Category: Politics

Bondi & Kash Can’t Save Trump This Time

Trump’s calls to execute lawmakers show escalating authoritarian impulse and a bid to bury the Epstein fallout. The normalization is the danger.

Bondi & Kash Can’t Save Trump This Time | Secret Podcast Preview
AI Note

This summary was generated with the assistance of AI after reviewing the Bulwark episode transcript. It reflects the core facts and themes discussed by the hosts, but readers are encouraged to consult the original source for full context.

JVL and Sarah say Trump’s “hang them” posts are both escalation and distraction: he melts down whenever anyone reminds the military that their oath is to the Constitution, not to him, and this triggers his long-standing obsession with total obedience from “the guys with guns.” At the same time, he’s seizing on this outrage cycle to smother the Epstein-email story that was starting to corner him. The real danger, they argue, is how normalized this level of presidential extremism has become.

The MAGA Machine Can’t Save Trump From Epstein

Frum explains why Epstein shattered MAGA’s myths—and why Trump’s shame has his own movement turning on him.

The MAGA Machine Can’t Save Trump From Epstein (w/ David Frum) | The Bulwark Podcast
AI Note

AI was used to help summarize David Frum’s analysis, but it’s absolutely worth watching the full episode for the complete conversation and nuance.

David Frum breaks down why the Epstein scandal uniquely destabilizes Trump: it’s the one case where Trump acts genuinely guilty, triggering the conspiratorial right that built Epstein into a master myth. Frum explains how Epstein’s Jewish identity fueled para-MAGA’s antisemitic narrative machinery, why Trump can’t escape the story, and how the moral collapse around figures like Megan Kelly and Marjorie Taylor Green reveals a movement increasingly defined by paranoia, cruelty, and self-destruction.

Also in this episode:

  • Trump’s tariff policies and their role in raising consumer prices
  • The administration’s sudden pivot to reverse tariffs to curb inflation
  • Infighting across MAGA media personalities
  • Anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and how both left and right weaponize the distinction
  • Biden-era handling of Epstein/Maxwell documents
  • Michael Flynn’s $50M claim against the U.S. government
  • Political retaliation inside federal agencies during the Trump years
  • Expanding use of force in immigration enforcement
  • U.S. drug interdiction failures in the Caribbean
  • Venezuela policy and speculation around U.S. intervention
  • Canada’s economic vulnerabilities under Trump-era decisions

Democrats Just Crushed Republicans

Democrats crushed Republicans not by shifting left or right—but by running the right candidates for their states, proving that normal, competent governance still wins. The GOP is cracking under Trump’s weight, and for the first time in years, the future looks governable.

AI Note

This summary was generated from The Next Level Podcast transcript using AI analysis to distill the episode’s core ideas. It’s meant as a guide — not a substitute — for watching the full conversation, which is absolutely worth your time.

The 2025 off-year elections weren’t just wins — they were a realignment. Democrats swept Virginia, New Jersey, and New York by running the right candidates for their states: Spanberger’s pragmatic normalcy, Sherrill’s suburban competence, and Mamdani’s populist activism.

“Tonight the resistance struck back.” — JVL, The Next Level

Together they proved the formula: coalitional pragmatism beats chaos. Turnout was massive, MAGA candidates were crushed, and the GOP now faces a lame-duck crisis. The Trump cult is fracturing — torn between populist grifters and exhausted traditionalists — while Democrats look energized and sane.

If this night signals anything, it’s that normal, competent governance still wins.

Watch the episode:
▶️ The Next Level Podcast: Democrats Just CRUSHED Republicans

The K-Shaped Economy: Raging Moderates on the Moral Collapse of American Prosperity

Galloway and Tarlov’s Raging Moderates episode captures America’s moral divide: a K-shaped economy feeding the top 1 percent while MAGA normalizes hate and authoritarian awe. Between Gatsby’s glitter and populist rage, they find the same creed—power without empathy, cruelty mistaken for strength.

This summary was generated with AI assistance to capture the moral and political through-lines of Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov’s latest Raging Moderates episode.

The full conversation is worth your time; watch it here.

Podcast: Raging Moderates – “Trump’s K-Shaped Economy”
Hosts: Scott Galloway & Jessica Tarlov

1️⃣ The K-Shaped Economy: America’s New Gatsby Era

During the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, military families lined up at food pantries while Trump hosted a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago—girls in martini glasses, confetti over unpaid workers. That tableau, the hosts argue, is the moral diagram of the K-shaped economy itself.

“Budgets are moral documents.”

“America is a terrible place to be unfortunate.”

GDP may grow 3.8 percent, but for most Americans “the bottom 90 serve as nutrition for the top 10 percent.” Markets become morality plays; as Galloway notes, “As long as the stock market is up, you can do anything—even deploy secret police with masks.”

