentary B+ and our sincere regards.”

The university insists this move will “strengthen the academic culture of Harvard.” Really? Because under this system, grades won’t reflect what any one student knows—they’ll reflect how many other people also knew it. And nothing says “healthy scholarly environment” quite like forcing hypercompetitive Ivy League overachievers to battle one another for a limited supply of academic validation.

Instead of encouraging curiosity, risk-taking, or genuine learning, the policy practically guarantees anxiety, paranoia, bickering, backstabbing, strategic course-shopping, and students treating their classmates like contestants standing between them and the final rose on The Bachelor.

Imagine applying this logic literally any other situation in the universe. A mother with five children announcing that hugs have gotten a little perfunctory, so only two kids per day will now receive affection regardless of circumstances or behavior. A track coach whose team consistently sweeps regional meets starts making star sprinters carry jugs of milk when they run to level the playing field. A restaurant decides ingredients have gotten too expensive so it starts charging every fourth table for water. The whole thing feels less like academic reform and more like Soviet bread rationing in a tweed blazer.

It’s an optics problem for the university, whose elitism has been its defining characteristic since before America was even a country. Because for nearly 400 years, just getting into Hahvahd meant you were exceptional. Now, suddenly, the school is essentially saying, “Not everyone can be special anymore, peasants.”

Unsurprisingly, students are furious. Some have launched petitions condemning the policy as “racist” (of course), arguing that grading caps will unfairly burden minority, first-generation, and low-income students. Which is a fascinating concern for Harvard of all places to suddenly prioritize—an institution that has functioned for centuries as an elite finishing school for wealthy legacy families whose names are already engraved on half the campus buildings.

Because for generations, Harvard has been a model of selective exclusion. Mediocre prep-school heirs coast through admissions while objectively smarter applicants get tossed aside because their grandfathers tragically failed to own a shipping empire or donate a library.

And maybe that’s the real irony here. Harvard has always marketed itself as a meritocratic bastion of elite intellectual excellence while quietly reserving enormous advantages for the well-connected, the well-funded, and the genetically adjacent to old money. The problem was never too much excellence. The problem was always how selectively the institution chose to define it.

Now, after decades of inflating grades until “superior” became basically meaningless, Harvard’s answer is not to restore rigor or reward genuine achievement honestly. It’s to artificially limit recognition itself—as though excellence is a luxury good that needs to remain scarce in order to feel prestigious. Which, come to think of it, may actually be the most Harvard solution imaginable.

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Today feels like an appropriate day to return. As we honor those who gave everything in service to this country, I hope your Memorial Day is filled with gratitude, chemtrail-free skies, and the people you love the very most.

A year ago, if you knew who Spencer Pratt was, chances are you spent the late 2000s watching The Hills while sipping a vodka Red Bull and possibly rocking an Ed Hardy hat. Today, the former reality-TV chaos agent somehow has folks from both sides of the political aisle vowing to fly, drive, skate, paddleboard, or crawl into Los Angeles to cast a mayoral vote on his behalf—legality be damned.

@alderfb008@Spencer Pratt Maryland 💛🖤❤️stands with you!!! #spencerpratt #mayoralrace #losangeleslife #spencerprattformayor

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Pratt has built a surprisingly enthusiastic fan club among fed-up Angelenos who are increasingly tired of homelessness, crime, government dysfunction, and paying $4,000 a month to live somewhere that smells like a port-a-potty behind a music festival taco truck. He talks passionately about restoring public safety, cleaning up the city, reducing government waste, reversing business flight, and bringing civility back to a place where CVS stores now lock up the Old Spice like it’s enriched uranium. His platform is less “burn it all down” and more “could we maybe stop stepping over fentanyl needles and human feces on the way to Whole Foods?”

And somehow, to much of the country’s shock, that message is landing.

In fact, Pratt outraised incumbent mayor Karen Bass by a modest ten to one margin during the latest fundraising period, pulling in roughly $2.7 million compared to Bass’s $283,000. Which is either a political earthquake or the single largest concentration of disaffected Erewhon shoppers ever assembled.

It’s also why the media has become increasingly desperate to frame Pratt as the “MAGA Star” being “steered by Republicans.” To be fair, Pratt is a registered Republican—information he volunteered, without being asked, on day two of his campaign. He also has repeatedly said there will be no R or D next to his name on the ballot and that the only party he represents is the “angry Angelenos” party. But modern political journalism increasingly operates under a simple rule: if you criticize progressive governance, congratulations, you’re MAGA now.

Which has created a hilarious media conundrum. Journalists desperately want Pratt to fit neatly into the “Trump-style reality TV narcissist” template, but he keeps making annoyingly sensible points about quality-of-life issues normal people actually care about. And it’s tough to portray someone as a dangerous populist demagogue when his central campaign thesis is that public spaces should be safe and elected officials should generally be held accountable for their actions.

Pratt is also, it must be said, extremely good at reading the room. His online presence is slick, funny, and disarmingly self-aware. It’s working. So much so that this weekend, social media exploded with posts from out-of-towners announcing plans to storm California to vote for Pratt because “what they gonna do… ID me?”

To be clear, voting illegally in any election is a crime. But that wasn’t really the joke. The joke was watching people who spent years insisting that any safeguard was discriminatory abruptly become extremely interested in explaining all the safeguards.

“You still have to register!” “They verify eligibility!” “There are systems in place!” “Voter fraud is a felony punishable by prison!”

Apparently there are rules after all.

California’s election structure makes the panic even funnier. Unlike many states, Los Angeles doesn’t hold separate primaries where each party selects its nominee. All candidates run together in the same primary regardless of party affiliation, and if one manages to clear 50% plus one vote in June, the race is simply over. No November showdown. No dramatic finale. Otherwise, the top two finishers advance to the general election regardless of party. Spencer Pratt doesn’t need to “win the Republican primary” because there literally isn’t one.

Which is also why the media is so invested in framing this as a Republican insurgency. If Pratt is MAGA, only MAGA shows up for him. If he’s an unaffiliated, exasperated Angeleno with a platform that makes sense, suddenly Democrats, independents, the politically homeless, and anyone else tired of dodging drugged-out zombies at preschool drop-off might not care what box he checked on his voter registration card.

All of which has accidentally forced half the country to rediscover how elections actually work. Because for years, Americans expressing concerns about election integrity have been treated like barefoot men screaming at pigeons in a Walmart parking lot. Voter ID? Racist. Signature verification? Dangerous. Cleaning voter rolls? Unfair! Authoritarian! Discriminatory! We’ve been repeatedly assured that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and bordering on impossible—so everyone should calm down and stop asking questions.

Thanks to Pratt somehow becoming a serious contender, suddenly everyone on Earth cares about the Los Angeles mayoral race, a contest most Americans normally ignore with the passion of a Terms of Service agreement. Los Angeles has become a symbol—which is a polite way of saying it has morphed into a cautionary tale that both sides are using for completely different purposes. Conservatives view LA as the physical manifestation of every blue-city failure they’ve been screaming about for a decade. Progressives see any criticism of Los Angeles as right-wing propaganda—which is a bold claim to make about a city whose residents are just trying not to get their catalytic converters stolen between Pilates classes.

Pratt may not be a politician, but he’s undeniably a catalyst. While his competition tries to gaslight the population into believing Los Angeles is thriving, Pratt is tapping into the increasingly radical position that people do, in fact, have eyeballs. We’re talking about a city that managed to let thousands of homes burn down during a drought nobody addressed, while its mayor was on vacation in Ghana amid a homelessness crisis so visible it’s become a tourist attraction and a crime wave polite enough to hit every zip code.

Pratt sees what we all see—and he actually has the cojones to say it out loud. California is a circus. Los Angeles is the clown smoking behind the tent. And Spencer Pratt is just a guy whose house was reduced to an insurance claim, whose city failed him, and who responded the way Americans used to respond when something was broken: by deciding to fix it himself.

“Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles,” Pratt has said. He’s not wrong.

Whether he wins or loses, he got America to care about Los Angeles. And frankly, that’s more than any mayor of that city has ever managed.

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I'd LOVE a coffee, thanks!

I was raised in an era whose weight-management mantra was “calories in, calories out.” If you ate more than you burned, you got fat. If you burned off more than you ate, you got skinny. This was as simple as it was frustrating and tiresome, because eating was fun, exercising wasn’t, and thin was in. But we did what we had to do.

Fortunately, in the late ‘80s, scientists made a delightful discovery: food didn’t make you fat; Fat Made You Fat™. How had we not known this? Of course it did—it made perfect sense! It was right there in the name. All you had to do was avoid dietary fat and—boom!—move over, Kate Moss.

Back when calories made you fat, we had to actually monitor how much food we put in our pieholes. But with this exciting new FMYF™ information, we could simply focus on cutting out grease-laden goodies. You know, like steak and butter and egg yolks and salads drizzled with oily Italian dressing and all the foods that make life worth living (and also regulate appetite, maintain healthy hormone levels, support brain function, and build cell membranes, but whatever). As long as we avoided THOSE, there was no way we could blow up.

Pork chops and sauteed spinach—so fatty!—were replaced with heaping bowls of pasta drowning in tomato paste and sprinkled with low-fat, flavorless cardboard cheese shavings. Breakfast was a bagel the size of a steering wheel slathered in fat-free cream cheese that tasted like Elmer’s glue—but hey, zero fat! Why not make yourself two? Lunch could be a baked potato big enough to need its own zip code buried under a mountain of fat-free sour cream and “chili” made from ketchup and ground turkey sadness.

Of course, none of this was even mildly tasty or satisfying. Spoiler alert: when you outlaw oil, you strip all of the joy out of eating. But the FMYF™ people didn’t want us to be sad, so they made treats.

So. Many. Treats.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a big snacker. For most of my adult life I’ve also been pretty consistently committed to wearing the same size jeans until the day I die. But all of a sudden, snacks didn’t even count—as long as they were fat-free. I hadn’t eaten an Oreo in years, but there I was, deprived of any real food and overcompensating by inhaling SnackWell’s cookies and Healthy Choice ice cream and Lay’s Wow! chips (which warned right on the bag “May cause anal leakage” and we ate them anyway), proudly mistaking digestive distress for discipline. Sure, I might crap my pants, but I could eat an entire trough! With no guilt!

I wasn’t alone. When Joe American learned that fat was the enemy, he found solace in sugar’s loving arms. He doubled his carbs and calories, added dessert for good measure—as long as it was completely joy-free—and called it science. Guess what happened?

HE GOT EVEN FATTER.

It turned out calories still counted.

Having lived through this trainwreck (as well as the next wave of Fat Makes You Skinny As Long As You Never Even Look At Another Carb™), you can imagine why I felt a vague sense of PTSD yesterday when I stumbled across this news story:

Somewhere in a sleek glass conference room, PepsiCo executives apparently had a panicked meeting about slumping sales and realized that thanks to RFK Jr., people were actually talking about junk food—and not in a good way. So the maker of fan favorites like Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, Cheetos, Pepsi, Gatorade, and MTN DEW (am I the only one who didn’t even know about the 2008 rebrand?) decided to ride the more-natural, protein-obsessed consumer wave. The plan? Axe artificial dyes, focus on adding fiber and the trendiest macro, and drizzle some heart-healthy olive and avocado oils into their heroically processed, high-calorie, nutritionally void snack and beverage lineup.

I know, it’s what we wanted, right? This is MAHA in action! Except… does anyone really think marginally less-crappy crap is the key to ending chronic disease? I worry that suddenly just because people can pronounce the ingredients, they’ll start stockpiling snacks like pandemic toilet paper. Sure, taking a little junk out of the junk we eat isn’t a horrible idea. Some protein in your bottled Starbucks coffee might be better than none. But you can already hear the national rationalization forming:

“Don’t worry, babe—they’re natural Doritos. They count as vegetables now.”

PepsiCo’s CEO Ramon Laguarta says the company is working “with a real sense of urgency” to capture “disproportionately growing” market segments. Translation: people who’ve started reading labels and realizing that their munchies shouldn’t be more flammable than hairspray.

A big part of the “refresh,” it turns out, is inspired by the Ozempic generation. PepsiCo’s new Propel Clear Protein line was literally designed in response to the “soaring popularity” of weight-loss drugs, which come with unfun side effects like muscle loss and digestive issues (not to mention pancreatitis, hypoglycemia, thyroid tumors, and cancer—but PepsiCo doesn’t have a sports drink solution for those yet). Each bottle of Propel promises protein for melting muscles, fiber for confused intestines, and electrolytes for the parched will to live. It’s genius in that deeply dystopian way only modern marketing can pull off: we broke your metabolism, but we made a partial fix! Would you prefer watermelon mint or peach ginger?

