Speaking of Epstein, Mundy has some thoughts on him. Notably, he wants you to stop talking about the billionaire pedophile with deep connections to the people who run our country. You’ll have to forgive me for this next part, because the assertion that anybody needs to ‘shut their mouth about Epstein’ in the year 2026 is frankly disgusting on multiple levels. The people and power structures that let Epstein operate are unchanged to this day. In fact, they continue to make the world a worse place as revenge on those who dared to speak up about Epstein. The following is a polite argument for some reasons that you should not ‘shut your mouth about Epstein’, despite what certain people say.

It’s not like Epstein is some distant cryptid to the communities DAP claims to care so much about. Epstein managed the finances of Columbus based retail mogul and Ohio’s richest man, Les Wexner for two decades. Wexner has deep financial ties with Ohio State and had a hand in covering up sexual abuse that took place at the university by Dr. Richard Strauss. This has led to victims of Strauss at Ohio State to publicly come out in support of Epstein’s victims, not just due to disgust with his crimes, but also with the understanding that what Epstein did was only possible because of the same people that let their abuse go unpunished for years.

Wexner has ingrained himself with the Buckeye State through significant financial investments, donating at one time over $160 million in support of the Columbus Foundation. This foundation invests in various projects around Ohio’s capitol, although Wexner’s contributions seem to have focused mostly on Ohio State. The same Ohio State recently opened an investigation into Epstein’s payment of at least $100,000 and multiple expensive packages to the university’s Head of Gynecology, Mark B. Landon. Wexner was paying LeBron money to keep the LeBron James of international pedophiles on his roster.

It’s one thing to be this flippant about people who dare to mention Epstein if you know that people in your community aren’t affected. It’s another to build your entire brand off of protecting children from pedophiles and not even be aware of how long the top dog was operating in your own backyard. These are people in Ohio that have names and addresses out there. They are extremely powerful and they have not been stopped.

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In the months since I put out my video on Dads Against Predators, a lot has happened to the group and not all of it has developed necessarily to their advantage. A string of arrests, missed court dates, and the impending launch of a video platform have come together to put DAP on dangerous footing. Will this bring the group a new found sense of purpose or a simply hasten a downfall already in motion?

As a brief refresher, Dads Against Predators is the organization/media brand that’s responsible for all those videos you see of dumb guys being yelled at and slapped in parking lots by slightly less dumb guys. They go on apps like Grindr pretending to be 13 year olds so they can expose the men that want to meet up, so they’re also helping the closeted community by giving another plausible reason someone might find Grindr downloaded on your phone.

DAP was founded by Joshua Mundy and Jay Carnicom, both of whom can probably best be described as a different version of what Colonel Sanders would be like if he owned a franchise of Methadone clinics. They decided that the best way to keep their pedo hunting adventures going was to paywall about half the videos and not release the names of these creeps in all but a few cases. This was my main problem with them in my initial video, that they claim moral superiority for taking on this imminent threat while treating it like a Netflix original. Actually according to Mundy it’s more like a PBS original, based on his understanding that PBS is something you pay a monthly subscription for

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If it wasn’t clear how seriously DAP takes the mission of exposing pedophiles, there is a physical book that Mundy possesses with the names and faces of supposed predators they have caught. I can’t get any more info on this mysterious book unfortunately, the Instagram post featuring it was deleted for some reason. Why he isn’t able to just release this Pedonomicon baffles me because it’s not even like he’s selling this thing.

This is all while Josh and Jay have managed to get in a lot more trouble with the law over their general ineptitudes at the job they’ve had for the past 5 years. These include Great Depression Hobo Classics such as kicking a car for no reason and skipping town after a court hearing. The reasons they get in legal trouble aren’t even for harming the predators, it’s just for being so stupid that they can’t manage their own calendar or resist the possibility of slightly grazing someone’s fender.

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I don’t think Graham Platner style guys are the future of politics in this country. Like I said before, he’s basically a caricature of what Democratic strategists try to look for in every district, just with stronger opinions and Dumb Guy Swag. On top of that, he’s remarkably skilled at finding new ways to keep his profile up.

Not only has the tattoo scandal mostly evaporated, it seems like he’s expanding his presence into more apolitical spaces. The fact he was able to get a livestream with World of Warcraft streamer Bajheera and speed runner TriHex, both of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers, is impressive and slightly baffling. These aren’t political streamers from what I can tell, they just came to some mutually beneficial agreement for cross promotion that furthered their interests. I feel the spirit of Mao’s war time opium smuggling operations in the image below, if not in the political struggle, then at least in the amount of opiates.

This resilience is not due to Platner’s stellar bona fides, it’s his first time running for public office and his resume continues to raise questions. The truth of the matter is that a candidate with all his specific flaws is perfectly suited to the current electoral environment. His opponent is an elderly establishment Democrat, his policy positions are definitively to the left of the party, and the revelations about his past fit do not hit as hard as they would have even 5 years ago.

By that last one, I mean that the punch of being associated with the term ‘Nazi’ in American politics is not the haymaker it used to be. Think about how the term ‘Nazi’ has evolved since Trump’s first term. Between Richard Spencer’s victory night speech and Charlottesville, association with the extreme right was almost always shunned by Trump. Even the ‘very good people on both sides’ comment post-Charlottesville was barely a nod to the polo-clad protesters who just risked their professional careers to be photographed supporting their president.

It was a massive PR disaster for the ‘Alt-Right’ faction. The next few years after Charlottesville saw the out and out white nationalists in full retreat. Richard Spencer wouldn't get any cushy interviews and allies in the White House like Steve Bannon were given the boot. Associations with the brand were extremely toxic but got less so as Trump began regrouping for a third run in 2024.

Fast forward to 2024. The far right in the Republican Party is on the rise yet again, but pointing out their Nazi ties is not that shocking anymore. Part of this from how obvious it was, but another was fatigue from Trump’s first term, when the threat of creeping authoritarianism was seen as mostly overblown. The third key part of it was the term ‘Nazi’ being actively undercut by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as the domestic opponents of it (mostly college students) were being slapped with the label.

Not only does this devalue the term the same way any term would be from over use, it undercuts one of the last direct reminders of the horrors committed by Nazi Germany in the public consciousness. Israel, the state created as a direct result of the Holocaust, is not only committing a genocide, but using accusations of Nazi sympathy to justify it. This is not to say people are becoming virulently antisemitic because of what is happening in Gaza, rather that the rhetoric just isn’t going to move them as much in one way or another. As my 8th grade computer science teacher once said unprompted to our class for some reason: “the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy”.

Restoring the impact of calling someone a Nazi is really difficult once it starts being used against people that are calling for an end to ethnic cleansing. Even without what Israel has been doing over the past two years, I think ideas that this tattoo would knock Platner out of the race would be misplaced. World War II ended over 80 years ago and the post war prosperity only exists as the vague basis for the current economy.