The metrics that matter are off-book:

  • Pawn-shop sales, auto-loan delinquencies, Hamburger Helper spikes.
  • Teen self-harm, anxiety, and hunger.

These, not the S&P 500, are the nation’s true balance sheet.
The “K” is a hieroglyph of our values—one arm ascending toward excess, the other collapsing into despair.

2️⃣ MAGA’s Dark Communion

Later the hosts turn from money to morality. Their focus shifts to Nick Fuentes, whose praise of Stalin exposes what the MAGA movement has become: a coalition comfortable with white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarian awe.

“Strength and masculinity have been conflated with coarseness and cruelty.”

“The most dangerous person in the world is a young man without economic or romantic opportunity.”

Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and their online echo chambers reveal a movement that glorifies domination and calls it leadership. Algorithms amplify the poison because rage pays. Ben Shapiro, once an architect of grievance media, now looks aghast at the antisemitic monster it unleashed—a moral recursion too late to contain.

3️⃣ The Moral Through-Line

Between Gatsby’s glitter and MAGA’s rage lies a single creed: power without empathy. One end worships wealth; the other worships strength. Both treat human beings as expendable.

“Budgets reflect the values of a nation.”

When compassion is weakness and cruelty is currency, prosperity becomes performative. The republic mistakes spectacle for virtue, the algorithm for conscience, and domination for destiny.

Billionaires Should Exist

Billionaires aren’t the problem—rigged systems are. In any fair economy with risk and a healthy dose of luck, outliers will emerge. The challenge isn’t to erase them but to hold them accountable: fair taxes, honest competition, and reinvestment in the people who made them rich. That’s stewardship, not socialism.

(Version 1.3)

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars,” she wasn’t wrong to name exploitation. But she was wrong to name every fortune that way. The line lands because populism is simple — and it targets people for hatred. Naming an enemy works. It always has. But if you’re serious about justice, you can’t build it on resentment. Billionaires should exist for one simple reason: in any fair system that includes a healthy dose of luck, they inevitably will.

The Game Is Capitalism

If I play a game, I play to win. I learn the rules, find the META[1], and compete to excel.

Capitalism is an amoral, not immoral, economic system. It doesn’t reward goodness or fairness; it rewards ownership of leverage, scale, and speed. That means we can — and must — bend it toward moral ends rather than cede the field to the greedy and rent-seeking. If you leave a game to the worst players, don’t be surprised when they corrupt it.

A honest game works for everyone. Practically speaking this means ownership should be as widespread as possible. The system works for who it’s supposed to work for: owners. Everyone benefits.[2]

Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong

She’s right that some billionaires got there through extraction — underpaying labor, gaming laws, hoarding rents. That’s theft by another name. But she’s wrong to pretend that’s the whole story. Some fortunes come from creation: innovation, coordination, risk-taking, with, it must be said, a healthy dose of luck. In any fair system that contains risk and randomness, outliers will emerge. Sometimes spectacularly so.

Jay-Z, for example, parlayed his monopoly on his enormous talent (and his wife Beyoncé) into a billionaire power couple. What wages did he steal? What worker collective should he establish? What about Steven Spielberg? Or Oprah? And so on. Workers are the lynchpin here and that leads me to my next point.

The Moral Obligation of Winners

When capitalism’s winners forget the social fabric that sustains them — schools, roads, courts, labor, consumers — the system curdles into rot. Politics becomes ugly and bad things can happen. They need to remember that social fabric consists of people who have voluntarily made them rich. So they should show gratitude — and afford that fabric fair taxes in proportion to the public goods they enjoy: living wages so full-time work leads to a full life, honest competition instead of monopoly or captured regulation, and reinvestment in the communities that raised your markets and your workers.

That’s not socialism. That’s stewardship. Leadership not rule.

The Progressive Error

Progressives too often confuse moral critique with moral condemnation. Ideals are twisted into ideology. They attack wealth itself which is both a blessing and responsibility instead of the unjust systems that distort it. The result is they drive away good people who would play on their team. If you vacate the field, you don’t purify the world — you forfeit it.

Their moral task shouldn’t be to wish capitalism away; it’s to discipline it — to aim its power at human flourishing instead of greed. That’s how you beat the game: not by quitting, but by outplaying the immoral within it.

The World I Want

I want a world where billionaires exist because they earned it justly — through ingenuity, creativity, service, and the courage to take real risks. I want a capitalism worthy of human dignity — one that lifts as it climbs and measures success by how many lives rise with yours.

