This is a sequel to:

If you read that, you might be less lost in this post!

The Dude was at Hollywood Lanes, mid-frame, staring down a 7-10 split that pretty much summed up the whole Democratic coalition, when Walter came stomping over with a newspaper he’d printed out, because Walter does not trust a screen to hold still long enough to be angry at.

“Dude. Maine. Texas. Look at these numbers.”

“I’m bowling, Walter.”

“You’re gonna wanna hear this while you’re bowling, trust me, it’s thematically appropriate.” He slapped the printout down next to the ball return. “Working-class voters, no college degree — Platner’s down almost 20 points with ‘em in Maine. Talarico’s getting smoked 68 to 27 with the same crowd in Texas. Two different states, two completely different candidates — one’s a Marine oyster farmer, other one’s a former middle school teacher who talks about God — and somehow they’re both getting run out of the same exact room by the same exact crowd.”

“That’s a pattern, man.”

“That’s not a pattern, Dude, that’s a structural collapse. This is not two guys havin’ a bad week. This is two decades of a coalition walkin’ out the door, and nobody in Washington’s noticed the room’s half empty.”

The Dude picked up his ball, considered the split, and did not throw it, which is very on-brand.

“See, I remember when the working guy was the guy, man. I was Port Huron. I sat in buildings for this. Union halls, the whole thing — the working class was, like, the load-bearing wall of the entire operation. And now it’s — it’s not there anymore. It’s just gone, man. Like somebody came in while we were out and took the whole wall with ‘em.”

“Nobody took the wall, Dude. We walked away from the wall for forty years and acted surprised when it stopped holding the roof up.”

This is the part where Maude usually shows up, and — right on cue — Maude showed up, wearing a robe that costs more than the bowling alley, carrying a laptop like it was a specimen.

“You’re both being sentimental,” she said. “It’s not a mystery. It’s arithmetic.” She turned the laptop around. “The party spent the last several years pouring industrial investment into exactly these communities — battery plants, semiconductor fabs, grid infrastructure, a great deal of it landing in red and rural districts on purpose — on the theory that voters reward the people who fund the factory. And the factory got funded. And the needle did not move. At all.”

“So the plants didn’t work?” Donny asked, appearing from nowhere with a hot dog, the way Donny does.

“The plants worked fine, Donny,” Maude said, not unkindly, because nobody’s ever unkind to Donny, it feels like hitting a golden retriever. “The theory of gratitude didn’t work. Nobody drives past a construction site and reverse-engineers the appropriations bill. If the local information ecosystem doesn’t credit you, or actively credits somebody else, the investment is functionally invisible. You can build the plant and lose the county in the same news cycle.”

“This is not ‘Nam,” Walter said, apropos of absolutely nothing, but also everything. “This is bowling. There are rules. And rule one is nobody thanks the guy who oiled the lane. They just bowl on it and go home. You think a man’s gonna vote for you ‘cause his cousin’s cousin got hired at a plant he’s never heard of, funded by a bill he’s never read, passed by a party he’s spent thirty years being told hates him? No. He votes on what he *feels* about you, and you cannot buy a feeling with a construction permit.”

The Dude finally threw the ball. Gutter, obviously. Nobody reacted, because at this point it felt on-theme.

“It’s like the rug, man,” he said, watching it happen. “The old rug — that rug really tied the room together. Wasn’t fancy. Wasn’t new. But it made the whole place feel like somebody actually lived there and gave a damn about the room. And somewhere along the way we let some very bad men walk in and take a piss on it, and instead of dealing with the actual guys who did it, we went out and bought a nicer rug from a catalog and got real confused when the room still didn’t feel like home.”

“That’s — that’s actually good, Dude,” Walter said, surprised, the way he gets when the Dude accidentally says something true.

“I have my moments.”

“The rug was never the problem,” Maude said, closing the laptop. “The room was. You can replace the rug as many times as you like. If the people who live there don’t trust you anymore, they’re not looking at the floor. They’re looking at you.”

Nobody had a comeback for that, which is usually how you know Maude’s landed the actual point of the piece.

“So what do we do?” Donny asked, which is the question everybody’s actually been avoiding this whole time, Donny included, since he’s mostly just hungry.

“I don’t know, man,” the Dude said, and for once it wasn’t a bit, it was just true. “I don’t think there’s a bill for this one. I don’t think there’s a candidate for this one either — not one guy, not one cycle. Trust takes about as long to rebuild as it took to lose, and everybody in Washington wants it back by the next election, which is like asking to grow a new rug in a weekend.”

He racked another ball. Somewhere behind the counter, Creedence was playing low — *lookin’ out my back door* — and for a second nobody said anything, which for this crew is basically a moment of silence.

“Anyway,” the Dude said. “This is a bummer of a topic for league night.”

“Nobody fucks with the working class,” Jesus Quintana said, walking by for no reason, licking a bowling ball, entirely unrelated to anything.

“Yeah, well,” the Dude said. “That’s just, like, everybody’s opinion now, man.”

The Dude abides. The lane’s still empty, though.

So I wake up Sunday, right, and something’s off in the apartment. Takes me a minute. It’s not the Jesus’s bowling ball I keep finding under the couch, it’s not the pilot light, it’s not — well, it’s not nothing, man, it’s everything, but that’s not the point right now. I’m standing there in my robe, coffee not made yet, and I look down and I go: that’s not my rug.

Not gone. Worse. Replaced. Somebody came in here, took the rug that tied the whole room together, and put down something that’s rug-shaped. Same general area rug energy. Doesn’t abide the same. I flip up the corner and there’s a tag on it, man, and the tag says it came from a warehouse in New Jersey with a website attached to it, and the website has a name like it’s trying to sell you a mattress and a rug at the same time. And the worst part — the actual worst part — somebody’s standing behind me going, “that’s the rug you’ve always had, Dude, don’t be dramatic.” And I’m supposed to just, what, abide that?

This whole line of thinking, I gotta level with you, isn’t originally mine. Credit where it’s due — a lady named Lyz Lenz was noodling on her own version of this a while back, behind a paywall, which, fair, a woman’s gotta eat. But it got its hooks in me, and I’ve been chewing on it since, the way you chew on a joint that’s mostly seeds. So: hat tip to Lyz. This one’s downstream of her.

Here’s the thing that got me going, though. Everybody and their conservative uncle is walking around right now saying the American Dream is dead. There was a poll — CNBC, Survey Monkey, very scientific, very sad — fifty-one percent of people think it’s out of reach. Gone. Buried. Rug pulled.

And normally I don’t get worked up about polls, because a poll is just a bunch of strangers having opinions at you, which, man, that’s just, like, their opinion. But this one’s got a specific move in it that bugged me. It quotes James Truslow Adams — the guy who actually put “the American Dream” into words back in 1931 — like he’s on record saying the dream is a “better, richer, happier life for all our citizens.” Sounds nice. Sounds like a fortune cookie for capitalism.

Except that’s not what the man said. Not the whole of it. Not close.

Adams wrote a whole book, The Epic of America, and when he wants to show you what the American Dream actually looks like, in practice, on the ground — he doesn’t describe a guy in a bigger house. He describes the reading room at the Library of Congress. Rich guy, poor guy, general, private, scholar, schoolkid, all of ‘em sitting at the same tables, reading books that belong to everybody, paid for by everybody, open to everybody. That’s the dream. Shared. Public. Free at the point of use, like a bowling alley that never closes and never charges for shoes.

Subscribe now

I told Walter about this one and it did something to him I wasn’t expecting.

“The actual Dream was a library,” Walter says, and he’s not mad exactly, he’s got this look like somebody told him the Port Huron Statement was ghostwritten. “A library, Dude. Say what you want about the man’s Dream, at least it’s got rules. At least it’s a system. Everybody gets a card, everybody follows the same checkout policy, you bring the book back on time or you pay the fine, there’s no —” and here he’s building up to it — “there’s no bullshit about who deserves to be there.”

“Walter, it’s a library.”

“It’s a covenant, Dude.”

Donny, who has once again arrived to the conversation several exits late, goes: “Wait, so the American Dream was... a library card?”

“Donny, you’re out of your element.”

He’s not wrong to be confused, though, because that is genuinely not the dream anybody sold you. Nobody’s running for president on “vote for me, I’ll get you a library card and a reading table.” They’re running on the picket fence. The bootstraps. The guy who did it all himself.

Which brings me to Laura Ingalls Wilder, because if you want the bootstrap myth in its purest form, man, it’s Little House on the Prairie. Pa Ingalls, alone against the elements, alone against the wilderness, a family surviving on grit and a rifle and the Lord’s own stubbornness.

Except — and I did not know this, and once I knew it I couldn’t stop thinking about it — Pa Ingalls was squatting. On Osage land. The land he “settled” wasn’t empty, it was stolen, and it was handed to him basically for free by a federal government that also protected him while he was breaking the law to be there. Railroads dropped him supplies. And in the famous killer winter in De Smet, the one that almost wipes the whole family out — they don’t survive because Pa’s tough. They survive because two other guys ride out into a blizzard to buy sixty bushels of seed wheat off a farmer who has it, and bring it back to keep the whole town alive. That’s not a rugged individualist. That’s a mutual aid society with a bonnet on it. And on top of that — his own daughter, Rose, is the one who took the real, messier record and edited it down into the bootstrap version we all grew up on. The myth isn’t just wrong, man, it’s got a credited author.

Maude heard me going on about this and didn’t even look up from what she was doing. “Self-invention,” she said, “is just plagiarism with better lighting.” Then something about vaginas, which, look, that’s Maude’s whole thing, I’m not going to explain it to you here.

But she’s right, and it’s not just a 19th-century problem. It’s not even a problem confined to guys with covered wagons. Turn on any podcast right now and you’ll find some guy in a quarter-zip explaining how he built his empire through “the grind” — up at 4 a.m., no days off, did it all himself. And every single time, my first question is: okay, but who raised his kids? Who made him dinner? Who kept the house from turning into the inside of my Torino? Because it wasn’t him, man. It was almost never him. Same deal when the finance gurus tell some struggling family to cut back — go down to one car, stop eating out, let the cleaning lady go. Convenient how “let’s tighten the belt” always means somebody, usually a woman, quietly absorbing a second unpaid job so the math works out on a spreadsheet. Same deal with the restaurant owner living his dream on the backs of servers he won’t (or can’t) pay a living wage, or the whole economy running on immigrant labor everybody claims to love the work of and hate the worker for. The Dream’s always had a tab, man. It’s just never been sent to the guy who ordered.

So here’s where I land, and I’m not trying to be a bummer about it, because that’s not really my scene. The actual pioneers, the real ones, out on the actual prairie — they weren’t lone wolves. They couldn’t be. Going it alone out there got you dead. What got people through was neighbors. Shared seed wheat. Shared land, even when the “sharing” was theft with better PR. Community, not conquest. That’s the original rug, man, before anybody swapped it out for the Overstock.com version and told us it was always this thin.

I don’t need the old Dream back exactly the way it was — I’m not asking for a shrine to the Library of Congress reading room here, I just want a coaster and a decent record player. But I’d like everybody arguing about the Dream to at least agree on what it originally was, and who’s been quietly picking up the tab while somebody else gets the toast at the dinner. That seems fair. That seems, dare I say, abide-able.

The Dude abides. He’d just like his actual rug back, or at minimum, an itemized receipt for whoever swapped it.

The Dude was sitting on the rug — the new rug, the replacement rug, the one that doesn’t tie the room together quite as well as the old one but you make do, man, you abide — nursing a White Russian and reading about a guy in Maine who used to have a Nazi tattoo and now doesn’t, technically, in the sense that a tattoo artist covered it with a Celtic knot, which, respectfully, is not the flex anybody thinks it is.

