Back on June 21, the paper ran a column by Rob Henderson, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, under the headline, “The latest data on baby names reveals a progressive paradox.” A week later, the Post Opinions account put out a video version with Henderson delivering the argument to camera. That’s when it ended up on my radar. Here’s how it opens:

“The most progressive parents in the United States are giving their children the most traditional names. The latest baby name data from Washington, D.C., reads like a roll call of 19th-century senators and their wives. Lucy, Eleanor and Caroline for girls. Charles, John and George for boys. These are not the names you might expect from one of the most progressive cities in the country.”

Not the names you might expect? From whom, though? Based on what? Weirdly, the column never gives coherent answers to those questions.

The liberal in this column doesn’t exist, and neither does the belief she’s supposedly betraying

Henderson constructs a bit of a straw man, ascribing beliefs to liberals and progressives that they don’t actually hold… based on beliefs on related issues that they do hold? It’s weird.

“Upper-middle-class professionals often talk a big game about openness, inclusion and social experimentation. They tend to say that people should be free to invent themselves,” writes Henderson.

Okay?

“They are wary of old rules and outdated hierarchies. Baby name experts told NBC News that ridiculing an unusual name can reveal ‘uncomfortable classism.’ The unease suggests that even those who preach against the judgment know it is real,” he continues.1

Yes. And?

He goes on to highlight the fact that people with unique names often face social and professional penalties. I guess the point he’s trying to make here is that… if liberals don’t think someone should be discriminated against or mocked for having a strange name, they have an obligation to give their kids odd names? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Actually, strike that; it makes no sense at all.

Henderson’s (extremely questionable) framework is “luxury beliefs,” his own coinage, which he defines as ideas that “confer status on members of the upper class at little cost while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes.” (It’s similar to “virtue signaling” in how it gets used.) As it applies to names: rich progressives loudly insist that weird names are great, give their own kids something boring, and the poorer parents who took them at their word about how awesome odd names are get their kid’s resume thrown in the trash.

If this is hypocrisy, there needs to be someone actually doing this. Is there? Here is the closest the column comes to producing one:

“An educated professional in a blue city may say that all names are equally valid. Or she might go one step further and say that unconventional names should be celebrated. She might even go so far as to suggest that giving your child a traditional name is a sign of unoriginality or narrow-mindedness.”

“May.” “Might.” “Might even go so far as to.”

No name, quote, tweet, book, survey, or study. There’s not even an anecdote from a dinner party. This liberal is made out of a handful of hypotheticals and a guess about what people like her think and do. Henderson’s entire argument rests on this hypothetical woman’s shoulders.

It’s another entry into the category of “making up a guy to get mad at,” a favorite genre of mine. The formula never changes: Liberals claim to be fine with [weird but harmless thing]. And yet liberals do not personally do [weird but harmless thing]. Checkmate.

Yes! That’s how tolerance works.

Nobody holds the belief that “everyone should give their kids unusual names.” That’s a strawman that Henderson seems to have invented from whole cloth so that he can then accuse them of hypocrisy. Liberals’ actual position is that you shouldn’t hold a person’s name against them, which is about how you treat other people, not a set of instructions for filling out your own kid’s birth certificate. Thinking a kid named Nevaeh deserves the same callback as a kid named Charles does not obligate someone to name anyone Nevaeh. There’s no hypocrisy here.

And one of the reasons liberals hold that position, in case anyone wants to check, is that the discrimination in hiring is real and it’s been measured, especially when it comes to names coded as Black.

The belief is that employers shouldn’t be doing this, not that parents owe their kids something unusual. Henderson took a claim about how hiring managers behave, invented something that liberals supposedly believe (that kids should have unique names), saw that the most common names in a solidly liberal city were, well, common, and called it hypocrisy.

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A list of the 10 most popular names is always going to be a list of popular names

There’s a second problem, and it’s the kind that should have been caught by an editor.

Henderson’s evidence is a top-10 list. A top-10 list of baby names is, by definition, a list of names that lots of people picked. That’s how names get on the list. A name cannot chart unless thousands of strangers independently landed on the same one. You could not build a top-10 list out of unusual names if you tried. The unusual ones are unusual. That’s the whole deal.

So Henderson went and looked at the most popular names in Washington and found that they were... popular. Yeah, man! That’s how it works. You’re never going to see some wild, obscure name atop the list of popular baby names. Ever. And it doesn’t say something about society or whatever. It just says

One researcher he cites found close to the opposite of what he says they found

Henderson writes: “J. Eric Oliver, a political scientist, has studied naming patterns and found that educated mothers tend to favor common, conventional names.”

The paper he links is Oliver, Wood and Bass in Political Behavior. Here’s the sentence from the abstract (bolded emphasis mine):

“Although higher status mothers of all races favor more popular birth names, higher status, white liberal mothers more often choose uncommon, culturally obscure birth names.”

This marks the second time in his column where he cut off the back half of a sentence that contradicts his point. He used the first half of that sentence, sure. But the second half is the finding that high-status liberal mothers are the exception, which is to say the group his entire column is about, doing the thing he says they don’t do. It’s in the same sentence he took the first half from. Groan…

So what are we even doing here? What’s the point of this column?

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion section would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” It’s shifted hard to the right, leaning into “owning the libs.”

“Luxury beliefs” is a very good tool for this. Feed it anything and it hands back the same answer: the real problem is liberals and the left. Is it factual? Who cares! Checking the numbers underneath is somebody else’s job, and evidently nobody’s.

Once the replies started coming in, Henderson went back to promote the video anyway, with a note: “The very calm and very sane replies indicate that maybe I’m onto something.”

Sure. Once being wrong counts as evidence that you’re right, there’s nothing left in the world that could talk you out of it.

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At one point during his speech, Trump got around to Kaitlan Collins, who had just accepted the WHCA’s award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure from Wolf Blitzer, which she earned covering the Oval Office Zelensky blowup last year. Trump congratulated her, sort of: the award was fake, he told the room, and she shouldn’t have won it. She never smiles, he went on, and she really should, considering what a nice position she has over at CNN, which he reminded everyone is fake news. “So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.” (He ran the same routine on her in the Oval Office in February, mid-question about Epstein’s survivors.)

Then the bit. He’d heard Collins had landed a big sponsorship, except “it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.” Mulvaney, he claimed, cost Bud Light “$35 billion in market cap.” And he closed with a line about how he’d never want to give her a job.

On Sunday morning he posted a follow-up to his personal Truth Social account: an AI-edited image of Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body, lifted from the 2023 Bud Light video.

And look at what that image actually shows. A smiling woman in a black dress and gloves, holding a beer, a few more cans lined up on the table. That’s the entire picture. The insult is something the viewer has to supply.

Everybody supplied it. That’s what I keep coming back to. The bit bombed, sure. But nobody in that ballroom needed the joke explained, and nobody leaned over to ask what he meant. Neither did anyone who read about it the next morning. The joke has exactly one moving part, the assumption that being compared to a trans woman is a step down, and that assumption is so widely shared in 2026 that the president of the United States can build a punchline on it, on live television, without ever saying it out loud.

Then came the objections. They ran on the same assumption.

“Apologize to Kaitlan, specifically”

The most instructive objection came from Rahm Emanuel, 2028-curious and on CNN’s payroll as a contributor. Trump, he told the Washington Examiner, “should apologize to Kaitlan Collins specifically,” and to all the journalists he insults. Mulvaney’s name doesn’t come up. This is the same guy who gave Megyn Kelly a flat “Can a man become a woman? No,” then stood by it for months, and who told NPR “That’s not what I said” when asked whether that denies trans people exist. (He does.) (I’ve written about Rahm before.)

CNN stood behind its anchor, calling her “an exceptional, trusted journalist.” Every word of it earned. But every word of it about Collins.

To be clear: Collins deserved defending. What Trump does to her (trashing her work, grading her face, ordering her to smile) is its own familiar ugliness, and I’m glad people pushed back. But I’m a little saddened by how few people seemed to realize that Mulvaney was being insulted here (repeatedly), too.

Her little musicals

On Sunday evening, Mulvaney posted a four-minute video to TikTok and Instagram. I’m going to give you the whole thing, because it deserves to be read whole.

Hi, is this a good time? Well, it’s definitely an interesting time, because my name is Dylan Mulvaney, and the president of the United States said my name in his speech four times on Friday night. I couldn’t respond right away, because yesterday I had tickets to see Meg Stalter in Oh, Mary!, but now I think I’d like to say a little something.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on her award and tell her that I’m incredibly honored to be compared to her in any way. And I hope that she keeps doing all the great work.

Now, the president also brought up a video I did over three years ago. And mind you, I’ve been kind of flying under the radar, keeping up a pretty low profile, just doing my little musicals, singing, dancing, and yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later. And it seems to me that I might be the one that got away for these men. I am permanently burned into their retinas. I am microchipped into their minds.

And when I first heard that the president put me on his diss track, I was like, well, that’s not good. Now, a few weeks ago, I would have probably been more upset about this. But luckily, I was ghosted last month by a hookup who I really liked. And what I realized from that experience was that I shouldn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t really want to be with me. So maybe I shouldn’t want to be professionally supported by an administration that doesn’t personally support me, or so many others in this country. Food for thought.

In fact, maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually the greatest compliment of all, because it puts me in the company of some of the most brilliant, empathetic people in our world today.

But I do still wonder: why is it so important to them that I don’t find success? What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.

So now I have some action items for us. Are you ready?

Number one: Support trans and nonbinary people. This is the time. I am sounding the alarm. We need you to stand up for us, vote for us, donate to our causes, hire us, and support the businesses who hire us. But most importantly, love us. That is what we need more than anything right now, publicly and proudly.

Number two: If a young person is seeking acceptance, we are going to love them. And if you are a young person watching this, I need you to hold onto every piece of yourself tightly, especially the parts that they are trying to make you feel guilty about, or trying to scare you into abandoning. And I need you to find people who will help you carry those pieces into a kinder day, okay?

Okay. And number three: When they try to judge you for your support of us, take that as the greatest compliment. Ladies, when they tell you that you look like a trans woman, wear it like a medal. Men, when they tell you that being attracted to trans women makes you gay, I want you to Hilary Duff PSA their ass so hard that they don’t even know what just happened. And to the dolls: let’s have each other’s backs.

And lastly, to the president: thank you for reminding me that I am more powerful than I even knew. And to quote my favorite recording artist, Shea Diamond: I am America.

Love you.

We’ve now spent a solid decade fighting about cancel culture, about whether anyone should be ruined over an old tweet or a resurfaced college photo. Okay. Run that framework on Dylan Mulvaney and look for the offense. The complete inventory: one sponsored Instagram video promoting a March Madness contest, and a novelty can the company mailed her with her face on it. That’s the whole file. No statement to disavow, no scandal to relitigate, no victim anywhere in it. A beer ad.

And I’ll be honest: I’ve found plenty of Mulvaney’s content reductive over the years. Cringe, even. It could not matter less. Her content has never been the thing on trial. If her posts aren’t for you, the technology for not watching them is free and works great.

So here’s who we’re actually talking about. A musical theater kid who documented her transition online, did one sponsored post for a beer company, and has been screamed at ever since. Nobody has ever said what would end it, because nothing would. The problem is not something she says or does, but who she is. And that’s just bigotry.

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Bud Light got to come back, but not Dylan

“I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan any time soon,” said Trump on Friday. This has always been the point. When the boycott was at full boil in 2023, I wrote that its real goal was making companies think twice about hiring a trans person for anything, at any level. Mulvaney said something similar that fall: a company that hires a trans person and then goes quiet “gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want.”

The company’s rehabilitation went fine. In October 2023, with the boycott still going, Bud Light became the official beer of the UFC, in what was reported as the biggest sponsorship deal in the promotion’s history. And that deal is how, this June, Bud Light’s logo ended up printed on the Octagon on the White House South Lawn, at the UFC event Trump spent part of Friday’s speech bragging about. (I wrote about that spectacle when it happened.)

The company’s offense was proximity to a trans woman, and proximity can be worked off. You reorganize the marketing department, you sponsor the right fights, you put your logo where the president parties, and all is forgiven. Her offense was being the trans woman. And there’s no working that off.

About all that power we supposedly have

She can’t come back, because she’s needed right where she is. For any of this to look like a fair fight, Dylan Mulvaney has to be enormous.

The whole genre of “super powerful trans people” runs on an imaginary trans person: the one shrieking “did you just assume my gender!?” at strangers, the one demanding you memorize neopronouns. (I’ve been out as trans for fourteen years. I’ve never met a single person who goes by “xir.” I’m sure such people exist, but they are nowhere near common enough for this to be something you spend any amount of time thinking about.) The imaginary trans person is everywhere, powerful, hair-trigger, coming for your kid’s locker room.

Here’s how the people with actual power spent last month. The White House published a press release titled “Supreme Court Bolsters President Trump’s Push to Eliminate Transgender Insanity.” That’s the real name of a real document on whitehouse.gov, posted in the middle of Pride Month, listing the administration’s moves against trans people as a stack of wins. That’s pretty scary, and it goes beyond “reasonable concerns” that people claim to have about sports and youth medicine and whatnot.

Same government that, since the Supreme Court cleared the policy in November, now only issues passports showing your sex assigned at birth. Renew yours, and the letter reverts, no matter what your license, your doctors, your birth certificate, or your entire life says. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent warned that the policy exposes trans people to “increased violence, harassment, and discrimination.”

And the opposition party? Three weeks ago, days after that Supreme Court ruling, Amy Acton, the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, told the Toledo Blade: “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Boys. Her word. She’s got company: Gavin Newsom opened his podcast in 2025 by agreeing with Charlie Kirk about trans athletes. Some Democrats have pushed back; Tim Walz called the party’s retreat a mistake. But with the exception of J.B. Pritzker, the defense almost never comes from anyone who wants to be president, which really worries me about where things are headed.

The butt of the joke

I said at the top that I wanted to sit with this. Here’s where it landed.

The most powerful man alive stood in front of the American press corps and used a cheerful musical theater performer as the worst thing he could think to call a woman. Everyone understood him. The room understood, the headlines understood, the apology demand understood: it is an insult to be compared to a trans woman, as society tends to view us as weird little goblins. The one person who seemed to reject the premise was Mulvaney.

And Mulvaney had to be lovely about it. Again. In 2023 she spent months “scared to leave my house.” Last year she told People she finally felt “a thousand times stronger,” healed, in a good place. Then the president picked at the scab from a podium, and her job was to answer with grace. She did. Everyone spent Monday admiring it. Nobody should need this much of it.