Then there’s the new “NKD” (yes, really) line of Doritos and Cheetos, stripped of artificial dyes and flavors. Sounds revolutionary, right? More MAHA winning!

Let’s consider: “Regular” Doritos are made with corn, vegetable oil (sunflower, canola, and/or corn oil), maltodextrin (from corn), salt, cheddar cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), whey, monosodium glutamate, buttermilk, Romano cheese (part-skim cow’s milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), whey protein concentrate, onion powder, corn flour, natural and artificial flavor, dextrose, tomato powder, lactose, spices, artificial color (Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Red 40), lactic acid, citric acid, sugar, garlic powder, skim milk, red and green bell pepper powder, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, potassium chloride, and sodium caseinate.

See those seven words in bold? That’s what NKD is taking out. The other 84 ingredient-words? Those stay. And yet, I have a feeling folks will be greedily inhaling family-sized bags of “clean” Doritos and feeling downright virtuous about it. Somewhere, an organic kale chip is weeping.

Alas, when your baseline is fluorescent corn dust, even “faintly less toxic” counts as innovation. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in on MAHA. I know that change happens slowly. A little progress is better than none. If PepsiCo wants to swap paprika and turmeric for the Red 40 in my Flamin’ Hot Cheetos—a once a year road trip indulgence at most—I won’t even be mad. But let’s not pretend this is a wellness revolution in the making. It’s a billion-dollar snack empire trying to convince investors (and consumers) that modestly upgraded garbage is basically bok choy.

So yes, PepsiCo, congrats on taking the antifreeze out of our chips. Sincerely. But maybe hold off on the victory lap for a minute. Because if “cleaner junk” becomes code for “bottomless bowl,” we’re going to end up right back where we started—on the couch, orange-fingered, wondering why our pants won’t button and Googling how long does it take for Ozempic to kick in.

Am I wrong? I know you’ll LMK in the comments. (And please hit the ❤️ if you enjoyed this post.)

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“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been [*checks calendar*] thirty-eight years since my last confession.”

I lied to you guys.

Before I tell you how and why, I have two quick stories I want to share from my childhood.

I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through high school. In first grade, we received the sacrament of Holy Communion, and in second grade, it was First Confession. The nuns had prepped us for what the latter would look like (“You’ll go into the confessional and tell Father Sean all the awful things you’ve done—he’ll be behind a screen so it won’t even be all that embarrassing—and then he’ll tell you what prayers to say for your penance.”) so I was only modestly nervous. Plus I’d gotten a shiny new cross necklace for the occasion, because nothing says our God is a loving, forgiving God like a 10-karat gold-plated accessory from JCPenney.

We lined up in the back of the church and one by one, entered the tiny confessional when the last person came out. When my turn came, I had my sins all queued up and ready to go.

Me: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first Confession.”

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to self]: Okey-doke. I guess I just spill it then.

Me [to the screen]: “I was mean to my sister, I lied about eating a snack before dinner, and I talked back to my mom.”

Narrator: Those would be her go-to confessions for the next eleven years.

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to self]: Didn’t the nuns say he was supposed to say something back? Did I do it wrong? Were my sins so bad that I shocked or angered him into silence? WHAT WERE MY CLASSMATES CONFESSING?

Me [to the screen, grasping here]: “So, yeah, like, I’m really sorry and everything.”

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to the screen]: “I guess I’ll just go say a bunch of prayers?”

Father Sean: [silence]

Me [to self, leaving confessional in confused shame]: This cannot be good.

LITERALLY ALL OF MY FRIENDS BACK IN THE PEW: “Well, what’d ya get? Two Our Fathers and a Hail Mary? No way, I got FOUR Our Fathers, two Hail Mary’s and a Glory Be to the Father!”

Me [to self]: I’m definitely going to hell.

I’m honestly not sure if it would be days or years before I realized that there were confessionals on either side of Father Sean, and that he’d merely been listening to some other kid’s transgressions while I was spewing mine to a wall. Either way, the wait-your-turn part might have been good information for a seven-year-old reconciliation rookie to have in advance.

The other story isn’t so much a story as evidence that I can overthink things in two languages.

In that same Catholic school, mass was still sometimes spoken in Latin (to this day I can recite the Pater Noster and Ave Maria flawlessly *I’m really fun after a few margaritas*). I’d somehow gotten it stuck in my mildly-OCD head that the sign of the cross was essentially like hitting the speakerphone button on a phone. Also, it was more official if you said it extra reverently in Latin.

In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen meant “Hey God, I’m about to talk to you about some really important, Godly things and when I’m done, I’ll ‘hang up’ with a nice In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen, so you’ll know you can stop listening.”

I was genuinely concerned about God having to juggle billions of prayers at once—while also sifting them out from the rest of the world’s mental chatter. I figured the LEAST I could do was give him that little heads up when I wanted his attention.

One day I had a paralyzing thought: What if I had forgotten to hang up just one time? That would mean my every sinful thought was going directly to the Almighty, and then when I *thought* I was ringing him up to express my gratitude (and probably ask for a baby sister or a kitten or a Sony Walkman, let’s be honest), I was actually, accidentally hanging up and God wasn’t hearing a word of it.

I worried about that a lot. It probably made me a better person, frankly, on account of the fact that I was constantly terrified I had mentally butt-dialed our Lord and Savior.

All of that is just to say I am not in the habit of lying.

Anyway, back when I started this stack, I declared that my intention was to keep it free for everyone, always. I wanted (and still want!) my words to reach as many people as possible. Originally, I was posting maybe a stack a week. Eventually it was a solid, predictable two, and for more than a year, it was thrice-a-week. For the last several months—even before my funemployment kicked in—I have consistently posted five days a week.

Here’s the thing: even when it was a lowly one or two, people pledged their money to support me, despite the fact that they weren’t getting anything special or different than the folks who hadn’t forked over a single skinny nickel.

That fact will never not blow my mind.

(It’s my stack. I’m allowed to say never-not.)

Now that I’m officially funemployed, I basically have two choices: turn this substack into a viable source of income, or go out and get a real job.

I’m praying I can make #1 work.

In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen.

So here’s my plan: Starting next week, I am going to put one post a week behind a paywall—yes, in the hope that FOMO will nudge more people to support me. Just one. I figure nonpaying subscribers can’t really complain about getting eighty percent of what I put out for free, and I *do* like the idea of paid subs being rewarded with some bonus material. (Although admittedly, the comments section won’t be as fun.) Also, I promise I won’t bury the paywall mid-stack; it’ll be right up front so hopefully you’ll never feel bait-and-switched.

I never wanted to do this—and I still don’t. I’m just going Gestalt on myself and giving myself the advice I’d give my own daughter: “You work hard. It’s okay to ask for support when you need it. Your efforts are valuable. The people who judge don’t matter and the people who matter won’t judge. You’re not for everyone—and that’s okay.”

You’re welcome to tell me—honestly—how you feel about this in the comments. And if you have any other/better suggestions, I’m all ears.

P.S. A quick reminder that annual subscribers get a free signed book (don’t forget to email me at jenna(at)jennamccarthy(dot)com with your mailing address and who you’d like it personalized to) and all subs get the opportunity to be featured in my Subscriber Spotlight. Also if you’re one of the generous patrons who’ve mailed me a check in lieu of paying through the platform, pretty-please email me a reminder so I can mark you as a full-access subscriber. Again, a million actual thanks for your support. XOXO

P.P.S. Yesterday, I asked for resources and prayers for one of my beloved subscribers. Your kindness and generosity, once again, brought me to my literal knees. I honestly don’t know what I did to deserve the followers I have, but I pray I never stop doing it. In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti, Amen.

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One-time tips are great, too!

My very first job was at a “healthy” fast-food joint in Florida called D’Lites in the mid 1980s. The “healthy” part was the twenty-foot salad bar, brimming with “nutritious” options like imitation bacon bits, sunflower seeds rolled in sugar, marshmallow ambrosia, reduced-fat cheese, and croutons the size of Rubik’s cubes.

Salad bar duty was the literal worst. In addition to having to constantly refill a hundred different compartments, the management at D’Lites was fanatical about the lettuce. It was the centerpiece of the whole salad station; a giant plastic canoe filled with wilted iceberg chunks that Store Rules insisted must be piled precisely as high as the canoe was deep.

To achieve this noble goal, once an hour or so, you’d have to lug that giant tub to the walk-in refrigerator, which housed several industrial-sized trashcans filled with replacement lettuce floating in frigid water. (No, the bins were not lined with trash bags; I assume they were purchased expressly for this purpose and weren’t previously used for actual refuse, but I never asked.) Attached to each trashcan was a metal colander on a chain—ostensibly so no one would abscond with it?—that was just long enough for the colander to sit on the floor of the refrigerator when it wasn’t in use.

I wish I was making that part up. Or any of it, really.

This was the process: Remove the lid of any random trashcan, dump the remaining contents of the canoe into the watery-lettuce mix (did you think they made us toss the uneaten half in the trash-trash? Hahaha you’re cute), and then—after pushing your sleeves up into your armpits—bend over and use both of your naked arms to swish that whole mess around really good, making sure you shoved at least half of the old stuff toward the bottom for a solid old/new mix. Of course, I never once saw them completely empty those bins and start over with farm-fresh greenery, so “old/new” is relative here.

Finally, you’d use the colander—the one resting on the floor by your feet—to scoop out a “fresh” new batch of piled-high lettuce, which you would proudly return to its place of glory on the buffet of bad decisions.

(I have told this story dozens of times and the response is always “You’re lying!” but I pinky-promise you I am not.)

I was fifteen and needed money. I did what I was told. I do not think I suffer any lingering PTSD over the experience. And yes, I still ate there.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m less-than-sympathetic to a newly identified workplace woe called quiet cracking. This, gentle readers, is not the same thing as “quiet quitting,” which was popularized during the pandemic and is generally described as “doing just enough to not get fired.” No, this is a new iteration of employee dissatisfaction marked by “a subtle, often invisible erosion of morale and motivation.”

URGENT HR MEMO: “Your employees are miserable—and you don’t even know it!”

Even when I entered the real workforce in the early 1990s, there was no such thing as “quiet cracking.” In fact, there was no such thing as quiet anything. If you were unhappy in your job, you either quit in a blaze of glory, got yourself fired for telling your boss to shove it, or drank half a pot of Maxwell House, lit a Marlboro in the break room, and powered through until you died of natural causes at 48.

That was it. Those were the options.

If you think I’m exaggerating, keep in mind this was an era when your boss could sidle up to you at the Xerox machine, give you a solid smack on the ass, and say, “Good hustle out there, kid.” That counted as positive reinforcement. HR was a lady named Carol who reminded you to sign your timesheet and occasionally brought donuts to staff meetings. You could have an actual mental breakdown at your desk, and you’d be lucky if one of your coworkers didn’t use the time to poach your sack lunch from the communal refrigerator.

But I’m supposed to care that the woke industrial complex is being plagued by an epidemic of muffled misery (which, as far as I can tell, is when you continue showing up for your shift even though you’d rather be surfing)? I thought that was called work.

Regular readers can probably guess my theory about what’s driving this so-called phenomenon; namely, that it’s yet another predictable result of a generation raised on “everyone gets a trophy,” where showing up to soccer practice and picking dandelions on the sidelines earned you the same medal as the kid who scored eight goals. Now that those kids are grown, they’re realizing the workplace doesn’t hand out ribbons for doing the job you were hired to do, and it’s a full-blown existential crisis.

Also to blame, in my rarely demure or tentative opinion, is the gentle parenting approach popular for the last few decades—the one that taught kids that their every emotional fluctuation was worthy of a family summit, three hours of active listening, and a feelings chart. Fast-forward to adulthood, and the first time a manager fails to praise a formerly coddled kid’s “effort” in rebooting the office router, they’re Googling “early retirement” and silently splintering like a dollar-store popsicle stick.

Back in my day, your parents prepared you for the working world by telling you that you looked fat in those jeans and making you mow the lawn in August. Do you think I felt entitled to a meltdown in the D’Lites walk-in fridge because I was making $3.35 an hour to get neck deep in a trashcan full of lettuce water? No. I churned that nasty garden slop around, scooped it up with the floor-colander like the guy paying me told me to do, and presented it unflinchingly to the public. I probably don’t need to mention that I never even got a trophy for surviving that salmonella obstacle course.