“Walter,” the Dude said. “This Platner guy. He’s got a whole — it’s a whole thing, man.”

“I read the file,” Walter said. He was cleaning a bowling ball like it owed him money. “Reddit posts. Tattoo. Sexting. An ex-girlfriend on the record. Cocaine on military leave. Three staffers out the door. This is not a scandal, Dude, this is a Behind the Music episode.”

“He says he’s sorry.”

“I’m sure he’s sorry. Nixon was sorry. Everybody’s sorry once the file’s public.”

Here’s the thing, though — and I want to be straight with you, because I’ve gotten some pushback on this, people saying c’mon man, the guy’s trying to atone, cut him some slack — and look, I hear that. I’m not the nihilists. I believe in something. I believe a man can walk out of a decade of ugly internet behavior and PTSD-soaked bad judgment and become, genuinely, a better dude. That’s not a bit. That’s the whole religion around here.

Share

But here’s where the rug gets pulled out from under the argument: atonement doesn’t come with a deadline. Nobody’s out here saying you’ve got until November to finish becoming a good person or the offer expires. You can take your time. You can go slow. You can, and should, spend years quietly not being a piece of shit before you ask anybody to trust you with anything, let alone a seat that requires forty thousand strangers to bet their healthcare on your judgment.

The Senate, though? The Senate has a deadline. The Senate has an election. And the Senate does not grade on a redemption curve — it grades on “can this specific person be trusted with the job, right now, given everything anyone can find out about them in the next four months.” Those are two completely different clocks running at two completely different speeds, and Platner is trying to run them both at once — atone and ask for the promotion, in the same news cycle, using the same biography.

“It’s like,” Donny said, looking up from the pretzels, “it’s like turning in a job application and the reference letter is also your rap sheet.”

Everybody looked at Donny.

“That’s — Donny, that’s actually it,” Walter said, visibly annoyed at how correct this was. “You’re out of your element, but you’re not wrong.”

Maude wasn’t interested in any of the sentiment. She’d stopped by to make a point and she was going to make it whether or not there was a rug involved.

“You’re conflating two mechanisms,” she said, to nobody in particular, the way she does. “There’s scandal fatigue, which is a press phenomenon — reporters get bored, the fifth Reddit post gets less coverage than the first. That helps him. And there’s what I’d call priors calcification, which is a voter phenomenon — a pattern of revelations, in the window where an unknown candidate is still introducing himself, doesn’t produce forgiveness. It produces a settled impression, formed before anyone can list the specifics. ‘Something’s off with that guy.’ That impression doesn’t need footnotes. It’s the cheapest kind of belief to hold and the hardest kind to unwind.”

“See, this is why I don’t bring Maude to bowling,” the Dude said. “She’ll finish your whole argument before you’ve picked up your ball.”

“He built his entire pitch on being the real deal,” Maude went on. “Not a platform. A vibe. Working-class, no bullshit, the guy who actually gets it. Every one of these stories is a direct hit on that specific asset. If his pitch had been ‘I have the best healthcare plan,’ none of this would matter nearly as much. His pitch was ‘you can trust me,’ and that’s the one thing under continuous demolition.”

Walter slammed the ball down. “This is not ‘Nam, Dude. This is bowling. There. Are. Rules. Rule one: if you’re gonna run on authenticity, you cannot also have a decade of receipts saying otherwise. You wanna run on ‘I’m a flawed guy who’s grown,’ fine, be Walter about it — own it loud, don’t apologize for existing. But you don’t get to run the redemption arc and the electability pitch on the same rug, man, because eventually somebody’s gonna lift the corner and there’s just more stains under there.”

“Maine had a window to swap him out,” the Dude said. “July 13th. They didn’t take it. So now they’re — they’re stuck with the guy, man. Whatever comes out between now and November, that’s the nominee. No do-overs. No new rug.”

“Which means the smart move for the other side,” Maude said, “isn’t to dump everything now. It’s to meter it. A little in August. A little more in September. Save the worst of it for October, when there’s no time left to recover and no news cycle left to bury it in. They don’t need a knockout. They just need him bleeding on Election Day.”

Share The Dude Shitposts

Nobody had anything to add to that. The Dude took a sip of his White Russian, looked down at the rug — not the good rug, the one that got peed on, the memory of the good rug, honestly, at this point — and abided.

“Look, man,” he said finally. “I want the guy to have gotten better. I hope he did. I’m not out here rooting for anybody’s PTSD to be a life sentence. But wanting somebody’s growth to be real and deciding they’re ready for the Senate are two different questions, and you don’t get to answer ‘em with the same sentence just because the timeline’s inconvenient. Atonement’s beautiful, man. It’s just not a résumé.”

“Also he had a Nazi tattoo,” Donny added.

“DONNY.”

The Dude abides. The rug does not.

The Dude does not road trip lightly1. There are preparations. The White Russian situation must be resolved before departure — you cannot trust the interior of this country to have Kahlúa at a reasonable price point. Creedence goes on the speakers somewhere around Albuquerque, which feels right, and then you point the car east and let America happen to you.

What America serves up, it turns out, is a lot of emptiness. Beautiful, occasionally unnerving, geographically humbling emptiness. New Mexico fades into the Texas panhandle, which is basically New Mexico with more evangelical radio. Oklahoma opens up like someone took Kansas and removed the interesting parts. Missouri gets greener and hillier and the deer start appearing on the roadside, but we’ll get to the deer. The point is that the interior of this country is, in the most literal sense, mostly not there. Half of all Americans live east of a line running roughly through Chicago and Nashville. The western two-thirds of the lower 48 hold the other half, and most of them are in a handful of cities huddled on the coasts and in the mountains. Everything in between is exactly what you see from the interstate: space, sky, a gas station every forty miles, and more sky.

It’s one thing to know this. It’s another thing to drive through it for two days with Creedence on the speakers and your elbow out the window. The map is not the territory, man. The map has never been the territory.

Where Are All the Damn Teslas

The Dude is no stranger to Teslas. In California they are like cockroaches — everywhere, silent, vaguely smug, occasionally driven by people who will absolutely tell you about their carbon footprint before you ask. On this particular drive from New Mexico through Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, the Dude counted maybe four. Possibly five if one of those was actually a Tesla and not just a Hyundai that had been detailed recently.

This is not an accident. The Biden administration put five billion dollars into something called NEVI — the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program — to build charging stations across the country. As of early 2025, most of that money had not been spent. Then the Trump administration froze it. Then there was a lawsuit. Then they “streamlined” it, which the Sierra Club noted had accomplished roughly six months of additional delay. The net result: as of last spring, the federal government’s entire EV charging buildout had produced 384 actual charging ports. In the entire country. Against a promise of 500,000 by 2030. The gap between those two numbers is the gap between the press release and the parking lot, and if you’ve ever wondered why nobody in Oklahoma is buying a Kia EV6, it is because nobody in Oklahoma wants to do long division about charging stops while they’re trying to get to Tulsa.

“This is a catastrophic institutional failure,” Walter said, from the passenger seat where Walter always is when the Dude needs someone to be furious about infrastructure. “You had the money, you had the mandate, you had a bipartisan bill. This is not complicated. In Vietnam, we built an entire logistical network across triple-canopy jungle. Triple-canopy jungle, Dude. And these people couldn’t plug in a charging station in Ohio.”

The Dude pointed out that we also lost that war.

Walter was briefly quiet.

What you do see on the interstates, in impressive volume, are hybrids. RAV4 Hybrids. F-150 Hybrids. Camry Hybrids. The hybrid is the product that correctly solves the problem as it actually exists in the American interior: better mileage, familiar refueling, no existential range anxiety on the way to a town with a population of eight hundred. The political valence is also zero. A F-150 Hybrid in rural Missouri announces nothing about its owner except that they’d prefer not to pay four dollars a gallon for longer than necessary. This is a purchasing decision the Dude respects. The Dude drives what he drives, man, and he’s not judging. He’s just noting that the future of transportation in this part of the country is a sensible Japanese-German hybrid powertrain in a domestic-branded truck, and that this was always more likely than a charging network that took four years to produce fewer ports than a single California Costco.

Share

The Wildlife Situation Is Out of Control

Nobody warned the Dude about the armadillos.

There are a lot of them. Or rather: there were a lot of them, in the past tense that counts on a Texas highway at night. They appear on the shoulder in quantity, small armored shapes in the headlights, and the Dude, who is a gentle soul, found this troubling enough to look into.

Here is what the Dude learned about armadillos, and it is both fascinating and genuinely sad. The nine-banded armadillo’s primary defensive reflex, honed over millions of years of evolutionary pressure, is to leap straight up into the air. Three to four feet, straight vertical, when startled. This works with tremendous effectiveness against foxes, coyotes, and most other biological threats, which it startles into a momentary hesitation that allows the armadillo to escape. Against a vehicle doing seventy-five miles per hour, this response positions the armadillo to be hit by the undercarriage. A slower animal — your opossum, your standard-issue turtle — at least has a chance of a car passing harmlessly over it. The armadillo, through no fault of its own, has been optimizing for the wrong threat model for approximately forty million years, and is now paying for this in volume on the shoulder of I-44.

“It’s a failure of tactical doctrine,” Walter said. “Complete failure. You don’t commit to a vertical defense posture against a mechanized threat. This is basic. This is so basic.”

“What’s an armadillo?” Donny asked.

“Donny, you’re out of your element.”

The skunks had their own problem, which was the opposite kind: too much confidence. A skunk’s chemical defense is so reliably effective against everything in its natural environment that skunks have simply stopped being afraid of things. They mosey. They take their time. Their entire behavioral model assumes that anything approaching will smell the warning and reconsider. This works on bears. It does not work on a Peterbilt at highway speed whose driver cannot smell anything until it is far too late for the information to be useful.

By Missouri, the roadside sociology shifted to deer, which are a different situation entirely. The white-tailed deer population in the Midwest is at historically enormous levels — predators gone, agricultural landscape creating perfect habitat, suburbs providing supplemental food and zero hunting pressure. They are everywhere in numbers that would have seemed impossible two hundred years ago, and the interstates cut through their movement corridors like a slow-motion disaster. An estimated one to two million vehicle-deer collisions happen in the United States every year. The average one costs twenty thousand dollars. This is, in some sense, an infrastructure problem, a wildlife management problem, and a predator reintroduction problem simultaneously. It is the kind of problem that could be substantially addressed but mostly isn’t, because it would require thinking about several things at once, which is not the country’s current strong suit.

Subscribe now

Indiana Has the Best Rest Stop on Earth and the Dude Will Not Be Taking Questions

This is not a bit.

Crossing into Indiana on US-71, the first rest area — also a visitor information center — stopped the Dude cold. Racing themed. An actual IndyCar in the lobby. A kids’ play area that appeared to have been designed by someone who had children and also taste. Architecture that seemed to have been conceived by a human being with intentions, rather than assembled from a DOT catalogue of beige rectangles.

The Dude stood in the lobby for a moment longer than was strictly necessary for a rest stop, taking in the IndyCar, which was very shiny, and thought: America, man. Sometimes you’re driving through five hundred miles of highway mortality statistics and armadillo tragedy and then this. A genuinely excellent rest stop. In Indiana. The Dude does not know who designed it or who fought for the budget or who said yes, put the race car in the lobby, but that person is doing God’s work and the Dude thanks them.

There was a White Russian situation to resolve and then it was back on the road. But the rest stop stays with you. It was good, man. It was really good.

The Signs, or The Lack Thereof

Anyone who drove through rural America during the Trump first administration remembers the signage. Barn-sized flags. Multiple competing displays per property. Hand-lettered plywood declarations. The general aesthetic of a political movement that felt, for the first time in a long time, like it was winning something and wanted everyone driving past to know it. Every farm, every country store, every fence line — somebody had feelings and a staple gun and the combination was visible from the highway at sixty miles an hour.