The trick isn’t to stop billionaires from existing (as if you could) — it’s to police them so they don’t rig the system for their special benefit. That means taxing fairly so wealth contributes to the society that made it possible, curbing monopolies to keep markets open and innovation alive, and limiting political influence so money can’t purchase democracy. The goal is not to eliminate winners. It’s to keep the game honest.[3]

If I play a game, I play to win. The difference is, I know what winning should look like: a world where success uplifts rather than devours.

  1. Gamerspeak for Most Efficient Tactics Available. ↩︎

  2. How is more a discussion for another post. ↩︎

  3. The Nordics are examples of societies where there are more billionaires per capita than the United States but also have the highest unionization rates in the world. Embarrassing facts for ideologues across all stripes of our political spectrum. ↩︎

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Forrest Gump’s plain wisdom—“Stupid is as stupid does”—frames a meditation on ideology and discernment. We trade freedom for the comfort of belonging when we let ideas think for us. Faith is the way back to freedom: to think, to pray, to see.

Forrest Gump, an intellectually challenged man who was at the same time exceptionally wise, had a maxim: “Stupid is as stupid does.” In that single sentence lies an indictment of much of what passes for intelligence in our age — people with expansive vocabularies and expensive degrees still doing stupid things because they’ve given themselves over to emotional need without discernment and stopped thinking for themselves.

Ideology (Merriam-Webster): “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture,” and more pointedly, “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.”

Ideological (Merriam-Webster): “relating to or concerned with ideas or ideology,” and more critically, “characterized by blind or partisan devotion to a system or belief.”

The first is descriptive; the second is diagnostic. To believe an ideology is one thing: you have an ordered worldview. To have faith in it, however, is to let someone else do your thinking for you.

Most people don’t wake up and say to themselves, “Today, I’m going to let [insert ideology] do my thinking for me!” It doesn’t happen that way. It creeps in. We inherit our slogans from parents, pastors, pundits, or professors, and we wear them like armor against uncertainty. Over time, the armor becomes a cage — most clearly when it fuses with our identity. What once protected us begins to define us. Principles and faith demand the work of discernment — they force us to confront ambiguity and to wrestle with conscience. Ideology relieves us of that burden. It offers the comfort of belonging without the discomfort of examination. It trades freedom for (false) certainty and sells the exchange as virtue.

Ignatius of Loyola would have recognized this as a disordered attachment — the subtle clinging to anything that offers security at the cost of truth. When we identify more with our camp than with Christ, when we prize being right over being good, we begin to confuse the voice of the crowd with the voice of God.

Many ideologies begin as attempts to make sense of the world, and some even manage to remain supple — capable of reflection, repentance, and reform. But most do not. Once the slogans take hold, questioning becomes betrayal of oneself and one’s tribe. Curiosity feels like disloyalty. A set of ideas becomes the grounds for personal and corporate Pride, the mother of all sin. The all-important We then determines Truth and all the rest — replacing God.[1]

Faith, by contrast, is trust in God whom we can never fully know and who is always Mystery. It grows by encounter, by humility, by the willingness to be surprised. It doesn’t spare us the work of thinking; it deepens it. It doesn’t silence doubt; it sanctifies it by putting it in conversation with love. That’s what Ignatius meant by freedom — not the ability to do whatever we wish, but the grace to choose what leads us toward God even when the world shouts for certainty.

So, yes, “stupid is as stupid does.” Stupidity is the refusal — the refusal to look when Truth is right in front of you, whispering through the noise, inviting you — again — to be free: to think, to pray, to see.

  1. The Examen exists precisely to disrupt that drift: to pause, to look back, to notice what moved us toward love and what led us away. It’s not a prayer for the pure but for the brutally honest, for those who know how easily conviction turns into control. The Examen is a bulwark against idolatry. ↩︎

No Kings, No Knee: A Movement for Democracy

This weekend, I couldn’t join the protests but felt a renewed sense of civic spirit while observing from afar. The recent No Kings gatherings have transformed from mere protests into powerful rallies of unity and resolve. They reflected a deep commitment to democracy, reminding us that the instinct to resist lives on. Hope flourishes!

I didn’t march this weekend. Family duty came first, so I only drove past a small satellite protest, stopped quick to chat up some protestors, and kept it moving. But even from the margins, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: the sense that ordinary people are remembering how to be citizens. For the last year I’ve had a gnawing feeling that Americans didn’t have the appetite to fight for democracy, that we’d rather rationalize power than restrain it. “No Kings” is the right slogan for that feeling: a polite, pointed reminder that we don’t bend the knee.

The first No Kings back in June gave me a pulse: hopeful, but fragile. The second one hit different. Same message, more backbone–a lot more. Less spectacle, more resolve. You could see it in the way people showed up everywhere and didn’t need a headliner to tell them what to do. It read less like a protest and more like a rally–a gathering of spirit.