You’ve probably read the rest: Trump’s speech was an hour of insults, and it flopped. CNN’s Brian Stelter says Trump “bombed” so thoroughly that he accidentally proved the dinner’s point. The Daily Beast went with “Humiliated.” And sure. The jokes were terrible. But I think these reviews are grading the wrong performance.

I wrote in April, after a gunman ended the first attempt at this dinner, that the correspondents’ association should let the whole thing end. They rescheduled it instead.

A performer bombs when he wants a room’s approval and can’t get it, and approval was never what Trump was there to collect. He already had what he needed from the press corps: attendance, a captive audience. It rescheduled its biggest night around him and sat him at the head table. What he wanted was the rest of it: the chance to stand in front of a profession he’s spent a year and a half suing, subpoenaing, banning, and defunding, insult it to its face for an hour on live television, and watch it hold still. He was there specifically for the silence.

Resist?

This is what standing up to Trump looked like on Friday night, according to the people who will defend the dinner.

The WHCA played a video featuring a computer-generated James Madison, who appeared onscreen to inform the room that “The government doesn’t get to shut the press up.” A living journalist saying that sentence into the microphone, to the president’s face, might have been a risk. A cartoon of a man who died in 1836 saying it is weak slop. AI-resurrected founders are usually a PragerU and Glenn Beck genre, the kind of thing I cover as right-wing propaganda. The press corps has now adopted the right’s format in its own defense. That’s roughly where we are.

There were awards, like the one Blitzer presented.

And there was Weijia Jiang, the outgoing WHCA president, opening the night with “We are back. We will not be intimidated.” She meant the gunman from April. But the man who intimidates the American press for a living? Sat beside her on the dais as her guest.

The genre’s well established by now. When Trump banned the AP from the Oval Office last year, the WHCA passed out “First Amendment” pins. At the April dinner, Jiang promised the press would keep covering this administration “whether you like it or not.” Pins and cartoons and toasts: okay.

When Trump announced in March that he’d attend, he posted that the correspondents had asked him to be “the Honoree” at their own dinner. They didn’t technically “honor” him, but if the association ever corrected him on that, I can’t find it. The right spent the weekend running its usual bit about how the press can dish it out but can’t take it. The truth is that taking it was all the press did. Politely, even.

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Don’t say they weren’t warned

Days before the dinner, more than 500 retired and former journalists joined eight press freedom groups, the Committee to Protect Journalists among them, in an open letter telling the WHCA that celebrating the First Amendment “in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it” is hypocrisy.

Ten days before the dinner, Trump’s Justice Department was holding grand jury subpoenas over four New York Times reporters for their coverage of the Qatari jet, demanding testimony and phone records, including records belonging to their family members. The department pulled the subpoenas the day before the dinner, once a federal judge started asking whether the application contained perjury. The week before the dinner, Trump publicly called for revoking NBC’s and ABC’s broadcast licenses after they declined to carry his recent primetime address live. And back in November, the president declared that elected officials urging troops to refuse illegal orders had committed “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Does this sound like a man who respects the First Amendment?

And there’s no clean modern precedent for it. However, you can argue that John Adams jailing editors under the Sedition Act or Woodrow Wilson imprisoning dissenters under the Espionage Act are just as bad but different. The current attack on the press pulls every lever at once (the regulators, the courts, the licenses, the owners, the platforms, the money), and it’s how the United States just fell to 64th in the world on press freedom, its lowest ranking ever, in an index citing the defunded public broadcasters, the gutted Voice of America, and the detention and deportation of journalist Mario Guevara. Clayton Weimers, who runs Reporters Without Borders’ US office, skips the hedging entirely: Trump is “the single biggest threat to American press freedom today.”

The correspondents’ association read the letter and answered with a statement:

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner exists because the First Amendment matters most when it’s under pressure... our choice to gather as journalists, newsmakers and the president in the same room is a reminder of what a free press means to this country.

But gathering in that particular room was never the only option. The New York Times hasn’t bought a ticket to this thing since 2008, for reasons its former executive editor Dean Baquet once summed up: the dinner tells readers “we are all in it together and it is all a game.” The WHCA could have done any number of other things here. There was the awards-without-the-gala option, the no-invitation option, the no-thank-yous option. But no.

The letter called all this hypocritical. But Hypocrisy is a values problem. What the news business has with this president is an accounting problem.

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The price of a not-so-free press

So let’s do the books.

In December 2024, Disney paid Trump $15 million, plus another million in legal fees, over one sentence George Stephanopoulos said on the air. Meta paid $25 million to settle his deplatforming suit; X paid about $10 million for the same. Paramount paid $16 million over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview, and the FCC approved the company’s sale to Skydance just weeks later.

Then there’s YouTube. Google paid $24.5 million in September, and $22 million of it is earmarked for the White House ballroom. The fortified ballroom Trump spent part of Friday’s speech advertising, the one he suggested could host this dinner next year, is being built partly out of money a media company paid him to drop a lawsuit.

Paul Farhi ran the tally earlier this month: roughly $86 million from media and tech companies so far, spread across more than 30 defamation suits, exactly none of which Trump has ever won in court. He doesn’t need to win them. The filing of the lawsuits are themselves a show of force.

On the other hand, I’ve already explained what happens to journalists who publish stories Trump doesn’t like. That’s the menu every institution with a table at the Waldorf last Friday lives under: pay him, or bleed. Most of the owners paid.

IMAX 70mm tickets went on sale a full year ahead of release, presales crashed ticketing servers when they opened wide in June, and Variety found fans planning cross-country trips around 70mm screenings, including a couple who were reportedly delaying pregnancies over seat availability.

The movie finally opened on July 17, and it made $124.5 million in North America and $264.1 million worldwide, the biggest global opening Nolan has ever had. The record it broke belonged to The Dark Knight Rises and had stood since 2012. Reviews came in at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, the best of his career, opening-night crowds gave it an A on CinemaScore, and the verified audience score (the Rotten Tomatoes number you can only vote in if you actually bought a ticket) sits at 97 percent as of this writing.

So sure, there’s an easy piece to be written about how everyone who swore this movie would bomb turned out to be wrong, and plenty of people have already written it. I keep getting stuck on a different number, though, one that has nothing to do with ticket sales. Over opening weekend, July 17 through 20, The Economist and YouGov asked 1,602 American adults whether it was appropriate or inappropriate “for Black actress Lupita Nyong’o to portray Helen of Troy” in the film. Thirty percent said inappropriate.

Thirty percent! Over a casting choice in a movie based on a 2,700-year-old poem.

And that opinion is brand new, which is the part I can’t get past. Nobody held it a year ago, because there was nothing to hold it about; the roles hadn’t even been announced yet. Somebody had to go build it, and the building took roughly six months and happened mostly on one website. The campaign against The Odyssey failed as a boycott but worked as a proof of concept, and this piece is about both halves.

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And because this is the same Pete Hegseth who spent his first weeks in office moving to purge trans people from the military and cut off their hormone therapy, you already know what happened next. Rep. Pramila Jayapal declared the program gender-affirming care and said it “completely debunks all of Republicans’ attacks on trans people.” Tammy Duckworth, my own senator here in Illinois, said it sounded “like gender-affirming care to me.” One viral post cracked, “Babe wake up, they’re transmascing the military.” Common Dreams ran a whole roundup of the dunks under the headline “’Literally Gender Affirming Care’: Hegseth Mocked for Plan to Offer US Soldiers Testosterone.” Within hours, “Hegseth is doing gender-affirming care” was the take.

I get the impulse. I really do.

And I wish everyone would knock it off.

A few disclaimers before anybody gets mad at me. I’m speaking for myself here, one trans woman with a newsletter, and I don’t claim to represent anyone else. I know these jokes come from allies. I know the point is to call out the cruelty of banning care for one group while handing it out to another. I know plenty of trans people make the same joke, and I’m not interested in running a purity test. But I wince every single time I see it, and I want to explain why. Again, I am just speaking for myself here.

Two things happen whenever somebody fires off this particular gotcha. The first is that healthcare I spent years fighting to get becomes a punchline. The second is that a political movement with a perfectly coherent plan for people like me gets talked about as if it simply made a logic error. Both are bad. The second one might be worse.

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The punchline is my healthcare

Start with the healthcare. Gender-affirming care is the medical treatment for gender dysphoria: hormone therapy, sometimes surgery, prescribed under clinical guidelines built over decades and recognized as medically necessary by dozens of major medical organizations, including the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics. If you’ve never felt dysphoria, I can only tell you how it felt to me: wrong, all the time, in a way I couldn’t reason my way out of. A depression with no obvious floor. Sick at the sight of my own reflection. A flinch at every “he.” This care is what helped make that stop. For a lot of us, it’s the thing that made everything else in life possible.

Getting it is a whole other story. I’ve been through the gatekeeping myself. Separate letters from separate providers certifying that I was who I said I was. A years-long waitlist. Insurance fights over care that the people writing the checks would clearly rather not pay for. It’s grueling.

Now picture the 42-year-old staff sergeant whose bloodwork comes back a little low on testosterone next spring. Nobody’s asking him for evaluation letters from therapists. There’s no legislature holding hearings about his prescription, no lawsuit trying to stop his refills. Under Hegseth’s program, he won’t even have to ask. The Pentagon is coming to him.

So when a member of Congress looks at that program and declares it the same thing I went through the wringer for, I understand the point she thinks she’s making. But here’s the message a casual reader actually takes away: transition care belongs in the same drawer as testosterone boosters, Botox, and Elon Musk’s hair plugs. And once it’s in that drawer, it’s about as “medically necessary” as anything else in there. Which is to say: completely optional.

That phrase, medically necessary, is doing far more work than it gets credit for. It’s the standard insurers use to decide what they’ll cover and what they’ll wave off as cosmetic, and “cosmetic” is already their favorite exit ramp when a trans patient’s claim hits the desk. It’s the finding those dozens of medical organizations put their names behind. It’s the thing my three letters existed to establish in the first place. The entire miserable apparatus I climbed through exists because this care has to keep proving, over and over, to skeptical people holding checkbooks, that it’s necessary. The joke hands that hard-won word away for free.

I’m far from the first trans person to notice this. Back in January, after a publication described Karoline Leavitt’s lip filler as gender-affirming care, Woodlief McCabe wrote in Autostraddle about how insulting the comparison feels from the receiving end, and where the logic ends up if you follow it: “If everything is gender affirming care, then nothing is.” He’s right. A category that stretches to cover lip filler and hair plugs is a category insurers and legislators will be delighted to treat like lip filler and hair plugs. They’ve been trying to file us under “cosmetic” for years. The gotcha does the paperwork for them.

There’s no contradiction to catch

The assumption buried inside every one of these dunks is that Republicans oppose gender-affirming care because they think hormones are dangerous, or because they think the government shouldn’t be in the hormone business. Catch them handing out testosterone to soldiers and you’ve caught them breaking their own rule.

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The topic leaked out within hours anyway. Two White House officials told MS NOW (the channel you knew as MSNBC) that Trump plans to use the address to claim that newly declassified intelligence reports show a foreign government plotted to interfere in the 2020 election.

As I write this, none of the broadcast networks has said whether it’ll carry the speech live. But they shouldn’t.

Trump’s track record alone should be enough to justify that call, because every live primetime address this man has given has come with documented falsehoods attached, and I’ll walk you through the list below. But this speech is worse than the usual primetime lying because this one serves a specific purpose. The people behind it have spent the past month describing that purpose out loud, on podcasts and in news reports: wave declassified documents around as proof that 2020 was stolen from him, declare a national emergency over it, and use that emergency to grab control over this fall’s midterms that Congress and the courts keep refusing to hand him.

So here’s the plan

Media Matters’ John Knefel has a great piece detailing some of the public facing groundwork being laid to support Trump’s midterm takeover. The full version names a preferred villain (China, in most tellings) and an endgame: with supposed proof in hand and an emergency declared, Trump could impose the SAVE America Act’s proof-of-citizenship voting rules by executive order, skipping the Congress that keeps declining to pass the actual bill. Knefel hedged, appropriately, that the details are fuzzy and the whole thing could still collapse. But now that he’s planning a primetime address, this reporting becomes a whole lot more interesting.

On June 20, Steve Bannon told his War Room audience that Bill Pulte’s job at ODNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Pulte has no intelligence background at all and still runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency while nominally overseeing all 18 spy agencies (a part-time gig, apparently). On June 29, Bannon said the White House’s document effort and Pulte would together supply the predicate, his word, for an emergency declaration. The next day, his Real America’s Voice colleague Wayne Allyn Root argued on air that an emergency order should simply contain everything in the SAVE Act, plus whatever else they can cram in.

NBC News reported on June 30 that a White House task force is pulling thousands of pages from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Pulte’s ODNI, with plans to declassify a chunk of it. Running it is John Solomon, the Just the News founder whose Biden-Ukraine misinformation earned him 2019 Misinformer of the Year from my old colleagues at Media Matters, alongside Derek Harvey, a first-term Trump national security aide. And per NBC’s sources, members have been urged to keep redactions light, even where that means leaving in the names of officials and private citizens. The only reasons to publish private citizens’ names in declassified intelligence files are political ones.

And Trump keeps leaving fingerprints. On July 1, he told reporters that Pulte has free rein to declassify whatever he wants, 2020 records included, while noting Pulte would only be around another month or two. That same week he posted about meeting Tina Peters, the former Colorado clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines in service of his stolen-election claims, and in late June he torched a bipartisan housing bill’s signing ceremony to squeeze Congress on the SAVE America Act, which he’s taken to calling a national emergency in itself.

The one thing this plan still needs, besides a president willing to deliver it on camera, is an audience that hasn’t seen the actual record.

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We already know what happened in 2020

Here’s what Thursday’s staging is built to make you forget: the question of foreign involvement in the 2020 election was investigated to death, in real time, by Donald Trump’s own government, under rules Donald Trump signed. His September 2018 executive order requires the intelligence community to formally assess foreign interference after every federal election. The assessment for 2020, declassified in March 2021, found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect” of the voting process. Registration, ballot casting, tabulation, reporting: all clean. A companion review by the Justice Department and DHS, with the FBI and CISA doing the digging, hit the same dead end: no evidence any foreign government-linked actor blocked anyone from voting, changed a vote, disrupted a count, or compromised registration data or ballots.