This trip: not so much.

The first thing the Dude saw with TRUMP on it — first visible piece of political signage across New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and into Missouri — was a piece of plywood, maybe four feet by seven, white background, hand-lettered TRUMP in black. On US-71 through Illinois. Pulling past it, it became clear that local kids had used it for paintball practice at some point. Maybe more than once. The sign was still standing, still legible, but it had clearly become part of the landscape rather than a statement — furniture rather than a flag.

The Dude thought about this for a while, somewhere around the Missouri-Illinois line with Creedence’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” doing its thing on the speakers, which felt cosmically appropriate.

The first-term signage was insurgency energy. The movement had the emotional fuel of people who felt perpetually ignored and condescended to, and suddenly had a vessel for all of it, and were going to make damn sure the people driving past knew. That feeling is real and it was always going to be hard to sustain once the guy actually won and started being in charge of things rather than raging against them. The grievance that generates barn-sized flags requires an enemy that controls everything. When your guy controls everything, the energy has nowhere clean to go. The farmers who watched their export markets contract while tariffs played out, who spent a year doing math on soybean prices — they didn’t switch to hating Trump. The anger doesn’t travel that direction in these counties. But it also doesn’t repaint the barn.

The paintball sign isn’t opposition. It’s indifference, which is its own kind of data point, and in some ways a more interesting one.

The Billboard Economy of the Soul

The Dude is not easily surprised by American commercial creativity. He has seen things. He has driven past things. But the Bible Belt interstate billboard situation merits some extended contemplation, specifically the way in which God talk and marital aid advertisements exist in cheerful adjacency across the full length of Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, as though whoever is selling display space made a philosophical peace with the contradiction sometime around 1987 and has not revisited it since.

The adult stores along the southern interstates are not the seedy Times Square relics of the Dude’s youth. They are well-lit, well-marketed, and their billboards specifically target women in the language of self-improvement and relationship wellness — the implication being that this is a purchase a sensible and responsible wife might make, not a transgression but a contribution to domestic harmony. The Dude is not here to judge anyone’s purchasing decisions. The Dude is here to note that this framing exists because it has to exist — because the customer base is the same population that fills the megachurches, living in communities where desire is publicly suppressed enough that even the billboard has to provide cover. You’re not buying something shameful. You’re being a good partner. The off-ramp from the interstate provides anonymity. The marketing provides deniability. It’s a complete system.

“The commerce is a direct expression of the repression,” Maude said, from wherever Maude is when the Dude needs someone to make the uncomfortable point with clinical precision. “This isn’t a contradiction. The billboards exist because the culture requires them to exist in exactly this form.”

The Dude considered this.

“Yeah,” he said. “That tracks.”

And then there was the other billboard. Simple. Black background. White lettering. The message, roughly: if you have taken the abortion medication and have regrets, call this number, it may not be too late.

The Dude drove past it and did not say anything for a while.

Here is the clinical reality, which Maude would want stated plainly: the “abortion pill reversal” protocol is not established medicine. It is based on a single small study that was halted for safety reasons and has not been replicated. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists does not endorse it. The hotline routes to crisis pregnancy centers rather than licensed providers. The progesterone protocol carries its own risks when administered in non-clinical settings, and the outcome data on pregnancies carried to term after attempted reversal is thin.

And the regret question, which the billboard presents as self-evident, is more complicated than it appears. Genuine post-abortion regret exists but is uncommon — studies consistently put it in the low single digits, and it correlates most strongly with social pressure and lack of support rather than the individual’s own decision. The population most likely to call that number almost certainly skews toward people for whom a partner or a parent or a pastor found out, and who are now looking for a way to reframe what happened as something done to them rather than a choice they made. The billboard is engineered to serve that reframing. It presents medical-sounding hope to people who may be in coercive situations, offering an unproven intervention in a non-clinical context, with incomplete safety data.

The Dude drove past it and Creedence played and the road kept going.

Share The Dude Shitposts

The Dude Abides, Man

Here is the thing about driving through the middle of America, which the Dude commends to anyone who has strong opinions about what the middle of America is or isn’t: it does not confirm what you think it is. It doesn’t confirm what the people who live there think it is, either. The map — the cultural, political, demographic map that everyone is always arguing about — is a simplification of a place that is doing several contradictory things simultaneously and has been for a long time.

Half the population lives east of Chicago. The armadillos are out here leaping toward their doom with the confidence of creatures whose threat model hasn’t updated in forty million years. The EV infrastructure was never really built. The political signage is sparse and weathered and someone’s kids shot paintballs at it. The adult stores and the churches share the same billboard inventory and the same customer base. And in Indiana, on US-71, there is a rest stop with an IndyCar in the lobby that is genuinely, uncomplicatedly excellent, and the Dude stood in it for a moment and felt something like affection for the whole improbable project.

The rug that was supposed to tie this room together — the coherent story about what rural America is and believes and wants — the Dude has been looking for it since Albuquerque, and man, he’s not sure it was ever really there. What’s there is complicated and contradictory and not particularly well-served by anyone’s narrative about it, including the people who live in it.

The Dude abides. He’s got a long way to go yet.

Creedence plays. The road continues. Somewhere in Ohio, the population density is finally going to pick back up.

The Dude is a founding member of the Venice, California bowling community and a signatory of the Port Huron Statement, probably. His views do not represent those of anyone rational. He has opinions about Kahlúa sourcing.

So Charlie Sykes, man.

Look, I don’t hold grudges. The Dude is not a grudge-holder. I believe in the free flow of opinion, the marketplace of ideas, the whole thing. If a guy wants to write a Substack, he should write a Substack. That’s America. That’s fine.

But Charlie Sykes published a piece today called “Misunderstanding the DSA,” and I have read it, and I have a few notes, and the main note is: Charlie, man. You’re playing The Eagles again. I can hear it from out here.

To the Contrary

The Broken Brains of MAGA: "Libtard" Edition

There was a simultaneously flattering and humbling chat over on social media yesterday. One savvy observer lamented that we do not have a P.J. O’Rourke to help us navigate the blather and buncombe of our times. “I’m glad we had still had him for part of the Trump years, but his voice is one of the ones I miss most now…

Read more

10 days ago · 97 likes · 61 comments · Charlie Sykes

The piece has a move in it. It’s a good move, actually — I’ll give him that. The DSA co-chair apparently said, out loud, with his whole chest, that the DSA is “using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals” and sees the Democratic establishment as “an obstacle, not a home.” That is, as the lawyers say, a statement against interest. It’s real. It’s the entryism argument and it lands.

And then Sykes does what Sykes does.

Share

The Platform Trick

Having established that the DSA is running a conscious infiltration strategy — which, again, fair — Sykes pulls out a Third Way memo listing the DSA’s most extreme national platform positions. Abolish the Senate. Nationalize all real estate. Close all prisons. Open all borders. Withdraw from NATO. A second constitutional convention to found a socialist democracy.

These are real DSA positions, man. They’re in the platform. I’m not disputing that.

Here is what I am disputing: Brad Lander ran on housing affordability and ending the Gaza war. Darializa Avila Chevalier did not campaign on abolishing the Senate. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City on a platform of fixing the subway and making rent less insane, not nationalizing the insurance industry. The voters who pulled those levers were not voting to close all prisons. They were voting against a guy with an AIPAC endorsement who marched in the Israel Day parade while their district was telling him something different.

Conflating the DSA’s theoretical maximalism with the actual governing agenda of candidates who ran on kitchen-table issues is a move. It’s a move Republicans ran on every Democrat for thirty years. Sykes watched them do it. He’s now doing it. The rug, man. Somebody pissed on it and he’s asking us not to notice the smell.

Walter Would Like To Say Something About Hostile Takeovers

Walter. Barely containing himself. He has been waiting for this specific moment.

“You want to talk about a hostile takeover, Charlie? You want to have that conversation? Because I was there. I watched your party get taken over by a game show host who questioned a war hero’s capture and mocked a gold star family and paid hush money to a porn star and got convicted of fraud and STILL won the nomination TWICE. And you wrote books about it, Charlie. Very good books. Very well-reviewed books. And then the thing you wrote the books about happened anyway. And you’re going to sit there and tell Democrats how to stop a hostile takeover?”

Walter, man.

He’s not wrong though. The Tea Party ran exactly the entryism play Sykes is describing. They used the Republican ballot line as a vehicle. They called the Republican establishment an obstacle, not a home. They primaryied incumbents. They built infrastructure at the state level. They took over.

Sykes watched it happen from the inside and has a Substack to show for it. His credibility on “here’s how to stop this” is, to put it gently, not his strongest asset.

Subscribe now

The Footnote

Here is the part that got the Dude’s attention, man. Buried in a footnote — an actual footnote, at the bottom, where things go when you want to say them but not really say them — is a quote from Will Rahn observing that Goldman and Espaillat lost “because they aren’t anti-Israel enough” and drawing a line to Pat Buchanan’s old “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory” bit.

That’s in a footnote.

The central animating issue of the Tuesday primary — the one that explains why a fifty-point polling lead for Lander over Goldman was fifty points and not fifteen — is in a footnote. The thing that explains why a guy who prosecuted Trump’s impeachment got obliterated in a district that presumably dislikes Trump is in a footnote.

The Never Trumpers are more upset about the Israel shift than anything else in this wave. That’s what the footnote tells you, man. Everything else — the prison stuff, the platform stuff, the entryism framing — that’s the music they’re playing in the cab. The Israel question is why they need to be in the cab in the first place.

Donny Has A Question

Donny has been reading along. He has arrived, as always, slightly late.

“Hey, wait,” says Donny. “Didn’t a guy from the Never Trump thing also run in one of these primaries? And lose? Like, badly?”

Yes, Donny. George Conway, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, lifelong Republican turned Democratic candidate for Congress, ran in the open seat in Manhattan on a platform of being very publicly furious about Donald Trump, and received approximately six percent of the vote in an eight-person field. In Manhattan. Where people are, statistically, the most furious about Donald Trump of anywhere on earth.

“So the Never Trump thing,” Donny continues, slowly, “didn’t work either?”

“Donny,” Walter says.

“No but I’m saying—”

“Donny. You’re out of your element.”

But here is the thing, man. Donny’s question is the one Sykes doesn’t answer. The piece runs nearly two thousand words about how the DSA model is going to destroy the Democratic Party in swing states, and it does not mention — not once, not in a footnote, not anywhere — that the alternative model, the Never Trump aesthetic-as-politics model, just got six percent in the friendliest possible district for that exact pitch.

If the DSA candidates are a problem because they can’t win outside deep blue urban cores, what exactly is the theory of the case for a former Republican whose entire platform is “I am on television a lot being mad”? What does that win? Where does that win it?

The Eagles are playing, man. I can hear them from out here.

The Dude’s Takeaway

Look. There’s a real argument in the Sykes piece. The entryism framing is accurate as a structural description. Some of Avila Chevalier’s social media history is genuinely going to be a problem and nobody should pretend otherwise. The Wisconsin question — whether any of this travels to a purple state — is real and unresolved.

But Sykes is not making that argument in good faith and the tells are everywhere: the platform cherry-pick, the Tea Party amnesia, the footnoted Israel burial, the total silence on Conway’s six percent. He’s using a real concern to launder a fundamentally self-interested conclusion, which is that the Democratic Party should look enough like the pre-Trump Republican Party that Charlie Sykes can feel comfortable in it.

That’s the rug he wants back, man. The one that tied his room together. The one that had reasonable center-right professionals running a reasonable center-right party where everybody agreed on the basic parameters and nobody was getting primaried by a 32-year-old democratic socialist.