Unless it’s linked to a contemporary issue, I have a hard time seeing Platner’s potential voters really caring that much. The immediate reaction of many that thought Platner’s career was over once the tattoo pictures came out betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of how much of America actually thinks and has thought about World War II’s European antagonists.

See, Nazis are pretty well established as the ultimate evil in popular imagination, but that image of Nazis in the popular imagination comes with a few caveats. Without a somewhat detailed understanding of what lead to the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the men involved in it can easily seem near mythical. Obviously the success of Hitler in conquering Europe was not due to any near-superhuman adeptness on the part of him or his generals, but the results were extraordinary none the less.

This is why I always find it tiresome when things like Operation Paperclip or the Nazi generals that served in NATO are brought up as if they’re scandalous revelations about America’s past that were being actively hidden up until now. The reality is that most people knew about it even at the time, and simply did not mind. As long as they had *some* plausible deniability, the public would generally tolerate ex-Nazis. As most of these Nazis died off, it went from an acceptable resume to a relatively lighthearted criticism of the US government that was good for a quick joke if NASA ever came up. Hell, Marvel made an entire movie and TV show that assumed the viewer would at least be vaguely aware of Operation Paperclip to quickly explain the villain.

I’m not even limiting myself to the West here, there were plenty of Nazis that found themselves working with the Soviets post war, including the field marshal who commanded German troops at Stalingrad. I think the fact that Russia and Ukraine, countries devastated far more by the war than America, both have large militant groups that take after the Nazis should be an indication that the issue is in no way unique to the US. A more geopolitically consequential example would be the way during the 1980s, China (still ruled by a generation of veterans of the Second Sino-Japanese War) relied heavily on Japanese expertise to modernize its economy.

This is the inevitable consequence of how Nazis became the undisputed villains of the 20th century in the wider public’s imagination. In order for their ideology to receive lasting condemnation, its villainy became absolute, but its success also had to be explained. How do you conquer an entire continent with a backwards and reprehensible ideology? How do you make the first jet fighters before America does? How do you squander all that in the space of a few years? Can we replicate this success somehow?

So certain aspects of the Nazi regime became alluring, the things that could be removed and safely repurposed, both literally and in the mind of the public. The Porches, the more agreeable generals, the Hugo Boss suits, the scientists, the IBM computers, so much found its way back into polite society that could have theoretically been replaced fairly easily. Despite what the basic morality theoretically encourages, it’s easier for most people to simply move on, even from history’s greatest humanitarian tragedy and its perpetrators.

Do not consider Platner’s decision to get a tattoo in this context, instead, use it to consider the reaction. In another year, this would probably have sunk his campaign, but that is clearly not the case. It’s exciting to say that the political norms are collapsing, but that collapse can’t happen without people like Graham Platner showing up, especially if the Democratic base demanding someone with populist credentials above all.

Places like New York City have the luxury of diverse, well educated populations that can produce near perfect candidates to carry the left wing banner both in electoral politics and the wider media. Obviously Zohran Mamdani is the example that comes to mind, but outside of NYC this trend still holds. The most consistently progressive legislators almost exclusively come from diverse urban areas. If you want someone that’s consistently progressive at home and morally sound on Israel, which much of the Democratic base is looking for, you’re essentially limited to diverse urban areas that also have sizable Muslim populations. There are definitely some good recruits for the progressive cause in places like NYC and Minneapolis, but cities like these are the exception.

If you’re outside of a major city, your options are pretty slim without a concerted effort by local activists to find candidates that can carry the banner without incident. It’s in situations like this that a guy with vague but at least somewhat working class credentials can wander in to a city hall meeting and whip up support.

Think about it this way: each of New York City’s 52 city council members represent, on average, about 170,000 people. In the state House of Representatives, where Zohran Mamdani currently serves, the ratio is about 120,000 per representative. Portland, Maine’s largest city, has a city council of 8 members that each represent roughly 8,500 people, and a mayor that represents a population a little more that 1/3 the size of an NYC city council member’s district. Their State House has a slightly higher ratio, at about 10,000 represented per House member. All of this is while Maine has just as much representation in the Senate as New York. There are simply far less people in Maine that can run for office, and their constituents are far fewer in number.

This isn’t a situation where in a tight pack, one candidate can get knocked out easily by another with extremely similar positions. I looked at who the Maine Morning Register listed as running for the senate seat and Platner is the only Democrat competitive with Governor Janet Mills. The rest of the field is also hard to see being favored by progressives over Platner, most of them seem to be some kind of veteran or small business owner.

The only interesting one is this woman Natasha Alcala. Like everyone else in this race apparently, she’s a veteran but unlike anyone else in the race, a fashion designer. Her campaign website seems to indicate she’s broadly progressive but special attention seems to be given to the issue of aiding Ukraine. The ‘official’ picture of her has both an Imperial Russian and modified Ukrainian flag that includes its coat of arms. She also uses images of Olga of Kyiv, a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church known for her brutal military campaigns and conversion of Ukraine to Christianity. She has also, according to her website, ‘studied Putin since she was 8 years old’ and ‘will put Putin behind bars’.

The hardest pill to swallow for a lot of left wing observers is that sticking to your guns and not backing down as the most left wing candidate, a quality so many of us admire about Zohran Mamdani, is also present in Graham Platner. The difference is that, unlike most of the newly emerging urban progressives, Platner isn’t coming from the ranks of a local DSA chapter or other explicitly left wing organization that would have potentially filtered out a person who worked for Blackwater.

While groups like the DSA have had major success in pushing their candidates in the wake of centrist Democrats’ 2024 failure, they, nor the wider left wing in America, have a patent on candidates that criticize Democrats for not doing enough. There also haven’t been any serious efforts to organize outside of the context of the Democratic Party, which means still being reliant on at least a plurality of primary voters. Of course, if someone with less baggage wants to take up the Party for Socialism and Liberation or Green Party nomination and run in Maine’s Senate race, they’re more than welcome to, but I think most realize how effective that’s likely to be.

One of my friends from NYC was talking about Platner in a group chat and said he couldn’t expect his non-white constituents to vote for him after the tattoo pictures came out. I don’t know if that’s how it’ll play out but what’s funny is that it could be true and Platner, unlike most other Democrats running for competitive senate seats, would still be fine. Maine is the 2nd whitest state in the country and 1st in terms of rural population. The whitest state, Vermont, is home to the senator that arguably revived the type of political rhetoric that both Platner and Mamdani have been using in their own ways.

Ironically, Platner is a lot closer to Bernie Sanders than Mamdani in a lot of ways, not just geographically. The senator from Vermont waited until the week before the New York City Democratic primary to endorse the now mayor-elect, but has consistently defended Platner months before he’s set to square off with his Democratic opponent. This is not to say Bernie is the gold standard, I think even he knows that the torch has to be handed off, but it is a reminder of how idiosyncratic small state Senators can be.

