A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, July 5, 2026 10:13
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Tuesday, May 19, 2026 1:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only problem with that story is that you've had plenty of opportunity to reverse it, but it always gets worse when you guys run the show too.

Go fuck yourself, Paul.

Nobody trusts the likes of you either.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you are completely fucked up in the head.

I know you are, but what am I?

Go fuck yourself, retard.

The Democratic Party is dead. Finished. You lose everything.

Move out of my country. Everybody hates you.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 5:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only problem with that story is that you've had plenty of opportunity to reverse it, but it always gets worse when you guys run the show too.

Go fuck yourself, Paul.

Nobody trusts the likes of you either.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you are completely fucked up in the head.

I know you are, but what am I?

Go fuck yourself, retard.

The Democratic Party is dead. Finished. You lose everything.

Move out of my country. Everybody hates you.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.

Above is an example of 6ix's Nihilism.

Below is an example of Trump’s Nihilism.

Trump, after getting a private talking-to from Xi, now wants to know why any of this is a big deal.

Trump was asked about concerns that China was inserting code in crucial systems that control various parts of American infrastructure, such as energy, communications, and water. “You don’t know that,” he answered. “I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do. And we’re doing things to them. I told them, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about, and you are doing stuff to us that we probably do know about.’ We do plenty. It’s a double-edged sword.”

Instead of saying that these cyberattacks were real threats and that the country’s national-security professionals were working to stop them, the president of the United States gave an answer that just as easily could have come from a Chinese official: Secret code in your power grid? You don’t know that. We’d like to see the proof. But you Americans do plenty of things to us that we probably don’t even know about.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 6:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump’s deportations are costing Americans jobs

May 19, 2026

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2026/05/19/trumps-deportations-are-co
sting-americans-jobs/

The New York Times reports:

The Trump administration has long claimed that mass deportations would deliver more jobs and higher wages to American-born workers. But a new study casts doubt on that assertion, undermining a central tenet of the president’s immigration policy.

Recent surges in deportations have led to job losses for both immigrant and American-born workers, while wages have stayed flat, according to the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan research organization. Construction, which depends heavily on immigrant labor, was impacted more than any other industry studied, with American-born workers losing more jobs as a result of the deportations than the undocumented workers who remained. https://www.nber.org/papers/w35129?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=em
ail&utm_source=ntwg5

The study offers the first national analysis of the effects of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation operations on the labor market, comparing communities that experienced surges in deportations between January 2025 and October 2025 with those that did not.

Analyzing federal labor data, researchers focused on four industries that rely heavily on undocumented immigrant workers: agriculture, construction, manufacturing and wholesale. Deportations had a chilling effect on each of those industries, disproportionately affecting men, who accounted for more than 90 percent of the immigration arrests. Taken together, the affected industries saw a 5 percent drop in employment for male undocumented workers and a 1.3 percent drop for male American-born workers without a college degree.

The researchers found no evidence that employers increased wages to attract American workers. Instead, work slowed.

In construction — where the researchers estimated 15 percent of the workforce is undocumented — American-born workers have paid a price for the deportations, the study found: Employment dropped by 3 percent for male American-born workers without a college degree, and 7.5 percent for undocumented workers. For each arrest, six American-born workers lost a job, and four undocumented workers lost one.

“Construction companies view it as easier to reduce production, reduce the construction of new homes and new buildings in general, rather than try to increase wages for U.S.-born workers,” said Chloe East, an author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Previous research has also shown that increased immigration enforcement slows housing construction, drives up home prices and leads to job losses for American-born workers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026 3:11 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Barney Frank, now in hospice care, has an urgent message for Democrats hoping to bounce back from Trump

Democrats have a chance to defeat President Donald Trump's brand of right-wing populism, but only if the party embraces core economic issues instead of polarizing culture fights.

By Anthony Brooks

May 14, 2026

https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/05/14/barney-frank-hospice-congress-dem
ocrats-trump

Brooks: Let me start with a very general question. You've been talking to CNN, Politico and other journalists, including me. What is it you want to say about this moment?

Frank: "That it is essential for the values that have driven me into politics to defeat right-wing populism, and that the major obstacle to doing that is the insistence by part of the left wing of pushing everybody to adopt politically unacceptable views. I'm not telling people I don't want them to advocate for those things — I filed a bill to legalize marijuana in 1972 and I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. My problem is that instead of treating some of these reforms as issues which are currently unpopular — for which you have to build support — they instantly make them litmus tests for everybody and therefore make it harder for us to win."

Brooks: What specific examples of litmus tests are you talking about?

Frank: "Open borders is one. Defunding the police would be another, along with insistence on political correctness and transgender participation in girls' sports. And environmental issues like the Green New Deal — they just go too far."

Brooks: Your book is entitled "The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy." [Publication date September 15, 2026] What other ways does the left have to reform itself?

Frank: "Beginning in the '80s there's a sharp divergence between economic growth and the extent to which that's shared. After the financial crisis, there's anger about inequality and I was one of those trying to get Democrats to move on this. And finally, after the emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and people like like Marine Le Pen [in France], there was movement on the economic issue. At that point I had hoped, 'OK, now we're all for fighting inequality and we'll diminish the anger.' But the problem was that those on the left, who had been right on the economic issue, decided that they could do even more changes. They said, 'Good, let's do the economics, but let's get rid of all these cultural and social evils.' And they went way too far. Like a lot of ideologues, they convinced themselves that the public agreed with them far more than it did."

Brooks: I want to ask you about the last 10 years, which have been dominated by Donald Trump. Is the dream of furthering liberal democracy gone for good, or do you think it will come back?

Frank: "It's not gone for good but there's been a lot of harm done. That's why I have a sense of urgency and why I'm taking advantage of this situation to talk about it. If liberal Democrats, not just here in America but elsewhere, do not repudiate the extremism that drives away a lot of voters, we're going to have this kind of [right-wing] populism for the long-term. And as to Trump, I have developed my theory about him: It's not just that he's bad on all these values, but he is an idiot savant. He has just one talent: an ability to exploit anger that got him into power. But having gotten into power, he's got nothing left, and that's why now he's just floundering."

Brooks: You've said that you think he's "imploding."

Frank: "Yes. I cannot think of an issue on which he's popular. The Iran war, the fight with the Pope, the economy, even immigration, where the left was dead wrong in its excessive openness, he's managed to make himself more unpopular. His anger, his narcissism, all of the negative parts of his personality have asserted themselves, and he really doesn't have much of a positive vision of things to offset that."

More at https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/05/14/barney-frank-hospice-congress-dem
ocrats-trump

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 21, 2026 2:11 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Final Five and U.S. Competitiveness

by Jerry Cayford | Posted on Thursday, May 21, 2026 5:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/author/jerrycayford

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/final-five-and-u-s-compe
titiveness.html

California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.

This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?

The Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project was a large-scale, eight-year investigation of the causes of America’s poor recovery from the Great Recession. Its final report, A Recovery Squandered: The State of U.S. Competitiveness 2019, looks at many factors that combine to determine the health of a society and its economy. https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/a-recovery-squandered.pd
f

The finding that connects their project to California’s primary is this: “the most important reason the United States has made so little progress during the long expansion [is]: deep dysfunction in our political system” (17).

California’s nonpartisan top-two primary system is a reform-that-is-really-half-a-reform of American states’ usual dysfunctional system. In top-two voting, all candidates compete in a single, nonpartisan primary, and only the top two qualify for the general election. This half-reform avoids giving voters a realistic choice outside the top two parties and, as we will see in the HBS report, thereby preserves the dysfunction of our politics. The full reform needed is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections” (26), in which the top five candidates advance from the nonpartisan primary, and voters then choose among them in the general election by ranked choice (aka instant runoff voting). One of the HBS report’s authors, Katherine Gehl, expands on this reform in a 2023 article, “The Case for the Five in Final Five Voting.”

The Wider Crisis

Harvard Business School comes to electoral reform inadvertently, not as a choice but as a discovery in its survey of the business community. The U.S. Competitiveness Project, co-chaired by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin, surveyed American business leaders working in a wide range of industries, almost 6,000 HBS alumni (along with some current MBA students and a cross-section of the public). They repeated this survey six times between 2011 and 2019. You can get a quick snapshot of the Competitiveness Project—and of America—from Figure 7 in the introductory chapter of A Recovery Squandered. It shows nineteen “elements of the national business environment” graphed by how America is doing compared to other countries (X-axis) and whether America is improving or deteriorating (Y-axis). (The scale of both axes is the net percentage of respondent positive/negative views.) Notice the dot in the lower left corner: “Political System” ranks worst for on-going deterioration, and only “Health Care” ranks worse compared to other countries.

Three points from the report’s big picture deserve mention before we focus on the political system. First is the report’s thesis statement on our recovery from the Great Recession: “despite a decade of steady economic growth, the United States has done remarkably little to address underlying structural weaknesses in our economy and our society. The nation has squandered the recovery” (3). Second, the report points out that Figure 7 clarifies our enormous inequality and “lack of shared prosperity”: America’s strengths (in the upper right) almost exclusively pertain to and benefit large companies. “Middle- and working-class Americans, in contrast, cannot escape the ramifications of a weak educational system, political paralysis, crumbling roads and bridges, and costly, inaccessible health care” (9). Third, this level of dysfunction is by no means common or normal: “The United States was one of only four countries [out of 146] whose Social Progress Index declined in absolute terms between 2014 and 2019. The others were Brazil, Nicaragua, and South Sudan” (14). America is failing, and there is nothing slight or subtle about it.

The Politics Industry

The HBS report’s Executive Summary succinctly assembles the themes of its chapter on political dysfunction:

Chapter 2 zeroes in on a central reason America has made so little progress: our political system has been optimized by the two major political parties to advance their partisan interests rather than the public interest. (1)

Americans do not fully grasp the structural nature of our political system problem. Many believe that we have simply elected the wrong people. (1)

Survey respondents [show]…stronger support for widely publicized changes, such as campaign finance reform and efforts to counter gerrymandering, than for reforms that we believe are more powerful, such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting. (1)

I will discuss each of these themes in turn: the system optimizes partisan interests; most people don’t even know the electoral system is the cause of their problems; when they do recognize the need for electoral reforms, they see the popular ones instead of the important ones.

“Partisan Interests”

A profound and original analysis lies behind the idea that our political system has been optimized for partisan advantage by the two major parties (an analysis elaborated in a 2017 interim report by Gehl and Porter and summarized in Appendix A of Squandered). Its view that politics is an industry like any other yields this key insight:

At the center of the politics industry are two private rivals who can only be described as a textbook duopoly: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Around this duopoly has arisen a large array of actors and organizations, including special interest groups, lobbyists, big-money donors, Super PACs, think tanks, consultants, and the media that bridges Washington, D.C., to the rest of the country. Together they comprise what Gehl and Porter call the “political industrial complex.” (56)

What Gehl and Porter present is a very different picture of American politics: “Most people think of our American political system as a public institution derived from the Constitution. Not so….[Rather], our political system has become a self-serving, self-perpetuating industry comprising gain-seeking actors who write their own rules” (56). If a “politics industry” seems like just a manner of speaking, a sensible market approach to healthy political competition, the important point in Gehl and Porter’s analysis is that it is an unhealthy industry practicing unhealthy competition. Their characterization suggests we can apply to politics the tools of analysis we normally apply to industry, and particularly the analysis of unhealthy competition due to monopolies.

To digress for a moment, this framework implies the possibility of a useful partnership between two activist movements: electoral reform and anti-monopoly. Monopoly and its ills is a topic in the midst of an explosion of attention and influence with the rise of the anti-monopoly movement, developing and evolving quickly since the Great Recession. In comments on the anti-monopoly movement’s main blog, Matt Stoller’s Substack BIG, I have argued that political power is a product, manufactured and sold in a monopolized market. Harvard Business School brings to that thesis a depth of research and analysis that I could not.

Let’s now take this industry framework back to California’s messed up primary and its new rules. “The engines of unhealthy competition in the politics industry are the overlooked but all-powerful rules, structures, norms, and practices of politics” (56). In 2010, California adopted a top-two open primary. This reform raised voter turnout, made more races competitive, encouraged bipartisan cooperation, etc. Yet these improvements are all superficial (seen through an industry lens) and they do nothing to touch the real problem Gehl and Porter identify: “The politics industry is perfectly designed to serve the private interests of the actors in this industrial complex: to grow their power and revenues and to protect against threats to their hegemony. It’s not designed to serve citizens” (19). California’s top-two rule does not threaten the politics industry’s power because it preserves the all-important “spoiler effect.” The spoiler effect is what we are watching in the current crowded primary: voters having to sacrifice their real preferences in order to get to choose between the top two candidates. The spoiler effect protects the duopoly by disciplining voters to choose only what the two parties offer. It is why ranked choice voting (RCV) is essential for healthy competition: “RCV eliminates the powerful ‘spoiler effect’” (57).