That rug is gone. Somebody pissed on it in 2015 and his name wasn’t Zohran Mamdani.

The Dude abides. But he’s not getting back in that cab.

Yeah, well. That’s just, like, your opinion, Charlie.

So here’s the thing, man.

I didn’t have big plans for Tuesday. Maybe knock a few frames. Maybe crack another White Russian, let the evening unspool the way evenings are supposed to unspool — gently, without incident, without anybody on television losing their mind about the future of the Democratic Party.

But then New York City went and had itself a primary.

Three candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their races. Two Democratic incumbents got their rugs pulled right out from under them. A 32-year-old community organizer knocked off a five-term congressman who chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Brad Lander — man, Brad Lander — beat the guy who prosecuted Trump’s first impeachment by roughly thirty-four points. And somewhere in a Manhattan district that smells like artisanal anxiety and donor money, a former Republican who spent five years being very publicly outraged about Donald Trump discovered that Democratic primary voters would give him about six percent of their vote. Which is, like, not very much, man.

And the loudest upset people in the room? Not the candidates who lost. Not the institutional Democrats watching their rug get carried out the door. No, man. The loudest people are the Never Trumpers. The guys who’ve been riding shotgun this whole time, controlling the aux cord, insisting on The Eagles.

I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.

You know the type. They’ve been in the front seat since 2017, telling us what electability sounds like, who the acceptable Democrats are, why we need to play Hotel California one more time because it tests well in the suburbs. Abigail Spanberger. Mikie Sherrill. The kind of Democrat a Never Trumper can support without feeling like they’ve wandered too far from the party they actually belong to. Good people, maybe. But their music, their vibe, their ask.

Tuesday night, a significant chunk of the Democratic coalition got out of the cab.

And before we get to the full autopsy, man, I want to plant one thread we’re going to come back to, because it ties the room together. While all this was happening in New York, the woman who spent over $215 million to keep Donald Trump in power — Miriam Adelson, casino empire, Israel Hayom newspaper, the whole apparatus — had her own publication call Trump a failed president. Headline: You could have been the greatest president of all, but you failed.

We’re going to need to talk about that rug.

Subscribe now

Walter Has Something to Say About the Incumbent Protection Racket

Walter has been waiting for this conversation. He has a lot of feelings. He may be slightly overhydrated with righteous fury.

“You want to know what this is, Dude? I’ll tell you what this is. This is the incumbent protection racket. Both parties. Carved out over decades. A self-perpetuating machine for insulating professional politicians from the one thing they cannot survive — accountability. Am I wrong?”

Walter is not wrong.

The machine works like this: you win a seat, the party apparatus closes ranks around you, the consultants get paid to keep you in the seat, the incumbency advantages compound, and the whole ecosystem optimizes for survival rather than representation. It’s bipartisan. It’s structural. And it has been running largely unchallenged for a very long time.

Trump cracked it on the Republican side. You can say a lot of things about that man, and the Dude has said some of them, but the chaos he brought to Republican primaries disrupted an incumbent protection apparatus that had produced its own generation of comfortable mediocrities. The Republican base decided it wanted something that was at least performing accountability, even if the performance was deranged.

What happened Tuesday in New York is the left-side version of that disruption. And here is the part that the national press isn’t fully covering, man: it wasn’t just three congressional seats. Mamdani-endorsed DSA candidates picked up multiple state assembly and state senate races across Queens and Brooklyn on the same night. State Assembly District 37. Assembly District 38. Assembly District 54. Assembly District 56. A state senate seat in Queens.

This is infrastructure. This is what it looks like when a political movement decides to build a pipeline instead of just audition for the main stage.

“The consultant class,” Walter continues, and at this point he’s really rolling, “the consultant class bills you whether they win or lose, Dude. You understand what I’m saying? There is no accountability mechanism. They lose a race, they book the next one. They hollow out the state party infrastructure, they get hired to run the next state campaign. You want to understand why the Democratic Party keeps losing races it should win? Follow the invoices.”

Walter, man. He’s not wrong. He’s also knocking over someone’s beer, but he’s not wrong.

The Dude Is Just Genuinely Baffled By Dan Goldman

Not angry. Just... man.

Look, I signed the Port Huron Statement. I was involved with the Seattle Seven. I have, over the course of a long and largely horizontal life, watched a lot of politicians make a lot of choices, and I try not to judge, man. People have their thing. I have my thing. The world is a complicated place.

But Dan Goldman, man.

Goldman had a rug. It was a good rug, actually — impeachment prosecutor, sharp on TV, spoke fluent outrage-at-Trump, had the whole institutional package tied together. AIPAC endorsement. Israel Day parade. The support of the House Democratic leadership. Governor Hochul. The works. That rug tied the room together, man.

Except it wasn’t his rug.

It was the district’s rug. And the district — which had been telling him for two years, in poll after poll, rally after rally, which way it was leaning on Gaza and Israel and the whole complicated knot of that — the district wanted its rug back.

A May poll had Brad Lander up 57 to 23. That’s not a trend, man. That’s not a late-breaking development. That’s the district putting a Post-It on the refrigerator that says we’ve moved on and Goldman responding by marching in the Israel Day parade.

And then the concession speech. Oh, man, the concession speech.

Rather than reckon with why a district that overwhelmingly agrees with him on virtually every other issue decided to send him home, Goldman blamed antisemitism. Talked about antisemitic tropes he heard on the campaign. Framed his loss as a warning sign for democracy.

That’s not reading the room. That’s blaming the room for existing.

Here is what makes Goldman’s position particularly untenable, and we’ll come back to this when we talk about Miriam Adelson: he spent his political capital defending a consensus that was fracturing simultaneously from his left and from within the Republican donor apparatus that built it. The rug was already being carried out before the votes were cast. He just didn’t notice, man, because the rug had been there for so long everybody forgot it wasn’t bolted down.

Share

Maude Would Like to Explain What the Never Trumpers Actually Want

Maude has a glass of something expensive. She has done the work. She is not interested in being diplomatic about it.

The Never Trumpers are upset.

Charlie Sykes is upset. Rick Wilson is upset. The Bulwark’s notification feed has that particular energy of people who are performing alarm while being privately gratified because their preferred narrative — Democrats are self-destructing — has been handed to them on a platter made of other people’s political losses.

They will tell you this is about electability. They will talk about the heartland. They will invoke Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill as the gold standard of what a Democrat should look like — credentialed, moderate, safe. The kind of candidate who can win a swing district. The kind of candidate a former Republican can pull a lever for without feeling like they’ve crossed some invisible ideological line.

And here is the part that Maude would like you to sit with: Spanberger is a former CIA operations officer. Sherrill is a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor. These are not ideological stretches for people with Republican priors. These are, in fact, almost exactly the kind of Democrats that a certain kind of Never Trump Republican would have designed if given a blank sheet of paper and asked to describe their comfort zone.

“The demand structure,” Maude says, examining her wine with clinical detachment, “has always been asymmetric. The Democrats are expected to moderate rightward to earn Never Trump votes. In exchange, the Never Trumpers will continue to podcast about it. The transaction has never been equal. And when it stops producing the desired results, they revert to the position that the problem is the Democrats.”

The Eagles metaphor completes itself here. They were never actually passengers in your political project. They were just in your cab, controlling the music, and calling it a coalition.

That said — and Maude is nothing if not honest, even when it’s inconvenient — there is a real tension underneath all the bad faith. The DSA model has produced wins in deep urban cores. New York. Seattle. Washington D.C. These are not competitive districts. The one actually competitive New York seat — NY-17, the Lawler seat, the one that actually matters for flipping the House — was won in the Democratic primary by Cait Conley, a former NSC counterterrorism official. Not a democratic socialist. Not Mamdani-endorsed. A fairly conventional credentialed-Democrat candidate.

So the question of whether the Mamdani model can travel to districts where November actually matters is real. The people raising it are doing so in bad faith. Both things are true. Maude has noted this and moved on, because she has work to do and the wine is not going to drink itself.

Donny Has Just Learned About George Conway

He arrived late to this conversation, as he arrives late to all conversations.

“Wait,” says Donny. “So this guy — the one who was on TV all the time being mad about Trump — he ran as a Democrat?”

Yes, Donny.

“And he lost?”

He got six percent, Donny. In an eight-person field. In Manhattan. In Jerry Nadler’s old district. He finished fifth. Behind a guy whose entire qualification for public office is that his grandfather was John F. Kennedy.

“Huh,” says Donny. “Is that—”

“Donny,” Walter says, “you’re out of your element.”

But here’s the thing, man — Donny’s instinct that this means something is not wrong, even if Walter won’t let him finish the thought.

George Conway launched his congressional campaign on January 6th, 2026 — the fifth anniversary of the Capitol riot — with a video that opened on clips of the insurrection and an argument that the stakes for democracy had never been higher. His entire pitch, from start to finish, was: I hate Trump, I am very good at hating Trump on television, send me to Congress so I can hate Trump from there.

Democratic primary voters in the single most anti-Trump congressional district in the United States looked at that pitch and said: we’ll give you six percent.

They gave the rest to two actual Democratic politicians with records on actual Democratic issues, a Kennedy grandson coasting on legacy, and a handful of other candidates who had at least thought about what they wanted to do in Congress.

This is the cab scene, man. Conway thought the Democratic Party was a cab he could get into, flip the music to his preferred station — which is also, coincidentally, The Eagles, just a different Eagles, like a cover band of the same song — and ride to Congress on the strength of his anti-Trump credentials.

The Democratic primary electorate threw him out at fifty miles an hour.

The Resistance as aesthetic is over. You cannot build a politics out of the other team’s worst guy, even when the other team’s worst guy is genuinely, historically terrible. People want to know what you’re for, man. They want to know who you’re going to fight for. Six percent is the market rate for “I am extremely mad about Donald Trump and I have a Yale Law degree.” It is not a winning number.

The Adelson Rug: A Throughline Pays Off

The Dude, putting it together. This is the part that makes the whole thing weird.

Okay, man. We planted this thread at the beginning and it is time to pull it.

Miriam Adelson is not a household name in most households, but she should be. She is a dual US-Israeli citizen, a casino magnate, and the single largest financial force behind Donald Trump’s political career. Her PAC poured over $215 million into keeping Trump in power across his presidential campaigns. She and her late husband Sheldon had, by one accounting, more visits to the Trump White House than anyone else the man could think of. She is, in the most literal financial sense, one of the people who built the thing.

Her newspaper — Israel Hayom, the most widely distributed paper in Israel, which she owns — just published an op-ed calling Trump a failed president. Headline: You could have been the greatest president of all, but you failed. The piece called the Iran deal a “colossal mistake,” accused Trump of signing a “surrender agreement with a murderous terror regime,” and said he had lost his “moral and leadership compass.”

That is not a critic. That is the principal investor telling the CEO he blew it.

Now hold that next to Dan Goldman’s career trajectory and the whole picture comes into focus, man.

Goldman spent his political capital defending the proposition that unconditional support for the Netanyahu government was not only morally correct but politically necessary — that you couldn’t be a serious Democrat without the AIPAC endorsement, without the parade, without the full package. He was defending a consensus. The problem is the consensus was fracturing from every direction at once: from his left, where his district had clearly moved; and from within the Republican donor apparatus that built the pro-Israel political infrastructure in the first place, where the Iran deal just introduced a serious crack in the foundation.

Goldman lost his seat holding a position that Miriam Adelson’s own newspaper is now treating as politically complicated.

The rug that tied the whole room together — the “this is just how things work” consensus around unconditional Israel support as the price of doing serious politics — somebody pissed on it from every direction simultaneously. The left pulled it from below. The Iran deal yanked it from above. And Goldman was standing in the middle of the room looking surprised that the floor felt wet.

