His latest book—and absolute must-read—is called Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It. He draws on his wealth of knowledge, his travels to remote locales, and interviews will all manner of experts to provide a comprehensive look at climate change: how it affects the air we breathe, the water we drink, the energy that powers our lives, and its impact on the planet. It’s everything you want to know—and even some things you didn’t!—about what lies ahead for us as the climate clock prepares to strike midnight.

This is the last ten minutes of our conversation. For the full interview, which covers the shakeup on 10 Downing Street, and an in-depth talk about the book, tune in to The Five 8 at 8pm ET this Friday!

Here is a transcript of this part of the discussion, edited for clarity:

GO:

Obviously we’re being run by Trump, who, we’ve talked about him enough, but what’s scarier than even that is the fact that enough people in the United States elected this guy a second time, knowing everything that they knew about him, having the record from the first term, which was so awful. I think the number is going down a little bit, maybe, but it’s still a significant percentage of the population that still thinks this guy is swell.

And then his entire party—which has the ability to get rid of him at any time and has always just sat down on the job and will not do anything unless it’s something that is inherently self-defeating. We’re spending all of our resources on terrorizing our immigrant population—which is also, as you found out after Brexit, what drives the economy, with their labor. The reason the Elon Musk people are so worried about the the “domestic infant supply,” so-called, is because they know that the population isn’t increasing enough to support and sustain the economy. In the United States, we depend on immigration to grow the economy. It’s just how it works. And all of the money’s going to that—that and God knows what we’re doing in Iran. I mean, that’s just…words fail to describe how stupid that is.

But at some point, theoretically, we will be rid of this guy, and we will have someone else in charge. In your book, you seem very, very not bullish about the United States, and with good reason, but what should we be doing? What what policies should we be putting in place? What should we prioritize? How do you see us now and what can we do to get out of it?

ARTHUR SNELL (AS)

I think, if you were going to make the bold case for the United States, clearly what you still have is, you have innovation. You have all the best scientists, you have the best universities, and you have a economy that, when it wants to, can put finance behind things that are worth doing. And, you know, we’re seeing this AI revolution—

GO

“Revolution.”

AS

—which, that’s another debate. Whether whether it proves good for humanity, we don’t know yet.

GO

We do; it doesn’t.

AS

Yeah, I don’t disagree.

But there’s no reason why the U.S. couldn’t completely dominate the renewable energy revolution and the transition from hydrocarbon energy. Unfortunately, you seem to have a political leadership that’s embedded with Big Oil and the related industrial sectors.

Not all doom

America's Oil Rush

As we emerge into a brief respite between heatwaves striking Europe, the insistence by the Trump Administration that climate change is “the scam of the century” seems hard to understand. It’s not as if America, facing wildfires, rising sea levels and extreme heat, doesn’t have its own evidence of what’s happening. But its politicians, especially of the …

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11 hours ago · 19 likes · Arthur Snell

And I don’t want to sound like some conspiracy guy in a bar, but it’s true. Something that people forget is that in the U.S., not very long ago, oil and gas production had dropped quite low. So around the turn of the millennium, it was really quite low relative to a lot of other countries. And it has grown massively. So the growth of that sector—the “oil rush” was not back in Texas in 18-something-or-others. It’s in the last 20 years. And then it’s no surprise, anyway, that there’s the impact—all that money that is flowing through the system, which is dependent on this hydrocarbon economy.

But there’s absolutely no reason why the U.S. couldn’t reverse that. Because you have the technology. You have, as I say, you have an economy that’s good at supporting innovation. Also, you’ve got space; that’s quite important. Coming back to the thing about solar panels: you know, people get antsy if you put solar panels in a natural-beauty spot, near a national park. But you’ve got a big country with relatively low population density.

So I think there are loads of things that the U.S. could do. When you talk about what are the policies—I think the problem is, you know, there were some good policies there that the Biden government put in, and Trump has reversed them all. And of course for him, everything with him is about a form of retribution, isn’t it, that he takes great pleasure from tearing up something that was either an Obama or a Biden policy.

But clearly having targets, whether it’s emissions targets—I mean, there’s this terrible irony, isn’t there, that the electric vehicle revolution was really the work of Elon Musk until about two years ago, at which point the Chinese kind of surged ahead. Now obviously Musk turns out to be a fascist, and somebody that we would perhaps not particularly want to see get rich. But before Teslas, no one believed that EVs were going to be a thing.

That’s an example of what America can do. But because of all the other factors, America no longer leads the EV economy. And it’s now completely dominated by China—not just in terms of volumes, but actually in innovation. The new EVs they’re making are way better than the Teslas. And that was totally not the case even two or three years ago.

GO

Yeah. The Chinese seem to be so far ahead. That’s the other takeaway from the book— that it’s almost an insurmountable lead at this point. Although if we’ve learned nothing else by watching the New York Knicks—which is something else we have in the United States!—no lead is too big, Arthur. No lead is too big.

AS

No, you are right. I think the sporting analogy is not a bad one because I would hesitate to write off the U.S., because the record of coming up trumps again and again—that’s an unfortunate turn of phrase, but you know what I mean—is very strong.

GO

Ha!

AS

But it just feels to me this time around that the politics has become so toxic that actually that you can’t—no one can sustain anything. The one thing you need is a sustained policy.

So let’s say, let’s all hope and pray that, I don’t know, President Newsom comes in—I mean, other people may have views, but a Democrat president sweeps away, JD Vance proves unelectable—he looks unelectable, he behaves on it, so that’s no shock—and we’re allowed to count the votes properly. JD Vance is history, there’s a Democrat president, they say, “We’ve got to get serious on the climate crisis.”

But also it’s a strategic necessity, because China is outstripping us. This isn’t about hugging trees and rare types of owls or whatever— which, it will help them too, so it’s not bad for that—but it’s a strategic necessity.

And then four years later, if you get some Republican in and they rip it all up—that’s the real issue. This kind of policymaking, which again, the U.S. used to be quite good at because of a bipartisan approach, has just gone.

GO

Well, you know, we’ll see. And this is the last question I want to ask you. Because there’s a lot of facts in the book that are…dispiriting, let us say. And I know how this goes; I write about dispiriting things all the time. But how do you, Arthur, maintain your own sense of of hope about all of this? Is there some secret?

AS

Well, I think there’s a couple of things. I think I come back to the point I made earlier about the technology being there. So it’s not like that bit at the beginning of the pandemic, where there was this disease, we had no cure, and it was killing people. It’s the bit where we got the vaccine. And so actually, there’s a way to deal with this.

Now, of course, there’s also idiots who say don’t take the vaccine, you got all that nonsense. But the fundamental question is, Are we living in the shadow of COVID anymore? No, we’re not. Because of human ingenuity, and because we got a vaccine. People were saying, “It’s going to take 10 years.” It didn’t. It took 24 months or less. Was it 18 months? So that’s a great example that the technology exists.

The other thing I think is that there are lots of examples where these shifts are happening just because of economic good sense—particularly in developing countries, where perhaps there was less electricity installed just because of less developed economies. They’re installing renewable energy because it’s the cheapest and the quickest way to do it. So you’re having this energy transformation. Trump might hate windmills, but most people are like, “I like windmills. It’s cheap. It gives me electricity straight away. It’s reliable. It’s simple. It’s way simpler than burning gas to turn that into electricity.”

So I think that there are lots of things like that which give cause for hope. Clearly we’ve done too little too late, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t still do things now. So I think that’s one part of it.

And I guess the other part is, you know, why you and me got to know each other. In the end, you find the people who are trying to do the right thing and you work with them and hope that eventually, in a small way, your own individual efforts add up to something a bit bigger overall.

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Dear Reader,

In January of 1991, Sting released The Soul Cages, his third (and best) studio album, inspired by the death of his father. The first single, “All This Time,” a song about his father’s funeral—and, more broadly, how we cope with death—features the line “Better to be poor than be a fat man in the eye of a needle.”

I was a senior in high school in 1991. I remember talking about the song that spring with my honors-class “frenemy,” whom we’ll call Dennis. He was going on about how dumb the lyrics were, because “fat man in the eye of a needle” struck him as silly and meaningless.

“It’s from the Bible,” I told him, explaining the meaning of the allusion, and that it was a camel, not a fat man, that could not pass through the eye of a needle; Sting was actually making fun of the passage from Matthew, mocking religion. Dennis was a smart guy, but because his parents hadn’t dragged him to Church every Sunday, this was all news to him.

A week later, there was a question about the “eye of the needle” passage on the AP English exam we both took.

“You owe me one,” I told him after.

Let’s begin with a poetical meditation on love:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, then I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge—if I have a faith that can move mountains—but do not have love, then I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to such hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, then I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Beautiful sentiment, right? I particularly like when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. It hits different, as the kids say.

The passage is from Paul the Apostle’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. And, after the Texas State Board of Education voted 9-5-1 to approve its new English literature curriculum, it will soon be—shiver me timbers!—required reading for every senior at every public high school in the Lone Star State.

There are, for sure, plenty of reasons not to like the BOE decision. Is the Board trying to foist Christianity upon unsuspecting students in Texas? That may well be an ulterior motive. Is this a power grab, a brazen attempt to weld Church and State together? This being Texas, probably yes. Is it fair to mandate passages from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but not the Quran, or other religious texts? I’ll let Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, take that question: “Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”

Those are all valid arguments. But they are arguments about politics, not about education—and certainly not about literature.

Ay, there’s the rub: while critics of the BOE’s decision are correct that certain titles in the new curriculum have no place in an English lit class—more on that shortly—the Bible passages are not what needs to go. On the contrary, the Bible passages are essential reading.

In From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, the historian Jacques Barzun—who was 93 when this magnus opus was published—argues that a distinct half-millennium-long cultural era had its genesis in the Protestant Reformation—and, specifically, in Martin Luther’s discovery and promotion of the Bible, and its subsequent mass production.

Incredible as it may seem today, when seemingly every hotel nightstand drawer in Christendom contains a copy of the “Good Book,” until the early 16th century the Bible was read almost exclusively by holy men—cloistered monks, parish priests, and the like. Churchgoers were familiar with sections of the Bible, from hearing about them at Mass. But the unabridged text? That was hard to get one’s hands on. It didn’t help that the literacy rate in Europe in 1517 was even lower than Donald Trump’s current approval rating.

After Luther’s 95 Theses, and with a big assist from Gutenberg, that all changed. Bible study was encouraged—and enabled Luther and his followers to challenge the Papal status quo: to protest. Families acquired Bibles that were passed down through the generations. This had an enormous impact on what we now call “Western” culture. Barzun writes:

To start with, it gave whole populations a common background of knowledge, a common culture in the high sense of the term. A 19C incident makes the point vivid: when Coleridge was lecturing in London on the great English writers, he happened to mention Dr. Johnson’s finding on his way home one night a woman of the streets ill or drunk in a gutter. Johnson carried her on his broad back to his own poor lodging for food and shelter. Coleridge’s fashionable audience tittered and murmured, the men sneering, the women shocked. Coleridge paused and said: “I remind you of the parable of the good Samaritan” and all were hushed. No amount of moralizing could’ve done the work of rebuke and edification with such speed and finality.

The Bible was a whole literature, a library. It was an anthology of poetry and short stories. It taught history, biography, biology, geography, philosophy, political, science, psychology, hygiene, and sociology (statistical at that), in addition to cosmogony, ethics, and theology. What gives the Bible so strong a hold on the minds that once grow familiar with its content is its dramatic reporting of human affairs. For all its piety, it presents a worldly panorama, and with particular so varied that it is hard to think of a domestic or social situation without a biblical example to match and turn to moral ends.

As Barzun correctly points out, the Bible is, first and foremost, a work of literature. Actually, it’s thousands of often contradictory works of literature, some better than others, all mashed up. But it’s literature just the same. And whether we like it or not, whether we are believers or not—and, for the record, I don’t like it and I’m not a believer—the Bible is, for the reasons he describes, the foundational text of all “Western” letters. Thus, studying English lit without reading the Bible is like building an apartment building without a foundation. The structure will collapse without it.

As I see it, literature—real literature, enduring literature, literature that influences later works—is a conversation authors have with each other, over the course of many centuries. It’s similar to a long series of inside jokes. As Dennis learned while taking the AP English exam, to not be at least familiar with the Bible is to miss all the allusions, all the references, all the context of two thousand years of Western literary endeavor. If the purpose of an English literature curriculum is to, you know, have students learn about English literature, then some knowledge of the Bible is compulsory.

And that is the context in which the Texas BOE is issuing its edict. The students are not being required to take classes in Religion, or being force-fed Christian dogma. It’s not even “Bible study,” like at Church. Students are reading short Biblical passages for English class. In English class, what you’re supposed to do is read texts and then discuss them. It isn’t about right and wrong, per se; it’s about nuance and interpretation and, above all, the development of critical thinking: a grave deficiency in the United States of Donald Trump—and the Texas of Greg Abbott particularly, as evidenced by the state continuing to choose such a cruel, performative, spiteful monster as its governor.

Take the passage from 1 Corinthians. That’s an ideal text to generate lively class discussion: It’s short, so everyone will have read it and thus can participate. It’s relatively straightforward, but just cryptic enough to allow for different interpretations. A teacher might ask: What does St. Paul mean by “when completeness comes, what is in part disappears?” What is he trying to convey with the metaphor of childhood and adulthood? Can life have meaning without love? What kind of love? Does love trump faith and hope? In the right hands, those five questions are enough to sustain a 45-minute English class, without the topic of Christianity even coming up.

Because indoctrination involves closing rather than opening minds, English classes are not an effective medium for proselytization. I had a Shakespeare professor in college who taught the plays with a religious zeal, as if the Bard came down from the mountaintop with Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet etched into stone tablets. It didn’t work. His zealotry only bred resistance in me, as zealotry should.

Speaking of Shakespeare: seniors in Texas high school English classes will also have to read Hamlet, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and [checks notes, drops jaw] “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” That poem contains these lines:

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet

Readers unfamiliar with the Bible story of Salome and John the Baptist will have no idea what Eliot is talking about there (just as they will have missed my allusion to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from Jehovah, in the last paragraph). Heads on platters? Prophet? Huh?

T.S. Eliot was hardly some Christian evangelist, nor was he exclusive to that faith; as anyone who’s attempted to analyze “The Waste Land” well knows, he incorporated all kinds of ancient texts, spiritual and otherwise, into his allusive and esoteric work.

The poem ends like this:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

That final Sanskrit word, repeated thrice, is, as Eliot explains in his notes, the formal end to an Upanishad: like saying “Amen” three times—or, in New York City this summer, “Knicks in five.” He translates it as “the Peace which passeth understanding.”

Do we cast out “The Waste Land” because it alludes to the Upanishads? Of course not. Eliot’s poem is no better at converting readers to Hinduism than St. Paul’s epistle is at bringing them to Jesus.

The required reading list does, I concede, get more Bible-y.

In English III junior year, Texas high school students will read Chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Genesis, subtitled in the online version “The Origin of Human Beings” and “The Origin of Evil”—the whole Adam and Eve saga.

Variations of the Garden of Eden myth are found throughout Western literature. To name only the most obvious example, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of the finest works in the English language, cannot be understood without familiarity with Genesis 2 and 3.

We all know the story, but here, for sake of argument, are the actual excerpts:

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden so that he might work it and care for it. The Lord God told the man, “You can eat of any of the trees in the garden, but you must never eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you were to eat from it, you would surely die.”

And the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I wish to make another creature who will be like him.”

The Lord God therefore formed every sort of wild animal and all the birds of the air, and he brought them before the man to see what he would name them. Whatever the man called each living creature, that was the name that it would bear. The man gave names to every type of animal, all the birds of the air and all the wild animals, but the man could not find anything that was like him.

The Lord God therefore caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. He took one of his ribs and replaced it with flesh. The Lord God then formed a woman out of the rib that he had taken from the man. He brought her before the man.

And:

The serpent was the most clever of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. It said to the woman, “Is it true that God told you not to eat of any of the trees in the garden?”

The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but as for the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, God said that we must not eat it, nor even touch it, lest we die.”

But the serpent said to the woman, “Certainly you shall not die! God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing that which is good and that which is evil.”

The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to look at and desirable for imparting wisdom. She took some fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband who was with her, and he also ate it. Their eyes were opened and they realized that they were naked. They took fig leaves and sewed them together, making themselves a covering.

They then heard the Lord God walking in the garden toward the evening. The man and his wife hid themselves from the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where were you?”

He answered, “I heard you walking in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.”

He said, “Who let you know that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”

The man answered, “The woman whom you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.”

The Lord God said to the woman, “What have you done?”

The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me and I ate it.”

The story ends like this:

The Lord God said, “Behold, man has become like one of us, for he has knowledge of that which is good and that which is evil. Now, we must prevent him from reaching out and taking the fruit of the tree of life lest he eat it and live forever.” The Lord God cast him out of the Garden of Eden; henceforth he was to labor tilling the soil from which he had come. When he expelled him, he placed cherubim to the east of the Garden of Eden with flaming swords to keep watch over the way to the tree of life.

Take it from a former creative writing adjunct professor: those Genesis passages are excellent fodder for critical classroom discussion—which is the entire point of English class! Why did God only create two humans? Why did He think denying them knowledge was a good idea? What was the serpent doing in the Garden in the first place? Wasn’t it God’s job to keep Eden free of snakes? How can two creatures ignorant of good and evil be expected to understand that the serpent is a bad actor? Why did Eve heed the serpent but Adam did not? Was it because Adam was kind of a dolt, and she was bored? If he was so sure he wasn’t supposed to take the bite, why did he do so? Where did the shame come from? Why would they think God, who created them, would object to their nudity? Why should nudity be shameful? Why did Adam immediately throw Eve under the bus? Why did God react like such a butt-hurt dick? Why did He banish them for all eternity and not give them a second chance? Why was He so concerned about them eating the fruit of the tree of life and living forever? Who are the cherubim who guard the Garden? Are they still there? Isn’t that kind of a boring job? Why didn’t Adam and Eve, or any of their descendants, ever try to return to Eden? Can the story be read as anti-patriarchy, because Jehovah behaves like an abusive father and Adam is a spineless coward, while Eve is the only one who has agency, curiosity, common sense, and courage?

Have we been reading it wrong this whole time?

On its face, the Garden of Eden story is ridiculous. Even the most pious, literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible English teacher in all of Texas would be besieged by clever students poking holes in the narrative. No thinking person would read those Genesis chapters and be like, “You know what? Christianity sounds great! Sign me up!”—not least because the Adam and Eve story is not unique to Christianity, but originates in Judaism and recurs in Islam. Five billion of the eight billion people now alive regard that story as part of their culture. Why not discuss it in an English lit class?

Infinitely more offensive to me than the Bible chapters is the fact that Ayn Rand is the lone woman author on the list of readings for junior year:

The best Rand novels—Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead—are, at best, engaging Young Adult yarns, not exemplary enough examples of literary fiction to merit inclusion, especially on such a short list. But On Capitalism? Setting aside that it’s nothing but oligarch propaganda, it’s more applicable to a class in economics, philosophy, or history. Miss me with that claptrap.

While Texas juniors contemplate Adam and Eve, its sophomores will read the Book of Job, which is probably the most novelistic book in the entire Bible, as well as the funeral oration of Pericles, from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War:

Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others than of our imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.

Good on the Texas BOE for sneaking this subversive anti-fascist text into the curriculum!

The outlier for English II is not Job or Pericles but rather—and I can’t believe this turd made its way into the literary punchbowl—Margaret Thatcher’s ho-hum eulogy for Ronald Reagan. Just because you’re the leader of English people doesn’t make you a luminary of English literature.

“Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them,” the Iron Lady said. “He and they loved America and what it stands for: freedom and opportunity for ordinary people.” Thatcher declined to mention that “Ronnie” expressed his love for ordinary people by dismantling the welfare state, ignoring the AIDS epidemic, disseminating racist tropes, thwarting the law by doing business with Iran, and planting the seeds of the implosion of democracy and the ascension of the exact same corrupt oligarchy he (to his credit) helped bring down in Russia.

Could it be that the Texas Board of Education knew that performative liberals would reflexively object to the establishment of compulsory Bible passages, and used that as cover, so it could sneak in brazen pro-oligarch propaganda? I wonder.

Less Margaret Thatcher, I say, and more Margaret Atwood; less Ayn Rand, and more Ann Radcliffe. But the Bible excerpts should be part of the curriculum. How can we expect students to learn about English literature without making at least a passing acquaintance with its foundational text?

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

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ICYMI

A “neat” show on Friday:

And we went doo-wop:

PROGRAMMING NOTES

• I am on the road the next two weeks on business trips: first Madrid, where I will wait out the 250th, and then Orlando. My tentative plan is to produce new PREVAIL pieces this week (June 30, July 3, July 5) and then take off the following week (July 7, 10, 12).

• I am on actual vacation the week of July 20.

• There will be no new Five 8 this Friday. I will do the show live from Florida on the 12th; on the 17th, we will have a very special guest.

• Finally, I am working on another “Infrequently Asked Questions” series. I hope to have more time to work on that this summer, and will begin posting it in installments in a few weeks.

Thanks, as always, for your support. I hope you’re enjoying the summer, insofar as that’s possible…

Photo credit: The dancer and choreographer Gertrude Hoffmann, scantily dressed for role in the controversial Salome opera, with head of John the Baptist.

And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. It is Friday morning, June 26th. It is 5:30 in the morning. Sun’s starting to rise here in the Hudson Valley of New York.

I want to talk today about some comments Vice President JD Vance made at the Richard Nixon Center. It’s so appropriate that he would be at the Richard Nixon Center that it’s sort of funny. The whole thing is funny. But being funny is part of the problem.

Let me just play some clips here—some of them you may have seen—but just for posterity I want to get these down, because this will not even be a twelve-hour news story.

Interviewer: That title chapter is “More Money, More Problems.” Why does more money sometimes cause more problems?

JD Vance: I’m a Millennial, so I believe that that’s the wisdom of the great Christian theologian, P. Diddy—who, as we found out in the last couple years, is very much not a Christian or a theologian. But— [laughs] See, I’m gonna get in trouble for all kinds of things; that’ll be one of them that will be an attack at some point.

That’s one. And here’s the other one, which I think has been talked about a little bit more:

So we were talking about this a little bit backstage, but I’m actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history. I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of renaissance, but I think deservingly so.

As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a twelve-hour new story. The idea that it would’ve taken down a presidency is crazy.

And, by the way, if you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump Administration. There is a parallel.

So these are two things that JD Vance said.

What I think is offensive about them is that he’s making light of, first, the sex crimes of P. Diddy, Sean Combs, who is…maybe not quite an Epstein-level sex offender, but, you know, close. And he’s also making light of Watergate, and making that into a laugh line. I mean, you could tell when Vance was saying the Diddy jokes that he was pausing for laughs, because he knew he’d get a laugh. Like, did he write that himself? Was that scripted?

This idea of the Deep State taking down Nixon is preposterous, which we’ll get into in a second. But I think it’s emblematic of this whole period of time that we’re in, that this guy, this Millennial as he calls himself, is not a serious man in any way, shape, or form.

How unserious is he? JD Vance is so unserious that someone wrote as a joke on Twitter that he used a latex glove to fuck a couch, and people believed it enough that it’s still a thing. That’s how much of a joke this guy is.

We know he’s a a puppet of Peter Thiel, the guy who brought us Palantir and is obsessed with the Antichrist and immortality. And we’ve talked about him a lot here at PREVAIL, but Vance is a puppet of Thiel. That’s all that he is, that’s all he’ll ever be. So this whole act of his is performative bullshit, but in a different way than Trump himself does the performative bullshit. Because Vance is smart enough to know what he’s doing, for one thing. And there’s a trolling aspect of it coming from JD that is more reminiscent of Donald Trump Jr. than Donald Trump Sr.

It’s just kind of repulsive. I mean, Watergate, which happened when I was, I think, a year old, not even. It happened around the same time that the Knicks last won the title, actually. Watergate was a watershed moment in the history of this country. I mean, it really was. For whatever reasons that started it—the break-in and the Plumbers and the cover-up and the missing audio, all of that stuff—there’s so many details. A lot of the stuff remains murky to this day, which is why I think it’s just called “Watergate,” as an umbrella term for the whole thing that fell underneath it. But major changes happened politically, culturally, in the wake of Watergate. One of the things that happened is that Congress actually, you know, did something about it—which is unthinkable today.

So just a couple of points that I want to make here about the comments JD Vance made.

Starting with Diddy, the idea that this guy, JD Vance—last seen, according to that book by Haberman and Swan, in the Situation Room, leading a meeting about how to cover up his boss’s complicity in the trafficking and rape of underage girls in the Epstein Files—the idea that this guy, who has zero moral compass, just zero, who is incapable of it—the idea that JD Vance could trot up there and quote, jokingly, the words of a sex criminal on the scale of P. Diddy—I mean, it’s disgusting, and it’s also insulting—not least to all the the women who are the survivors of these monstrous crimes.

This is the guy that’s gonna be, probably, president at some point. If you go by the actuarial tables: Trump is not in good health, he is eighty years old, and we’ve got three more years of this shit. He would be replaced by a guy in JD Vance who has zero ethics at all, zero moral compass, zero self awareness or ability to read the room—although I suppose he can read the room at the Nixon Center.

So that’s the first thing.

The second thing: Watergate was about election interference, really, if you think about it. Like the idea that what they were trying to do was bug the offices of the chair of the DNC—Larry O’Brien, the proto political insider from the Democratic Party, who dreamed up a lot of the techniques still used by the party today, and ran JFK’s successful 1960 campaign against…Richard Nixon. So, not somebody Nixon likes. That was the office that they bugged. So, you know, why were they in there bugging it? Because they wanted to win the fucking election.

This is the thing that is very much at the forefront of Trump’s mind, and therefore Vance’s mind. The midterm elections—if the Democrats take the House and the Senate, there’s gonna be a lot of bad shit coming down the pike for these people. Presumably. I don’t want to guarantee it because, you know, I’ve done that before. And if you go back and read my archive of of tweets from 2018, 2019, the biggest mistake I made in those tweets was thinking that the Democrats would come after Trump and his people in a real, meaningful way, which obviously didn’t happen.

Watergate was about election interference. And here’s JD Vance joking and making light about election interference.

The next thing is that if you go back and read through the history, all the shenanigans these Plumbing guys were up to, G. Gordon Liddy and all the others, they all had these German Nazi names for the ops they were doing. So these are guys that were pretty okay with Nazis and Nazism. Not that that’s a big surprise. Just like, you know, Trump and Elon Musk, and presumably you know, Vance, since he has no moral compass and does whatever Peter Thiel says.

Watergate was also very much associated with a corrupt Attorney General—who wound up going to prison, by the way. And we’ve got that. We’ve got two. We’ve got Pam Bondi who left, and now we’ve got this Todd Blanche. And we’ll see if history repeats with these people. It’s unlikely. I think Trump will pardon both of them before he leaves, unless he dies before he can do so. Probably he already has, would be my guess.

Watergate involved rightwing Cubans. We have a major-league rightwing Cuban in the Secretary of State position right now, who is not covering himself in glory these days.

So you know, you’ve got that.

There was a whole conspiracy theory that there was a “kompromat” angle to Watergate, where they were breaking in there to find incriminating evidence of some prostitution ring that was used by members of the Democratic Party. It wound up being bullshit, probably. Although, did people in the Democratic Party frequent the sex workers’ places of employment? Probably. And probably also Republicans did too.

So you’ve got that bubbling in the background. Maybe that’s what JD Vance meant by the Deep State, right? Maybe he just meant sex workers and sex traffickers.

You’ve got a body count. You know, Nixon won the election in ‘72 overwhelmingly. And he didn’t need to be doing all this stuff—which is, to me, being a Gen Xer and not Millennial like Vance, the most perplexing thing to me about Watergate is: why did they even bother doing this? I mean, they were so far ahead in the polls and Nixon won resoundingly. Why risk everything for this? For what possible gain? That was the thing that to me always seemed puzzling and never made much sense.

But Nixon was paranoid. He was paranoid and weird and creepy and evil. And those people kind of get lost in their own minds and in their own stories that they invent for themselves. You know, kind of like Trump does now.

But Nixon had a body count. Nixon and Kissinger had a body count. Because of Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, they had a body count. They killed a lot of people. Not just the U.S. service members who died, but also the people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos who they killed by extending the war.

Trump and Vance also have a body count. It’s an enormous body count, if we consider the half a million, coming up on one million people who died of starvation because of the DOGE cuts to USAID implemented by Elon Musk—if we consider that as part of Trump’s body count, and we should, it’s an enormous body count. I saw a statistic on Twitter—by 2030 Musk/Trump will be responsible for more deaths than Hitler. So, congratulations guys; good on the body count.

We still hear to this day Woodward and Bernstein—Woodward and Bernstein, obviously great investigative journalists working for the Washington Post, who broke the Watergate story and stuck with the story even when Nixon denied it and really came after them. And people hold that up—and rightly so—as an example of good journalism and the power of journalism. Absolutely so.

But—and I’ve said this a bunch of times, usually on Five 8: so many things had to go right for that story to work. You had to have the two journalists willing to do the story, one of whom, Woodward, had the really good source in Deep Throat. You had an editor that was willing to work with them and help them and guide them and believed in them and let them keep covering the story. And then you had an editor-in-chief, Ben Bradlee, who stuck by his people even at the face of great difficulty when the Nixon people came after them. And you had Kay Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who let Ben Bradlee do that. So you had to have all of those things in place for this to work. So even back then, Woodward and Bernstein was more of an anomaly than not.

Fast-forward to now, Woodward, Bob Woodward, one of the many, many journalists who has embraced the “I will save all the good stuff for the book, which will be out in nine months, maybe 10, at which time what I’m reporting about and what I’ve discovered will be out of date and nobody will be able to do much with it” school.

That’s the state of journalism now—everybody’s got to wait for the book. I don’t really know why that is. I mean, we’re learning a lot of great stuff now from Haberman and Swan, kudos to them. But, like, making us wait for the book is not cool, guys. It’s not cool.

And of course, now the Washington Post is not owned by Kay Graham, it’s owned by Jeff Bezos, who, you know, is in Trump’s pocket—to maybe to a slightly lesser degree than CBS News is, certainly: Bari Weiss and the Ellisons and these horrible people.

Having a legacy media outlet that’s even willing to go after the president in this way, and the way that the Post did in ‘73, is also not terribly realistic right now—which is something Vance is well aware of, as he’s making jokes about Watergate.