“The Wrong People”

A well-known obstacle to fixing any problem is confusion about where the problem even lies. Of the obstacles listed in the Executive Summary quotations above, the one that most simply guarantees continued dysfunction is that most people don’t see a system problem but instead imagine we are just electing the wrong people. I will digress again to present a recent example of this dynamic.

In Paul Krugman’s May 12 post, “What Happens When Americans Realize How Miserable We Are?” his subject is roughly the same as HBS’s. He looks at a number of measures of America’s failure to perform as well as other developed countries: life expectancy (the graph at the top of this article); traffic deaths; infant mortality rate. We used to be equal or better on these measures and are now worse. Our traffic deaths are three times France’s; infant mortality is worse even than China’s. Our homicide rate is four to ten or more times as bad as basically everyone’s. Beyond deaths, Krugman considers quality factors—work-life balance, paid leave, healthcare, walkable cities, public transportation—and notes, “my guess is that relatively few Americans realize how much we are falling behind other nations on basic aspects of a civilized life.”

In case you thought Squandered was just a snapshot of a few bad years, Krugman in 2026 confirms its portrait of American decline. But then he says this:

Why are American lives so often nastier, more brutish, and shorter than those of citizens of other advanced nations? That’s a complicated story, but much of it comes down to the fact that US politics has for decades been dominated by a party that is fiercely opposed to any concept of shared responsibility, of caring for our fellow citizens, and that foments a deep level of distrust that makes it ever harder to operate as a society.

Where Squandered has a genuinely complicated story to tell of dysfunction’s sources, Krugman says it comes down to our electing the wrong people: Republicans. And if “dominated by” seems to leave a systemic interpretation open, he doubles down in his next post, “The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance” (May 13): “The rejection of science, like so much of the U.S. political landscape, has a lot to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry,” as well as “the growing extremism of the Republican Party” and its “rejection of expertise.” But explanations like these are too small even to account for the U.S. political landscape, let alone the failure of American society. As Squandered shows us, “America is stuck because we have a structural political system problem” (18).

In “The Case for the Five in Final Five Voting” (2023), Katherine Gehl tries to turn our thinking from people to systems. All the minor improvements introduced by California’s nonpartisan top-two primary, for example, help voters select “the best winner,” which is the traditional goal of election theorizing. But finding the best winner, like finding who is to blame, is too small to solve our structural problem. It will not change the political industrial complex. Instead, she proposes “a new, more holistic, and results-oriented inquiry: ‘Which voting system best incentivizes elected officials to act in the public interest?’” This is the right question, based on Gehl’s work with HBS. As long as elected officials are operating within and constrained by a politics industry “perfectly designed to serve the private interests” of the system, it hardly matters whether those officials ideally reflect the values of their constituents. Before the “best winner” can matter, we must fundamentally shift power within the politics industry, or rather away from it.

Gehl’s question brings us back to the spoiler effect. As long as only the top two candidates have a viable chance of winning, most of the public will limit itself to choosing between them, enabling the duopoly to act in its own interests without fear of losing elections. Ranked choice voting—Gehl uses “instant runoff voting”—is the mechanism that enables voters to safely choose candidates outside the duopoly. Forcing the two parties to compete with outside candidates would break the duopoly control of our politics. Serving the public interest would become a viable career path, and the American political system could return to being a public institution, rather than a self-serving industry. The answer to Gehl’s holistic inquiry is Final Five Voting: to incentivize officials to the public interest, adopt nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.

“More Powerful Reforms”

Our dysfunctional political system is “a central reason America has made so little progress.” And as we’ve seen, that phrase “so little progress” labels a vast and ominously growing sea of economic weakness and societal failure. The stakes in reforming our politics, then, could not be higher. Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project takes the problem seriously.

In seeking solutions, its researchers proceed from democratic principles to corresponding political reforms, and they examine seven major reforms aimed at fostering those principles. But effectiveness is also important, and they focus on “innovations found at the intersection of what’s powerful and what’s achievable” (22). Three of the seven reforms land most clearly at that intersection. Yet those three are not well known to the public. Media attention has brought popularity to “a laundry list of reforms…[that] will either not address root causes of system failure, or they aren’t viable—or both” (26). Appendix C lists the “40 most commonly proposed reforms” from among 800 or so suggestions by survey respondents. (Multimember districts and proportional representation, which are popular in parts of the reform community, do not appear anywhere in HBS’s report and are apparently not on business leaders’ radar.)

Political effectiveness and public awareness are not much correlated. “Of these seven reforms, four have been widely discussed in the public discourse and by political commentators: (1) eliminating gerrymandering; (2) campaign finance reform; (3) congressional term limits; and (4) lobbying bans for former elected officials” (22). The report acknowledges that eliminating gerrymandering and campaign finance reform “can be beneficial,” but finds that term limits and lobbying bans make little difference. And even those beneficial first two reforms receive attention disproportionate to their impact, possibly at the expense of stronger measures:

The most powerful reforms are in three other areas not known to most individuals, but far more powerful because they will change the nature of political competition, reduce partisanship, and raise the ability of our legislators to pass and implement real solutions to our pressing economic and social challenges.

Nonpartisan Top-Five primaries…
Ranked-choice voting (RCV)…
Legislative rules reform. (22-23)

Elsewhere, Squandered refers to the first two of these as “two constituent parts” of the “Final Five Voting System” to be implemented “in tandem” (57); I treat them as a single reform.

Since I have recently been advocating an end to gerrymandering (via mathematical algorithm), I should note here that I agree with HBS that RCV/Final Five Voting is much more important. I have also argued that ending gerrymandering is a step toward Final Five Voting, a step suddenly made possible by today’s redistricting wars. Though less powerful than RCV, the reform that HBS found “resonated most strongly across all groups [was]…eliminating gerrymandering” (24), which garnered both the highest level of support and the fastest growing support over time (25, Figure 8). And this was years before the intense attention now trained on redistricting. There is a solid case for opportunism here: just as the Great Recession seared “Too big to fail” into the public’s consciousness, sending a flood of attention, money, and power into the anti-monopoly movement, so I believe the current gerrymander wars could be the galvanizing event for major electoral reform.

Be that as it may, Final Five Voting emerges as the single most powerful way to address political dysfunction, “the root cause of the decades-long inability of our government to make progress on America’s most pressing economic and social problems” (18). (Better legislative rules take a strong but secondary position.) Harvard Business School’s large-scale, multi-year project has given us, then—along with valuable information, analysis, and insight—a thesis vitally relevant to our public conversation about electoral reform: the stakes of that conversation are immeasurably higher than we usually recognize. To make this point, HBS not only documented the magnitude of America’s decline and crisis, but also spotlighted electoral reform as the very top priority in reversing our long slide. Not just easing polarization, gridlock, and other narrowly “political” problems. Not just making California’s elections sensible. Breaking the politics industry’s self-serving duopoly is how we address everything else as well.

Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 3:09 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Are you tired of the Trump era yet?
Every few weeks there's a new disaster that would have sunk any other president.
By Noah Smith
May 25, 2026

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/are-you-tired-of-the-trump-era-yet

I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.

And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.

To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:

• The assault on international tech industry employees and founders

• The disastrous Iran War

• Trump’s unprecedented corruption

Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.

But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.

Much more at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/are-you-tired-of-the-trump-era-yet

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 6:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There’s One Thing All Democrats Must Agree On, or They’re Dead in 2028

The DNC’s 2024 autopsy is a waste of your time. The answer to the party’s woes lies deep in a New York Times poll released the same day.

Michael Tomasky / May 22, 2026 / 10:26 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/210843/democrats-autopsy-2024-electoral-s
trategy-2028

I started reading the Democratic autopsy of their 2024 loss that was belatedly released Thursday, but I stopped on page eight, when I got to this sentence: “In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.” The second I saw that indefensible sentence, I clicked away.

Why? I’ve written this a few times, but I’ll write it again: There is no comparison whatsoever to be made between the Democrats’ situation after the 1988 election and their situation now, post-2024. In 1989, the Democrats had been absolutely pasted in three elections in a row. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan by nearly 10 points and 440 electoral votes; in 1984, Walter Mondale lost to Reagan by 18 points and 512 electoral votes; in 1988, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 points and 315 electoral votes.

Meanwhile, the last three presidential elections have been decided by razor-thin margins. Hillary Clinton lost narrowly, though she won the popular vote by a fairly substantial margin (2.8 million); Joe Biden won; and Kamala Harris lost by a combined 230,000 votes in three states. There is no parallel to 1989.

So why would someone write this? I can think of only two reasons. The first is a combination of historical ignorance and allowing emotion to push aside facts. Democrats were so crushed by 2024 that it kinda felt like 1988. But feeling that without looking at the actual numbers is either dumb or lazy.

The second reason someone might write that sentence is ideological. That is, they are firmly committed to the view that the Democratic Party needs to “move to the center” or even “to the right,” and so they invoke the anemic ghost of 1988 to help them make their case. And if they did happen to stop and look at the numbers from the 1980s and wrote the sentence anyway, well, that would make the writing of it a deeply cynical exercise as well, because the writer would know there’s no truth to the analogy.

That “someone,” by the way, was Democratic consultant Paul Rivera. The Democratic National Committee hired him on a pro bono, part-time basis to conduct the autopsy even though he hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades. Apparently, he never finished the job, as the document released on Thursday was shockingly incomplete. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” DNC chair Ken Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

No wonder I couldn’t read it any further. Lazy and inapt historical analogies, and indeed carrying on a detailed argument about why Harris lost, is irrelevant to what’s needed most in this moment: a discussion of how the Democrats can win in 2028. But before doing that, let me quickly offer three broad reasons why Harris lost:

1. Joe Biden didn’t exit the race in time.

2. Harris didn’t do an adequate job of reminding voters of Trump’s incompetence on a range of fronts in his first term (this is a point the autopsy apparently does make, in fairness).

3. Harris didn’t make a compelling or aggressive enough economic case.

Always in presidential campaigns, there are dozens of factors, but I would hope about 97 percent of us can agree that if Biden had exited in the spring and the Harris campaign had done a better job of 2 and 3, she’d likely have won those 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and more. OK? And that’s all the autopsy that’s really needed. (There are separate questions of the ground game and spending and things like that, but those topics are for insiders only.)

The same day the autopsy was released, The New York Times published a poll looking at Democrats’ beliefs and attitudes right now. The poll does say that in some ways, Democrats and “potential Democratic supporters” want the party to move to the center; 52 percent said the party should nominate a centrist in 2028, and 25 percent said it should nominate a more progressive candidate. Respondents thought Democrats should moderate their positions on immigration (specifically the border) and crime. And I think it’s clear to most people, for example, that the 2028 Democratic standard bearer does have to take a pretty stern line on border security. It’s the one promise Donald Trump made that he’s actually delivered on, and the only issue on which he’s above water in polls (this does not include, mind you, wanton deportations by ICE thugs—just the actual border).

So there were things, surprise surprise, that Democrats disagree on. But there was one thing they seemed to agree on: “Still, the economic populism pushed by a growing number of Democratic midterm candidates has found a receptive audience. More than 80 percent of the party’s backers thought the political and economic system should be torn down entirely or needed major changes, and nearly 90 percent called the economic system unfair.”

That’s the secret sauce, right there. That’s the answer. There was one question in the poll that to me was more important than all the others. It was wordy, so bear with me: “Now I’m going to describe two hypothetical Democrats. Tell me which of the two you would be more likely to support in the next Democratic primary for president. A candidate who promises to lower prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gouging. [Or] a candidate who promises to lower prices by making it easier to build housing and expand energy production.”

I’m not quite sure why housing and energy were considered the opposite of monopoly power and price gouging, but hey, I didn’t write it. Anyway: Going after monopolies and price gougers won 67 to 30 percent. It won massive majorities from every category in the cross-tabs. Young people, 75 percent; old people, 68 percent. Men, 65 percent; women, 69 percent. Whites, 70 percent; nonwhites, 65 percent.