Foreign governments did run operations around that election. They aimed at voters’ heads, which is a different thing from touching the vote, and that difference is important. Russia pushed narratives trashing Biden through cutouts the Treasury Department later sanctioned by name. Iran probed state voter websites, scraped data on more than 100,000 Alaska voters through a badly configured registration site (they saw data; they changed none), and sent threatening emails to Democratic voters while posing as the Proud Boys, which got two Iranians indicted. All of it was aimed at perception and trust. The Thursday production depends on you hearing “foreign activity” and filling in “changed votes” yourself.

And the specific fantasy Trump has spent five years selling, the one where Venezuela or Cuba or China rigs the voting machines? DOJ and DHS, with the FBI and CISA, took it on directly:

“The Departments investigated multiple public claims that one or more foreign governments owned, directed, or controlled election infrastructure used in the 2020 federal elections; implemented a scheme to manipulate election infrastructure; or tallied, changed, or otherwise manipulated vote counts. The Departments found that those claims were not credible.”

That’s the federal government’s verdict on the exact genre of claim Thursday’s speech is reportedly built around.

Bill Barr, then Trump’s own attorney general, said in December 2020 that the department found no outcome-flipping fraud. Courts tossed the lawsuits by the dozen. Georgia counted its ballots three times, once by hand; Biden won every count. On China, where this push keeps pointing: the intelligence community assessed with high confidence that Beijing considered getting involved and decided it wasn’t worth it.

As for Thursday’s declassified props, the likely seed material is already public, and it’s embarrassing. In June 2025, Kash Patel declassified an anonymous tip from August 2020 claiming China had manufactured fake driver’s licenses, built on TikTok data, to flood the mail with fraudulent Biden ballots. The FBI’s own files describe the tip as recalled and never fully pursued, and it falls apart on contact: TikTok accounts had no address field, so the scheme’s fake voters have no addresses; registration checks and ballot signature matching would catch it at any scale; it would require armies of noncitizens to commit a deportable felony officials and courts keep finding vanishingly rare; and when Customs did seize counterfeit licenses at O’Hare in 2020, the government found no link to voting.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, anticipating this exact moment back in March, laid out the bar for any new 2020 claim: genuinely new intelligence, an accounting of how it differs from what the spy agencies, DOJ, and DHS already reviewed, and a reason the original conclusions were wrong. Watch Thursday with that checklist in hand.

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And it seems like he had plenty of company. A woman in Los Angeles County photographed her ballot and flat out asked Claude who to vote for. A man in Baltimore told the Times that researching his last ballot ate up something like 20 hours of his life; with Claude summarizing every candidate for him, this one took an hour. Medina’s read is that 2026 might be the first cycle where enough voters do this for it to matter, and honestly, that feels conservative to me.

Now… the part the Times didn’t get into.

Three days before that story ran, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a policy declaring that AI companies that steer their chatbots toward “undisclosed ideological objectives” may be committing consumer fraud (the public can comment through July 31). Which sounds reasonable! Nobody wants a secretly ideological chatbot. But then there’s the obvious follow-up: who decides what “ideological” means? Right now, that would be the Trump administration. The same administration that has spent the past year attacking AI companies as woke, that cut the entire federal government off from the one AI company that told the Pentagon no, and that handed the cheapest deal in its AI purchasing program to the company whose chatbot had spent the better part of a day praising Hitler a couple of months earlier.

Americans started trusting chatbots with their ballots at the exact moment the federal government finished building the machinery to control what those chatbots say. I think that’s a pretty big story! The right ran this pressure campaign against newspapers for decades, then against Facebook and Twitter. The chatbots are the next phase in a familiar playbook.

You’ve seen this before… over and over and over

Back during the 1992 campaign, Republican Party chair Rich Bond explained to the Washington Post why the right complained so relentlessly about the “liberal media,” and his answer was disarmingly honest: it’s the same thing coaches do to officials, where “what they try to do is ‘work the refs’” in hopes of friendlier calls later. Complain loudly enough, long enough, and the calls start going your way.

The social media sequel ran for most of a decade, which I wrote about back at Media Matters in 2020. Years of shadowban panic and congressional hearings about Silicon Valley silencing conservatives, all of it building to Trump signing an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship” in May 2020, days after Twitter had the nerve to fact-check his mail-in ballot lies. Tucked inside that order was a legal theory worth remembering: if a platform moderates content in ways that contradict what it promises the public, the FTC could treat that as an “unfair or deceptive” business practice.

None of this ever required the underlying claim to be true. When NYU’s Stern Center went looking for evidence in 2021, it concluded that the anti-conservative censorship charge was “itself a form of disinformation,” and that the platforms’ algorithms often handed right-wing content extra reach. Didn’t matter. In 2025, Meta killed its US fact-checking program anyway, with Zuckerberg echoing the censorship complaints himself and shipping his moderation team off to Texas to reassure people worried about its bias.

And the AI version of the surrender was already underway before most people noticed there was a fight. When Meta released Llama 4 in April 2025, the announcement claimed the big AI models all lean left and bragged that the new model’s tilt was “comparable to Grok”, Elon Musk’s chatbot. I wrote about it at the time. A tech giant advertising that its AI now leans like Musk’s is what winning this play looks like.

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In steps the government

A year ago this month, Trump signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which bars federal agencies from buying AI models that fail the administration’s test for “ideological neutrality.” The president explained at the signing: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.”

That same month, then-Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sent formal demand letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta because their chatbots, asked to rank recent presidents on antisemitism, had put Trump last. His theory was that an AI giving unflattering answers about the president might amount to consumer fraud under Missouri law.

The escalation from there moved fast. It’s like I recently wrote: consumer-outrage campaigns picking up state muscle. In December, Trump signed a second executive order creating a Justice Department task force with one job: suing states over their AI laws. The order also held tens of billions of dollars in broadband money over the heads of states that regulate AI, and it directed the FTC to explain when state AI laws amount to forcing companies to deceive their customers.

And when xAI sued Colorado over its AI anti-discrimination law this spring, the Justice Department intervened on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has gone to court to kill a state AI law. Colorado didn’t wait around to lose. In May, its legislature gutted the law on its own, swapping the discrimination protections for disclosure requirements.

The FTC’s proposed policy statement from this month runs on the legal theory from the 2020 Twitter order: AI companies market their products as accurate, so steering outputs in ways users wouldn’t expect can be deception under federal law. Chair Andrew Ferguson is inviting the public to tell him about “the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends.”

The lawyers, for what it’s worth, doubt much of this survives contact with a courtroom. TechFreedom’s Andy Jung walked through why the preemption theory fails, concluding that “a policy statement simply will not suffice.” And when Judge Rita Lin got a look at the administration’s treatment of Anthropic, she called it “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation”, though the administration and Anthropic would later come to an agreement.

But the weapon was never really built for a courtroom. The Brennan Center called this last August when the woke AI order dropped: a standard that vague works as a standing threat, and companies over-comply rather than find out what it means. Which, to no one’s surprise, is exactly what’s been happening.

And if you want proof the administration was never actually worried about chatbots picking sides, you only need to read the FTC’s own footnotes.

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The conceit is that Trump, bragging in the first person, wants you to understand there will be no getting away from him. Not during your morning coffee, not while you stare at a sunset. “I am inescapable,” the fake Trump gloats, before running through the aspects of American life he’s already wrecked and promising to get around to the rest. The piece closes with a list of everything he might poison that particular week: the World Series, Halloween, rollercoasters, Christmas trees, birthday cake, the new iPhone. You get the idea.

The article gets passed around again every few months because it keeps being right. But I think the joke has aged in a way that nobody at The Onion could have predicted, and “satire became reality” doesn’t quite cover what happened to it.

Here’s what I mean.

He spent this past week inserting himself into the men’s World Cup, of all things. An American player got suspended over a red card, the White House decided that wouldn’t do, and after days of pressure, FIFA let him play. Half the soccer world is still furious about it.

A red card. At the World Cup. The machinery of the United States government cranked up because a soccer player was told to sit out one game.

The 2017 version of this bit was about our attention. The Onion’s Trump ruined the World Series by showing up in your head while you tried to watch it. He was an intrusive thought, a name you couldn’t stop hearing. Today’s version involves him actually inserting himself into stories. He calls the president of FIFA to strongarm the organization for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s benefit. He hosts the Kennedy Center Honors. He headlines the country’s birthday party. He puts his face on the money and his name on your kid’s savings account.

Trying to tune him out was a you problem in 2017. In 2026, he really is inescapable.

So. About that red card.

“I didn’t know what the hell a red card was”

Last Wednesday night, during the 2-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina that pushed the US men’s national team into the knockout round, striker Folarin Balogun got tangled up with a defender while chasing a ball and came down on the back of the guy’s leg. The referee saw it happen and let play continue. Then the video review officials stepped in, the referee got sent to a monitor to watch the collision again in slow motion, and out came a red card. FIFA’s rulebook is blunt on this point: a red card brings an automatic one-game suspension. Balogun, the team’s leading scorer, would sit out the round of 16 against Belgium. It was a huge blow to Team USA’s chances in the tournament.

That wouldn’t last.

Andrew Giuliani (yes, Rudy’s son, and yes, he runs the White House’s World Cup task force) told ESPN that conversations about rescuing Balogun’s eligibility started immediately after the ejection. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who’d watched the game from a seat next to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, got on the phone that night to find out what could be done. A senior US official told the AP that the debate over the card ate up the entire flight from Santa Clara back to Washington. And NBC News reported that the days after that were spent in strategy sessions about how the federal government could help U.S. Soccer’s lawyers put together their argument.

On Thursday, Trump called Infantino personally. Back in December, FIFA handed Trump its inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” at the World Cup draw, a ceremony held at the Kennedy Center (more on that building in a bit), and Infantino gave him $15,000 worth of tickets, part of the nearly $120,000 in free sports tickets from executives, owners, and allies that showed up on Trump’s most recent financial disclosure. After news of the call broke, Infantino put out a statement confirming it, noting that he hears from heads of state all the time, and insisting the case sat with FIFA’s independent judicial bodies. Sure, sure, sure.

On Sunday, those independent judicial bodies set the suspension aside, citing a provision that lets FIFA’s disciplinary committee pause a punishment and put a player on probation instead.

The rest of the soccer world reacted about how you’d expect. UEFA, Europe’s governing body, expressed its disbelief at a decision it called “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable” and warned that a competition loses its credibility when the people guarding the rules stop enforcing them. Belgium’s federation said it was astonished, demanded to see the reasoning, and had its appeal tossed on the grounds that it had no standing to file one. Belgium’s coach, Rudi Garcia, told reporters he’d learned that at this World Cup, “the 5th of July is actually the first of April. It’s April Fools.” Wayne Rooney went on the BBC and called the whole thing a disgrace that Infantino ought to be ashamed of. And Herculez Gomez, the former USMNT player turned ESPN analyst, said what everybody watching already suspected: “It feels like the host nation is gaining a favor here.”

Trump spent Monday explaining himself, sort of. He’d asked Infantino for a review, he told reporters, because he’d watched the play and decided no foul had occurred, and he admitted he had no idea what a red card even was until someone explained the suspension that came with it. He described the play as “two great athletes that crashed into each other.” He insisted, repeatedly, that he never told Infantino what to do and that a committee made the call. And then he pronounced the referee “a little bit suspect” and encouraged the assembled press to go dig through the man’s record.

Nobody has produced evidence that Trump’s call is what flipped FIFA’s decision, and to be clear, I’m not claiming it did. But oh boy, this sure is a great example of him inserting himself into the story.

And then the US lost to Belgium 4-1 and crashed out of its own World Cup.

All of it for nothing.

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He found a way to ruin the Knicks, too

The World Cup episode stands out because he changed the conditions of the competition itself. Most of the time, showing up is enough.

On June 8, Trump accepted an invitation from James Dolan, his longtime friend and the owner of the Knicks, and went to Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. No sitting president had ever attended an NBA Finals game. And the Knicks hadn’t hosted one in 27 years, so that night should’ve belonged to the most famously starved fan base in basketball. Instead, the neighborhood got a 12-block security perimeter staffed by hundreds of NYPD officers. It shut out anyone without a ticket, killed the street watch parties that had formed outside the Garden for Games 1 and 2, and left the vendors selling Knicks gear on the sidewalk wondering where everyone went.

Inside, Trump watched from a suite fitted with bulletproof glass, next to Dolan. When his face appeared on the big screens during the anthem and stayed up for close to eight seconds, the crowd booed him so hard that the reception for the visiting Spurs sounded warm by comparison. Asked about it afterward, he told reporters: “It was, I think, mostly cheers.” Sure, sure.

The Knicks lost, by the way. They hadn’t lost a game in 46 days.

Before Game 4, fans gathered outside the Garden to burn sage, hoping to clear out whatever he’d left behind. One of them walked Variety through the evidence: he picked the Chiefs to win, and they lost. He went to a Mets game, and they lost. He came to the Garden, and the Knicks lost. “He’s a curse to every team that he picks.” The Onion’s Trump bragged about finding a way to ruin Twix bars. The real one has New Yorkers performing smoke rituals outside a basketball arena.

And the Garden was one stop on a tour. In his first eight months back in office, he hit the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, UFC cards in Miami and Newark, the NCAA wrestling championships, the Club World Cup final, and the US Open men’s final, getting booed at the last two. Every one of these visits works the same way. The streets close, the perimeter goes up, the anthem plays, the cameras find him, and whatever you actually came to watch runs second.

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The party, the buildings, the money, the babies

Sports are the small version of this. The country’s actual birthday got the full treatment.

Trump billed his Fourth of July speech on the National Mall, the centerpiece of America’s 250th anniversary, as a “TRUMP RALLY”, and he delivered one, pushing his election overhaul bill and warning that communists were on the march. Congress created a nonpartisan commission back in 2016 to plan the semiquincentennial; his Freedom 250 operation largely shoved that body aside and fenced off much of the Mall. And when the musical acts booked for Freedom 250’s kickoff event backed out en masse rather than be associated with him, he fixed it by announcing he’d headline the thing himself. The entertainment canceled, so he became the entertainment.

And the Kennedy Center, where FIFA staged its Peace Prize ceremony? Trump fired its trustees in 2025, and the replacements he picked elected him chairman and voted his name onto the building, a renaming a federal judge has since ruled illegal. He hosted the Kennedy Center Honors in December, drawing the lowest TV ratings in the show’s history, while ticket sales fell and performers kept canceling.

The physical city is getting the same treatment. He tore down the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom, his name or image has gone up on the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Justice Department’s headquarters, and he’s pushing a triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. On the Fourth itself, his Domestic Policy Council released a report declaring that the people who run the Smithsonian “can’t be trusted”.