Obviously some jobs are worse than others, and I’m certainly not suggesting that quietly suffering actual workplace abuse is admirable. But more often than not, a position is just a paycheck. You give up your time and effort and someone else hands you money in exchange. It’s a transaction, not a self-esteem retreat. And unless your boss is also your life coach, it’s not her duty to validate your mood swings or curate your sense of purpose.

Call me a bitter boomer, but here’s how I see it: we’ve replaced scooping trashcan lettuce with singing about organic spring mix, and now nobody’s tough enough to top off the canoe. Give today’s workforce a few shifts in that fridge and I bet they’d either stop “quietly cracking” or start loudly quitting in under 24 hours.

Either way, problem solved.

Tell me about your worst employment experience in the comments—and feel free to share your best advice for the silently suffering workforce out there.

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In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and ordering alphabet agencies to help states remove ineligible voters from election databases. This week, the Associated Press reported—with the solemn gravity normally reserved for incoming asteroids—that at least 67 million election records have already been run through federal registries in an effort to identify noncitizens and deceased voters before the midterms. Tens of thousands were flagged for further review. Yes, humanity mapped the human genome before we figured out how to cross-reference voter rolls with obituaries.

The media’s response, hilariously, is essentially: “Okay fine, maybe there are hundreds of thousands of dead voters on the books, but statistically speaking that’s only a tiny percentage.” Which is comforting right up until you remember that modern American elections are now routinely decided by margins approximately equivalent to the number of people waiting in line at a Buc-ee’s restroom.

Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020 by about 10,000 votes. Georgia by fewer than 12,000. Wisconsin by around 20,000. Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by exactly 10,704. The 2000 presidential election was effectively decided by 537 ballots and one deeply exhausted Supreme Court. So yes, technically speaking, 384,000 aggressively civic cadavers scattered across the country may represent “less than 1%” of registrations. And only a tiny percentage of the Titanic was damaged when it nicked that iceberg.

“But something about fascist Orange Man destroying democracy,” cry Democrats, activist groups, and civil-rights coalitions, who are horrified that eligible citizens could accidentally get swept up in the process. They're now in federal court demanding that Trump's “power grab” be blocked because—among other terrifying possibilities—states could soon receive lists of voting-age citizens from Social Security and Homeland Security databases to help verify eligibility. A judge has already suggested it’s not clear anyone is being “irreparably harmed” by the administration… compiling data it already has.

To be fair, clerical screwups are possible. Government record systems are held together with duct tape, expired passwords, and a 1997 Dell desktop running Windows XP somewhere beneath the Pentagon. Mistakes are inevitable. Just probably not in the hundreds of thousands.

According to these opponents, enforcement would create “maximum confusion,” become a “nightmare for election officials,” and “erode confidence in elections.” Call me old-fashioned, but I would have guessed that discovering thousands of dead people and enthusiastic out-of-town guests making their presidential preference known every four years would be the thing that might erode confidence in elections.

ELECTION OFFICIAL 1: We found duplicate registrations, fake addresses, names that don’t match any U.S. citizen database, 114 people who died during Obama’s second term, and a family of 77 living inside a Buffalo Wild Wings in Dayton.

ELECTION OFFICIAL 2: I don’t see how traumatizing election workers like this helps anyone.

One lawyer warned the court that voters could be harmed if they are mistakenly removed and don’t discover the error in time to cast a ballot. I’ll point out here that the midterms are six months away. If the government accidentally categorizes you as a corpse sometime between now and November, I feel reasonably confident you’ll have enough time to upload a utility bill and gently clarify that you remain among the living.

Contrary to what your MSNBC-addicted aunt may believe, conservatives are not claiming hordes of zombies are shuffling into polling stations demanding Marlboro Lights and absentee ballots. The issue is less Beetlejuice and more somebody forgot to—or opted not to—update the spreadsheet. Inaccurate citizen archives can be exploited by political operatives, ballot harvesters, dishonest relatives, or anyone else who discovers that Grandma has maintained a surprisingly active voting record despite having spent the last fifteen years in a mausoleum.

This is not a remotely controversial concept in any other area of life. Banks remove dead customers from active accounts. The Social Security Administration (ostensibly—unless there’s massive fraud, ahem) removes dead recipients from benefit rolls. Insurance companies become extremely interested in whether you’re still alive the moment money is involved. But asking election officials to periodically verify that registered voters are biologically functional citizens has somehow become a harbinger of martial law.

The funniest part is that the people insisting voter-roll maintenance is dangerous authoritarian overreach are simultaneously assuring us that American elections are more secure than Fort Knox. That’s sort of like a liquor store insisting carding customers destroys confidence in alcohol sales.

One Texan quoted in the AP story—a naturalized citizen who’d been voting for years—was temporarily flagged because his passport had expired while officials were verifying his status. Sure, frustrating. But that’s not evidence that voter verification is dangerous or inherently flawed. It’s evidence that Washington—the same bureaucracy that oversees our DMVs and designs our tax returns—cannot successfully merge databases without accidentally declaring at least a few people dead.

Is anyone actually surprised by this?

The more serious concern—and Jenna’s Side readers already recognize that there is one—isn’t about dead or illegal voters at all. It’s about what a fully integrated national voter-verification database looks like in ten years, under whoever happens to be running the show then. A government that can confirm you’re alive and eligible to participate in elections is also a government that knows exactly who voted, when, where, and for whom. That infrastructure doesn’t expire when an administration does. It’s inherited. And the people who build these systems rarely end up operating them for long.

Of course, worrying about the feds knowing whether you’re alive is almost quaint. They also know your income, your address, your prescription history, your travel patterns, your Spotify favorites, and precisely how many times you watched the same episode of The Office this year. The Social Security Administration, the IRS, the DMV, your health insurance company, your phone, and at least fourteen apps you gave location access to in 2019 and forgot about have been quietly assembling a fairly complete portrait of your existence for years.

Allowing election officials to confirm that all voters still possess a pulse probably won’t be the precise moment America tumbles into a dystopian surveillance hellscape. That’s what the kill switches are for.

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A note to new readers and faithful regulars: Earlier this month, my family said goodbye to my wonderful, one-of-a-kind father-in-law. Today we fly to California to celebrate his long and enviable life. I’ll be recycling a few older posts for the rest of the week; hopefully at least one is new-to-you. I appreciate your patience and prayers as we gather to grieve and prepare to navigate this next chapter.

That collective ennui is unfortunate for the World Hysteria Organization, because this weekend our friends at the WHO declared the latest Ebola outbreak in central Africa a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), which is Geneva-speak for “it’s time for cable news to dust off the doomsday ticker and wheel out the giant touchscreen maps again.”

I know. We haven’t even taken our hantavirus decorations down yet and already we’re doing Ebola. Here’s the full scope of the current crisis: As of yesterday, authorities had recorded 8 laboratory-confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases, and 80 deaths. (Don’t ask me how you can have 80 deaths with only 8 confirmed cases. I’m not a scientist or a mathematician, okay?)

Out of a global population of roughly 8.3 billion people, we’re talking about the equivalent of roughly four drops of water in an Olympic swimming pool. At this point, statistically speaking, a vending machine remains a more realistic threat to your personal safety than Ebola.

Nevertheless, it’s a PHEIC. Please panic accordingly.

It’s hard to believe that it was less than two weeks ago that the media nearly sprained something trying to convince Americans that hantavirus was the next civilization-ending nightmare. Fortunately, the WHO calmly clarified at the time that hantavirus was not a global emergency. See? This is how you know you can trust these people. They don’t call everything a global emergency. Just the outbreaks involving international coordination, emergency declarations, cross-border spread, “suspected cases” at least in the triple digits, and breathless dispatches beginning with “there is no approved vaccine for this species of Ebola.”

And there it is. No approved vaccine.

That line appeared right in The New York Times’ subhead, because catastrophe reporting now operates like the opening scene of Contagion. Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to hear “novel outbreak” and immediately wonder whether we’re headed toward “wash your hands and avoid sneezy people” or “download the government app and stand six feet apart inside Costco.”

To be fair, Ebola is genuinely terrifying. Unlike Covid—which many people experienced as a weird flu that robbed their ability to distinguish Coke from Pepsi—Ebola’s symptom list reads like a medieval curse: violent vomiting, internal hemorrhaging, multi-organ failure, loss of consciousness, and bleeding from the nose, gums, mouth, and nether regions, to name a few. The fatality rate ranges from 25 to 90%, depending on the strain. Think Old Testament plague meets Pulp Fiction.

The current outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola—and no, I am not making that up—for which there is allegedly no treatment. (Except see here and below.) That particular detail was repeated throughout coverage with the subtlety of a guy pacing outside your window whispering, “Just so you know, the locks on your doors don’t actually work.”

Conveniently, serendipitously, and in no way suspiciously, just four months ago Bill Gates’ vaccine research organization CEPI handed Moderna and Oxford $26.7 million to develop an mRNA vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain specifically. (I’ll add here that in all of history, dating back to the beginning of recorded time, there have been a grand total of [*checks notes*] 104 confirmed cases of the Bundibugyo species in the entire world. Not a typo. One hundred and four.) Gates is also, since America’s exit, the WHO’s single largest funder. File that info wherever you’d like.

So if there’s no vaccine… and no approved treatment… I guess the only option left is locking everyone inside again. You know, to prevent the spread. So conscientious. So responsible.

Because this is the decade’s second scamdemic rodeo, it took approximately eleven minutes for internet sleuths to rediscover that the U.S. government—specifically the Department of Health and Human Services—has actually spent years filing patents on none other than the Bundibugyo species, along with the methods to detect and treat it. It’s comforting to know that while we’re supposed to be out here worrying about our internal organs imploding, the NIH is busy ensuring that no one else is allowed to develop a cure without cutting them a royalty check.

Raise your hand if you’re shocked.

The confusing thing is that the WHO insists this outbreak does not meet the criteria for a pandemic emergency, which is the highest level of alert (and, you’ll recall, the one they assigned to the-flu-that-was-Covid). Officials are simultaneously advising against border closures while also warning of “significant uncertainties” regarding the true number of infected people and the geographic reach. Cases have popped up in multiple African cities and health authorities are openly acknowledging that they frankly have no idea of the true scope of the outbreak.

Which is a totally normal and reassuring set of statements to make simultaneously.

“We’re not at DEFCON 1-level threat but also we have no idea how many people have it or where it is and we are not actively trying to contain it.” It’s the disease-management equivalent of “There may or may not be a snake that may or may not be deadly under your bed but definitely don’t check.”

Here’s the actual problem (spoiler: it’s not Ebola): Somewhere between “two weeks to flatten the curve” and “masks don’t work, wait, actually they do, wait, actually the cloth ones don’t but we’d like you to wear one anyway while seated at a restaurant between bites,” the wheels fell off. We trained an entire population to treat pathogen-control guidance the way most people treat the terms and conditions on a software update—something to scroll past on the way to the cute kitten videos.

So here we are, staring down a genuinely frightening virus with a truly alarming symptom list and disturbingly uncertain case counts that’s been declared an official planetary emergency. And a significant portion of the population’s first instinct is I could be bleeding from my rectum and I still wouldn’t trust the WHO to tell me which end it was coming from.

It’s worth noting that Ebola is not airborne. You cannot get it from casual contact or from a visibly healthy stranger. It is transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids—blood, vomit, sweat, saliva—of someone who is actively symptomatic. (The one notable exception: semen, in which the virus can apparently survive for a year or longer after full recovery. So if you are considering intimate relations with a recent Ebola survivor, perhaps lead with some questions. This has been your Jenna’s Side public health bulletin of the week.)

In other words, you’d essentially have to enjoy (?) prolonged, intimate contact with someone in the middle of actively liquefying—which, given the symptom list, is not a situation most people are going to accidentally stumble into.

Here’s the thing about living on Earth: it has always been trying to kill us. Flesh-eating bacteria. Venomous spiders. Lightning strikes. Falling coconuts. Piranhas. Tsunamis and sinkholes and salmonella. Chainsaws. Unrefrigerated potato salad at the company picnic. The list of legitimate threats to our continued existence is long, varied, and largely indifferent to our feelings about it.

C.S. Lewis, writing in 1948 about the dawn of the nuclear revolution, asked: “How are we to live in an atomic age?” His answer was essentially: the same way we lived before it (which was not cowering beneath beds thinking about bombs). Because a scarier explosive didn’t change the fundamental human condition—it just gave us a new, more dramatic thing to catastrophize about.