The Republicans in Congress fought back after Watergate. They got Nixon to resign. They made it clear they were going to impeach him. They made it clear that he was going to be convicted and and removed. And to avoid that ignominy, he resigned. Nixon resigned. He left office. “I’m not a crook. I’m…I’m not a crook.” He was a crook, and he left.

Trump doesn’t have that shame factor, so he will never leave willingly. I’ve long said, even if he was impeached and they said he had to go, I don’t think he would go. I think he would just hole up in his bunker or whatever and refuse to leave. But we’re never gonna find that out, because Congress is full of these disgustingly craven poltroons who just, you know, they can’t get out of their own way. They’re beholden either to the donors or to fear, or to, you know, internal party bullshit politics. I don’t know.

But there’s no way that that we could depend on any of these people, including a lot of Democrats, to do the right thing. And we’re seeing this now. We’re seeing this now here, even in blue New York. One of our senators here in New York is the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who is, I think, way more concerned with Israel right now than he’s concerned with the United States.

And then the other senator, Gillibrand, is too busy sucking up to the crypto boys; she wanted to make sure her son had nice venture capital coming his way, didn’t want to disrupt his big business operation that’s being launched. This is a kid who just graduated from Stanford and raised $30 million in venture funding, for some app that may or may not be good. But the idea that he would have gotten the venture funding if he wasn’t the son of this prominent U.S. senator is probably far-fetched.

Anyway, it’s just everybody in Congress is too concerned with their own shit. And at some point, money, currency, has no value. A dollar, a $20 bill, a $100 bill, has no inherent value. There’s nothing valuable about it, other than the fact that we all believe it’s valuable. And when we stop believing that it’s valuable, it just becomes paper. And I think if it’s a crypto wallet printout, that’s even less likely to hold someone’s faith.

That’s what these people are toying with right now, as JD Vance jokes that Nixon is making a comeback. I don’t know. I like to think that Nixon would not like what’s happening now. I like to think that he would look at especially the way that Trump is completely capitulating to the Russians, to the Iranians, and likely also to the Chinese, and just shake his head and be like, “I don’t like this guy.”

We’ll never know that either, of course. But in the meantime, you know, it’s funny to laugh at JD Vance and call him a couchfucker, and I do it all the time to preserve my sanity. But the reality is that he is a puppet of Peter Thiel, who is very Nazi adjacent. Vance has zero moral compass. He is so in the bag for the regime that he’s down in the Situation Room trying to make sure that the Epstein Files do not ever see the light of day, because he knows what his boss did, probably, or suspects what his boss did is so bad that it would just take him down.

And if he becomes president, as I said before they even picked JD Vance, out on the road with Allison Gill and LB, what, two years ago, two summers ago, I guess it was. JD Vance is a fascist, man. He’s a big player in the Dark Enlightenment. He really does believe, insofar as he believes anything, that democracy is lame and that, you know, this other way is the way. So if and when he becomes president, it’s gonna be a big, big problem.

Trump is horrible in his own way, for sure, obviously. But what I’ve seen, based on the Iran stuff, is that he’s not Hitler bad; he’s only mobster bad. Not that he isn’t doing Hitler things, and not that we should breathe a sigh of relief, but I think Trump is concerned with just getting his cut and his taste of all the corrupt money shit going on, the little schemes here and there—that’s his number one priority. He’s not concerned with ruling over people in the way that Hitler was. I think that he sees the concentration camps, for example, more as a boondoggle and a way to funnel money to his cronies. He doesn’t really care about whether they’re ever completed or any of that stuff. I think that the the prime movers of all of these things are other people who have enormous power in his administration—and Vance may well be one of them. You know, Russ Vougt, and Stephen Miller certainly—those guys are definitely real fascists, and they’re dangerous.

And when Trump goes, maybe some of the corruption, the obvious stealing and plunder, will be a little bit less. But the fascism is going to be more. And the fascism, the Nazism, the citizens turning on citizens…that’s going to be what gets us.

These are bleak thoughts—but Watergate is no laughing matter.

But we have to remember, just to end it on an “up” note, that the person who was the chair of the DNC, Larry O’Brien, whose office the Plumbers broke into during Watergate, went on to become the commissioner of the NBA. And the trophy that Jalen Brunson is shown holding here is in fact the Larry O’Brien Trophy. So, I don’t know. All’s well that ends well, I guess?

I felt that way about the Knicks, and I feel that way about us as a people: We shall prevail.

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TONIGHT

Join us on The Five 8.

Photo of Brunson by Newsday.

Well, no one told me about her, the way she lied…
Well, let me tell you ‘bout the way she looked,
The way she acts, and the color of her hair—
Her voice was soft and cool, her eyes were clear and bright,
But she’s not there.
—The Zombies, “She’s Not There,” 1965

In the X-Men comics, there is a mutant called Rogue. She has no superpowers of her own. What Rogue does is, she absorbs the life force of anyone she touches, and takes on their life force—including, in the case of mutants, their superpowers. She’s a superpower vampire, basically.

Rogue is easy to spot. She has a head of flowing brown-black hair—except for the swoop above her forehead, which is stark white.

Tulsi Gabbard wears her hair like Rogue. This is appropriate when we consider that, like the comic book character, all of her energy comes from someone else.

The real Tulsi? She’s not there.

This vacant-ness made Tulsi Gabbard arguably the most dangerous of Donald Trump’s second-term appointments. On the surface, her nomination as Director of National Intelligence was an example of bipartisan cooperation. But Gabbard had long ago left the Democrats, finding succor at FoxNews. She was a turncoat to her party—and, some alleged, a traitor to her country. During my Twitter heyday, I certainly quote-tweeted some of Gabbard’s more Kremlin-infused posts with my signature catchphrase, “The traitors are easy to spot.”

But Tulsi Gabbard is not, strictly speaking, a traitor. On the contrary: she’s always been the good solider. Indeed, she is arguably the most fiercely loyal politician in all of Washington. And that is what was so risky about making her the head of the eighteen agencies that comprise the U.S Intelligence Community.

Gabbard has no agency. She is a puppet, a zombie, a mouthpiece, an empty vessel sent to Washington to do the bidding of her master—a master she has not and likely will never betray.

Her master is not Donald Trump. And, while most of her actions throughout her political career, from her terms in Congress through her disastrous stint as DNI, have helped the Kremlin—although “Tulsi is a Russian puppet” has become a running joke—her master is not Vladimir Putin.

No, her master is a man named Chris Butler. He is the leader of her cult—the cult she’d grown up with in Hawai’i, and has been a part of her entire life.

I learned about the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF) in the summer of 2019, mostly from the diligent work of the LGBTQ activist Lisa Talmadge and the intrepid Hawai’i-based independent reporter Christine Gralow, the first journalist to expose Gabbard’s ties to the cult group.

At the time, Gabbard was still running, albeit unsuccessfully, in the Democratic primary. She was, as I saw it, a chaos candidate, a fake progressive whose entire campaign existed to siphon the votes of idealistic and/or gullible leftists away from whichever candidate the party wound up nominating. That she was easy on the eyes—already there were MAGA men openly ogling her online—made her that much more of a threat.

Also at the time, I had a prominent “blue check” Twitter account, and my 80,000 or so followers included a lot of movers and shakers in independent media and the broad anti-Trump community. (Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter, predicted and warned about on these pages, was a devastating blow to both journalism and activism—exactly as its new Nazi owner intended.) Gabbard’s membership in SIF was a Mauna Loa-sized red flag, and I wanted to sound the alarm. But I did not yet have this PREVAIL platform. And so, on August 8, 2019, I took to Twitter and wrote a thread:

Twitter threads have a different style than Substack posts; word-count is limited, so threads are written in short, choppy bursts. The idea is to be as direct as possible, explain as much as you can as economically as possible, and provide lots of links to relevant sources, for further reading. My purpose was not to break Tulsi Gabbard news; Gralow and Talmadge had done that. My purpose was to amplify their work. I wanted to get my followers up to speed on what I’d learned.

Although it has been online for seven years, and although Tulsi Gabbard has been in the headlines for much of that time, my thread did not perform well, in terms of analytics. It has, as of today, just 815k “impressions”—40,000 of which came this week, after it was RT’d by prominent accounts1 —and still hasn’t hit the 5k “like” threshold. By contrast, my “Trump is a Russian asset, a mob money launderer installed by his mob whoremasters to sow chaos and weaken the US & our allies” thread—which ran nine months earlier, when I had far fewer followers—has five million impressions.

Jack Dorsey, who owned Twitter at the time, was a big Tulsi guy. He was known to temporarily ban accounts that spoke ill of her. He acted like her Lord Protector. Was I perhaps being throttled?

The original thread can be read here. Below is an expanded, updated version.

This man is Chris Butler (b. 1948), aka Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa:

He’s the founder of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), a fringe yogic sect based in Hawai’i. He is the “guru” of Tulsi Gabbard, who was a child of the Science of Identity cult.

A survivor of the SIF cult describes it as a “High Demand Closed Group” because it “has isolated itself from mainstream life and lives by the demanding and usually arbitrary rules set by the leader of the group.” Science of Identity revolves around the despotic whims of one man: Butler, who is treated as the embodiment of God on earth. Its members isolate themselves from outside influence: they marry each other, send their kids to SIF schools (Tulsi attended such schools), and so on.

SIF members who leave the group are shunned. Outsiders who report on the group are stalked and harassed, in the dickish style pioneered by the Scientologists. Christine Gralow, who has investigated the cult extensively, has been the subject of such treatment.

Check this, from SIF’s official website: “Jagad Guru appeared in this world in 1948 as Chris Butler.” Impressed with yourself much, my dude? And: “Perhaps one of the most difficult concepts for the Western mind to comprehend in relation to traditional yoga and Vedic thought is the question of spiritual authority.” Dig? Chris Butler = THE spiritual authority.

In September 2017, Lalita Mann, the aforementioned Science of Identity cult survivor, wrote a harrowing first-person account of her experiences growing up under Butler’s thumb:

I also remember Chris Butler held this larger than life presence in my childhood. Everything I did I had to think about how it benefitted him. He was my parents spiritual master and they looked to him for guidance on everything, from what to eat, to how to raise their children, and they did it all without question. When I talk to people about the lack of questioning, they find that aspect odd. It is odd, but to put it into perspective, I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God’s voice on earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God, and because we believed in reincarnation, that meant that you would be reborn as the lowest lifeform imaginable and then have to spend eon’s working your way back into God’s good graces. So questioning the leader was spiritual suicide, which was seen as worse than death. So no-one questioned. Chris Butler also would ridicule the intelligence of anyone he didn’t like, belittling anyone he felt was questioning his authority even slightly. He demanded the utmost dedication and loyalty from his followers and if he didn’t get it, the punishments were swift and severe. I remember hearing stories of people who were told they weren’t allowed to eat because they didn’t make food to his liking, who were not allowed to sleep because there was a light making a buzzing noise in the house, and the follower didn’t have the foresight to fix the issue ahead of time.

Literally everything we did had to go through Chris. If you wanted to work outside of the group, you had to ask his permission. No-one could get married without his consent. From the late 80’s all of us kids were removed from public schools because he didn’t want them influencing our minds away from our service to him….

From a young child I remember one of the main features of my life was the lectures that were sent to us via tape for us to listen to. Basically these were 1 hour long sessions of Chris talking about his beliefs—how evil and out of control gay people were, how women were inferior and sub human and should be controlled by their husbands, how messed up and evil the outside world was, and how his relationship with God was so special, only he could lead you back to Godhead (Heaven) and that he had so much control over his existence on earth, he could choose the moment of his death. We worshipped him, loved him even. Another part of his teachings was that all life is an illusion, and because of that all relationships were an illusion. We were encouraged to not invest in any relationships other than with him, so we were in effect isolated from our parents who did their best to not love us as per his recommendation, and instead looked at him like a surrogate father/messiah figure. He was this imposing force in our life that we weren’t supposed to offend, which is frankly terrifying when you’re a small child. I remember having many nightmare’s and a condition called sleep paralysis which can be brought on in times of great stress. My sister developed stress induced epilepsy during the time when we were supposed to be taken out of school….

I really wanted to paint this picture of my childhood, because Tulsi Gabbard grew up in the same group that I did. She was subjected to the same environment I was. She’s still surrounded by this group and calls Chris Butler her guru. This is why the increased interest and her rise to power concerns me so greatly. I want to be very clear, I have no issue with Tulsi, as far as I am concerned, she’s as much a victim as I am, more so because she was groomed from an early age specifically for the path she is now on. What I am concerned about is the control I know Chris Butler has over her, the influence he has over her ability to make decisions, decisions that could become law and impact a whole lot of people. I know what an abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, germophobic, narcissistic nightmare Chris Butler is. And I know what kind of relationship he has with Tulsi.

To be fair, Butler isn’t as bad as Hubbard/Miscavige, David Koresh, or NXIVM’s Keith Raniere. But he ain’t no prince. “Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa” is a virulent homophobe who loves to use the f-word in his teachings. Gralow obtained and shared a transcript:

(I have subsequently heard audio of Butler, who comes off like a failed insult comic; it’s somehow even worse when it’s spoken out loud, because he’s playing it for laughs.)

Tulsi’s “guru” also really REALLY dislikes Muslims:

Tulsi Gabbard’s parents bought what “Jagad Guru” was selling, hook line and sinker. She and her siblings were raised in the cult, immersed in the homophobic, Islamophobic teachings of Chris Butler.

In June of 2019, two months before my thread, Kerry Howley wrote an excellent piece on Gabbard for New York magazine, delving into Tulsi’s childhood and her relationship to Butler. Howley wrote:

When Tulsi talks about her girlhood, it is with a profound vagueness, a visible discomfort. In Iowa, there is awkward silence when I ask about her three brothers (“They’re kind of separate,” her sister eventually says) and silence when I ask about being homeschooled (“The schools in Hawaii weren’t very good,” [her sister] Davan offers). Tulsi calls herself Hindu, the first Hindu member of Congress, in fact, though the group in which she appears to have grown up does not identify as Hindu. She says she was raised by “an eccentric Catholic father.”

In 1970, the Honolulu Advertiser published a piece called “One Man Rules Haiku Krishnaites,” with the subhead “Absolute power of devotees.” In the photo beside the piece, [Chris] Butler is seated shirtless and smoking, hair skimming his shoulders and a sarong around his waist, staring alluringly into the distance, a mischievous smile on his face. It is the expression of less a guru than a playboy, and this is how Advertiser reporter Janice Wolf depicts him, a handsome dictator with the ability to hypnotize the two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds who live with him in his Quonset hut. One of the girls, an 18-year-old who also happened to have the Sanskrit name Tulsi, says he arranged her marriage to another member of the group. She and another girl, who say they would kill for him, describe his teachings. Among them: “Flowers scream when they’re picked. So do trees when they’re trimmed.” (“Tulsi and Boni were sitting on the lawn chewing blades of grass when they said this,” notes Wolf.)

Butler taught vegetarianism, sexual conservatism, mind-body dualism, and disinterest in the material world. He taught a virulent homophobia, skepticism of science, and the dangers of public schools. He had been associated with Hare Krishna, and in fact claimed to have been given his Sanskrit name, Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, by the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, but by the time he encountered the Gabbards, he’d started his own group. His teachings revolved around worship of Krishna but differed from those of Hare Krishna, in that he instructed his followers to learn from only a single guru — himself — and did not require them to shave their heads or wear robes. The lack of formal dress allowed the group an anonymity he encouraged. He forbade them from visiting India, which is not typical of Hare Krishna, and, also against Hare Krishna practice, married. His wife was one of his followers, Wai Lana, a popular yoga instructor who later had a long-running instructional yoga series on public television. (Abraham, Tulsi’s husband, has helped with filming Wai Lana’s videos; his mother also works for her.) Whenever Butler traveled, he’d have the homes he stayed in lined with tinfoil, to protect against electromagnetic radiation.

Tulsi’s old man is Mike Gabbard, a big wheel in SIF. One of Tulsi’s contemporaries told New York: “You just knew Mike was a dick. He carried himself with dickishness.” That may be Mike Gabbard’s nature—but he may also have been channeling Chris Butler, who is an A-1 asshole.

Mike Gabbard ran a nonprofit called Stop Promoting Homosexuality America. This explains why Gabbard, ostensibly a Democrat, was such an enthusiastic opponent of gay marriage…and in such a bizarre, tone-deaf sort of way:

Tulsi was steeped in Science of Identity and her hateful guru for the first two decades of her life. It’s all she knew. She married young, to another SIF-er. The first time she left the cult was during her tour in Iraq. War was her first exposure to the outside world.

In the thread, I wrote this: “To be clear, it’s not her fault that her parents got brainwashed and raised her this way. I feel bad for Tulsi. I don’t think she’s a bad person. I think she’s a decent person who was brainwashed and is being manipulated.” I’m not sure if I really meant that at the time, and I certainly don’t agree now.

“The problem,” I wrote, “is that Tulsi is still involved with the Science of Identity cult. Chris Butler remains her guru. She has not renounced him. Much of her staff and insular inner circle are SIF people.” Christine Gralow produced this handy-dandy Venn diagram, illustrating the point:

“I think she’s still very much in his thrall,” I wrote. “Her odd record, especially concerning foreign policy, suggests this is so. She even SPEAKS like she’s in a cult, seems to me. Detached. Weird.”

“Bottom line,” I concluded, “It makes no sense to replace a president who is a puppet of Putin”—that is, Donald Trump—“with one who is a puppet of this guy:”

In early December 2024, as the Senate prepared for Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, I published a piece on these pages, “Confirmation Hearing Aid: What to Ask Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and RFK, Jr.”

Among other things, I called for Gabbard to be asked these questions:

—Chris Butler, aka Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, is the founder of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), a fringe yogic sect based in your native Hawai’i. Please relate your history with SIF and Butler, respectively. Are you still active in SIF?

—Critics have suggested that SIF is a cult, and Butler, a cult leader. Is it? Is he? I’m asking this because, as Director of National Intelligence, you will have to be fiercely independent, and I have concerns that Butler has undue influence over your decision-making. Are you more loyal to the American people or to your “guru”?

—Ms. Gabbard, Chris Butler’s remarks about the LGBT community are repugnant. He is particularly fond of a gay slur that begins with “f.” I have heard audio of him making hateful comments about gay men that sound like the world’s worst stand-up routine—like a less funny Greg Gutfeld (if that were possible). While in your twenties, you did work for the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, an anti-gay-rights group run by your father, a Chris Butler acolyte, who was then a state senator. You have since recanted those views. How much did Butler influence your decision to do that work? What are your feelings about LGBT rights now? What can you say to reassure LGBT members of the Intelligence Community that you aren’t a hateful homophobe like Chris Butler?

—You have been such an obvious supporter of Vladimir Putin, and such a mainstay on Russian television, that even former House colleagues openly call you a Kremlin asset. Are you? And if you’re not, why do you reliably stand with Putin and other Putin-adjacent dictators like Bashar al-Assad, even when their interests clash with those of the United States? Could it be that, growing up in the SIF cult, you are more comfortable with dictators than democracy?

My suggestions were ignored. These questions were not asked.

I searched the transcript. Not a single mention of SIF or Chris Butler. “Cult” showed up twice—embedded in the words “difficult” and “cultural.”

I guess the fear of being called “Hinduphobic” and harassed by these losers outweighed legitimate concerns about national security.

Friday was Gabbard’s last day at DNI.2 In her brief tenure, Gabbard did inestimable damage to the national security of the United States. She outed new CIA recruits by sending a list of new hires via Gmail; exposed an undercover CIA agent; showed up in Georgia at an FBI search of a voting center; wrote a report poo-pooing vulnerabilities in voting machines; and, on her last day in office, with the health of her husband presumably very much on her mind, she released a bunch of bullshit about Dr. Fauci’s handling of the pandemic—spewing Kremlin talking points until the bitter end.

“Today,” she tweeted, “on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.”

All that “exposing” does is make us all less healthy and less safe.

Two days after she left office, the Washington Post published a lengthy investigative piece by Jon Swaine, who revealed—and I’m simplifying here—that Tulsi Gabbard has been Chris Butler’s puppet and mouthpiece for basically her entire political career.

It’s remarkable, a superb piece of investigative journalism. Swaine found a tranche of emails related to a SIF-affiliated group called Nine Isles, that, taken together, seem to be a transcript of Butler issuing commands to Gabbard—and being a total abusive dick about it, as is his wont. Of the emails, Swaine writes:

Their content was extraordinary.

Dozens of attached memos appeared to document directives and advice for Gabbard from her time in Congress. Some contained instructions on what legislation she should propose, which policies she should embrace and how she should conduct herself on television. They had an air of authority. A memo about a proposal to partition war-torn Iraq into three states quoted an unnamed person as saying it was “time for TG to come up with this idea.”

Some of the language was harshly critical. One memo I found, from January 2015, contained a derisive assessment of a statement Gabbard was to give in response to President Barack Obama’s annual address to Congress.

“In the first place, nobody gives a shit what you think about his State of the Union speech, unless you’re going to say something of interest,” the memo quoted someone as saying. “You’re not even trying. You’ve become really intellectually lazy.”

In another, Gabbard was described as “chickenshit” and “mealymouthed” for her comments on a policy proposal.

SIF, of course, denies that Butler is the puppetmaster. His name is not on the Nine Isles emails, so there’s no way to prove for certain that he is the source. But we all know that cult leaders are oh-so famous for outsourcing authority.

The WaPo article makes it pretty clear that yes, Tulsi Gabbard really was a puppet, if not for Butler directly than for individuals in his inner circle. The piece confirms SIF survivor Lalita Mann’s impression of Butler as “an abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, germophobic, narcissistic nightmare.” It confirms Gralow’s reporting. It confirms my 2019 Twitter thread.

And, needless to say, it arrived in the newspaper too late to do us any good.

What’s the lesson here?

Dave Troy of America 2.0—one of the single best publications out there for making sense of the forces working against democracy—put out this X thread yesterday:

What no one is asking now is WHY Gabbard was being run by a cult? For decades, Russia has worked to inject itself into spiritual cults (Maharishi, ISKCON, SIF) to 1) get people staring at their navels instead of taking political or practical action, 2) bring about “world peace” by capturing and dismantling US capabilities.

The “antiwar” movement is a left-right capture play and has been on display at recent events such as “Rage Against the War Machine” and “Rally to Rescue the Republic” which are run by the Libertarian Party, the Schiller Institute, the Ron Paul network, and the RFK Jr network — as well as the full menagerie of RU/CN proxies. Gabbard is fully part of that network and has spoken at those events.

This network goes back decades in various forms and has been at the heart of the anti-war and anti-nuclear “movements” which have been fluffed by Russia, and more recently by China.

But why, you might wonder, would a third-rate, luau’d Charles Manson be so concerned with Russian interests? New York talked to his brother:

Back in the ’70s, Butler went by the name “Sai Young,” a name he possibly picked because he was a gifted baseball player who had hoped to go pro. In their boyhood, according to his estranged brother Kurt, Chris was the handsome, popular one. Their father, a family physician named Willis Butler, took them, their mother, and their siblings to protest Vietnam well before it was socially acceptable to do so. Kurt remembers the whole family standing along a sidewalk on the edge of the University of Hawaii campus, holding signs that read stop the war and stop the bombing. From their cars, people threw garbage at the family. They yelled things: “Losers,” “Love it or leave it,” “Fucking commies.”

Their father was, in fact, a communist. The Butler patriarch loved the Soviet Union, thought North Korea a workers’ paradise. When Kurt brought home a geography book from school that mentioned political repression in the USSR, his father called it “lying propaganda.” When, as an adolescent, Chris pointed out that the Viet Cong had committed atrocities, his father wouldn’t hear it. Chris sought refuge in psychedelics, Kurt wrote in an email to me, then in meditation. He began writing poetry. He began giving meditation classes. “The classes,” says Kurt, “gradually evolved into a full-fledged cult.”

There ya go.

Troy’s thread concludes with a warning:

Gabbard isn’t some one-off whack-job proxy of a rogue3 cult leader: this is an assault by our adversaries in a long game of information warfare and state capture, and those adversaries now have every state secret she cared to locate and share. We are less secure now. Congrats.

I’m not telling you anything here that wasn’t known during her confirmation hearings. Which means the Senate was derelict of duty, and complicit.

Some will also remember when Tulsi was briefly chair of the DNC, a Sanders Institute fellow, and a darling of the left cheering on Julian Assange. She was always a snake and her goal was to infiltrate and destroy the Democratic Party.

Next time maybe more people will pay attention to those doing closer reads of the signals instead of flitting from scandal to scandal.

What’s particularly infuriating about Tulsi Gabbard is that she isn’t even a convincing puppet. Kerry Howley nailed it in her New York piece (boldface mine):

Many have called Tulsi cold and lacking in charisma and “not particularly spontaneous.” She is not cold. She can be spontaneous in the right setting, exude charisma if engaged on the right subject. What she is — take it from someone with the same emotional profile — is remote. In interview after interview, she gives the impression of having anti-Establishment convictions just beyond the reach of articulation, as if she had carried instructions into battle and lost them. Her speeches feel not so much overly prepared as capably delivered from a separate location through her. She operates on the slightest delay, taking in information, scanning it, and delivering a slow response that registers only barely on her face.

Tulsi Gabbard is nothing but Chris Butler on a seven-second tape delay.

Although no longer in office, Gabbard remains a threat to national security; she’s still a useful tool the bad guys have at their disposal.

“Don’t kid yourself that Tulsi is gone and won’t need to be dealt with later,” Troy admonishes. “These people are like a low-grade infection and there are still plenty of household uses for her by the adversaries. She’ll be back.”

Of course she’ll be back.

That’s what zombies do.

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Photo credit: Yaroslav Shuraev via Pexels.

Dear Reader,

Back in 2011, when a trustwashed iteration of Donald Trump was still firing D-list celebrities on a contrived “reality” show, I published a novel about a day in the life of a stay-at-home dad. I called it Fathermucker, because ha ha. That was also the title of the German edition; I was hoping for an umlaut over the “u,” like a heavy metal band, but no such luck. In French, it was released as Fête des Pères—Father’s Day.

At the time, my kids were six and four, a year older than their respective characters in the book. And unlike in the book, my wife and I both shared the parenting responsibilities—which didn’t make the job any easier.

The period that begins with a child being conveyed from hospital to home, snug in the car-seat, and ends with the same child being conveyed from home to kindergarten on a school bus is, to the parent, unlike any other phase in life. I wrote the book because I wanted to make sure I remembered it all, good, bad, and ugly—although, curiously, I have not read my novel in probably a dozen years.

Fathermucker is mostly a vehicle for my observations and jokes about presiding over two small and fussy humans. It begins like this:

Fatherhood is fear. Fatherhood is disappointment. Fatherhood is anger and envy and lust. And the surest guarantee of fatherly success is a Spock-like mastery of those base emotions. Mister Spock, not Doctor.

Good fathers conquer fear. They become One with their phobias. Like the Buddha. Or Patrick Swayze in Point Break. 

Good fathers manage their expectations. They do not expend perspiration on small stuff, and they recognize, like the Zen masters that they are, that all stuff is small. That nothing is worth sweating over. Not even punishments cruel and unusual, tortures that violate the Geneva Conventions: sleep deprivation, emotional blackmail, Go, Diego, Go!.

Good fathers temper their anger. They don’t snap, they don’t yell, they don’t call the douchebag in the BMW who just cut them off a fucking asshole when children are in earshot, they don’t smack, and they sure as hell don’t spank. Love is their sole instrument of discipline. 

Good fathers combat the Seven Deadly Sins with the Seven Cardinal Virtues: humility, charity, kindness, patience, temperance, prudence, and, oh yes, chastity. Good fathers emulate good fathers of another kind, priestly, offering blessing and balm, sacrificing their own desires for the salvation of others. 

That’s what good fathers do.

I strive to be a good father, but when your three-year-old won’t stop kicking you, and your five-year-old swats at you with his fork when you try to take away his Lego catalog, and the two of them come to blows over matters of great import, such as who gets to play with the US Weekly magazine insert they found on the mildewy floor near the toilet, this can be a challenging—nay, an impossible—duty to uphold. 

Which calls to mind another axiom of my austere and lonely office:

Fatherhood is failure.

I think what I meant by that last line is that parents are held to impossible standards—that we all make mistakes, sometimes big ones, and we have to accept that a certain amount of fucking up is the natural order of things. It’s no coincidence that one of the taglines for Noggin, the now-defunct cable channel that ran Blue’s Clues and Yo Gabba Gabba! and Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends, was: “We’re not perfect; we’re parents.”

Fifteen years later, with my kids now 21 and 19, I have come to understand, and to accept, that they are their own unique human beings, completely independent of me and my wife, each with their own distinct personalities that were fully evident from the day they were born: the oldest, a full two weeks late, wanting to maximize the time inside the coziness of the womb; the youngest, a full month early, stubbornly insisting to be released into the world RIGHT NOW, READY OR NOT. They are who they are—and always have been. We can nurture our children, support them, encourage them, nudge them in certain directions, give them the tools they need to succeed, and love them to pieces, but what they make of themselves is largely beyond our control.

(Fatherhood, I might have added, is frustration.)

The best words in that little snippet from my book are the ones I didn’t write. “My austere and lonely office” is an allusion to “Those Winter Sundays,” a poem by Robert Hayden, the first Black Poet Laureate of the United States—which feels especially appropriate to share the Sunday after Juneteenth (if not the first day of summer).

The poem is based on memories from his own (unhappy) childhood in Michigan. In the first stanza, Hayden recalls how “[o]n Sundays too my father got up early,” in the freezing cold, and would get a fire going, so everyone in the family would be warm when dressing for church. “No one ever thanked him.”

The poem continues:

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

And that is another fact of fatherhood, which Hayden articulates so beautifully in those last two lines: So much of what our parents do for us is unknowable. What could we know? Either we were too young to remember, or we were never aware of it in the first place. That’s the mystifying nature of the parent-child dynamic.

My father died three and a half years ago. This is already my fourth Father’s Day without him. I know he worried about whether or not he was a good father, just as I worry about whether I’m a good father (or, for that matter, whether I’d been a good son.) On that count, Dad had nothing to fear. As I wrote on these pages the day after he died:

You know how a lot of creative people have terrible fathers? Dads who are petty, who don’t believe in them at all, who scoff at their ambitions, who delight in their disappointment, who call out their failures? My father was almost comically not like that. He was exactly the opposite. I don’t know that he ever really understood what I do, all of the projects that I was undertaking at any given time—we had the same name, but not the same pursuits—but he always encouraged me, believed in me, supported me. I felt protected and nurtured and loved. I felt taken care of. My father would have done anything for me and my brother. What a privilege, what a gift, for us to have that knowledge, that certitude! There is nothing more meaningful a parent can give a child. I don’t know how he knew to be that way. Certainly not from his father, who was the self-centered, tyrannical, belittling patriarch we find so often in novels and films and the songs of Bruce Springsteen.