Graham Platner also has one other huge advantage beyond the fading legacy of Nazi Germany and the state he’s running in. Graham Platner is still popular because he’s done something that most Americans have done but most politicians made sure to never do publicly before getting elected: he fucked up. In a country that’s getting more downwardly mobile by the day, it’s hard for a lot of people to not feel like they fucked up in some way. When most people fuck up, it’s not by getting an SS tattoo, usually it’s getting stuck in a horrible job or having a relationship crash and burn (which Platner seems to have avoided through counseling), but there is a through line that makes Platner relatable.

This average primary voter likely has a lot more in common with Graham Platner than I think most people realize. I’m no expert on Maine specifically, but I can read those statistics and get a very good idea of the type of person Platner is engaging. If they’re previously apolitical, they likely don’t care about the tattoo in the first place. If they’re an engaged Democratic primary voter, it’s almost certain they’re aware of what Republicans were saying in group chats and might even get some catharsis out of defending Platner.

Think about the average Democratic primary voter in Maine. You probably live in an urban area, as Democrats tend to, but know a lot of people that don’t. You are, like most primary voters, on the older side (Maine is also the oldest state demographically) but probably don’t remember much of politics from before the Reagan years. And finally, you are well aware of how past controversies don’t seem to hinder Republicans, and if anything they help them show how unfazed they are by the media.

If you’re this guy, a middle age liberal white man living in somewhere in Maine, do you feel like you never fucked up in a way that was your fault for the most part? Those Republicans seem to think they never fucked up, and you’re definitely not like them. Maybe you got heated during an argument in college about a joke you heard in a Chris Rock special. Maybe you thought one of your wife’s gay friends would laugh at a joke he most certainly did not laugh at. Maybe you got really into visors.

Whatever it is, you almost certainly remember a less politically correct version of yourself. You don’t want them to come back and haunt you, but it’s not like you still endorse those views now. Thank Christ the internet only got big after you graduated high school, otherwise you’d be in real trouble. You also don’t like to worry about these things. The Democrats lost in 2024 for a lot of reasons, but you told a pollster that you think Kamala Harris came across as too woke.

So what does it mean when this news comes out about one of your guys, a working class combat veteran, a guy that seems like almost a caricature of the people Democrats have been trying to get the support of? Do you buckle after he owned up to his mistake? Do you give up and tacitly admit that you got tricked by yet another politician? Do you let them tell you that the only other option in the primary is a lawyer turned governor who will be almost in her 80s when she gets to the Senate? I have a hard time believing many Platner supporters are interested in that, and I don't think they’ll change their minds anytime soon.

After I published the YouTube adaptation of my article on the group, I got some attention from Joshua Mundy, one of the founders of Dads Against Predators. He made a video responding to me, which consisted of an hour and a half of watching my video and periodically pausing to reveal some freudian slip or hilarious incompetence.

There were a lot of really great moments in the video. One was when Mundy said that:

I enjoy this analogy a lot. First, because Mundy implies that beavers help engineers when building dams*. Second, because he seems to think beavers are building dams because they really hate water and not because water is something beavers rely on to not be homeless. If the point trying to be made is that DAP is a rodent like inconvenience to public works projects, then I must concede it, but I get the feeling he means something else.

*apparently beavers can do this sometimes but my point stands

Young Man’s Game

I also get the feeling Mundy is making these types of videos now because he knows things are changing. If you want to stay relevant as a content creator of any stripe, you either have to be really exceptional at what you do, or you have to evolve. An exceptional novelist or a cinematic auteur can mold the perceptions of their audience with just their name. But DAP is not the project of medium defining genius, it’s the project of two guys from Ohio that walk to the gas station in basketball shorts so they can buy Delta 8.

Really, it’s a miracle that they got as far as they did based off their current set up. Shaky phone cameras, ill defined mission statement, uploading videos months after they happen, it’s impressive they got this far. But catching is a young man’s game, one Josh and Jay are aging out of.

This isn’t because catching predators is particularly hard on one’s body (it’s not like they ever confront someone they don’t have outnumbered). No, the wear and tear comes from the legal demands of working in this business. Sure, for the first few years you can avoid catching that many cases as you go after guys that aren’t going to talk to the police about what they were doing, and if you do get in trouble, it’s a misdemeanor at worst. But every catch is a new chance being taken, a chance you get a little too excited and swing too hard, a chance you didn’t make it totally clear you were supposed to be 13 in those messages, a chance the person you messed with wants to take this to court.

Jay Carnicom, one of DAP’s founders, just got out of an Austin Texas jail. He got in this situation because, unsurprisingly, he was beating someone up in a parking lot for a video. Currently, it looks like he was locked up for a charge for Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity (EOCA), although there might be more in the future. He posted videos indicating he was released to Locals, went radio silent for about two weeks, and then came out with another video of him chasing someone into an apartment building in Gainesville, Florida. Of course, Jay never specifies that it’s in Gainesville to warn the residents, that was only possible because I managed to cross reference the sign for a D.P. Dough franchise location with the wording on an apartment building and the types of trees in the background.

See, it’s pretty easy to get charges like Jay’s plead down if the offenders turn themselves in. Crucially, it’s easier for everyone involved if this happens. Jay apparently did not realize this, instead opting to leave the state and getting an active warrant in the process. This resulted in Jay getting arrested for an out of state warrant in Clay County, Florida on September 24th, 2025.

Like most things with DAP, this was an incredibly stupid move that didn’t really benefit anyone in the long run. While the other suspects written up in this case (including Kick streamer Ac7ionMan) seem to have all gone free without incident, Jay has no such luck. According to a source familiar with the case, Jay is likely going to be facing the full felony charge Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity. Based on his previous behavior, this wasn’t anything radically new or different, but the fact he skipped town for almost a year makes this case much more serious.

A felony conviction would make Jay’s job a whole lot more difficult, even after he leaves prison. The minimum sentence for EOCA in Texas is six months with a maximum of two years, but if it’s bumped up to a third degree felony, two years becomes the minimum sentence. In a fast paced media ecosystem, it’s pretty hard to stay out of the game for a couple years. Sure, if you’re a lauded writer or director you can take some time off, but not if you’re a content creator. He could try the pedo hunting routine in prison, but I think thats already taken care of by everyone else in prison. It’s difficult to compete price wise with something bored prisoners do for free.

Jay can keep doing what he’s doing, but it won’t last forever. The legal repercussions will hasten the end of his operation fast if he doesn’t find a way to deal with them. Judging by the fact the first thing he did out of jail was cross state lines to film himself hitting someone in the lobby of an apartment building, I think hold habits are dying hard. At this point, the best we can hope for is that Jay has had the foresight to invest at least some of his income into his kids’ college funds before he gets locked up again, but like before, I’m not optimistic.

Joshua Mundy at least has some kind of idea for what he can do in the future. After recording his response video, he seemed to have gotten back in the mood for content creation, uploading two episodes of his podcast since. He’s also opted to reupload older videos instead of new ones. One he posted to locals showed a Christmas tree in the predator’s house and another uploaded to Instagram is at least a year old. As Jay seems content on burning twice as bright, Josh wants to go twice as long.