Oh. And among which subcategory was the result most lopsided? White noncollege, by 76 to 22 percent. In other words, those magic white working-class voters the Democrats have hemorrhaged, and the media can never stop talking and writing about. The result among nonwhite noncollege respondents was not as extreme as that, but was still a whopping 64 to 34 percent.

The lesson here is obvious. Democrats have to make it crystal clear, unmissably clear, that they are on the side of working people struggling to get by and getting nickel-and-dimed by shifty corporations every day of their lives. That means taking certain policy positions, but it means much more.

“Positions” are close to worthless in campaigns today. What’s needed today is to create emotionally gripping narratives and make them go viral. On this issue, that means calling out the bad actors by name. It means naming villains. It means educating the American public about why they’re paying higher prices for prescription drugs and other forms of medical care, and who’s responsible. Watch this five-minute clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just ever so deftly ripping the eyeballs out of David Joyner, the CEO of CVS Health, earlier this year. Much more of that, please, Democrats.

In the superficial lexicon the political media uses, I suppose this means “moving to the left” on economics. Fine. So be it. But I’d argue it isn’t even “to the left.” It’s moving to where the people are. The people are furious about getting ripped off by corporate actors whom a rigged system will never hold to account. If virtually every demographic in that poll prefers a nominee who goes after monopolists and price gougers by 30-plus points, well, polling doesn’t ever get any clearer than that.

There’s this endless and often boring debate about whether to energize the base or reach out to moderates. As the above poll numbers show, a populist economics that targets bad actors can energize both. It’s only elite moderates who are against this, because they accept money from those sources for their campaigns or their organizations. They don’t actually represent anybody, or they represent a share of the electorate that is shrinking at a lightning pace. They, too, need to get with the program. This is where the people are.

So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 6, 2026 7:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How many lynchings ended with a trial of the murderers followed by a conviction for something, anything, not just murder?

AI Overview
There is no exact total number for how many lynchings ended in a trial and conviction. However, historians and civil rights archives estimate it was exceedingly rare.

Because a lynching is defined as an extralegal, mob-driven execution without due process, the vast majority of perpetrators were never held legally accountable.

Why Convictions Were Rare:

• Complicity and Scale: Dozens or hundreds of individuals often took part in a lynching, and local law enforcement frequently turned a blind eye or actively participated.

• Acquittals: When mob members were actually arrested and put on trial, all-white juries in the Jim Crow-era South almost universally refused to convict anyone for the murder of an African American.

• Lesser Charges: If a trial did result in a conviction, it was almost exclusively for a minor, peripheral offense like rioting or arson rather than murder.

The Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP both maintain extensive documentation regarding the thousands of documented racial terror lynchings that occurred in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings of Black Americans in the United States between 1865 and 1950.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 10, 2026 6:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Four Ideas That Explain America’s Democratic Crisis

By Brynn Tannehill | Jun 9, 2026

https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/06/09/four-ideas-explain-americas-de
mocratic-crisis/

Now that I’m an American living in Canada, something I hear all the time is some variation of, “What the hell is going on in the United States?” spoken with a tone of mixed bemusement and horror. The people I work with come from all over the world, and it’s the same message from everyone. The very short answer is “fascism”. However, people outside the U.S. can’t square the circle when it comes to understanding how the Americans they meet are generally friendly and helpful yet elected a government that revels in cruelty. The answer to why America is the way it is today lies in four central concepts: the “Chesterton’s fence” thought experiment, the Dunning-Krueger effect, Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity, and social dominance orientation (SDO).

The U.S. is diving deeper and deeper into a constitutional, political, economic, and military crisis, and it’s too much for most people to absorb. Understanding the root of these problems is critical to responding to them and the current regime, and hopefully, to finding a path toward future repair.

Chesterton’s Fence

This rule states that one should not remove any established system until you understand the purpose it serves. In 1929 novelist G.K. Chesterton wrote the following on politics and reform:

“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

By understanding the “why” behind the “what,” we avoid situations where removing something leads to unexpected problems or negative outcomes. This is crucial for avoiding unintended consequences when making changes. Even if a system appears inefficient or outdated, there might be a hidden purpose or benefit that is not immediately obvious.

The modern MAGA and Trumpist movement refuse to do this. They make their decisions from the “gut” or on the fly, guided by common sense or Christian religious beliefs. If they don’t understand something, it needs to be eliminated; no further thought is required so long as the person regards themselves as intelligent or Christian.

For example, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claimed massive fraud at the Social Security Administration (SSA). This belief was caused by their misunderstanding of the system’s data. They assumed that the system was wrong, never considering it was their comprehension that was flawed. It never occurred to them to dig deeper to understand why they were seeing what they were seeing. Instead, they chose to kick down Chesterton’s metaphorical fence.

Musk and Trump believe that their great wealth is a sign of their intelligence and infallibility, despite all evidence to the contrary. This belief in their superiority leads them to assume that their decisions to kick down fences are, naturally, correct because no one could possibly be smarter than them or better at deciding what needs to be destroyed. In reality, it is more reflective of their sociopathy and amoral ability to exploit the system for personal gain.

Which leads us to the next fundamental concept for understanding American fascism:

More at https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/06/09/four-ideas-explain-americas-de
mocratic-crisis/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 10, 2026 7:30 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, June 15, 2026 5:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.

Trumptards are Confederates. They don't want Lincoln telling them that slavery is wrong, and they know that slaves deserve to work for free so that Confederates don't have to.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 5:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Voters Who Believe That Trump Defends Their Values

Why Calls to ‘Save Democracy’ Don’t Work

Katy Osborn, Scott Warren | June 13, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/democracy-government-trump-m
aga/687535/

Given President Trump’s disregard for long-standing political norms and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, many Americans fear that he is hostile to democracy. According to this view, the 49.8 percent of voters who supported him in 2024 must simply be unaware of the existential threat he poses to our republic. The logic, to Trump’s critics, is therefore simple: Once voters fully grasp that democracy is under threat from creeping authoritarianism, then surely they will turn against Trump.

Yet this strategy has largely fallen flat. Why? The consulting and pro-democracy organizations where we work have spent the past few months with conservative Trump voters across three counties in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. We learned that many do indeed revere America’s founding design, including the Constitution, free and fair elections, the Electoral College, and the rule of law. But these voters feel that government institutions have drifted from their founding values and priorities, which they classify as faith, or the belief that moral authority precedes political authority; family, the primary unit of social life and obligation; freedom, mainly from government overreach; and place, or the importance of local community over national abstraction. The people we spoke with explained that by forsaking these values, the country’s political institutions have lost touch with the moral ethos that they believe should guide public life, and that these institutions were designed to protect.

Our research involved conducting in-depth interviews with and observing the daily lives of dozens of people along with their friends, families, and neighbors to better understand how they think about American democracy right now. Our goal was not to persuade or judge, but to figure out why public trust in national institutions has plummeted to historic lows and what might be done to build it back up.

We learned that the central question for the conservatives we met is not “Should America be a democracy?” Instead it is: “Has American democracy remained faithful to what makes it legitimate?” Democratic institutions are legitimate, in the view of conservatives, when they honor and protect the faith, freedom, families, and communities of their constituents. When institutions and the politicians who inhabit them fail to appreciate the centrality of these core values, they become illegitimate.

One participant, Sarah, a 30-something mother of three in rural Wyoming, grew up poor, the daughter of a single teen mom. From the time she was 10, her local church fed her family, cared for her when her mother couldn’t be around, and surrounded her with people who treated her with dignity. In 2008, at age 18, she strongly considered voting for Barack Obama for president. She appreciated his care for struggling Americans and believed his promises of change. The parents of her boyfriend at the time didn’t argue with her. Instead, her future in-laws listened and then asked: Who brought you out of poverty? The answer, Sarah realized, was not the federal government, but her church community—a view that she believed put her closer to the priorities and policies of conservatives rather than Democrats.

Nearly 20 years later, Sarah told us that virtually every major institution she has encountered in her life, including public schools, hospitals, and various federal agencies, has squandered her trust and fallen short of what her church gave her. Having witnessed the shortcomings of the public-school system firsthand as a teacher, Sarah now home-schools her children. When neurologists dismissed her young son's recurring seizures, she turned to networks of mothers online to crowdsource a diagnosis and treatment plan, which largely entailed avoiding certain government-sanctioned products and chemicals. (When we met her, her son hadn’t had a seizure for more than a year.) During the coronavirus pandemic, Sarah watched policies that seemed designed for urbanites arrive in her rural town without the consent of residents or evidence of their local efficacy. She threw herself into local activism, showing up to county meetings, local boards, and precinct caucuses. She now aligns herself with a chapter of the right-wing Freedom Caucus.

Across Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina, we heard stories like Sarah’s: Conventional institutions had failed participants, and faith and values-aligned organizations filled the gap. This is why calls to restore power to government institutions ring hollow, and why the Democratic Party’s faith in institutions can appear naive and godless. As Thomas, a rural South Carolinian who comes from a family with a long history of military service and civic engagement, told us: “Democrats see government as their god, while conservatives see their god as God, and government as sort of secondary.”

Disappointment and distrust in much of government—owing to the ways these institutions have seemingly abandoned the priorities that made them just and meaningful—have hardened into a worldview, one that dismisses democratic rules and norms as expendable if they don’t reinforce what’s morally essential. As Sam, a small-business owner in Michigan, put it: “Political norms are just like culture, right? Norms just mean how we have always done things. So I think that’s fine to disrupt.”

Which brings us to Trump. How can people with such a strong attachment to faith and family vote for someone who criticizes religious leaders and defies so many ethical standards? We learned that these voters evaluate Trump not as a model of their values, but as a defender of them. “I don’t like him as a person,” Cindy, a 50-something nurse in South Carolina, told us. “But I like him as a president.”

A number of respondents expressed gratitude for the way Trump has worked to protect their communities and livelihoods, particularly in coal country. Sarah told us, for example, that when Trump returned to office, her husband, a land surveyor in Wyoming, was nearly unemployed and the family was worried about making ends meet. But thanks to the president’s reversal of Biden-era restrictions on coal mining, her husband is now overwhelmed with work. Such moves have made Trump a hero in parts of the country where Americans have been unwilling or unable to pivot away from coal.

This view of Trump as a protector of the country’s core values and interests also helps explain how participants reconcile the president’s interventionist policies and growing executive power with their stated preferences for small, local governance. Many of the people with whom we spoke justified Trump’s aggressive use of federal power as a necessary response to hostile institutions that have violated their constitutional mandate. When the FBI investigates Trump, when government agencies mandate vaccines, and when the Department of Education influences local curricula, voters say these institutions have exceeded their legitimate authority. In cracking down on these institutional breaches, Trump is not breaking the rules but defending the foundation the rules were meant to protect. “Do I think Trump’s all the time, great? No. But I do think he’s fighting for everyone right now,” Kyle, a 20-something delivery driver in rural Wyoming, told us.

Our research suggests that activists seeking to protect American democracy from authoritarian influences are pursuing a failing strategy. They are defending largely abstract democratic processes, such as norms and rules, on the assumption that everyone agrees that they are legitimate and worth saving. But such arguments are unlikely to resonate with voters who have come to believe that many of these norms and processes have abandoned the country’s bedrock values. Calls to defend democracy promise to alienate anyone who feels that democratic institutions have somehow failed them. Few care to preserve a system they feel stopped serving its purpose long ago.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 2:23 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Boomers actually do hold most of the wealth and power. So why do they call it ‘whiny’ to point that out?

By Nick Lichtenberg

June 14, 2026, 7:00 AM ET

https://fortune.com/2026/06/14/why-are-boomers-millennials-angry-at-ea
ch-other-wealth-inequality-psychology/

Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had some bars about the kids these days: “Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately,” the great philosopher wrote in Rhetoric. “They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over… They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations.”

Later in the same chapter, he had some words for their elders: “They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive.”

He could have been reading my email.

A striking number of my readers—older, almost uniformly—skipped past the data entirely and went straight to character: younger generations complain too much. They spend recklessly. They don’t sacrifice. They whine.

What was notable wasn’t the anger. It was the precision of the deflection. No one challenged the Federal Reserve data showing that Baby Boomers control roughly 52% of U.S. household wealth while representing about 20% of the population. No one argued that Millennials are, in fact, thriving. The response to a structural argument about wealth and power was, almost invariably, a moral argument about character.