And we already have vending machines.

Once again, I couldn’t decide on a single poll. Be sure to vote in both!

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Apparently, we fought the British crown for independence so we could one day govern ourselves through an elaborate network of increasingly specialized… czars. We’ve had energy czars, drug czars, border czars, COVID czars, and at least one car czar during the Obama administration—which was a real job title that real Americans said out loud with straight faces. The Czar Industrial Complex™ has been quietly expanding for decades, and nobody seemed to notice or mind, because at least it sounded like someone was in charge of something.

Now, the federal government has appointed a “fraud czar” to investigate the misuse of funds inside the federal government, which feels less like public policy and more like putting the seagulls in charge of solving the mystery of missing french fries at the beach.

After being appointed our nation’s very first fraud czar, Vice President JD Vance announced this week that the Trump administration is suspending $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California over what officials describe as questionable expenditures, suspicious billing patterns, and widespread bureaucratic monkey business. Minnesota got the same treatment earlier this year.

All fifty states are now being warned that if they fail to “aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud,” the federal government will freeze funding to the very anti-fraud units created to investigate Medicaid fraud. Which is basically the federal version of, “If you’re not going to babysit the kids, I’m not paying you to babysit the kids.” Outrageous it is not.

To be clear, this is not a task force assembled to investigate fraud. Those already exist in every state. This is a task force assembled to investigate the task forces that exist to investigate fraud. In other words: new watchdogs will be watching the old watchdogs who have been sitting around watching the fraud happen. We have officially reached peak administrative state.

“No amount of fraud is too big or too small,” Vance said. “If you’re defrauding the taxpayers, you ought to go to prison. And anybody that’s helping you ought to go to prison, too.”

According to the administration, California alone needs to explain roughly $630 million in billing discrepancies, $500 million in home healthcare services, and $200 million in expenditures for undocumented immigrants. California officials say they’re being targeted for political reasons—which may be true. It is also true that asking a giant bureaucracy where enormous piles of taxpayer money went is not, historically, an act of tyranny.

Vance’s partner in this aggressive endeavor is Dr. Mehmet Oz—yes, the former daytime TV host who spent the better part of the 2000s explaining the spiritual benefits of green tea to suburban moms and peddling “magic” weight-loss supplements. As the current Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Oz is now knee-deep in coding irregularities and taxpayer-funded confusion rather than miracle metabolism boosters, proving once again that America is a land of endless opportunity.

According to the Great and Powerful Oz, one-third of all end-of-life centers in the entire country are in Los Angeles—think about just that for a second—and a full half of those are complete fakes. Money-sucking fronts. Elaborate shams. Ghost operations with zero actual patients and not a single hour of care being administered. Which is a horrible accusation to make against the Quality Hotspice Center, frankly, so I hope he has receipts.

Here’s the part I find genuinely fascinating: Nobody heard “Medicaid fraud crackdown” and gasped. There was no national moment of disbelief that someone had implied inefficiency inside a sprawling federal healthcare maze involving trillions of dollars, thousands of contractors, overlapping agencies, pharmaceutical incentives, billing codes, private providers, middlemen, and enough paperwork to bury a horse.

Americans hear “fraud in government healthcare programs” the same way medieval peasants heard “rats in the grain supply.” I mean, whaddayagonnado? Of course there’s fraud! Everyone already assumed there was fraud. The only surprising part is that it took a 23-year-old YouTuber and a television doctor to expose it because the agencies specifically created and funded to find it apparently had other things going on.

This is how every massive government system eventually evolves. First comes the program. Then the inefficiencies. Then the loopholes. Then the fraud. Then the oversight committees. Then the anti-fraud task forces. Then the analytics divisions monitoring the task forces monitoring the fraud. Then the czar. Then, eventually, cable news panels debating whether investigating obvious waste constitutes fascism.

The fact that a state can “lose” half a billion dollars in a digital economy is the real punchline. Your bank knows exactly how much you spent on Amazon this month to the literal cent, yet the federal government—with access to the same digital infrastructure—can’t find hundreds of millions in California. That’s not incompetence; it’s what happens when you let a system become the bureaucratic equivalent of a fat, drunk uncle in diapers—too bloated to manage, too messy to confront, and too old to care.

The truly staggering thing is not the waste itself. Again: expected. It’s the sheer number of people required to monitor, scrutinize, supervise, regulate, investigate, and explain the waste generated by other people tasked with monitoring, scrutinizing, supervising, regulating, and explaining things. At some point you’re not running a government program anymore. You’re running a government program that’s staffing the production company that’s making a documentary about running the government program.

Meanwhile ordinary Americans are just standing in CVS trying to figure out why a tube of toothpaste now requires a retinal scan and a payment plan.

My favorite part of this entire story is picturing someone, somewhere in Washington, finally looking around at the flaming administrative dumpster fire America has spent half a century stoking and concluding:

“You know what this needs? A czar.”

At this very moment, a taxpayer-funded committee is probably hard at work assembling a Federal Task Force to Oversee the Office of Fraud-Oversight Oversight Accountability.

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P.S. Hotspice was an intentional typo. A joke. If anyone calls that out unironically, I reserve the right to manually unsubscribe you from my list.

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“My Life Is Not Affordable,” the headline pouted. “No One Cares.”

It actually said that: No One Cares. Apparently this is what happens when participation-trophy kids grow up and get journalism degrees.

Call me cynical, but I suspect this was typed on a $1,200 iPhone 17 Pro in between sips of cold foam through a reusable straw thick enough to siphon gasoline.

“About one-third of Americans say they worry all or most of the time that their income won’t be enough to meet their expenses, with another 42% saying they worry about that at least some of the time,” CNN reported.

“Most say they cannot comfortably afford extras like a nice dinner out or a vacation, and only about a third feel they can comfortably afford an emergency expense of $1,000 or to save money for the future.”

“It’s more expensive to exist,” one respondent lamented. Another said, “You’re just staying afloat instead of getting ahead.” Yet another declared, “It should not be like this.” These negative feelings about the economy, CNN gravely explained, have major political implications for the midterms.

The implications, obviously, are that Americans are miserable, they blame Trump for it, and Democrats would very much like everyone to keep feeling that way through November.

No one would deny that groceries are expensive. Housing is insane. Insurance premiums now resemble ransom demands written by organized crime syndicates. Wages have not kept pace with healthcare, education, or having a roof over your head. Filling up your gas tank feels like paying tuition. A quick Target run somehow costs $173 even if you popped in intending to buy nothing but toothpaste and paper towels. This part is as real as a speeding ticket.

But I would also like to gently submit for consideration that modern Americans may have quietly expanded the definition of baseline survival to include approximately 76 luxury conveniences including but not limited to pre-cut produce, subscription beauty boxes, weekly grocery delivery, doggy birthday parties, seasonal throw pillows, and a countertop appliance dedicated exclusively to spiralizing zucchini. Maybe the occasional “nice dinner out” wouldn’t be such an impossible goal if folks weren’t DoorDashing the rest of the week and leasing Lexuses they otherwise could never afford.

The reality is, we are a nation of consumers. We spend abundantly, recklessly, constantly. We pay for convenience, for comfort, and for cachet. “Getting by” has gone from practical to premium without most of us even realizing it.

I say this not from a position of judgment, but from the middle of my own kitchen, a room that in a single, crowded drawer houses an avocado slicer, a strawberry huller, an apple corer, a selection of pizza wheels, an orange-peel remover, not-one-but-two corn huskers, a mandoline for when I need really thin slices of something, a garlic press, several peelers, yes—a spiralizer, multiple specialized cheese graters, and a watermelon knife.

I do. I own a watermelon knife. This is, of course, in addition to a vast assortment of cutting implements ranging from dull to razor-deadly and specifically designed for butter, bread, grapefruit, lettuce, fish, steak, cheese, and just about every other edible God put on this glorious Earth.

My grandmother had one utility blade. One. A regular old sharp knife. That’s what she called it, too. “Hand me the sharp knife.” She somehow managed to prepare meals for an entire family for decades without a dedicated stainless steel cylinder designed specifically to core tropical fruit with ergonomic precision. She also survived the Great Depression, raised children, baked bread from scratch, and never once complained that her mushroom coffee subscription hadn’t arrived.

This is not to say Americans aren’t under real economic pressure. Many unquestionably are. Americans are also extremely, aggressively, almost heroically bad at distinguishing between “I cannot afford this” and “I have chosen to afford seventeen other things first.” And it’s difficult to discuss present-day financial hardship honestly without acknowledging that contemporary life now comes preloaded with a breathtaking number of expenses previous generations never even conceived of.

We don’t just buy coffee anymore. We buy artisan cold brew with premium oat milk through an app that lets us pre-order it while earning points toward future purchases we absolutely would have made anyway. We’ve somehow been convinced that spending $8 six times a week counts as “saving money” so long as there’s a loyalty program involved.

We no longer simply watch television. We maintain a carefully diversified portfolio of streaming platforms that collectively require a level of financial commitment once associated with boat ownership. Couch surfers are out here juggling Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, ESPN, Amazon Prime, Max, Apple TV, Peacock, Paramount+, Spotify, Audible, and at least one mystery subscription nobody remembers signing up for but which continues siphoning $14.99 a month from the family checking account like an invisible digital parasite.

And the market, bless its heart, never stops innovating. No one owns a single water bottle anymore; we stockpile giant emotional-support hydration systems with motivational slogans and ergonomic handles. We have robot vacuums mapping our homes like rolling spies employed by the CIA. We subscribe to meal kits because apparently purchasing groceries and selecting recipes independently has become psychologically overwhelming. We pay for apps that remind us to breathe, encourage us to drink water, monitor our sleep, and gently shame us for not meditating enough.

Ironically, the same Americans who increasingly describe themselves as financially underwater are also carrying around four-figure smartphones capable of facial recognition, satellite communication, professional-grade photography, real-time navigation, instant global information access, and livestreaming raccoons stealing cat food in high definition. These astonishing technological miracles aren’t the frivolous luxuries they might have been considered just a generation ago—they’re absolute bare necessities.

Then there’s “little treat” culture—yes, it’s a thing—where the internet collectively decided that we deserve rewards for routine adult functioning like paying bills, picking up our own dog’s poop, surviving Costco on a Saturday, flossing our teeth, and refraining from flipping someone off in traffic.

Took out the trash? Little treat. Sat through a Zoom meeting that could have been an email? Little treat. Scheduled the oil change you’ve been putting off? Congratulations, you just earned a $9 lavender matcha sprinkled with ethically sourced cinnamon dust.

Again: none of this is to say inflation isn’t real. It is. But part of the disconnect may be that today’s “normal life” has quietly drifted into what would have looked to earlier generations like low-key aristocracy.

Your grandfather’s starter home had one television, one bathroom, one telephone attached to the wall, no air conditioning, and one small loveseat that was probably covered in plastic. Meanwhile modern Americans have streaming entertainment in every room, multiple smart devices, temperature-controlled memory foam mattresses, noise-canceling headphones, wireless earbuds, internet-connected refrigerators, sectional sofas that can sleep seven, and enough charging cables to wire a medium-sized airport.

And nobody can figure out why we’re all broke.

Which, in a way, makes perfect sense. Because lifestyle inflation is sneaky. Nobody wakes up one morning announcing, “I shall now normalize lavish conveniences until they subconsciously register as basic human rights.” It just sort of happens—quietly, incrementally, almost accidentally. The first time you pay seven dollars for a single cup of coffee, it feels absurd. By the fiftieth time, it just feels like Tuesday.

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation, and humans are remarkably good at it.

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Which is how you end up with a negative bank balance and a junk drawer that’s too full to close. The cost of living genuinely rose while the cultural definition of “living” blew up like Building 7.

We’re not merely trying to survive anymore. We’re trying to survive comfortably, conveniently, wirelessly, ergonomically, aesthetically, sustainably, algorithmically, and preferably with free two-day shipping.

And occasionally with dedicated watermelon-processing equipment.

I showed you my embarrassing inventory of niche kitchen gadgets. Tell me what you stockpile needlessly in the comments. ;)

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If you want in, you can upgrade below (an annual subscription works out to about 30 cents a post and come with a free signed book). If you can’t swing it or you aren’t sure if you like me that much, no worries. Free content will resume tomorrow.