But it’s tough. Josh is clearly uncomfortable and out of his element trying to host a show. He seems to want his personal gravitas to carry the program without a central theme or gimmick beyond that. You certainly can get away with this type of podcast if your proprietary audience is large enough, but if he wants to live off of it, Josh needs more juice than he has.

Sure, Josh can get some decent views on his podcast, but is it enough to eventually replace his Locals revenue if he runs into legal trouble? Is there much to Josh’s brand if you phase out the predator catches? I wouldn’t point this out if it wasn’t a very real existential threat to this man’s livelihood. Who knows what will happen when such an erratic man grows desperate, what will he do to keep his lot in life? Well, we don’t know, but we do know what he wouldn’t do.

Evil Triumphs When Stupid Men Don’t Do The Bare Minimum

“It is alleged that on Monday, March 27, 2023 Kalemaj attempted to meet with who he thought was a young girl to engage in sexual activity after meeting on an internet site. A member of a group called “Dads Against Predators” was actually posing as the young girl. Kalemaj set up a date with who he thought was the young girl but two members of “Dads Against Predators” confronted him instead. The police were called and Sinan Kalemaj was arrested.” - press release by Peter J. Lucido, Macomb County Prosecuting Attorney, March 31st, 2023.

“Child sexually abusive activity and computer charges against a Sterling Heights man were dismissed this month after the witnesses did not appear in court, according to the prosecutor’s office.

Sinan Kalemaj, 24, was accused of arranging to meet a 13-year-old for sex, according to the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office.

He was scheduled for a preliminary exam Sept. 12, but when the witnesses did not attend the hearing, the case was dismissed.

He was charged with three counts of child sexually abusive activity and three counts of using a computer to commit a crime.” - report by Kara Berg of the Detroit News, September 23, 2023.

On September 12th, 2023, Dads Against Predators let a pedophile walk free, all because they simply couldn’t be asked to show up at the court house. It really boggles the mind just how easy this was to avoid, and how much of the motivation can be understood as an almost completely pure disregard for justice and child welfare. And this wasn’t some slap on the wrist being avoided either, according to another Detroit News report, Sinan Kalemaj was facing two felonies with up to 20 year sentences each.

Even of you only cared about catching pedophiles in a way that was entirely cynical, purely just as a means to an end for making content, you would realize how moronic this is. To risk all your credibility so that you don’t have to spend an hour in a court room on a Tuesday morning. If I was a father myself, I can’t imagine how I’d be able to look my children in the eyes knowing I didn’t do the bare minimum to stop this man that hunts for children getting released back on to the streets.

FWIW, I was able to figure out what Kalemaj is up to now. He was bragging about beating the case under an Instagram post. I confirmed it was him in direct messages and alerted the boxing gym he seems to be training at now, Throwback Boxing in Fraser, Michigan, near Detroit. I’d encourage others to contact Throwback if possible and let them know to keep an eye out for this person. He’s also going by Nani now, so this isn’t the fault of Throwback for not knowing.

This really trumps all the other criticisms I’ve made against DAP in terms of what it represents. I think the sloppiness of their tactics have let far more predators get away, but I can’t prove that definitively, it exists as a theoretical outcome. This is not theoretical, this can be proven as happening and the only explanation for it is that the two members of Dads Against Predators chose to let a known predator go through their own inaction.

I don’t expect things to get better for DAP (Dads Apathetic about Predators) as the years go on. I expect this won’t be my last time writing about them, and I don’t expect they’ll stop talking about me. But my job is only getting easier, and their job harder, with each new court case.

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‘BookTok’ is a term that is used to describe a community of TikTok users who use the platform to find books (primarily YA fiction and/or romance) to read and authors that cater to them. It’s a phenomenon that’s rare, but not unprecedented, because it manages to unite fans of a genre, instead of just a certain author, into a marketable group. But once these readers and authors are brought together under a name in the collective consciousness, that name has much more social gravity than the sum of its parts.

Because of its size and online nature, BookTok is an excellent stand in for a lot of different grievances about modern society. The choking presence of fandom, the dumbing down of society, the over-commercialization of literature as a whole. It all seems like a degeneration of all the culture worth preserving, like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, or Leno returning to The Tonight Show.

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Oorah operates two facilities in the Catskills Mountains of New York, collectively referred to as ‘The Zone’. These are actually old ski resorts which were bought and converted into summer camps by Oorah. I said two facilities because they are not just gender segregated by cabins, but by geography, as the boys camp is located in Delaware County and the girls camp is located 8 miles down the road in Schoharie County. This puts it more than an hour away from the closest airport, and virtually inaccessible by any method other than a personal car or chartered bus. Unless you’re on vacation, there’s scarcely a reason to come. And there are plenty of reasons you wouldn’t want to come here. While the Catskills are no doubt beautiful, it is not these mountains which make The Zone notable. Instead, it is the scandals inside of The Zone that are justification for looking closer.

Where to even start? Probably with the safety hazards. See, there comes a certain set of upsides and downsides when you build a summer camp in an old ski resort. Upsides: more sophisticated housing, extensive facilities, potential to commune with a ghost that will help you with your tight five. Downsides: older buildings are more prone to issues, untrained counselors can mishandle equipment, that ghost is actually just the result of a gas leak caused by the aforementioned downsides.

In 2021, Oorah had to evacuate its Boy’s Zone camp because of a carbon monoxide leak in one of its dorm buildings. This wasn't a lapse in protocol that caused the state bureaucracy to seize on a long awaited opportunity. The gas leak was only reported because the entire dorm building spent one morning in various states of disorientation, including several campers passing out. By the time EMTs were able to respond, 53 campers and staff members had to be taken to the hospital after inhaling potentially lethal quantities of carbon monoxide. Schohaire County’s Director of Emergency Services, Michael Hartzel, said that the campers were still very lucky, as if the leak had happened in the middle of the night, there could have been a ‘worse outcome’

Even worse, this wasn’t the only nearly fatal incident experienced by campers in The Zone in the past fiveish years. In July of 2020, the Girl’s Zone had to be evacuated because a kitchen fire burned the dining hall to the ground. This was during the height of Covid-19 restrictions, when camps like The Zone were fighting tooth and nail to shirk any social distancing orders through technicalities. It was also not the first time that Oorah has faced criticism for not following fire safety codes. Back in 2014, its camps had their tax exempt status challenged by local government. All the way back in 2014, the city of Jefferson in Schoharie County filed a lawsuit against Oorah for it alleged were multiple fire and building code violations.

The loophole that was utilized by The Zone involved the reclassification of summer camps as ‘temporary residences’, where minors could travel with a parent or guardian. This practice was not limited to The Zone, but it seems like they’re the ones who have put the most children in danger because of it. According to a report by Schoharie County’s Public Health Director, Dr. Amy Gildemeister, busloads of unaccompanied children were being dropped off at The Zone.