That pattern has a name in psychology. And understanding it—alongside what actually makes Boomers different from every dominant class that preceded them—tells you more about where America is stuck than any balance sheet. Is it whiny to try to understand this psychology, or is it a form of self-knowledge?

Two kinds of threats—and why they’re not symmetrical

In 2023, researchers Stéphane Francioli, Felix Danbold, and Michael North published a peer-reviewed study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examining precisely what makes Boomers and Millennials hostile toward each other. The findings map almost perfectly onto the reader mail in this reporter’s inbox. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11490062/

Both generations express genuine animosity toward the other. But the nature of that animosity is fundamentally different, and the difference is not incidental.

Millennials’ hostility toward Boomers is driven primarily by what intergroup threat theorists call realistic threat—specifically, the fear that Boomers’ delayed transmission of power hampers their life prospects. The Federal Reserve data on housing, wealth, and debt give that fear its material texture. Millennials aren’t upset about Boomer values. They’re upset about Boomer advantages, and the structural conditions that have made those advantages self-perpetuating.

Boomers’ hostility toward Millennials runs in the opposite direction. Their animosity is driven primarily by symbolic threat—perceived conflict over culture, values, and worldview. Not economics or data. The feeling that a generation coming up behind them is challenging something essential about what America is, what hard work means, what success is supposed to look like.

This asymmetry is a predictable feature of dominant-group psychology, older even than Aristotle. When you hold the material advantages, you don’t feel materially threatened — because you aren’t. What you feel threatened by is the narrative that your advantages might not be entirely earned. That is a different kind of threat that produces a different kind of defense.

The meritocracy is the message

One word I used in a previous headline was particularly triggering: “hoarding,” as in, hoarding wealth, hoarding real estate, hoarding political power and opportunity. Seen through the lens of psychology, this verb begs the question of what Boomers are actually being asked to defend.

It isn’t just wealth. It’s the story they’ve told about wealth—that it arrived through discipline, sacrifice and superior decision-making. And many vivid stories I’ve been told show that story isn’t entirely wrong. Many Boomers did work hard. Many did save diligently. But the story has a significant omission: they also came of age during the single most favorable economic environment in American history. Postwar manufacturing at its apex. Housing that cost 2x or 3x annual income, not 10x. Defined-benefit pensions, subsidized public universities, and a tax structure that rewarded wages as much as assets are all features of history, not current economic life.

Researchers who study system justification theory—the psychological tendency to defend existing social arrangements as fair and legitimate, even when they aren’t—have found that this impulse is strongest among people who have benefited most from the system. The more you’ve gained from an arrangement, the more motivated you are to believe the arrangement is just. Not because you’re dishonest, but because the alternative — accepting that luck and timing played a decisive role in your success — is genuinely destabilizing to the self.

A fair objection deserves airing here: a framework in which both agreement and angry disagreement confirm the thesis risks explaining everything and therefore nothing. If every defensive email is just “system justification in action,” the argument becomes unfalsifiable. That’s why the asymmetry documented by Francioli and his colleagues matters. The claim isn’t that Boomers got angry—anyone might. It’s that the anger ran almost exclusively through one channel (character and values) while leaving the other (the data) untouched, exactly as intergroup threat theory predicts for a materially dominant group. Had readers attacked the numbers and ignored the character question, the theory would have been wrong. But they didn’t do that.

Not just any privileged class

Here is where the Boomer defensiveness becomes harder to dismiss—and, strangely, easier to understand.

Every dominant group in history has reached for the same psychological toolkit. Roman senators, English landowners and mid-century American corporate aristocracies — all told versions of the same story: we have what we have because we earned it. System justification is ancient. Generational condescension goes back to the Greeks.

But Boomers are not simply the latest iteration of a recurring historical pattern. The specific configuration of advantages they accumulated — and the mechanisms by which they accumulated them—has no real precedent. This matters, because it means the defensiveness isn’t just psychologically understandable. It’s also, in a structural sense, more consequential than prior versions of the same reflex.

Start with the scale. Boomers hold an estimated $85 trillion in wealth—not merely more than prior American generations at the same life stage, but more than any cohort in recorded economic history by a vast multiple. Many of them would seemingly like to think they earned this simply by working harder than anyone who came before, but they entered the housing and equity markets just before both began 40-year appreciation cycles, and they were the largest generation in American history to do so. They didn’t just accumulate wealth—they sat on top of two of the most powerful asset-appreciation engines in modern economic history during their prime earning years.

Then there’s the democratic dimension, which gets almost no attention. Previous dominant classes held power through class, race or institutional control—not raw democratic headcount. Boomers were the largest voting bloc [by eligibility or participation?] in American history for nearly four consecutive decades, from roughly 1978 until the mid-2010s. That means the policies that shaped housing markets, the tax treatment of capital gains, the defunding of public universities and the dismantling of defined-benefit pensions were debated and passed during a period when Boomers were the decisive electoral constituency. They didn’t just benefit from the system. They voted for it repeatedly at the precise moment when their demographic weight and financial self-interest were in perfect alignment. No prior privileged class had that combination of democratic legitimacy and self-interested policymaking available simultaneously at this scale.

Finally, consider what the gap actually looks like on the other side. In most prior periods of wealth concentration, the non-wealthy simply had less. What’s structurally novel now is that younger generations don’t just have less wealth—they carry the majority of the debt. Federal Reserve data shows Millennial and Gen X mortgage debt is nearly double that of Boomers in absolute terms. More than a third of all student loan borrowers are Millennials, and the St. Louis Fed explicitly documents a generational “clear increase in debt holdings” for younger generations. “Specifically, both Gen Xers and millennials held more debt than Baby Boomers.” Student debt—which exploded during the very decades of Boomer political dominance—has no real historical parallel in prior generational transitions. The floor has been actively lowered, not just the ceiling raised.

The lattés and avocado toast

There’s another concept in social psychology called motivated invisibility — the tendency of dominant groups to render their advantages structurally invisible, not through explicit denial but through reframing.

The most durable reframe in Boomer wealth discourse is the pivot to younger-generation spending behavior: avocado toast, streaming subscriptions, the failure to delay gratification. One reader deployed this argument almost reflexively—a near-word-for-word echo of criticisms that have circulated for a decade. “Wealth is NOT a fixed amount,” they wrote to me. “Want some wealth? Go earn it and save it and accumulate it, rather than always upgrading to the latest iPhone and swilling lattés and avocado toast.” The kicker on the email brought it back to that other epithet: “you’re a whiny turd who figured out who to string some sentences together and vie for cliques.”

But the spending-habits argument is durable precisely because it accomplishes what the data cannot: it relocates the problem from structure to individual. If the gap is about choices, then no one needs to feel uncomfortable about conditions. The system is fine. The kids just need to cut back on lattés.

This is system justification in action, and it is not unique to Boomers, or to this moment. Research consistently shows that members of dominant groups across race, class, and—now, generation—reach for the same mechanism when their advantages are named.

The honest caveat

Serious coverage of this topic requires the acknowledgment that Boomers are not monolithic. Per a Pew Research Center analysis, Boomer households collectively held $77 trillion in 2022—and the top 10% of those households held 71% of it. A white-collar Boomer who bought a San Francisco home in 1985 and maxed a 401(k) is in a categorically different position from a working-class Boomer who rented their whole life and watched their pension disappear.

The structural argument is real—but the villain of this story, to the extent there is one, is not a generation. It is a cohort within a generation: college-educated, propertied, politically engaged, and concentrated in expensive coastal metros. They shaped the policy environment in their own interest during the decades when their demographic weight gave them the power to do so. And they are, not coincidentally, the people most likely to be reading Fortune—and writing back.

The scolding reflex, it turns out, doesn’t even stop at the generational boundary. It operates within the generation, too. One Boomer reader described protesting the Vietnam War at 18 and feeling “angst about selling out”—”then I grew up,” he wrote. He told me he isn’t rich, but he “worked my way up to making enough to make sure my kids weren’t hungry.” His verdict on his peers was harsher than anything Millennials sent me: “I am not rich, but I am not complaining. And I can’t believe that so many in my generation of Flower Children are such losers.” The character argument, in other words, is not really about age. It is a portable script, and it gets deployed downward—at whoever has less—regardless of birth year.

Another reader put it more cleanly than most: “The bigger issue is not old versus young. It is a broken American system that has made housing unaffordable, healthcare unaffordable, retirement insecure, and work feel unstable for nearly everyone.” That framing is neither wrong nor incompatible with the structural argument about how we ended up in a place where everyone feels stuck, and like everyone else is whining about it.

That is a harder emotional position than defensiveness. It requires disaggregating two things that Boomer identity has long held together: the real effort and the real tailwind. It requires acknowledging that you can deserve what you earned and still have been given conditions that made earning easier — conditions that were then, through the very political power that prosperity enabled, systematically withdrawn from the people who came after.

Jon from the Channel Islands sees an even larger force gathering behind the generational one. The Boomer/Millennial wealth debate, he argued, is being overtaken by a capitalism-and-AI-driven concentration that will make the current gap look modest—wealth flowing not from young to old but from nearly everyone to the owners of the machines. The combatants in the generational war, in his telling, are arguing over a shoreline that is about to be redrawn entirely: “It is like they are scratching their heads wondering why the water has suddenly drained out of the bay,” he wrote, “oblivious to the tsunami that is coming in shortly, to swallow them up.”

Only a few readers asked the question that none of the angry emails even approached. My favorite: “How do we build a country where younger people can rise without older people being discarded?” That is a political question, not a generational one. The answer isn’t unknowable, but the people with the most power to shape it have spent the better part of a decade arguing about whether the question is fair.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 15, 2026 2:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.
Trumptards are Confederates. They don't want Lincoln telling them that slavery is wrong, and they know that slaves deserve to work for free so that Confederates don't have to.

Confederates were Democrats.

And it's the Democrats today that want to let in millions every year to work for slave wages and keep the quality of life down for everyone who isn't rich.

YOU are the bad guys. You were always the bad guys.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 6:16 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

SPOILER ALERT: You ARE the bad guys.
Trumptards are Confederates. They don't want Lincoln telling them that slavery is wrong, and they know that slaves deserve to work for free so that Confederates don't have to.

Confederates were Democrats.

And it's the Democrats today that want to let in millions every year to work for slave wages and keep the quality of life down for everyone who isn't rich.

YOU are the bad guys. You were always the bad guys.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

So, the Democrats of today's USA are the Democrats of the Confederacy in 1860? Then the Democrats of North Korea must be the Democrats of today's USA, too. The same name must mean they are the same.

• People's Democratic Republic of Algeria
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste
• Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
• Lao People's Democratic Republic
• Democratic People's Republic of Korea
• Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal
• Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 6:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The End of Neoliberalism

The virtues it extolled—cosmopolitanism and competition—led to its demise.

June 15, 2026, 12:13 AM

By Branko Milanovic, a research professor at the CUNY Graduate Center.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/15/neoliberalism-globalization-compe
tition-cosmopolitanism-economics-reagan-thatcher/

If one were to define neoliberal globalization during the 40-year period from the early 1980s to around 2020, one could say it was driven by two ideas: cosmopolitanism and competition. One could also say these same features have now led to neoliberalism’s undoing.

Cosmopolitanism was an essential neoliberal idea going back to the meetings of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1930s Paris and the early Mont Pèlerin Society. Cosmopolitanism meant that every individual in the world was to be thought of as equally important and equally capable of economic improvement if they faced optimal economic conditions—which implied security of private property, free trade, low taxes, and a “tolerable administration of justice.” Very little else, in the words of economist Adam Smith, was needed to fulfill the universal desire of all persons to “better their own condition” and for the world to attain unimagined levels of prosperity.

Cosmopolitanism was also the political idea underpinning a neoliberal world where national government as such would be out of sight and would leave individuals free to pursue their self-interest. This was, ideally, a world of small or almost invisible government. In the language of early advocates of neoliberalism, “imperium”—that is, flags, anthems, languages, and other paraphernalia of nationhood—would be left to politicians (and to voters, if citizens insisted on voting), and the more consequential world of “dominium” would consist of the movement of goods, capital, technology, and people.

For cosmopolitanism to create global wealth and prosperity, the world also had to be competitive. Not only would people be allowed to compete with (or against) one another regardless of national borders, but they also needed to be stimulated to compete by the display of all the goods that could be theirs and by the societal approval they would command if they won in that competition.