Then there’s the money. Treasury drafted a $1 anniversary coin with Trump’s profile on the front and, on the back, Trump raising his fist over the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT”. Federal law bars living presidents from US currency, a practice that exists, per the San Francisco Fed, to keep the country from resembling a monarchy. Nine Democratic senators have urged Treasury to reject it, warning against the appearance of a “cult of personality.” But in March, the federal arts commission he stacked with his own appointees approved a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing his image, with the Treasury secretary using his authority over gold coinage to route around that law. The commission was told the president had personally selected the design.

And then there are the babies. This week, the White House held an event promoting newborn savings accounts that are called, officially, Trump Accounts. They launched over the holiday weekend, timed to the 250th, with a $1,000 government contribution for eligible babies born during his term. He rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange to promote them Monday morning. The Onion’s list of things he might taint topped out at Christmas trees and birthday cake. Reality reached the maternity ward and beyond.

People have noticed. There’s data. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans think the 250th anniversary events have become too political, including three-quarters of Democrats and half of Republicans. And the Reuters Institute’s global survey found that 40% of people now say they sometimes or often avoid the news, tied for the highest share ever recorded. In 2017, the year The Onion ran its piece, it was 29%. Record numbers of people are trying to look away. The trouble is where they look: the game, the holiday, the arena, their kid’s bank account. He is everywhere.

On July 19, somebody is going to win the World Cup. The final is at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and whichever team survives to reach it, its captain will climb the podium at the end of the night to lift the most famous trophy in sports. Trump plans to be up there too. Infantino confirmed it last month: the two of them will watch the final side by side and be “handing the trophy to the winner – of course, together.” He ran the dress rehearsal last summer, awkwardly planting himself in the middle of Chelsea’s celebration at the Club World Cup final and staying put while the players hoisted the trophy around him.

It’s going to be a long… [checks calendar]… two and a half years more of this.

“New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool. Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can. Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings, dimming/turning off our lights during peak electricity demand, asking private partners to do the same, and powering down non-essential equipment. A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved. Let’s ease demand — and get through the heat — together.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A request. “The City is asking every business and every New Yorker to do their part,” is how the mayor’s press office put it to Newsweek. Asking. Con Edison, the utility company, made the same plea to its customers. There’s no mandate here, no fine, no inspector coming to look at your thermostat. You can read that post, mutter “absolutely not,” crank your AC to 65, and nothing will happen to you.

You wouldn’t know any of that from the reaction on the right.

“78 degrees??? Welcome to communism people! Hope you enjoy!” wrote Barstool’s Dave Portnoy. Sen. Rand Paul declared the post “Proof that communism is (unfortunately) alive and well,” while Sen. Lindsey Graham warned, “This is the future that WOKE Democrats want not just for NYC but for South Carolina too!” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went with “Is this what was meant by the warmth of collectivism?” (all three via The Hill). The post has been viewed more than 58.4 million times as of this writing, and seemingly every Republican with a working phone showed up to explain that a suggestion about air conditioning is what the breadlines were like.

Full disclosure: my thermostat is not set to 78. If I lived in New York, I’d probably read the mayor’s post, feel vaguely guilty for a minute, and go right on ignoring it. (I like being cold in the summer. Sue me.) But whether the request is annoying has nothing to do with whether it’s authoritarian. It’s a suggestion. A suggestion is the thing you’re allowed to ignore. That’s the entire concept.

And that’s what makes this freakout so exhausting: they know. Of course they know. The federal government’s own energy guidance recommended this exact thermostat range until, oh, roughly yesterday (more on that later). Their own states make the same request, during every heat wave, year after year. Nobody quoted above is confused about what a voluntary conservation notice is. They’re doing a bit. And we’re all expected to sit through the bit every single time a Democrat suggests anything, delivered by people who treat playing dumb like a full-time job with a quota to hit.

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Their own states say the same thing

Start close to home. In July 2025, with a heat advisory in effect, then-Mayor Eric Adams told New Yorkers to set their air conditioners to, you guessed it, 78 degrees. City Hall says the practice goes back a lot further than that. A Mamdani spokesperson told TMZ the city was following utility recommendations that had been “implemented under previous Mayors, including Adams, De Blasio, Bloomberg, and Giuliani”.

Then there’s the federal government. Like I said, until this week, the Department of Energy’s home cooling guidance told Americans to “Start with an indoor temperature between 75-78°F during the day.” The standing recommendation of a federal agency that answers to Donald Trump sat right there on a government website while the president’s allies spent two days calling the same number communism. Apparently, the page was deleted some time after Bulwark reporter Sam Stein posted about the Trump government’s guidance being the same as the NYC guidance being torn to shreds by the right on Thursday morning.

And then there’s Texas. ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, asked Texans to raise their thermostats to 78 over and over through the brutal summer of 2022, and raising your thermostat during peak demand remains standing guidance on ERCOT’s website today. Back in 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott personally appealed to Texans to “set air conditioning thermostats to 78 degrees or higher.”

Which brings us to Ted Cruz, who fired off “In a first-world country, you could turn on the A/C.” This is the senator from the state whose grid failed so completely in February 2021 that Texans froze to death waiting for the power to come back, and whose grid operator has spent every summer since asking residents to do precisely what Mamdani asked. Cruz’s post promptly got hit with a community note laying all of this out.

It changed nothing. It never does.

DeSantis’s “warmth of collectivism” quip ran into the same problem: the Florida Public Service Commission, whose members he hand-picked, issued the identical 78-degree recommendation as recently as June. Of this year. The one we’re currently in.

And the number itself? The 78-degree standard traces back to Jimmy Carter, who ordered federal buildings kept at 78 in the summer during the 1979 energy crisis, and utilities have pushed it for decades for the deeply boring reason that every degree above 78 shaves roughly 2 percent off cooling costs. It’s the HVAC equivalent of “drink more water.”

They run this exact play over and over

The thermostat freakout isn’t even original. We’ve sat through this routine before, and it’s worth remembering how it goes.

In April 2021, Joe Biden announced a target of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030. There was nothing in his speeches or his policy papers about anyone’s diet. The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, filled in the blank itself, publishing a piece speculating that the plan “could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH” based on a 2020 University of Michigan study that had no connection to Biden1 or his plan whatsoever. Fox News converted the tabloid’s guesswork into an on-screen graphic presenting “cut 90% of red meat from diet” and “max 4 lbs per year” as “Biden’s climate requirements”, and from there it went straight into the mouths of elected officials. “Joe Biden’s climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030,” tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert. “They want to limit us to about four pounds a year. Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?”

And here’s Abbott, right on schedule. The governor of Texas tweeted out the fake Fox graphic with the caption “Not gonna happen in Texas!” Greg Abbott, 2021: outraged over a meat restriction that did not exist. Greg Abbott, 2015: personally asking Texans to turn their thermostats up to 78. The same man, working both sides of the same con, six years apart. Fox eventually walked the whole thing back, with anchor John Roberts acknowledging on air that a graphic and script “incorrectly implied” the study was part of Biden’s plan (”That is not the case”). By then the story had done its job.

The 2023 gas stove panic ran a slightly different version. This was slighly more justified… at first. A Consumer Product Safety Commission member, Richard Trumka Jr., really did call gas stoves “a hidden hazard” and really did tell Bloomberg that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” A real quote, from a real official, and if the outrage had ended when the facts came in, fair enough. It didn’t! Big surprise. Trumka clarified within days that “CPSC isn’t coming for anyone’s gas stoves,” and the commission’s chair stated flatly: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Two days after that clarification, Rep. Ronny Jackson was fundraising off “Biden and Democrats want to BAN gas stoves in EVERY home! INCLUDING YOURS!” A year and a half later, with no ban, no proposed ban, no regulatory action of any kind, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was still describing the episode as “a backdoor attempt to advance the current administration’s radical green agenda.” The facts had been settled for eighteen months. The show stayed on the road anyway.

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And you remember the pandemic. Every ask, no matter how mild or voluntary or obviously sensible, went through the same machine: a recommendation became a mandate became tyranny became a whole personality. The people loudly refusing understood exactly what “recommended” meant. Refusing was the point.

Which is why the replies to Mamdani were so predictable. “As a New Yorker I’ll be setting my AC to 62 degrees for the foreseeable future as a direct retaliation to your authority,” wrote one reply guy, apparently prepared to detonate his own Con Ed bill to own the mayor. Normally, that kind of oppositional defiance nonsense is just sad. This week it might have stakes. The premise of the request is that the grid is strained, and that’s not hypothetical: New York’s grid operator issued an early energy warning Thursday over declining operating reserves. If enough people crank their ACs as a political statement and the grid buckles, the air conditioning could go off for everybody, in 100-degree heat, and people could die. Will the health of the grid hinge on whether or not people who see the mayor’s post set their thermostats at 78 degrees? Probably not. But hey, it doesn’t hurt for the government to ask, as part of a larger strategy for handling the heatwave. It’s fine. Just ignore it if that’s what you want to do. That was the entire content of the mayor’s post. They’re all pretending not to understand it.

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There are real criticisms. Make them.

And the truly maddening part of all this is that none of it was necessary, because Mamdani isn’t above criticism. No politician is, and this one happens to be attempting some of the most ambitious and most contested municipal policy in the country.

If you want to come after the mayor over this week specifically, there’s material. Start with the grid. The premise of the whole request is that New York’s power system gets shaky when every air conditioner in the city runs at once. Okay: why? Why does the largest city in the wealthiest country on Earth have a grid that needs coaxing through a predictable summer? What’s the plan to fix it, on what timeline, at what cost? Those are real questions, a serious opposition would be asking them loudly, and I’d honestly like to hear the answers myself.

Or push on fairness. Asking people in sweltering walkups to conserve while Midtown blazes all night and Taylor Swift holds her wedding at Madison Square Garden is a genuinely uncomfortable look, and plenty of New Yorkers said exactly that. The city has an answer: Con Edison says the Times Square billboards run on separate distribution networks, so darkening them wouldn’t free up power anywhere else, and the Times Square Alliance asked screen operators to dim their displays anyway. Maybe that answer holds up. Maybe it doesn’t! A critic’s job would be to stress-test it instead of tweeting through the feeling.

Nobody did that. Not one of the senators or governors quoted at the top of this piece asked a single question about grid capacity, energy policy, or who carries the burden of conservation. They do not actually care about any of this, just like they didn’t care about Peanut the Squirrel when the right rallied around its owner in 2024. They just want material to attack their political opponents with.

Do we really have to do this with every single thing? You have actual disagreements with this mayor. Some of them are even interesting! His agenda (rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, fare-free buses) is full of substantive debates, with tradeoffs serious people can argue about in good faith. Yelling about a thermostat suggestion your own states make every summer contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone doing it knows that. It’s intellectually bankrupt work: performing confusion for an audience you’ve decided is too dumb to check.

The vote was 6 to 3, sort of. Six justices decided the bans don’t violate the Constitution. But on the separate question of whether they violate Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination in schools, all nine agreed the answer was no. Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, and the takeaway is that a state can decide who gets to play on a girls’ team based on what he called “biological sex.”

Then there’s the part where you can hear them straining to sound kind about it. Kavanaugh closed by assuring trans kids that their “desire to compete warrants respect” and that none of them should be “ostracized or vilified.” Clarence Thomas, in a concurrence, skipped the bedside manner. Trans girls, he wrote, “are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.”

The West Virginia half of the case was about a girl named Becky Pepper-Jackson. She’s 16. She throws shot put and discus, she’s been on puberty blockers and estrogen since before her teens, and she never went through the testosterone-driven puberty these laws claim to be built around. She’s also, as best anyone’s been able to determine, the only person West Virginia’s ban has ever applied to.

The ruling clears the way for laws like the one aimed at her, already on the books in 29 states.

You already know how this gets covered: as a sports story. Kavanaugh the girls’ basketball coach, sounding a little sorry. A respectful nod to how decent people can disagree. A debate about fairness and biology, pre-booked for the Sunday panels.

I’ve written about trans athletes for more than a decade, and I’ll say up front that the sports question has some real complications (more on that shortly). But the people who spent years drafting these bills have said, out loud and in print, that they picked sports and kids because it was the easiest place to begin, and that they mean to go a great deal further.

So while everyone else argues about the shot put, I want to talk to a different group. For years, a certain kind of person has told me, and told themselves, that they aren’t “anti-trans.” They just have some “reasonable concerns.” Concerns about sports. Concerns about teenagers and medicine. And plenty of them treated those concerns as a reason to stay quiet while the restrictions piled up, on the assumption that this would all stop somewhere sensible.

This ruling is where that assumption comes due. The people who kept warning where this was going got called hysterical for it. And I’d like to know, from everyone who promised me their concerns were reasonable, whether they ever intend to say enough is enough, or whether the people they dismissed have been right the whole time.

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Where I land on the sports question

Before I get to those people, I owe the sports question an honest answer of my own, because I’ve never been able to pretend it’s simple. So here’s the version that doesn’t fit on a chyron. Does a trans girl have some physical advantage over the other girls on the team? Sometimes. It depends on the sport, on whether she went through puberty on testosterone or blocked it early, on how long she’s been on estrogen, on a dozen things that vary from one kid to the next. At the top levels of competition, that’s a real conversation, and the bodies that run elite sports, the NCAA and the IOC and the rest, are a legitimate place to have it. I’ve said as much for years. And for what it’s worth, I think both of them folded to political pressure when they moved to shut trans women out, because nothing on the field had changed to make them. But that’s between me and the people who run sports.

This case was never about that.

By the time it got to the Supreme Court, the result was close to a formality. A year ago, in Skrmetti, the same six justices ruled that laws restricting this kind of care for trans kids only have to clear the lowest bar the law sets, the one almost nothing fails. Once that was the standard, a sports case built on the same constitutional claim was going to fall the same way. The Title IX claim was weak enough that even the court’s liberals rejected it. The court is hostile, sure. But this one was weak on its own terms, and it would have been a heavy lift in front of almost any bench. I’m not going to pretend a friendlier court would have saved it.

I can lose that argument and still tell you, flatly, that the court got it wrong. Both things are true at the same time. West Virginia passed a law that has only ever applied to one girl, and yesterday the court told the state it can keep her out. I think that’s sad, and I feel back for Becky.