Curiously, the director of communications for The Zone (who has the same role with Kars4Kids), Wendy Kirwan, defended the operation by stating that minor staff members went home at the end of the night and campers were accompanied by parents. This isn’t impossible, but if you remember how far away from any population center this place is, the story doesn’t add up. A drive from Gilboa to New York City, the closest major metropolitan area, would take around 3.5 hours. For these counselors to have worked at The Zone while following Covid-19 restrictions, many of them would have had to spend roughly 1/3 of their day shuttling to and from The Zone.

This is where Kars4Kids is sending your money, these are the titular ‘Kids’ that are being helped by car donations. It seems like the main way that children are being helped is by giving them the opportunity to spend their summer is buildings that are prone to accidents that threaten to kill any and all occupants. And this only scratches the surface of what is going on at The Zone. Crimes that go beyond fines and tax loopholes.

Humans aren’t the only ones suffering either. ‘The Zone’ is also home to a variety of different animals. The biggest draw seems to be the horses, which feature prominently in promotional material as a draw to the camp. Unfortunately, it seems that these horses are not treated all that well. According to a statement by Rosemary Farm Sanctuary that links to a Facebook post outlining the details, these horses were recovered from The Zone. The animals were found starved, exhausted, and branded by hot iron. It was only when one of the horses died from being overworked that the person leasing these horses to the camp got involved. Ultimately it was only because of this intervention that the abuse even came to light in the first place. Thankfully, the horses have found new homes with help from Rosemary Farm and Equine Rescue Resource, but the fact that it took the death of one of these horses for any investigation to occur is troubling.

Also of note is The Zone’s unusually diverse collection of birds. Beyond the standard fare of chickens and turkeys, The Zone also has resident parrots and peacocks. Why do I bring this up? Mainly because of how they choose to advertise these animals on their official YouTube channel.

It may also be the cause of an abnormally high number of exotic bird sightings around Stamford, New York. While looking for any anecdotes that might lead me to news stories in the Facebook group Stanford New York Neighbors, I noticed that a few people seemed to have spotted some kind of exotic bird walking around their yards. I’m not saying it’s necessarily an escapee of The Zone, but given all the information we have on the treatment of animals there, it’s not impossible.

Exactly one week after the dining hall went up in flames, Oorah had a new problem related to The Girl Zone’s camp.

This is normally where I would put a paywall in one of my article. However, given the nature of what is being described, I feel it would be disingenuous to hide it behind a paywall. If you would like to support me, I can ask for you to do a paid subscription. I’ll have an article about Oorah and the wider Lakewood real estate market out soon just for those subscribers.

By the time Dorina Sokolovsky settled out of court with Oorah after uploading a video detailing her sexual abuse by Gittie Kohn Sheinkopf, one of the counselors at The Girl’s Zone, over six years had passed. For all these years, Sokolovsky was pursued relentlessly by the Orthodox community for speaking up about this abuse and the issue was repeatedly pushed to rabbinical courts in order to protect Sheinkopf from answering for the crimes as an employee of Oorah. It was only thanks to the work of the people in Zaakah, a victims advocacy group working in the Orthodox community, that this case even came to light.

Speaking out against abuse in any community is hard enough, but one that prizes insularity and trust as much as the Orthodox makes coming forward a uniquely difficult emotional, mental, and sometimes physical ordeal. Zaakah actually lists on their website a few of the key difficulties with holding abusers accountable in Orthodox communities.

This was also not a case of hush money being paid so that an organization wouldn't have to deal with the fallout and paperwork of a lawsuit. Oorah fought this lawsuit with its full legal might. According to Zaakah, motions and subpoenas were filed as often as possible in order to prove that the lawsuit was being brought on by Zaakah and not the plaintiff. Some of this is obviously to be expected by a group trying to win a legal battle, and we don’t have Oorah’s interpretation of events. But given how long this was drawn out and the fact Oorah went on the legal counter offensive to get as many documents sealed as possible does raise a lot of questions as to what their end goal was. The lengths gone to here, paired with what the victim was put through out of court, suggest that the goal is not quiet settlement, but explicit punishment.

Of course, the greatest revelation from all this is that the money donated to Kars4Kids/Oorah is being used to settle child sexual abuse lawsuits. There’s no way around the fact, and it should raise more red flags than even the disregard for children’s physical safety at their camps. Oorah has not publicly acknowledged this lawsuit or offered any kind of explanation of what their role was in it, leaving Zaakah as the only reliable source on what transpired. I have reached out to Oorah but have not gotten a response yet.

The final danger for those in The Zone is not to campers, but to the contractors it relies upon. Subcontracting isn’t at all unusual, and a summer camp that needs regular maintenance and new construction is going to be utilizing these services fairly often. What’s notable about Oorah is how they treat their contractors, or really anyone outside their immediate organization. According to an anonymous source who lived in the community around The Zone I spoke to, people who do work at The Zone are routinely underpaid, which would be consistent with protests outside Oorah headquarters that occurred back in 2010. This anonymous source also alerted to me to an incident that occurred in one of the ponds owned by Oorah near The Zone. Due to the restrictions on contact between men and women in Orthodox Judaism, processes like signing for a package were made incredibly difficult for delivery drivers who happened to be women.

Around 2:30pm on Friday, March 31st, 2023, police were called to respond to a call off Scotch Valley road in Schoharie County, according to the Times Union. A small boat had flipped and three of the passengers were plunged into the icy waters. Two of the men emerged, one could not be found. It would be another day before the body of Juan E. Parco Saez could be recovered. Saez, an Ecuadorian national, was being employed as part of a team installing tiles for The Zone but were not officially employees of the company, a fact that a camp spokesperson was quick to point out.

Despite only working as contractors, it was reported that these men were living on site at the camp. It was never clarified why these men were fishing in a pond that had just recently thawed. The fact these men were living on site in a remote area with potentially hostile employers makes the fact they were fishing in these conditions seem less and less like a way to pass the time. My source told me that the other two men were gone the next day, presumably going back to New Jersey or their families in Ecuador.

Oorah runs a ruthlessly efficient operation in The Zone. But the way in which it is ruthless is not in its staff management, its scheduling, or even its building, in fact, it’s pretty bad at all those things. What it is ruthlessly efficient is how they have kept this operation going for over a decade without significant public backlash, despite the fact it is the beneficiary of a nation wide advertising campaign. One hopes that changes soon.

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You might not realize that if you were one of the many people who have been sharing doomsday prophecies based on a recent article in New York Magazine about how students use ChatGPT in their coursework. Many seem to be of the opinion that those who are in school right now are irreparably damaged in terms of intellect because of LLMs. Looking at responses to the article, this attitude seems to be very popular among Millennials who see themselves as being in the last helicopter out before the fall of human intelligence.