The Dude doesn’t gloat. The Dude has seen enough political certainties dissolve into White Russian to know better than to gloat. But the Dude does note, gently, man, that “marching in the Israel Day parade as your closing argument to a district that has been clear about where it stands” is going to look, in the fullness of time, like a real poor read of the room.

The Dude Abides (But He’s Watching the Spare)

The Stranger drifts through. The Dude finishes his White Russian.

I’m not going to tell you this is over, man. I’ve been around too long for that.

The DSA hasn’t flipped a competitive seat yet. The one race in New York where November actually matters went to a former counterterrorism official, not a democratic socialist, which suggests the model has some geographic limits that haven’t been stress-tested. The Never Trumpers will keep podcasting. They will keep invoicing their newsletter subscribers for hot takes about Democratic self-destruction. The consultant class will survive this particular reckoning and bill someone for the debrief.

And yet.

Something moved on Tuesday night. The Eagles got turned off — not everywhere, not permanently, but in a string of New York districts that just told the institutional party something pretty clear about who they want driving the cab. The Mamdani machine didn’t just win three congressional primaries. It won a stack of state assembly and state senate seats that are going to be the infrastructure for the next ten years of New York politics. That’s not a vibe. That’s a plan.

The rug is in play, man. The one the institutional party kept insisting tied the room together — the one that said acceptable candidates, acceptable positions, trust the professionals, play Hotel California one more time — a lot of people decided they wanted a different rug. A rug they actually picked. A rug that actually ties their room together, not somebody else’s.

George Conway is going back to television. Dan Goldman is going to write a Substack about antisemitism. Charlie Sykes is going to podcast about this being exactly what he warned about, while carefully not mentioning that his preferred alternative was The Eagles.

And the Dude? The Dude’s going to finish his White Russian, roll a few frames, and watch what happens when a political movement decides to actually build something instead of just holding the line.

The Dude abides.

And he is never, under any circumstances, getting back in that cab.

Sometimes there’s a primary... and sometimes that primary really ties the room together.

So I’m sitting here, White Russian in hand, watching the news, and I see this thing about how the guys who used to run PayPal are now basically running the government. And I think, man. Man. That’s a lot to process before noon.

Let me back up.

In 2007, Fortune magazine did a story about a bunch of dudes who used to work at this payment company called PayPal and kept starting companies together. For the photo, they dressed up like the mob. Suits, gold chains, the whole thing. They called themselves the PayPal Mafia.

I thought that was pretty funny at the time.

It is less funny now, man. It is considerably less funny now.

Because three of those dudes are running the federal government. One of them owns the platform most people get their news from. Another one just got put in charge of whatever TikTok’s algorithm decides to show you. And another one — and this one really gets me — is building the surveillance infrastructure for what he described, at a meeting with investors, as a system where citizens will be on their “best behavior” because everything is constantly recorded and reported on.

He said that. Out loud. To investors. As a pitch.

The Dude does not find that groovy.

The Lucky Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s the thing about these guys that I keep coming back to, man. The whole story they tell about themselves — the genius, the vision, the hustle — it kind of skips over the part where they just got incredibly, historically, once-in-a-generation lucky.

PayPal got bought by eBay in October 2002. That’s when everyone got their money. And here’s the thing — the dot-com bust had just wiped out basically every other tech startup. Everyone else was broke. The venture capital guys had nothing to invest in. The whole market was on the floor.

And these guys showed up with pockets full of eBay money.

They put that money into the next wave of stuff — Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn — and the next wave happened to be the biggest value-creation cycle in the history of commerce. Everything went up. Their stuff went up with it.

Man. Am I wrong? Am I wrong?

Being rich and available in 2003 is the whole story. That’s it. That’s the secret. The rest of it — the first principles thinking, the contrarianism, the vision — you can kind of put that in the same category as my rug. Nice to have. Not what tied the room together.

The Guy Who Went The Other Way

There’s this one dude, Reid Hoffman, who took the same money from the same exit and went Democratic. Backed Hillary. Invested in OpenAI. Argued that AI should be regulated. The whole opposite direction.

Which means all the other guys chose to go the direction they went.

That’s important, man. It wasn’t gravity. It wasn’t inevitable. One of them looked at the same pile of money and the same network and the same historical moment and made a different call. Which means the rest of them — the ones building the surveillance state and deregulating crypto and running DOGE — they decided to do that. On purpose.

I just think that’s worth sitting with for a minute.

Subscribe now

The Doctrine Dude

There’s this guy Sacks. David Sacks. He was at PayPal, made his money, started a podcast, and built a whole persona around being the guy willing to say the uncomfortable thing.

In March 2020 he wrote a piece saying COVID lockdowns were destroying everything and the cure was worse than the disease. He was wrong. A lot of people died. He never really updated the argument. But the persona was set.

Now he’s been the AI and crypto czar at the White House. He wrote a stablecoin bill. He didn’t finish the crypto market structure bill he also said he’d write. His time was up after 130 days and they promoted him onto a federal science advisory council as co-chair.

Didn’t finish the job. Got promoted anyway.

Man. The Dude has had some jobs where that didn’t work out that way.

The ‘Barnacle’

Okay so here’s the character I find the most philosophically interesting, man. There’s this guy Calacanis. Jason Calacanis. He was not PayPal. He was a tech blogger who made an early investment in Uber and then attached himself to the Sacks and Thiel network so completely that he’s now in the group chats, on the podcast, and part of every political conversation these guys have in public.

Now. I want to be precise here, because I think about ecology sometimes when I’m bowling.

A barnacle is not a failure. The barnacle is very good at what it does. It finds something larger than itself that’s moving through productive waters, attaches at the waterline, and extracts nutrients from whatever the host moves through. It’s hard to remove once it’s on there. It goes wherever the ship goes.

Calacanis found the hull, man. He has been at the waterline ever since, his podcast microphone pointed upward, performing the id that the principals would rather not perform themselves. When the California wealth tax came up last year, it was Calacanis calling it confiscation and illegal and civilization-ending while the others nodded thoughtfully at a safe remove.

The attack dog function has value precisely because it gives the network’s actual power players distance from the aggression.

The Dude respects the commitment, even while finding the vibe pretty unchill.

The Machine

So Sacks and Calacanis and two other guys — Friedberg and Chamath — do this podcast called All-In. It gets a few million downloads. The tech press covers it like it’s independent analysis.

I’m going to be straight with you, man. It is not independent analysis.

It is four extremely wealthy men with overlapping investments and overlapping political interests agreeing with each other about politics for two hours. The “debate” is four guys arguing about the degree to which they agree. The thing that makes it look like analysis rather than a donor-class group therapy session is the production values.

Here’s what the machine actually does. The arguments that get workshopped in the billionaires’ group texts — and we know they have group texts, man, this has been reported — show up on All-In the following week formatted to sound like they were reasoned from first principles. Like someone sat down and thought about it carefully. Not like someone got a text from their billionaire friend at 11pm and decided it was a good take.

That’s credibility laundering. It goes in as a private consensus and comes out as public analysis. That’s the whole operation.

The Photo

So there’s this photo from 2007. Thirteen guys in mob cosplay for a magazine. I looked at it again the other day.

It’s a class photo, man. That’s what it is. The class that took over the government. They’re wearing the suits and the gold chains and doing the menacing faces, and the building behind them now is the actual federal government, not a photo studio backdrop.

They were goofing around for the camera in 2007. They were not goofing around.

The Dude does not abide.

He abides. But he does not abide this specifically.

The Dude’s got the sample ballot spread out on the coffee table next to a fresh White Russian, and he’s not reading it so much as excavating it. Sixty-one names for governor. Sixty-one. The county did the counting, not him — he checked twice out of professional courtesy to the absurdity of the thing. Next to each name there’s an occupation, like the whole ballot got mistaken for a dating profile. “Hotel Worker.” “Mother/Builder/Entrepreneur.” “Retired CEO.” Somewhere around name forty he finds a guy who’d clearly arranged his own name to land somewhere in the neighborhood of a former president’s. Nobody asked this man to do that. He did it anyway, free of charge, no signature required beyond his own. That’s the whole ballgame, right there, before a single argument gets made.

Donny picks the ballot up like he’s been deputized and starts reading names out loud, fully committed, the way he gets fixated on a Beatles lyric nobody asked him to recite at that particular moment. “Civil Engineer.” “Farmer slash Businessman slash Broadcaster.” Three minutes deep, no sign of slowing. And then — give the man his due, he always gets there eventually — Donny looks up and asks the only question in the room that actually matters: out of sixty-one guys, how many of them count? Walter tells him he’s out of his element. Walter, as a policy matter, is dead wrong about this specific instance, and somebody ought to write that down, because it doesn’t happen often.

Share

Maude answers it instead, the same flat, clinical register she’d use to say the word that makes certain men at dinner parties suddenly very interested in their napkins. Two. The number’s always two. She doesn’t raise her voice doing it, which is somehow worse than if she had. Then she walks the mechanism, four sentences, no theater: winner-take-all means the top two finishers advance regardless of party, and every other vote just gets discarded on its way to the binary. Stack that same logic across fifty more contests for president and you’ve built the Electoral College — fifty-one separate winner-take-all elections wired together, each one throwing out everybody who didn’t finish first or second in that particular state. And if some ambitious type tries to route around the binary by losing the big primary and running independent instead, there are sore loser laws on the books in most states built for exactly that contingency — door’s already closed before he reaches it. She says all of this like she’s reading a parts list off the back of a washing machine. There’s no outrage in the delivery. The outrage is supposed to be yours.

Walter, predictably, cannot leave it where Maude left it — too clean, not nearly enough vein in it for his taste. So he picks it up and points it somewhere else entirely: the money. You think a guy with nine figures to spend on politics is going to bankroll a brand-new party from scratch when he can just buy a controlling interest in one of the two that already exist, fully built, ballot-line and infrastructure included? That’s not generosity. That’s a hostile takeover with better lighting and a press release. Same exact logic as a guy who never buys his own bowling ball — he just shows up, finds whoever’s already got one, and makes it his problem to share. Sixty-one names on a primary ballot looks like choice if you squint. It’s mostly just sixty-one people who didn’t get the memo about how the math actually works, plus two or three who got the memo early and are about to win because of it.

The Dude folds the ballot back up, takes a slow pull off the White Russian, lets it sit a second. Sixty-one people RSVP’d to this party. The rug’s only got room for two of them to stand on at once, and everybody else is just milling around in a costume, waiting for an invitation that already went out to somebody else weeks ago. That’s not a multiparty system, man. That’s a costume party. And the costume count has never once been the same thing as the guest list — doesn’t matter how many guys show up calling themselves Obama.

The Dude abides. Sixty-one of his fellow Californians, apparently, abide a little less efficiently — though in fairness to all sixty-one of them, the system was never built to let efficiency be the point.

Tuesday night at the lanes, some kid in a Member’s Only knockoff steps half a shoe over the foul line on his approach, and Walter is up before the ball even gets to the pins. Finger out. Vein going. The whole “you’re entering a world of pain” routine, except this time it’s just a kid in a bowling shirt who has no idea what he just stepped into. The .45 stays in the bag — it always stays in the bag — but Walter doesn’t need it tonight, because the kid backs off, the score gets marked, and Walter sits back down like he just held the line at the Chosin Reservoir instead of a Thursday league night in Reseda.

Here’s the thing about Walter nobody gives him enough credit for: he’s not actually a hypocrite about rules. Step over the line, you get called. No carve-out for guys with a sob story, no exception for guys who really, really wanted to. That’s exhausting to sit through for three straight games, but it’s also, structurally, the only defensible position a person can hold. A rule that only applies to the other guy isn’t a rule. It’s a leash, and you’re just the one holding it.

Which brings me — by a route Walter would call a bridge too far for normal people but exactly correct for a man who’s seen some things — to the rug.