Competition produced global growth: Between 1980 and 2020-21, the average world GDP per capita more than doubled, jumping from $7,700 (in 2005 international dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity) to almost $17,000. This makes the worldwide yearly average growth rate 2.1 percent per capita, an extraordinarily high rate for a period of 40 years. (And this despite the increase of the world population from 4.4 billion in 1980 to 8.3 billion now.) The more than doubling of per capita income combined with an almost doubling of the world population means that the total amount of goods and services produced in the world quadrupled during the era of neoliberal globalization.

But this “anonymous” growth rate, realized principally thanks to the high growth rates of Asian countries and notably China, did not help neoliberals’ case in rich countries. What was politically salient was not the 2.1 percent global rate but the fact that in the United States and in most rich Western countries, much of the population registered real (adjusted for inflation) growth rates of approximately 1 percent per year, while incomes of the rich grew two to three times faster.

Moreover, the neoliberal period (dated from Ronald Reagan’s presidency onward) was not only pro-rich, in the sense that incomes of the rich increased faster than those of the middle class and the poor. It also represented a slowdown in across-the-board growth compared with the preceding period. In fact, at every point of U.S. income distribution—except at the very top—growth was slower during the neoliberal era than during the previous decade and a half.

The world, at least for a while, seemed to become uniform, divided not by borders of nation-states, race, or gender but by differences in people’s abilities, skills, and effort. It was approaching the neoliberal ideal of a borderless world full of intensively competitive individuals whose competitive juices were additionally stimulated by the ability to communicate with any part of the globe and to learn what potential competitors may do—and then to try to outdo them.

But cosmopolitanism and competition, however attractive in themselves, were an unstable combination.

Cosmopolitanism crashed against national political borders. Excessive competition created a world of greed, amorality, and commercialization of all activities, even those that used to be the most private ones. Fundamentally, it threatened to make family superfluous.

The winners of neoliberal globalization in rich countries—inspired precisely by their cosmopolitanism, which they regarded as a moral virtue (being free of poisonous nationalism)—were quick not only to treat their less fortunate compatriots’ welfare as of no greater importance as the welfare of a foreigner or a stranger but also to believe that their compatriots’ failure in such an open competition was indicative of some moral flaw. Economic success meant being virtuous, or as Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whose rise to power coincided almost perfectly with those of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, did not deny: “To be rich is glorious.”

The political system however is organized within nation-states. The less fortunate compatriots felt forgotten and ignored, and they were resentful of the way in which they were treated. They saw the readiness, even eagerness, of the rich to invest in faraway places as callousness toward domestic workers. Promises of new jobs that would replace those lost due to cheaper imports or online work elsewhere were hard to materialize.

The resulting discontent created political turbulence in the richest democracies. The 2007-08 global financial crisis made obvious what had previously only been implicit. The rich did not care for those left behind, and when the costs of the crisis had to be paid, they made sure that the bill was not sent to them.

The malcontents who in previous times would equally replenish extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing parties, as they did during the Great Depression in the 1930s, had now much less choice. The left-wing parties were either discredited by the failure of the “real-existing socialism” or, through their accommodative third-way policies, seen as accomplices of the center-right parties in promoting the type of neoliberal globalization that so disenchanted Western working and middle classes. Indeed, the peak of neoliberal globalization was achieved under the notionally left-wing governments of Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in the U.K., and François Mitterrand in France.

So the disappointed masses turned toward the right-wing parties that promoted national solidarity, an end to the (economically) equal treatment of the domestic population and foreigners, and even a return of industrial jobs. In the international arena, neoliberal globalization thus became increasingly replaced by neomercantilism, which used economic coercion, the seizure of foreign assets, import bans, and extravagant tariff policies to cut, or at least control, the free flow of goods and services. Free flow of labor was even easier to cut because its political popularity, even at the peak of neoliberal globalization, was small.

The second part of the neoliberal equation—competition within society and across borders and time zones—created, with the assistance of technical advances, a world where the upkeep of one’s homes and cars and even domestic chores, from cooking to elder- and childcare, were shifted precisely to the people who no longer had steady jobs and were part of the class of malcontents. The moral norms that previously held societies and families together and would have forestalled such outsourcing had become effaced by a desire to be “glorious”—that is, to be rich. That perceived amorality also helped the rise of anti-systemic right-wing parties. They grew on the promise of a restoration not only of lost jobs but of self-respect among malcontents and a return to allegedly traditional values for society as a whole.

In short, neoliberalism has succumbed to its own substitution by a combination of protective barriers for foreign goods and foreign people and vain attempts to return to a more traditional world at home. As in a Greek tragedy, the very features that ensured neoliberal globalization’s success for decades produced its inevitable demise.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 6:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Wall Street Journal BOOKSHELF | By Barton Swaim | June 15, 2026 4:05 pm ET

‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress

JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’

Harper, 304 pages, $35

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/communion-review-the-veeps-prog
ress-358f0ac2

JD Vance’s intellectual evolution continues apace. In “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) he lamented the social pathologies he witnessed as a child in small-town Kentucky and Ohio—drug addiction, domestic violence, idleness and dependency—but concluded that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” As a political figure, first as U.S. senator and currently as vice president, Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create them, namely by free trade and offshoring. As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.

These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race.

Mr. Vance’s second memoir, “Communion,” chronicles the evolution of his religious views: from the Evangelical-Pentecostal faith of his early years, through the halfhearted atheism of his 20s, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 at age 35. The book is part religious memoir, part campaign book. Roughly the latter half articulates Mr. Vance’s updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics, with Christianity making appearances at opportune moments; readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028.

Mr. Vance has no ill words for the unlearned fundamentalism in which his grandmother raised him. He credits the small-town nondenominational congregants of his early years with living out the kind of communitarian values the rest of the world professes to value but mostly doesn’t. You soon get the feeling, however, that the Bible-carrying countryfolk of Mr. Vance’s early years serve mainly as a foil for the educated elites he so detests. “From the professional pipeline I encountered in law school to the social media mob of the 2016 election,” he writes, “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”

More than once Mr. Vance scorns elite “strivers” and purports to feel shame that he once tried hard to gain admittance to their circles. “I wanted to win the race because other people wanted to win the race,” he recalls of his feverish attempt to attend an elite law school. “In a sense, I won that race and was admitted to Yale Law School.” But it all came at a price. “Without realizing it, I had become addicted to winning the competitions other people set for me.” On the next page, Mr. Vance uses the term “humblebrag,” but about other people, not himself.

You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He equates the free-market outlook with amoral indifference to anything apart from abstract economic-growth numbers. Reciting stories of people trampling one another to buy new tech products on Black Friday, Mr. Vance observes that “from the view of classical economics, they’re doing something far more ‘productive’ than reading a book or spending time with their children.”

Having several years ago read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum novarum,” in which the pope sought to enunciate an economic outlook that avoided both socialism and capitalism, Mr. Vance attempts to express his own “Christian approach to economics,” which amounts to little more than the prescription that economic actors should exercise kindness, mercy and generosity. Employers, Mr. Vance accordingly thinks, should pay workers a fair or living wage. He doesn’t say who would define “fair” and “living”—Labor Department bureaucrats?

In one passage of egregious sloppiness, Mr. Vance quotes a paper by Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, in which she explains the perverse effects of mandatory parental-leave benefits. “A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Ms. Calder writes. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.” Mr. Vance fulminates: “Never have I read a purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.” If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them.

Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes. If he wins the presidency, one hopes he can take his own counsel to practice humility in the face of difficult questions. But by then, he may have a different set of views.

Mr. Swaim writes the Journal's Unruly Republic column.

Download JD Vance’s books for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Vance,%20J.D. or https://z-lib.sk/book/45vmxEveqa/communion-finding-my-way-back-to-fait
h.html for this particular book.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 21, 2026 6:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why Wages Fall

Paul Krugman | Jun 20, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/arindrajit-dube-on-wages

. . . So the entire shareholder primacy revolution that happens in the ‘70s and ‘80s, turns out had a real impact on how wages were set. Research by Daron Acemoglu from M.I.T. and coauthors find a really interesting fact. Most businesses are not run by people with a business school degree. I actually didn’t know that. Even today, that’s actually the case. But the share that actually have a CEO with a business school degree has been rising quite, quite steadily. So what happened, for example, in the ‘80s or the ‘90s, when a company moved for the first time to a CEO with an MBA? Sometimes it’s because maybe someone retired or even died, you know? It sounds kind of grim, but actually it makes for a good natural experiment where, almost random, you introduce a CEO with an MBA for the first time. And what’s really interesting is that it leads to a very clear reduction in pay: about a 6% reduction in pay for workers overall, and about a 9% reduction for blue-collar workers. So the labor share falls by about five percentage points. That’s the amount of money going to workers versus owners. And of course, CEO pay rises. Now you may say, well, maybe that happens, and that’s just like the cost of running the business better, right? MBAs probably raise productivity. Wrong. It has no effect on productivity compared to comparable businesses. So it’s purely a rent transfer, as we say. Meaning, you’re taking money from one group and giving it to the other. In this case, the money is going towards owners of capital and high-income managers, and away from the workers, especially blue-collar workers.

Krugman: Wow. I always thought that the Harvard Business School was evil, but I didn’t realize it was quite that evil. So that’s pretty impressive. That’s really a significant impact on sort of the nature of our society that comes from almost an academic doctrine.

Dube: Absolutely. This is sort of like ideology. It’s ideology, not skills that is explaining this important change here. And, in fact, this turns out to have played a non-trivial role in the fall in the labor share in the United States, for example.

Krugman: That’s a really funny thing for me. Economists are supposed to be hard-headed, but in fact, if you really look at the data, and really do economic science, it says that ideology matters a lot.

The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It [2026]
Download the book from https://z-lib.sk/s/?q=The+Wage+Standard+What+Wrong+in+the+Labor+Market
+and+How+to+Fix+It

A sample from the book:

Quote:
If you’re like most working Americans, I have some good news: You probably deserve a raise!

Now, you very well may share this sentiment—after all, most of us believe we’re doing a decent job. But here’s the kicker: In this case, chances are, you’re right. You might wonder how I could possibly know that, since we’ve likely never met. I’ve never been to your workplace, and we’ve never shared a meal or even a coffee. So how can I be so sure?

Well, it has everything to do with my job. I study how people get paid, and why they earn what they earn. My work involves poring over mountains of data, analyzing how companies set wages, and examining the ripple effects of those decisions on employees, customers, and companies themselves. I’ve researched what happens when businesses compete to attract talent and what unfolds when governments step in to establish pay standards. A few years ago, I even advised the United Kingdom’s government on setting its minimum wage policy. These experiences have given me a unique perspective on how companies—your employer included—figure out what to pay.

Here’s the truth: Over the past half century, many working- and middle-class Americans have received paychecks smaller than they should be, even as our society has grown more prosperous. In this book, I aim to show you why—and, more importantly, how—we can change the labor market to work better for us all.

The Wage Standard tells the story of how we got here, the choices that led to this situation, and the steps we can take to give America a raise. Let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine we were time-traveling anthropologists transported back to 1980 to study the American economy. What would seem familiar? What would feel completely different?

Life in 1980 was, in many ways, a world apart from our own. If you wanted to buy a TV, you might head to a department store like Sears, where a 19-inch color RCA television would cost the equivalent of $1,700 today (as in 2023 dollars, after adjusting for inflation).[1] These TVs were clunky and expensive, and they required manual adjustments for a decent picture. On your way home, you might drive to a supermarket called Alpha Beta—yes, that was a real chain—in a car without keyless ignition, built-in navigation, or even airbags, likely getting around sixteen miles per gallon. Inside the store, you’d find few pre-prepared meals, no exotic fruits out of season, and hardly any imported food products.

Fast-forward to today, and the differences are staggering, but the most notable is economic: America has become a far wealthier society than we were forty-five years ago. One way to measure this progress is by looking at how much American workers produce in an hour of work. After accounting for inflation in a manner consistent with how pay is measured, and subtracting the portion of output needed to replenish machinery, buildings, and so on, American workers’ overall hourly productivity rose by 73 percent between 1980 and 2019.[2] That statistic alone shows how much wealthier our society has become: We can produce over 1.7x as many goods and services in an hour as we did forty years ago. To put this in perspective, a 73 percent gap in current overall income is roughly the difference between America and countries like Estonia or Poland.[3]

But how have wages grown since 1980? If everyone’s wages had risen in step with overall productivity—and if the shares of income going to labor and capital had stayed the same—then real (inflation-adjusted) wages could have grown by as much as 73 percent between 1980 and 2019.[4] But is that what actually happened? Or did wages evolve in a way that diverted much of the productivity gains to top earners and business owners rather than to most workers?