I’d been fumbling for the right word, and my wife found it: unconditional. He loved unconditionally. If you were in the circle, you were in the circle. She said, “He was non-judgey. He always made me feel good about myself.”

Sometimes it takes us being fathers and mothers ourselves to really understand our own parents. Hayden was born in 1913. “Those Winter Sundays” was written in 1966, when he was 53—my age now. When he was a kid, he surely recognized his father’s “chronic angers,” but the expressions of love? That took him a lot longer to understand.

“No one ever thanked him” is both a statement of fact—parenting little children is inherently a thankless job—and an expression of regret.

And so to all the fathers out there—including mine and yours, wherever they may be—I say: thank you.

Happy Father’s Day!

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ICYMI

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate senior editor and host of the Amicus podcast, joined us to talk about the Supreme Court.

Plus, Five 8 Studios brings you the Disclosure Day the world needs:

Photo credit: Shot of my kids in the rearview mirror, circa 2011.

Note: This piece ran in a slightly different form on Father’s Day 2022.

And here is a transcript:

Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, June 19th—Juneteenth. I’m recording it on Thursday evening, June 18th, right after 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Yeah, another crazy week. There’s really a lot to talk about, and I’m not gonna go into detail about everything this morning. I’m sure we’ll cover a lot of stuff tonight on The Five 8. And I hope that you watch LB—Stephanie Koff—and I tonight. We have a great guest. We’re gonna be talking about a lot of things, such as our complete and total capitulation in Iran.

I watched a video of Trump signing the—well, the surrender notice. And he did it with a Sharpie, which seems…I mean, I know he uses Sharpies, but something about “Versailles” and “Sharpie” contrasted. You know, it just didn’t feel right to me to have this lummox signing his name with a Sharpie.

But I want to talk about this secret society thing. There is a hacktivist in Switzerland named Maia Arson—I don’t know how this last name is pronounced: Crimew. Crime with a W at the end. And she basically found this information about a secret society or a club or whatever the hell you want to call it, founded by Peter Thiel. Antichrist-obsessed Peter Thiel, longevity-obsessed Peter Thiel, fucking moron Peter Thiel.

There’s a list that was released of names—and I’m always a little bit hesitant about stuff like this, because I don’t know where the names came from. I don’t know if these are people that actually went to this retreat. I don’t know what they thought they were going to when they went. I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.

There were a couple of names that didn’t surprise me at all. Thiel himself; Leonard Leo, his fellow radical Catholic extremist; Jared Kushner, of course; Elon Musk; Scott Bessent; and Ted Cruz—which, just seeing Ted Cruz’s name on the roster…if this was an E-vite and you came across Ted Cruz’s name, you would think, “Yeah, I think I’m good. I’m not gonna go to this thing.”

There were names that were not on the list. Conspicuous omissions. None of the Trumps made the cut. Ian Osborne, who I know Peter Thiel knows because Ian Osborne hooked him up with Jeffrey Epstein. So Osborne is not on the list. Jes Staley and Jamie Diamond of JP Epstein Chase—not on the list. JD Vance—not on the list! Peter Thiel’s puppet couldn’t even get an invite. That must sting. I guess too many couches at the place where they’re going to go and they didn’t want to make a mess? I don’t know.

The name of the secret society is called Dialog—without the U and the E at the end. So D I A L, like “diabolical.” And then OG, like Anunoby—and like my initials backwards. This is a stupid name, it’s a dumb name. All these resources and you can’t come up with a better name than that for your secret society? Come on, guys, you could do better than that.

They’re reportedly going to this retreat in August in Dublin, outside of Dublin in Ireland. What struck me was some of the agenda items on the list, some of the seminars here. And I don’t know if if Maia is the one that leaked this. I heard about this from the Hollywood Reporter.

I just want to go through these seminars, and give you my interpretation of what you would learn at such a seminar. Okay, the first one…

Bring Back Nuclear

The key here is that it’s written down. So all they want to do—it’s not about the power supply that they want to back bring back. What they want to bring back is pronouncing the word like George W. Bush did. New-cue-ler, new-cue-ler. They want to bring back nuclear. That’s what they want to bring back. So I think it’s just basically a bunch of people in the room repeating nuclear, nuclear, nuclear over and over and over again. which is actually honestly probably more interesting than whatever the heck the real seminar would be.

Okay, next up we have…

Disinformation and Deepfakes

I don’t know if this is like a how-to or a way to protect yourself. We’re off into the in into the stratosphere with this stuff already. Even though none of these AI apps are very good. Have you noticed that even the bots and the chat bots seem to be getting worse lately? I don’t know.

Like, you know, the New York Knicks, as we know—as people that watch this show know—won the championship for the first time in 53 years. And literally, 53 years is something that was spoken constantly during the broadcast, constantly tweeted about. And the little Grok model says: “After 51 years, Knicks are champions again.” If you can’t get an AI to subtract—by now—I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s going to create deep fakes, much less be able to tell them apart.

Okay, next up…

Democracy Under Surveillance

I’m pretty sure this is Thiel being like, “Yeah, this is how we’re going to do this.” Because there’s no such thing as democracy under surveillance. Surveillance is incompatible with true democracy, it says here. So this is them trying to convince themselves of something that isn’t true.

Three Predictions in Iran

Three predictions in Iran? 1. Trump will fuck up. 2. Trump will fuck up really badly. 3. And everything will be much, much worse than it was before we started. Wow, all the predictions came true. Who would have thought?

Build-a-Party

“Build a party” is actually a plot point in Widow’s Bay. Patricia has a book about it.

And I would love it if all of these people that were on this Dialog thing went to Widow’s Bay and were, you know, locked in this fallout shelter during the storm when the horrible spirit makes the storm and comes to the island to demand human sacrifice. That would be fun, you know? I think that’d be more fun than whatever it is these people are gonna do.

Build a party. Please. I wonder if they mean political party? [laughs] My mind went right to how to build a party because I don’t think these dorks know how to throw parties.

Money (Does?) Buy Happiness

Money does buy happiness? Ho ho ho ho ho.

My stock joke has always been, “They say money can’t buy happiness—but don’t you want to test that theory?”

These people have all the money in the world. I think it costs like, I don’t know, fifty grand to get into this thing, sixteen grand, whatever it was—more money than you or I would pay to go spend time with these fuckos. Does it make you happy? Does it make you happy to be on a retreat with fucking Ted Cruz? ‘Cause that’s what money can buy. Time with Ted Cruz. It’s exciting.

Okay, next up we have…

How’s Your Sex Life?

My god. Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Dialog has a dating app that’s also attached to it, for, like, super-duper awesome people. You know, people that are wealthy and don’t want to deal with the hoi polloi. They can just go on dating dot dialogue-without-the-EU dot whatever the fuck it is. And it’s probably it’s gotta be dot AI, right? and get get matched up with each other.

My god. This just seems like a catastrophe. Most of the people at this thing are guys. You know, there’s women there, but it’s mostly dudes, which is I guess how Peter Thiel likes it.

But again, would you want to be in a room talking about your sex life with Ted Cruz? Or Jared Kushner? Dear God.

It’s Fun to Be in Charge

I guess they are in charge for now, because they have so much money and our society, you know, values money the way that it does. Are they in charge, though? Like if Peter Thiel came into the house, or even where I work, and started to try to like throw his weight around, would anybody listen to him? I don’t know. He can’t talk for one thing. Just kind of mumbles around. I don’t really get it. But I guess it’s fun to be in charge?

And when you have that much money, nobody tells you no. There’s just a bunch of fucking lickspittles following you around, telling you you’re a genius all the time. Remember, that’s what the AIs do. Brooke Harrington talked about this. The reason the CEOs like the AIs is because the AIs tell them how genius they are.

I don’t know how many of these people are geniusy.

Research-Based Longevity Hacks

For one longevity hack, how about beheading a whale, drinking raw milk?

I guess—do people bathe in blood now? Like, is that it? Are we gonna go into the Elizabeth Báthory kind of thing here? With Thiel, nothing would surprise me. I think he would do anything to extend his life. I think he’s that shallow and that narcissistic and that contemptuous of other people. I think that’s what he’s about.

And, you know, Thiel is contemptuous of other people because other people don’t like him—because he’s a fucking asshole. Maybe stop being such an asshole and other people might like you more. Maybe give money to things that are helpful to society instead of trying to tear it apart. How about that?

Build-a-Cult

Build a cult. Okay. It’s possible to build a cult. Peter Thiel’s cult. I guess he did. I guess the secret society, I guess Dialog, is a cult, right? Isn’t it a cult? A cult of power and money and very, very bad sex.

I think that if you’re gonna build a cult, you have to be a narcissistic, sociopathic asshole. And if you look at the list of invites to the Dialog, there are a lot of narcissistic sociopathic assholes. Meaning, people that don’t care what happens to other people. Because that’s the thing about being the leader of a cult: you have to shape the cult and get people to do things and not care if they get hurt or anything else. It’s just not what anybody with a shred of compassion would would seek to do, I don’t think.

Last but not least…

Navigating WWIII

This is what I find funny. World War III is going to be some sort of class war. Because what’s going to happen if things continue at this rate—and I’m just talking about historically now—it’s going to be the moneyed, propertied, elite, Dialog-membership class of people against everybody else. Because they’re going to have all the money and they’re going to have all the resources. And that is going to empower them to do certain things.

And sure, they’re going to have people that are going to protect them. But at the end of the day, when they’re navigating World War III, the people win, you know? The people win. We just do. Roman emperors were all-powerful too, until the Praetorian Guard stabbed them in the back—until they decided they were too assholic to be emperors anymore. a

And that’s the last thought I want to share about this topic, because I think this whole thing is stupid, and these people are stupid, and I hate all of them:

What they’re trying to do is create, here in the United States, generations of wealth. They want to create a titled class of people, like they had in Britain, where there’s land barons that are actually Lord blah blah blah, and Count ha ha ha, that kind of thing. I think they want it to be that way.

But, when kings of old or princes or margraves or whoever the leaders were, you know, they were hereditary. It’s a hereditary thing. The eldest son inherits from the father, so on, right? And the family, the extended family, is part of the nobility and the landed class. And when you have a king, the king is from a family that has been in charge for centuries, usually, give or take.

These people aren’t even from here. Peter Thiel isn’t even from here. Elon Musk isn’t from here. We’re supposed to have him come here and set up some kind of class structure and just follow along, like there’s nothing to it? They have money, but that’s all they have. And the only reason they have money is because this government gives them money and subsidizes all their shit, and protects them, and makes sure they don’t have to pay taxes.

As far as I see it, they’re taking money from us. They’ve seized our wealth and our resources. And at some point, World War III is going to be, I think—again, this is my extrapolation based on history—it’s going to be the non-Peter Thiel classes of the world rising up, uniting under one common banner. And that’s going to be the end of these people.

And nobody’s gonna think twice about it. Because, you know, they’re not kings, they’re not from royal families, they’re not Habsburgs or Hohenzollerens or Romanovs, they’re just dudes, you know, who happen to get lucky with money and have a dad that owned an emerald mine.

I like to believe in karma. I like to believe that good will prevail. I like to believe that the scales will balance. And right now there’s a tremendous imbalance in everything. I think that’s the problem with with the world right now. There’s too much imbalance. There’s so much money, so much power, so much knowledge, I guess, with all the data stuff that these people are constantly wanting to suck up.

Like, “We want data.” All right, you want my height and weight? Why? You know, here’s the data: “I fucking hate you guys.” You know, that’s all the data that you need.

There’s too much imbalance. And whenever there’s too much imbalance, you know, stuff happens that I think the people that have gobbled up all this power are not going to enjoy.

This is not a threat in any way, shape, or form. This is an observation that I’m making, and a prediction that I’m making, based on my knowledge of history, of what happens when people get too fucking greedy.

And if there’s one thing we know about these people, is that they’re too fucking greedy. The last class of people in a society that had this much concentrated wealth and power relative to everybody else were the Romanovs. And we know what happened to the Romanovs, right? The tsar and his wife and the children all got killed, slaughtered brutally. But the extended family got thrown in a well, and people put dynamite in the well, and then the dynamite went off, but it didn’t kill them at the bottom of the dried-up well, and they all died horribly of thirst.

So, yeah, I hope that the navigating World War III seminar is great, because you know, if everything goes the way it seems to be headed, they’re gonna need all the help they can get.

Thank you for coming to this “dialog.”

Have a great weekend. Happy Father’s Day to everybody to whom it applies.

And, we shall prevail!

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Erethismus mercurialis—erethism—is a neurological disorder caused by exposure to mercury. It was a common complaint of hat-makers, who used mercuric nitrate to work the felt.

Low-level exposure to mercury causes fine tremors; so many hat-makers in Danbury, Connecticut, once a hub of haberdashery, suffered from erethism that the tremors became known as the “Danbury shakes.” Higher levels of mercury exposure cause psychotic issues, including irritability, anxiety, depression, memory loss, and delirium. In short, acute mercury exposure makes you lose your mind. Hence, “mad as a hatter.”

The President and his propagandists often invoke Trump Derangement Syndrome. One of his more obsequious lickspittles, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), went so far as to introduce a bill, the “Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) Research Act of 2025,” that aimed to “direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the psychological and social roots of what is known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, a phenomenon marked by extreme negative reactions to President Donald J. Trump.”

“TDS has divided families, the country, and led to nationwide violence—including two assassination attempts on President Trump. The TDS Research Act would require the NIH to study this toxic state of mind, so we can understand the root cause and identify solutions,” Davidson said, in one of the dumbest statements in U.S. history. “Instead of funding ludicrous studies such as giving methamphetamine to cats or teaching monkeys to gamble for their drinking water, the NIH should use that funding to research issues that are relevant to the real world.”

“TDS” is not a real thing. But MAGA, it seems to me, is like mercuric nitrate—a toxic compound. Too much exposure really does cause irritability, anxiety, delirium, and mass delusion in human beings who were once perfectly normal.

Consider how many MAGA who didn’t start off like this. Like, John Solomon was once the assistant bureau chief in Washington for the Associated Press, an organization as staid and by-the-book as it gets. Kash Patel used to be a public defender in Florida. Dr. Mehmet Oz was a heart surgeon who once performed a successful heart transplant for Joe Torre’s brother. Pete Hegseth got into Princeton, a school I didn’t even bother applying to. Todd Blanche headed the Southern District of New York’s violent crimes unit, working closely with Mimi Rocah. Kristi Noem was the South Dakota Snow Queen of 1990. There was even a time, many centuries ago, that Stephen Miller wasn’t an undead nosferatu who slept in a coffin.

They are all MAGA hatters who went MAGA mad.

Another example: Dan Bongino, host of the popular MAGA podcast The Dan Bongino Show, used to be a New York City cop and a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, where he served on protection detail for George W. Bush and Barak Obama. He was actually good at these law enforcement jobs. How the mighty are fallen! Unlike, say, Tucker Carlson, who occasionally provides useful interviews, Bongino’s podcast is nothing but empty calories of rightwing rage-bait and conspiratorial bunk. It’s hard for me to conceive of Bongino as anything but a clown—a comic relief basso in the opera buffa that is MAGA.

“Clown” is not my assessment. I took that from a report sent to Congress in November 2025 by an “alliance” of former and active FBI agents and analysts who were critical of his work as the Bureau’s Deputy Director—a position he held for ten dizzying months, from March 2025 through early January of this year. The report suggests that his performance as the FBI’s number two was…number two.

Here are some highlights:

And:

Yikes.

Of all the Bizarro World appointments in Trump’s second term—and there have been scores—Bongino’s always struck me as the most curious. I get why Donald wanted Kash Patel to head the Bureau. Patel is a loyalist, a bootlicker, a J6 insider, and, because of his experience as designee for Trump’s presidential records, an expert on which incriminating documents the FBI might have in its archives. But when you appoint an outsider like Patel to the top job, you typically want a deputy who’s an experienced hand—someone with vast institutional knowledge who can be leaned on for help navigating the organization. Bongino ain’t that.

That Bongino had a podcast was irrelevant; former FBI executives Andy McCabe and Frank Figliuzzi have had podcasts, and both of them are quite capable of running the Bureau, as they’ve demonstrated. The issue with Bongino was his lack of relevant work experience. The guy hadn’t worked in government for years, and even then it was for the Secret Service. What real assistance could Bongino possibly have offered Patel? And if he wasn’t brought in to actually help run the Bureau, then why was he brought in? What, precisely, was he tasked to do? Why did he take the job? And why did he leave it so quickly and so abruptly? Was it really because he missed his podcast—and the big bucks the podcast generated? Or was it something else entirely?

Bongino has been in the news lately. For one thing, he’s in a public spat with Carlson, who claims Bongino told him that Donald Trump himself shut down the FBI’s investigation into the Butler, Pa. assassination attempt—an allegation Bongino vehemently denies. More importantly, he seems to have been a prominent source for the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who write about a secret meeting in the Situation Room where JD Vance, Susie Wiles, and other Trump loyalists discussed how to handle the Epstein Files fallout.

During the Biden years, Bongino, like many MAGA media members, had loudly demanded the truth about the Epstein Files. As the journalists report:

On “The Dan Bongino Show,” Bongino’s background as a Secret Service agent had lent authority to his claims of a cover-up. “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” he’d asked his large audience of MAGA devotees. The release of the client list would “rock the political world,” he predicted. The “Washington swamp” was “not telling you the truth.”

On his podcast, Bongino was routinely critical of the FBI. As the New York Times reported in April: “Like many of Mr. Trump’s allies, Mr. Bongino has repeatedly ridiculed the F.B.I., calling it corrupt, denouncing its agents as thugs and floating conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as he gained traction as a right-wing pundit.”

If Bongino vowed to clean up the Bureau and get to the truth about Epstein, but wound up doing neither, he’d risk alienating his MAGA audience, on whom his livelihood depended.

This was always going to be an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force. It was just a matter of time before the violent collision. In this case, it took four months. Things came to a head last summer.

The timeline is instructive:

July 7, 2025

The FBI and the DOJ release an unsigned joint memo, stating that a “systematic review” of the Files “revealed no incriminating ‘client list’”—a claim that contradicts Attorney General Pam Bondi’s earlier “on my desk” assertions. “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” The memo also says, “After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019.”

Later that day, as Haberman and Swan write in their book,

Bongino showed up to a daily Justice Department meeting with the F.B.I. staff and the attorney general. He was in a volcanic mood. As soon as he entered the room, he erupted at Bondi, shouting at her.

“You fucked this thing up from the start,” Bongino yelled. “The way you’ve been talking about this — that dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files, the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there.”

Patel and Bongino both subsequently told a White House official that Bondi needed to resign.

July 9, 2025

Bongino is summoned to a meeting by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who accuses him of leaking a story about Bondi. He denies it. Then, as Haberman and Swan report, this happened:

“I’ll tell you what,” Bongino replied. “I’ll give you $100,000 cash right now. I’m not kidding. Walk out to West Exec, put that reporter on speaker and get him to admit I leaked it. A hundred thousand dollars.”

Wiles snapped back, “Well, we all got ourselves into this —— ”

Bongino cut her off.

“No, no, no, no, no. We didn’t get ourselves into anything. I warned you guys about this the whole time, and you ignored me. And exactly what I said was going to happen happened. And now you’re pretending I was in on this. I was never in on this.”

Bongino’s aggressive response to Wiles startled the others; she was the White House chief of staff, essentially a stand-in for the president. Wiles put Bongino on the spot. “Going forward,” she said, “we’re all in. We’re all going to agree to move forward. Are you in or not?”

“No, I’m not,” Bongino said. “This is not my plan. I’m not part of this going forward. Forget it. I’m out of here.” He stormed out of the Situation Room and onto West Executive Avenue, where he climbed into the back of Patel’s armored S.U.V. and directed the driver to take him to F.B.I. headquarters.

July 11, 2025

The New York Times reports that Bongino and Bondi got in a tiff about the contents of that memo. In “an angry face-to-face confrontation at the White House…an irate Ms. Bondi accused Mr. Bongino of leaking information to the news media in the presence of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and one of her deputies, Taylor Budowich. Mr. Bongino denied it, they said.”

And:

Mr. Bongino, during another confrontation within the past week, told Ms. Bondi she had overhyped the likelihood that a review of the case undertaken by the Justice Department and F.B.I. this year would reveal a list of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking clients, and possibly raise questions about his 2019 death by hanging in custody, which was ruled a suicide.

The Times also reports that Bongino had threatened to resign:

On Friday, a high-profile Bongino booster — the far-right influencer and conspiracist Laura Loomer — claimed, in two dramatic social media posts, that the bureau’s deputy director had taken Friday off to collect his thoughts, and was “now seriously thinking about RESIGNING” over Ms. Bondi’s actions in the Epstein case.

That he did not show up to work that day only fuels more speculation.

Ultimately, cooler heads prevail, and Bongino agrees to stay on.

July 18, 2025

Democrat Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sends Bongino a letter, writing:

Prior to becoming FBI Deputy Director, you spent years as a private citizen making claims about the Jeffrey Epstein case. For example, you stated: “That Jeffrey Epstein story is a big deal. Please do not let that story go. Keep your eye on it.” On July 11, far-right activist Laura Loomer claimed that you and FBI Director Patel “[were] livid with [Attorney General Bondi] over her DOJ Memo and the lack of transparency from her office regarding the Jeffrey Epstein files.” Subsequent public reporting indicates this apparent dispute came to a head at a meeting between White House, DOJ, and FBI officials that you and Director Patel attended, leading to claims that you may resign from your position over these issues. You have made no public statements since these reports have come out, but reports have emerged that the dispute may have been related to Attorney General Bondi accusing you of leaking to NewsNation a story critical of her for allegedly preventing the FBI from releasing more Epstein-related records.

Durbin then requests answers to a number of thorny questions related to the Epstein Files, including:

• Have you personally reviewed all files in DOJ’s possession related to Jeffrey Epstein?

• Is the FBI in possession of further Epstein-related records that DOJ has not reviewed?

• Aside from the negative backlash Attorney General Bondi received over the February 27 record release, what was the purpose of placing almost 1,000 FBI IMD personnel on 24-hour shifts to review Epstein-related records over the course of a two-week period in March?

• Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?

• Why is the July 7 memorandum making the two official findings regarding Jeffrey Epstein unsigned by any DOJ or FBI officials?

• Please describe in detail the process that occurred in the three-month period between April and the July 7 memorandum, after the March review of documents, that led to the findings in the July 7 memorandum.

• What was the nature of the dispute between you and White House and DOJ officials after the release of the July 7 memorandum?

• Are there additional Epstein-related records that Attorney General Bondi is preventing the FBI from releasing to the public or preparing for public release?

Durbin requests that the answers be sent to him by August 1.

These are questions I, as well, would love the answers to. But as best as I can tell, Bongino has yet to respond.

July 26, 2025

Bongino posts a long and cryptic tweet from the official @FBIDDBongino account:

During my tenure here as the Deputy Director of the FBI, I have repeatedly relayed to you that things are happening that might not be immediately visible, but they are happening.

The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations. It is a priority for us. But what I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters, has shocked me down to my core. We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.

We are going to conduct these righteous and proper investigations by the book and in accordance with the law. We are going to get the answers WE ALL DESERVE. As with any investigation, I cannot predict where it will land, but I can promise you an honest and dignified effort at truth. Not “my truth,” or “your truth,” but THE TRUTH.

God bless America, and all those who defend Her.
Respectfully,
Dan

November 30, 2025

Miranda Devine of the New York Post breaks the story of the FBI “alliance” report, under the headline, “Damning report labels FBI ‘rudderless ship’ under Kash Patel — with him and Dan Bongino more concerned with building ‘personal résumés.’” Bongino is characterized as a “clown.”

Patel is drowning in bad press.

December 17, 2025

Bongino resigns to spend more time with his family podcast.

The Times story cites an interview he gave to Sean Hannity in early December, after the arrest of the D.C. pipe bomber suspect:

After the arrest earlier this month, Mr. Bongino appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where the host asked him to explain his previous claim that the case was an “inside job” abetted by a federal cover-up.

“I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions, that’s clear, and one day I will be back in that space — but that’s not what I’m paid for now,” Mr. Bongino said.

He added: “I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

This suggests that, unlike most MAGA, Bongino does understand the difference.

January 3, 2026

Bongino’s last day at the FBI.

Both the news stories and the “alliance” report suggest that Bongino prioritized his standing with his MAGA audience above all—podcast über alles. Everything in the timeline supports that assertion. He missed his old media job, he always intended to return to it, and he wasn’t going to do anything as FBI Deputy Director to fuck that up. Every public move he made was one that could burnish his reputation and set up whatever hero story he chose to tell after he bailed; he was preemptively controlling the narrative. Even that cryptic tweet can be read as a teaser for future podcast programming.

But there is another possibility.

In the Haberman/Swan book excerpt, Bongino comes off like one of the good guys, righteously infuriated by the slow progress of the Epstein Files release. What if he…is? What if that enigmatic tweet was him telling us that, as Deputy Director, he’s seen the files, knows the truth, but can’t legally reveal it? What if he meant what he told Hannity—that “I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts?” What if his prominence in the Haberman/Swan reporting is his way of getting the story out? Could it be that Dan Bongino, of all people, is going to be the one who brings it all down?

Is Bongino a MAGA mad hatter? Or is he a white hat?

The odds are certainly on the former. But in a world in which the President of the United States is a mobbed-up, Kremlin-owned racist and serial sexual assailant who was best friends with the most notorious child sex trafficker in recent memory, and was last seen turning the South Lawn of the White House into a pop-up county fair, capitulating to Iran on a war he started, and pretending he’s fit as a fiddle…anything is possible.

More likely, I’m the one that’s gone mad; my DTS is real; I’ve huffed too much mercuric nitrate on the way to the Danbury Trader Joe’s, and this “white hat” theory is nothing more than a case of the Danbongino Shakes.

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Photo credit: Bongino’s official portrait.

1.

I had most of a conventional “Sunday Pages” all ready to roll, but how could I not write about the Knicks?

They did it. They really did it.

Pinch me.

2.

There are 15 players on the Knicks’ playoff roster. Combined, they earned $205 million this year, an average of $13.6 million per player. The highest-paid Knick, Karl-Anthony Towns, made $53,142,264—more than a million bucks a week. These men are all professional athletes, the best of the best, and with a few notable exceptions, they are all staggeringly tall. Of the 15, one player is white, and he didn’t play a single minute in the Finals. Oh, and they represent New York City.

Nothing about this team should be relatable to a nation notorious for its institutional racism—a nation that’s 56 percent white, where half the men are shorter than 5’ 9”, where three quarters of the population is considered overweight, where the median income is less than what Towns makes in a single day, and where the rightwing media has conditioned most of the country to fear NYC. And yet these Knicks are the most relatable and likable squad the franchise has assembled since I started watching basketball 32 years ago.

Sports has the power to unite us.

3.

Trump knows that sports has the power to unite us. That’s why there’s such a spectacle on the lawn, or what used to be the lawn, of the White House. He wants UFC cage matches to bring the people together. For his birthday. Not gonna happen—and certainly not now.

4.

My son’s boyfriend, who knows nothing about sports, watched the fourth quarter with us. “Is it okay if I root for another game so this can continue?” he asked innocently, and the rest of us snapped, in unison, “NO!”

He was taken aback. He said, quietly, “But it’s just a game.”

And he’s right. It is just a game. A game in which the teams are owned by horrible people, some of them in the Epstein Files. A game in which the owner of the Knicks, James Dolan, very unpopular with the fan base, has tussled with the (very popular in the city) Mayor of New York and hosted the (very unpopular in the city) President of the United States. It is ridiculous that something so inconsequential has had such a profound emotional impact on me.

But basketball is a metaphor for life. The lessons we learn from watching the game are applicable to all of us. Plus, sports-watching is a safe way to channel, and release, our emotions: rage at the crappy officiating, regret at the opportunities lost, disappointment at shots not falling, stress during the endgame moments, agony at being defeated—and, best of all, joy at winning.

There was a lot of joy last night, and there’s a lot of joy this morning. And here’s the thing: Joy derived from a game is still joy. Your body doesn’t know the difference.

5.

In recent years, great basketball teams are typically led by an alpha star, a pair of secondary stars, and role players. The Knicks certainly fit that model, with Jalen Brunson, Towns, and Game Four hero OG Anunoby leading the pack. Even so, this was a team effort, and a team victory. Everyone on the roster made significant contributions to what was an historic playoff run.

The Knicks showed us how successful teams function. They work together, they pick each other up, they have each others’ backs, and they are genuinely happy when a teammate does well. They are humble, and they are not interested in individual glory. There’s a reason the Pope likes the Knicks, and it’s not just because that he and three of the Knicks starting five all went to Villanova.

6.

Styles, they say, make fights. This series was a study in contrasts. The best player on the Knicks, Jalen Brunson, is listed at 6’ 2” but is shorter than that. (“LOL he is shaped like you,” my friend Chris, who hasn’t watched hoops all year, texted me). The best player on the Spurs, Victor Wembanyama, is listed at 7’ 4” but is taller than that. My wife called him a giraffe. So there was a David and Goliath element to the match-up.

But the Knicks are older, more experienced. They are all around 30. The Spurs are young. Wemby is 22. Stephon Castle is 21. Dylan Harper, a rookie who is already the second-best player on the team, turned 20 on March 2.

Young teams almost never win in their first deep playoff run, because they tend to blunder in the fourth quarter, when the game gets tight and the pressure ramps up. That happened in all five of these games. The Spurs led in all of them. They lost four of five.

7.

The only game San Antonio won was the one Donald Trump attended.

8.

I get that a lot of folks aren’t interested in sports. I respect that. Hey, I don’t particularly care about the World Cup, something hundreds of millions of people around the world get super excited about.

PSA: if you don’t care about sports, you don’t need to assert that opinion today. If you have the urge to tweet something with the word “sportsball,” please resist the temptation. It only makes you look like an asshole.

The world is on fire, Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and the South Lawn of the White House looks like the Ulster County Fair. Don’t shit on our joy.

9.