The parts of this that can still be won are worth fighting for. The states that let trans kids play should keep letting them. The legislatures that protect those kids should hold the line. And when Congress tries to turn yesterday’s ruling into a national ban, which it already started with the Protect Women and Girls Act, that’s a fight worth having as loudly as we can have it.

Terry Schilling told you the plan

Terry Schilling runs the American Principles Project, one of the outfits that spent years writing and bankrolling bills like the ones the court just upheld. In early 2023, he told the New York Times what the group was really after. Its goal, he confirmed, was to do away with transition care entirely, for adults as much as for kids. Starting with kids was just, in his words, “going where the consensus is.”

He wasn’t being coy about the rest of it. That same year, lawmakers in Oklahoma and South Carolina were pushing bills to criminalize transition care for anyone under 26, felony charges included. Others, in those two states and in Kansas and Mississippi, would have drawn the line at 21. A 25-year-old isn’t a kid. Neither is a 21-year-old. The movement that swore it only wanted to protect kids was already writing adults into the bills, in 2023, where anyone reading the Times could see it.

Now here’s Schilling yesterday, in a statement his group put out to celebrate the ruling. He called it a “landmark victory for fairness and sanity.” He said girls deserve spaces “free from biological men who seek to invade them.”

The “biological man” in this case is a 16-year-old girl who throws discus.

So the same ruling that assured trans kids their “desire to compete warrants respect” is being cheered by the man who calls one of those kids an invader, whose stated goal is to end transition care for every trans person in the country, and who said so in the New York Times three years ago. Anyone who told you this was only ever about a fair race either wasn’t paying attention or was lying to you.

About those reasonable concerns

So let’s say you meant it. Your worry really was just about a fair race, or just about kids and hormones, and nothing past that. Fine. Here’s some of what’s happened while you were thinking it over.

Start with the care, since that’s supposedly where the line sat. The federal government stopped covering hormones and transition surgery for its own employees this year, at any age. It’s proposed a rule that would pull Medicare and Medicaid from any hospital that provides that care to a patient under 18, which would drive it out of most hospitals in the country. And in March, a federal appeals court let West Virginia drop transition care for adults from its Medicaid program, on the theory that it would, in the court’s words, “encourage citizens to appreciate their sex.”

Then there’s whether the government will admit you’re who you say you are. On his first day back, Trump signed an executive order defining sex as fixed at conception and ordering every federal agency to swap the word gender for the word sex. New passports now carry the sex you were assigned at birth, a policy the Supreme Court let take effect in November. The Social Security Administration stopped processing gender-marker changes. Kansas told residents it had flagged as trans that their driver’s licenses would stop being valid the next morning, no grace period.

That last part isn’t abstract for me. A license or a passport with the wrong letter on it doesn’t stay in a drawer. It comes out whenever a bouncer or a pharmacist or a TSA agent asks for ID, and I don’t go around telling strangers I’m trans. These policies do it for me, in front of whoever’s next in line, and then I get to learn in real time how that person takes the news.

It keeps going from there. Trans people in federal prison are now put through a program borrowed from Florida: hair cut short, hormones stopped, psychiatric sessions meant to talk them out of being trans. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi has told the FBI to pay for tips that lead to arresting trans activists she’s branded domestic terrorists, and the White House’s counterterrorism strategy now lists “radically pro-transgender” groups next to the cartels and terrorists it exists to stop. In the schools, the Justice Department has been demanding that districts hand over files on their trans students.

None of this is about a track meet. I could keep listing, because the real tally runs a lot longer than what fits here. But every item on it has the same hole in the middle that the sports ban does. Nobody who wrote these rules has ever answered the one question you’d ask about any new restriction before you agreed to it. What’s the problem it solves?

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Nobody’s making you say anything

That question never gets answered, and to see why, go back to what the reasonable-concerns crowd said it feared in the first place.

The fears were about words. Being forced to say “trans women are women.” Being made to say “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” or to watch the word “woman” get retired from official forms. None of that happened. And the part that should have been obvious from the start is that none of it could. There’s no law that can put words in your mouth and make you say a slogan. Nobody had that power over you, and nobody was trying to get it.

You already saw what this administration did to the word “gender.” It went into the federal code, struck it out everywhere, and put the word sex in its place (and as yesterday’s SCOTUS decision tells us, they view “sex” as whatever you were born as), effectively boxing trans people out of any legal protections at all. So if the thing that worried you was somebody with real power reaching into the language and deciding which words are allowed, your instinct wasn’t wrong. You just had the wrong culprit.

There’s an asymmetry underneath all of this, and it frustrates me. I can think of plenty of changes I’d like to see in trans people’s favor beyond just undoing the attacks against trans people that have taken place since Trump retook office. If I wanted them, the work of making the case would be mine. I’d have to show why the current rule is unfair, make the argument for a better one, and expect a real fight along the way. That’s what it’s supposed to cost to change the rules on people, and I’d consider it fair.

The other side never pays it. They never had to show that trans women were wrecking women’s sports. They never had to show that Becky’s medicine had hurt a single person, or that the letter on my license put anyone in danger. They just said the word “protect” and pointed at us.

And the press treats that as an argument. It runs the restriction as news, quotes the sponsor calling us a threat, books the segment, and never once asks him to name a person we’ve endangered. The bar for taking something from us turns out to be lower than the bar I’d face for asking to keep it.

That machine only runs because enough people who think of themselves as reasonable decided that staying quiet kept their hands clean. It didn’t.

So where are you?

I’m talking to you now. You spent the last few years telling everyone you weren’t against trans people, that you just had questions.

You were allowed the questions. Everybody had questions once. But it isn’t 2021 anymore, and the questions have answers, and the answers are sitting in a Supreme Court opinion and a stack of federal rules and a press release from a man who told the New York Times his goal was to get rid of us. This is a project with an endpoint, and the endpoint is a country where being openly trans gets harder every month, on purpose, until it isn’t possible at all.

So I want to know what you’re going to do about it. Whether you’ll say, out loud, that this has gone too far, the way you were so sure you would if it ever did. Will you use your platforms at big, mainstream news outlets, the same ones you used to help spark the moral panic about trans youth medicine and sports, to make a compassionate argument in favor of trans people and against the ongoing persecution?

Because the people you called alarmists have been right about every step of this, and most of you have met the moment they were proven right with silence.

I’d love to be wrong about you. I’d love for this to be the paragraph that ages badly, the one where I misjudged a lot of decent people who were about to find their voice. So prove me wrong. Say something now, while it’s still moving, while it still matters.

Buster Posey, the former Giants catcher who now runs their baseball operations, started with a short statement. He understood there were “strong feelings on this topic.” He understood there were “differing perspectives.” And out of respect to everybody involved, he said, this was “not something that I’m going to revisit.” Then he opened the floor. Baseball questions only.

Reporters had other ideas.

What followed went about how you’d expect from a man who’d decided ahead of time that the only safe subject was the infield. Someone asked about Pride Night. “I’ll answer baseball questions.” Someone asked again, coming at it from a different direction. “I’ll answer baseball questions.” One reporter asked him, flat out, why he’d take nothing but baseball questions when “there’s some very important matters that the public is debating outside this organization.” “I’m gonna answer baseball questions.”

He said some version of it around eight times. The reporters were probably aware that they weren’t going to break them, but I want to give them credit for trying and for being relentless about it.

My friend Darth put it on Bluesky better than I’m going to: “buster getting tougher questions from the local media than trump gets from the white house press corps.”

He’s right. And the more I think about it, the more that’s the actual story, not the caps. (Or, at least, it’s one of the stories.)

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The whole thing is Trevor Moore, sitting on a stool in front of a blank backdrop, delivering the most deadpan public service announcement you’ve ever seen. “Did you know,” he asks, “that it’s illegal to say ‘I want to kill the president of the United States of America’? It’s a federal offense. One of the only sentences you’re not allowed to say.” And then, of course, he spends the next minute saying it, over and over, in increasingly elaborate forms, while insisting the entire time that he’s only informing you that it’s illegal, not actually saying it

By the end he’s talking about mortar launchers and the best vantage point for hitting the White House and an “illustrated diagram,” each one “extremely illegal,” “ridiculously, horribly felonious,” and he’s letting you know all of this purely as a public service. The comedy is in how straight he plays it. He’s not winking. He’s basically your local news anchor warning you about a scam.

WKUK was a great show, and Moore was the engine of it. He died in 2021, at 41, after a fall from his balcony. (Fun fact, and a sad one: Zach Cregger, who made last year’s Weapons, was a founding member of the troupe alongside Moore, and he’s said in interviews that the movie came out of his grief over losing him. There’s a lot of Trevor Moore buried in that film if you know to look for it.

My favorite part, though. Moore was apparently worried enough about whether doing the bit was itself illegal that he called the ACLU to check. He told Wisconsin Public Radio about it:

“I called the ACLU and I was like, ‘Hey, am I getting in trouble for this? Is this fine? Can I do this bit?’ And they’re like, ‘We can’t advise on that kind of thing.’ But they did say, ‘If you did get in trouble, we would defend you.’ And I was like, ‘Well, OK, that’s enough for me.’”

That’s a guy doing a joke about an unspeakable sentence and quietly making sure he wasn’t about to become a test case.

And then, years later, the sketch became one anyway.

In 2010, a man named Anthony Elonis was going through a divorce, and he started posting on Facebook. Some of it was the script of Moore’s sketch, reworked so that the unspeakable sentence was about his estranged wife instead of the president. Other posts read like rap lyrics, which is what he said they were. He was convicted of making threats, and the case went all the way up. In 2015, the Supreme Court reversed his conviction, 8 to 1.

Worth getting right what he actually won, because it isn’t what you’d assume. Elonis didn’t establish a right to post a guy’s wife into a comedy bit about murder. The Court reversed on a narrower question about what’s going on in the speaker’s head. The jury at his trial had been told it only needed to find that a reasonable person would read his posts as a threat, and the justices said that bar was too low, that his own mental state had to factor in. True threats still aren’t protected speech. What the case really showed is how far the American system will bend to protect even genuinely menacing words, because it cares so much about whether you meant them. Moore, for his part, thought it was hilarious that the whole Supreme Court had to sit and watch his dumb sketch.

I think about that case a lot, and I think about it more now. Because for all the criticism I have of the United States, and living under a second Trump term, I have a great deal of it, I’m genuinely grateful for the First Amendment. I’m grateful that “I support an unpopular cause” is not, here, a sentence that can put you in a cell. Free speech is good. It’s worth protecting. And it’s worth protecting most on the days the government would rather you shut up, which, lately, is most of them.

(For the record, and for any federal employee whose job involves reading sentences like the ones a few paragraphs up: this is a column about a comedy sketch. Nothing here is a threat against anyone. I’m just letting you know what’s illegal to say. As a public service.)

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Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom…

Moore’s sketch was a joke about a country that would throw you in prison for the shape of a sentence, no matter what you meant by it. Britain has spent the last year running the real version.

Last June, activists with a group called Palestine Action broke into RAF Brize Norton and sprayed red paint on two military aircraft. That’s the kind of thing the group does, mostly property damage aimed at weapons manufacturers and military sites tied to Israel’s war in Gaza. Broken windows, spray paint. Days later, the British government, under the control of the Labour Party, proscribed it under the Terrorism Act 2000, which made it a crime not only to belong to Palestine Action but to “invite or recklessly express support” for it. The ban took effect at one minute past midnight on July 5, 2025. It was the first time a direct-action protest group had ever been classed as a terrorist organization in the UK, which dropped it, legally, into the same bucket as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

You don’t have to like Palestine Action to see the problem. Spray-painting a plane is a crime, and Britain has laws against that already. What it didn’t have, until last summer, was a rule that made it a terrorism offense to say out loud that you back the people who did it. Even the UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, called the ban a “disturbing” misuse of counterterrorism law.

And look at the word in the statute: recklessly. The whole fight in Elonis was over how sure the government has to be about what’s in your head before it can punish you for your words, and the Court raised the bar. Britain set a very, very low one. Reckless is enough.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. People have been arrested for holding cardboard signs that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” One of the first taken in, on the day the ban took effect, was Rev. Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired priest. At a single demonstration in Parliament Square last September, the Metropolitan Police arrested 890 people, 857 of them for supporting the banned group, the biggest mass arrest London had seen in decades. At an earlier protest, nearly half of the people arrested were 60 or older, and fifteen were in their 80s. More than 3,300 people have been arrested across the UK since the ban, according to Amnesty International. Terror-related arrests jumped 660% year over year, and 86% of them were tied to supporting Palestine Action. A law written for terrorists, used mostly on pensioners with poster board.

The courts have gone back and forth on it. In February, the High Court ruled the ban unlawful, calling it disproportionate and a breach of free expression. The police briefly signaled they’d stop arresting people, then started again in March anyway. And this past Monday, the Court of Appeal overturned the High Court and said the government had it right all along. They were arresting supporters outside the courthouse the same day.

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Owen Jones did the bit on live TV

Which is roughly where things stood when I watched a clip from an episode of Jeremy Vine on Channel 5. The journalist Owen Jones was on the panel, and when Palestine Action came up, he did something I recognized right away.

He started saying the sentence. “You can’t now say, ‘I support Palestine Action,’” Jones said. “That’s an illegal offense. You can’t say, ‘I support Palestine Action with all my heart.’ You can get arrested and sent to prison for 14 years for doing that.” Vine, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else, cut in: “You’re skating around it, aren’t you?” And Jones, who was not skating around anything, kept right on going. “No, I’m not. I’m saying it’s illegal to say, ‘I support Palestine Action, and they are fighting to stop a genocide.’ You can get arrested and sent to prison for 14 years for saying that. And retired vicars are now being arrested and face prosecution for holding a placard saying, ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.’ This is absurd, and everyone knows it.”

That’s the Trevor Moore bit! The exact same move: say the forbidden thing over and over while narrating, in real time, that it’s forbidden to say it. Moore was doing a joke about a law that mostly didn’t exist the way he pretended. Jones was doing it about a law that does. Vine and the other panelist spent the segment looking like the floor might open up. (I emailed Jones to ask whether he’d seen the WKUK sketch, and whether it had anything to do with his decision to try it on live daytime television. I haven’t heard back.)

Here’s what gets me, though. There’s been no shortage of hand-wringing about a “free speech crisis” in Britain. But a lot of it has been about whether men like Graham Linehan should be free to harass and threaten trans women online, not about a government arresting thousands of people for a sentence on a piece of cardboard. The loudest free-speech voices went quiet when the speech in question wasn’t theirs. That’s the tell. It always is.