During our hypothetical trip back in time, imagine asking the employees at Alpha Beta how much they were making. To find out what their wages looked like—and how they’ve changed—we can turn to the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly federal survey based on household interviews. According to the CPS, the average hourly wage for retail workers in 1980 was about $14.60 in today’s dollars. Fast-forward four decades: If we repeated the survey in 2019, just before the pandemic, we’d find that their average pay had risen to only about $17.40, a 19 percent increase in the real (or inflation-adjusted) wage.[5]

In other words, while the broader economy has changed in dramatic, fundamental ways—becoming much richer overall—wages for many workers have remained much more suppressed. Even as economy-wide productivity climbed by 73 percent, the purchasing power of frontline retail workers grew much less, only by around 19 percent. That’s a striking—and sobering—gap, reminding us that economic growth alone doesn’t guarantee broad-based prosperity.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 22, 2026 5:24 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why America Is Spiritually Broken and How to Fix It

June 20, 2026

Senator Chris Murphy on his provocative new book about loneliness, disconnection, and what Democrats need to do to win back America’s soul.

Emily Bazelon interviews Senator Chris Murphy about his new book Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. Murphy argues that Trump is not the root cause of America’s political crisis—he’s a symptom. The real diagnosis: a country ravaged by loneliness, disconnection, and the collapse of community. From gun violence to Jan. 6, Murphy traces our troubles back to a spiritual unspooling, a loss of meaning and purpose. But his book offers solutions.

https://slate.com/podcasts/gabfestreads/2026/06/senator-chris-murphys-
crisis-of-the-common-good-argues-that-americas-political-crisis-stems-from-loneliness-and-disconnection

Download the free book from https://z-lib.sk/s/Crisis%20of%20the%20Common%20Good

Quote:
Introduction

Black Bear

Rider isn’t likely to play in the NHL. Don’t get me wrong— my fourteen-year-old son is a good, dedicated athlete, and he might be a little upset that the first line of his dad’s book sells short his professional hockey prospects. But despite competing in a serious, multistate league that requires me to occasionally miss votes in the Senate to travel up and down the East Coast every weekend over a grueling sixty-game, five-month season, he’s not interested in devoting his entire childhood to chasing a pro career as a hockey goalie. He still plays other sports—flag football, basketball, and golf—and he values the locker-room camaraderie just as much as the competition. That sounds about right for an eighth grader.

The problem is that the people who run the league he plays in see things differently. For the owners of the American Hockey Federation (AHF)—the youth hockey association that pulls together elite teams from Connecticut to Virginia—kids’ sports is a cutthroat business, a way to make a handful of people very, very rich. Black Bear Sports Group owns the AHF, several other youth hockey leagues, and many of the rinks in which the teams practice and play. Methodically and quietly, Black Bear—backed by private equity investment—is building a stranglehold over the youth hockey infrastructure in the eastern United States. While Rider sees hockey as character-building fun, Black Bear’s objective is far simpler: to make a grotesque amount of money off kids’ sports.

I first came face-to-face with this reality when I noticed a parent from our team sheepishly recording his son from a dark corner of the rink during one of our league games. . . .

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 28, 2026 6:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Adam Bates
June 27 at 12:27?PM

I think one of the underdiscussed aspects of these young progressive/socialist firebrands is what their youth says about their perception of the Republican Party.

I've been trying to figure out why it bugged me so much to hear Chris Murphy say that "boldness" is the lesson he took from the socialist youth coup the other night, and I think this is it.

One of my frequent complaints about the current generation of Democrat leaders is that they regularly act like (and sometimes flat-out say) they think at some point this Trumpist trance is going to break and the GOP will revert to the party of Ronald Reagan and George Will that old guard Democrats remember from their formative years in politics.

32-year-old Darializa Avila Chevalier doesn't have that memory. 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani doesn't have that memory. For their entire adult lives, the GOP has been a party of inveterate, openly bigoted trolls who never participate in any discourse in good faith and can never be reasoned with.

It's not boldness for its own sake. It's boldness born of seeing this iteration of the Republican Party for what it is, of not lying to themselves that at some point everything is just going to snap back to "Republican" meaning open borders and skepticism of foreign interventions just because that's what Ronnie Reagan thought 40 years ago.
Their boldness is the natural, inevitable consequence of hearing "Republican" and reflexively thinking of Stephen Miller instead of George Will.

Chuck Schumer's and Joe Biden's ancient dalliances with their "colleagues across the aisle" must now be seen as grotesque failures to heed the warning signs rather than halcyon reveries to which we should aspire to return.

George Will ain't walkin through that door. The GOP is a nazi troll party now, and the only people in our entire political ecosystem who seem to actually understand that are the ones who are too young to remember anything else. They are being bold, but not because it appeals to voters. They're being bold because once you stop lying to yourself about what we're dealing with, there's no excuse to be anything else.

https://www.facebook.com/adam.bates.9216/posts/i-think-one-of-the-unde
rdiscussed-aspects-of-these-young-progressivesocialist-fi/10109266615535087/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 5, 2026 6:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What J. D. Vance Once Knew

Ten years ago, the vice president wrote that one day, voters would realize the truth about Donald Trump. That day has now arrived.

By Peter Wehner | Jul 4, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/jd-vance-trump-independence-
day/687779/

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, in the middle of the presidential campaign, an essay in The Atlantic set out to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. Its author traced that appeal to the social decline and cultural trauma he had known firsthand, in an impoverished childhood. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-of-the-mas
ses/489911/

The author, J. D. Vance, had only days earlier published Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to sell roughly 3 million copies and made him, almost overnight, the country’s designated interpreter of working-class grievances. And he was quite good at it.

In the July 4, 2016, essay, Vance described the places from which the pain came—factories that downsized or ceased to exist, along with the jobs they had provided; the aesthetic decline in once beautiful and vibrant towns; families that were shattering or never forming in the first place; and anger and frustration with a government that had broken the trust with the people it was meant to serve. “During this election season,” Vance wrote, “it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever.” His name was Donald Trump.

In the midst of a social crisis, Vance observed, Trump offered “an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” But, he argued, such promises were a cheap high. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”

“Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

“One day” is today.

THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY, while still quite dangerous, is also collapsing, cracking under the weight of its own choices. The main driver is the economy, which he sold as his strong point. We’re seeing tariff-driven price increases, gas prices that spiked from less than $3 to more than $4 a gallon during a 100-day war against Iran that America lost, wages failing to keep pace with the cost of living, and inflation ticking back up. Manufacturing jobs, which Trump promised to bring roaring back, are still being lost. Health care has gotten much more expensive on his watch, and millions have lost coverage.

At the top of the nation’s health agencies sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a single year moved to cut the list of recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half, fired the government’s vaccine advisers and replaced them with skeptics, and presided over the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biomedical science, has seen billions in research cut, clinical trials canceled, and labs closed, resulting in a “brain drain” that rival nations are racing to exploit. And the dismantling of USAID, along with the gutting of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan AIDS-relief program credited with saving more than 25 million lives—has, by credible estimates, already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, most of them children, with projections of as many as 14 million more by 2030 if the cuts hold.

Americans are deeply divided and intensely polarized, with pessimism at or near a multidecade high. Faith in nearly every major institution—government, the press, universities, religious leaders—sits at or near the bottom of the modern record.

It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s approval rating is anemic. (In one recent poll, it’s down to 30 percent.) His remaining support is soft, while the unhappiness with him is intense. Republican members of Congress are beginning to break with him. His MAGA base is fracturing. Former stalwart supporters, such as Tucker Carlson, are openly mocking the president. (“Shut up, bitch! I don’t take you seriously,” Carlson said 10 days ago.) Trump looks weak and lost, a husk of a man still performing the same routine to a crowd that is drifting toward the exits. The country is finally waking to the comedown Vance predicted.

THIS IS THE CONTEXT in which Americans are celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday. It’s not simply that things are going badly; it’s that their view of the United States is darkening. Pride in being an American has hit a new low. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the Founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.

Some of that sentiment reflects the fact that the president and those around him subvert the rule of law, decency, and democratic restraints. Many Americans believe the country is, in its current incarnation, betraying its ideals. They feel at odds with the nation they love.

And this is true as well: Among more and more Americans there is a sickening recognition of what the United States, during the Trump era, has become. They see it as a pitiable farce, a verdict that is hard to dispute when a nation has twice elected a carnival barker as its leader. For a historically proud people, that is an indignity and a humiliation. We are in the bread-and-circuses phase of the American story, the point at which a great republic, having lost its sense of purpose, makes do with spectacle.

Which brings me back to J. D. Vance. Ten summers ago he understood, better than most, the threat Trump posed to America. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” thought Trump was an “idiot.” https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/10/01/vance-walz-vp-debate-
tonight/vances-past-trump-comments-00182072

He admitted to a friend at the time that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/04/19/americas-hitler-old-j-d-vanc
e-message-turns-up-in-heated-senate-primary/

But then ambition made its offer, and Vance, who had seen the danger so clearly, discovered he could see his way around it. The first stop was the Senate; the next was the vice presidency.

Along the way, the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy—a teller of hard truths, a morally serious person committed to honesty even when it cost him, beholden to no one—became a cynic, a partner in a cruel enterprise, a peddler of lies he is surely clever enough to recognize as such, a man whose only fixed commitment is to his own rise to power.

In his memoir, Vance wrote, “Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.” It’s a poignant line, referring to a man raised amid the addiction and volatility he feared he might inherit. The monster Vance feared was a private one; the monster he became is a public one. His legacy turns out to be a much more destructive than the one he was afraid of inheriting.

AMERICA WILL OUTLAST TRUMP AND VANCE; the issue is whether they will be seen as a parenthesis the country closes or the opening of a different, dark chapter.

Abraham Lincoln, in his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum on the subject of the perpetuation of our political institutions, warned, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” What Lincoln meant is that the threat America faced was not external conquest; it was internal decay. If destruction is to be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

Lincoln was responding to a wave of mob violence in the 1830s, including lynchings such as the murder of the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The “props” that once supported a “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” were “decayed, and crumbled away.” Out of such decay might rise a demagogue, a future tyrant, feeding on what the Lincoln scholar Diana Schaub called “politically degenerative passions.”

The remedy, according to Lincoln, was a “political religion” based on reverence for the law and fidelity to America’s constitutional process. Lincoln was in turn relying on the wisdom of George Washington, and particularly Washington’s farewell address. America’s two greatest presidents shared an intense conviction: that a republic depends on some measure of virtue in its citizens and some measure of integrity in its leaders. Without them, the temple of liberty will fall.

The past decade in America has been a lost decade. Far too many Americans have cheered on the men tearing at the temple. But Americans can now see, later than they should have, the cost of the damage. It is within our power to make it whole. What remains is to find the will. There is a name for those who do: renewers of ruined cities, repairers of the breach, restorers of streets in which to dwell.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Judeo-Bolshevist Target

Popular memory in the West tends to separate the Holocaust from the German war against the Soviet Union, but for the Nazi regime they were two faces of the same undertaking.

By Omer Bartov | July 23, 2026 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/07/23/the-judeo-bolshevist-targe
t-jochen-hellbeck/

Reviewed:
World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews
by Jochen Hellbeck
Penguin Press, 536 pp., $35.00

Free download of Jochen Hellbeck's books from https://z-lib.sk/s/Jochen%20Hellbeck

Sometime in early 1983, toward the end of my time as a graduate student at Oxford University, I met with the military historian Michael Howard, who had served as an officer during World War II and fought in the Italian campaign. As I followed this distinguished, rather reserved scholar toward the entrance of All Souls College, where he was a fellow, he sensed my unease at walking across the immaculate lawn. Grinning discreetly, he muttered, “They’d shoot you were you to do this on your own.”

By then Howard had already read much of my Ph.D. thesis on the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) against Red Army troops and Soviet civilians, for which I had used German army documents to demonstrate that regular combat units—influenced by a combination of intense indoctrination, orders from the high command, brutal discipline, and fierce fighting at the front—had killed civilians and prisoners of war on an unprecedented scale. The number of crimes I described, he told me, had astonished him.

Howard explained that for much of the Italian campaign his battalion had fought against the same German unit. When they captured one of the German officers, they invited him to the mess and shared a glass of cognac before sending him to a POW camp. They expected the same treatment from the Germans.