I started watching basketball in 1994, the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I didn’t go home that summer. I stayed in D.C. The Knicks were in the playoffs, and some of my housemates were into it. So I watched with them.

Led by Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and John Starks, the Knicks made the Finals, where they squared off against Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets. They almost won Game Six. They lost Game Seven. It was an exciting series, and it made me a Knicks fan for life.

When the ‘94 playoffs started, I didn’t know anything about basketball. By Game Seven, I was shouting at the TV, “Olajuwon has five fouls! Feed Ewing in the post!”

I’m sure there are newly minted Knicks fans who didn’t know the rules a month ago, but who can now opine expertly on what does and does not constitute a flagrant foul.

10.

There’s been a lot of grousing on Knicks Twitter about real fans versus bandwagon jumpers. To wit: My friend Mike told me about a viral clip, where some pranksters interviewed Knicks fans in the street, and asked where Aubrey Graham ranked on the list of all-time Knicks. There was a lot of, “Oh, top 20 for sure.” What did you like about his game? “Toughness.”

Aubrey Graham is not a basketball player. Aubrey Graham is a musical artist. We know him as Drake.

Me, I welcome the new fans with open arms. Because I was a new fan myself, and I know how exciting it is. And the new fans will, one day, become old fans. That’s how fandom works.

11.

Also: this is New York City. We don’t have bandwagons. There’s way too many people for a wagon. We have subway lines. Take the A train to 34th Street. Everyone’s invited.

12.

Jalen Brunson is a closer. He is Mariano Rivera in a Knicks jersey.

We’ve had good players, we’ve had great players, but we’ve never had a closer—a guy who can take the ball with the clock winding down and say, “Relax, I got this.”

13.

My friend Chris, who I used to watch the Knicks with in the 90s, texted me during the first quarter: “So, I tune in after all this hype and this looks like the Knicks I used to watch, lol.”

I respond: “This happens every game. The Spurs get off to a hot start and fade down the stretch. Wemby gets tired and Brunson heats up.”

Two hours later: “Yup. Not the old Knicks.”

14.

In 1996-97, I was in a bad way. I was 24 years old, I was single, I was lonely, I was broke, and I wasn’t having any success with my writing. That season, I watched the Knicks obsessively. I mean, it was unhealthy.

How unhealthy? At the time, the Knicks color analyst was an older, white-haired chap named John Andariese, whom I adored. He skipped a few regular-season games to attend his daughter’s wedding. And I dreamt I was at the wedding.

Like I said, unhealthy.

That year, the Knicks rolled into the playoffs, taking a commanding 3-1 lead against the rival Miami Heat. But all hell broke loose in Game Five. An altercation at the end of the fourth quarter led to a bench-clearing brawl. Half the Knicks team was suspended for leaving the bench during the melee—a stupid rule then and now.

The Heat won Games Five, Six, and Seven. I was so depressed after the Knicks lost, I stayed in bed for two days. I was despondent. I felt like I’d lost a close relative.

15.

The Knicks played the Spurs in the 1999 Finals. That was a fun team, invigorated by the acquisition of Latrell Sprewell, who we got on the cheap from Golden State because he’d choked his coach. Spree looked a bit like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. I liked to think he was Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. But we had no chance against San Antonio that year.

When he came to New York, the sportswriters were salivating to hate on him. But they were used to years of surly interviews from Ewing and Oakley. Sprewell showed up in bookish glasses, spoke eloquently, answered all the questions patiently—and won over the press corps in about five minutes. An amazing performance.

16.

James Dolan—the guy with the veneers and the orange sport coat next to the slumbering Trump in the owners box—inherited the Knicks franchise from his daddy in 1999. Jeff Van Gundy, our beloved coach, quit in 1999.

In a related story, the Knicks sucked from 1999 until 2021. Not just sucked—were unwatchably bad. Terrible hires, whiffed draft picks, idiotic trades, even more idiotic free agent signings—a two-decade clusterfuck.

Larry Brown, who’d coached Allen Iverson in Philadelphia and had won the title with the Pistons in 2004, came to New York in 2005. I loathed this man. He singlehandedly drove away all the joy I got out of basketball. My hatred for him is irrational; to this day, I’d still rank him somewhere between Elon Musk and Todd Blanche on my all-time Most Despised list.

The point is, I didn’t think the Knicks would ever be good again, much less win the chip.

17 .

Longtime Knicks fan Katie Baker explains Knicks fandom well over at The Ringer:

The glory days of the 1990s Knicks that folks my age never shut up about, meanwhile, are covered in very little actual glory.

Knicks fans have long bonded by invoking the most dismal formative memories they can conjure—Charles Smith missing layup after layup in 1993; John Starks going 0-for-11 from the 3-point line in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals; the bench-clearing brawl against the Miami Heat in 1997 that left multiple Knicks starters suspended, not to be confused with the bench-clearing brawl against the Miami Heat in 1998 that left Jeff Van Gundy clinging to Alonzo Mourning’s leg like a child who doesn’t want to be dropped off at day care; various gut punches and/or faxes from the likes of Reggie Miller and Pat Riley—and then shaking their heads in communion. And all that’s, like, only the half of it! The other half, which we at The Ringer merely scratched the surface of here, is far darker.

In other words, as a Knicks fan, I’m extremely accustomed to all manner of meltdowns and fuckups, to all forms of seeing some other team’s game-winners go in with a swish (or, worse somehow, game-tiers go in with a 10-foot bounce).

But this year, as she said, she expected them to win. As did I.

I can’t express how weird that feels, as a fan of this team.

18.

The Knicks were supposed to contend in the Eastern Conference this year, and maybe make the Finals. Even after they went on the most ass-kicking playoff win streak ever—after falling behind 1-2 to the Atlanta Hawks in the first round, they won 13 straight, many of the victories lopsided blowouts—no one really expected them to win.

And yet they managed to put together the single greatest playoff run of all time. They lost two games by one point and one game by four points. They won 16 games by a combined 289 points, for a playoff point differential of +283, by far the best ever. They came back from down 20 in the fourth quarter—twice! Including the biggest comeback in Finals history!

I mean…

19.

There is an adage in basketball—Lawler’s Law—that the first team to 100 points wins the game. In Game Five, neither squad crossed that threshold. It was a low-scoring game, 94-90—a score out of the 90s.

Jalen Brunson scored 45 of the 94 points.

Note: I’ve been a subscriber to Knicks Centric, Tommy Beer’s Substack, for a few years now. He does a great job breaking down all the action. I can’t wait to see what he writes about last night. If you want to re-live what just happened, go read:

Knicks Centric

A quality, data-driven, New York Knicks-centric NBA newsletter.

By Tommy Beer

20.

My favorite thing about sports is watching grown men cry tears of joy. I love watching people being happy. I like to see how the players react. Some of them weep. Some of them scream for joy. It’s meaningful to all of them.

Unlike in real life, success in sports is quantifiable. It is zero sum. You win or you lose. And my god does it feel good to win—even vicariously. Look at how happy Taylor Swift and Ben Stiller and Spike Lee looked. Even Larry David was gleeful!

After the Celtics won the title in 2008, someone asked Kevin Garnett, who came to Boston after years of playing for shitty teams in Minnesota, about the significance of winning the title. “It is like knowledge,” he said. “Once it is achieved, it is achieved.”

Nothing—not even the malevolent Donald Trump—can take away what the Knicks just did.

21.

Since losing the Trump Game on Monday, “Knicks in Five” has been a mantra, in and around the city, and on social media. Chants break out on the subway—even at a World Cup match, reportedly.

And lo, the Knicks won in five. We collectively spoke it into existence.

And I know things are bleak right now. But Donald Trump is 80 years old and was examined by 22 doctors at his last check-up, thunderstorms are in the forecast for UFC Freedom, and as the OG Anunoby tip-in showed us, anything is possible.

“You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario,” Jalen Brunson said. “Now do something about it.”

There’s wisdom in that.

Brunson also said, when asked what the most important thing is in having the right mindset to be cool under pressure: “Don’t be afraid to fail.”

Knicks in Five, for real. The 53-year championship drought, which spanned almost my entire lifetime, is over. If we can do that, we can do anything. Or, as the song about New York says: if we can make it there, we can make it anywhere.

I know we shall prevail, because you know what?

We just did.

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ICYMI

Excellent show on Friday. Jeremy Lent came on to talk about his new book, ECOCIVILIZATION, and his ideas for how we can affect positive change.

Plus, my wife Stephanie St. John did the singing on my Suzanne Vega parody…

On Tuesday, I promise, we’ll bring our focus back to the bad guys.

Thanks, everyone!

Photo credit: Closeup of Larry O’Brien Trophy.

Good morning. As you’re watching this, it is Friday morning, June 12th. I am recording on Thursday evening, June 11th, 7 o’clock P.M.

I’m a little tired. I was up late last night. I got up early this morning. I was at a watch party in Kingston where I watched my New York Knicks come back from a 29-point deficit in the second half—the largest comeback in the history of the NBA finals. It was a fascinatingly awesome game, and I just still am having difficulty processing what happened and what I saw. And I’m not alone. I’m not surprised they won. I’m just surprised at how they won, I guess.

But the the Knicks broke the curse. Trump came, he ended the the thirteen game winning streak. And the curse is now lifted because the Knicks have won again. Fans were outside of Madison Square Garden with sage, literally saging it. Also Taylor Swift showed up, which helps. She’s a good luck charm—and, by the way, a Knicks fan for real.

So I’ve been a little bit distracted for the last couple days. And I’ve only just now gotten to read the New York Times piece by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, which people are calling a “bombshell.” I don’t think it’s much of a “bombshell,” myself. But I want to go through it real quick, just in case people haven’t read it.

It is an excerpt from their new book, and it talks about how, last summer, during the time of the Epstein files and all the buildup, the President’s circle of advisors were very, very nervous about information coming out—so much so that they had meetings in the Situation Room. Which is, you know, a room reserved for when we’re at war and stuff like that. They were down there. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Cheung, the former UFC spokesman that’s now director of communications, Todd Blanche. Other people, you know, called in: Bondi, I think Patel was there, Bongino.

Anyway, the point is that they were down there trying to come up with a strategy about what to do with these Epstein files, because people were wanting the Epstein files to be released. How should they spin this, and what should they do?

So that’s what the article was about. It told this story. There wasn’t much in there that I didn’t know already, in terms of information about the files themselves or what might be in them that they’re trying to hide. It seemed to me like a vehicle through which JD Vance and Dan Bongino could distance themselves a little bit from Trump— and certainly from the Epstein stuff. You know, they’re establishing their “release the files” bona fides.

The idea that JD Vance is some sort of hero for doing this, for trying to release the files when he knows damn well that releasing the files will cause Trump’s presidency to end and him to be president? Let’s just say I’m a little bit cynical. I’m a little bit cynical about that, about JD Vance’s motives.

I thought it was weird that Trump wasn’t there. It was like an intervention without the person that was being intervened. It just seemed odd to me. I don’t know. I’ve never been in the Situation Room. I’ve never had to gather people together to try to quash reports of hanging out with a child sex trafficker. That’s not my bag. Maybe that’s just what’s done? But Trump wasn’t there. And I thought that was interesting.

There’s a lot in the article about process. You know, this thing happened, and then that thing happened, and then Bongino said this, and then Pam Bondi said that, and then Todd Blanche did this. Okay, I don’t actually give a shit. I don’t like any of these people. I don’t fucking care who did what. They’re all awful. They all belong in prison. They will never, ever, ever wipe the stink off them, no matter how much they try or how much access journalism writes about them. It’s just never gonna happen.

What I wanted was something about what’s in the files. What is it that Trump doesn’t want to have released? As you know, I have written a book about this, Another Wonderful Secret: Infrequently Ask Questions about Jeffrey Epstein, in which I tackle that question and a lot of other questions besides.

These guys don’t seem to be tackling the question. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan don’t seem to be even interested in the question. They’re in the frickin’ Situation Room, you know, where they’re like doing war stuff. And, like, why? What is in the damn files? Is it just because, as Trump said, “If the files get out, some of my friends will get hurt?” Since when does Trump care about his friends? Since when does Trump have friends? Other than perhaps the owner of the Knicks, James Dolan. But that’s neither here nor there.

The point is, I still don’t know why Trump is so insistent on not being transparent. They do mention in the article that the president does not want transparency. Duh. But that’s now, I guess, been confirmed. He doesn’t want transparency. Why doesn’t he want transparency? What is he hiding? What is he hiding? And this article, this alleged “bombshell,” gives me zero information about that. Just zero information.

Do the people in the Situation Room know? Do they know? Todd Blanche must know. Susie Wiles must know. Pam Bondi—she must know. Kash Patel must know. Bongino has to have some idea, because he got out of there as fast as he could. He didn’t want anything to do with it. Now, granted, he was making more money podcasting (lucky him). But he couldn’t get away fast enough.

So something’s there. I think all of these people that are mentioned that were in the Situation Room need to be asked point blank: “What is it that Trump is hiding? Why doesn’t he want the files to be released?” That’s the question. That’s the question. Everything else is noise. That’s the question. They all knew. Does Maggie Haberman know? Does Jonathan Swan know? Are they gonna tell us? Or are they just gonna, you know, leave it for the book?

Anyway, it’s great that the Epstein files are still being mentioned. It’s great they’re still being talked about. It’s great that none of this made anything go away. But we need to know. Reporters need to ask—not just Trump, but all these people that we now we know were in the room: Did the topic ever come up about what Trump did and why he doesn’t want those files released? Why? That’s what I want to know. That’s what everybody wants to know. And until we know that definitively—because we know he’s in the fucking files. He’s not not in the files. We know he’s in the files. The reason we know he’s in the files is because Kash Patel spent almost a million dollars of money in overtime payments to hire FBI agents to redact his name from the files. That’s how we know. And there’s been reporting on it. So he’s in the files. We know he’s friends with this guy.

It’s gaslighting of the highest order. And this article seems to me to be more gaslighting. Because it’s taking the focus off what the focus should be on, right? I don’t care about Susie Wiles. I really don’t. I don’t care about her at all. I certainly don’t care about JD Vance. I care about what Trump did and why he’s hiding it. So until they tell us that? Nobody cares about your book, man.

But this is the state of journalism today, I suppose. I should add also, I didn’t think it was written very well—for a book, which presumably they took time to write. I thought it was mid, the section that I read. There’s grammatical mistakes in it and stuff, which again, you know, I hate when I make grammatical mistakes, but I don’t have a line editor at all. Presumably this has been through a lot of editing, and still a couple of commas were not in parallel. Not a great look. Not a great look.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. I need the Epstein Files out. I need Trump to go to jail. And I need the Knicks in five. They’re playing again Saturday night. So you know, fingers crossed.

And in the meantime, have an excellent weekend, everybody, and we shall prevail!

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TONIGHT!

We have a great guest tonight who has what we all want—ideas on how to fix it.

ANOTHER WONDERFUL SECRET

Thanks to everyone who bought a copy of my new book. I’m told that reviews are critical, so if you don’t mind dropping a review—or even just a starred rating—I’d be obliged.

Thank you!

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Indian Creek Island is a gated community situated on an artificial barrier island in Biscayne Bay, eight miles from Miami’s South Beach. Most of the island is occupied by a private golf course. The only link to the mainland is a single bridge, connecting the eastern shore to 91st Street in Surfside. Indian Creek even has its own constabulary—not that there’s much for the cops to do but keep out the riffraff.

The island is secure, surrounded by what is effectively a moat. It is private; what happens on Indian Creek Island stays on Indian Creek Island. It is secluded, hidden from the prying eyes of paparazzi and hoi polloi. And that’s how its 84 residents like it.

Indian Creek Island is known, with good reason, as “Billionaire Bunker.” On the east, south, and west coast of the island, arrayed in the shape of a “U,” are some three dozen of the most exclusive properties in the world. Among the owners of these mansions—“estates” is a more accurate term, or, perhaps, “compounds”—are Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Carl Icahn, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Tom Brady, Julio Iglesias, former Philadelphia Eagles owner and longtime Marco Rubio benefactor Norman Braman, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

During Kushner’s four years working at the White House, per a financial analysis by CREW, the ghoulish twosome generated between $172 million and $640 million in outside income (which is approximately $172-640 million more than Hunter Biden made during his father’s lone term, but that’s another story). And that was before the Saudi investment capital came calling. They are loaded.

In April of 2021, three months after Jared spent J6 hiding in the shower, the power couple plunked down $24 million for a home on “Billionaire Bunker.” Given that Zuckerberg paid seven times that for his mansion five years later, this stands as one of Jared’s better real estate investments.

“The 1.8-acre estate sits along the island’s eastern waterfront, with direct bay views and a long private drive,” reports a post from the Jills Zeder Group, a local real estate firm, on the Kushner manse. “Since purchasing the property, they’ve completed a full two-year renovation, transforming it into a modern estate. The updates were kept quiet, but aerial shots show clean lines, white stonework, and a layout designed for privacy.”

Jared and Ivanka have generational wealth—so-called “fuck you” money. Their privileged children will inherit vast fortunes. They live in one of the most sought-after addresses in the country, in a “modern estate.” There is presumably so much security at Indian Creek Island that it would take SEAL Team Six to penetrate it, so the blest pair can sleep soundly at night without worrying about angry peasants showing up with burning torches and pitchforks. Plus, all two of their friends live nearby.1

Riddle me this, Batman: If you already have a gorgeous estate on a private isle that’s safe, secure, and secluded, why on earth do you need to acquire an island off the coast of Albania? Why do you have to raze one of the last undeveloped places in the region—a National Marine Park, home to pink flamingoes—for yet another luxury resort? Because that’s what Jared and Ivanka are fixin’ to do.

On May 31, Ivanka spoke with David Senra on his Founders podcast, where she explained, in that breathy Jessica Rabbit voice of hers, that Sazan Island is “an unbelievable, beautiful 1,400 hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean,” which is all true, except the part about its location, because it’s actually where the Adriatic and the Ionian Seas converge.

“We were on a friend’s boat”—the friend is Nat Rothschild, come to find out, and the “boat” is a big fucking yacht—“and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it,” Ivanka claimed. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top and we were just captivated. And it stayed with us ever since. And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care, because the land is so beautiful, that really the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it.”

(I forgot to mention that the title of the podcast episode is “Building an Authentic Life.” Because if there’s one word that describes Ivanka Trump, it’s “authentic.”)

She explained that “it’s not even a business for me, despite the scale of it….For me, this feels more like a challenge than anything else. The culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

Yeah, okay, fine—but, like, can Ivanka really not live the way she wants to live on the beautiful island where she already lives? How are people “wanting to live,” in her estimation? Which people? What the fuck is she talking about?

What’s Sazan Island got that Indian Creek Island doesn’t?

Well, for one thing, unlike “Billionaire Bunker,” Sazan Island has actual bunkers. Thousands of them, like heavy concrete set pieces from Alderaan, all built to withstand a nuclear attack. Enver Hoxha, who ruled Communist Albania for four decades, was, like all strongmen, crazy paranoid. The guy was obsessed with bunkers. And he built them all over the country. Bunkers in Albania are like bodegas in New York City. It’s a thing.

Because of Sazan’s strategic geographical importance, Hoxha really went to town on the island, constructing a “vast network of underground tunnels and bunkers,” per The Spaces. So it may be that Jared and Ivanka are simply planning ahead, making sure they have a safe space to wait out the looming apocalypse kickstarted by her father. But: why build new bunkers when perfectly good ones already exist? And in such a lovely, scenic spot, no less?

There has to be more to it than that. Because it ain’t just Boy Plunder and the Bride of Slenderman who are active in this niche real estate market. A number of Silicon Valley libertarian oligarch types seem fixated on gobbling up remote islands.

Look at what’s happening in Honduras, on Roatán Island. On that tropical paradise, in St. John’s Bay, is a place called Zona Próspera—“the first modern charter city with world-class institutions,” according to the literature of the corporation that founded it, Honduras Próspera Inc.

As I wrote back in April, Zona Próspera is

not actually a city. Not yet. Technically, Zona Próspera is a ZEDE—a Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico, or, in English, a Zone for Employment and Economic Development. Zona Próspera is basically an autonomous enclave—part United Fruit Company banana plantation 2.0, part tax haven, part crypto cult, part corporate utopia, part fiefdom, part deregulated medical laboratory, and part Ayn Rand fan fiction.

The founding father of the ZEDE is the American economist Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize winner who was a senior VP at the (insidious) World Bank. Imagining a 21st-century twist on Hong Kong, he coined the term “charter city” in a 2009 TED Talk that became popular with the John Galt set.

“The key to the project is a charter city,” Romer explained to Freakonomics that same year, “which starts out as a city-sized piece of uninhabited territory and a charter or constitution specifying the rules that will apply there. If the charter specifies good rules (or in our professional jargon, good institutions) millions of people will come together to build a new city.” A Barry Goldwater Field of Dreams, in other words.

ZEDEs became legal in Honduras in 2013. The legislation was championed by the president, who was—you guessed it!—Orlando Hernández. By law, JOH was required to set up an advisory committee, which he did. And the dude gets points for creativity. Among the ZEDE advisors are, as Rachel Corbett noted in her 2024 New York Times feature, “a granddaughter of the final Austrian emperor and a band of Republicans from the U.S. that included the former Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the former Reagan aide Faith Whittlesey, the libertarian economist Mark Skousen and Ronald Reagan’s son Michael Reagan.” …

Próspera [Corbett continues] has become particularly well known for the zone’s experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards. The week of my visit, Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera, had a chip with his Tesla key implanted into his hand. On a previous trip he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities. Another time he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him “stronger and faster,” as he put it at a conference in Roatán that weekend.

I mean, a descendent of Milton Friedman—the late Chicago School doyen whose reactionary economic theories, when implemented IRL in Chile, gave us Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship…implanting a microchip…in his hand, Revelations-style…that controls the electric automobile built by Elon Musk’s company…which is itself heavily subsidized by the U.S. government…and thus, theoretically, anathema to Friedman? You can’t make this shit up. Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t make this shit up.

If you’re still on the fence, there’s also the fact that Próspera’s investors include Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, whose 2022 book, The Network State, helped flesh out the concept.

Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan? That’s a quintet more ruthless and terrifying than the starting lineup of the 2001 L.A. Lakers.

“A network state,” Srinivasan writes, “is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

He also offers a more detailed definition:

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

What a robust ZEDE network state would look like in the real world remains to be seen. What its overlords would want to do there—far from pesky government regulators; where no one can hear you scream—is anybody’s guess. But given the Thiel crew’s dual obsession with immortality and genetic engineering, it’s not hard for one’s imagination to wander into dark, dark places.

Edith Romero of Truthout sums it up neatly:

These ZEDEs are a project of Praxis, a tech billionaire-funded start-up that aims to create libertarian city-states to “restore Western Civilization.” The ZEDEs are allowed to have their own government, police force, courts, laws, and any taxes collected would not be paid to the Honduran government but to the ZEDEs themselves. ZEDEs are a tech billionaire’s dream: unbridled power, tech fantasy, and resource hoarding, where the government is run by AI and cryptocurrency is the main currency.

That sounds like bad science fiction, I realize, like a shitty William Gibson knock-off, but in actuality, there have been extra-governmental organizations that maintained their own administrations, law enforcement, courts, laws, and tax collection…and that also enjoyed the right to raise armies, sign treaties, crush popular uprisings, and execute enemies of the (corporate) state.

The East India Company had all of that power. Chartered in 1600, the most powerful corporation that ever existed grew and grew, eventually controlling ruling over vast swaths of India. Curious what it would be like if a vast and populous country was run by an actual corporation? The EIC provides a helpful historical example. It exploited and extracted on a galactic scale. It engaged in the slave trade. It wasn’t shy about sending its own private proto-ICE to rough up the locals. It tortured citizens to get them to pay their taxes. It brought widespread poverty to the subcontinent. Oh, and it was directly responsible for some 10 million Indians starving to death during the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. But don’t worry, friends, I’m sure our future AI overlords will prove much more compassionate than the heartless London stuffed shirts who called all the shots in India from their well-appointed corporate offices halfway around the world.

James Brooke, the restless, adventurous son of a British magistrate, marveled at the might of the East India Company. Born outside of Calcutta in 1803, he had a front-row seat to the EIC’s sinister machinations. He envied its wealth and its power. He wanted it for himself.

When his father passed away, he inherited the equivalent of $3 million—enough to live on comfortably for the rest of his days. But this did not satisfy him. He wanted something more. Something bigger. He didn’t want a small fortune. He wanted a large one. And he wasn’t afraid to travel to the ends of the earth to get it, if that’s what was required.

Brooke was certainly well-off, but hardly the scion of a British robber baron. Nor did he work at some cushy desk job. He was a professional soldier and seafarer. He was enterprising. He was bold. And he was opportunistic. Adventuring in the East Indies, he found himself doing mercenary work for the Sultan of Brunei—putting down uprisings and blowing up pirate ships and saving the Sultan’s uncle from assassination attempts. As gifted as he was at taking out pirates, Brooke was positively elite—Epstein-like, one might even say—at currying favor with the rich and powerful.

From the Sultan, Brooke received the governorship of Sarawak, the Malaysian slice of northern Borneo. In 1841, he was given sovereign power over the region, as well as a new title: Rajah of Sarawak. It’s kind of nuts, in hindsight. An upper-middle-class Englishman, a white guy, became head of state of a new nation in the East Indies! And it wasn’t some bogus title, either. Brooke cannily allied himself with Britain, so while he enjoyed absolute power, he also had the world’s most powerful navy to protect him when he needed it—the best of both worlds. He issued currency, putting his portrait on the coins and banknotes. He established a hereditary monarchy, the White Rajahs of Sarawak, that only ended because the Japanese overran Borneo in the Second World War.

Like Peter Thiel, Brooke was gay. Unlike Peter Thiel, Brooke was by nature benevolent. He was good to his subjects, raising their standard of living. He abolished slavery and all but eliminated piracy. He left Sarawak in a better place than how he found it.

He was succeeded by his nephew, Charles Johnson Brooke, who was succeeded in turn by Sir Charles Vyner de Windt Brooke, the last White Rajah, who abdicated in 1946. The dynasty lasted over a century!

James Brooke, I submit, is the template for the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels, Alex Karps, Sam Altmans, and Jared Kushners of the world. He is why they are investing in real estate in far-flung locales (see also: Thiel in Argentina). They all want to be White Rajahs, it says here. They all want to know what real absolute power feels like. And how else can that be achieved, if not by carving out their own private Sarawaks?

Elon Musk can exert influence over presidents and prime ministers, as we’ve seen. But he can’t be a president or a prime minister—much less a prince or potentate. Neither can Peter Thiel or Jared Kushner. And even Trump, the leader of an extant state, is having difficulty putting his mug on the money; you think Donald isn’t jealous of King Charles, who holds no real power but has his portrait on the coinage?

This isn’t the eleventh century, when restless Franks could repulse the Turks from the Holy Land and set up shop in, say, Antioch. Jared Kushner ain’t Tancred of Galilee. The only way to establish a hereditary monarchy, in this day and age—and in this economy—is to build one from scratch. Like Thiel and his tech-bro comrades want to do in Honduras. Like Jared and Ivanka want to do in Albania. That, I believe, is what Ivanka meant when she talked about doing “a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

This is consistent with what we know about her imperial ambitions. In my May 2020 interview with Noel Casler, who while working on The Celebrity Apprentice spent a lot of time with Donald Trump’s favorite daughter, he said, “Ivanka runs the show and plays her father like a fiddle. She and Jared are using him to gain power. I don’t fear Trump; I’m terrified of them getting control of this country—and I believe that is their plan. As I often say: ‘Trump wants music to play when he walks in a room, he wants to get high and he wants to grab women; Ivanka & Jared want to rule the world.’”

They can’t rule the world. But they could certainly rule Sazan Island.

There’s a template for this. Making deals with the likes of Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania, and Juan Orlando Hernández, the then-president of Honduras, and Javier Milei, the Nazi-adjacent president of Argentina, our aspiring Rajahs are doing exactly what James Brooke did with the Sultan of Brunei.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to any of these monstrous sociopaths spending the rest of their lives on some faraway island. I’d just rather it was St. Helena. Or Île d’If. Or the Bagne de Cayenne. Or, better yet, since Donald is so gung-ho about reviving the place, Alcatraz.

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Photo credit: Sarawak coinage from early 20th century.

Dear Reader,

In 1809, 185 years after the Dutch colonists founded Fort Amsterdam, 26-year-old Washington Irving published a satirical history of the island. The book came with a gimmick. A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty was written under a pseudonym—or, rather, by a fictional character: one Diedrich Knickerbocker.

Irving did his Andy Kaufman best to keep up the joke. In the lead-up to publication, he created a hoax, taking out newspaper ads inquiring after the whereabouts of Mr. Knickerbocker, supposedly a Dutch-American historian who’d gone missing. The ruse worked; the “lost historian” mystery became a story in itself; the book sold well; after Irving was revealed to be the actual author, subsequent editions were titled Knickerbocker’s History of New York.

The surname of the fictional Dutch-American historian became so well known, and so associated with the former New Amsterdam, that “Knickerbocker” became a synonym for “New Yorker.” In “The Author’s Apology,” a foreword to an 1848 edition, Irving marvels at the accidental coinage. “[W]hen I find, after a lapse of nearly forty years,” he writes, “this haphazard production of my youth still cherished among them; when I find its very name become a ‘household word,’ and used to give the home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptation, such as Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker omnibuses, Knickerbocker bread, and Knickerbocker ice; and when I find New Yorkers of Dutch descent priding themselves upon being ‘genuine Knickerbockers,’ I please myself with the persuasion that I have struck the right chord…”

The most famous “home stamp” would not happen for another century. Almost exactly a hundred years after Irving’s “Apology,” the Basketball Association of America, the precursor to the NBA, was founded. Owners of the eleven original franchises convened at the Commodore Hotel—the same E. 42nd Street hotel that Donald Trump would convert into the Grand Hyatt 34 years later—to sign the paperwork. In an homage to Washington Irving, the New York team called itself the Knickerbockers—or, for short, the Knicks.

Fast-forward eighty years. After decades in the basketball wilderness—a quarter century of futility, poor management, disastrous trades, foolhardy draft picks, Carmelo Anthony hero ball, and unwatchable games—the Knicks are once again the toast of the town. On Friday night in San Antonio, the ‘Bockers beat the Spurs, in a game they probably should have lost, to take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series—and there was jubilation in New York. I mean, people were literally jumping for joy. Fans took to the streets to celebrate. The noise was so loud it could be heard in New Jersey.