Somebody tracked something foul onto it a long time ago. And now that people are trying to clean it, the guys who tracked it on are extremely, conspicuously upset about the cleaning. They’ve got a whole library of language ready to go about how actually the rug is fine, actually you wouldn’t understand, and also — have you considered that cleaning products are confusing to operate?

Share

You want a case study, I’ll give you a case study. 2008, Washington state. Voters pass a top-two primary because they’re sick of party machines hand-picking who’s allowed to run under the party label. So who sues to kill it? Not one party fighting another the normal way, where you can at least respect the brawl. The Republicans, the Democrats, and the Libertarians — three outfits who agree on nothing, who would not share a foxhole, who Walter would describe as holding “ideologically irreconcilable positions, Dude, irreconcilable” — all walk into federal court arm in arm to protect their shared right to pick the menu before anybody gets a vote. That’s not a coalition. That’s a cartel that finally found the one product they all need to keep monopolized.

Then you’ve got Alaska. Alaska tries cracking the door — top-four primary, ranked vote in November, no party gatekeeping on who gets to run as what. The state GOP loses its mind, and somewhere in the middle of losing its mind, a guy goes on the record and says the quiet part out loud: candidates don’t need “the blessing” of the State Central Committee anymore. Blessing. That’s the word he reached for. Not endorsement. Not support. Blessing — like the man’s running a confessional booth instead of a ballot line, like the rest of us are supposed to show up, kneel, and wait to be told who we’re allowed to vote for. Walter would almost respect the honesty if it weren’t so goddamn on the nose. Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, except the tradition is “we decide who you’re allowed to choose from.”

And here’s the part that should make even a guy as patient as the Dude want to put a bowling ball through a television. Every one of these outfits has the exact same complaint loaded and ready: voters don’t understand the new system, it’s confusing, it breeds distrust, won’t somebody think of the poor bewildered electorate. Fine. Maybe that’s even a real concern. So where’s the pamphlet? Where’s the ad buy walking people through how a ranked ballot actually works? Where’s a single dollar of party money going toward making voters less confused, instead of a hundred percent of it going toward repealing the thing that confused them? Walter can locate a human toe inside an afternoon when the situation calls for it. These guys can’t print a fucking flyer.

Donny, bless him, pipes up around here — wait, isn’t it good if people understand their ballot? — which is, as usual, the only sane thing said all night, and which gets steamrolled, as usual, because Donny’s out of his element and nobody invited him into this particular conversation. But here’s what the movie always got right that everybody forgets: Donny’s wrong about basically nothing. He’s just saying it at the wrong volume in the wrong room. The Dude doesn’t argue with Walter about any of it. Doesn’t need to. Just nods at Donny like, yeah, man, you had it the whole time — and lets Walter keep yelling, because Walter being right and Walter being exhausting were never mutually exclusive. They’re a package deal.

So no, they were never trying to clean the rug. They were trying to get rid of it before anybody asked what they’d been hiding under it for fifty years. That’s the whole con, man. Not confusion. Not tradition. Not some tender concern for the voters. Just a bunch of guys who built a very nice room around a very dirty rug, and would rather burn the floor down than let anybody lift the corner.

The Dude abides. The rug, less so. Somebody’s gonna have to deal with that eventually — and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be the guys who soiled it.

The Dude is on his second White Russian. He’s at his lane. The 10-pin is giving him a look. Above Lane 7, there’s a TV mounted slightly crooked — they’re always mounted slightly crooked in bowling alleys, man, it’s like a rule — and on it is a panel of guys. Nice suits. Practiced concern. The specific facial expression of men who have recently discovered a conscience and are still getting used to where they keep it.

They are explaining, patiently, that the Democrats need to stop talking about abortion. Gender stuff. You know, the whole identity thing. If they ever want to be competitive again. They are very clear on this. It is, they say, just strategy.

The Dude releases the ball. Watches it. It goes where it goes.

Man, he thinks. Man.

Now look. The Dude gets it. He’s not here to tell you the left never overcorrects — sure, sometimes the left overcorrects. He’s seen the Twitter threads, man. He’s aware of the discourse. There are real conversations to be had about tone and tactics and how you talk to people you’re trying to persuade.

But there’s something rolling around in his head that won’t find the pocket, and it’s this: some of the guys on that panel — the Never Trump guys, the Lincoln Project emeriti, the Bulwark podcast regulars — they’re offering the Democratic Party a deal. And the Dude has some experience with deals that turn out to be something other than what they initially appeared to be.

The Deal, Man. Let’s Look at the Deal.

There’s a book. Well — there’s a book with a guy’s name on it. The man who actually wrote it, a journalist named Tony Schwartz, has been very clear that he regrets this, and that the title reads as unintentional irony at this point. It’s called The Art of the Deal. The premise is that a good deal has to work for both sides.

So let’s look at this deal.

What the Never Trump coalition is asking from the Democratic Party: Abandon the messaging on reproductive rights. Soften on gender equality. Deprioritize civil rights framing. Stop doing the things that make centrist Republicans uncomfortable. Reorganize the entire coalition’s priorities around the preferences of people who are not in that coalition and have been clear they do not intend to fully join it.

What the Never Trump coalition is putting on the table in return: The temporary gift of their disapproval of someone they spent three decades building the conditions for.

Nobody’s asking Bill Kristol to endorse card-check. Nobody asked Charlie Sykes to call for Medicaid expansion. Rick Wilson hasn’t come out for the PRO Act. The negotiation runs exactly one direction. And the Dude — who has seen some bad deals in his time, man, who once got talked into retrieving a briefcase that turned out to have nothing in it, by a man who turned out to have nothing in his bank account either — recognizes this shape.

You don’t get to call it the Art of the Deal when only one side is doing the dealing. Even the ghostwriter knows that, man.

Walter Has Thoughts. Walter Has Many Thoughts.

Walter puts down his bowling ball.

Walter has been waiting for this moment since approximately the second White Russian.

“These people,” Walter says, with the controlled fury of a man who is not particularly controlling his fury, “are not bystanders, Dude. They were not standing in the parking lot when this happened. They were in the building.”

And man. Walter is not wrong.

Bill Kristol championed Sarah Palin. Put her on a national ticket. Palin is, whatever else you want to say about her, the direct prototype of the MAGA aesthetic — the aggrieved outsider, the media enemy, the policy-light culture warrior who runs on vibes and resentment. Kristol gift-wrapped that and handed it to the American electorate. He was also one of the principal architects of the Iraq War, which burned through American institutional trust like a lit match through a paper score sheet, and generated the precise furnace of disillusionment that Donald Trump walked into in 2016.

Charlie Sykes spent decades as a Wisconsin right-wing talk radio host building exactly the audience psychology that became the MAGA base. The grievance loops. The media distrust. The tribal epistemology where facts are what your team says and everything else is the enemy. He was an artisan of it. He was good at it. His listeners became the base. He is now, professionally, a man who deplores the base, which is a sustainable business model but a genuinely interesting personal journey.

Rick Wilson ran campaigns and opposition research for politicians who mainstreamed racial resentment as a voter turnout mechanism. He was effective at this.

These men did not create MAGA despite their careers. They created the preconditions for it through their careers. The supply-side dogma, the Southern Strategy’s long refinement, the epistemic closure of right-wing media, the years of telling the base that government was the enemy and compromise was weakness — these were Republican Party projects, and these men were card-carrying members.

“They are coming to us,” Walter says, reaching a controlled simmer that is not actually controlled, “with the bill for a fire they started. And asking us to pay it by giving them the thermostat.”

Walter, the Dude says.

“AM I WRONG?”

He is not wrong.

Subscribe now

Donny Wanders In From The Snack Bar

Donny has nachos. Donny missed most of this.

“Wait,” Donny says. “Are you saying the Lincoln Project guys are bad? I thought they made those great ads.”

Walter does not look up from his bowling shoes.

“Donny,” Walter says. “You’re out of your element.”

Donny represents — and the Dude means this with genuine affection for Donny, man, Donny is good people — the well-meaning Democrat who takes the Never Trump alliance at face value. Who sees the ads. Who appreciates the anti-Trump commitment. Who doesn’t read the fine print.

The fine print says: TEMPORARY. EXPIRES UPON RETURN TO NORMAL REPUBLICAN POLITICS.

They have been very upfront about this, actually. They are not becoming Democrats. They don’t want to become Democrats. Their stated goal is to destroy Trumpism, reclaim a functioning center-right Republican Party, and go home. After which they would like a competitive two-party system where their team is one of the parties and Democratic dominance is bounded by a viable opposition that they can be part of.

A durable, structurally powerful Democratic majority is not their goal. If you think about it for more than a minute — and the Dude has had time, man, lane 7 is slow tonight — it’s actually mildly against their long-term interests.

Donny eats his nachos. He seems okay with this.

The Expiration Date Is Right There On The Label

In a bowling league, everyone is trying to win, and the structure of the thing means everyone has roughly aligned incentives — get the best score, advance in the standings, play to your strengths. It’s not complicated.

This is not a bowling league.

The Never Trump coalition needs Democrats to win enough elections to prevent a Trumpist authoritarian consolidation. That’s real, and the Dude doesn’t dismiss it. But they don’t need Democrats to build a dominant progressive majority that structurally reconfigures American politics for a generation. That outcome would make it very difficult for a reconstituted “reasonable” Republican Party to be competitive afterward — which is the thing they’re actually working toward.

Their ideal end state looks something like: Trump recedes, a Youngkin or a Kemp type emerges as the “normal” Republican, the Never Trump consultants and podcasters return to relevance within a chastened GOP, and the Democratic Party settles back into being a manageable opposition that wins sometimes but doesn’t win so much that it crowds out the center-right lane.

In that world, they matter enormously. In a world where Democrats build a lasting majority around their actual values and govern with confidence — they matter less.

The Dude is not saying their anti-Trump sincerity is fake. He’s saying their interests and the Democratic coalition’s interests overlap on one thing, and diverge on almost everything that comes after. Read the expiration date, man. It’s right there man.

Share

Maude Would Like To Show You Some Numbers

Maude Lebowski does not shout. She doesn’t need to. She states things the way you state the height of a building or the boiling point of water — as conditions of reality, offered without particular interest in whether you find them comfortable.

The Never Trump argument on abortion is this: Democrats are being reckless. They need to moderate. They need to stop centering reproductive rights if they want to be competitive in red states. It is a painful but strategically necessary concession to electoral reality.

Maude would like to show you what voters in red states actually did when given the chance to weigh in directly.

Kansas, 2022. A constitutional amendment that would have eliminated abortion rights protections went before Kansas voters. Kansas, man. They rejected it. Fifty-nine percent to forty-one.

Kentucky, 2022. Voters blocked an anti-abortion amendment. In fucking Kentucky man.

Ohio, 2023. Voters enshrined reproductive rights in the state constitution. Fifty-six to forty-four. Ohio.

Michigan. Montana. Maryland. The ballot referendum record on reproductive rights is not a record of a losing issue. It is a record of an issue that wins — including in states where Democrats lose everything else on the same ballot — because it turns out that when you ask actual human voters whether they want the government making their most private medical decisions for them, a majority of them say no. Even in red states. Especially, it turns out, when the question is asked plainly.

The empirical case for strategic retreat on reproductive rights is not merely morally convenient for people whose own reproductive autonomy is not on the line. It is factually wrong. The data is not ambiguous. The data is, frankly, embarrassing for the argument being made.

And then there is the other thing Maude would note, which she states without inflection: many of the men currently advising Democrats to quiet down about abortion came up in a political tradition that spent decades treating reproductive rights as a wedge issue — not a policy question, a wedge, a tool for activating conservative turnout and making Democrats look extreme. Many of them were, at best, neutral on the substance. Some were actively hostile.