And I say all of this from the United States, where the president spends his days testing how much of the First Amendment he can get away with ignoring. We’re not safe from this. The reason I can type “I support an unpopular cause” without a 14-year sentence hanging over it comes down to one amendment and a Supreme Court that, on a good day, still cares whether the government can prove what you meant. That’s the whole margin. It’s thinner than people think. Britain is what it looks like when it’s gone.

Plenty of people clocked it and got confused. Wasn’t that the woke beer? Didn’t conservatives spend the better part of 2023 shooting cases of it in the backyard?

So there was the usual round of takes. One treated the logo as proof that the outrage was always hollow, that culture-war anger has the shelf life of a gas station sandwich and nobody really means it. Another just called it hypocrisy.

I think both of those miss what actually happened and what Bud Light represents.

Yes, the logo’s there because Bud Light is UFC’s official beer, so at first glance it’s just one more logo at one more event. When Dana White got asked in 2023 about doing business with a company the right had spent months torching, he shrugged on Hannity that you take sponsorships “for the money.” Fine. And yet the same drink the right turned into the single most radioactive brand in the country is now the official beer of the most MAGA-coded sport in America, appearing in the octagon at the president’s birthday party, with not one Republican throwing a fit about it.

Why? It’s simple: They won.

The logo on that cage is the trophy. Bud Light handed over everything the right asked for in 2023. The company transformed its marketing strategy in the wake of the backlash and Trump’s eventual reelection. Out were sponsored posts on a transgender microcelebrity’s Instagram page. In came bid dollar deals with the UFC and Super Bowl ads. They relentlessly targeted and pandered to conservatives and successfully got back in the right’s good graces.

And calling it hypocrisy misunderstands the slogan they run on. “Go woke, go broke” is a threat dressed up as a market prediction. The right doesn’t sit back and wait for shoppers to punish a woke company; its influencers and politicians and pressure groups go do the punishing themselves. Bud Light is where they showed they could, and every other brand in the country got the message: this could be you. Don’t anger us. Bend the knee.

Let’s remember the Bud Light backlash

In April 2023, Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney a custom can with her face on it for a sponsored Instagram post marking a year of her transition.

This was about as small as a brand deal gets. One paid post, on Mulvaney’s own Instagram, made for the fans already following her, the kind of thing influencers sign every day of the week. Bud Light wasn’t putting her on television or making her the face of the brand. Bud Light had likely partnered with dozens if not hundreds of influencers to advertise to their own niche audiences.

It's worth getting specific about what she actually did to set off the backlash Did she say something bigoted? No. Was her content cruel, or gross, or even edgy? No. Her whole catalog was personal vlogs and day-in-the-life videos, about as harmless as online content gets. And a good chunk of the country looked at that and nodded: yep, the brand blew it by, uh, paying a trans woman to post about a beer. It'd be one thing if she were some provocateur firing off inflammatory takes all day. She wasn't. She filmed her life. The boycott needed her to have done something, and she hadn't. So being a trans woman in public had to be enough.

There was nothing she’d done. The fury was about who she is. The fury was about being angry that this company would try to advertise specifically to her audience.

The company folded hard.

Two weeks in, CEO Brendan Whitworth released a statement that managed to never say Mulvaney’s name and never defend her. “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” he offered, which is a strange thing to say about mailing someone a novelty beer can. Soon enough, Anheuser-Busch had pushed several executives out the door, including the Bud Light marketing VP who’d approved the partnership. (After that executive moved on to another job, some right-wing media outlets tried to get the outrage machine running again to drive her out of that, too.) The warning to anyone else on the payroll was easy to read: get near the wrong person and you’re the one who goes.

Modelo Especial overtook Bud Light as the best-selling beer in America, ending a run at the top that had lasted about two decades. Sales fell by nearly 30 percent year over year. That July, the company laid off around 380 U.S. workers. By the time the year was out, the boycott had cost Anheuser-Busch as much as $1.4 billion in North American sales.

Through all of it, Bud Light never once stood up for the person it had partnered with. It sidelined the marketers, went quiet, absorbed the losses, and waited for the weather to change. The whole plan was to make Dylan Mulvaney vanish from the story as fast as possible.

Going quiet was only half of it. Bud Light also chased the customers it had lost. That October, with the boycott still biting, it took the UFC sponsorship back from Modelo, the brand that had just passed it, and leaned hard into its American roots and its support for veterans and first responders. It paid off.

The welcome started at the top. In February 2024, with Bud Light’s sales still down, Trump asked his supporters on Truth Social to give the brand a “second chance,” telling them it wasn’t really a woke company after all.

Dylan Mulvaney named what the racket was for before most people did. She had gone quiet for months, scared to leave her house. Then she spoke about Bud Light directly. “For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse, in my opinion, than not hiring a trans person at all,” she said, “because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want.” The silence taught every company watching that the safe move is to cut the trans person loose and walk away. But Mulvaney was looking past the boardrooms. The hate, she said, doesn’t end with her. It has “serious and grave consequences for the rest of our community.” She was right.

@dylanmulvaneyTrans people like beer too. 🏳️‍⚧️🍻

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The lesson everyone else took

Back when the boycott was still raging, I wrote that the point was to make companies think twice before hiring a trans person for any role at any level, and that it already seemed to be working. It’s working.

This goes well beyond one beer, or even beyond trans people. The same machine swings at anything it can tag as “woke,” big or small, serious or silly: Cracker Barrel’s redesigned logo (Trump told them to change it back, and they did), Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl booking (the president called a Spanish-language halftime show a slap in the face to the country), a brief kiss between two women in a Pixar movie, Pride night at Dodger Stadium. Most people can let a movie or a halftime show that isn’t aimed at them go by. This crowd can’t. This crowd needs everything to be centered around itself. The whole project is to bend the culture to their liking and crowd everyone else out.

Point that machine at trans people and the results stack up fast. Building on the Bud Light backlash, right-wing activist Robby Starbuck turned the boycott into a business model, running one campaign after another until, by early 2025, he was claiming credit for getting more than a dozen major companies to drop their diversity and LGBTQ programs.

The corporate Pride money that used to flow every June started to evaporate. NYC Pride came up $750,000 short in 2025 as longtime sponsors slipped away, and Target gutted its diversity commitments. Matt Walsh, one of the loudest voices behind these boycotts, said the goal was to make “pride” toxic for brands. Well, congrats, Matt. I guess?

No need for a smoke-filled room. One company got made an example of, the punishment was loud, the reward was real, and every other company drew the obvious conclusion. That’s all it takes: one cautionary tale and a long memory.

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The public face

All of that is the view from the boardroom. Here’s what it costs on the other side.

Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time in 2014, the face of what the magazine called “the transgender tipping point.” This month, promoting a memoir, she took stock of what the backlash has cost her. “I’ve lost so much money because of this administration, the past year,” she told Attitude. She’d stayed busy with acting and branding, she said, but “never thought college speaking gigs would dry up.” By her own estimate, the lost work came to around 90 percent of her income. The reason she gave is the one behind all of it: “This administration is very punitive with anything that suggests ‘DEI’ or ‘gender ideology,’ and corporations have been very scared.”

Your first thought might be to write this off as celebrities whining. But like Cox and Mulvaney have said, this goes way beyond just them.

Making an example of people whose names you know is how you set the price for everyone whose names you don’t: the trans woman who doesn’t get the second interview, the regional brand that kills a campaign, the HR department that decides a trans hire is “a distraction,” the school that drops the speaker before a single parent complains. The famous losses make the news. The rest happens in hiring meetings and budget reviews nobody will ever report, which is where the real work gets done.

Mulvaney saw it. She wasn’t asking for sympathy, she said, but telling people that “if this is my experience from a very privileged perspective, know that it is much, much worse for other trans people.” The most visible casualty of the whole saga was already pointing at the ones you’d never read about.

The man in the cage

On Sunday, with Trump in the front row, a heavyweight named Josh Hokit won his fight, and during the post-fight interview, with Joe Rogan holding the mic, he turned to the camera: “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” Cheers and groans went up from the lawn. Rogan looked flustered, managed “Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Hokit,” and the broadcast moved on.

The Michelle Obama bit is a transvestigation conspiracy theory, the genre that insists this or that famous person is secretly trans. I wrote about it in 2023, when the targets were people like Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Now it’s a punchline at the president’s birthday party.

And nothing happened to him. Dana White texted TIME that he’s “completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families.” Okay. A White House spokesman waved it off: Hokit “had a great win last night.” He’d run the same bit about Brittney Griner back in January. The shtick costs him nothing, because the shtick plays now.

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What everyone agrees on

This last part is a bit of an aside, but it’s something I want to say.

The attacks on Michelle Obama have always been about racism and sexism, with transphobia bolted on. But look at the whole reaction to “Michelle Obama is a man” (by which he’s saying she’s secretly a trans woman), and you find one assumption nobody questions: that calling a woman trans is about the worst thing you can say about her. It’s all very, “Ew, gross. How could you think she’s one of them.” But I get it. As someone who is trans, I do get it. And obviously, it’s important to push back on lies about Michelle Obama (she’s not trans; she’s given birth to two kids; we have photos of her from when she was younger; this is all obvious nonsense meant to play on racist tropes about Black women looking masculine). I just wish more people went to the Lady Gaga School of Responding to Transvestigations:

I’m still doing it.

Somewhere in there, The Present Age stopped being a side project and became the thing that pays my bills. So this is a thank-you note. It’s also, fair warning, a sales pitch, because I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. New subscriptions and upgrades are 30% off right now, and I’m going to spend the next few hundred words trying to earn it.

The short version: this newsletter has no owner. Nobody can spike a piece I write, water down a headline after it’s published, or kill a story for being inconvenient to the wrong person. No billionaire, no board, no parent company. Just me and you. That’s the whole arrangement, and it’s the reason this works at all.

What I’ve done with that freedom, mostly, is write about the same handful of things over and over.

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The New York Times, for one. When the paper opened 2023 by hiring David French, a columnist who’d co-signed the 2017 Nashville Statement and once worked as an attorney for a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an anti-LGBTQ hate group, I pointed out that he was the second anti-trans voice the opinion section had brought on without a single trans columnist anywhere on staff. They’d let Jennifer Finney Boylan’s column go the year before. The math wasn’t subtle.

Then there’s the trick where outlets turn plain facts into open questions. CNN once ran a headline about Florida barring residents from changing the gender marker on their licenses and tacked on the line “Critics say the policy targets transgender people.” Critics say. As if it were a matter of opinion who that policy targets. I keep coming back to that move, right up through the way fact-checkers spent 2024 rating Project 2025 claims “false” because the document wasn’t technically written by Trump, just by the people around him.

A lot of these five years went to watching billionaires buy the press and then swear they’d keep their hands off it. When the Washington Post’s CEO pushed out his top editor and replaced her with a loyalist, he assured staff the new editor was “free to publish when, how, and what they want to.” Nobody offers that reassurance unless they’ve already made sure the answer will come out right.

And lately, the slop. After Elon Musk’s chatbot started calling itself MechaHitler and posting antisemitic garbage, NBC ran the headline “AI chatbot Grok issues apology for antisemitic posts.” I wrote that Grok apologized for nothing, because Grok is a product. The company that built it issued the statement, and writing it the other way hands Musk a shield he hasn’t earned.

Not all of it has been grim. A year and a half after the first auction collapsed, I got to write that The Onion really is taking over Infowars. Every so often, the bad guys lose one.

Every newsroom with an owner has a pressure point, a place where the right phone call gets results. A president who wants a segment gone calls the billionaire who signs the checks. An advertiser that hates a story pulls its money. A corporate parent with a merger to protect makes sure an editor understands what’s good for their career. That’s not a theory. The editor the Post forced out didn’t leave by accident; somebody up the chain wanted a tamer newsroom and got one.

None of those levers exist here. The chain of command stops at you.

That’s the trade, and I’ll be straight about it: the readers are the only people I answer to. It also means I can’t coast, because the moment you decide I’m phoning it in, you can leave. If enough of you do, this ends. I’ll take that deal over the alternative every single time.

So, the pitch I promised at the top.

If you’ve been reading for free, thank you, and please keep reading. But the paid version is what keeps this a job instead of a hobby, and it’s 30% off for new subscribers and for anyone upgrading from free. Paid gets you everything I publish and the full five-year archive, which is to say, more of what you just read. That’s the hard sell. I don’t do this often, which is probably why I’m bad at it.

Get 30% off for 1 year

And if money’s genuinely tight, email me. I’ve always set aside comp subscriptions for people who want to read and can’t swing it, and I’m not about to stop. I’d rather you read than not.

Anyway. Mostly I just want to say thanks. For reading five years of a newsletter that is, let’s be honest, me being annoyed at how the news gets told. For the corrections when I got something wrong, and for the times you sent a piece to someone who needed it. Media criticism isn’t exactly a day at the beach, and you kept showing up for it.

I wish I could tell you the stuff I cover is getting better. It isn’t. The billionaires aren’t finished, and the headlines aren’t getting more honest. There’ll be plenty to write about a year from now, and I’ll be here writing it. The only reason I can is you.

The award is named for Mike Wallace, one of the original “60 Minutes” correspondents and the kind of interviewer the powerful learned to dread. The grant money comes from CBS News. Scott Pelley handed it to him.

Campos thanked them for it. Then he kept talking. He said CBS’s recent direction “stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.” He said corporate elites were seizing “the very pipes through which our information flows.” And he finished like this: “So if at any time you hesitate to utter the word ‘genocide’ or remain silent in the face of blatant lies, remember to ask yourself, who is this for?” Then, to the room: “I hope you choose us.”

Wallace spent his career walking into rooms like that one and refusing to flinch. The award in his name had just gone to a teenager willing to aim that at CBS itself, to its face, with the network’s own check in his hand. Jeremy Barr of the Guardian reported that Campos both startled the crowd and won much of it over.

It was brave. I’ll say that plainly.

For about a year, the journalists watching CBS get hollowed out have been saying a version of what Campos said. Just not like that. They’ve said it in resignation memos and farewell broadcasts and the occasional interview, in language vague enough to keep their jobs or protect against getting blackballed elsewhere. Campos didn’t have a job to keep. So he said it the way you’d say it if you weren’t afraid, and the reaction in that room gave away how rare that’s gotten.

The long takeover

None of this started with Campos, and none of it was a secret. I’ve covered just about every step of it.

Trump sued CBS over an edited 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris and demanded $20 billion. Paramount, which needed the Trump administration to wave through its merger with Skydance, paid $16 million to make it disappear. When Stephen Colbert called that settlement a “big fat bribe” on the air, CBS canceled his show and called it a “financial decision.” Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned in April. Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News, was gone a month later.