The focus on undergrad Ivy League students is probably a mistake for discussing AI in schools. It carries the implication that the very heights of academic honesty have fallen to the AI hordes, and that no institution is safe. What goes unexamined is the possibility that being admitted to an Ivy League school is a process that these students are forced to game and plan around. Padding your application with stretched truths and even paying to become a “peer reviewed author” becomes necessary when competing with rich, connected parents who can all but guarantee a spot for their children. Why shouldn’t these kids try to take the easy route through the institution that asked them to sacrifice so much in high school just for the privilege of going into debt so they can attend?

A bachelor’s degree is also a necessity for pretty much any professional career with room for advancement at this point. Many will pursue their passion in undergrad, but many others pursue the subject that they’re the least apathetic about, or the subject they think will sound the best to prospective employers. If this is what you have to go through for a chance at a decent job after you graduate*, it’s hard to not adopt an attitude of ‘fuck you, got mine’.

*The author of this article recently graduated with a Bachelor’s in History, which is not a choice you make if you’re in college to get a job or meet people of the opposite sex.

Using AI to write your papers is obviously a problem, but the roots of that problem aren’t being interrogated and the blame is instead being fully directed at students. What I also find irritating about this attitude towards students using LLMs is that it isn’t original at all, and should be within living memory for anyone born before the new millennium. For whatever reason, coming up some time in the last 20 years of the internet is supposed to be a sign of intellectual merit, the Millennial version of walking 10 miles to school uphill both ways. The issue with this attitude is that I fail to see an aspect of the old internet enlightenment which is being permanently extinguished by LLMs.

Rose tinting is something that everyone will do to some degree, but it seems to be encroaching on our wider understanding of recent history as new generations aren’t experiencing the meteoric rises in living standards that older generations did. All of my grandparents were born before World War II (one was actually born during Pearl Harbor but thats technically pre war), reaching adulthood before the Baby Boom years. Meanwhile, my parents were both Gen Xers that never shared rave reviews of growing up in the 70s and early 80s. Maybe there was something poetic about my paternal grandfather dying right before the Dot Com Bubble after moving to Seattle in the 60s.

Were I roughly 10 years older, I might have had parents that grew up in a GI Bill subsidized home that allowed them a being the first in their family to get a college degree from UCLA back when the acceptance rate was 104% and tuition was $8.36. I would then have grown up in an era of steadily increasing levels of technological advancement, culminating in smartphones around the time I graduated high school. The recession would have hit pretty hard, but my digital skillset would evolve with the needs of the economy.

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That’s why I’m starting an actual weekly newsletter here: It’s Very Stupid. Every week I want to highlight some policy or idea being floated in American politics that doesn’t make a lot of sense for anyone involved. This won’t be things like a tax breaks for billionaires that spikes the federal deficit or bills that strip transgender people of rights, because those have some utility for the ruling class and/or part of their psychotic constituency. I want to focus on the policies which help almost nobody, that bring back forms of economic and social inefficiency thought impossible since being in government generally required one to have known how to read.

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Currently, the central pillar of Elon’s wealth, Tesla stock, is down to around its pre election price (at time of writing). This is part of an over 40% drop in the stock’s value since its December, 2024 height. Meanwhile, Elon has taken his job in the administration incredibly seriously and put his face on many of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies. This would be all well and good if Elon was going to push through a very pro business agenda, and in some ways he has. But for every slash to regulation that investors dislike, there are many more questionable decisions.

Part of it is Elon’s genuine political commitment to a right wing project. But there’s also the businessman side of Elon that wants to use his position to further his companies, which we saw in his continued insistence on shoving the Tesla brand into every possible aspect of his work. But why hasn’t this garnered huge returns in stock prices? I think this comes from a profound misunderstanding by Elon of what was holding his company back and what the government could do to remove those constraints.

Tesla is a company that has mostly thrived under Democratic presidents. The Obama Administration granted billions in tax credits for electric vehicles and by the time he left office in 2017, the company’s value had increased by over 1000%. Trump’s first two years actually saw stagnation for Tesla’s stock price, before a meteoric rise that occurred across 2020 during the zero interest rate period. This was continued into 2021 and held strong through most of 2022 before another drop that coincided with the Twitter purchase. Although personally shunned by Biden, the administration’s policies to bring back domestic manufacturing and invest in green energy was not hostile to Tesla and gave investors many reasons to feel confident.

Trump’s policies aren’t actually looking amazing for Tesla. I want to credit Max Chafkin (as I often do) for making the observation that got me thinking about this on a recent episode of his podcast, Elon Inc. Chafkin pointed out that Trump and allied Republicans have been getting hundreds of millions in Super PAC money from the Elon post election. While Trump has given Tesla endorsements that reek so badly of favoritism it could rub off, he hasn’t taken the kinds of risks for Elon that Elon has taken for Trump.

Despite Elon’s stardom among Republican voters, most of those voters are not going to buy a Tesla. The kind of people that have practical reasons to purchase an electric vehicle (upper middle class, climate conscious city dwellers) are not the people Elon appeals to. The Cybertruck is unable to usurp the market and cultural dominance of the F-150 among Republican voters. There’s probably some kind of beautiful and biting metaphor to be made about how the Cybertruck has about as much storage space as the average F-150 actually needs, but its glaring flaws in that department make it a non-option for so many truck buyers.

I don’t know what exactly Trump could do at this point to bail Elon out, even if he really wanted to. Obviously it’s a lot less likely that federal prosecutors are going to go after Tesla and SpaceX now, but that was never a massive concern the way it was for the other industries Trump rode to the White House, (crypto, venture capital, AI). It remains to be seen what exactly Elon is going to do to turn this situation around, or if it might even just resolve itself. But so far, he hasn't recouped the losses incurred by his new job.

The concerns over what trends are present in youth movements rose to new prominence after 2024 election exit polls showed that voters under 30 voted for Trump in record numbers. It dovetails with another similar issue, that being the rise of ‘manosphere’ figures like Andrew Tate among boys and young men. These trends have seemingly come together to form a new chimera of ideology, the so called ‘rightward shift of Gen Z’. It brings to mind an apocalyptic vision for the more historically informed. Maybe the Italian Blackshirts of the 1920s, maybe the Reaganite Baby Boomers of the 1980s, maybe a little bit of both. Either way, if it comes to pass, an entire generation would be spent reversing the advancements made during the past 20 years.

‘Gen Z’ could roughly be defined as anyone who was in school at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, the psychological effects of which it will take years to fully comprehend. Because of this ambiguity everyone gets to have their own reasons for why the supposed shift to the right has happened. There is no real social risk to being a pessimist, which makes hysterical predictions about the supposed descent of Gen Z into fascism easy to throw out and difficult to disprove. Lack of economic opportunity, a void of political leadership, and ‘the damn phones’ are popular explanations across the left to center of the ideological spectrum for the phenomenon.