Asking Democrats to soft-pedal abortion is not purely strategic advice. It is also, consciously or not, asking the Democratic Party to stop making these men feel bad about positions they held for most of their careers.

Maude returns to her work. She does not require acknowledgment.

The Dude: Yeah. What she said, man.

It’s A Protection Racket, Man. Let’s Just Call It That.

The Dude has been here before. Someone peed on his rug. He went looking for the other Jeffrey Lebowski — the one in Pasadena, the one with the mansion and the biography and the very convincing performance of a man of substance. Who turned out to have nothing. No real money, no real achievements, nothing but the appearance of gravitas and the willingness to weaponize it against people who couldn’t see through it.

He knows what this shape looks like.

The offer from the Never Trump coalition is this: give us what we want — a Democratic Party organized around our preferences, stripped of the commitments that make us uncomfortable, comfortable for people who were Republicans until recently and intend to be Republicans again — and we’ll protect you from the monster we spent thirty years building the conditions for.

That is not a coalition. That is a protection racket.

And look — the Dude wants to get along. The Dude is not a warlike man. He genuinely appreciates that these folks find Trump abhorrent. That’s real and it counts for something and the Dude’s not dismissing it. But there’s a difference between accepting help from someone who’s temporarily aligned with you and reorganizing your entire operation around their comfort. One of those is coalition politics. The other one is capitulation dressed up in strategic language.

Nobody in a protection racket is asked to prove they mean it. That’s kind of the whole mechanism, man.

The Rug, Man. Come On Back To The Rug.

The soul of the Democratic Party is not an abstraction. It is a specific and historical thing — the expanding circle of who counts. The New Deal. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The ADA. The ACA. The long, imperfect, genuinely incomplete project of building a country where the government is not an instrument of the powerful against everyone else.

That is the rug. It ties the room together.

The Never Trump ask — go quiet on reproductive rights, soften on gender equality, make the coalition comfortable for people who spent thirty years actively working against these things — is to roll up that rug and put it in storage. So their guys feel more at home coming over.

The first time someone peed on the Dude’s rug, there was at least the pretense of a mistake. Wrong Jeffrey Lebowski. Honest error. Could happen to anyone.

This time, they’re handing you the cleaning bill and calling it strategy.

The Democratic Party didn’t become what it is by figuring out what its opponents found acceptable and doing that. It built what it built by being the thing that needed to exist — for the people who needed it to exist. When those people get thrown overboard to make the boat more comfortable for recent arrivals who are already planning their next voyage, you don’t end up with a better coalition. You end up with a party that doesn’t know why it exists and can’t explain it to voters who are wondering the same thing.

That’s the rug. That’s always been the rug.

You don’t abide without your rug, man.

The Dude abides. But not without the rug.

The Dude abides. Find him at shitpostdude.com when he’s not at the lanes.

So I’m sitting in my bungalow, right, working on a White Russian — second one, maybe third, the Dude’s keeping it casual — and the news comes on. Trump’s announced a historic memorandum of understanding with Iran. An MOU. Ends the war he started in February. “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” he posts on Truth Social. “Congratulations to all!”

And I’m thinking, man. Man.

I’ve seen this rug before. It was soiled the first time too.

A writer named Jay Kuo — good dude, pays attention — has laid out the pattern [LINK]. And the pattern, once you see it, you can’t un-see it. Trump doesn’t make deals. He makes announcements. Phase 1 is the ceremony: the signing table, the handshakes, the Truth Social post with the exclamation points. Phase 2 is where the actual conflict lives — the stuff both sides couldn’t agree on, which is usually the entire substance of the disagreement. Phase 2 never happens. The check is always in the mail.

The UK trade deal: announced May 2025, “full and comprehensive,” ran to five pages, left the digital services tax — the thing America most wanted resolved — for later. By December, the whole $42 billion Tech Prosperity Deal was frozen over that exact unresolved question. Far out.

Gaza: ceasefire announced January 2025. Phase 1 delivered hostage releases and prisoner swaps — the packageable stuff. Phase 2 was supposed to address the permanent ceasefire and the political future of Gaza. Phase 2 negotiations were supposed to begin during Phase 1. Netanyahu’s own adviser described Phase 2’s implementation as “imaginary, impossible and unacceptable” before the ink on Phase 1 was dry. The bombing resumed. Trump announced a second Gaza ceasefire in October with structurally identical terms. Same result.

So now it’s Iran’s turn at the lanes.

Walter called while I was on my second White Russian. I made the mistake of mentioning the MOU.

“The MOU is a capitulation, Dude. Do you see what happens? You negotiate with the Islamic Republic, you get nothing. This is not how sovereign nations conduct themselves. This is not—”

“Walter—”

“I’m not done. The neocons — and I know you don’t respect this, Dude, I know you think this is all about ‘Nam, but this is NOT about ‘Nam — the neocons have been right about Iran for thirty years. And now we’re handing them a signed piece of paper that says they can keep enriching uranium as long as they pinky-promise not to build a bomb—”

“Walter, they’re not pinky-promising—”

“They signed this exact promise in 2015! And then Trump tore it up in 2018 and called it a disaster! And now they’re signing it again! Dude, am I wrong? AM I WRONG?”

He’s not wrong. He’s just loud about it in a way that doesn’t leave room to finish a thought.

The thing Pete Hegseth offered as the MOU’s headline achievement on Face the Nation — that the document says Iran won’t seek or acquire a nuclear weapon — prompted host Margaret Brennan to note, with admirable composure, that the JCPOA said precisely the same thing. It did. Iran signed that commitment. Violated it after Trump walked in 2018. And is now being asked to sign a recycled version of it as the marquee deliverable of a war that cost God knows what.

“The word ‘recycled,’” Donny offered, from somewhere in the background, “kind of makes you feel like the whole thing is—”

“Donny, you’re out of your element.”

Here’s the thing about the enrichment question, and I want to be careful here because this matters even if the whole conversation makes the Dude want to go bowling and not come back.

Enrichment is the actual substance of every Iran nuclear negotiation for twenty years. The American position, stated by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff — a real estate developer, which is the kind of credential you want in a guy handling the nuclear file — in May 2025: “We cannot allow even 1 percent of an enrichment capability.” The Iranian position, stated by Foreign Minister Araghchi the same day: “Enrichment in Iran will continue with or without a deal.”

A year later, those are still the positions. Recent talks produced specific numbers — the U.S. wants Iran to suspend enrichment for twenty years, Iran has offered five. The MOU left those numbers exactly where they were and pressed forward to the Geneva ceremony anyway.

Now here’s where the Iran deal is categorically worse than the UK deal or Gaza, and I need you to stay with me because this is important even if it’s a little dry.

A frozen UK trade deal produces friction. A collapsed Gaza ceasefire returns the conflict roughly to its prior position. An Iran Phase 2 that produces nothing of substance leaves Iran in a meaningfully better position than where it started. Partial sanctions relief: extracted in Phase 1. International legitimacy: cashed. Strait of Hormuz question: papered over. Enrichment program: continues on whatever schedule Iran prefers. Iran doesn’t exit the 60-day window back where it started. It exits having banked the concessions while the hard questions remain scheduled, deferred, and unresolved.

Iran’s own state media outlet IRNA was helpfully clear about what Tehran thinks it agreed to: the “current draft agreement” states that “Iran undertakes no new commitments” on nuclear weapons, with further negotiations to follow. In other words: Iran signed up to keep talking, collected its gains, and reserved its position on the one question America most needed to resolve.

That’s a ratchet, man. Not a reset.

The IRGC hardliners — the Revolutionary Guard, the institution that actually runs the show in Tehran and has a documented habit of blowing up negotiations right as they approach conclusion — don’t need to dramatically detonate anything. They just need to run the clock. They’ve had twenty years of practice.

Share

Maude called too, which surprised me. She doesn’t usually follow foreign policy unless there’s an aesthetic angle.

“The press consensus is rather unambiguous,” she said, with the calm of someone who is always three analytical steps ahead and wants you to know it. “The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic. They’ve each independently concluded that the United States lost this war.”

“Yeah, I saw that.”

“The Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey. The institutional voice of Republican foreign policy establishment. And The Atlantic. And the Times. When those three publications converge on the same read of a Republican foreign policy initiative, one is not looking at a partisan pile-on.”

“What about the Economist?”

A pause. “Lukewarm.”

“So when the Economist can only manage lukewarm—”

“One is looking at a consensus that the emperor has no clothes. Yes. The phrasing I would use is that the announcement machine has broken down.”

She’s right. She’s largely right about everything, which is both useful and a little exhausting.

Trump knows the coverage is bad because it’s sticking in his craw. You can tell because of what comes next.

The most revealing tell in this whole episode — more revealing than the recycled nuclear promise, more revealing than Iran’s own state media saying they’ve agreed to nothing new — is what’s being done with the Vice President.

JD Vance is being positioned to take the fall. In advance of the signing.

Think about that for a second. With the UK deal, Trump announced “full and comprehensive” and appeared to genuinely believe his own marketing. With Gaza, he announced the ceasefire twice with visible enthusiasm, seemingly persuaded each time that the fanfare would generate its own momentum. With Iran, the administration is pre-distributing blame before the ceremony has even happened.

That is not triumphalism. That is liability management. When you hand the bag to your VP before the check is even written, you have already priced in the bounce. The announcement machine, which runs on the belief that the act of announcing creates the conditions for implementation, has broken down — and Trump, whatever else you want to say about the man, is not unaware of how badly this is going to land with a general electorate that was never enthusiastic about the war in the first place.

“Who’s Vance?” Donny asked.

“Donny, you’re out of your element.”

The regional endgame has a certain clarifying logic to it, even if it’s clarifying in the way a hangover clarifies the previous evening’s decisions.

The Abraham Accords were premised on a coalition of Sunni states and Israel operating as a U.S.-backed counterweight to Iranian regional power, with American maximum pressure eventually forcing a fundamental change in Iran’s behavior. The 2023 Saudi-Iran normalization deal brokered by China was the Gulf states pricing in that premise’s failure three years ago. The MOU makes official what Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have been quietly hedging toward ever since: Iranian regional presence is a permanent condition to be managed, not a problem to be solved. They can now normalize without having to pretend they’re waiting for Washington’s strategy to work. They’ve been doing it anyway.

The Abraham Accords, in other words, are a historical artifact. A rug that turned out not to tie the room together after all.

For Israel the calculation splits cleanly depending on whether you’re asking about the country or the man currently running it. Israel-the-country gets something genuinely ambiguous: a deferred nuclear threat is better than an active enrichment sprint in the near term, missiles aren’t landing on Tel Aviv. Netanyahu-the-man loses something that may be existential for him personally. The conflict was the political oxygen keeping him airborne above his legal jeopardy and his coalition’s internal contradictions. A U.S.-brokered peace that takes American military backing off the table removes his most important lever. He can’t credibly threaten a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure without U.S. logistical support, and an American president who just announced a historic peace deal is not going to provide that support to blow up his own signing ceremony.

Meanwhile, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are going to be enraged, and Netanyahu can’t give them the war they need to stay satisfied. He is caught between a coalition that requires escalation and a patron who just foreclosed it. That is the tightest corner he has been in yet, and he walked into it because the alternative was admitting earlier that the whole framework was built on a promise America was never going to keep.

So Trump gets the Geneva photo. Truth Social gets the exclamation points. Iran banks the gains and runs the clock. The Gulf states continue the normalization they’ve already been building for years. The enrichment program hums along on a schedule that the agreement agreed not to discuss for sixty days. The legacy press writes “the U.S. lost,” and they’re not wrong. Vance holds the bag. And somewhere in a Pasadena mansion, a man in a wheelchair gives a speech about how the bums lost.