Then the new owners made their real move. David Ellison’s Skydance took over Paramount, and Ellison, who is friendly with Trump, bought Bari Weiss’s opinion site The Free Press and installed her atop CBS News, with her former Free Press colleague Adam Rubenstein as a top deputy. In December, three hours before air, Weiss spiked a finished 60 Minutes report on the El Salvador megaprison where the administration was shipping the men it deported. It ran a month later, buried.

Weiss said the segment “was not ready.” Take her at her word for a second, then look at what “ready” has turned out to mean.

Weiss is staunchly pro-Israel, and so is the pattern she’s built. A Variety cover story on Ellison reported that one staffer believed CBS’s layoffs had fallen hardest on journalists whose work was critical of Israel, among them the veteran foreign correspondent Debora Patta, who’d reported from Gaza for years. The New York Post reported that Weiss pulled a pro-Israel correspondent off the layoff list after he lobbied to become the network’s Israel correspondent, and cut Patta instead, months after Patta’s interview with Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, drew his complaint that CBS had edited his words unfairly. And Zeteo reported that Weiss personally reworked a CBS Sunday Morning story about Israeli digs in the occupied West Bank just before it aired, something staffers said she’d never done to that broadcast before.

This is the context for the word Campos chose. In September, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza (Israel rejected the finding). So when an 18-year-old stood on a CBS stage and dared the room to say “genocide,” he was reaching for the exact word the network had trained its people not to say.

Notice how all of it got described. A finished report “wasn’t ready.” Killing a late-night show was “a financial decision.” Every move came wrapped in language built to mean as little as possible. For a year, nobody inside CBS said the plain thing out loud. And then, last week, somebody did.

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Then Pelley said it too

Scott Pelley had handed Campos that award only days earlier, and told the room, “God, we need young people like you right behind us.”

On Monday, the staff of 60 Minutes gathered to meet the new boss Weiss had chosen to run the show: Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist and author who has never produced television news. Bilton said Weiss “loves” 60 Minutes. Pelley cut him off. “She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” he said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s doing exactly that.” He said it in a closed meeting, on audio that Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter obtained.

Then he kept going, the way Wallace might have. He told Bilton, to his face, that he had “slender” qualifications for the job. He pressed him on the firings of the week before, when Weiss cleared out much of the show, and called the way they’d been handled “cruel.” When Weiss’s deputy Charles Forelle told Pelley he was being “rude,” Pelley shot back that what was rude was “Black Thursday.” The other producers in the room applauded him. Afterward, some of them wondered whether he would resign.

Here’s what makes Pelley worth pausing on. A year ago he gave a commencement speech at Wake Forest that went viral, anchored to a line from George Orwell, carved into the wall of the BBC, that liberty “means telling someone something that they don’t want to hear.” He warned those graduates about “the fear to speak in America.” Last week, on the Emmy stage, an 18-year-old did the exact thing Pelley had described, told a room what it didn’t want to hear, at his own expense, and Pelley applauded him for it. Now Pelley’s doing it himself.

That’s what it looks like when someone stops hinting. It’s loud, and it’s rare. Almost nobody else has managed it.

Others spoke in increasingly unsubtle code

Go back through the year with that in mind, and you can watch people try to say it without saying it.

From a Status article about some of the comments from departing CBS Newsers:

While Ellison might wish to ignore the meltdown at “60 Minutes”—a crisis instigated by his handpicked leader of CBS News—that is becoming increasingly difficult. Indeed, Pelley and Owens are not alone in describing the health of the iconic program in dire terms. Anderson Cooper delivered a not-so-subtle message to management when he exited the program. Sharyn Alfonsi warned that the “wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down.” Cecilia Vega accused the company of “censorship” and said it is “dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.” And the legendary “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft said that the program had been “executed” by Donald Trump, who has put enormous pressure on CBS News and parent company Paramount to muzzle the program.

Scott MacFarlane, the network’s justice correspondent, left in March. His public note thanked his bosses and talked about chasing “personal goals.” What had actually happened, as Jeremy Barr reported, was that MacFarlane, who’d covered January 6 for years, watched CBS mark the fifth anniversary with a brief, both-sided shrug, then posted his own old BBC segment about that day the next morning, which read as the goodbye he couldn’t put in the memo. “Personal goals” and “they both-sided an insurrection I covered for years” are the same complaint said two ways.

Lesley Stahl is still on staff, so her version stayed systemic. On the New Yorker Radio Hour she called Trump’s lawsuit baseless and said she was angry at Shari Redstone for settling it, then went a step past that: the whole situation, she said, “makes me question whether any corporation should own a news operation.” She blamed the structure, carefully, without pointing at any one spiked story. That’s what you do when you still have to show up there.

By the time Sharyn Alfonsi spoke up, her contract was already lapsing, and she got specific. She called her own treatment a “deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting,” and warned people not to be fooled when the purge got dressed up as “modernization” or “restructuring.”

Line them up and it’s obvious. The further someone got from the paycheck, the plainer they got. Every name here had something to protect, a contract, a career, so they reached for words that couldn’t be used against them. The code was fear, the ordinary kind that belongs to people who can’t yet afford to be right out loud. And the fact that this many careful, decorated journalists felt they had to whisper it tells you how big the thing is they were whispering about.

Which brings it back to the one person in the room who wasn’t whispering, and didn’t have to.

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Why he could say it

Start with where Campos was standing.

He’s eighteen, a senior at a public school in Washington, about to leave for college. The scholarship is a one-time check, not a contract. He doesn’t have a beat to lose or a future at CBS to protect, because he was never angling for one. The network has something to hold over everybody we just met: a paycheck, a next assignment that comes or doesn’t. It has nothing to hold over a kid who’s only passing through.

He wasn’t trying to detonate the evening, either. “I knew it was kind of what I had to do,” he told Barr, and he’d run the gist of his remarks past the television academy beforehand, so it wasn’t an ambush. He used the moment anyway, with CBS’s money already in hand.

And he saw the asymmetry clearly. Asked about the response, he told the Guardian that all the attention mostly proved how far the bar has dropped, that what he said should be ordinary, the kind of thing working journalists do every day rather than something left to an 18-year-old at a podium. He’s right, and he put it better than I could.

His own statement afterward said the rest. He believes in journalism made for ordinary people instead of elites, and that it starts with “the audacity and integrity to call out the same organization funding my award.” Reporters who can’t manage that much, he wrote, can’t be trusted at all.

That’s the whole asymmetry. The word he reached for, “genocide,” named exactly what CBS had been editing around. He could say it because he wants nothing the network is in a position to withhold. The fear Pelley named at Wake Forest belongs to people with something to lose inside the building. Campos was never inside it.

This was never only about CBS. Weiss is running her conservative, “anti-woke” Free Press politics through one of the most trusted names in American news, and CBS isn’t the only outlet bending toward whatever keeps its owners and the administration comfortable. ABC wrote Trump a settlement check. The Washington Post’s opinion page went quiet under Jeff Bezos. It’s the pattern I keep coming back to: the people who own the news deciding what the news is allowed to be.

The candidate, Democrat James Talarico, is cisgender and heterosexual. Miller knew that, and reached for “transgender” anyway, because he wanted an insult and that was the one he grabbed. The DNC had posted a photo of Talarico with the line “Fired up. Ready to go. It’s time to take back Texas,” and Miller quote-tweeted it: “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.”

The DNC wrote back: “shut up you ugly fuck.”

And then the fainting started.

Katie Miller, Stephen’s wife, went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox show and warned that the DNC’s five-word insult was “the same violent political rhetoric that is leading people to shooting up, whether it be the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or President Trump in Butler.” A party account told her husband to shut up, and she heard gunfire.

This is the household, remember, where Stephen Miller calls the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” and promises the government will “dismantle and destroy” what he labels the left’s terror networks. He talks about taking the opposition apart with the power of the state. His wife thinks the word “ugly” is how people end up shot. They’re married to each other.

The press found the cursing genuinely newsworthy. Mediaite reported that the DNC “wildly berates” a Trump official, as though the wild thing that happened this week was somebody typing “fuck.”

There’s an old tweet that explains all of this better than I can. It’s gone now, I think deleted along with the account that posted it, but it went around for years. In 2019, a user going by PissJugTycoon (yes, I know, lol) wrote:

I dated a 5’8 guy who’d taunt every jacked, 6’3 bro he met until they’d pull their fist back to beat him up, whereupon my ex would go “heyheyheyyy c’maahn I’m little guy, I’m just a little guyy, noo, it’s also my birthday, I’m a little birthday boyy” & it somehow always worked

That’s the move, start to finish. You go looking for the fight. You poke and poke until the other guy finally pulls his arm back, and then, right when it might actually cost you something, you crumple into the little guy. I’m just a little guy. It’s my birthday. You wouldn’t hit a little birthday boy. And it works, because now the big guy is the one who looks bad for almost swinging at someone so pitiful.

The whole Republican Party runs this play. Its officials spend their days saying genuinely vicious things about entire categories of people who can’t hit back, and the moment one of them takes a single insult from someone who can, out comes the birthday boy: the wounded innocence, the lecture about civility, the warning that words like this get people killed. The performance has one purpose, and it’s to make your swing the only blow anyone remembers seeing.

Whatever happened to “fuck your feelings”?

Getting the other guy to lower his fist is only half the move. The other half is the part where it turns out his feelings are precious and yours were never really feelings at all.

Another tweet lost to time, this one from 2018, put it as well as anyone has. User KrangTNelson wrote:

no no no you misunderstood. I said “fuck YOUR feelings”. MY feelings are very important and must be handled gently, like a tiny baby hummingbird

They sold this, by the way. Literally. “Fuck Your Feelings” went on T-shirts and got run up flagpoles starting in 2016, and “Make Liberals Cry Again” went on hats. For the better part of a decade, the brand was simple: other people’s hurt feelings were funny, and the tears of your opponents were the whole point.

So which of these tough customers turned out to have the tiny baby hummingbird for a heart? Stephen Miller. The man who took children from their parents at the border and built the current deportation machine. His whole career is an argument that some people’s suffering doesn’t register. And his were the feelings that had to be cradled, live on Fox, because a political party was rude to him.

The hummingbird routine works fine, as long as nobody looks too closely at how these same people talk about everyone who isn’t Stephen Miller.

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The stuff that doesn’t count as uncivil

Start with Randy Fine, the Republican congressman from Florida. When photographs went around of Palestinians starving in Gaza, his response was “Hey Muslim terrorists, cry harder. #StarveAway.” He’s called Muslim members of Congress “terrorists,” and when people demanded he apologize, he said, “Boo hoo.” He’s also offered that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” and confirmed he meant the dog (no one was seriously suggesting anyone needed to choose between the two). He said that “mainstream Muslims” should be “destroyed.” The movement that produced him spent this week clutching itself over the word “fuck.”

Then there’s the president. In December, closing out a cabinet meeting, Donald Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage,” said “they contribute nothing,” and told the room “I don’t want them in our country.” His cabinet cheered and applauded; the vice president pumped his fist, and the defense secretary said, “Well said.” Within days, federal agents were moving through Somali neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.

Then there’s the way they talk about trans people. At CPAC, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” and when that went over badly, explained that it wasn’t a call to harm anyone, because in his telling trans people don’t really exist to begin with. His Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh calls the trans movement “the greatest evil our country faces.”

In a congressional hearing, Representative Nancy Mace, who calls herself a “proud transphobe,” shouted “Tranny, tranny, tranny! I don’t really care“ and said she wouldn’t be lectured by “men who have mental health issues dressing as women.” Stephen Miller reaches for almost the same words, calling trans troops “men in dresses pretending to be women.” When the deputy White House chief of staff and a sitting congresswoman land on the identical sneer, you’re looking at the house style. And nobody on the right worried that “eradicated” might be the kind of word that gets people hurt.

That move, taking a whole category of people and turning it into the insult, is the one that started this. Miller called Talarico “transgender” as a slur; Trump decided Chuck Schumer “used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” The insult is built to land on everyone in the group at once.

None of it summoned a civility brigade. There were no fainting couches for the starving, the deported, or the eradicated. Every one of these landed on people with no way to answer back, and the right’s tender new concern for everyone’s tone switched on at the exact moment the target was a powerful man who could.

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Alfonsi has been a correspondent at 60 Minutes since 2015. Her contract at CBS expired Saturday. The network didn’t renew it. Her agent’s calls went unreturned, she said, so she went to the Times instead.

“It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” she told the Times. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”

Bari Weiss is using CBS News to launder her conservative “anti-woke” politics as mainstream journalism. The brand has to keep functioning for the laundering to work, so the people who’d report stories Weiss doesn’t want aired have to go. Alfonsi is the latest. She named the project on the record before they could close the door behind her.

She’s not resigning. “If they want me gone because I did my job, they’ll have to fire me.”

The first refusal

In December, Alfonsi had a 60 Minutes segment ready on conditions inside El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where the Trump administration was sending Venezuelan men it had deported. CBS had already started promoting the piece. Three hours before broadcast, Weiss pulled it.

Alfonsi sent an internal memo, which leaked (because of course it did). She wrote that the segment had been “screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.” Pulling it, she said, was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Weiss said the story “was not ready”. One of her objections, per NYT’s Grynbaum: the segment lacked an on-camera interview with Stephen Miller, the architect of the deportation policy.

Stephen Miller doesn’t sit for accountability interviews about his own deportation policy. Weiss knew that. Demanding one was the mechanism for spiking the piece, dressed in editorial standards language. If Miller declines, the spiking gets a defensible reason. If he accepts, a segment about what the policy did to people becomes a debate about whether those people deserved it. Alfonsi’s reporting goes nowhere either way. The laundering mechanism in miniature.

The segment aired in January, with administration comments tacked on the front. Same reporting, same conclusions, slightly less inconvenient timing for the White House. If the story really wasn’t ready in December, what changed by January? Nothing, except the news cycle had moved.

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This isn’t the first person at CBS to be shown the door

Bill Owens went first. April 2025. The longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned, telling the staff he “would not be allowed to run the show” as he had before. This was before Weiss arrived. Owens saw what was coming.

Then Colbert. July 2025. CBS canceled The Late Show days after Colbert called Paramount’s $16 million Trump settlement a “big fat bribe.” The network said it was a “financial decision,” which it absolutely was not. The show went dark earlier this month.