“New Yorkers are really New Yorking like never before,” one local observed. “In all my years living here, I’ve never seen the city this joyous.”

“City vibes are hard to explain right now,” reported the hockey writer Adam Herman. “There’s a guy [in a Knicks jersey] smoking a cigar and holding a broom”—symbolizing the hoped-for four-game “sweep”—“and everyone is shaking his hand as if he’s an essential worker during the pandemic.”

A short poem, written by “Ty Rory,” began to circulate on social media; within hours, it was readily available on a t-shirt or a hat:

Our mayor is Muslim.
Our bagels are Jewish.
Our Christian is Dior.
And the Knicks in four.

I can’t read that without an explosion of pure happiness detonating in my nervous system. I love everything about it: the cleverness of the concept; the switcheroo with the placement of the third religious adjective; the sneaky A-B-C-C rhyme scheme; the bold declaration that the hometown team will sweep its third series in a row—which, if it happens, would tie the NBA record (15) for the most consecutive wins in a playoff series.1 Most of all, I love the word our. That is a poem about community. About diversity, equity, and inclusion. About us. And it ties those things to the basketball franchise, the team that unites the entire city.

Perhaps because the name of the team means “true-blood New Yorker,” there’s been some debate on social media the last few days about what makes one the genuine article. Is it birthright citizenship only, as Jennifer Lopez suggested in an old clip someone dug up? At what point does one become a Knickerbocker? I would say that if you read this tweet by Emma Specter and not only understand exactly what she’s talking about, but find yourself nodding, then you make the cut:

i am not a new yorker bc i was born there, i am a new yorker bc a rat once ran over my sandal-clad foot while i was walking thru the 14th street underpass to get on the f to get to my shift as a hostess at a seafood brunch place in carroll gardens and when i got there i got fired

In 1949, E.B. White, of Charlotte’s Web and Strunk & fame, was commissioned by the now-defunct Holiday magazine to write something about New York City. The culmination of that effort, “Here Is New York,” beautifully articulates what, for this onetime resident anyway, makes the city so special. I’d never even heard of the essay before, much less read it, until yesterday afternoon, when Ryder Kessler, a Democratic candidate for Assembly District 66, posted a screenshot from the essay that moved me to tears. Stumbling upon it was a lovely surprise.

The essay too long to run in its entirety. But on this loveliest of New York weekends, I wanted to share some excerpts, including the one Kessler posted.

White’s piece begins:

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.2 I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher’s office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, five blocks from where I used to usher at the Metropolitan Opera and only a hundred and twelve blocks from the spot where Clarence Day the Elder was washed of his sins in the Church of the Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and some wise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.

I’ve always found this to be the case. The density of the place, packed like the nucleus of an atom; the concentration of wealth and power and celebrity; the immediacy of everything; the city’s ghosts so palpable that you want Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd to come and take them away.3 In New York, as I wrote in my first novel, nothing is as decadent as wasted space. When you occupy the limited space with so many luminaries, you’re bound to run into some of them now and again. Or, looking back, you wonder if you had. As I recalled in my deep-dive about Melania Trump:

Plus, we tread the same Manhattan streets. Our common ground really was common ground! Not only did Melania move to New York around the same time that I did, but she occupied the same spaces in New York that I did. The apartment where she lived in 1996, the one at Zeckendorf Towers that her friend the Milanese playboy and modeling agent Paolo Zampolli found for her, was in Union Square, home to the now-defunct 119 Bar, one of my favorite old haunts. Had she ever popped in there for a (non-alcoholic, for her) drink, slid into one of the battered red vinyl booths? Probably she’d been to Bar Six—another of my go-to watering holes, on account of its location across the street from my friend Keri’s Sixth Avenue sublet; there were always aspiring models hanging out in there, sipping well vodka on the rocks, smoking Camel Lights, self-consciously checking their reflections in the mirrors that hung on every wall. And if Melania was a fixture at Moomba—then a hip nightclub, and reportedly the site of her first date with Donald—might she have also patronized Nell’s, a similar establishment, where my friend Chris and I used to go on Tuesday nights? (Keri worked there, so we were able to both jump the line and get in for free.) Later that decade, Melania lived on 30th and Park Avenue, a short stroll from my studio apartment on 28th and Lexington.4 Did she ever grab Indian takeout from Curry in a Hurry? Or a slice from the pizzeria across the street, with its delicious sausage rolls, where one afternoon I walked in on what appeared to be an Albanian mob sit-down?5

One night many years ago, I met some friends—including the aforementioned Keri—at the West Bank Cafe in Hell’s Kitchen. For some reason, the topic of Kevin Bacon came up, and Keri’s roommate, a Scottish cokehead architecture student named Mike, went on a loud, obnoxious, and bizarre rant about how Kevin Bacon was a shitty and overrated actor. As he spoke, I saw Keri, who was sitting across from me and Mike at the table, suddenly go white.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Her eyes widened. She stage-whispered: “Kevin Bacon is sitting right behind you.”

And so he was. There was Bacon, perched on a high chair at the bar area, holding court with a few friends, and he could not have been more resplendent if there were an actual halo above his head. Kyra Sedgwick, his actress wife, was also there, chatting with a friend at the bar.

My first thought was not, “Wow, this is a great celebrity sighting.” My first thought was, “Shit, I hope he didn’t hear us.”

A fun anecdote, perhaps, but nothing special. Every real New Yorker has a few stories like this.

Back to E.B. White. He continues:

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn’t attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn’t even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this air shaft to fly over. The biggest ocean-going ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers. I am told this is the greatest seaport in the world, with six hundred and fifty miles of water front, and ships calling here from many exotic lands, but the only boat I’ve happened to notice since my arrival was a small sloop tacking out of the East River night before last on the ebb tide when I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss. The Lions have been in convention. I’ve seen not one Lion. A friend of mine saw one and told me about him. (He was lame, and was wearing a bolero.) At the ballgrounds and horse parks the greatest sporting spectacles have been enacted. I saw no ballplayer, no race horse. The governor came to town. I heard the siren scream, but that was all there was to that—an eighteen-inch margin again. A man was killed by a falling cornice. I was not a party to the tragedy, and again the inches counted heavily.

I mention these merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event upon its inhabitants, so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. In most metropolises, small and large, the choice is often not with the individual at all. He is thrown to the Lions….

That is one of the best things about New York. People do their own thing, and events that would be a big deal in any other city can be safely ignored. Even on 9/11, some New Yorkers were lost in their own worlds—getting haircuts, talking about Michael Jordan coming out of retirement to play for the Washington Wizards, zealously passing out leaflets for Lyndon LaRouche as dazed passersby (like me) walked by their stand on Fifth Avenue.

For all the happy tumult on Friday night, how many of the city’s 8.8 million inhabitants were completely oblivious? How many couldn’t pick Jalen Brunson or Josh Hart out of a police lineup? How many don’t know Chalamet from Shamet? How many who saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 didn’t recognize the Karl-Anthony Towns cameo?

White really gets into it here:

Although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location ten blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation—a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless. I think that although many persons are here from some excess of spirit (which caused them to break away from their small town), some, too, are here from a deficiency of spirit, who find in New York a protection, or an easy substitution.

Think of how many movies are set in New York. It’s an entire genre all to itself. And whether it’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Marathon Man, Big or Midnight Cowboy, Saturday Night Fever or Glengarry Glen Ross, Uncut Gems or West Side Story, every movie set in NYC is implicitly an underdog story, a David and Goliath tale. The series between the Knicks, with their diminutive star Jalen Brunson, and the Spurs, with their nimble giant Victor Wembanyama so otherworldly that his nickname is Area 51, is no different.

And now we come to the paragraph that Kessler posted on X:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

That’s it. That’s it exactly. The city that is a goal. Cue up the Frank Sinatra, who grew up in Hoboken—just across the river from Manhattan but a million miles away: If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.

But White is just getting started:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain illusive….

New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression. The Empire State Building shot twelve hundred and fifty feet into the air when it was madness to put out as much as six inches of new growth. (The building has a mooring mast that no dirigible has ever tied to; it employs a man to flush toilets in slack times; it has been hit by an airplane in a fog, struck countless times by lightning, and been jumped off of by so many unhappy people that pedestrians instinctively quicken step when passing Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.)

Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow. This, more than any other thing, is responsible for its physical majesty. It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village—the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up….

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time the residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Catskills and the hills of Westchester. When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube-pfft-just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils. Every time an incision is made in the pavement, the noisy surgeons expose ganglia that are tangled beyond belief. By rights New York should have destroyed itself long ago, from panic or fire or rioting or failure of some vital supply line in its circulatory system or from some deep labyrinthine short circuit. Long ago the city should have experienced an insoluble traffic snarl at some impossible bottleneck. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ships’ rats. It should have been overwhelmed by the sea that licks at it on every side. The workers in its myriad cells should have succumbed to nerves, from the fearful pall of smoke-fog that drifts over every few days from Jersey, blotting out all light at noon and leaving the high offices suspended, men groping and depressed, and the sense of world’s end. It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker.

Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit—a sort of perpetual muddling through. Every facility is inadequate—the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin—the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.

That sense of belonging, the right that all New Yorkers—whether natives, commuters, or fortune-seekers—implicitly possess just by virtue of calling the place home, even for a short while, is what animated the celebrations this past weekend. The city belongs to all of us. The Knicks belong to all of us. New York is what happens when you forge a giant metropolis out of those “Immigrants Welcome Here” signs. It is a place of sanctuary, where, whatever its vilest native might like to believe, the tired and the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free are explicitly greeted with welcome by the most famous statue in the world. The Markwayne Mullins of the world will never understand, much less approve.

This part is particularly relevant to the here and now:

The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. If the people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite. In New York smolders every race problem there is, but the noticeable thing is not the problem but the inviolate truce.

Our mayor is Muslim, our bagels are Jewish, and everybody’s cool with that. New York is both the problem and the solution, simultaneously—Schrödinger’s bodega cat.

In the introduction to Low Life, Lucy Sante—who I had the honor of meeting at the Woodstock event a few Sundays ago—writes that New York “would seem on the face of it to be founded on progress, on change, on the bulldozing of what has faded to make way for the next thing, the thing after that, the future. The lure of the new is built right into the name; it is the part of the name that actually registers, since the ‘York,’ a commemoration of a colonial lineage, carries no resonance and exists only as a vestige….New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.”

White writes, “To a New Yorker the city is both changeless and changing. In many respects it neither looks nor feels the way it did twenty-five years ago.”

In Gotham,6 their meticulous history of the city, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace quote an editorial in Harper’s Monthly that ran in 1856: “New York is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years together. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.”

This complaint is what makes New York New York—and makes anyone who can credibly complain thus, it says here, indubitably a New Yorker. Here is my grievance: I moved out of the city 21 years ago this month, and I still think the presence of a Sephora on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Third Avenue constitutes a war crime.

White ends his essay on a dark note. He is troubled by visions of apocalypse. In 1949, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was no doubt thinking of nuclear holocaust, not eleven jihadists with box-cutters. But in the fretful days after 9/11, White’s words seemed prophetic:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

And yet unlike Carthage or Troy or Babylon, New York has held—just as Rome held after its fall, and Constantinople after its sacking. It has survived panic and fire and riots, snarling traffic and famine and plague, and, so far, the encroachment of the Atlantic Ocean—not to mention 9/11, the ban on smoking indoors, and the Garth Brooks concert in Central Park.

New York was built to last.

It used to be that the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death. Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations—the greatest housing project of them all. In its stride, New York takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war. New York is not a capital city—it is not a national capital or a state capital. But it is by way of becoming the capital of the world.

So it is. The United States may be ceding its hegemonic status to China, but fat chance of Beijing or Shanghai or Hong Kong supplanting New York as the capital of the world anytime soon.

The city’s history is inextricably bound with the history of the nation. Of the four greatest U.S. presidents, one was born and raised in Manhattan, another was a resident there for so many years that the highway on the East Side is named for him, one effectively clinched the Republican nomination after a speech at Cooper Union, and one took the oath of office and “developed the American presidency” from his official residence at 3 Cherry Street.

It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the current holder of that office, inarguably the worst U.S. president, is also a product of New York City. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm. So it must be to the corpulent Queens native, who understands that the “New York” in White’s elegant sentence does not refer to the Outer Boroughs.

Two years after E.B. White wrote his essay, the New York Knicks made their first appearance in the NBA Finals—the first of what would be three consecutive trips to the championship round. In what we can now call “typical Knicks fashion,” they lost all three times. In ‘51, the Rochester Royals—featuring a 5’ 11” point guard named Red Holzman, who would go on to coach the Knicks’ two championship teams in ‘70 and ‘73, the franchise’s only titles—beat them in seven games.

Let’s hope history does not repeat itself this year.

The 2026 postseason has been, in the words of longtime Knicks play-by-play announcer Mike Breen, a “magic carpet ride.” Thirteen straight victories! In the playoffs! The largest point differential of any playoff team ever! A loveable team of humble, thoughtful, considerate players who genuinely love one another! Bang bang! Bing bong!

Tomorrow night, these Knicks will face a more terrifying opponent than even the San Antonio Spurs. What happens when one of the best things New York City ever produced collides with one of the worst? Is the human good luck charm named Jalen Brunson mighty enough to ward off the cursèd Donald Trump stink? Will Epstein’s buddy—the orange energy vampire whom the NBA commissioner and the owner of the Knicks have inexplicably invited into the building—ruin everyone’s good time, as is his wont?

The optimist in me likes to think that this year’s chapter of the Knickerbockers’ History of New York will have a happy ending. We haven’t appeared in the Finals since before Y2K. We haven’t won the title since I learned to walk. We’re due!

Besides, even if Trump dares to show his ugly face at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, we can rise above it. Whether we’re facing a 6’ 3” Kremlin asset or a 7’ 6” French phenom, we can go higher.

We New Yorkers instinctively know that E.B. White’s observation about the city is true:

The way is up.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was the great Jen Taub:

Reminder that my Epstein book is now available:

Photo credit: Yours truly. A lamppost n Manhattan.

Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday, June 5th. I’m recording it Thursday, June 4th, 6:30 p.m. at night. I have just watched, on Wednesday night, the New York Knicks defeat the San Antonio Spurs in Game One of the NBA Finals— which seemed a preposterous sentence to utter, even two months ago.

And I want to talk about this. Not because I’m a Knicks fan and I’m excited—although I am a Knicks fan and I am excited. I want to talk about it because something is happening regarding the NBA Finals that I think is a microcosm of what’s wrong with Trump. Just as a person, what’s wrong with him. It’s a microcosm of that. And what I mean is, Trump has decided that he wants to go to Game Three of the Finals.

Now it’s a best-of-seven series. The first two games are in San Antonio. Games Three and Four are at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Right in New York City, right at Penn Station, right in the heart of everything. A couple of things here, just to provide some context, for people that don’t know what’s happening with the basketball.

This Knicks team is very good, extremely likable. And the vibes—as Jalen Brunson, the star player, remarked last year—are immaculate. Everybody likes the team. It’s a New York team. They’re they’re hard workers. They’re all give it their all all the time. They’re tough, they play good defense, they get on the floor, all of that stuff. They’re underdogs. It’s an easy team to root for.

(Hype video by @IQfor3)

The Knicks have been terrible since basically 1999. They got into the finals against the same San Antonio Spurs in 1999 and lost in five games, because they were not nearly as good. So the Knicks have not won a championship since 1973. That’s a long time ago. It’s a very long time ago. I was seven months old when the Knicks last won the NBA Finals. So the fact that they’re in it is a big deal, beause they haven’t been in it since ‘99. They were in it also in ‘94. That time they came close, but they did not win.

Just getting to the finals is a big deal. And New York, as a city, people need to understand—it’s a basketball town, at the end of the day. And the reason why is because there’s two baseball teams—used to be three. Used to be the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Yankees. Now it’s the Yankees and the Mets. There’s two football teams. I get that they play in New Jersey, but they’re the New York Giants and the New York Jets. Hockey, you know, you’ve got the Rangers, the Islanders, you’ve got the Devils.

But basketball is all Knicks. And I get that there’s another team in New York that plays in Brooklyn now, but nobody cares about Brooklyn. Nobody cares about the Brooklyn Nets. Everybody likes the Knicks in New York. It is a basketball town. They have not won in 53 years. If they win the Finals, it will be—and I don’t think I’m exaggerating—it’ll be the biggest sporting event of any kind in terms of impact on the the wider culture in quite some time. I’ve been listening to podcasts about this, and people are comparing it to when the Cubs won the World Series for the first time, which they did in 2016, for the first time since 1908. It’s a long time. Long drought, famously awful.

The Knicks have been not only bad for the last 20 years. Until Brunson showed up four years ago, they were unwatchably bad. They were terrible. Just terrible every year. Bad management, bad players, just no fun. You know, you don’t mind watching a team that loses, as long as they’re entertaining. They weren’t even entertaining. They were just bad. Depressing. It was depressing. It was a depressing team.

And now they’re not. They’re the opposite of that. They’re exactly the kind of team that every other franchise wants. It’s a team of, like I said, likable people. The guy that’s the best player on the Knicks, Jalen Brunson, is like—he says he’s six-two and he’s not. He’s maybe six feet tall. I don’t even think he can dunk. And he’s amazing. Going up against the Spurs, who have Victor Wembanyama, who’s like seven-seven and will be the best player of all time, possibly, when all is said and done. Certainly the best player in the NBA, possibly by next year. But he’s still very young.

That’s what’s going on in the wide world of sports. And Trump says, “I want to come to the game.” Well, he’s invited to the game by the Knicks owner, James Dolan, who is a nepo baby, who inherited the team from his father, Charles Dolan, who owned Cablevision, and they own MSG, and they own that Sphere in Las Vegas and all this stuff. And Dolan is not a very good owner. People do not like him. Fans do not like him. However, he spends money and he gets out of the way, which ultimately is what you want. And he cares about the Knicks winning. So we’re all happy now. I think this is the first time in the entire 25-year tenure of James Dolan that Knicks fans are like, “Maybe James Dolan is okay.” And then he goes and invites Trump to the game. And it’s not okay. It’s not okay.

Basketball isn’t like the other sports. Football is a huge stadium. You’re far away from the field. You’re in luxury boxes. Baseball, the field is a little bit smaller than football, but still you’re far away. You’re in the luxury boxes. Basketball is a small arena, relatively speaking. And I don’t know where Trump’s going to be. I don’t know what the deal is with the security. It’s going to be a nightmare. It’s going to inconvenience everybody that goes to the game—or anybody that’s coming to Penn Station, for that matter, at that time of day. Monday, you know—it’s a school day.

All of that is going to be an inconvenience beyond belief by this guy who is not really a basketball fan. He’s not. I know Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, has said, “No, Trump’s a fan. He used to come to the games back in the day.” And, you know, there’s pictures of him sitting courtside at the finals in ‘99.

Of course there are. That’s a place he went to be seen. Trump doesn’t care about basketball. I’ve never seen him or heard of him liking basketball. Plus, he is a white supremacist, and his entire administration promotes racism. So why is this guy gonna come to an NBA game and watch basketball? Come on. You know, we’re not dumb here.

The answer is two things. First thing is Obama—who does legitimately like basketball and is friendly with some of the basketball players, et cetera—Obama went to the All-Star game this year, the NBA All-Star game. Now it said in The Athletic, which is now owned by the New York Times, that no president has gone to an NBA game since 2015. Wrong. Obama went in February to the All-Star Game. And he was there because All-Star Game was in Chicago. His new library is in Chicago, the foundation that he was starting, all that stuff. So he did it to promote that.

And honestly, as me, as Greg watching it, it was nice to see the Obamas, Barack and Michelle both, there at the arena—everybody loving on them and missing them and and cheering for them. And it felt good. But as a sports person, I didn’t like that, either. I don’t think these politicians should go near it. If you’re the mayor, it’s different, because it’s the city, and you almost have to go. So Mamdani gets a pass, because it’s his city—and he’s a legitimate Knicks fan.

But why is the President showing up to this thing? One, because he wants to do what Obama did, because we know he’s got the insecurity complex with regards to Barack Obama. And two, he wants to steal the joy. He’s a thief of joy, this guy. He is an energy vampire. He’s Colin Robinson on that What We Do in the Shadows show. He’s a lot bigger, but that’s what he is.

And Trump doesn’t care about the game. He doesn’t care about the players. He just cares about the vibe. He knows it’s a good vibe. It’s a good hang. These are cool guys. Everybody wants to be there. The cheapest ticket to the nosebleeds is something like $7,500. So he wants to flex a little muscle and show up and be where the action’s at. I mean, that’s always what he wants to do.

But the problem is he’s not just Joe Schmo anymore. He’s not even one of the celebrity fans. He’s not Ben Stiller. He’s not Timothée Chalamet. He’s not Spike Lee. These guys are there all the time watching the games. Trump is a fair-weather fan—at best. And he is the President of the United States. So just by being in the arena, he immediately politicizes something that should not be politicized. It should not be politicized.

One thing that Trump does that I can’t stand—that I can’t stand—is that he inserts himself into everything. He’s like this sweaty, disgusting creature that’s just oozing slime. He’s like the Creature from the Black Lagoon or something. Creature from the Orange Lagoon, I suppose. Except orange is Knicks colors. You know what I mean. So he’s just oozing this slime. And when his gross body comes in contact, the slime gets on everything.

And that’s what’s gonna happen to the game, just by him showing up. Even if he’s there for 10 minutes, he’s going to try to make it about him. Because that’s what Donald does. He wants to take the attention that everybody’s focusing on these guys who have worked really hard to get to the Finals for the first time in their careers, for almost all of them. And he wants to make it about him. Why him? What did he do? He went to a Finals game 27 years ago. Good job, Trumpy.

I don’t think he’s a real fan. I don’t think he cares who wins the game or anything like that. I think he just wants to go there because Obama did it and he wants to do what Obama did.

And he wants to be where all the positive energy is. That’s the thing. The Spurs, too—it’s a young team, it’s a fun team. I was rooting for them in the Western Conference Finals. These are two very, very likable kind teams. And Trump can’t handle it. He cannot handle that. He doesn’t understand it. So what he wants is to get in there and slime everything up with his disgustingness.

So it’s selfish for him to do this. It’s inconsiderate for everybody, for everybody, for this to happen. Even the people that are working for him at the Secret Service. They got to plan this thing. Madison Square Garden is built into Penn Station. It’s right over the major subway line, right? The cabs are lined up there. There’s watch parties outside on the street. What are we going to do? Are they going to not allow the watch parties now? How is he going to get out of there? Is he going to take a subway? There’s so many problems logistically with keeping him safe.

At the game Wednesday night, Game One, some kid ran out on the court, which you never see. He had his stupid phone, he was trying to take a selfie with Victor Wembanyama. And they whisked him out of there. But you know, what if something happens like that during the game? What if this is just another, you know, “assassination attempt” or whatever? Then we’re gonna ruin the entire basketball season because this asshole doesn’t know when to stay away?

It’s disgusting. It’s repulsive. And I know in the grand scheme of things, it is completely arbitrary and meaningless. I understand that. I’m not saying that this is at in any way on par with the Supreme Court stuff and the stealing the money stuff and the corruption stuff and the Russian spy stuff and putting that weirdo in charge of intelligence and the meat is maybe bad now, I was reading, and there’s ebola—just all of the bad stuff. There’s so much bad stuff! I get it. This is nothing.

But it’s a microcosm of what he is. It’s perfectly emblematic of his character, so-called. It should not be about him. It shouldn’t be about him. And somebody who is the President of the United States should know that. They should know that. So this is gonna be a disaster.

And I’ve been thinking about this. People say, “Well, he’s going to get booed.” That’s the other thing. Adam Silver, who’s the NBA Commissioner, said, “At the end of the day, I think New Yorkers won’t mind at all that Trump is there.” Meaning, they won’t mind the inconvenience of having to get in early and all that. They won’t mind at all. Adam Silver, you are wrong! Everyone will mind. No one wants him there. No one wants him there.

And should he be booed, if and when he’s shown on screen? I’m sure people will boo, lustily, because they fucking hate him. But I think if you’re gonna do that, you might as well make a chant. The one I suggest is “Jeff-rey Ep-stein, Jeff-rey Ep-stein.” Just over and over until they forget about him.

But really the best thing would be to just ignore him. Just pretend he’s not there. That would drive him more crazy than anything else. Just as if he doesn’t even exist. Because for the purposes of this, he doesn’t exist.

And maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s just a made-up creature. On Twitter, the sports journalist Ella Brockway said “Different cities, different sports, yes, yes, but I am a believer in the theory that a Knicks title win would close the loophole in the universe that opened when the Cubs won the World Series 10 years ago.”

And I looked at that and I thought, “Wow,” because I wrote a piece about that:

Because the Cubs did win the World Series. They won it in October of 2016. It was close to Election Day, maybe a week before. And they were losing the game, Game Seven, and then there was a rain delay. There was a rain delay for 20 minutes, and then they came back and they won the game. And it was like, okay, that rain delay tore something through the space-time continuum.

And I’m telling you, Jalen Brunson—who even looks like Andor; he does; he looks like Andor—he’s going to save us. He’s going to close that loophole and get us on the path, back towards normalcy—back to a reality where the president doesn’t ruin sporting events, where we’re not building a garish gladiatorial arena on the lawn of the White House next to the ruins of the East Wing, where people around the world respect us, where we don’t just start wars for no reason and then try to back out of them, where the Cabinet isn’t a bunch of fucking incompetent losers who hate America and just want to destroy everything.

We want to get back to that point. We want to get back to that point. And, you know, there would be celebration in the streets of New York City and, I don’t know, maybe we’ll wake up from this horrible nightmare. Isn’t that the cliché? It was all a dream. It’s not really all a dream. It’s a dream for me to say that it was all a dream.

Anyway, it’s Friday as you’re watching this, June 5th. the Knicks play tonight, at 8:30, again in San Antonio. I will be on live TV with Stephanie Koff—LB—over at The Five 8. That starts at 8 o’clock Eastern time. We have a great guest—yeah, she’s great. She’s been on before. You’ll love her. We’re gonna have a good time.

And when the show is over, I’m gonna turn the Knicks game on. And that’s what I’m gonna do. So anyway, I hope everybody has a good weekend, in spite of it all. Because I know this has been a weird week for a lot of reasons, not just because of this, but that’s the other thing: There is joy in the world. There is still joy in the world. And try as he might—and he’s trying really hard—Trump cannot destroy all of the joy in the world. He really can’t. He can try, but he can’t.

So until next time, we—and by “we” I mean the New York Knicks—shall prevail.

TONIGHT

And my new Epstein book is now available:

I got my copies from the alternative printer to Amazon, so if you’re interested in buying the book but don’t want to support Emperor Bezos, hit me up.

Thanks!

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Appalled by the viciousness of the autocratic government, sympathetic to the country’s oppressed people, and desirous of spreading democracy around the globe, the United States declares war on a once-mighty but moribund empire.

Not Iran in 2026; I speak of Spain in 1898.

It is not a fair fight. The hostilities begin right around Easter and end before the first day of school; the peace treaty is signed by Christmas. There are 2,246 military deaths—2,000 from infectious disease, almost all the rest from the sinking of the Maine; the conflict does not make the list of the top ten bloodiest wars in U.S. history.

And it is wildly successful. The decaying empire falls forever. The oppressed people are liberated—albeit briefly. The United States expands its territory and even tries its own hand at colonial power.

The Spanish-American War is everything Trump wanted his “excursion” with Iran to be.

The nation’d had designs on Cuba since before the Civil War. In 1854, during the administration of James Buchanan—who for decades was considered the worst president in American history but now stands comfortably at either third or fourth worst, depending on how you feel about Andrew Johnson and George W. Bush—the so-called Ostend Manifesto proposed a decidedly Trumpian policy: the United States should offer to buy Cuba from Spain, and, if the Spanish refused, declare war and take the island by force. Ostend was widely opposed in the North—because of an aversion to empire-building, yes, but mostly because annexing Cuba was a regarded as a sneaky way of expanding slavery in the South.

Things in Cuba festered for half a century, and finally came to a head in 1898. Then as now, the Cuban government was oppressive. Valeriano Weyler, the island’s Governor-General, was nicknamed “The Butcher” due to his unsound methods of putting down a popular uprising. As the 1910-11 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica notes:

Among the military means adopted by the Spaniards to isolate their foes were “trochas” (i.e., entrenchments, barb-wire fences, and lines of block-houses) across the narrow parts of the island, and “reconcentracion” of non-combatants in camps guarded by the Spanish forces. The latter measure produced extreme suffering and much starvation (as the reconcentrados were largely thrown upon the charity of the beggared communities in which they were huddled.)

Reconcentrados, as the name implies, were concentration camps.

The American people had sent food to the reconcentrados; President McKinley, while opposing recognition of the rebels, affirmed the possibility of intervention; Spain resented this attitude; and finally, in February 1898, the United States battleship “Maine” was blown up—by whom will probably never be known—in the harbour of Havana.

In April 1898, Washington told Spain to recall its troops from Cuba; when Spain refused, the U.S. imposed a naval blockade on the island. Four months later, the war was over. When the dust settled, Spain was eighty-sixed from North America, and the United States picked up the Spanish possessions of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba was libre—and the U.S. promised to keep it that way.

When we consider what was gained, what was sacrificed, why the war was fought, how many Americans supported it, and how quickly the objectives were achieved, the Spanish-American War is arguably the most successful military operation in American history. It is the polar opposite of this year’s conflict with Iran, which is unnecessary, pointless, self-defeating, unpopular, economy-destroying, morally reprehensible, and humiliating in every possible way.

Frozen out by the people of Greenland and pantsed by Iran, Donald Trump is desperate for a victory to salvage his laughingstock legacy—and, more urgently, to help himself in the midterms. Has he turned his attention to Cuba, where the Spanish-American War began, in the hopes that a sequel of that 1898 conflict might prove equally successful? Because it certainly seems like he’s preparing to move on Cuba.