I was taken aback that Howard, one of the preeminent military historians of his time, was surprised to learn of the atrocities on the Eastern Front. But at that point few scholars in the United Kingdom or the United States seemed to understand that in Europe World War II had been conducted as two very different wars. In Western Europe the fighting was quite conventional, despite its frequent ferocity. The war in Eastern Europe, by contrast, was precisely what Adolf Hitler ordered his generals to carry out: a Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, against subhuman enemies to be exterminated or enslaved.

During the war Americans and Europeans paid close attention to the daily news that documented the fighting on the Eastern Front—and for good reason. For much of the war, most of the German military was fighting in the East, which is also where it sustained its greatest defeats and most of its casualties. It is hard to imagine that the Western Allies could have freed Europe from Hitler and his collaborators without the Red Army’s relentless drive to Berlin, which came at great cost: the Soviet military lost as many as 11 million men and women.

But no sooner had the fighting come to an end than competing national memories of the Eastern Front started to take shape. In the Soviet Union the war became a foundational event binding together a vast and complex society. The collective memory of the war continues to play this role to this day: official commemoration emphasized the sacrifice and heroism of everyday Soviet citizens for freedom around the world. As the cold war began, however, the British and the Americans came to see the Soviet Union as essentially the equivalent of Nazi Germany—one totalitarian regime that replaced another. By the early 1950s the war was increasingly recalled as a struggle against tyranny by the forces of democracy, and America’s “unholy alliance” with the USSR—now a bitter adversary—as a necessary evil.

Most popular accounts of the war in America fixated on those fronts where the US Army had been engaged; the war in the East, where the bulk of the Wehrmacht was destroyed, drew relatively little attention. The titles given in 1978 to a remarkable twenty-part US-Soviet television documentary on the Eastern Front—codirected by the venerable Jewish Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen, narrated by Burt Lancaster, and produced in collaboration between the American Fred Weiner and the Soviet agency Sovinfilm—reflected these diverging perspectives. Called The Great Patriotic War in Russian and The Unforgotten War in German, it was distributed in the US under the title The Unknown War.

Further reshaping the legacy of the Eastern Front in the US and Western Europe were major changes in the memory of the Holocaust. Apart from stories of courageous GIs and Tommies liberating usually unidentified inmates from concentration camps, the Shoah as the Nazi genocide of the Jews hardly figured in early commemorations of the “good war,” the very name of which underlined a righteous struggle against tyranny, without direct reference to Nazi crimes. Starting in the mid-1970s and reaching a peak in the early twenty-first century, the emerging perception in the West that the Holocaust marked, in the words of the historian Dan Diner, the “collapse of civilization” meant that it was seen as the single most important event during World War II.

This shift of emphasis at times had the effect of isolating the systematic murder of Jews from the historical conditions that shaped it. In popular memory, the Nazis’ mass murder of other groups receded to a secondary place: Soviet casualties—between 26 and 27 million, including soldiers and civilians—were rarely counted among the victims of Hitler’s regime (usually cited as either six million Jews or 11 million Jews and “others”). When Western historians took stock of Nazi ideology, too, they tended to downplay how thoroughly entangled antisemitism was both with the regime’s anticommunism and with its expansionist designs on the East. Many of them therefore minimized or neglected the claim, endlessly repeated by Nazi propaganda and the Wehrmacht’s high command and generals in the field, that fighting “Judeo-Bolshevism” was the fundamental mission of the war.

More recent scholarship has sought to remedy some of these oversimplifications, putting the genocide of the Jews in the larger setting of the Nazis’ geopolitical ambitions on the Eastern Front and their obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism.”1 The latest effort to correct the record is a major survey by the German-born Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck. World Enemy No. 1 aims to decisively reorient the general reader’s understanding of World War II as well as the Holocaust toward the Eastern Front and the murderous anticommunist campaign the Wehrmacht waged there. The Nazis’ “crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism,” Hellbeck stresses, was nothing less than “the conflict’s driving force.” And just as it was the Soviet Union that finally defeated Hitler’s armies, he argues, so it was the war in the USSR that became “the laboratory for the German politics of mass murder.”

Germany’s military collapse at the end of World War I profoundly shocked the nation. Its army commanders Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg (who was president of Germany from 1925 to 1934) tried to shirk responsibility for their failures by singling out Jews and socialists as the leaders of the “November criminals” who had allegedly stabbed the army in the back by creating unrest in the German population and inciting defeatism among the ranks of the military, leading to the armistice of 1918.

This myth, known in Germany as the Dolchstosslegende (the stab-in-the-back legend), made the rounds in far-right circles. Before long it was adopted by the fledgling Nazi Party, which drew on an already well-established political form of antisemitism that attributed the pains of rapid modernization to the recent emancipation of the Jews and legitimized age-old prejudices by invoking “scientific” racism that defined Jews as an immutable biological threat. The conflation of Jews and socialists had a particularly lethal salience, because it both linked the Jews to a political ideology that sought to undermine the social order and provided an explanation for the defeat of the German Empire.

As Hitler and his followers saw it, in order to make sure that Germany would not be stabbed in the back once more, it had to deal with the enemies from within before turning against its external enemies: the Communists and the Jews. The “Judeo-Bolshevist” threat became an essential ingredient of Nazi ideology, appearing in Hitler’s writings and speeches both before and after he came to power. The distinction between the two targets was never clear. Although Germany after 1933 had a Judenpolitik (policies of economic boycott, removal from state service, racial definition and segregation, property requisition, and forced emigration that were specifically aimed at Jews), as the German historian Peter Longerich argues in his 1988 study of the extermination of the Jews (published in English in 2010), its first victims were the Communists, the Socialists, and the trade unionists, who were incarcerated and murdered in vast numbers. (Jewish Communists, it should be pointed out, were abused even more brutally than their “Aryan” comrades.)

The Nazis persecuted Jews severely from the moment they took over. In 1935 they enacted and enforced discriminatory racial laws. In 1938 came the devastating Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass. Afterward, they incarcerated tens of thousands of Jews in concentration camps to coerce them to leave the country.

By the outbreak of World War II about half of the Jewish population of the Reich had emigrated. Then the Germans marched into Poland, subjecting an additional two million Jews to their rule. Plans to expel Poland’s Jews faltered, since by that point there was nowhere for them to go, and so the Nazis forced them into lethally crowded ghettos.

As we know from the work of Christopher Browning, some Nazi officials wanted to let the Jews incarcerated in the ghettos die of “natural causes,” while others preferred to put them to work for the Reich. The latter temporarily won out; nonetheless hundreds of thousands of Jews perished in the ghettos from starvation and epidemics. But no decision had yet been made to murder them all. There was still talk of transferring them somewhere, even as far as Madagascar.

Then, on June 22, 1941, more than three million German and Axis soldiers launched Operation Barbarossa, a surprise attack on the USSR. The single largest military campaign in history, it confirmed that Joseph Stalin’s nonaggression treaty with Hitler—the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, which enabled Hitler to conquer Poland and then turn to the West and defeat France—had for the Soviet leader been a convenient and yet shortsighted move. Stalin signed it to give himself more time to prepare for war. But nonaggression had always been incompatible with the central ideological tenets of Nazism, which called for the creation of Lebensraum—“living space”—for Germans in the East and saw Bolshevism as a mortal enemy.

Hitler’s forces were determined to put that ideology into practice. At its peak in late 1942, the Germans occupied up to a million square miles of Soviet territory, which had contained over 40 percent of the pre-war Soviet population. The Wehrmacht was at that moment besieging Leningrad, where a million citizens ultimately died, mostly of starvation. It was conducting “hunger politics,” as the historian Christian Gerlach has elaborated, by stripping the inhabitants of Belarus, the poorest region under its control, of food and livestock for use by its own soldiers, while also undertaking brutal antipartisan operations, which devastated the land for a generation. It was deporting vast numbers of civilians from Ukraine for forced labor in Germany. And it was in the process of flattening Stalingrad, where it eventually sustained its greatest defeat. Many, if not most, Soviet citizens, united against a common enemy, pushed away memories of their own regime’s brutality. Hellbeck quotes a joke people told in Ukraine in 1942: “What did Hitler manage to accomplish in just one year that Stalin couldn’t in twenty-four? Getting us to like Soviet rule.”

It was a few weeks after the invasion of the USSR in late June that the mass murder of Jews began. Four Einsatzgruppen (task forces), which included SS men and police personnel, marched behind the advancing military, first shooting mostly Jewish men, and then murdering entire communities from the Baltic states to Ukraine—at times in vast massacres, such as the slaughter of over 23,000 Jews in Kamianets-Podilskyi in late August, up to 12,000 Jews in Stanyslaviv in mid-October, and 33,000 Jews in Babyn Yar, on the outskirts of Kyiv, at the end of September. The orders for the invasion explicitly grouped together Bolsheviks, Red Army commissars, partisans, and Jews, all of whom were to be killed on sight.

At the time there was still talk in the SS of eventually pushing the Jews beyond Germany’s anticipated Lebensraum east of the Urals. But after a number of catastrophic defeats, the Red Army finally stopped the Wehrmacht’s onslaught and launched a counterattack at the gates of Moscow in early December 1941. From that point on Germany could no longer plan to expel the millions of Jews who had come under its rule into the depths of the Soviet Union, or for that matter anywhere else outside the lands under its control, since the seas were firmly ruled by the British and the Americans.

The Nazi identification of Jews with Bolsheviks only intensified as the Soviet counterattack took a devastating toll on the German army. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, delivered his notorious “total war” speech in February 1943, reiterating that the “goal of Bolshevism is Jewish world revolution” and announcing that the country would “take the most radical measures.”

The speech was made after the German debacle at the Battle of Stalingrad, which heralded the Red Army’s long and bloody march to the West that culminated in the capture of Berlin. In Europe and North America we tend to remember D-Day as a turning point in the war. In fact, it was Stalingrad. Even after the Western Allies landed in Normandy, between June and December 1944 the Wehrmacht lost ten times as many troops fighting the Red Army as it did fighting the Anglo-American forces in Western Europe. Long before that, the Nazi leadership had warned the Germans of the fate they could expect in case of defeat. “Behind the onrushing Soviet divisions,” screamed Goebbels in his speech, “we already see the Jewish death squads, and behind them, complete anarchy and famine for millions.” Nazi propaganda had perfected the art of projection: the retreating Wehrmacht pursued a scorched earth policy that ravaged vast stretches of Soviet territory. Soviet troops never engaged in a policy of genocide and enslavement in Germany remotely like that of the Germans in the USSR. However, brutalized by years of war and the ruin of their own land, they did commit mass violence against German citizens, especially mass rapes on an unprecedented scale.

The timing of the decision to carry out the Final Solution—the Nazi regime’s resolution to murder all the Jews of Europe—remains disputed. Was it made in the “euphoria of victory” over the USSR in the fall of 1941, as Browning has argued? Or was it made, as Gerlach suggests, only after Hitler declared war on the US after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, which plunged Germany into precisely the kind of worldwide war that, according to the Führer’s logic, called for the extermination of the Jews? Did the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, when high-ranking officials were informed of a “final solution to the Jewish question,” actually indicate a recent high-level decision at the top, or was it merely an attempt to coordinate the actions of state agencies after the policy had already been implemented? We know that the construction of extermination camps had begun in the fall of 1941 in former Polish territory, but there are indications that these camps may have been originally intended only to resolve local “problems” of large populations of Jews.

At a meeting in the summer of 1941, Hitler told Heinrich Himmler to treat the Jews “like partisans,” making precisely the analogy that appeared in the orders for Barbarossa. This was a drastic shift from violent persecution, ghettoization, and forced labor to the outright extermination of men, women, and children. By the end of 1941 the Germans had murdered nearly 100 percent of the Jews detained in areas that had previously been under Soviet rule, and 15 to 25 percent of the Jews—most of them men—in areas previously under Polish rule. As Hellbeck puts it, “The mass murder of all Jews—young and old, male and female—began with the murder of Soviet Jews” and then “radiated out,” first to the “occupied Western peripheries of the Soviet state, then spreading farther west.” We cannot say what would have happened had Hitler decided not to invade his erstwhile ally, but we can say that the war in the East and the increasing ferocity of the Holocaust were inextricably linked.