NOTE: Jeff Childers flagged this story yesterday. He was right to. But I don’t think anyone has fully reckoned with how insane it actually is. That’s what I’m here for. 😉

Ever since Russiagate was dominating news cycles, Americans have been cautioned about misinformation with the intensity of medieval villagers being warned about wolves. The wolves, we were told, were everywhere—dressed up as comedians, homeschool moms, anti-vax cheerleaders, rogue chiropractors, and basically anyone with a MAHA yard sign and a Canva account.

So it’s worth pausing to appreciate the fact that for more than half of that time, a literal Chinese government propaganda outfit was running a fake-news website right here on U.S. soil. In the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. Which is a real place with a median home price of $1.8 million, wild peacocks that have pedestrian rights, and a very nice racetrack.

Oh, and the whole operation was under the direction of a woman who would ultimately be elected to run the city.

She is, it turns out, exactly what we were told didn’t exist. For much of modern history, concerns about Chinese Communist Party infiltration of American institutions—local government, school boards, universities, civic organizations—have been actively mocked as racist paranoia, Cold War hysteria, or right-wing fearmongering. Unfortunately for the fact-checkers, the whole subgenre of “actually, worrying about Chinese influence is xenophobic” commentary is having a really bad week.

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And of course, in an age where even toddlers have iPhones and half the cabin would livestream their own root canal if the lighting was decent and they thought it might get lots of likes, the mayhem is typically being filmed from every possible angle.

Except maybe not anymore.

British Airways is now threatening to press charges against passengers who film crew members without consent. The airline is framing the new policy as a matter of employee privacy and safety, which the rest of us are free to interpret as “please stop documenting the collapse of civilization at cruising altitude.”

I understand the impulse. If I spent my working hours in a pressurized aluminum tube full of frustrated, sleep-deprived strangers who’ve been marinating in airport bourbon since 6 a.m., I’d probably want some privacy too. Flight attendants are, by any reasonable measure, performing one of the most complex and psychologically demanding jobs in existence—part EMT, part hostage negotiator, part riot police, part kindergarten teacher on the last day before winter break.

They’re expected to politely serve you a Dr. Pepper, help you troubleshoot your glitchy in-flight entertainment system, respond to complaints about seat recline angles, know how to operate a defibrillator, and calmly lead a floating evacuation should the aircraft unexpectedly become a boat. They deserve dignity, respect, and the right to not temporarily trend on X for having to explain to a passenger why he cannot clip his toenails in the aisle.

They also work for an industry that has spent the better part of a decade turning coach class into a lightly supervised gladiatorial arena and is now, with a straight face, asking everyone to stop gathering evidence.

Because let’s be honest about what modern air travel has become. This is not the glamorous Pan Am era of complimentary champagne, fine china, and the occasional live pianist. This is a Greyhound bus inside a pressure cooker, with alcohol, emotional fragility, recycled air, shrinking personal space, and one lavatory for 240 people, at least one of whom is definitely vaping in there right now.

As someone who scans news headlines for a living, I come across some version of “Airline Passenger Goes Completely Feral” at least once a week. Just in the last few months: a traveler had to be restrained after attempting to open the emergency exit of a taxiing Delta plane. A Ryanair brawl went so comprehensively sideways that the plane was forced to make an emergency landing and multiple passengers required medical attention. A deranged flyer bit a fellow traveler on another Delta flight. Yes, bit. With his teeth. These are not isolated incidents—they are a genre. They have their own corner of the internet. People set them to music.

And now airlines would like customers to stop filming, which is roughly the equivalent of asking people not to record a herd of buffalo stampeding through Starbucks. Once bedlam reaches a certain threshold, the phones are coming out.

Here’s the thing about filming on planes: yes, social media has turned large portions of the public into amateur content creators, but it has also turned everyone into a potential eyewitness. And commercial aviation has deteriorated into such open-air behavioral decay that documentation has become a form of self-defense. Passengers film because they may need evidence. For the airline. For the insurance company. For the police report. For the personal injury lawyer. For the jury. These are not unreasonable contingencies given that a belligerent man recently had to be duct-taped to his seat on a Frontier flight after groping two flight attendants and taking a swing at a third.

The sublime irony, of course, is that the same industry asking you to put your camera away has been filming you since you walked into the terminal. (Also, who decided a euphemism for not getting out of this alive was a good name for a transit hub? Asking for a friend.) Your face was scanned at check-in. Your luggage was X-rayed, photographed, and tracked. The airport has more cameras per square foot than a casino. Your seat assignment, purchase history, biometric data, and approximate emotional state have all been logged somewhere. But the gentleman in 14C growling at the flight crew? That’s between him and the fasten seatbelt sign.

There’s also the small matter of accountability. Some of the most significant airline safety and conduct investigations of the last decade began with passenger footage—footage that airlines did not volunteer, that crew members did not endorse, and that turned out to be rather important. “Please stop filming us” is a reasonable request from an individual or a flight team. From an institution with a history of denying, minimizing, and litigating? It lands—pun intended—slightly differently.

In most public places, Americans are generally free to photograph anything in plain view. Airplanes, however, are not public spaces—they’re private property operated by private companies, which means airlines can impose their own rules as a condition of travel. In other words, British Airways may not be able to stop you from hitting RECORD, but they absolutely can penalize you for doing it—by confiscating your phone or your Meta glasses (and you know another passenger is going to record that scuffle), removing you from flights, banning you from future travel, or otherwise treating your viral TikTok video as a violation of the terms of service you agreed to when you bought your ticket.

To be clear: harassing flight attendants (or other travelers!) is not okay. In no way is filming crew members to intimidate or humiliate them acceptable behavior. There is a version of this policy that makes complete sense. But “you may not document the in-flight chaos” is only going to work if airlines also commit to ending the in-flight chaos. Until the day that comes, passengers will likely continue to act like unpaid war correspondents. And you kind of can’t blame them.

p.s. In other, completely unrelated news that is literally too ridiculous to keep to myself, apparently an American has tested mildly positive for hantavirus. Silly me, I thought viruses were like retirement accounts or ankle monitors: you either have one or you don’t. What’s next, calling someone “a little bit pregnant”? “Partially deceased”? “Somewhat on fire”? And yes, Reuters reported this with complete sincerity and zero awareness of the absurdity, which is peak newsing. The investigation, as always, is ongoing. Be sure to stay scared, though!

Tips welcome. I promise not to bite.

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That was swiftly followed by the Federal Communications Commission launching a review into ABC’s broadcast licenses—something the agency claimed had nothing to do with the Kimmel kerfuffle and was simply part of their ongoing investigation into the broadcast giant’s DEI policies. As a result, ABC promptly scheduled a candlelight vigil for free speech and wept into their quarterly earnings report.

Now, the Disney-owned network has filed a petition against the very agency investigating them—accusing the federal government of violating ABC’s First Amendment rights by… wait for it… refusing to recognize The View as a legitimate, hard-hitting news program.

I am not even making this up.

The gist is this: every two to four years, broadcast television becomes a political battleground—and the federal government has opinions about how that fight gets conducted. Under the federal Equal Time Rule, any network that gives airtime to a political candidate is required to offer comparable airtime to their opponents.

Seems fair. Except… a single category—what the FCC calls “bona fide” [word nerd alert: that’s Latin for “good faith”] news programs—is exempt from this requirement. Programming can be as openly partisan, slanted, ideological, and one-sided as it wants… so long as it qualifies as news rather than entertainment—a determination that’s ultimately made by the FCC.

(If you can make that make sense, there’s a free book in it for you.)

This is where things get awkward for The View, a program that—according to a Media Research Center analysis—hosted 128 liberal guests in 2025 compared to just [*squints at spreadsheet*] two conservatives. Out of 341 total guests, 25 Democratic politicians appeared on the show, while red-state representation amounted to roughly one half of Fleetwood Mac. But they can get away with that without so much as a mea culpa, see, because they’re a bona fide news program.

And I’m the heir to the Crayola fortune.

If The View were to be classified as what it visibly, obviously, and demonstrably is—a shriek of women arguing about current events in between commercials for Febreze plug-ins and prescription allergy medication—ABC could be required to offer equal time to the Republican candidates its hosts spend the majority of the show mocking.

The financial and logistical implications of that are seemingly alarming enough that ABC has decided the better play is to argue, loudly and with a straight face, that Whoopi Goldberg is essentially Walter Cronkite.

“Uncertainty as to the scope of broadcast licensees’ editorial discretion threatens to limit news coverage of political candidates and chill core First Amendment-protected speech for years and potentially decades to come,” ABC wrote. “As the 2026 midterm election approaches, the American people need more access to political news and more exposure to political candidates, not less.”

What makes ABC’s argument so unintentionally hilarious is that the network is essentially warning that if The uber-liberal View is forced to comply with equal-time requirements, they might actually have to platform conservatives and independents—something ABC frames as a terrifying threat to the public’s access to political information. Even though that is, quite literally, the entire point of equal-time rules: not to reduce political speech, but to prevent one side from monopolizing it.

The FCC, for its part, appears deeply unconvinced that federal broadcast law intended the phrase “bona fide journalism” to cover Joy Behar wearing nipple covers over her eyes and talking about merkins.

“Decades ago, Congress passed a law that generally prohibits broadcast television programs from putting a thumb on the scale in favor of one political candidate over another,” an FCC spokesperson told Politico. “Specifically, Congress put protections in place to ensure that covered programs offer legally qualified candidates for office (both Republican and Democrat) equal time on the public airwaves. The equal time law encourages more speech and empowers voters to decide the outcome of elections.”

Again, we are talking about The View here. A show which is, depending on the day, a mix of celebrity interviews, hot takes, personal anecdotes, applause breaks, digs at Donald Trump, tales of random dental disasters and accidental flashings, and extended discussions about dating, menopause, family drama, and whether some actress was “brave” for wearing a dollar bill over her eyes at the Met Gala. It’s less unbiased investigative reporting enterprise and more televised book club meeting with commercial breaks and a legal team. Which makes The New York Times dubbing it “the most important political TV show in America” the strongest possible argument for national media reform.

And that’s it. That’s the loophole. Classify yourself as “news” and you get special regulatory protections, even if your content largely consists of quasi-celebrities yelling “Did you just point at me?” while the audience erupts like trained sea lions at feeding time. It’s basically the equivalent of buying a press badge at Party City and immediately gaining diplomatic immunity.

Ironically, for years now, networks have insisted many of their most openly ideological personalities are not “journalists” when defending themselves from defamation claims or factual scrutiny. When Tucker Carlson was accused of slander, the judge ruled that given the show’s reputation for hyperbole, no reasonable viewer would take his statements as literal factual assertions. Similarly, Rachel Maddow’s lawyers famously argued in court that anyone with a pulse and basic pattern recognition can see that her show is a mix of exaggeration and opinion and not literal, objective reporting.

EVERY NETWORK UNDER THE SUN: “Tonight, we bring you the most important news from around the world.”

THE WORLD: “So it’s going to be fair, balanced, and one-hundred-percent objective?”

EVERY NETWORK UNDER THE SUN: “Hahahaha you’re cute. No, we just call it news so we can avoid all of those annoying regulatory restrictions.”

And now, after decades of having it both ways, someone finally asked ABC to pick a lane. Cue the hysterics.

Maybe ABC wins because courts and regulators decide it’s simply too messy—and too politically radioactive—to start redefining “news” after spending decades handing out exemptions like free tote bags at a book fair. Maybe the FCC wins and The View suddenly has to start carving out matching airtime for Republicans every time the hosts spend twenty uninterrupted minutes applauding Democrats. Most likely, the government concludes that trying to separate journalism from entertainment in 2026 would be like trying to un-toast bread and just leaves it up to the public to determine what’s propaganda, what’s activism, what’s opinion, and what’s rigorous, old-school reporting.

Anyway, I’m sure it’ll end well.

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P.S. If you missed this weekend’s The Autism Conversation We’re Not Supposed to Have post, you can check it out here.

As a baby, Kerri’s son Patrick was ‘smart, curious, and alert.’ But sometime between his first and second birthdays, there was a dramatic shift. Patrick developed chronic digestive issues, uncontrollable crying, and unmanageable sleeplessness. The speech he had been mastering vanished almost entirely. At four years old, Patrick was diagnosed with autism. Doctors could only offer antibiotics or more vaccines.

“He was probably born like this,” they told her. Kerri knew otherwise.

She dove headfirst into research, exploring nutrition, gut health, environmental stressors, detox protocols, pathogens, behavior patterns, and a long list of topics most mainstream conversations either avoid or aggressively mock. In other words, she did exactly what they tell you not to do—and probably what every reader of this Substack would have done in Kerri’s situation.