Rising inflation and a locked up real estate market made Gen Z slightly more optimistic about Trump’s policies on housing than other generations even if there was never much in the way of a concrete plan from his campaign. A massive upwards wealth transfer during the pandemic coupled with deepening inequality for those without real estate assets. While racial wealth inequality deepened during the pandemic, those who owned real estate (overwhelmingly older Americans) were relatively better off. The difference in growth of financial assets was 35% between Black and White Americans, while in real estate, the difference was a little under 15%. Inflation and cost of living were issues that carried Trump to victory in 2024, apparently showing that the American youth sought a right wing plan to fix it.

For the politically active members of Gen Z, 2020 was not just the year of the pandemic, but also a year of profound disillusion. Bernie Sanders had mobilized thousands of young people (myself included) to an electoral goal which inspired genuine hope for the future of the country. In the last minute before Super Tuesday, most other candidates dropped out to support former vice president Joe Biden, who had been almost completely dead in the water before the South Carolina primary. It was incredibly cynical move by the Democratic Party establishment to secure the nomination for the most conservative candidate in the primary, and one whose mental faculties were being questioned even before the Iowa caucuses.

This understandably left a bitter taste in the mouth of many left wing Gen Z activists as Covid-19 was declared a pandemic 8 days after Super Tuesday. Even after his victory was all but assured and the pandemic was declared, Biden was still encouraging his supporters to go vote in person. Biden’s

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Both of these presidencies ended engulfed in crises they actively made worse. In both cases, it was the fault of ignoring common sense that would benefit the wider public in order to loosen regulations that provided some kind of relief as the problems were made worse. Bush didn’t step on the growing subprime bubble, Trump opted to not encourage lockdowns and opted to instead pump the economy with zero interest PPP loans that would float the economy until Election Day.

Both of these administrations were supposedly staffed by experts, cold blooded killers that had a lifelong mission which they sought to carry out. To these people, seeming failures were part of the plan, reshaping the Middle East despite Saddam’s lack of WMDs being probably the most glaring example. Hyper-competence is expected, enough experts staffing a presidential administration would make it operate with almost perfect information, and if there is a crisis, it is because the administration decided it would be this way. Of course, everything didn't go according to plan. With the example of Iraq, a power vacuum left by Saddam’s fall was partially filled by Iran; the arch-enemy of Neo-Conservatives that they supported Saddam’s war against.

I am here to make the case that there are morons, especially in the forthcoming administration. There isn’t 3D chess, there isn’t a cleverly hidden plan to advance the interests of capital, there is only a group of very incompetent people that are going to steer the boat. These morons (sometimes the exact same people) existed, but now we will have to really start dealing with this fact if we want to make sense of the upcoming administration. The churn of the Trump administration has kept few long term allies, any potential future James Bakers or Donald Rumsfelds were probably too frustrated by the end of 2020 and got replaced by Laura Boomer, one of J.D. Vance’s 17 year old mutuals, or an AI generated picture of Harambe smoking a joint that Elon Musk thinks is the funniest thing of all time.

This phenomenon obviously isn’t exclusive to Republicans. I would say that the outgoing Biden administration was a masterclass in many of the ways an administration can be objectively stupid. The difference with Biden was that the stupid decisions were wrapped up in egotistical idealism and cognitive decline. There’s an entire book to be written about how much of Biden’s presidency was a trauma response by someone who was trying to be every Democratic president from the past 50 years and failing miserably, all while being supported by an unquestioning inner circle. But as we enter the second Trump administration, a different set of morons is coming into the White House.

Part I: Deportations

The first area of incompetence is Trump administration’s deportation plan. Deporting all 11 million undocumented people in the country is logistically impossible, financially ruinous, and very unpopular. Furthermore, Trump has proven to not even be the best at deportations, the Biden administration deported more people than Trump had. The incoming administration could still increase deportations, ruin countless people’s lives, focus on the weak and marginalized, and keep more of the country in a state of perpetual fear. But that isn’t all of what is being promised, it’s some of it, but the promise is to reshape the demographic nature of the country, not to enhance the policies of Obama and Biden.

One could say that this is all rhetorical window dressing, that it’s a promise made to be broken as part of a wider plan. While this could certainly be considered, the history of mass deportations tells us that showboating creates more of a headache than it is a mobilizer of popular support. While the mass deportations might bring to mind Germany during the worst years of the Holocaust in Poland and other occupied territories, the more accurate allegory would be the years before the Holocaust, when Germany tried to cleanse it’s Jewish population while maintaining a growth in its peacetime economy.

I was recently reading a book about the rise of Reinhard Heydrich (Gerwarth, 2011), one of Hitler’s ministers who was famous for his cold, calculating methods with which he carried out some of the worst crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. Something that I took note of was how Heydrich reacted to Kristallnacht, the violent pogrom against Jewish businesses in 1938. Like most of the Nazi leadership, Heydrich felt that Kristallnacht was actually a massive headache and general step back when it came to the wider plans of purifying Germany of Jews. Until this point, the plan was to force legal emigration in such a manner that kept Jewish assets intact and able to be seized by the government. Heydrich himself was surprised by the outbreak of pogroms, and quickly sent out a telegram instructing police to make sure that only Jewish buildings (i.e. synagogues, Jewish owned businesses) were to be allowed to burn, and only if they were not endangering other buildings.

This was a surprise to Heydrich and the rest of the police apparatus in charge of ethnically cleansing Germany because it conflicted with the established plan of ‘encouraging’ Jews to emigrate while leaving their assets behind to be seized by the Reich. It was the only way to make deportations more than just a pet project for a regime strapped for cash. Getting rid of a large number of German citizens was impractical, especially in a modern country where value can't be easily grabbed and melted down. Adam Tooze Wages of Destruction elaborates on this phenomenon:

“The Jews would pay the bill for clearing up the mess, but replacing the high-quality Belgian plate glass would cost the Reichsbank 3 million Reichsmarks in precious foreign exchange. As Goering put it: 'I wish you had killed 200 Jews, and not destroyed such values’” (Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 278).

Following the assassination of a German diplomat, the violence against Jewish businesses that would be Kristallnacht was encouraged by those in Hitler’s inner circle most interested in keeping up appearances: Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and Der Stürmer editor Julius Streicher. Stirring a population to rise up for a night of looting that terrifies their supposed mortal enemies is a great way to move papers and add gravitas to speeches. However, as could be seen previously, it didn't actually further the broader Nazi goal of conquering Europe, and only further isolated the country on the international stage.

All of this is not to say that the Nazis had some humanitarian standards on the treatment of Jews, by all accounts the core leadership still regarded them with the same genocidal hatred as during the height of the Holocaust. What is relevant is how even if a country’s government has complete contempt for a population, uprooting said population is not easy and flys directly in the face of most other government functions. It’s also to say that the whole ‘Trump = Nazi’ metaphor doesn't work for our traditional understanding of the war time Nazis, but does somewhat work when predicting the effects of civilian mass deportation.