On January 29th, Trump issued an executive order, seemingly out of the blue, imposing an oil blockade on the island. The reason he gave is this:

The Government of Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States. The regime aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the Government of the Russian Federation (Russia), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. For example, Cuba blatantly hosts dangerous adversaries of the United States, inviting them to base sophisticated military and intelligence capabilities in Cuba that directly threaten the national security of the United States. Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information of the United States. Cuba continues to build deep intelligence and defense cooperation with the PRC. Cuba welcomes transnational terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, creating a safe environment for these malign groups so that these transnational terrorist groups can build economic, cultural, and security ties throughout the region and attempt to destabilize the Western Hemisphere, including the United States. Cuba has long provided defense, intelligence, and security assistance to adversaries in the Western Hemisphere, attempting to thwart United States and international sanctions designed to enforce the stability of the region, uphold the rule of law, and safeguard the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Cuba continues to try to thwart United States efforts to address threats to the United States posed by hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors, including in the Western Hemisphere.

Why the urgency? Where’s the fire? How does any of that rise to the level of an “unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security and foreign policy of the United States?” I mean, Russian signals intelligence hubs? Give me a break. Like, the current occupant of the Oval Office is a Kremlin asset—as I’ve painstakingly detailed for years now. Hard to see how a Russian signals intelligence operation in Havana trumps Trump.

In February, as Mariana Perez of the Inter-American Law Review explains, Trump

floated the idea of a “friendly takeover” of Cuba. After a campaign event in Texas, he stated, “[t]he Cuban government is talking with us. They’re in a big deal of trouble… They have no money, they have no anything right now. But they’re talking with us and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.” These remarks followed the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro earlier in the year, an event that sent shockwaves throughout Latin America. The effects have been especially pronounced in Cuba, which lost access to Venezuelan oil exports.

Then, in April, the Department of Justice indicted Raúl Castro—Fidel’s brother and the former President of Cuba, who incidentally turns 95 tomorrow—and six other Cuban nationals for their alleged participation “in the Feb. 24, 1996 shoot‑down of two unarmed U.S. civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR), also known as Hermanos al Rescate, over international waters.”

The indictment was unsealed on May 20th. “For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens,” said Acting Attorney General, Trump lickspittle, and Ghislaine Maxwell canoodler Todd Blanche. “President Trump and this Justice Department are committed to restoring a simple principle: if you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.”

Tough talk, but the Castro indictment is nothing but a troll. Even if the allegations are true, the United States spent the beginning of 2026 using Venezuelan fishermen as target practice, and thus is in no position to take the moral high ground on extrajudicial executions in international waters.

Why is Trump doing this now?

On the first of May, in another executive order, Trump imposed sanctions on unnamed Cuban nationals who were responsible for “repression” by the Cuban government (which, to be fair, does a lot of repressing). The E.O. seems to be a precursor to some serious asset seizure:

All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States persons of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in:

(i) any foreign person determined by the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury; or by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State.

About that Secretary of State: Marco Rubio’s fingerprints are all over this. His parents, as he never tires of reminding us, were born in Cuba. They came to the U.S. in the 1950s, when Cuba’s strongman Fulgencio Batista—our man in Havana—teamed up with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky to make the city into a gleaming hub of gambling and prostitution. The well-heeled Cuban refugees who fled to Miami after Fidel Castro took over in 1959 were, generally, allies of the Batista regime and/or Fulgencio’s Mafia cohorts; small wonder Trump would give them a sympathetic ear (if not one disfigured in any way by gunshot wounds). Doubtless Rubio is intimately familiar with the history of the island, and fancies himself the next all-powerful Governor-General. Wouldn’t that make Mommy and Daddy proud?

Four months after the current U.S. oil embargo, Cuba has, quite literally, run out of gas. A New York Times in Spanish report from May 28th explains the peril:

As a result, daily life is becoming increasingly difficult. Electricity works for only a few hours a day, Cubans cook with charcoal and firewood, aid distribution is complicated by a lack of gas, and fuel is only available on the black market, where it can cost more than $40 a gallon.

Cubans are preparing for the summer heat, when energy demand typically increases, while the Trump administration hopes the situation will force Cuban officials to accept U.S. demands.

Because there is no fuel, sanitation trucks cannot operate, and the streets of Havana are piled high with trash.

It’s a humanitarian disaster waiting to happen.

And Trump and Rubio are intentionally exacerbating the suffering.

Previously, as Mariana Perez mentioned, Cuba got most of its oil from Venezuela—but ever since the Maduro kidnapping, the spigot has been cut off. It’s almost like Venezuela, an inexplicable undertaking in the moment, was a chessboard move whose entire purpose was to set up an attack on Cuba.

If history is not entirely on Trump and Rubio’s side, it can surely be spun to help the argument for war with Cuba. The Platt Amendment of 1901 granted the United States “the right to intervene in Cuban affairs in order to defend Cuban independence and to maintain ‘a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.’” Indeed, U.S. troops occupied Cuba from 1906-09, because the locals couldn’t get their shit together and govern properly. It is that same amendment—to an army appropriations bill, not to the Constitution—that allows the U.S. to maintain its lease on the military base at Guantanamo Bay.

Is the Platt Amendment still in effect? No. It was repealed by FDR. Will Trump and Rubio cite the Platt Amendment if and when they decide to regime-change the Communist government in Havana? Almost certainly. “We are bound by U.S. law to defend Cuban independence and to maintain ‘a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty’” is a wonderfully persuasive talking point. Americans just love the idea of spreading democracy and defeating evildoers.

And then there’s the JFK piece. In the first days of the disastrous Iran war, the MAGA messaging was, “The Iranian regime has been allowed to exist for 46 years. Trump is finally doing something about it.” I’m sure we’ll hear something in the same vein, should the U.S. attack Cuba: “In 1962, JFK failed at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow the Communists. We will finish the job,” or somesuch. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some selective release of Kennedy assassination documents that appear to implicate Fidel Castro in the 1963 hit, just to give Fox News something fresh to rile up the base with. (It would not be the first time U.S. media went crazy over war in Cuba.)

In a May 20th address, in Spanish, to the Cuban people, Rubio was clear:

The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil “blockade” by the U.S. As you know, better than anyone, you have been suffering from blackouts for years.

The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.

Rubio promised “$100 million dollars in food and medicine for you, the people”—but only if—and I’m paraphrasing here—the corrupt Communist government fucks off.

“In the U.S. we are ready to open a new chapter in the relationship between our people and our countries,” he said, not unsubtly, at the end of his address. “And, currently, the only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.”

Rubio has a point. The Cuban government sucks—although 66 years of U.S. embargoes have surely not helped matters. And the Secretary of State of a regime that’s actively building its own reconcentrados cannot claim moral superiority.

Is this all just tough talk, or is the Trump Administration serious about regime change in Cuba? Is a “friendly takeover” possible? Is Rubio angling to be the new Fulgencio Batista? How soon after a changeover can Trump’s associates in organized crime reinvigorate Havana? Will Jared Kushner get to build some new hotels and casinos? Will there be Trump Tower Havana? Trump-branded cigars? A new boondoggle for Ivanka?

And: might U.S. intervention in Cuba actually be…a good thing?

All I can say for sure is that, in 2026, Trump wants to party like it’s 1898.

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Photo credit: An American cartoon published in Judge, February 6, 1897: Columbia (representing the American people) reaches out to the oppressed Cuba (the caption under the chained child reads "Spain's 16th century methods") while Uncle Sam (representing the U.S. government) sits blindfolded, refusing to see the atrocities or use his guns to intervene (cartoon by Grant E. Hamilton).

Dear Reader,

Sir Walter Ralegh was Elizabethan England’s embodiment of Everything Everywhere All at Once.

He was a Renaissance man in both senses of the word. Born in 1552—19 years after Queen Elizabeth, the same year as his friend Edmund Spenser, nine years before Francis Bacon, and 12 years before Marlowe and Shakespeare—he literally came of age during the English Renaissance. And, other than spell his surname consistently, there was nothing that Ralegh could not do. He was a legendary polymath, who made himself expert at everything from agriculture to literature to navigation. How many humans in all of history could credibly be called poet, pirate, and privateer?

Precocious. Restless. Unbridled.

His family had connections but no money; that “Sir” was hard-earned, not inherited. He recognized early on that his fortunes hinged on the whims of an unpredictable, moody monarch—and so he spent his days at court rizzing her up. Only Ralegh could make the Virgin Queen think about getting busy. If he was alive now, he’d stroll his handsome self into the Oval Office, charm the pants off Donald Trump, and make off with most of the gold.

Ambitious. Charming. Canny.

Did you know that the potato is not native to Ireland? It was introduced to the island in 1588—by Walter Ralegh! The same Walter Ralegh who introduced tobacco to British society the year before. If that was the sum of his life’s achievements, he’d be more accomplished, and more historically relevant, than 99 percent of all the men who ever served in Parliament. But he did so much more!

Fearless.

Here are some highlights from Ralegh’s astonishing life—a life that, famously, came to an end at the bad end of an executioner’s axe:

At 15, he was in France, fighting on the side of the French Huguenots in an army of British mercenaries.

At 20, he was studying at Oxford, but did not graduate.

At 22, he was introduced to the royal court by his cousin Katherine Ashley, who was friends with the 41-year-old Virgin Queen; he immediately, and successfully, ensorcelled her.

At 26, he was exploring the New World, with a patent to establish colonies along the North American coast. (Less than a century after Columbus, Ralegh made more trans-Atlantic trips than my mother and father combined.)

At 28, he was putting down a rebellion in Ireland, beheading some 600 Spanish and Italian Papal soldiers.

At 29, he was back in court, glamouring everyone he came in contact with, including the Queen.

At 32, he was granted a royal charter “to discover, search, finde out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince, nor inhabited by Christian People.” One of the “barbarous lands” he discovered he named Virginia, for his patron.

At 33, he was knighted by the fawning Virgin Queen. He began writing poetry at this time—mostly to flatter her. (Ralegh would have slayed at one of Trump’s Cabinet meetings.)

At 34, he was introducing, and helping to popularize, the smoking of tobacco in Britain; four centuries later, the Beatles would reference this in “I’m So Tired”: Although I’m so tired, I smoke another cigarette / And curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get.

At 35, he was establishing a colony on Roanoke Island, in what is now North Carolina; the subsequent abandonment of that colony and the fate of its settlers to this day remain a Widow’s Bay-worthy mystery.

At 36, he was introducing potatoes to Ireland(!).

At 39, he was wedding—secretly, and without royal consent—the wonderfully-named Bessie Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting; Bessie bore a striking resemblance to the Queen, which Elizabeth could not have failed to notice, but was 13 years younger than Walter, rather than 19 years older. The couple had a son, conceived before the marriage, who died of plague.

At 40, he was imprisoned, for the first time but not the last, in the Tower of London, after the jealous Queen discovered the secret wedding and lost her shit; Bessie was also locked up. While there, he began writing a series of love poems.

At 40, he was dispatched from prison to the coast of Spain, because he was the only man in England trustworthy enough to fairly divvy up the spoils from the capture of a Spanish merchant ship.

At 42, he was a member of Parliament, arguing with the dour Reverend Ralph Ironsides, who accused him of being an atheist—a false charge promulgated by Spanish Jesuits also.

At 43, he was in Venezuela, tracking down the golden city of El Dorado—which, unfortunately for him, did not exist. He published an account of this, The Discovery of Guiana, which won him literary acclaim.

At 43, he was wounded in battle at Cádiz.

At 44, he was in the Azores.

At 45, he was once again fighting the Spanish Armada—but also, allegedly, contemplating defection to the enemy’s side.

At 46, he was sitting once again in Parliament.

At 48, he was named governor of the island of Jersey—then as now a hotbed of covert money exchange.

At 51, he was still mourning the sudden death of his patron, Elizabeth, when he was arrested by her successor, James I, for his alleged role in the “Main Plot” to depose the king and replace him with his cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart. Once again, he found himself imprisoned in the Tower.

At 52, he was defending himself at trial—eloquently, passionately, convincingly, but unsuccessfully. His inability to cross-examine his accusers would become the impetus for the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause.

At 55, he was writing The History of the World, an incomplete but still very long chronicle of earthly events from Creation until the Roman conquest of Macedon.

At 62, he was still in the Tower, but his history book was published. Despite the lack of a proper book tour, it sold well.

At 63, he was suffering from ill health—probably from all that smoking.

At 65, he was released from the Tower and [checks notes] sent back to Venezuela, to look for more gold, which he did not find in Venezuela, but did find on Spanish ships. While there, he violated terms of a ceasefire with Spain, pissing off King James.

At 66, he was beheaded in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster. He chastised the executioner for taking his sweet-ass time, explaining that he was sick with fever and did not want anyone watching to form the mistaken impression that he was quaking in fear. His last words were, “Strike, man! Strike!” (A clip of him reprimanding the headsman before his decapitation would have broken the internet, if Instagram stories had existed in 1618.)

It’s a fun thought experiment to guess at which historical figures would thrive, if suddenly and magically reincarnated in the here and now. Ralegh, for sure. He would have been a force of nature no matter when he lived.

What would he be doing, if alive today? Running against Keir Starmer in Parliament…or Michael Whatley in North Carolina? Deep-sea exploration? Cannabis farming? Hostile takeover of OpenAI? Obviously he would have a podcast.

But I’m writing about Ralegh for “Sunday Pages” because I came across one of his poems—eight rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, undated, and, until well after its publication, untitled. It presents as a sort of riddle. And my reasons for running this particular Ralegh effort will be obvious as soon as you get to the line that is way more appropriate in 2026 than it was 450 years ago (italics not mine):

Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian’s heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn.

I mean, “the dreadful sound of trump?” It’s too perfect!

The poem is written in the language of prophesy—he tells the truth slant, as Emily Dickinson would say—and there is a sense of foreboding, of looming dread, throughout. It reminds me a bit of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” from which poem the title of Rough Beast derives, or a passage from Revelation. But, because it’s a riddle, it also reads like something Shakespeare might dream up, in one of his more playful passages, in one of his lesser plays.

Let’s break it down:

Before the sixth day of the next new year,

That would be Twelfth Night, the last of the 12 days of Christmas—the Feast of the Epiphany, honoring the arrival of the Magi at the manger-side of the infant Jesus. There were three “wise men,” three “kings of Orient are bearing gifts.” Not so here:

Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.

Ralegh is not referring to Malchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar, but rather to the King of Hearts, the King of Diamonds, the King of Clubs, and the King of Spades. In a time before social media, television, FM radio, and even mass-market books, card games were extremely popular in Elizabethan England, both among the lower classes and at court. Elizabeth of York, the wife of Henry VII, was a compulsive gaming enthusiast of the kind now found at Atlantic City blackjack tables at 3 am, who famously rung up massive gambling debts. Ralegh himself was no stranger to games of chance or to profligate spending.

Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;

Some will win, some will lose—bigly. “End of crosses” might mean that the players end the night crossing themselves, giving thanks to God for their good fortune. It might also refer to the suit; crosses are swords, which is a suit in the tarot, and in the Spanish and Italian cards of that time.

Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;

As Robin Bates points out at his Better Living Through Beowulf blog, “I assume ‘the great tumult,’ ‘end of crosses,’ and ‘great losses’ refer to gambling losses, but the idea that those who now ‘full joyful are and glad, / Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad’ sounds also like Jesus’s ‘So the last shall be first, and the first last’ (Matthew 20:16).”

Full many a Christian’s heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.

In card games, of course, “trump” is the suit, or the card, that is greater than the others—the instant winner. The word derives from “triumphe,” or “triumph.” But, as Bates points out, the dreadful trump “could also be the trumpet sounded in the Book of Revelation.”

Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.

At first blush, these lines have a spooky feel—skeletons risen from the graves, haunting the cities and towns. But Ralegh here is speaking of dice, which tumble; “roll the bones” is slang for playing dice. This, too, has apocalyptic undertones, as Bates suggests; these lines may refer to “the dry bones,” he writes, “that, in Ezekiel’s vision, will rise up and walk again once God breathes life into them.”

And that brings us to the strangest lines of the poem:

By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn.

This also sounds like an apocalyptic vision. The “beard of flesh and mouth of horn” is reminiscent of John of Patmos’s description of various beasts populating Armageddon. And what herald isn’t born?

Turns out, that’s a riddle akin to the “from the womb untimely ripped” line from Macbeth. The herald in question wasn’t born, because he was hatched. He has a waddle. He makes strident noises. And he does this to announce the coming of the dawn. Raleigh is speaking of a rooster.

Once the riddle is solved, the poem’s meaning becomes straightforward: all across England, people will play cards and shoot craps, and many will lose a great deal of money, and this will continue until morning, when the cock’s crow breaks the spell, and normal life resumes.

But the richness of the language, the overt reference to Christianity, the Biblical allusions, and the terrifying image of a beast whose “mouth is horn” suggest that these lines are a microcosm of something larger: that, even during the Christmas season, humans will indulge in vices, and gamble away fortunes, and succumb to addictions, and this will not change until the Second Coming, when the trumpet sounds, and Judgment arrives.

And while Ralegh certainly did not intend this little riddle to be a prophesy of his own, the lines are eerily prescient. The sixth day of the new year is January 6th, the day of the insurrection. The kingdom is the United States in the Trump regime. The four kings assembling are Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, and Xi. Certainly there is great tumult now, and many of us are sorrowful and sad. Gambling, as I wrote on Tuesday, is an insidious blight on society that the powers that be are encouraging; our money is being drained from us. I don’t know that Donald’s voice is anything to fear, but the sound, objectively, is dreadful. The dead bones are the fossil fuels now threatening a Sixth Extinction.

Where is the promised herald, to proclaim peace? Whose beard is flesh, Mitch McConnell’s? Whose mouth is horn, Kenny G’s? What will stop the tumult? Or can it not be stopped, and we’re all doomed?

If the spirit of Sir Walter Ralegh was summoned from the vasty deep, and we sought his wise counsel, what would he tell us? I’d like to think he’d implore us to take action: “Strike, man! Strike!”

But given the state of the country, and the world, and the planet, I expect the late, great tobacco enthusiast to take one look at the world and tell us, “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”

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ICYMI

The Tony Michaels was our guest on a lively Five 8:

I did the Rolling Stones two weeks ago; this week, it’s the Beatles:

And, as a gentle reminder, my new Epstein Q&A book, Another Wonderful Secret, is now available:

Photo credit: William Segar, portrait of Ralegh, 1598.

Last night I spoke with my friend, the novelist, essayist and travel writer Diana Spechler, about the Trump Administration’s push to build a useless, stupid, ugly wall through one of the most pristine, beautiful, and scientifically important parts of the country.

Below is a transcript, edited for clarity:

This has been a crazy, crazy week. And by crazy, I mean rage-inducing. Just so many over-the-top things, so many corrupt things, so many stupid things, so many insensitive things, so many self-defeating things, so many examples of incompetence by our elected officials. And, I don’t know, some guy in the CIA has all these gold bars. I’m in the wrong line of work, I guess.

So I wanted to have my friend Diana Spechler on. Diana is a fantastic writer—one of my favorite writers. She’s written some novels. She’s a travel writer. She has a great Substack that I highly recommend. And she wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about a situation that she encountered out in far west Texas, when she was out there writing a story for a local magazine.

And it’s something how Trump’s trying to ruin everything. You know, that’s just seems to be his purpose in life. And I thought that this is a good week to have her on, because I feel like this horrible thing that Trump is doing is maybe a good distraction from the other horrible things that Trump is doing. We had a great chat, and she’s gonna come up in a minute.

I just wanted to announce yet again that my book is out. It is called Another Wonderful Secret: Infrequently Asked Questions about Jeffrey Epstein, based on my series. And it lends itself very well to book form. So if you want to support what I’m doing, please go get a copy. And I think it’s a good read—I really do. I’m not even saying it because it’s mine and I want people to get it. I think it actually is helpful and you’ll plow right through it, is what I think.

There’s a show tonight, The Five 8, at eight PM Eastern time. I will be there with Stephanie Koff, so tune in for that. She is better, she’s gonna be back on the show this week.

And that’s all I have up front. So without further ado, we’ll be right back with Diana Spechler.

GREG OLEAR [GO]
Diana Spechler, welcome back to Prevail.

DIANA SPECHLER [DS]
I love being here. Thank you for having me.

GO
No, thanks for coming on. You wrote a couple weeks ago a piece on your Substack, which is called Dispatches from the Road. And as you know, it’s one of my favorite Substacks to read. And everybody listening to this should go subscribe to it if they’re not already subscribed to it. And you wrote a piece called “Who Cares.” Which is you know, it’s a it’s a it’s a double entendre kind of title, I guess. You know, Who Cares? Who Cares?

DS
And a rhetorical question.

GO
Who cares? So we’re gonna get into that, because this is about Texas and Trump’s almost single-minded mission to destroy and ruin every single last thing that’s good about the country. It’s almost impressive, how he’s ruined everything.

This week he ruined the New York Giants football season before it even started. He’s threatening to ruin the Knicks playoff run. Little things and big. Those are little things. The global economy would be, you know, kind of a big thing. But before we get into all that, I want to ask you a question, and I know I shouldn’t lead with something so difficult to articulate and hard for you to answer, because I don’t want to put you on the spot.

How are you?

DS
Actually really good. Yeah. Yeah, I’m doing great. How are you?

GO
Okay. Good. I’m—I’m better now that I hear that you’re good. Well, you just returned from being abroad. That’s why. That’s the secret, right?

DS
Yeah. I was working in Ireland. It’s always nice to get out of here, for sure. You gotta leave here to live here.

GO
Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

DS
I didn’t make it up.

GO
You’ve been all over the place and you travel quite a bit. So is the attitude different towards Americans now than it was last time you were in Europe? What do you think?

DS
This is such an interesting topic to me. I’ve heard a lot of people expressing fear about traveling abroad. I think there’s always been this anxiety among Americans—sewing the Canadian flag patch on their backpacks and all that. That’s been going on for decades, right? There’s always been the anxiety, but I’ve always felt it’s misplaced. And it continues to be.

People are very curious. They want to know what’s going on. They want to talk about it because, of course, everyone’s following our politics. People want to talk about it, and they want to ask questions. But mostly they want to tell me their opinion—or tell us their opinions about it.

But I have never been mistreated for being American. And I think we should probably be more mistreated than we are. But I don’t I don’t think it’s happening. I think everybody is is a little more sane than we’re giving them credit for.

GO
That’s good to hear. And that that also gels with my own experience, where people usually—they just feel bad for me. They just feel bad. Or they’re like, “What the fuck is going on? Why is this happening? Like, why can’t you guys do anything about it?” And some of these people live in the UK, where there’s apparently an election, or maybe there’s not. Nobody’s ever been able to explain to me how the election thing works there. And Nigel Farage may well be the next prime minister and and he’s basically Trump with a British accent. but

DS
Yeah. And they’ve already had a couple of trumps.

GO
Yes, yes. But he’s—Farage is the Trumpiest Trump that there is.

But I’m glad to hear that you had good experiences in Europe. And now you live in Texas, which is not, you know, a hotbed of liberal democracy traditionally, although you live in a relatively blue part of Texas. So what’s it like in Texas? Has Texas changed?

DS
Has Texas changed? I mean, we’re excited about Talarico, so we see potential for change. But I wouldn’t say Texas has changed. But I really like being in Texas.

I should have given this caveat, for the question about traveling abroad. People always want to know where I’m from in the States. And when I say Texas, they make assumptions, and I have to very quickly disabuse them of their notions. So I am quick to explain, “Hey, I don’t support that guy.” So maybe I would be having different conversations if that weren’t the case.

But yeah, we’re hopeful in Texas right now. We’ll see what happens. We kind of always get our hopes up and and have them dashed.

GO
It seems like this is the most clear-cut good versus evil that there could possibly be. I mean, Paxton is horrible.

DS
Yeah. Paxton’s horrible. And if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen with Talarico, I think. But we just don’t know. And what were they saying before the election? Nauseously optimistic? I guess that’s how we’re feeling.

GO
Yeah. And after the election we were just nauseous.

And there’s something going on in far west Texas. It’s the Big Bend area, which if you look at Texas, you know, and like its arms are outstretched, it’s like somebody’s muscles are sagging on the right arm, if they’re facing you. That’s the part of Texas that we’re talking about, the saggy-arm part of Texas, right?

DS
Mm-hmm.

GO
You wrote your Substack piece and you also wrote an article for which magazine was it?

DS
Yeah, it was for a local magazine called D. And I’m working on another one for another publication now.

GO
Yeah. So you’ve been on this this story, which involves things called—and I’ll let you explain it, but it involves things called the Dark Skies Festival, Big Bend, and International Dark Sky Reserve, which is not a wine. It’s not a wine, so people shouldn’t get their their hopes up.

And in your piece you write this, and then I’ll turn it over to you to explain more. You write:

Last August, the Department of Homeland Security waived two dozen environmental laws, expediting the Administration’s border wall through Big Bend. That department has since awarded millions of dollars in wall contracts.

The opposition here has been fierce and bipartisan. Data doesn’t support the claim that a wall in this sector would decrease illegal immigration; a wall would, however, pose an existential threat. Not only would it likely strip the region of its Dark Sky status, effectively tanking the tourism industry, but it would disrupt ecosystems, kill animals en masse, destroy archaeological sites, and increase flood risks. Because it would go up on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, the wall would also, ironically, cede part of the United States to Mexico.

That kind of the nugget in your piece. So go into a little more detail and tell people what’s going on down there.

DS
So the Big Bend—the Greater Big Bend region—is the world’s largest Dark Sky Reserve. It’s the best place to see the stars. And the dark sky status is very hard to get. And this is the largest one in the world. It’s the only one that crosses a country line, because it extends into Mexico. And it’s the backbone of their tourism industry. It’s incredibly beautiful out there, despite the saggy-arm shape.

It’s Texas’s last wild place. It’s one of America’s last wild places. It’s just an amazing—I mean, you can’t imagine how beautiful it is. And and we’re not talking about just the national park. Big Bend is a national park, but this is the entire region we’re talking about.

What happened was, Kristi Noem, when she was still in play, she was the one who got all those federal laws waived. They weren’t actually all environmental laws. Some of them were financial transparency laws. It was a bunch of really shady stuff. And she waived them, which is, you know, being contested legally right now because it’s overreach.

GO
Good.

DS
But that’s what happened. And from there, things just started moving really quickly, and the plans for the wall were expedited.

In February, the story broke. There’s there’s a publication called Big Ben Sentinel that if anyone’s interested in this story, they should be following. There’s a journalist named Sam Karas, who is incredible. And she’s been breaking a lot of these stories.

But basically, there’s construction equipment in the Big Bend region. There are contractors, there are people approaching landowners, asking for access to their wells, asking for access to their land, et cetera. Like, it’s all starting. And meanwhile, there’s just been very little transparency from the Administration and from the Department of Homeland Security about what is going on.

There’s a map on the Custom and Border Protections website that everyone’s been following. So you can see their plans on that map. And it keeps changing, and nobody’s communicating about why these things keep changing.

For example, currently they’re saying, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to build a physical wall through the national park. We’re still going to build a physical wall through the region. But in the park, it’s just gonna be, I don’t know, drones and whatever.” But people are still seeing construction equipment in the park. And because there’s been so little transparency, nobody believes it. Not to mention, it’s great if they don’t build a wall in the park. Any little thing is good.

But it’s not fixing the problem. I mean, this is still going to cause irreparable damage to the land, to the tourism industry out there, to our country, to animal habitats, ecosystems, archaeological sites. And the Dark Sky status, which they’ve been working toward really since the 70s, is in the toilet.

GO
All of that tracks. Them not being transparent, tracks, them trying to build a wall, even though it’s really fucking stupid to build a wall, tracks. The construction equipment just means it’s some boondoggle, somebody’s making money on it, hand over fist. And if there’s no transparency, we’ll probably never know, because people are paying attention to other things being erected right now, such as the octagon on the South Lawn of the White House right next to the ruins of the East Wing.

But the construction crews just being there, that ruins stuff enough, just having them drive there and start blowing stuff up initially, right?

DS
Yeah, absolutely. I mean everything is damaging, everything is ugly. Nothing bodes well.

So every single time these people show up, there’s some kind of fight, some kind of resistance against it. But they just keep coming. And then I’m just starting to learn about this, so I won’t go into detail about it, but there’s some major corruption, it seems like, around who they’ve been awarding the contracts to.

GO
No way! Get right out of town. I don’t believe it. Say it ain’t so.

DS
Yeah. Surprise. Yeah. yeah. And these are, you know, multibillion dollar contracts.

GO
Sure. I mean the best-case scenario, it sounds like, if this is the usual Trump thing, is that they award the contracts, they bring in some trucks, and nothing ever happens, and people take the money and leave. Which in this case would be better than the alternative, which is that they build something no one wants, and ruin everything, and then also take the money and leave.

DS
What I didn’t mention, but which is the most striking part of the story, is that the opposition to the wall in this region has been bipartisan. Nobody wants it.

There’s no data to support the claim that it would help with illegal immigration. Illegal immigration in that sector is famously low, and I mean, for better or worse, since Trump came into office, the numbers have gone way down. Like they’re really okay in that region right now. They don’t need anything more.

But even the people who are generally on the side of MAGA are saying stuff like, “Well, why don’t we just get drones?” The data supports the idea that drones could help and a wall could not. I spoke to a sheriff for one of the stories that I did who was like, “You know, we have a natural border there, a natural barrier, because we have the the cliffs. And the the idea that people are coming from Mexico and scaling these natural walls is crazy.” And he’s like, “Why would you just put a man-made wall on top of that? Like, it doesn’t even make sense.”

And then the other argument has been something that we all know, which is that walls are made to be breached. You can get under, around, and through walls.

GO
Yeah. Yeah. All of those reasons.

DS
It’s really a vanity project. And it’s a gesture. It’s a symbol. There’s really no justification for it. And there’s certainly no justification for spending all this money on it. Billions and billions of dollars.

GO
No, this is what they do. It’s the same thing with the ICE stuff. It’s like all of this money is being spent to round up people who are for the most part lawful residents, and then put them in these horrible places. And then the economy suffers. So there’s less money coming into the coffers while they’re spending money on this thing that is illegal and harmful to everybody involved. It’s just so self-defeating. It’s like they’re putting a spike in their foot and repeatedly hammering it over and over and over.

I wouldn’t say shot in the foot. It’s like they, you know, they have a beebee gun and they just keep, you know, toe after toe after toe, firing away.

DS
The spike hammering is spot on.

GO
There’s obviously a bit of optimism that there’s this bipartisan agreement about this. And the other thing that of late that seems to have bipartisan agreement is that nobody wants these energy- and water-sucking data centers in their—you know, at all, actually, but certainly not in their yard where it’s just gonna disrupt everybody’s supply of water and make the energy costs skyrocket. Do you see anything like that? Not necessarily in in Big Bend, but anywhere in Texas. Is that going on in Dallas? What have you seen?