After many years of trial and error, she was able to lift what she calls Patrick’s ‘veil of autism.’ She became a Doctor of Homeopathy, wrote several books, and opened her own holistic clinic in Mexico to help families struggling with the same challenges. The success stories on her website will bring you to your knees.

What struck me about Kerri wasn’t confidence or certainty—it was persistence. She read. She studied. She kept looking. Kept learning. She got attacked, censored, threatened, and shut down. She kept going. “I think a lot of parents of autistic children feel like I do: This is why we’re here and why we do what we do. We have to advocate for our children,” Kerri insists.

I know this is a sensitive topic—in the same way I know that ‘sensitive’ is often just another word for ‘we'd prefer you not discuss this.’ I also know there are a lot of families struggling behind the scenes while being gaslit, pretending everything is fine, or both.

If you or someone you know has a child with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, you may be interested in a workshop Kerri is hosting. Her Reversing Autism Online Course: A Step-by-Step Roadmap for Parents Who Refuse to Give Up covers symptom recognition, gut health, pathogens, detoxification, nutrition, inflammation, and nervous-system and recovery-support strategies. (*Full disclosure: Kerri gave me an affiliate link for the workshop, which means I may earn a commission if you sign up through it. My opinions, however, remain stubbornly unpaid. I really hope I didn’t need to say that.)

This course is not for everyone—particularly the ones who think CDC stands for Completely Dependable Conclusions. Kerri is not claiming she can cure or even treat autism (although many of her clients are now considered ‘neurotypical’—see the aforementioned success stories), but she wholeheartedly believes that progress and improvement are always possible.

I don’t have an autistic child. But I've read enough, talked to enough parents, and followed enough of these stories to know that ‘he was probably born like this’ is not an answer anyone should have to accept lying down.

Click here to listen to Kerri tell part of her story, and here to check out the course (and the special Mother’s Day discount). It comes with a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, so there’s honestly not a whole lot to lose.

Questions? Comments? Drop your thoughts below. And please share this post with anyone you think might benefit from Kerri’s hard-earned wisdom. :)

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A rare hantavirus outbreak tied to a cruise ship. A virus with a one-to-six-week incubation period. Passengers reportedly allowed to disembark anyway. International contact tracing suddenly back on the menu. Three people dead. Familiar quarantine-era faces popping up like Marvel characters in a low-budget reboot of Pandemic II: The Boostening. Conveniently, pharmaceutical companies and global-health institutions have already been working on mRNA-based hantavirus vaccine platforms. And not even two weeks ago, the WHO ran another “pandemic simulation exercise”—so they’re prepped and ready to go. Somebody get Bill Gates into makeup.

And I know what “the experts” are saying:

• “Correlation is not causation.”

• “Preparedness is not conspiracy.”

• “Researching viruses before outbreaks is literally the point.”

Maybe.

But you have to admit this has all the comforting energy of a flight attendant insisting there’s no need to panic before asking if anyone onboard happens to know how to fly a plane. Because to the average person—especially one who survived the last six years of COVID spin-doctoring—the whole thing feels less like a coincidence and more like waking up in the same nightmare wearing different pajamas.

Because we know how this goes. It starts with a vague “future threat.” Then come the ominous headlines. The urgent briefings. The concerned experts trotting out warnings. The discussions about isolation protocols, emergency response powers, international coordination, and the importance of public compliance. The mandates (they’re temporary!). The vaccine (it’s brand-spanking-new but also totally safe and effective!). The baffling explanations for why The Science™ changed three times while you were in the shower. And, most importantly, the need for every last useless eater to be monitored, mapped, tracked, traced, identified, inventoried, and integrated into their “temporary” emergency system (the one that’s permanent). For our safety and protection, obviously.

Problem, panic, product. Repeat.

You paranoid little peasants. Please stop noticing patterns immediately.

The official explanation is, objectively, not the dumbest thing they’ve ever asked us to believe. Hantavirus has existed for decades. Researchers study dangerous pathogens all the time. Scientists became especially obsessed with “pandemic preparedness” after COVID because nobody wanted to be caught flat-footed again. Hantavirus is a rare rodent-born disease usually contracted through infected droppings or dust; the Andes strain—the one circulating on the SS Déjà Vu—is newsworthy because it can spread person-to-person with “close, prolonged contact.” Cruise ships are floating petri dishes filled with buffet tongs and retired orthodontists licking slot-machine buttons.

All true. And yet.

You’re telling me that a rare zoonotic virus suddenly dominating headlines—after years of governments, corporations, NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical giants, international organizations, and benevolent billionaires diligently working together to build the infrastructure to clock, track, and vaccinate against exactly this kind of pathogen—is supposed to produce zero public suspicion?

Bless your heart.

“Chilling” videos about hantavirus’ transmissibility (complete with calls for social distancing and N95s) are circulating like aerosolized droplets online. And already the WHO is using this massive outbreak of five *suspected* cases as a plea for the U.S. and Argentina to reconsider their exit from the organization. “The best immunity we have is solidarity,” Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus insisted. “Viruses don’t care about our politics, and they don’t care about our borders.” When they start speaking in inspirational LinkedIn quotes, you know we’re in trouble.

And can we talk about the cruise ship itself for a second? Where is the nonstop footage? The breathless cable-news case count? The panicked cell-phone videos? The trembling interviews with passengers wrapped in emergency blankets? During COVID, we got 24-hour coverage of refrigerated trucks, masked toddlers, and terrified reporters broadcasting live from empty sidewalks. But now? We’ve got a single crisis actor named Jake delivering lines with the authenticity of a sock puppet.

Oh right. The passengers were largely wealthy older travelers on an expensive expedition cruise. Different demographic. Less TikTok. Fewer livestreams. Slightly harder to turn into a dancing hospital montage with upbeat piano music.

I know, I know. Not everything is a conspiracy. And to be fair, there’s a decent amount of white space between “This situation raises reasonable questions” and “This was clearly engineered by evil masterminds in a volcano lair.”

But come on.

The problem is, institutional trust has been obliterated so thoroughly that many people [*waves violent jazz hands*] no longer grant authorities the automatic benefit of the doubt. Because the authorities created this problem. You can’t spend seventy-two consecutive months insisting people ignore their own eyes, experiences, and instincts, and then act shocked when the public starts side-eyeing every new “emerging threat” like a toothless stranger handing out free whiskey shots from the trunk of a Buick.

Especially when the messaging sounds so eerily familiar.

“Don’t panic.”
“The risk is low.”
“There’s no evidence of widespread transmission.”
“We’re monitoring the situation.”
“Conspiracy theories are dangerous.”
“Also here’s a vaccine platform we’ve already been developing.”

Adding to the sweeping skepticism are several eyebrow-raising details. Back in 2021, Bill Gates’ GAVI innocently asked if hantavirus would be our next pandemic. (Spoiler: definitely-maybe-probably not-nobody knows TBH.) Then in 2024, an alarming 323 vials filled with deadly viruses went missing from a lab in Australia. (Whoops!) Two of those contained hantavirus. The mystery was never solved. Then there’s the fun fact that “hantavirus pulmonary infection” is listed right in Pfizer’s own Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports (which lists literally every single thing that can happen after COVID vaccine administration and does not indicate causation, but still). And let’s not forget the cryptic four-year-old X post predicting “2026: Hantavirus”—from an account with a grand total of four tweets, all posted during the same week in 2022—that’s recently resurfaced online. None of which is quite giving “OMG the Simpsons predicted this!” energy, but together it’s still… unsettling.

I mean… guys. At some point you have to understand why people are squinting.

Because here we are. Again. Another virus. Another cruise ship. Another vaccine platform lingering in the wings like a theater understudy who’s been slowly poisoning the lead actor. Maybe it’s a(nother) test run. Maybe it’ll fail to terrify a sufficient number of folks and go the way of avian flu and Monkeypox (sorry, Mpox) and Marburg and Disease X. Maybe this time “we’re all in this together” won’t somehow end with billionaires getting richer while reminding the rest of us to disinfect our groceries in the garage.

All I know is I’m not putting the mask back on. And if Fauci emerges from retirement blinking into the camera like a groundhog predicting six more years of temporary measures, I’m promoting myself from conspiracy theorist to prophet.

I couldn’t decide on a poll today… so you get TWO! Don’t forget to vote. :)

As always, please share your hot takes, concerns, and tinfoil-hat insights in comments.

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I could use all the tips.

The New York Times—which has spent the better part of the last decade implying that Donald Trump, his supporters, their neighbors, their dogs, and probably several brands of mayonnaise are one election cycle away from forming a minimum-melanin bowling league—is now being sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly discriminating against a white male employee in the name of diversity.

It’s almost poetic.

According to the complaint, a longtime editor at the paper was passed over for a promotion in favor of a less-experienced nonwhite woman, purportedly because the Times was pursuing stated race- and gender-conscious hiring goals. Despite more than a decade at the paper plus extensive real-estate journalism experience that made him a natural fit for the Deputy Real Estate Editor position, the unnamed journalist didn’t even make it to the final interview round. Not a single white man did, if you’re keeping track.

The suit further claims that the eventual (outside) hire had no background in real-estate coverage—even though that qualification was listed right in the job requirements—bypassed portions of the standard interview process altogether, and still landed the position after being rated below two other finalists by the Times’ own interview panel.

That last point isn’t insignificant. Because the issue isn’t merely that a white dude didn’t get a promotion. It’s that the paper’s own evaluators ranked other candidates higher and still gave the job to the third-place (alleged) diversity pick.

The paper “categorically rejects the politically motivated allegations brought by the Trump administration’s EEOC” [insert NO KINGS protest sign here] and insists its hiring practices are wholly merit-based. It’s a bold claim considering the Times has published an actual written report outlining “action plans to increase non-white and female representation in its leadership positions.”

THE TIMES: “We only hire the best, most qualified candidates!”
ALSO THE TIMES: “*from a diverse, pre-selected field of non-white, non-male, ideologically approved applicants.”

Also worth noting: This is not some brand-new Trumpian legal theory cooked up between Truth Social rants. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has prohibited employment discrimination against all races—which, last time I checked, includes whites—since 1964. (Presumably, the legacy media giant knows this.) And the Times is hardly an isolated target here. Under EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, the agency has also flagged companies including Nike and Coca-Cola for race- and sex-conscious hiring, mentorship, and networking programs. In other words, the move is part of a broader legal crackdown on corporate DEI practices, not a one-off grudge match with the Gray Lady.

If the EEOC prevails, the Times could face punitive damages, compensation orders, and a permanent injunction blocking future race-based hiring policies—which would be a fairly embarrassing outcome for the self-appointed referee of social justice.

To be clear, private companies are free to hire badly, irrationally, nepotistically, aesthetically, politically, spiritually, astrologically, or because the CEO’s nephew “smells like pine needles.” What they generally cannot do—at least under longstanding federal civil-rights law—is explicitly penalize applicants because of race.

Here’s what I find humorous: People hear “a white man was discriminated against” and respond the way medieval peasants reacted to reports of dragons: That’s impossible. It’s mythical. You’re making it up. A hedge fund manager named Chip whose father owns half of Connecticut was discriminated against? Don’t make me laugh.

This isn’t about diversity. It’s about the increasingly bizarre cultural assumption that “white male” is synonymous with “born on Park Avenue wearing a monocle.” Meanwhile there are more than 750,000 homeless people in America, tens of thousands of whom are white men sleeping under bridges, living in cars, or shuffling around Portland arguing with traffic cones. There are white men with addictions, white men who grew up abused, white men working the third shift at tire factories while their backs slowly disintegrate like drywall in a flood.

But in modern discourse, we still talk about “white men” as though they’re a distinct band of Ivy League graduates who summer in Nantucket and complain when the yacht club runs out of cucumber mint water. Here’s a newsflash: Treating whiteness itself as evidence of “supremacy” is as racist as installing segregated drinking fountains. It’s also spawned a weird, socially acceptable form of finger-pointing where if you’re a Caucasian who’s not walking around apologizing for your skin color, if you’re not willing to suffer professionally so that someone darker and perhaps less experienced than you can advance, you are somehow morally bankrupt. And honestly, that mentality is degrading to everyone involved.

It insults successful black Americans by implying they couldn’t possibly have earned their accomplishments without institutional assistance. Tyler Perry didn’t build a billion-dollar empire because some DEI-trained HR manager enthusiastically checked a diversity box. Ben Carson wasn’t named the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the country because Johns Hopkins needed better equity optics. Jay-Z did not become a multi-platinum music mogul because a board of directors said, “You know what this rap industry needs? More inclusion.”