Popular memory tends to separate the Holocaust and the German war against the Soviet Union, but for the Nazi regime they were two faces of the same undertaking. General Erich von Manstein, commander of the Eleventh Army, instructed his troops on November 20, 1941, that “the German Volk is in the midst of a battle for life and death against the Bolshevik system.” “This battle,” he stressed, is conducted “not only in a conventional manner according to the rules of European warfare.” The troops should understand that “Judaism is the mediator between the enemy in the rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership.” Hence, “the Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all.”

Manstein was hardly alone. General Walter von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, appealed to his troops on October 10, 1941, reminding them that “the essential goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its power instruments and the eradication of the Asiatic influence on the European cultural sphere.” The task of the troops, he insisted, must “go beyond the conventional unilateral soldierly tradition,” since in the East the soldier is “a carrier of an inexorable racial conception and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been committed against the Germans and related races.” Soldiers must have “complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh, but just atonement of Jewish subhumanity.” Indeed, as the commander of the XLVII Panzer Corps reminded his troops on the eve of the invasion, “We have never forgotten that it was Bolshevism which had stabbed our army in the back during the [First] World War and which bears the guilt for all the misfortunes our people has suffered.” Now, as General Erich Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4, told his troops, it was time to engage in “the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood, the warding off of Jewish Bolshevism.”

These citations come from German documents I used for my dissertation and were later printed in my book Hitler’s Army, published thirty-five years ago. What was new at the time came to be an accepted historical fact in the following two decades. But scholarly history is one thing, public perceptions another, and the connection between Germany’s war in the East and the launching of the Holocaust remains unknown in much of the West.

Knowledge about the war as it was happening naturally depended on where one lived. The genocide of the Jews remained hidden in the back pages of newspapers and was rarely mentioned in newsreels, even after information became readily available. This was even the case with the Hebrew-language press in Palestine.

In the immediate aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, Hellbeck writes, Soviet citizens “were presented with more detailed knowledge about the German mass murder of Jews than audiences anywhere else in the world.” But the Soviet authorities had always been ambivalent about highlighting that the Nazis’ genocidal fury against the Jews exceeded their brutality toward other groups under their occupation. (“At no point during the war,” according to Hellbeck, “did the genocide of the Jews make nationwide headlines in the Soviet media.”) Though Soviet leaders subsumed the Shoah under the general category of Soviet tragedy, many Soviet Jews responded to this erasure of the genocide by recovering their Jewish identity, including by demonstrating greater sympathy with Zionism and the newly established State of Israel. Thousands, for example, cheered Golda Meir, Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, during her visit to the Moscow Choral Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah in 1948. The aging, progressively paranoid Stalin reacted with vengeful suspicion, undertaking an anti-Jewish campaign that came to a halt only with his death in 1953.

In the decades just after the war, mainstream Western depictions of World War II, in films and documentaries and popular novels, had two distinguishing features. The first was the glorification of national heroes and the demonization of the enemy. (West German films and popular fiction, for instance, often portrayed German soldiers as the innocent young victims of a few nasty Nazis sending them to die in a war they never wanted to fight.) The second was the strict separation between the war and the Holocaust. Early documentaries on the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956), depicted an insulated “concentrationary universe,” to use the French survivor David Rousset’s term, whose inmates were an international assortment of resistance fighters rather than Jews. In fact, while the former had been deported for what they did, the latter were incarcerated for who they were, and they suffered a much higher death rate.

Beginning perhaps with Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews—a 1975 best seller that presented the Holocaust as the Nazis’ chief goal, predetermined years before it occurred—this separation began to collapse.2 The genocide of the Jews soon assumed a more central place in the popular understanding of the war, especially after the broadcast of the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, which shocked viewers—both in the US and Germany—by stressing that the victims and the perpetrators alike had been ordinary neighbors and families. In this depiction, the political backdrop to the genocide—the Nazis’ fantasies of world conquest and their brutal campaign against the enemy to the East—disappeared from view, and before long the violence of the Holocaust came to be seen as singularly motivated by racial hatred, a unique event that bore comparison to no mass murder in history. A popular view took hold, especially among Jewish Israelis and Americans, that the Holocaust could be explained only as the culmination of centuries of antisemitism, that “longest hatred,” as the historian Robert Wistrich called it in his eponymous 1991 book. Many scholars have since rejected this account as simplistic and unhistorical, but in a range of public settings it remains so firmly established that any other interpretation appears scandalous, if not antisemitic.

At the same time, recent revisionist historians who see the “unholy alliance” with the USSR as a grave error by the Western Allies—for instance, Sean McMeekin in Stalin’s War (2021)—tend to have their own reasons for downplaying the Soviet contribution to ending the Holocaust: after all, if we concede that the Red Army was essential to defeating the Nazis and liberating the camps, we would also have to admit that by spurning an alliance with Stalin, the Allies would have acquiesced to genocide. Fortunately, over the past four decades the historiographical trends have moved in the other direction. Such books as Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 (1998) and Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994) helped gradually convince historically minded readers to recognize the sacrifice of the Soviet Union and the centrality of the Red Army in winning the war, although the Western Front still looms larger in the popular imagination.

Even in Germany, where the Eastern Front was “the unforgotten war,” attempts to link the Holocaust with the other crimes of the Wehrmacht have encountered major obstacles and resistance. In 1985 the Historikerstreit (historians’ controversy) pitted German conservative scholars such as Ernst Nolte, who argued that the only difference between Soviet and Nazi crimes was the German invention of the gas chambers, against liberals such as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who rejected the attempt to relativize the Holocaust and portray the Nazis’ crimes as merely responses to and emulations of those of the Soviets. Germans also continued to believe that while the SS and Gestapo were responsible for the Holocaust, the Wehrmacht had acted honorably, not least in defending the Reich from the Bolshevik onslaught. In 1999 the roving exhibition “Crimes of the Wehrmacht,” visited by almost a million Germans and Austrians over the previous four years, closed down because of a public outcry after a few of the thousand-plus photographs it displayed were found to have been mislabeled, presenting Soviet crimes as German army crimes. Indeed, linking the Holocaust to the war in the East remains difficult in Germany; having accepted responsibility for the Final Solution, Germans still find it exceedingly hard to admit that regular soldiers, rather than just the Gestapo and the SS, had taken part in mass murder.

Hellbeck, who has written previously on the Battle of Stalingrad and on the inner lives of Soviet citizens in the early years of the regime, draws for his densely documented book not only on the German sources that I and others cited years ago but also on a rich trove of Soviet materials. These include previously unknown political and military directives, journalistic reports, personal writings, photographs, wartime interview transcripts, hundreds of letters written by Red Army soldiers, and, not least, a vast collection of interviews with Soviet soldiers and citizens conducted during the war under the leadership of the Moscow historian Isaak Izrailevich Mints. Hellbeck aims to firmly reorient the general public’s understanding of the Holocaust around the history of the war in the East. Nazi Germany, he insists once more, was fighting a genocidal war against what it imagined to be a Bolshevik system ruled and controlled by the Jews and aimed at world domination.

Until the start of Operation Barbarossa, he argues, “German violence against Jews remained of a lesser scope compared to the mass murder of ethnic Poles.” Before June 1941 the “mistreatment of Jews was fed by racial hatred, not a political calculus; expulsion, not annihilation, was its ultimate goal.” Conversely, after the invasion, Jews and Bolsheviks became synonymous as targets for total annihilation. Communist resistance to Nazism in occupied Europe—which was revived only after Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin—was similarly construed as Jewish, just as Jews were redefined, in Hellbeck’s words, as “racial-political enemies who needed to be destroyed,” rather than “racial aliens who could simply be expelled from Germanic soil.” Defining Jews as Bolsheviks dictated that the Jews had to be murdered wherever they could be found, even if they appeared to be entirely assimilated Europeans whose mistreatment had initially provoked some discomfort.

It is thus not surprising, Hellbeck argues, that starting in the summer of 1941 we find SS officers invariably listing those they had “finished off” as “Bolsheviks, Jews, and asocial elements,” or “functionaries, agents, saboteurs, and Jews.” The Holocaust, he suggests, evolved and spread not from any “single top-down order in 1941” but from “the cumulative violence of Germany’s attack on the Soviet system, the vicious anti-Bolshevik propaganda dating back to the 1920s, and the failure to win the quick victory Hitler had foretold.”

Hellbeck also reminds us that Germany “took aim at millions of non-Jewish Soviet citizens,” typically referred to as “Bolsheviks,” leading to the death of 15 million civilians (of whom 2.6 million were Jews). Plans for the postwar colonization of the Soviet Union, he notes, “foresaw the extinction” of additional “tens of millions of Soviet citizens,” in large part by starvation. In this respect the genocide of the Jews, the mass slaughter of other Soviet civilians, and the murder of over three million Red Army prisoners of war were all a consequence of the same genocidal worldview.

While I agree with the bulk of Hellbeck’s argument, some qualifications are in order. World Enemy No. 1 might have done more to acknowledge that Germany had an alliance with the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941, with major consequences for the course of the war; that Hitler also separately wished to expand to the West and crush France, a longtime German nemesis; that the Generalplan Ost, intended to create Lebensraum for the Germans in Eastern Europe and Western Russia, was conceived of separately and before the Final Solution of the Jewish question; and that the Nazis tried or planned to kill all the Jews they could lay their hands on, wherever they could be found, even in Palestine.

We should bear in mind that even before the invasion of the Soviet Union the violence against the two million Jews in German-occupied Poland was already accelerating and spilling over to German-occupied Southern, Northern, and Western Europe, and North Africa, consigning Jews throughout those lands to ethnic cleansing, enslavement, or mass murder. The Germans were stoking local antisemitism independently of the fight against Bolshevism; ironically, had Germany not attacked the USSR, the rest of Europe would likely have remained under German occupation for decades, sealing the fate of the Jews throughout those lands. In other words, while attacking the Bolsheviks was a fundamental part of Hitler’s worldview, so too was his obsession with the Jews.

Additionally, one must stress that the roots of antisemitism, even in its modern form, which evolved in the last third of the nineteenth century, predate Bolshevism, even if Jews came to be associated with Socialists—and then Communists—almost as soon as these political movements emerged. Communist regimes in the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and many other countries have hardly been innocent of this prejudice themselves, but while it could turn murderous, it was never genocidal. Another aspect of anti-Jewish sentiment (which may again be on the rise today) was anticapitalist, portraying Jews as plutocrats controlling the finances and therefore also the politics of the West—although it must be said that the Nazis never found it difficult to portray the “eternal Jew” as both a revolutionary and a money-grubbing billionaire.

World Enemy No. 1 also arguably pays too little attention to the crimes of Stalin’s regime in the 1930s, from the genocidal collectivization campaign in Ukraine—which claimed the lives of millions—to the Great Purge, which ended with the execution of up to another million Soviet citizens, including Stalin’s closest former associates, and decapitated the Red Army’s leadership. The 1939 pact between Hitler and Stalin not only ensured that the Red Army would not be deployed against the Wehrmacht; it also divided Poland between the two tyrannies, allowing Germany first to destroy western Poland, then to conquer the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Greece, and Serbia without any threat to its eastern flank. Meanwhile the pact facilitated the mutual Nazi and Soviet takeover and subjugation of Eastern Europe, including the imposition of Communist rule over eastern Poland (now West Ukraine) and the Baltic states, leading to murder and mass deportations of the Soviet regime’s political and social enemies, real or imagined. This “revolution from abroad,” as Jan T. Gross has called it, is remembered to this day in these lands as a major national trauma, even as it tends to overshadow the memory of local collaboration in the Holocaust under the German occupation that followed. There is plenty of denial and erasure to go around.

But Hellbeck has done an important service in reminding us of the ideological, demographic, and historical background against which the Holocaust took place. Early in World Enemy No. 1 he points out just how often our memory of Nazi violence obscures the anti-Soviet animus that drove it. When the theologian Martin Niemöller wrote his famous text on the complicity of silence and the cost of indifference, he had in mind the sacrifice of tens of thousands of German Communists—the first victims of Hitler’s regime. Opening with “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist—so I said nothing,” it ends with “Then they came for me, but there was no one left who could stand up for me.”

For decades a translation of Niemöller’s words has stood near the exit of the main galleries at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated in 1993. And yet in this version, Hellbeck points out, the Communists have been “erased from the record” in favor of a softer alternative, as if to avoid the embarrassment of admitting how central communism was to the fight against the Nazis. “First,” it begins, “they came for the socialists.”

—This is the first of two articles.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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