I’ve been helped in naming this by The Bulwark crew, who’ve framed it not as left vs. right, but citizens vs. subjects. Their read tracked what I felt driving by: this wasn’t outrage cosplay. It was calm, patriotic, neighborly. Families with flags, marshals with de-escalation, a lot of honking. “There was nothing hateful about it,” someone said on the show, and that mattered.

Authoritarianism is, in part, a spell and these crowds broke it by refusing to play the villain in someone else’s story. MAGA provocateurs got a very powerful response: nothing. They were ignored. That discipline meant that this was not merely about just showing up. It was about movement, about soldiering.

What moved me most is how joy and seriousness coexisted. Joy says we remember who we are; seriousness says we know what’s at stake. The Bulwark folks called it out: June was people shouting “No!”; October was people saying “We still here…and we are moving.”

So, no, I didn’t lace up and chant this time. I waved, prayed a little, and kept my commitment to family. But I also exhaled. The first No Kings let me hope. The second let me believe that hope might scale. If democracy survives, moments like these will sit on the timeline—not because they fixed everything, but because they proved the instinct to resist still lives in us. And the slow work of God continues.

Hotel pulls plug on Hawley fundraiser – POLITICO

Hawley blasted Loews’ decision in a statement, saying he wouldn’t “bow to left wing corporate pressure.”

“If these corporations don’t want conservatives to speak, they should just be honest about it,” Hawley said. “But to equate leading a debate on the floor of the Senate with inciting violence is a lie, and it’s dangerous.”

Hotel pulls plug on Hawley fundraiser – POLITICO

Corporations are now “left wing.” 😆 AOC took over Loews? Just asinine.

Hawley is, in typical politician fashion, telling whole lies with half truths considering his raised fist in support of the insurrectionist mob outside the Capitol. When you attack a country, you don’t get to demand love from that country. Just saying.

No Longer Feeling The Bern

I’m no longer feeling The Bern and feeling very, very disappointed (and somewhat embarrassed) about that.

In 2016, Bernie was my guy. I loved his in-your-face pride in being a democratic socialist, his integrity on sticking to his principles and calling bullshit on our socio-politico-economic establishment. I still like that about him. 

But what I didn’t do was examine his economic program very closely. I was too excited by his social-political stands and discounted almost all of what establishment critics were saying because naturally I didn’t trust them. (Free college, for example, is no pipe dream. Trump just proposed raising the national security budget by more than enough money to pay for it.) I assumed they must be demonizing him because he was pulling their files for all of us to see. I’m certain that is still true today, however never did I think their charges might hold any water. 

Full disclosure and apologies to those who might feel unfairly maligned but in my experience my brothers and sisters on the left tend to make very poor economic analyses of our economy and its institutions, especially when it comes to jobs and wages. And I expected not much different from Bernie. I did expect a bit of flexibility and realpolitik from his long years in office. On that score, I was wrong. He is an ideologue which is a strength when you’re leading the charge of some very angry people but it is a liability for governance. Recent events have given me serious pause on this point. Cringeworthy moral equivocations of Castro. Writing bills in an election year that tax startup employees on options they haven’t even sold yet. (WHY???!?!?) Making the rather dubious claim he wants to follow the Scandanavian or Nordic Model which has more billionaires per capita than here in the U.S. Billionaires that he says “shouldn’t exist.” People defending him with the kind of excuses we heard from morally sane but incredibly naive voters that were used for Trump in 2016. (Anyone remember “He’ll mature once he’s in office?”) When folks are telling me “Relax, he can’t actually do that. Congress will stop him.” It’s a red flag on the candidate.

Of course, none of this rises to the level that I would stay home on Election Day. It will be a cold day in hell before I abstain from casting a vote against Agent Orange and the GOP. But I have to say that I’m not rooting for Bernie anymore which is a very sad and disappointing realization. I really did believe in him.

Go and Do Likewise

I practice Jesuit (that is Ignatian) spirituality and at its core is the Greatest Commandment. It dominates my life and specifically here, my politics.

I practice Jesuit (that is Ignatian) spirituality. At its core is the Greatest Commandment which dominates my life and, specifically for this discussion, my politics (more on that later).

Let’s look at the how important this is in Luke:

The Greatest Commandment. There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test [Jesus] and said, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” He said in reply, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” He replied to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.”

Luke 10:25-28 (NABre)

Love of God includes love of neighbor. It is one of the direct signs of the love of God. It’s not an accident then, that who “my neighbor” is is critically important and likely why St. Luke connected the commandment directly to the parable of The Good Samaritan.

Continue reading “Go and Do Likewise”