These people succeeded because they’re wildly talented and because they outworked everyone else. The same goes for countless minority doctors, lawyers, executives, entrepreneurs, journalists, engineers, and business owners who would probably prefer not to have their accomplishments framed like Make-A-Wish prizes handed out by guilty white liberals in Patagonia vests.

It’s also a slap in the face to struggling white people to treat them all like heirs to the Vanderbilt fortune who spend their weekends fox hunting and shopping for fine art. As if, “you’ll be fine; you’re white” is a magic wand that waves away a foreclosure notice, a fentanyl addiction, or generational poverty.

None of this is to say discrimination against minorities doesn’t exist. Of course it does! Humans are tribal lunatics and always will be. And yes, race can absolutely intersect with genuine disadvantage. The problem is we’ve wandered into deeply unsettling territory where refusing to judge people by their skin color is seen as a character flaw—the irony!—while openly sorting them by race is considered enlightenment.

You can’t have it both ways. A person’s pigmentation either matters… or it doesn’t.

The fascinating part is that the same institutions that spent years aggressively racializing everything—from math standards to bird-watching to refrigerator ownership—now seem shocked that some white employees have learned to recognize discrimination when they experience it. It turns out that when you repeatedly insist everything is about race, people eventually take you at your word.

Funny how that works.

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Drop your spare change here!

I love having parties and hosting out-of-town guests. Not just for the human interaction—I mean, that part’s great, too—but because I invariably get at least thirteen projects knocked off my home improvement list [that have been there for a year] in preparation of the festivities. Fresh mulch? Done. Fluffy new guest towels? Check. Baseboards? You could eat off them.

Donald Trump seems to be feeling some of that pre-company panic, effectively running around the capital plumping every metaphorical pillow in site. And like any good host throwing a massive Fourth of July bash, he has decided the priority is… the pool.

The internet is divided on the details—with the exception of a single shared, burning question: who’s the bikini-clad babe next to him in the rendering?

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You’ve probably heard by now that longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was hospitalized with pneumonia on Sunday and is reportedly in critical but stable condition. You may also have heard that nearly a full week before the 80-year-old former NYC mayor even had a tickle in his throat, late night rabble-rouser Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Rudy’s proximity to death. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last 24 hours, you know exactly where this is going.

The barb was, by any measure, both unremarkable and unfunny. Kimmel has made far better efforts. He’s also dropped one-liners that should have come with a chalk outline. That’s the nature of doing a monologue five nights a week for twenty years—sometimes you’re on fire, sometimes you’re phoning it in, and sometimes you make a death joke about an elderly man who will, six days later, end up seriously ill in the ICU.

This is called a coincidence. I know we’re all emotionally scarred from COVID, but they do still occur in the wild. I promise.

It all started when Kimmel made another totally different offensive joke during a preemptive spoof of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech. “Our First Lady Melania is here,” Kimmel quipped. “Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” In another twist of especially unfortunate timing for Kimmel, the supposed punchline landed two days before a third assassination attempt on Melania’s husband.

That one didn’t just miss the mark—it sprinted past it, tripped, and took out a few bystanders. It was an objectively awful thing to say to/about a woman whose husband had—at the time—already survived two assassination attempts. But free speech doesn’t come with a feelings filter or its own HR department. As long as it’s not violent or defamatory, it’s free to be as unbecoming, crass, or tone-deaf as it likes. That part is baked right into the Constitution.

Kimmel later said the widow remark was obviously a swipe at the first couple’s age difference. The Trumps weren’t laughing. Melania condemned the jab as “hateful and violent rhetoric;” Trump dubbed it a “despicable call to violence” and demanded that Disney/ABC fire him immediately. (In what was surely another coincidence, the FCC ordered a review of all ABC station licenses within days.) Meanwhile, Giuliani took to his podcast to call Kimmel “one of the most distasteful human beings in this country” and “an incompetent jackass.”

And then everybody sort of forgot about it and moved on.

Hahahahaha just kidding. That’s when Kimmel doubled down.

“So last night, America’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, rose from the grave to weigh in on the ongoing drama involving me,” Kimmel said during the April 28 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “I have to say, it’s confusing to be called an incompetent jackass by a man who accidentally held a press conference outside a dildo store, who doesn’t seem to have any understanding of when videos are running and when they aren’t, and has a gallon of squid ink dribbling off the top of his head.”

Was it nice? No. Was it amusing? Only if your bar for hilarity hovers somewhere around plastic dog poop. Was it fair? Largely yes. Because if the rule is “humor becomes unacceptable if something bad happens later,” then no joke is safe—just temporarily pending.

I say this as someone who finds Kimmel about as entertaining as an ingrown toenail and who has not forgotten the comic’s inflammatory comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. When Kimmel was put on immediate suspension for those remarks, I said this:

“I’ll point out for my progressive friends that the First Amendment ensures that the government can’t lock you up for saying something they don’t like; it does not promise you there won’t be societal, financial, or professional consequences for being a schmuck (see: Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Roseanne Barr, Kanye West, et al.).”

You can etch those words into my gravestone.

There’s a difference, though, between holding someone accountable for what they say and demanding retribution for something that was mostly benign when it was said. (And to be clear, there wasn’t a single breathless news headline or X post about the Giuliani dig until he was hospitalized.) One is free speech working exactly as intended; the other is frankly a bit unhinged. And the backlash against Kimmel right now is firmly in the second category. The man mocks people for a living. Sometimes the universe has terrible timing. These things can coexist.

Here’s the part that might not win me any popularity contests: Kimmel is allowed to make the jokes. All of them. Even the tasteless ones. Even the ones about people we like, people who are sick or might be next month or next year, people whose only crime was being famous while Kimmel had five minutes to fill. That is precisely what free speech means. It does not mean “you may spew forth with any utterances I personally find acceptable.” Like it or not, it means “words that make me want to punch someone in the throat get to exist.”

Because the alternative—deciding which jokes are permitted based on whether the subject is currently under medical care, in power, or on “our side”—is a slippery slope. When we cheer for the government to come down hard on speech we hate, we’re handing someone else the keys to a car we may very much want to drive someday. And the people who get to decide what’s too offensive are never permanently our people. That’s not hypothetical. It’s history.

Former FBI Director James Comey recently posted a picture of some seashells arranged in a pattern that was about as ambiguous as a middle finger at a funeral. The post should have been met with an eyeroll—not a grand jury. But the DOJ actually indicted him over it, which is absurd and embarrassing for this administration, in my opinion. To clarify, I wasn’t a fan of the post. I thought it was classless and petty and obviously meant to trigger Trump and his supporters. (Well done, sir!) But I do love me some First Amendment, which means I believe Comey gets to post his little shell photos, Kimmel gets to make his little grave jokes, and we get to think both of them are tacky asshats and say so loudly and then move on with our lives.

What we don’t get to do is time-travel back to last week to declare a perfectly mediocre wisecrack sinister in light of brand new circumstances. It would be like calling your bookie to cancel a losing bet after the game is already over. That’s not really how these things work.

Get well soon, Rudy. I hope you’re back at the mic calling Kimmel a jackass soon. Because he is one, and you have every right—literally—to say so.

LMK what you think in the comments! I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it. :)

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The issue is… who gets to be the judge of that?

Starting in 2027, new cars will be required—as in mandated, by the federal government—to include technology that monitors whether you are fit to drive. (It’s buried in the breezy, 2,500-page 2021 Infrastructure Act that surely all Americans have read in its entirety.) Relying on this dystopian gadgetry, if the Almighty Automotive Oz decides that you are not firing on all cylinders, it will quickly render your car inoperable.

If it sounds like a kill switch for your car, that’s because it’s a kill switch for your car. That your car—with the government’s help—controls.

The system won’t use a breathalyzer, which would at least have the dignity of measuring something real. It will rely on infrared sensors and cameras that continuously monitor your pupil size, head movements, eye movements, and various “behaviors consistent with impairment.” Which is a very technical way of saying the nanny state is coming in hot—and it’s going to be buried in your dashboard.

Here’s a partial list of things that can also affect your pupil size, head movements, and eye movements that have nothing to do with alcohol: fatigue, stress, certain medications, bright sunlight, a migraine, crying, allergies, going into labor, getting a frantic call from your kid, and the particular expression most of us make when we are trying to merge onto a highway while someone in a Kia is doing eighty in the slow lane. Your car will not know the difference. Your car will not confirm, question, or seek a second opinion. Your car will simply decide.

And if it decides wrong? If your mother has fallen and needs you, if your house is on fire, if your dog was just spotted dodging cars on the highway? Well. Hopefully you have a neighbor you like. Because according to automotive experts, there is currently no clear answer to the question of how you get out of what is being called, with chilling accuracy, “kill switch jail.”

The bigger issue isn’t your F-150 temporarily refusing to fire up. The kill switch is almost beside the point. Because while you were probably focused on the part where your vehicle can vote you off the island, you may have missed the bit where it’s also building a file on you. The infrared cameras, the behavioral monitoring, the driving data—it doesn’t stay in the vehicle. It goes to the cloud. (If your current car has a touchscreen, a companion app, remote start, or built-in navigation, this is already happening, BTW.) And from the cloud, per the terms of service you agreed to when you bought the car—the ones no one in the history of time has ever actually read in their entirety—it gets sold. To companies that build what is being called, with a straight face, an automotive “risk score” on individual drivers. Which then gets sold to your insurance company.

In other words, your car is a spy. A snitchy, disloyal spy—the automotive equivalent of the older sister who timed how long you were on the phone and reported back to mom, or the babysitter who told your parents you didn’t go to bed until eleven even though you’d made a very reasonable case for staying up. You wash it. You wax it. You work overtime to afford the monthly payments. And all the while it’s just sitting there, the picture of innocence, compiling evidence that may or may not be used against you in a court of law.

In China, they’d call it what it is: part of the social credit system. Here, we’re calling it “making the roads safer,” because American politicians have learned that if you give authoritarian infrastructure a vague—or emotional—enough name, half the country will not only comply but will show up to volunteer. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The HALT Drunk Driving Act—named for a Michigan family killed by a drunk driver. Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Students Against Destructive Decisions. Road safety! Saving lives! It’s for the children! You have a problem with that? What kind of monster are you?

Republicans in Congress had a problem with it—an overwhelming majority voted against funding the program. Their efforts failed thanks to fifty-seven RINOs who voted with Democrats to keep the cameras coming. The mandate survived. Nobody had to explain themselves. And here we are.

I’ll reiterate, nobody is against safe roads. Nobody should be put at risk by exhausted, drunk, or distracted drivers. That’s the whole trick—you bake the surveillance into something impossible to argue with, and by the time anyone reads the fine print, the sensors are already embedded in the steering wheels.

Your behavior, continuously monitored. Your data, scored. Your ability to operate your own vehicle, subject to approval. What you pay for insurance, determined by a report card your car has been quietly keeping since the day you drove it off the lot.

There are other weapons in the anti-drunk-driving arsenal. Better driver education. Mandatory viewing of the kind of footage that makes you never want to get behind the wheel again—sober or otherwise. Harsher punishments for first-time DUI offenses. Ignition interlocks for people who’ve actually been convicted of driving while intoxicated—which already exist and have proven to work. Sobriety checkpoints in high-risk areas. Hell, I’d even vote for government subsidized Uber rides at closing time. Any of these would be a fine place to start. Instead we’re harvesting everyone’s biometrics and calling it “for the greater good.”

Remind me where I’ve heard that before?

There’s some good news in all of this. For one thing, the technology doesn’t exist—at least, not in a form accurate enough to employ, something the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration admitted in a February 2026 report to Congress. I know, you’ve seen the viral videos. Ford wants to scan your irises, GM wants to judge how you walk to your car, and Toyota has been working on sensors to detect alcohol in your sweat since 2007. But none of it has passed federal muster. Because of that, the NHTSA actually missed the implementation deadline—gotta love reliable bureaucratic inefficiency!—leaving us with the government officially requiring technology that hasn’t been remotely perfected yet.

Also, the mandate only applies to new vehicles, which means nobody is coming for your 2019 Tahoe. Yet. But here's the thing about a rule that applies to every new car sold in America starting next year: you don't have to retrofit anything. You just have to wait. Every year, more unmonitored cars will age out of existence and more compliant ones will roll off the lot. The surveillance state isn't in a hurry. It has a fifteen-year plan and infinite patience, and it is perfectly content to let you drive your old car into the ground while it waits for you to need a new one.