Many of Trump’s policies seem to have come from the media side of his operation as opposed to the administrative side. Mass deportations sound exciting, but don’t originate from a practical policy that can be pursued. It has already spread fear in immigrant communities, even if deportations have not yet increased noticeably (emphasis on yet). Many of his policies beyond immigration are also made to sound good, such as ‘no tax on tips’ and ‘stopping the fentanyl coming from Mexico’, but open problematic loopholes in the tax code or try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Part II: Foreign Policy

This is ironically where there the Nazi allegory kind of falls apart. Trump’s insistence on making new territory a central point is not really for anyone beyond the Hearts of Iron IV players that Vance has probably brought along with him. While the Nazis sought territory with the expressed purpose of exploitation, Trump is only interested in Greenland and the Panama Canal as a rhetorical tool without a well defined use.

Some have suggested that the plans for Greenland are a response to climate change, and a savvy move to secure American interests in the area. The fact that the US military already has bases on Greenland mostly negates this as an argument and serves mostly as wishful thinking. It seems like Greenland annexation may have originated from economist Tyler Cowen who has been suggesting it as a half serious policy since at least 2006. It is a proposal more at home with ideological exercises like Matt Yglesias’ One Billion Americans than with any strategic planning discussion.

The Panama Canal at least has some history of being owned by America, but Trump’s demands are similarly nonsensical. It feels repetitive to say why it’s stupid because it’s stupid for the same reasons that the Greenland annexation would be stupid. The idea of needing the Panama Canal as a strategic counter to China is a remnant of the days of battleships and does not hold up in the era of ICBMs. In fact, trade has been seen superseding war in recent years, with Ukraine only recently cutting off Russian gas that had been flowing through its pipelines since before the start of the Special Military Operation.

The obvious exception would be the Gaza ceasefire, which the Trump administration seems to have negotiated ahead of his inauguration. But the lack of a ceasefire deal after over a year is only exceptional because of the Biden administration. An article by ProPublica highlighted how the Biden’s National Security Council essentially froze up and refused to take any actions to limit Israel’s genocide. This allowed Trump to appoint one of his New York real estate friends to put the slightest bit of pressure on Israeli negotiators to get a deal.

The takeaway from this isn’t that Trump has an idiot savant foreign policy team, rather that Biden was uniquely unwilling to do anything about Israel. Given that the deal is nearly identical to the one laid out at the end of May, it doesn't seem like Israel’s negotiators had much extracted by Trump’s team that they didn’t expect to give up already. Also of not is that market researchers in Israel already predicted in December that 2025 would be a ‘post-war recovery’ year. The only reason that Trump was able to get a foreign policy win was because Biden had given Netanyahu as much time as he needed to wait out for a party that was more reliably Zionist.

When you take away the Gaza ceasefire and focus solely on what the Trump administration wants to introduce, what remains is crude nationalism buoyed by Wall Street confidence that hopes nothing will fundamentally change. It’s based on weird ideas that originate in equal parts from the 19th century and the grand strategy games of Paradox Interactive. There is no 4D chess, there is no saying the quiet part loud, there is only a new group of very stupid people advising a new senile president.

Part III: The Economy, Stupid

We don’t know how Trump plans to change the economy, it’s one of the biggest questions in the opening days of his presidency. Will he enact deregulation and tax cuts? Probably. Will he channel the spirit of Huey Long and share the wealth by helping white people build subsidized crypto currency farms? Probably not.

So far, tariffs are the most concrete policy we have to go on. Instead of a 60% tariff on China, Trump has started by kicking the can slightly down the road on tariffs with Canada and Mexico, promising to start at a rate of 25% on February 1st. If they don’t go through, it will be a potential minor scandal/sign of weakness. If they do go through, such a sudden price change is likely to cause massive shockwaves through the economies of North America.

It could be said Trump is doing a Nixonian ‘madman strategy’ to put pressure on neighbors and extract concessions. But Canada and Mexico aren’t primed as primed to negotiate as they might have been in previous years. Ontario’s Conservative Premier Doug Ford has promised Americans that, if tariffs go through, “they will feel the pain”. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum similarly stated that “"Mexico was preparing a list of retaliatory tariffs”.

Canada is currently waiting on an election to be called some time before October, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is not expected to win, leaving the country is a pseudo lame duck period. In October, President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum began her single 6 year term and is experiencing approval ratings as high as 80%. Both Canada and Mexico have unique reasons to dig their heels in on this issue.

I would include proposed tax cuts/exemptions in here as a stupid idea, but those were at least politically useful on the campaign trail. Still, we’ll have to see if allowing volunteer firefighters to not pay any taxes will end up happening. If it does, I’ll have a lot more to write about and there will be a lot more firefighters.

Works cited:

GERWARTH, ROBERT. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. Yale University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vm09x.

Tooze, Adam, 1967-. 2007. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York, Viking.

David Sacks has been named by Donald Trump as the incoming ‘A.I. and Crypto Czar’. Besides the irony of the title given Sacks’ obsession with Ukraine, this is not actually massive news in terms of policy. It was clear when Sacks’ hosted Trump for a lavish fundraiser in June that preceded a picking Thiel associate J.D. Vance as his running mate in July that this administration was always going to be solidly pro AI and crypto. This isn’t to say that Biden was ever particularly hostile to either, but I suspect that Trump will go out of his way to bail these industries out in case of a shake up in the coming years.

If I credit David Sacks with anything here, it would be his help in opening the floodgates to others like him joining the administration. Most notable is Elon Musk, although Marc Andreessen has been making waves recently for his deepening involvement after Trump’s victory. Where Peter Thiel failed to make much headway with Trump after his 2016 victory, his coworkers have been given essentially free rein to run their own industries. One might wonder how Thiel is feeling right now, seeing his acolytes and underlings succeed where he could have only hoped to, all without any of his help or wisdom.

While Thiel focused on patronage of fringe intellectuals and giving a new meaning to the term ‘twink death’, Sacks was the one in the trenches, putting together this new coalition. Thiel managed to conjure up an Oz-like image of himself as a master manipulator in 2016 through selective leaks and rare, but memorable public appearances. Sacks, in a Nixonian fashion, bided his time to build a more robust coalition based on business interests and social resentment. I hope that we can collectively move past Thiel as the catch-all figure, at least for now. His ideas didn't work, and getting people to think he was Dracula was really the only successful way he shaped the media narrative.

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Most reporters have focused mainly on the big numbers that Musk has been flashing, over $118 million to his ‘America PAC’ at the time of writing, along with additional donations from allies that have brought the total budget to about $140 million. This is a sliver compared to the $889 million that the Koch Brothers’ political machine spent on the 2016 presidential election, but Musk has also leveraged his substantial political capital among Trump supporters to take center stage. While that $118 million number would have an impact on any election, it’s what those millions are being spent on that I find more interesting. About $18 million of that sum has gone to 18 lucky individuals in swing states as part of a give away where one person gets gifted $1 million for signing a petition. It’s a nice gesture, and has made at least 18 people very grateful to Musk while giving him a PR boost. But what has that remaining $100 million gone towards?

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