Then Anderson Cooper. February 2026. Cooper announced he was leaving 60 Minutes after 20 years. In his farewell broadcast this month, he told viewers he hoped 60 Minutes “remains 60 Minutes.” Then this swipe at CBS: “The independence of 60 Minutes has been critical. The trust it has with viewers is critical to the success of 60 Minutes.”

Now Alfonsi.

The numbers tell the same story. CBS Evening News, the centerpiece of Weiss’s redesign, just had its lowest April in the 25-54 demo on record. Year over year, NBC was up in both. ABC was up in viewers. CBS was the only network down across the board. It dropped 7% in viewers and 18% in the demo. CBS Mornings posted its worst Q1 on record.

Weiss told staff in January that “winning isn’t about ratings”.

She’s preparing to remake 60 Minutes next. The show’s viewership is up 9% this season, per Nielsen. It’s the only CBS News property growing. And now…?

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Keep the show, remove the journalism

Per the Times, Weiss is considering hiring an outside journalist to oversee or work alongside Tanya Simon, the executive producer of 60 Minutes. Simon, daughter of the late 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon, has been at the show for 25 years. The current correspondents, Alfonsi among them, asked CBS to give her the job last year. Weiss may put someone over her anyway.

Weiss’s deputy is already in place. Adam Rubenstein, a conservative former New York Times opinion editor who worked at The Free Press, joined her at CBS as her No. 2. During a January meeting about the CECOT story, Alfonsi reportedly snapped at Rubenstein: “You don’t get to produce me.” A Free Press opinion editor was giving production notes to a 60 Minutes correspondent. Welcome to the new chain of command.

Weiss is also planning “60 Minutes” live events, modeled on The New Yorker Festival, where viewers could meet correspondents like Lesley Stahl. Whoever’s still around by then.

All three are pieces of the same project. The brand stays intact. The infrastructure underneath it gets rebuilt to meet Weiss and Paramount owner David Ellison’s ideological goals. That’s what makes the laundering work at scale.

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What “looks like 60 Minutes” actually means

Back to Alfonsi’s line: a broadcast that “looks like 60 Minutes” but doesn’t have “the courage or the character.” Next season the show will still be on. The watch will still tick. Lesley Stahl will still introduce segments. The graphics will still say 60 Minutes. The form will be preserved.

What gets removed is what the show was. The reporter who knows where the story is. The producer who fights for the air date. The executive producer who pushes back when the boss wants the architect of a deportation policy invited on for balance.

The audience won’t notice right away. They’ll just sense, over time, that the segments have less bite. They’ll wonder why nothing 60 Minutes airs ever seems to move anything anymore. They aren’t supposed to realize what’s happened: the show is now the delivery vehicle for the same instincts that drove the Jamie Reed coverage in 2023 and the CECOT spike in December, wrapped this time in CBS News stationery. Weiss’s politics couldn’t move policy through The Free Press the way they will through CBS. That’s the entire point of being at CBS.

In September 2025, when ICE agents began rolling through Chicago neighborhoods as part of an operation the Department of Homeland Security called Operation Midway Blitz, the city’s residents needed someone to tell them what was happening. Not federal officials, who would refuse to disclose who was being arrested or why. Not the White House, whose press releases ran the propaganda, not the receipts. Just a reporter willing to stand outside a courthouse, count the unmarked vehicles, and write down what she saw.

Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom that covers neighborhoods most legacy outlets ignore, had four reporters shot with pepper balls and tear-gassed by federal agents at a Broadview detention facility. It joined other Chicago news organizations in suing the Department of Homeland Security over First Amendment violations. They put up “know your rights” guides, launched a WhatsApp channel for ICE updates, partnered with other Chicago newsrooms to track sightings on Signal. Their analysis of federal ICE data eventually showed that more than 60 percent of ICE arrests in Illinois did not involve a criminal charge or conviction.

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It started at the University of Central Florida, on May 8, at the ceremony for the College of Arts and Humanities and the Nicholson School of Communication and Media. The speaker was Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Development Company, a Florida real estate firm. She’d been going for a few minutes, working through the usual commencement throat-clearing about how change is scary but also exciting, when she arrived at this: “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.”

The room booed her.

Not a scattered grumble. A real, rolling wave of it, loud enough that she stopped, turned around, and stood there with her hands out, trying to work out what had gone wrong. “Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. “May I finish?” Somewhere in the crowd, a graduate yelled “AI sucks.” She pushed on, reached the line “only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” and the room cheered. They were cheering, at a graduation, for the memory of a world that existed before ChatGPT. Caulfield, rattled now, called it “a bipolar topic,” and a minute later, getting booed again, settled on a reading of the moment that let her keep her feet: “I love it. Passion, let’s go.”

That weekend, it was Scott Borchetta’s turn. Borchetta founded Big Machine Records, the label that put out Taylor Swift’s early albums, and he was the commencement speaker at Middle Tennessee State University, where some of the graduates in front of him were collecting degrees from its Scott Borchetta College of Media and Entertainment. He told them “AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” and the room booed. Borchetta’s answer was not Caulfield’s. “Deal with it,” he said. “It’s a tool. Make it work for you.” To the people still booing him, he added: “Hear me now or pay me later.”

Then, the next week, it happened again! Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, gave the commencement address at the University of Arizona on May 15, and the graduates booed him too, loudest every time he turned to AI. Arizona is the messy example of the three. Students there had spent weeks organizing against Schmidt’s appearance over a sexual assault lawsuit filed by his former partner, and the booing started well before he got to AI at all. UCF and MTSU are cleaner. But the throughline holds across all of them: stand up in front of a graduating class in 2026, tell them their future runs on AI, and a good chunk of the room will let you know exactly what they think of that.

There’s something clarifying about a boo! It’s not a subtle instrument. Nobody has ever had to wonder what a few thousand people booing in unison were trying to get across. A boo has nothing in it to misread, no second meaning tucked behind the first. It isn’t really language. It’s volume aimed at a person, and it means no.

So let’s talk about it.

The students aren’t confused

The simplest part first: the students were right. Being right here didn’t take any special insight. They are about to graduate into a labor market that sucks and has been getting worse for years for people exactly like them, and they have noticed.

Madison Fuentes graduated from UCF this month with a degree in creative writing, and she told the Orlando station News 6 what was behind the booing: “I don’t think that kids are having a hard time accepting it because we know that AI exists. I think we’re just having a hard time acknowledging that it’s taking away job opportunities from us.” Fuentes and her classmates use AI. They’ve used it for years; about half of Gen Z uses generative AI at least weekly. The booing came from people who know the technology well and have done the math on what it means for them. The numbers are on their side, too. The education company Cengage found that just 30% of last year’s graduates landed full-time work, down from 41% the year before.

And the people building AI know all of this.

In April, the New York Times ran a piece by Jasmine Sun headlined “Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass,” about the mood inside the industry. Sun’s sources, she wrote, were a lot grimmer about AI and jobs in private than they were on the record. They “suddenly became optimists once I turned on the mic.”

While I was working on this, Brian Merchant published a piece at his excellent newsletter, Blood in the Machine (named after his book on the Luddites), that opens on the very same UCF clip. His argument, in short, is that the anger at AI is mostly anger at capitalism: AI has become the most visible face of an economy that was already stacked against the people now graduating into it, and the students booing understand that just fine. He makes that case better than I’m going to, and if it’s the case you came for, go read him. What I want to do here is follow the boo a little further, out of the auditorium and into the hands of the people who decided what it meant.

Blood in the Machine

AI as the new avatar of American capitalism

When a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida intoned that “AI is the next industrial revolution,” she was met with a chorus of thundering boos from the graduating students in attendance. The mass disapproval left the orator, Gloria Caulfield, Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company, flustered and unmoo…

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2 months ago · 183 likes · 18 comments · Brian Merchant

The room read her fine

Some of the write-ups of the Schmidt speech had him failing to “read room on AI.” Orlando Weekly called Caulfield’s line “ill-timed.” Plenty of the coverage was sharper than that, but the reflex was consistent: the booing was a misjudgment, a speaker who’d gotten her audience wrong.

I think that phrase is doing more work than it looks like.

I’d argue that “read the room” is a phrase mostly about delivery. It assumes the speech itself was basically fine and the speaker just aimed it badly, at the wrong crowd on the wrong day. Get the aim right and the speech lands. That’s the entire theory of the phrase. So does it hold up here? Is there a version of “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution” that a room of about-to-graduate humanities majors stands up and cheers for? Maybe. What’s the line a better-calibrated Caulfield delivers instead?

I don’t think there is one, because there’s really no gentle way to tell a graduating class that the economy is being rebuilt to need fewer of them. They heard the content. They heard it correctly. The delivery was never the problem.

And the boos were serious, and specific. Watch the rest of Caulfield’s speech and you find that her actual closing message, the inspirational note she chose to leave a room of arts and communications graduates with, was that “communication is a superpower.” Her example was Magic Johnson, and the story of how he once talked Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz into a business partnership. That was the send-off: here is how a person persuades a CEO. Houda Eletr, a UCF graduate quoted by Orlando Weekly, called Caulfield a “corporate mouthpiece.” Oof!

When “read the room” runs out, there’s always “Luddite,” a word that pulls the same trick: it turns a person with an objection into a person who’s just scared of machines. (Read Merchant’s book to better understand who the Luddites actually were, please.) Either way, the move is the same. Make the booing a feeling, a failure of manners or nerve, anything but a judgment.

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Don’t worry about it

It was interesting to watch how the people actually being booed responded to it live, while it was still happening to them. Mostly, what they did was reassure the room. (Borchetta, telling a booing crowd to “deal with it,” was the blunt exception.) And the AI industry keeps two reassurances on hand.

Schmidt’s was the more sophisticated one. He didn’t pretend the fear wasn’t there. He named it, and named it accurately: he told the Arizona graduates he could hear them, that they were afraid the machines were coming and the jobs “evaporating.” And he agreed the fear was “rational.” Then, in the same breath, he told them where it comes from. The fear, he said, is “amplified every day by social media platforms with algorithms that have learned with great precision that fear earns clicks and that anxiety drives engagement.”

A man who ran Google for a decade told a stadium of young people that their dread about the tech industry is real, then placed the source of that dread inside their own phones.

The second reassurance is for when the first one won’t hold, when the job losses get too concrete to wave off as a feeling. Then the answer becomes: don’t worry, there will be a safety net. And the safety net the industry reaches for, every time, is universal basic income.

UBI is a strange thing to keep promising, because it is close to the least likely policy in American life to actually happen. This is a country whose politics include a durable, bipartisan enthusiasm for drug-testing welfare recipients and arguing over whether food stamps should be allowed to cover soda. UBI gets named the way you make a vague promise to a kid who won’t stop asking. It’s there to close the subject, and most of the time it works.

The industry’s own behavior gives the game away. Sun’s piece describes the Democratic pollster David Shor laying out polling for a room of AI workers: universal basic income tests badly, while a federal jobs guarantee is much more likely. A safety-net policy that could actually pass exists; it just isn’t the one the industry names. Part of that, I believe, is because once you start talking about a jobs guarantee, you have to start addressing what these jobs look like.

The two reassurances don’t fit together, and the contradiction is total. One treats the fear as a glitch your feeds installed in you. The other treats the fear as accurate, and promises a fix. The industry never reconciles them. It just reaches for whichever one the moment calls for. Either way, the boo gets answered without being answered.

Then it became a word

When the AI backlash throws off another clip, another viral moment, the people whose job is to explain things go to work. I’m one of them. And one of the moves the job reaches for, again and again, is to give the thing a name.

The name that’s gotten attached to it is “AI populism.” The phrase itself isn’t new, but the definition everyone’s been quoting is Sun’s. She defined it, in her newsletter, as a worldview that treats AI as an elite political project: something tech billionaires are pushing onto an unwilling public in the service of layoffs and surveillance, with the question of whether the tools actually work treated as beside the point. It’s a sharp definition, and it spread fast. By early May, “A.I. Populism Is Here” was a New York Times headline. And then, the way these things go, the term became an argument about the term: Merchant pushed back on it, and pointed to the writer David Karpf doing the same, on the grounds that it lumps very different people together and makes their objection sound more paranoid than it is.

@jasmine’s substack

🌻 AI populism's warning shots

Sam Altman was targeted by two violent attacks in the last four days. First on Friday, when a man threw a Molotov cocktail into his home, and second yesterday, when two others shot at his door. Nobody was hurt in either case. Still, these acts are horrifying. Most of the AI safety intelligentsia—including some of Altman’s…

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4 months ago · 519 likes · 61 comments · Jasmine Sun

Underneath all of that, the question had changed. It had been whether the students were right. It became what to call them.

The students had made an argument. The commentary turned the argument into a category, and then turned the category into a debate about the category: whether “AI populism” is too broad a net, whether it condescends to the people it describes. None of that is stupid, and some of it I’d defend. But it is, unmistakably, the sound of an event being processed into a topic. A boo is a boo. “AI populism” is a panel discussion. (In fairness, this essay is one too.)

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A boo with no teeth

So, the question. What can a boo actually do?

On the evidence here, not much. Nobody had to suppress it. Nobody cut a microphone or stopped a single graduate from booing. The boos were loud, they were clear, they went viral, and none of that mattered, because loud and clear and viral isn’t the same as having leverage. Send a boo through all three rooms and what comes out the other end is everything except a reason for anyone to do anything differently.

None of it took malice. Nobody in any of those rooms set out to neutralize a class of angry graduates; they just did the jobs they already had, and the jobs, run end to end, do the neutralizing on their own. Schmidt had told the graduates that “when someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.” They booed him through most of the speech. He finished it, and the evening cost him nothing. Caulfield stood in front of thousands of people rejecting her and decided, out loud, that what she was hearing was “passion.”

The industry knows the difference between a boo and a threat. In Sun’s reporting, the Palantir CEO Alex Karp warned a panel that “the country could blow up politically.” He wasn’t talking about graduates booing. In April, someone tried to firebomb Sam Altman’s home; someone else is accused of shooting at an Indianapolis official who had voted for a data center. Those are crimes, and they are also the version of the backlash the industry takes seriously. A boo is the other version, the civil one, the kind that fits inside a thirty-second clip. It is also the most forceful thing a stadium of twenty-two-year-olds can actually do.

So the students were right, and they were heard. Unfortunately, it probably won’t matter.

If you made it this far, you've earned a little something. During the same stretch of graduations, Glendale Community College in Arizona let an AI system read its graduates' names at commencement. It skipped dozens of them. I went through and edited together a little video of the mishap. Enjoy!