For now, at least, enjoy not having Big Brother along for the ride.

Feeling tipsy? *DO NOT DRIVE*

Seeing Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci in an orange jumpsuit and ankle shackles is at the tippy top of my list.

It turns out, the fat lady is still adjusting her mic. According to people who understand things like “statutes of limitations,” the Justice Department still has approximately two weeks to indict the little weasel before the clock runs out forever—and Congress is begging them to do it.

For those of you just tuning in: earlier this week, Fauci’s former adviser Dr. David Morens—a man whose name precisely zero people knew before Tuesday—was indicted on charges related to allegedly covering up the origins of COVID-19. Obstruction, falsification of records, the whole criminal catalogue. He faces up to 51 years in prison, which is a lot of years for an almost octogenarian.

People said Morens was a fall guy—that he's the expendable one, the aide who takes the arrow so the man who handed him the bow walks away clean. It's a reasonable theory. Fauci has, after all, been walking away clean his entire career.

But here’s the thing. Morens might just be the prelude. The warm-up act. The opening band. We’re ready for the headliner, Lord. Give us Tony & The Indictments!

Because while the rest of America was locked inside making sourdough and watching Tiger King, while children sat alone in front of laptops doing “school,” while small businesses boarded up their windows forever, while people died alone without their families because of rules that Dr. Fauci himself apparently made up—the man was assuring Congress, with the confidence of a toddler in a Batman cape, that he was absolutely not funding or conducting risky experiments to make already bad viruses worse.

“Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect, that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci told Senator Rand Paul at a Senate hearing in May 2021, a statement that—if you cancel out the double negatives—sounds less like a denial and more like a cloaked confession.

Spoiler: Senator Paul was not entirely and completely incorrect. He wasn’t even a tiny bit off base. What the NIH was doing, according to the agency’s own principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak—who woke up one day in 2024 and chose chaos—was textbook gain-of-function research. “If you’re speaking about the generic term,” Tabak told Congress, “yes, we did.”

He did. He said that.

And now here we are! With a ticking clock! And a guy auditioning for a permanent role as Attorney General looking to make his mark and seriously considering going after the man who literally wished for a pandemic! It’s all I can do not to dust off a spot on my mantle for the mugshot.

I have lit a candle. I have said a novena. I have dropped to my knees and made wildly unrealistic promises in exchange for my wish being granted.

I understand there are complications. There’s the matter of Biden’s auto-pen pardon—issued for “any offenses” going back to 2014, which is the legal equivalent of your mom writing your teacher a note that says “please excuse my daughter from any misdeeds she’s committed since the third grade; she’s had a rough week.” Senator Rand Paul, bless his eternal persistence, thinks “Lock him up” is more than a fun rally chant. I choose to believe him because I once finished an entire tube of ChapStick without losing it, so I know miracles are real.

Here’s how that would actually work, for those of you who, like me, require adult supervision when reading legal documents: the way you test one of these sweeping, preemptive, auto-pen pardons is not by arguing about it on social media. It’s by charging the person first and then letting a court sort it out. Seriously. That’s the plan.

The Justice Department could theoretically bring charges, Fauci’s legal team would immediately scream “but the pardon!” and then a judge would get to decide whether a decade-long, blanket “anything you might have done” hall pass—possibly signed by a machine—is, in fact, a legally-binding instrument or just a very official-looking permission slip.

Senator Paul put it plainly: “You would have to indict somebody who’s been pardoned. And I think it’s worth a challenge.” His questions are not small ones. Is the pardon power so broad that a president can essentially write “whatever he did, we’re good” and have that hold up in federal court? Does it matter whether Biden even knew that he was signing something—or that his staff was signing something for him? Paul’s working theory is that these things do matter, bigly, and that the only way to get the answers is to haul the whole mess in front of a judge and make someone explain it with a court reporter present.

There’s also the question of timing. The pardon covers a specific window—back to 2014—but if anything happened outside of that, or if prosecutors frame certain actions as part of an ongoing conspiracy, suddenly you’re in fresh territory. Different charges. Different clock. Same orange jumpsuit, theoretically.

Fauci’s possible indictment isn’t the only pandemic news blowing up the internet at the moment. After a deep dive into what officials knew about COVID vaccine adverse events—and when—Senator Ron Johnson’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a damning report this week. The committee discovered that way back in 2021, FDA officials were offered a superior method for detecting injuries—one specifically designed to catch what the older, clunkier VAERS analysis was missing—and they chose not to use it. You read that correctly.

A senior FDA scientist named Dr. Ana Szarfman did the math nobody wanted done and discovered the existing method was hiding evidence of harm including Bell's palsy, pulmonary embolism, cardiac death (NBD!) and more. Despite heroic, repeated attempts to share her findings and methodology with FDA leadership, the response was not “wow, thank you, we’ll look into this immediately!” It was: kindly keep your annoying reports to yourself. (I know, you’re shocked.) Dr. Peter Marks, who ran the FDA’s vaccine division, warned a colleague that Szarfman’s updated algorithm might “create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric.”

Their solution? Ordering Dr. Szarfman to stop creating and sharing the new info. A literal cease and desist.

Let that marinate for a moment. The scientists were finding the signals. The officials were suppressing them. And the reason given, in writing, was essentially: this information is politically inconvenient.

Whether the man who was the public face of the entire federal COVID apparatus was aware that his colleagues were burying safety signals is a question someone should probably ask him. Under oath.

Two weeks to flatten the curve Fauci. Tick tock. Can I get a Hail Mary?

p.s. My Subscriber Directory is live! It’s not perfect (for some reason, you can’t search for state or zip code in the search bar—only name, city, keyword, etc.—which is pitifully lame), but folks are already finding each other! Hot tip: You can use your browser’s find feature (mine is control + F) to look for a state or part of a zip code, which is handy. And I’m so glad I added that “a little bit about me” box—y’all are equal parts fascinating and badass! Finally, I’ve noticed that some of your @handles don’t hyperlink to your Substack profiles, which sort of defeats the purpose of connection. This happens when you leave the “Substack URL” field blank. Your Substack URL is where it redirects when anyone clicks your name in Substack (usually substack.com/@yourname). I don’t have the ability to edit profiles, but you can always delete your existing one (copy your “about” info first!) and then create a new one with the link to your profile if you’d like. :)

I promised you guys I’d try to figure out how to create a subscriber directory… and I *think* I did it. It took me 3,294 tries [actual figure] and I am eleventy thousand percent positive there will be glitches, issues, and possibly (but hopefully not), a need to start over from scratch. But if you’re up for being part of the beta launch, check it out. Sign up. Search it. Let me know how it works… or if it doesn’t.

NOTES: For privacy and safety reasons, I did not include fields for home address, phone, or email. (I did put city/state/country/zip code, however, so you should be able to find folks in your area.) If you want to connect with someone, click on their @handle and it should take you to their Substack home page, where you can reach out via DM.

It’s hard for me to test the functionality because as of this minute, there are exactly two members—me and my very patient and supportive husband WHO BY THE WAY EXACTLY 26 YEARS AGO TODAY stood on a cliff and promised to love me for the rest of ever—or at least until one of us was finally able to rest in peace.
(You know, because we can’t hear the other one snoring anymore.)

Happy anniversary, baby—I got you on my miiiiiind ♫♪♩♬♭.

If there’s one thing Donald Trump isn’t, it’s modest. He’s called himself “a very stable genius,” “more presidential than anybody other than the great Abe Lincoln,” and “an extraordinarily brilliant person—as everyone knows.” He loves his moniker more than a suburban dad loves his leaf blower. He wanted Dulles Airport and Penn Station renamed after him. There’s been Trump Tower. Trump Steaks. Trump Vodka (“Success, Distilled,” which feels like satire but wasn’t). Trump University (RIP). Trump: The Game (all proceeds donated to charity though!). Bottled water. Hotels. Neckties. Golf courses. Donald Trump, The Fragrance (smells like… ego).

If there were a way to brand oxygen, we’d all be breathing Trump Air™.

And yet somehow, people are absolutely flabbergasted that POTUS is plastering his mug on the inside cover of a new, limited-edition U.S. passport.

“No sitting president has ever done this,” carped Democratic California Congressman Mike Levin. “Coins, park passes, battleships, and now your passport. The man cannot find a surface he will not slap his name or face on. This is not patriotism. It is vanity.”

It’s the mock-shock that gets me.

According to the press, we are one commemorative stamp away from a full monarchy. But let’s zoom out for a second and assess the actual threat level here.

This is a passport. Not all passports. Some passports. Passports issued to mark the United States’ 250th anniversary (something our Very Patriotic President is ESPECIALLY KEEN ON). Passports that you can choose to get—or not. Containing… a picture. On the inside. That you will see approximately once every two to ten years while mildly panicking about whether your shampoo is TSA-compliant.

That’s it. That’s the whole situation. And still—still!—we’re doing the full “this is a deeply concerning threat to democracy” dance.

“The passport redesign is the latest example of the president or his allies pushing to put his name, image or signature on institutions in Washington and across the country,” tsked The New York Times. “This year’s National Parks passes display his face alongside George Washington’s, and some of his administration’s initiatives, such as Trump savings accounts for children and TrumpRx, where Americans can buy prescription drugs directly, are named after him.”

“Trump loves putting his name on things!” the panic factory cries. That’s not a revelation—it’s his entire personality. It’s his brand, his business model, and probably his love language.

I know, I know. Most presidents wait until they leave office—or die—and then let other people suggest naming buildings, bridges, highways, hospitals, clinics, libraries, museums, institutions, theaters, and random university wings after them. But saying “Trump is not most presidents” is like saying “Lia Thomas is not most female swimmers.” Congrats on picking up on that. Really. Maybe you’ll get a shot at performing at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

A conspiracy theorist might speculate that the president’s eponym addiction isn’t delusional; it’s deliberate. That perhaps the goal is to gently discourage a certain segment of the population from traveling internationally, visiting our nation’s most spectacular parks, purchasing commemorative coins, buying discounted prescription drugs, hitting top-notch links, sipping “super premium” spirits, or staying in luxury hotels. Why force anyone to boycott your resorts, your golf courses, your neckties, or your vodka, when you can simply make participation feel morally incompatible with their existence?

I’ll reiterate, the retooled artwork is an option. A free upgrade for the fan club. If Trump had merely authorized a “special 250th anniversary passport design” featuring a bald eagle and some fireworks, no one would even know about it. But the man is savvy enough to know that if he Mount Rushmores that thing, the media will pounce. If “How to Get Immediate, Free Advertising” isn’t a chapter in The Art of the Deal… it should be. The only way he could have trumped his own ingenuity would’ve been to charge a premium and funnel the proceeds into his gilded ballroom.

The unintentionally hilarious twist in the “we’re basically a monarchy now” crisis came when—basically the same day the passport refresh dropped—the UK’s Daily Mail enlisted some genealogists to trace Trump’s family tree. Imagine their surprise when their digging revealed that he is actually King Charles’s cousin. Sorry, very distant cousin. The New York Times would like that noted.

But actually.

In what Yahoo breathlessly dubbed “bombshell research” (and The New York Times more or less described as “you and half of Britain, congratulations”), it turns out the two men share a common ancestor, the third Earl of Lennox, who was a great-grandson of King James II of Scotland—a connection that makes them [*checks notes*] 15th cousins. Practically twins.

“Many of the present-day residents of the U.K. and the diaspora all over the world will be descended from medieval kings and queens,” the Times was quick to add. “You could be talking about millions. Over the centuries many royal descendants will have reproduced with those of lower social status, spreading their genes.”

Trump, as one might imagine, is delighted by the discovery of his royal bloodline and shared the news—along with his lifelong dream of living in Buckingham Palace—on Truth Social (URL: trumpstruth.org, obviously).

TRUMP: “They said no kings. I said, actually, I’m related to the king. Very good genes. Beautiful bloodline. Just tremendous. People say it’s one of the best.”

Now that Trump can claim to be royal-adjacent, there’s only one thing left to brand: United States currency. Because if there’s one place monarchs consistently put their faces, it’s money. I would not be surprised if POTUS released $45 bills (and $47… and maybe even $48 just to troll folks) with his kisser stamped on the front and “Donald Bucks™” across the top in gold. We’d be the first country on earth with a currency whose “face value” is… subjective.

What do you think about POTUS putting his puss on everything from trading cards and T-shirts to park passes and passports? LMK in the comments!

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