DS
I don’t know a ton about this, so I’m not the really the person to ask though I could definitely introduce you to someone who would who could. But in the panhandle of Texas, this has become a major problem. There’s a major drought there now because of these data centers. But I don’t know much about it. But yes, it’s a topic of conversation here for sure. These monstrosities.

GO
Yeah. And it’s not people following blindly, just because Trump says it’s okay. It’s just like, “Wait a minute, you know, my water now looks like muddy water and it used to not.” And nobody knows what these data centers are really actually for, or why we need them.

DS
I didn’t know that. Is that true? I didn’t know that. I I really haven’t looked into it much.

GO
It’s a real problem and it’s something that’s gonna start spiking because these rich guys just wanna build these things. They don’t care what anybody says. It just reminds me of the beginning of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the guy just sits in front of the bulldozer on his towel to make the construction stop. And you know, at the end of the day, people doing that would make the construction stop. It’ll be interesting to see how far along it it goes.

DS
Yeah.

GO
You were talking before we hit record about the border itself. You obviously went there when you were writing this piece and you’ve been in Mexico a lot, so you know what the border of the country looks like. And I think, as you pointed out to me before we hit record, it’s a place that there’s a lot of misconceptions about. So talk a little bit about that. Tell us: what what is the border like? How is it different from other parts of Texas or the United States? Is there a shared mentality between the border in Texas and the and the same one in Mexico. Explain it a little bit for people that have never been there, like me.

DS
I mean, I think all of you should come to Texas and see the border. What I would recommend—and I’m a travel writer, by the way, so here I’m going to talk to you from a travel writer perspective—is, go to El Paso. It is so cool. That was my first experience with the border.

Prior to COVID, I lived in Mexico for five years. So I was pretty familiar with what was happening on either side of the border. But my first real experience with the border was I did a story for the New York Times in 2020 or 2021. It was during COVID, about the these muralists in El Paso who are…I mean, the the walls in El Paso look like fine art. I mean it’s just absolutely incredible. And you know, it all it’s all from the Chicano muralist tradition, starting with Diego Rivera and all those guys, Orozco. These walls are absolutely amazing.

So I was out there doing that story, which was a great COVID story because I never had to be inside. And that was when I really saw what was going on on the border. And it’s just so interesting to me because I think the the national imagining of the border is like it’s this crime-ridden, cartel-infested war zone. I think they use that kind of language on the right when they’re talking about the border.

But it’s so beautiful. And the thing that I just loved about El Paso, having just lived in Mexico, was, it’s not Mexico, but it’s not really America, either. It’s own thing. It’s border culture. They speak Spanglish. The food is the best. There’s this really laid-back, kind of tropical vibe there. It is so cool. More importantly, you know, when I’m not speaking as a travel writer, there’s a thriving community there who are living and working and just being normal people. And I think it’s easy to forget that and good to put faces to the news stories.

So that’s El Paso. And then my other travel writing suggestion would be to go to the Big Bend—and go quick, because we might lose it. The thing that’s so cool about the Big Bend is the national park, of course, and the river—which I guess is going to be Mexican now. But also all the little towns out there, Terlingua, Alpine, Presidio, they’re just these adorable little towns that have this kind of like half-hippie, half cowboy feel.

Again, just people living their lives, but they’re very beautiful, scenic places. In Terlingua, it’s a former ghost town, and they’ve left the ruins up of this old mining town that used to be there. And you just can walk through it and see these abandoned, junked-out cars. And there’s the Terlingua Theater, where people go dancing, and it’s it’s just adorable. And there are great places to eat and great places to stay. And if you like recreation, you know, you can engage a fishing guide and go on the river, you can go hiking, you can go biking. There’s so much to do out there.

So that’s the scary border.

GO
It sounds scary, because I looked on the map and there’s places there called Lost Mine Peak, Twisted Shoe, and Robber’s Roost, which seems like maybe they’re, you know, letting you know that maybe there’s robbers roosting there and you should be careful.

DS
Who knows? There could be robbers roosting anywhere. Let’s be honest.

GO
The ghost town sounds like maybe that’ll be like season two of Widows Bay, if anybody’s watching Widow’s Bay, who’s watching this.

DS
I have not I’ve not even heard of Widows Bay.

GO
I know. It’s on Apple. It’s very good. But that’s neither here nor there. I wanted to ask about the sky thing, right? Because this is part of the International Dark Sky Reserve. So you have these towns there, and towns have light and you know, trucks have light and what how does it work? Do they measure it in terms of…is there some metric that it has to be? Like, how how how does one establish a place as part of this?

DS
There are metrics that you have to meet. So there’s this guy out there—do you know about the McDonald Observatory out there?

GO
I do not.

DS
There’s an astronomy center that’s one of the world’s leading astronomy centers. And so ever since the 70s, they’ve been trying to make this area dark for the astronomers. They have some of the biggest, most powerful telescopes in the world. Like the place is super cool. That was the start of all this—they were just like, “We need dark skies to do our work.” Since the 70s, local ordinances have been passed to darken the skies. And there’s a guy out there named Stephen Hummel—you should get him on your show—who is basically just tasked with making the region dark. And so he, for example, approaches oil and gas facilities and says, like, “Hey, I can help you bring your lighting bills down.” Because if you use amber lights instead of bright white lights and if you shade your lights and if you point your lights toward the ground instead of toward the sky, you will have lower bills. And it works. And so there’s a lot of community education, and also just approaching these places that typically use a lot of lighting.

But then there’s also another element of it, which is just the community is all on board with this. Everybody wants to help because it’s so cool. There’s a a cultural thing around having dark skies out there now. Residentially, people just want to be helpful and they do what they have to do to keep the skies dark.

Now, who has not been cooperative? Border control.

GO
No way.

DS
Shocking.

GO
Where they have like big like spotlights that they train at the border to see if there’s border people crossing the border? Like that kind of thing?

DS
Yeah, and they say like they don’t have to comply because they’re federal, etc. So yeah. They’re party poopers. But generally people want to comply, whether they’re businesses or just regular folk, and it the economy there a lot. So it’s another incentive, right? I mean, they’re dependent on those dark skies for tourism.

GO
It’s like Kurt Cobain said in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. So people should take that to heart. He knew what he was talking about.

DS
Actually that was something I learned when I was doing this story: the argument against darkness is, it’s not safe to have darkness. And from what I understand, that’s not actually true. Statistically that’s not true.

GO
I believe that. I mean, it seems like, you know, all these stores at night are all lit up and stuff like that. It almost like car alarms. Like when someone hears a car alarm, your first reaction is not, “My God, someone’s trying to steal the car.” Your first reaction is, “Fucking car alarm. Turn your car alarm off.” No one responds to a car alarm the way that it was probably originally intended. So I it makes sense to me that it would that it would be that way.

DS
Yeah, and I guess they just studied the statistics and most crimes are not committed under the cover of night.

GO
That makes sense too.

DS
They might happen at night, but, as we all know, a lot of crimes are committed inside.

GO
That all makes sense. And it makes sense that they’re twisting it and trying to turn it into fear mongering like they do, to get this boondoggle through like they do, and treat the locals badly like they do. Because this is what they do.

But it’s encouraging to hear that the opposition is bipartisan, and that there is some coming together about, you know, an issue like this. I think it’s it’s optimistic and I’m gonna be very curious to see what happens.

I really think Talarico’s gonna win—but I’m also very bad with predicting things like this. So maybe I should say the opposite! I don’t know. It’s not even that he’s so great, it’s that Paxton is so bad.

DS
Yeah. And that’s what that’s kind of what we’re all banking on.

GO
So what what else is coming down the pike for you? You gonna go anywhere interesting in the next couple weeks, or during the summer? What’s next in line for you?

DS
I will be teaching in Vienna this summer, so that’ll be fun.

GO
That’s nice, yeah. I just did a coin set about Vienna. I should send you some pfennigs from the thirteenth century, see if you can still spend them there.

DS
Yes! I’ll try.

GO
I’ve never been to Vienna. That’s a place that I would like to go. I’ve been to Prague, but never never there. Have you been there before?

DS
Yes, I’ve taught there before. I teach for an MFA program. If anyone out there in the audience is a writer and you’re looking to get an MFA, I highly recommend the one I teach for because it’s a low residency program. And instead of our residencies being on a college campus in the summer, like most low residencies are, we meet in Europe in a different literary city each summer. So we rotate among Vienna, Dublin, and Barcelona.

GO
Wow.

DS
And it’s called the Cedar Crest Pan European MFA. So if you want to look into it, you should and let me know.

GO
Yeah. Okay. We’ll we’ll we’ll put a link to it.

DS
It’s a college out of Pennsylvania, but they just do this MFA that’s international.

GO
That sounds great. I mean, you know, if you’re gonna do the thing, you might as well go have an experience, you know, with it as well.

DS
I don’t understand why anybody goes to another MFA program—at least another low residency MFA program. Because why would you not want to also travel? It’s so cool. And learn the literary history.

GO
I feel like every time I go to some city, especially in Europe, I always go into writer mode right away. I’m like, this could be the setting of a thing. There’s this American guy and he’s in fill-in-the-blank city—Barcelona’s good; I was there—and something will happen. Yeah. Stranger in a strange land, you know, all that kind of stuff. That’s the backbone of every thriller, some crazy thing happening.

DS
You make yourself the main character.

GO
Always.

Well that that sounds fantastic. So okay, so again, your substack is called Dispatches from the Road and people should go subscribe to it. And people should just go…maybe I’ll do get an MFA in Vienna. Sounds fun to me. Or maybe I’ll just go to a city in Europe and hang out for a month. I don’t know. That would work too.

DS
Yeah, just meet us.

GO
Any other closing thoughts? I feel like you you seem like you’re pretty optimistic and I’m gonna take that to the bank. Beause when I look into the news this week, I have not been made optimistic. I’ve been made infuriated, which I know they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make us infuriated. But nonetheless it has succeeded with them where they’ve made me infuriated.

DS
I don’t know that I’m optimistic. My optimism depends entirely on my menstrual cycle.

I don’t know that I’m actually optimistic objectively. Like, am I losing sleep over this like the rest of us? Yes. Absolutely. Yes. It’s all very scary and disturbing. And I think we’re all collectively grieving.

GO
Yeah. Yeah.

DS
But there are little glimmers of hope that I cling to, like polling.

GO
Yeah. Polling, yep. Yep. So again: Dispatches From the Road. Diana Spechler, thanks for coming on today. It’s always great to see you.

DS
I love coming on. Any time.

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TONIGHT!

And the new book:

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Dude—didn’t you already write five of these Q&A pieces?

Yes.

And aren’t they available at PREVAIL, free of charge?

Also yes.

Then when on earth would anyone want this in book form?

Well, for one thing, the series is long. Too long to comfortably read on a phone or a laptop. Like, when I copy-pasted the five parts into a single document, it ran to 34,000 words.

That means nothing to me.

Dirty Rubles is 26,000 words. Rough Beast is 43,000 words—about the same length as On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, the Pope’s new Encyclical. The Great Gatsby is something like 47,000 words.

Those are short books.

Yes. Short books—but very long Substack posts.

In 2024 and again in 2025, I’ve put out a short book based on pieces I’d written during the previous year. It makes the work seem less ephemeral. Sturdier.

But I must say, Another Wonderful Secret lends itself particularly well to this format.

Of course you would say that. You want people to buy it.

That’s true. I do indeed. Daddy needs some brand-new spats!

But objectively, it really does. When it’s laid out that way, you just plow right through it.

I could just print out all five of your posts on three-hole-punched paper and put it in a three-ring binder, and read it that way. What do you think about that, smart guy?

For sure, you could. But it’s more cost effective, and certainly less work, to just buy the book. The book also looks way nicer and feels better in your hands. Three-ring binders are aesthetically on par with DMV lobbies, the pile of broken shopping carts near the dumpsters behind your local supermarket, and Trump’s Presidential “Library.”

Also, it’s not exactly the same as the online series. I took out some stuff, put in other stuff, moved stuff around a bit, wrote a few introduction, and compiled a few pages of endnotes.

I’m not convinced. Any other reasons?

Honestly, I’m low-key afraid there’s going to be an electro-magnetic blip and all the digital files on earth will vanish. And I’m actively afraid the fascist oligarchs who own all the media will suck everything up into their data centers, put up a wall, and cut us off from the internet entirely.

Books are made of paper, and are flammable, true—but in certain ways, they are a lot harder to destroy.

Why did you call it Another Wonderful Secret? You didn’t use that title for any of the pieces.

“Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein” is the subtitle of all five of the pieces. The actual title of each piece is derived from a quote—something someone else said or wrote about Epstein.

For example, Chapter Three is titled “As If In a Labyrinth.” That comes from a quote I found in a magazine article. The molecular biologist Richard Axel said it, talking about Epstein’s alleged genius: “He has enough information after fifteen minutes so that you can see his mind thrashing about, as if in a labyrinth.” I thought that was a ridiculous thing to say, and I wanted to highlight it. Also, labyrinth is a cool word that neatly conveys the byzantine aspect of Epstein’s network.

The title of the book, of course, comes from something Donald Trump wrote in Epstein’s Birthday Book: “May every day be another wonderful secret.”

What’s the deal with the cover?

I really didn’t want to have Epstein’s horrible face on the front. Just like I seldom use a photo of Donald for the PREVAIL pieces. I’m sick of looking at them. Even though it’s probably better for marketing purposes.

The cover image is one of the scanned documents in the Epstein Files. I believe it’s titles of various video cassettes. The “LSJ” stands for “Little St. James,” which is Epstein’s island.

The black is not a Photoshop paint-bucket black. It’s from the FBI’s scan, so it has some texture to it. I thought that looked cool.

What is the purpose of the book?

As I write in the introduction, it’s to paint as complete a portrait as possible of Jeffrey Epstein as I understand him, based on my years of research.

Dirty Rubles is a short introduction to Trump/Russia. The idea was, someone who wasn’t paying attention to the news could sit down with my book, read the whole thing in one sitting during a rainy afternoon, and walk away with a better understanding of what Donald still calls, incorrectly, a “hoax.”

Another Wonderful Secret is the same general idea. Someone who hasn’t been following the Epstein story can read the book one rainy afternoon, and walk away with a better understanding of the many, many facets of the Jeffrey Epstein story.

Is there a lot in there about the survivors?

Not really. Not because they’re not important—they very much are—or that their stories don’t deserve to be heard—they very much do. But there are writers better equipped to tell those stories, and they’ve been telling them more completely than I ever could.

With that said, you can’t write about Jeffrey Epstein and not talk about the monstrousness of the child sex trafficking, so I do discuss it. But my focus is more on his money, his intelligence ties, and his network. I try to delve into what gets under-reported.

Have you discussed this book anywhere?

I have! Matt Robison was kind enough to have me on his show yesterday afternoon, and we spent a good hour talking about my take on Epstein. Here is a clip:

You can watch the whole thing here:

Your publisher is Four Sticks Press.

Correct.

Isn’t that your company?

Also correct. Named for the Led Zeppelin song, which is itself a reference to the Four of Wands tarot—the card of celebration. Here’s the logo:

Why did you do that? Couldn’t you get a book deal?

I’m capable of having a major publishing house put out one of my books. Remember, HarperCollins published my first two novels.

The thing is—and I think this is one of the big challenges with long-form journalism—it takes months and months to put out a book with a traditional publisher. By the time it drops, more often than not, it’s too late to do much good.

The best, and funniest, example of that is Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson publishing their book about Joe Biden’s alleged senility after he’d already left office. But this happens a lot. Bob Woodward’s done it. Maggie Haberman. We all get mad—and rightly so—but that’s how the system works.

Traditional book publishers are wonderful in many ways. A good editor, for example, is worth her weight in gold. There are some amazing publicists I know who pitch me new books for my podcast. But all of that stuff takes time. Publishing operates on a nineteenth-century model. Still.

These days, the news moves too fast to wait around. Publishers have to be more nimble. They have to strike quickly. Through Four Sticks Press, I am able to do that. Like, I literally decided to put this book together two weeks ago. If I went with a traditional publisher, we’d still be dickering over the contract terms.

What’s the drawback to that?

I mean, I have to do everything myself, more or less. It’s a lot of work on the front end. Layout, cover design, proofreading, fact-checking. Stressing about things not coming out right. Publicity (which I suck at).

I have a ready-made distributor, because of Amazon—but the flip side of that is, I have to use Amazon. Booksellers can stock the book, via a company called Ingram Spark. But they probably won’t know about the book, so the chances of you seeing this at your local bookstore—to say nothing of in an airport bookstore, or at Target—are slim.

So how can we help?

You could buy a copy—or buy your own and send one to a friend. If you’re a free subscriber and want to support my work without commitment, it’s an ideal way.

You can help get the word out. Telling your local indie bookstore that it exists, and ordering a copy that way. Reviews on Amazon and elsewhere are always helpful.

Or just, you know, share this.

Thanks, as always, for your support!

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You know, the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino. I don’t like it, conceptually, but it is what it is.
—Donald Trump, April 24, 2026

All we have to do now is take these lies and make them true somehow.
—George Michael, “Freedom! 90”

Know when to walk away. Know when to run.
—Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler”

I. Freedom! 250

Sunday, June 14, 2026 is Flag Day and, more importantly for our purposes, Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. On that day, ostensibly to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, will hold a mixed martial arts extravaganza on the South Lawn of the White House, not far from the ruins of the East Wing. The event is being promoted as “The Most Historic Sporting Event of All Time,” which it most assuredly is not; the hyperbolic copy sounds suspiciously like something the Birthday Boy came up with himself.

UFC Freedom 250 features the two things (other than golf and sexual assault) that Trump loves most: 1) bloodsport and 2) sweaty, handsome, rugged men with big muscles.1 In Donald’s mind, he is a Roman emperor at the arena, presiding over a bevy of interchangeable gladiators—the ultimate arbiter of life and death for the vanquished, Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant and all that. In actuality, this is Trump’s twist on Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to JFK.

Trump first floated the idea at the Iowa State Fair last July. “Does anybody watch UFC?” he mused. “The great Dana White.”

Context clues would suggest that Dana White is one of the legends of the sport. Not so! Dana White is the guy who looks like a hybrid of Joe Rogan, Hank from Breaking Bad, Daddy Warbucks, and a baby manatee. He’s not the Patrick Mahomes or the LeBron James of MMA. He’s not even an athlete. He’s a businessman—the CEO of UFC. Saying “Does anybody watch UFC? The great Dana White” is like saying, “Did anybody see Pulp Fiction? The great Harvey Weinstein.”

Needless to say, Dana White is a big Trump supporter.

“We’re going to have a UFC fight on the grounds of the White House,” Trump continued. “We have a lot of land there. Dana’s going to do it. Dana’s great, one of a kind. We’re going to have a UFC fight, a championship fight, like full fight, 20, 25 thousand people and we’re going to do that as part of [Freedom] 250 also.”

About “250 also.” In the two headliners, a Brazilian national and a Georgian national will attempt to kick the shit out of each other. Then, a Frenchmen will attempt to kick the shit out of a white dude from Arizona. Other bouts include a Canadian, an Englishman, and another Brazilian. This would be a fitting homage to the diversity of the American people, if the regime that commissioned the event wasn’t run by a xenophobic white supremacist currently building concentration camps to detain immigrants—and also if more than one Black man was involved. (Dana is not the only thing about the UFC that’s White.)

Having spent one malarial summer in the nation’s capital, I can confidently predict that it will be hot and jungles-of-Vietnam humid on June 14th. There will also be, White tells us, an army of gnats annoying the shit out of the fighters and the spectators both.

So, come on down to MAGApalooza! White Nationalist Woodstock! Burning Manchild!

There will be blood! And sweat! And lib’rul tears!

There’s a lot of land there!

Seriously, though: even after all the crazy of the last 16 months—and there’s been a record high of crazy—I still can’t quite believe that this is actually happening.

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II. Say It Ain’t So, Joe

In 1919, the Chicago White Sox—the baseball team Pope Leo XIV would one day root for—threw the World Series. Arnold Rothstein, the first mob boss to really organize crime, paid eight members of the team, including, famously, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, to intentionally lose to the Cincinnati Reds, who were big underdogs. And lose they did, in eight games.

Seven of the eight players pocketed five thousand dollars. Chick Gandil, the mastermind of the scandal, banked $35k. In their defense: they needed the cash. The owner of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey, was a notorious skinflint. His players were underpaid, and, because they had not yet formed a union, depended on the munificence of ownership for a fair wage.

When the scheme was discovered, the “Black Sox” were indicted on nine counts of conspiracy to defraud. They wound up being acquitted on all charges—but they weren’t off the hook. The scandal compelled the AL and NL team owners to appoint a Commissioner of Major League Baseball: a hard-ass jurist named Kennesaw Mountain Landis. He promptly suspended all eight players for life.

Lesson learned, right?

Other betting scandals have flared up in the decades that followed: In 1951, some University of Kentucky college basketball players, including Ralph Beard and Alex Groza, were convicted in a point-shaving scandal. NFL stars Paul Hornung, of the Green Bay Packers, and Alex Karras, of the Detroit Lions, were suspended for the 1964 season for betting on games. In 1978, Rick Kuhn of Boston College hooked up with Henry Hill—yes, that Henry Hill—in a crooked plan to shave points. NBA referee Tim Donaghy was busted betting on games in which he officiated, in 2006. And, most notoriously, Pete Rose was banned for life by Major League Baseball for wagering on games involving his own team, the Cincinnati Reds.

These instances were few and far between. Point-shaving scandals generally involved college athletes, who, as “amateurs,” were not paid for their participation in sports; professional athletes generally make enough money that there is little financial incentive to throw games. Plus, until 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, sports betting was technically illegal almost everywhere in the country. Anyone who wished to wager on games had to either fly to Vegas or place bets illegally through bookies, which dissuaded most people, and certainly most pro athletes, from bothering.

Since 2018, and in the last few years especially, sports gambling is ubiquitous. Not only is it legal to gamble on sports in most states; not only is it easy to gamble on sports because anybody who has a phone can do so; but it is impossible to even watch sporting events without being constantly encouraged to do so. Every third ad is for some sports book, in which celebrities—former athletes, popular actors, beloved comics—try and make sports gambling seem so cool, like winning some prop bet is better than sex. Those same companies—Fan Duel, Draft Kings, BetMGM, etc.—sponsor segments of the actual broadcast. The studio hosts all give their best bets: How many points will Brunson score tonight? How many blocked shots will Wemby have? Who will win, and by how much? What parlays are best?

What used to be illegal has been not only decriminalized but normalized. And you can’t ignore it. It’s integrated into the product itself. Like, it’s illegal to run ads for hard liquor on certain networks during certain times, because they don’t want kids seeing the wanton debauchery that is retired athletes enjoying a vodka tonic. But sports books? Kids are exposed to this all the time—and they are forming the impression that wagering on games is normal and fun and the pastime of their favorite actors and ballplayers.

Sure, the ads all tell you to call 1-800-GAMBLER if you have a gambling problem. I’ve also seen PSAs where ex-football coach Steve Mariucci explains how it’s important to set limits on your wagers—to gamble responsibly. But that’s like trying to put out the Great Chicago Fire with a water pistol and some horse blankets.

In the last few years, dozens of players, from across the major sports leagues, have been suspended for online sports gambling. A fringe NBA player, Jontay Porter, was banned for life for “disclosing confidential information to sports bettors, limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes, and betting on NBA games.” Another active player, Terry Rozier, and a coach, Chauncey Billups, were indicted on charges related to sports gambling.

There are ripple effects and unintended consequences. Gamblers place “prop bets”—wagers that certain players will, say, score more than 19.5 points, or grab more than 7.5 rebounds. When they lose these bets, which they invariably do, some gamblers get angry, and direct their venom at the players—both on social media and in person. It’s a real problem that will, one of these days, end up with someone getting killed.

A century ago, Kennesaw Mountain Landis erected a wall between pro sports and sports gambling. That wall is crumbling.

Another Black Sox moment seems inevitable.

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III. The New Opium

America’s torrid love affair with gambling is not limited to sports betting.

Time was, to hit a casino, you had to go to either Las Vegas or Atlantic City or take a cruise into international waters. There was nowhere else. Slowly but steadily this changed. There’s casinos everywhere now. On boats in the Ozarks. In cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore. On Indian reservations, of course. While some are high-end establishments, most U.S. casinos are depressing places. I walked through one in Niagara Falls once—just a sad, lonely, charmless hall with roulette wheels, slot machines, old carpeting, and the potent reek of some brand of cigarettes popular half a century ago. When people say they’ve hit “rock bottom,” this is what they mean.

Gambling is an addiction. A serious addiction. And the United States has sort of collectively decided to be like, “Fuck it. Let’s bleed these degenerate fuckers.”

Worse, we’re having the addiction forced upon us. It’s hard to resist. And it’s hard to resist by design.

There’s a historical precedent for this. At the beginning of the 19th century—during the reign of George III, without whose alleged tyrannical acts Freedom 250 would not be taking place—Britain ran into a problem. The British were hooked on tea. Tea came from China. And the Chinese, who already had a large trading surplus, were reluctant to trade more with Britain, because the Brits had nothing of interest to offer in return. So the British East India Company—the most powerful corporation, by far, that ever existed; Amazon is mighty, sure, but it doesn’t enjoy the legal right to put U.S. residents to death (at least, not yet)—hatched one of the most diabolical plots ever conceived. The EIC, which governed the whole of India, began cultivating opium in Bengal, smuggled it into China, and got the Chinese addicted to opium.

They created a market that was fueled exclusively by addiction.

(It wasn’t just the British who did this. A few enterprising Americans were also involved, most notably a chap named Warren Delano, Jr., who made a vast fortune in the opium trade. Delano, as you may have surmised, was FDR’s maternal grandfather.)

The Qing emperors did not like this. Opium was declared illegal by imperial decree in 1799, 1814, and 1831. Chinese customs agents worked like sixty to stop the contraband from entering the country—but those efforts were about as successful as the current U.S. attempts to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the similarly sprawling country.

The demand for opium was overwhelming. Smuggling was a lucrative enterprise. To many cutthroat businessmen, the risk was well worth the reward.

The imperial enforcement of the opium ban led to not one but two wars between China and Great Britain—the Opium Wars; the first War on Drugs—that ended when the Chinese were forced to capitulate and end the prohibition on the drug.

Here we go again. The sports betting companies are the East India Company, the U.S. is China, and gambling is the new opium. Only, there were no wars fought over this. We just skipped right to the part where the emperor made it legal.

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IV. The Wealthy, the Rich…and the UFC Fighters

Chris Rock once had a bit about the difference between rich and wealthy. “Shaq,” he said, referencing then-current NBA All-Star Shaquille O’Neal, “is rich. The guy who signs his checks? He’s wealthy.”

Pro athletes today may not be what Chris Rock considers wealthy, but most of them are certainly what most Americans would consider rich. Consider: the real median individual income in the United States last year was $45,140. At that rate, it would take the average worker 22 years to earn a million dollars.

Here is what the top ten hockey players in the NHL will earn from their signing bonus—that is, money that is guaranteed in their current multi-year contracts. All figures are courtesy of Spotrac:

The contracts of NFL players can be voided year to year without penalty, so the top players demand that their teams guarantee at least some of the compensation. Here are the 10 highest contract guarantees in pro football:

What this means is that, as long as the player doesn’t retire or restructure the deal, he gets the whole bag. Deshaun Watson will collect all $230 million—not counting what he had to pay the 26 massage therapists who sued him for sexual assault.

NBA players do enjoy guaranteed contracts, and make even more than their NFL cohort. Here are the largest current pro basketball deals:

These totals, I should make clear, are just for the current deals. At the start of their pro careers, all of those players were signed to “rookie contracts,” which range from $2.7 million to $13.8 million a year. And unless there is serious injury, most top players will sign at least one more deal a few years down the line, adding even more multi-millions to the lifetime earnings.

Major League Baseball has no hard salary cap. Here are the top ten MLB deals. Again, these totals are just the value of the current contract:

The combined deals for the top three baseball players approaches two billion dollars!

The UFC, by contrast, is notoriously chintzy—so much so that in 2014, a class action lawsuit, Cung Le, et al. v. Zuffa, LLC d/b/a Ultimate Fighting Championship and UFC, was filed against the company, alleging “that the UFC used anticompetitive conduct to establish and maintain its dominance in the Elite Professional MMA services which resulted in injury to members of the Class by artificially suppressing their bout pay.” After years of litigation, a settlement was finally agreed to in March 2025, in the amount of $375 million. The UFC admitted no guilt, true. But $375 million is a lot of money.

The point is, UFC athletes are poorly compensated. The lifetime earnings of even the most successful fighters are dwarfed by their counterparts in the other major sports. Here is a list of the total career earnings for the ten richest UFC fighters:

The lifetime earnings of the second-highest-paid UFC fighter of all time is $33.8 million—generational wealth for you and me, but about what Mikal Bridges, the fourth-best player on the New York Knicks and, per The Ringer Top 100, the 65th best player in the Association, made this year.2 Fifty-two NBA players made more than Bridges. In one season!

Now, to be fair, the UFC has fewer events each year than the NHL, MBA, NFL, and MLB, so there’s less revenue. Plus, mixed martial arts is an individual, and not a team, sport. As the CFO of Endeavor, UFC’s parent company, recently remarked, “We agree there has been a lot of comparisons drawn to team sports such as the NFL and NBA, and we actually don’t think that is the right comparison to the UFC. We think the right comparison is to other individual sports, such as the PGA tour…”

Okay, fine, let’s compare it to golf. Here are your ten golfers with the highest lifetime earnings:

Next to the titans of the fairway, the lifetime earnings of UFC fighters are a rounding error. And since golf doesn’t involve beating the crap out of anything but a little white ball, the Tiger Woodses and Rory McIlroys can continue competing—and earning—for decades.

A better comp for the modern UFC fighter is the ancient Roman gladiator: a few big-name draws made a nice living—and everybody else was paid as little as possible until they either couldn’t physically compete any longer or died in the arena.

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V. Fighters of the World, Unite!

The pay structure of the UFC is about as top-heavy as the income inequality in the United States. The half-dozen most popular and best fighters make the lion’s share of the money. A Gold BJJ report in 2022 found that the

average UFC fighter makes $150,249.

But, this is heavily skewed by outliers. Some of the organizations biggest stars got paid far more than this, bringing the average up by quite a bit. The median UFC fighters makes just $91,250.

A more recent op-ed in the Quinnipiac Chronicle reported an even lower figure, citing a 2024 study:

The median annual salary for UFC athletes is $51,370; however, many fighters earn less. Of all fighters, 43% made less than $45,000 in median yearly earnings, according to a 2024 Gitnux Market Research study.

But wait—it gets worse.

The athletes don’t get to keep all of what they earn. Because UFC fighters are, legally, independent contractors, they are not eligible for health insurance, retirement benefits, paid time off, or disability. They have to cover their own travel and accommodations. They have to hire their own trainers. And the income is taxed heavily, especially when a fight takes places outside the U.S.

A fighter named John Makdessi, who was let go by the UFC after 20 bouts, posted his pay stub on social media. His take-home pay for a fight in Australia was a paltry $28,461.65.

You don’t have to be Samuel Gompers to figure out how the UFC gets away with this. “The reason this number is so low is because there isn’t a UFC fighters union to negotiate a fair collective bargaining agreement,” explains the Quinnipiac Chronicle. “With no union, there’s no way to bargain with the executives.”

But wait—it gets worse.

The owners of the UFC share less of the company’s overall revenue with its athletes than any other major pro sport—by far. This is why Dana White, the CEO, is marketed as the face of the UFC. The idea is to keep the focus on the organization, not the individual athletes—who are ultimately disposable.

As SB Nation reported last year, in 2013, Lorenzo Fertitta, then the UFC’s Chairman, who once boasted that the UFC paid its athletes “not far off what the other sports leagues pay as a percentage of revenue,” commissioned

a study on athlete pay to see how UFC stacked up, hiring a global consulting firm, Mercer, to gather salary info from a variety of sporting leagues—including his own— to see whether the percentages were in line….

The result of one study, unsealed as part of the ongoing anti-trust lawsuit against the UFC, made clear this fact: they weren’t. UFC paid 18.6 percent of its total revenue to fighters, four times less than Major League Soccer, which at 76 percent topped the list of revenue share paid to athletes.

Small wonder that UFC fighters have been under investigation multiple times for alleged fight fixing. Dana White makes Charles Comiskey look like MacKenzie Scott.

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VI. Mr. Nick and The Cork

Speaking of the Fertitta family: Lorenzo and his older brother Frank III—Dana White’s pals whose MMA promotion company Zuffa acquired the UFC in 2001 for $2 million—have a background in gaming.3 They are the sons of Frank Fertitta, Jr., the late Las Vegas icon called in his obituary the “patriarch of Station Casinos”—although “godfather” might have been a more apt word.

The Fertitta clan—which also includes Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets, as well as the Golden Nugget casino and a slew of restaurant chains, including Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., Morton’s and McCormick & Schmick’s—has a shall-we-say colorful background. As Henry Abbott reported at True Hoop in 2020:

Not too long ago, someone who works in the NBA wondered aloud to me: “Why did the NBA let a fourth-generation member of a mafia family buy the Rockets?”

It seemed like a breathless secret, the kind of thing you could never put in print—not without interviewing FBI agents and the like.

But it turns out I was wrong. It’s not even a secret. While I did not encounter anyone who suggested Tilman Fertitta is in the mob presently, his family tree is a tangle of magazine articles, FBI busts, books, wiretaps, even a major Hollywood motion picture [Casino] about the old days of the mob.

Abbott offers a helpful collection of article clippings about the family, from a variety of sources:

By Steve Weigand, Sacramento Bee, June 9, 2003 (accessed on Newspapers.com) on Frank Fertitta, Jr.:

In 1976, Fertitta scraped together enough to buy a small casino off the Strip with a partner, Carl Thomas. The casino became known as the Bingo Palace and later Palace Station. Both Thomas and Fertitta had other jobs as well. When Thomas was made chief executive officer of four casinos owned by the Argent Corp., he brought Fertitta in to be general manager of one of them, the Fremont.

But Thomas also had other partners. They were Giuseppe Nicoli “Mr. Nick” Civella and Carl “The Cork” Civella, brothers and bosses of the La Cosa Nostra chapter in Kansas City. In the 1980s, federal prosecutors charged that Thomas, the Civellas and other conspired to “skim” money from the Argent casinos by taking it from the counting rooms before it was on the casinos’ books. …

One witness who had been fired by Fertitta, former Fremont security chief Harold McBride, testified Fertitta had been involved in the skimming. Fertitta’s name also surfaced in FBI wiretaps of conversations between the Civellas and Thomas.

And:

March 24, 1994 Louisville Courier-Journal (accessed via newspapers.com) about Frank Fertitta Jr.:

Frank Fertitta Jr., founder of the applicant, Station Casinos Inc., was implicated but never charged during a 1985 criminal trial in a mid-1970s conspiracy to siphon money to mobsters from casinos before it was recorded on the company’s books. A dozen reputed organized-crime figures in Chicago; Kansas City, Mo.; Milwaukee; and Cleveland were convicted in federal court in Kansas City. …

A key figure in the elder Fertitta’s past was Carl Wesley Thomas, a casino executive whom investigators credit with teaching the Mafia how to steal money from Las Vegas casinos. Thomas, a close friend and once business partner of Fertitta’s, was sentenced in 1983 for stealing from casinos. Until his death last year, Thomas was listed on Nevada’s “Black Book” of people banned for life from entering any casino in that state.

An AP story on July 11 1987 Reno Gazette-Journal notes Thomas “ratted” on some of the most fearsome mobsters on the planet, but wouldn’t testify about Frank Fertitta. Thomas appealed his appearance in the “Black Book,” through an attorney named Richard Wright.

Wright said Thomas refused to answer questions concerning Palace Station owner Frank Fertitta, a former business partner. Thomas, 54, was convicted in Kansas City of conspiring to skim $280,000 from the Tropicana Hotel in 1978-79. FBI wiretaps caught Thomas instructing the late Kansas City mob boss Carl Civella on how to skim money from the casino. Thomas was sentenced to 15 years in prison but the sentence was reduced to two years after he testified at a trial at which several Midwest mob bosses were convicted of skimming money from the Stardust.

To be clear, this does not mean that the Fertitta brothers are, or ever were, in the mob. I don’t mean to suggest that or imply it in any way. Capisce? Plenty of Italian-Americans have ancestors who were maybe connected in some shadowy way to the criminal underworld—myself included. It comes with the territory. Lorenzo and Frank III probably never even met Mr. Nick, to say nothing of Carl the Cork.

But the Fertittas are affiliated with an even more insidious criminal enterprise: the GOP. Frank Fertitta III has given almost $10 million to Republican candidates in Nevada. He donated a quarter million to Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign.

In 2016, when asked on CNBC about Trump’s frequent and incendiary anti-immigrant rants, Tilman Fertitta said, “I think that he spoke more rhetoric to fire up his base. But Donald Trump is a smart man and he is not going to just start deporting people. He doesn’t want to deport illegal people. I think he makes that clear when you read and really listen to his speeches and what he says.” Being dead wrong about that seems not to have bothered Tilman’s conscience; in 2025, Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Italy—a country not at all associated with organized crime, so don’t get any big ideas.

The Fertitta brothers are no longer involved with the UFC, having sold Zuffa to William Morris Endeavor for $4.025 billion in 2016.4 But it’s notable that, with ultimate fighting, there’s never even been a pretense of separating the sport from the gambling—at least in the ownership suite.

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VII. From Caesar’s Palace to…Caesar’s Palace

The confluence of elements involved with UFC Freedom 250 makes the mind reel: old Mafia families, immigrant labor, gambling conglomerates, violence, the ever-present specter of fight fixing, an imperial spectator’s box—not to mention an Old Testament-style plague of gnats. The event is a performative and cheesy display of American might, a brute force exhibition—the sporting analog to what Trump hoped to achieve militarily in Iran but could not.

Are you not entertained?

And hey—this is the event we deserve. On the eve of America’s quarter-millennium birthday, UFC Freedom 250 is a perfect symbol of what the USA has become: Rome in steep decline, beaten back by the Persians. There’s an old, fat, laughingstock emperor, presiding over American gladiators duking it out in an arena festooned with corporate logos; an orgy of violence and vice; a public circus crafted to appeal to the lowest common denominator and distract the rest of us—as the price of oil and wheat skyrockets, as the currency is further debased, as inflation cripples the economy, and as the royal family plunders what remains in the imperial coffers.

Plus, what better way to celebrate Donald’s big 8-0 than by stiffing workers, busting unions, extolling corporate greed, enriching his cronies, eroticizing bloodsport, making a mockery of a sacred place, and locking men in cages?

Ever since Trump’s announcement last year, I’ve had questions about UFC Freedom 250. Why are we doing this? Who is involved? How malevolent are they? Is The Most Historic Sporting Event of All Time actually The Nadir of American Civilization? And, most importantly: How is Trump going to cash in on it?

Certainly there will be ample opportunity to do so. The UFC doesn’t make nearly the money the NFL does on a yearly basis, but one big event, properly hyped, can generate as much revenue as the Super Bowl. As the betting analysis site WSN reports,

For Super Bowl LIII, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Fiat Chrysler Automotive were the top-spending parent companies and altogether the revenue from that event was estimated to be $450 million.

Super Bowl ad spending alone for in-game spots exceeded $382 million, which was the same as the previous season.

There really is no Super Bowl level fight in the UFC, but if you look at the McGregor vs. Mayweather fight that took place in 2017, it did come close at just under $600 million total revenue.

It’s safe to say this will be the most heavily promoted UFC event ever.

Now, is it possible that Trump won’t collect a dime from his big birthday bash—that he has no mechanism in place to skim off the top, or otherwise collect his tribute from UFC Freedom 250?

Sure.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.

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Dear Reader,

A war by any other name still creates casualties. Whatever euphemism Trump and Hegseth opt to call our military misadventure in Iran, U.S. service members have died as a result of their hubris and their bloodlust. Nothing can undo that.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. It is particularly important this year to remember the origin of that holiday and what we are commanded to do to honor it. As General Logan wrote 16 decades ago, “All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders.” That number now includes those who lost their lives in the Middle East since February 28th.

I wrote the piece below last year. I’m running it again today, with a few minor updates.

May Divine Providence—or God, or Fate, or luck, or whatever you wish to call it—protect our service members from the consequences of foolhardy decisions made by our seditious, criminal Commander-in-Chief and the drunk, imbecilic sexual predator who cravenly calls his Department, but not the hostilities in Iran that he initiated and egged on, war.

Southern Illinois, where John Alexander Logan was born on February 9, 1826, was known as “Egypt.” No one definitively knows why, but the SCRC Virtual Museum at Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library offers this Biblical detail:

“Egyptians” traced the origin to providing grain for northern Illinois after the horrible winter of 1831-1832. Northern Illinoisans (and the nation) connected it to the southern region’s “intellectual darkness” and pro-enslavement attitudes. Both explanations come from allusions to the Old Testament, the first from the story of Joseph and the second from the “darkness” which spread over the land in Exodus.

From this place of intellectual darkness, Logan initially emerged as what we would now call a white supremacist. His father was once a slaveholder. He was staunchly pro-slavery. He believed Black people were inferior, and wanted nothing to do with them. When he served in the Illinois legislature, as a Democrat (back when the Democrats were the racists), he introduced “Logan’s Black Law,” a bill that effectively prohibited freed Blacks from settling in “Egypt.” This is likely when he was bequeathed his nickname, “Black Jack.” He also moved to kill bills that would grant basic civil rights to Black people. “It was never intended that whites and blacks should stand in equal relation,” he said at the time.

Logan wasn’t just a racist—he was an active racist, using his privileged position to screw over African-Americans. After winning a Congressional seat in the midterm election of 1858, Logan went to Washington, where he served in the House of Representatives. He was a rock-ribbed Democrat, an adversary of the abolitionists—but also committed to the Union, and to compromise.

After Lincoln’s election in 1860, South Carolina bailed on the Union. As the Logan Museum explains:

To Logan’s dismay Abraham Lincoln, whom he detested as he did all abolitionists, won the Presidency. When Southern states began to secede he wrote an open letter to his constituents blaming “the President elect … drunken with victory” of pursing policies that would destroy the nation. His desire for compromise brought accusations of treason.

Although he sympathized with the enslavers, Logan did not go along with the Confederacy. He held the Union more dear. Instead, he joined the Army. He rose through the ranks, fighting bravely. He was wounded so badly on the battlefield that his wife heard that he had died. But Logan survived. He was a major general by 1863, and then, by the end of the war, Commander of the Army of the Tennessee.

And something else happened. In the crucible of the battlefield, Logan experienced his own “Road to Damascus” epiphany. Fighting side by side with Black soldiers, the author of “Logan’s Black Law” realized that his prejudice against people of color, an ugly vestige of his upbringing in hidebound “Egypt,” was ill-informed, ignorant, hateful, and wrong. He saw the light. And he wasn’t passive about it. He wound up befriending his former bugbear Abraham Lincoln—unthinkable in 1860. He switched parties, becoming a Radical Republican. And after the war ended, “Black Jack” Logan became a tireless advocate for the rights of Black Americans. The Southern Illinois University Library sums it up:

While serving during the Civil War, Logan experienced a change of heart and reversed his stance on Black people and enslavement. In 1865, Logan spoke in Louisville, Kentucky, in favor of ratifying the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which would abolish enslavement in the United States. Blaming the Civil War on enslavement, Logan asked how “any mortal man [could] desire to see such a cause of sorrow and suffering, injury and infamy, hypocrisy and hate” perpetuated in the United States, imploring them “to strike at once and deal [enslavement] a death blow” that liberty might be proclaimed “to the end of the earth”.

In 1866, Logan supported passage of the 14th amendment granting citizenship to blacks. At a gathering of Union veterans in Salem, Illinois, he remarked that the bravery of Black people during the Civil War had removed his prejudices and asserted that the 14th amendment would give them “the protection of the law”. He argued that “any Christian people” and any government should grant citizenship to all residents. However, as he had in Louisville, Kentucky, Logan promised that the 14th amendment would not give Black people the right to “enjoy the privilege of voting or holding office.” That same year he switched political parties, reentering politics as a Radical Republican and vigorously supporting equal rights for America’s formerly enslaved people.

By 1867, Logan was arguing for Black voting rights. In speeches across Ohio supporting Black suffrage, he challenged opponents to “give a reason why the Negro should not vote”, stating “I don’t care whether a man is black, red, blue, or white”, he has the right to choose the men who “control the Government”. The 15th amendment, which prohibits denying a citizen’s right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” was ratified in 1870.

Logan’s commitment to the cause was very real. No less an authority than Frederick Douglass was all-in on “Black Jack.” When Logan ran for Vice President in the election of 1884, Douglass wrote:

If there is any statesman on this continent, now in public life, to whose courage, justice and fidelity, I would more fully and unreservedly trust the cause of the colored people of this country, or the cause of any other people, I do not know him. Since [Charles] Sumner and [Oliver. P.] Morton, no man has been bolder and truer to the cause of the colored man and to the country, than has JOHN A. LOGAN. There is no nonsense about him. I endorse him to you with all my might, mind, and strength, and without a single shadow of doubt.

As I see it, Logan’s path from overt racist to champion of civil rights represents a hero’s journey. Here was a man, son of an enslaver, so set in his racist ways that he proposed legislation to expressly harm Black people. Then, by allowing his heart and his mind to be open, he saw the error of his ways, and spent the rest of his life on the righteous path, working to secure civil rights for Black people—as well as suffrage for women.

That is a model for how to live. What John Logan teaches us, ultimately, is that it’s never too late to change ourselves for the better. Indeed, it is our moral obligation to do so.

The Morris Library calls this transformation “a change of heart.” Now we might say that Logan got woke. He refused to allow his eyes to be closed to the “sorrow and suffering, injury and infamy, hypocrisy and hate” caused by slavery, and extended by racism.

This could not have been easy for him socially. No doubt he lost lifelong friends in the process. But Logan refused to look away. This is the kind of energy we need right now in our political leaders—and which is sorely lacking.

Logan’s most enduring legacy is the creation of Memorial Day—originally known as Decoration Day, which is what my grandmother, born in 1912, and her cohort used to call it. This year it falls on the 25th, the last Monday in May. But Memorial Day was originally observed on May 30th, no matter the day of the week. The reason why is the flowers. In late May, the flowers are at the fullest bloom, and it is “the choicest flowers of spring-time” that we are supposed to strew upon the graves of the soldiers who died in combat during the Civil War.

By 1868, Logan was the leader of a veterans organization of Union soldiers. He issued an order three years after Lee surrendered designating the penultimate day of May for the purpose of properly acknowledging our war dead. That’s how Memorial Day began—as a way to pay tribute to those who died saving the Union from the proto-Nazi enslavers, the MAGA antecedents, who formed the Confederacy. Here is Logan’s Order No. 11:

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, “of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion.” What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.

I wrote about this three years ago. In that piece, I focused on my own good fortune not to have had to go to war. Last year, reading the Order aloud on The Five 8, I found myself fighting back tears at this line in particular: Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

Why was I getting choked up? Because in that sentence, Logan is addressing us, here, right now. And we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided republic. We have become effete, soft. We have forgotten how to fight—and, even worse, what to fight for.

In an era when Black people were still enslaved, John Logan evolved as a person, allowing himself to become enlightened. Donald, on the other hand, an impressionable 18 in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act that his Supreme Court has practically undone, has not changed one bit in eight decades. He espouses the same hateful, racist worldview espoused by his bigoted old man. (Just because the Putin-fluffing traitor Mark Burnett hasn’t released the Apprentice footage of Trump saying the n-word on set doesn’t mean Trump didn’t say the n-word on set.) He is a failed human being.

Worst of all his many faults, Donald is a black hole of empathy, constitutionally incapable of understanding even the concept of sacrifice for the greater good. According to the bombshell Atlantic story by Jeffrey Goldberg—the same well-sourced journalist added to the Pete Hegseth Signal chat in which the Secretary of Defense disclosed top secret war plans—Trump stood by the grave of Gen. John Kelly’s son, who lost his life in Afghanistan, and remarked to his then-chief-of-staff, in a rare moment of candor: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

For once, Donald wasn’t lying. He really didn’t get it. He cannot not see the world transactionally, as a long series of “deals.”

When Trump made the “suckers and losers” comment—and he really did say that, despite his bullshit denial at the Biden debate that feckless company man Jake Tapper let him get away with—he was channeling his fellow mobster Sonny Corleone in Godfather II, who says, of soldiers and sailors, “They’re saps. They risked their lives for strangers.”

(The O.G. gangsters, incidentally, hated the Nazis.)

Back in 2023, writing on the Sunday before Memorial Day, I closed with this:

For me, it is an enormous privilege not to know firsthand the hell of war. It is a historical anomaly, a piece of good fortune—and it was made possible by those who died fighting the Confederates, the Fascists and Nazis, the Soviet Empire by proxy, and all the enemies of democracy. And it may not last. Peace is a fragile thing. That’s what I will think about today and tomorrow, as I look out upon all the pretty flowers.

Three years later, a year and four months into the Trump Redux, there is no more peace. There is no peace because we are at war—or whatever euphemism the boozed-up Secretary of War wants to call it—with Iran. And there is no peace because there is no justice; without the latter we cannot enjoy the former. Democracy requires active maintenance, especially when the forces seeking to destroy it have been given the power and the opportunity to do so. If this withers, we wind up doing things like blowing up girls’s schools in Iran.

Today I think of John Logan’s former nemesis turned friend, Abraham Lincoln, who gave a famous speech at Gettysburg, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, honoring the men who died there—the same fallen soldiers Logan would pay homage to five years later. It was beyond his power, Lincoln said in November 1863, to “dedicate—consecrate—hallow—this ground” because “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

He concluded:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Let us all, now, in this moment, highly resolve that those honored dead, in whose distant memory we have tomorrow off, shall not have died in vain. Let us refuse to allow Trump and his racist minions in Congress and on the Supreme Court to Make America “Egypt” Again. Let us not go quietly. Let us defend what is ours—and what is right.

Logan never forgot the cost of a free and undivided republic. We have. And now we are paying the price.

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ICYMI

With LB a late scratch due, Lisa Graves and I hosted The Five 8. Was great to catch up with her:

The Friday of Memorial Day weekend 2025 saw an emotional and powerful episode of The Five 8. Our guest was Martha Swan, executive director of John Brown Lives!

And I finally put links to all my various projects in one place:

(The softest of soft launches.)

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Photo credit: Yours Truly. A paper poppy given to me by a veteran raising money for the American Legion, surrounded by flowers in my backyard.

Good morning.

As we head into the long weekend, I thought I would share some of my favorite podcast episodes from 2024-25—plus the accompanying pieces. If you set these up as a playlist—see below—it’s almost a full day of content!

Note that I’m using the Spotify links here, but “PREVAIL with Greg Olear” is available on all podcast platforms. Here is the Apple link.

Thanks for listening and reading, and enjoy the weekend!

Christopher Steele

Stephanie Baker

Candace Rondeaux

Gareth Gore

Nicolo Majnoni

Katherine Stewart

Lisa Graves

David Daley

Tom Carter

Paul Starr

Jessica Cale

Amy Sohn

Manisha Sinha

Robbie Harris

Gal Suburban

Ronlyn Domingue

Francine Prose

Rosanna Arquette

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Photo credit: Thomas Lineweaver.

The outcome I’ve been railing against for weeks has come to pass—and it’s even worse than I thought. This is not mere plunder. It’s also blasphemy.

The preposterous $10 billion lawsuit Donald Trump and his failsons filed against the IRS has been settled. Acting Attorney General and Ghislaine Maxwell canoodler Todd Blanche took pen to paper and signed one of the most un-American documents this nation has ever produced.

I addressed this lawsuit in my morning ramble a month ago:

Here’s what I said:

And why am I enraged? Because the US taxpayer, i.e. me, i.e. you (if you’re watching this in the United States)—we’re going to cut Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, we’re going to cut them a big fat check. Now, it’s not going to be for $10 billion, which is what they’re asking for. It’ll probably be for tens of millions. It could even be hundreds of millions. That’s where we’re at.

Why would we be doing this? Why would the U.S. taxpayer just flat-out be coughing up that much money to these criminals? Well, in January of this year, 2026, Donald filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. So let me read it. This is Trump versus IRS. And the summary is written by Claire Pollard over at the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse:

On January 29, 2026, Plaintiffs, President Donald Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, filed this lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of Treasury. Plaintiffs sought at least $10 billion in damages as recompense after Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor, illegally accessed and disclosed their confidential tax returns and related information between May 2019 and September 2020. Plaintiffs claim that Defendants had a duty to safeguard and protect Plaintiffs’ confidential tax returns and related tax return information from such unauthorized inspection and public disclosure. See 26 U.S.C. § 6103, 5 U.S.C. § 552a. They seek punitive damages, attorney’s fees, and costs.

This case is ongoing.

So the template for this has already been established. Mike Flynn—who Mueller indicted, and who pled guilty, and who Trump pardoned before he could be sentenced—Mike Flynn sued the Department of Justice and was just paid $1.25 million for his troubles. Carter Page, whose name we haven’t heard in a while—he was a big character around the dossier, from 2016. Carter Page, just this week, was also paid $1.25 million, you know, just to help make him feel better.

It’s not enough in the Trump administration that we just hand out pardons to crooks. We also now have to pay them. You know, it’s like a business expense. Here you go, Mike Flynn. Here’s 1.25 mill. Don’t spend it all in one place.

So that’s the template. And it’s the template that Trump himself is trying to exploit with this ridiculous lawsuit. Now, Trump’s suing the IRS for not properly safeguarding information and data. It reminds me a little bit of Howard Lutnick suing American Airlines right after 9/11 for not being able to stop the hijackers. It’s just a dick move in general. It’s especially a dick move when you’re the president of the United States.

Even in my heated rage, I did not believe the “settlement” would be in the 10 figures. Nor did I foresee the fiendish means of resolution.

It’s worth breaking down the DOJ announcement line by line:

The U.S. Department of Justice [on May 18, 2026] announced that as a part of the settlement agreement in President Donald J. Trump v. Internal Revenue Service, the Attorney General established “The Anti-Weaponization Fund” to provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.

In the Orwellian cant of the Trump regime, “Anti-Weaponization” means “Weaponization.”

The plaintiffs in the case, President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, LLC, filed suit against the Treasury and IRS in Southern District of Florida federal court following the leak of their tax returns. Per the settlement, plaintiffs will receive a formal apology but no monetary payment or damages of any kind. They have agreed, in exchange for the creation of this fund, to drop their pending lawsuit with prejudice, and also withdraw two administrative claims including for damages resulting from the unlawful raid of Mar-a-Lago and the Russia-collusion hoax.

Here, the American people are implicitly instructed to get on our knees and humbly beg forgiveness for hurting Donald’s fee-fees. We’re also supposed to be moved by the munificence of Trump and his venal sons, who have so gallantly refused monetary damages that surely were owed to them. You will hear MAGA unironically extolling the Trump family’s generosity.

Oh, and the DOJ here sneakily decrees that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that seized the classified documents Trump stole and the many, many, many times the Trump campaign liaised with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign were, respectively, “unlawful” and a “hoax.”

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

“The use of government power to target individuals or entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, or ideological reasons should not be tolerated by any Administration,” said Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter.

The mendacious Todd Blanche opining that the “machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American” sounds to me like a veiled threat by Trump’s former (current?) defense attorney to weaponize the machinery of government against any American the President doesn’t like.

As for “Trent McCotter,” I’m pretty sure that’s an AI-generated name and that he doesn’t exist.1

The Fund will have the power to issue formal apologies and monetary relief owed to claimants. Submission of a claim is voluntary. There are no partisan requirements to file a claim. Any money left when the Fund ceases operations will revert to the Federal Government.

No partisan claims, eh? So Jim Comey and Tish James can submit claims? How about all the legal residents ICE carted off to parts unknown? Or the media outlets and independent journalists, like Jim Stewartson, that the buffoonish Kash Patel is currently suing?

The Fund will receive $1.776 billion and will come from the judgment fund, which is a perpetual appropriation allowing DOJ to settle and pay cases. On a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.

This is the part the news coverage, as usual, got wrong—as a gander at the headlines shows:

It’s not a 1.8 billion dollar slush fund for traitors. It’s a 1,776 billion dollar slush fund for traitors. The number is meaningful. And its use in this context is nothing short of blasphemy.

Honestly, I would have preferred if they used their favorite number, the one with the Nazi connotations that all the alt-right weirdos snicker at. At least $1,488 billion would have been more honest about who these hateful people are—and saved the American taxpayer $300 million.

At the Attorney General’s direction, the Fund can be audited. The Fund must take steps to protect private information and avoid fraud. The Fund shall cease processing claims no later than December 1, 2028.

Translation: The fund will never be audited. And the money will be long gone by the time a new president is elected.

There is legal precedent for such a Fund, most notably the “Keepseagle” case where the Obama Administration created a $760 million fund to redress various claims alleging racism against the federal government over a period of decades.

One has to marvel at the elite level of trolling here. This sentence 1) argues for the legality of this blatant plunder by 2) blaming Obama—and it also 3) equates the well-documented and ugly history of institutionalized racism by the federal government with some J6 asshole getting pinched for beating up a cop.

But it doesn’t stop there:

In Keepseagle, hundreds of millions of dollars remaining in the fund were distributed to non-profits and NGOs that never made claims, whereas any money remaining in The Anti-Weaponization Fund will revert to the federal government. The Obama DOJ settled by putting $680 million from the judgment fund into a bank account for a single claims administrator to dole out. In Keepseagle the remaining money—which ended up being over $300 million—was distributed to the entities that had not even submitted claims.

That’s the Trump DOJ implying that the Obama people did a bad job administering the Keepseagle funds. It also suggests that, by the grace of Donald Trump’s big heart, any money stolen from us that he hasn’t been able to dole out to his minions before the presidential election will be returned. This is like my kid handing me back the change for the $20 I gave him to spend on lunch. What a guy!

And just in case you think there’s some small chance Jim Comey or Tish James could claim some of this dough:

The Fund will consist of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership. The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.

The five Members will be Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Lara Trump.

Not really—I made that up. The actual Members will be Sean Hannity, Maye Musk, Herschel Walker, Jack Posobiec, and that rapper with the MAGA tattoo on his face.

Not really—I made that up. The actual Members will be AI bots programmed to think like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Albert Fall, Boss Tweed, and Meyer Lansky.

Not really—I made that up. The actual Members will be. . .

Okay, I’ll stop now. The point is, if we know anything about the Trump regime, we can safely predict that the Fund Members will wind up being, somehow, even worse.

There’s more fun stuff in the actual document—is this an executive order? a directive? a list for Santa?—Todd Blanche signed yesterday. Like this:

Within 60 days of the Effective Date, the United States shall provide the U.S. Department of the Treasury with all necessary forms and documentation to direct a payment of $1,776,000,000 to an account for the sole use by the Anti-Weaponization Fund (“Designated Account”). The corpus of the Anti-Weaponization Fund's funding does not represent the value of any claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims.

Blanche thinks we’re stupid enough to believe that “projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” is how they came up with the number $1,776 billion, and not, you know, the significance of that number in the history of the United States of America—which, incidentally, turns 250 in July.

And this:

The funds deposited into the Designated Account may be used to pay for per diems, administrative services, funds, facilities, staff, travel, ammunition, tickets to George Strait concerts, Kash Patel-branded whiskey, Pearl Harbor snorkeling adventures, alimony, bar tabs, strip club bills, refurbishment of planes gifted by Qatar, penile implant surgeries, “massages,” and other support services as may be necessary to carry out the mission of the Anti-Weaponization Fund. The Members of the Anti-Weaponization Fund shall serve as volunteers and gratuitous service providers, without any further compensation for their work on the Fund. They are allowed travel expenses, including per diem in lieu of subsistence, to the extent permitted by law.

Okay, I may have added some things to the list. Also: the Fund Members will “take no salary” in the same way that Donald Trump “takes no salary,” wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

I mean. . .

It’s like. . .

I can’t even.

Even for these brazen criminals, this is egregious.

Since Trump and Blanche and this “Trent McCotter” replicant seem so enamored of the number 1776, perhaps they should take a gander at the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, which patiently explained to the mad king—who surely also didn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation”—that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness,” and that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

We were at that point 250 years ago. And now?

Seems to me that the best way to celebrate the semiquincentennial is by declaring our independence from a cruel, greedy, stupid, feckless, brain-addled tyrant.

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Photo credit: The Declaration of Independence, drafted and signed July 4, 1776. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Daniel Blackwell/Released)