Except this time the bums didn’t lose, man. The bums got sanctions relief, international legitimacy, and a sixty-day clock during which the question they most needed answered will remain politely unasked.

Walter called back. He was calmer — the second-call-Walter, which is a different register.

“Dude. The neocons are finished. The establishment foreign policy apparatus is finished. Cotton can write op-eds. Rubio has gone quiet, which tells you everything. The think tanks will produce papers. None of it matters. We lost the argument in 2016 and we’ve been losing the organizational fight ever since.”

“Are you— Walter, are you okay?”

A long pause.

“I’m calmer than you are.”

The Dude finished his White Russian. Rolled a modest J. Let the whole thing wash over him the way these things do — the announcements, the ceremonies, the recycled promises, the checks always in the mail, Phase 2 always just around the corner, the room never quite tied together no matter how many rugs you drag in from Pasadena.

The deal will be signed in Geneva. The photo will be taken. The sixty days will run.

The Dude abides. He just doesn’t have a lot of illusions about Phase 2.

Thanks to Jay Kuo, contributor at The Big Picture for the foundational receipts work. His analysis of the Trump deal pattern is required reading: The Devil and the Details.

So there’s this piece (gift link) in The Atlantic, man. Very careful, very respectful, a lot of good reporting — researchers who spent months embedded with conservative Trump voters in Wyoming and Michigan and South Carolina. And what they found is: the “save democracy” framing doesn’t work with these voters, has never worked, and cannot work, because it is structurally incompatible with how they think.

This finding surprised exactly no one who has been paying attention. But here’s the thing that’ll keep you up at night, man: everyone is going to read it and conclude we need to do better outreach. The diner safari will continue. The consultants will re-up. The same number will come in on election night, and we’ll commission another study.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Crack a White Russian. Let me explain.

Walter Has Always Known About The Loop

Here’s the part of the Atlantic piece that the researchers are too polite to say plainly: these voters have built a fully closed epistemological system. Every bad outcome — and there have been genuinely bad outcomes, man, we’re not talking invented grievances — gets metabolized as evidence of hostile forces rather than evidence that their guy’s policies caused harm. Farm bankruptcies: Democratic regulatory sabotage, finally showing up on the ledger. Rural hospitals closing: decades of coastal elites defunding real America. Coal keeps dying despite every promise: enemies, always enemies.

You cannot crack a closed epistemological system with outcomes data. The system was designed to survive outcomes data. Every bad result is processed as further confirmation of the original premise. The worse things get, the more the theory is vindicated.

Now. Here’s the thing, man. I live with Walter. And I will tell you something about Walter.

Walter cannot contextualize anything — anything — without Vietnam. You step over the line at the bowling alley, Walter draws a firearm. Because: Vietnam. A millionaire wants his wife back, Walter hatches a scheme involving a severed toe. Because: Vietnam. The world is not, to Walter, a place containing many kinds of situations. The world is a place containing Vietnam, and everything else is Vietnam with different decor.

Now ask yourself: is Walter’s epistemological loop fundamentally different from the loop the researchers spent months documenting?

I’m not saying this to be mean to Walter. Walter is my friend. But Walter is also a cautionary tale about what happens when one framework becomes load-bearing for an entire identity, and you build a life around the premise that the framework cannot be wrong.

The difference is Walter’s loop is just exhausting. The other loop has a TV show and three hundred Electoral College votes.

Subscribe now

The Diner Safari Must Be Stopped

Okay. This is the part I actually wanted to talk about.

The diner safari, man.

You know the format. A reporter from New York or DC — let’s be real, it’s always the Times, it’s always the Times — makes a pilgrimage to a diner in Youngstown or a VFW hall in rural Michigan or a church parking lot in South Carolina. They order something with gravy. They have a series of reverent conversations with a guy named Dale or Randy — always one syllable, always working-class — who is worried about inflation and the border and a factory that closed fifteen years ago that he traces back to a trade deal. Dale/Randy doesn’t love Trump’s personality, but he likes that Trump fights. He’s never met a Democrat. He says he just wants someone to listen.

The reporter wraps up. The piece lands. The conclusion — and I want you to really hear this, because it has been the conclusion every single time — is that Democrats need to do a better job of meeting people where they are.

This advice has been dispensed continuously since November 2016. It has produced zero observable electoral results. Zero.

There is a certain Youngstown diner that has achieved more column inches than some small nations. The regulars must be completely fucking exhausted.

Donny looks up from his bowling ball.

“But maybe this time, if we really listen—”

“DONNY. YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT.“

Here’s what everyone doing the diner safari knows and will not say out loud: these are not movable votes. They are not undecided. They are not waiting to be listened to more carefully. They have arrived — through lived experience, through community, through a fully coherent worldview — at a political conclusion. Treating them as perpetually persuadable voters who just need the right message is condescending as hell and factually wrong.

The diner safari doesn’t inform politics. It soothes the conscience of the professional class consuming it. We went there. We listened. We tried to understand. The subtext is always the same: someone should really do something about these people. The safari exists to maintain one fiction — that a persuasion play is available if someone were clever enough to find it. There isn’t one. Admitting that forces a conclusion the entire genre was constructed to avoid.

The Lincoln Project And Other Ways To Light Money On Fire

Lights the spliff.

You want to talk about the Lincoln Project? I can talk about the Lincoln Project.

These guys spent — conservatively — hundreds of millions of dollars on ads, constitutional argument-making, and very clever television spots aimed at voters who do not watch those channels, do not engage with those arguments because the arguments have been pre-identified as illegitimate, and are philosophically immune to the Lincoln Project’s entire theory of persuasion before the first ad rolls.

The spots were devastatingly clever. They won effusive praise from Twitter users in Brooklyn. They moved approximately zero persuadable Trump voters.

But they looked great in the reel. And the invoices cleared.

Man. The invoices cleared.

I have a theory about this. When a consulting operation fails consistently and keeps getting funded, it is not because the people funding it are stupid. It is because the actual function of the operation is not what it appears to be. The Lincoln Project wasn’t really trying to move Trump voters. The Lincoln Project was trying to soothe the existential dread of a certain class of center-right donor who needed to feel like something was being done. That is a real service. There is genuine market demand for it. It’s just not electoral strategy, man. It’s anxiety management with a media buy attached.

The center-left version is less flashy but equally futile — the “we need to talk to rural voters about kitchen table issues” school of Democratic consultancy, a sector that has survived 2010, 2014, 2016, 2020, and 2024 without a single billing rate taking a hit. They show up with healthcare talking points and broadband promises and occasionally a Democrat who hunts. They are received politely. The returns come in. It’s the same number.

The rug, man. They keep trying to get the rug back.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say: that rug was never in our room to begin with. We’ve been chasing a rug that was always somebody else’s. The votes the Lincoln Project was trying to peel off, the Dale/Randy votes the safari reporters are reverently transcribing — they were never available. The whole premise was the Big Lebowski’s fortune: everyone kept insisting it was there. Turns out Maude had the money the whole time, and the Pasadena operation was fraud in a better suit.

Share

So Where Do We Actually Bowl?

The electoral math is not subtle. The resistance to it is.

The path — for Democrats, for anyone who’d prefer not to live inside a competitive authoritarian state — runs through urban and suburban voters. College-educated voters, particularly women, who have been moving toward Democrats in measurable ways since 2018. Turnout infrastructure in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Detroit. Latino voters who have been quietly drifting away while everybody argues about who the Real America is. These are actual leverage points. They exist. Nobody’s renting a car to cover them. But they’re there, and the lanes are open.

Every dollar spent on a diner safari or a Lincoln Project ad is a dollar not spent registering voters in Fulton County. That’s the trade. It gets made every cycle. It gets made with great rhetorical cover — we can’t abandon these communities — but there’s an important distinction between abandoning a community as human beings and abandoning them as persuasion targets. Those are two different things. Conflating them has been ruinous, and the conflation is very convenient for the people cashing the strategy checks.

You want good policy for rural America? Great. Me too. Fix the hospital closures. Address the opioid crisis. Stop the farm bankruptcies. But you have to win elections to do any of that, and winning elections requires being honest about which votes are actually available — which means being honest about which ones aren’t.

The Stranger drifts through, adjusts his hat.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Dude — I don’t reckon a man’s obliged to keep bowling on a lane with a Closed sign on it. Sometimes the wisdom’s in knowin’ which lanes got pins.”

He tips his hat and is gone.

Whether the Democratic Party is capable of that kind of clarity is, as Maude would say, a separate question. Based on available evidence, I have my doubts. But that’s a White Russian for another evening.

The Dude abides.

— Jeffery Lebowski, Reseda, CA

The Dude doesn’t usually pay much attention to anniversaries. Birthdays, milestones, this whole “look how far we’ve come” routine — it all comes and goes, you have a White Russian, maybe two, and that’s that. But this last weekend, the country decided to throw itself — or really, throw one specific guy — a party. And it was, by any measure, a lot.

Let’s just run the ticker, man, because this was the kind of weekend where if you blinked, you missed three separate national stories, and one of them was about a hundred and sixty years of history getting quietly shoved off a calendar while everybody was watching a cage match. So. Here’s what was on the lawn. Literally, the actual lawn.

The Claw, the Cage

They built a ninety-two-foot steel structure on the South Lawn of the White House and called it “the Claw.” Inside it: an octagon. Inside the octagon: people getting punched, on purpose, for money, on television, on the South Lawn of the White House, on a Sunday. UFC Freedom 250. Sixty million dollars, all in, paid for by the UFC — which the White House wants you to know means the taxpayer isn’t footing the bill. Just, you know. The lawn. And the optics. And whatever it costs to turn the most photographed house in the country into a pay-per-view set for an evening.

The president called it “the greatest show on earth.” Which, fair enough — Walter would tell you the Romans called their stuff that too, and look how that whole arc ended up.

Speaking of Walter — he had Opinions about this one. Three thousand years of beautiful tradition aside, Walter’s read came down to one detail: turns out the president bought up to fifty grand in stock in TKO, the UFC’s parent company, earlier this year. The White House says it’s all sitting in a trust the kids run, so, no conflict, nothing to see, etc.

“This is not bowling,” Walter said, very seriously, holding a White Russian he had not been offered. “This is a man building a cage on his own lawn and then investing in the company that owns the cage. This is — Dude, this is THE conflict of interest. There are RULES about this.”

“Walter, it’s fine, man.”

“IS IT FINE? Is it FINE, Dude?”

It is, allegedly, fine. There’s also a crypto outfit — World Liberty Financial, run by one of the president’s kids — that chipped in a quarter-million-dollar bonus pool for Sunday night’s winners. So if you’re scoring at home: family crypto venture sponsors fights happening on family lawn, in a cage the president has a stake in, two Virginians sued to stop the whole thing on the grounds that maybe this isn’t what federal land is supposed to be for, and a judge said go ahead anyway.

The Dude doesn’t really have a joke for that part. It’s just sort of… the situation now. Like the situation already is the joke.

Subscribe now

Nitro Circus

The day before all that, they let some guys jump motorcycles over the South Lawn. Travis Pastrana — absolute legend, does backflips on dirt bikes for a living — brought a crew of motocross hall-of-famers and they just… did tricks. On the White House lawn. Because somebody asked, and somebody else said sure, why the hell not.

Donny loved this part. Genuinely, no notes — just a guy who saw some dudes do backflips on motorcycles and thought it was awesome.

“Did you see the one guy go all the way around?” Donny said.

“Donny, nobody’s talking about the motorcycles.”

“I’m talking about the motorcycles, Walter.”

And honestly? Donny’s right to be the only one enjoying this part. Out of the whole weekend, six guys backflipping dirt bikes for the sheer joy of backflipping dirt bikes might’ve been the most honest thing that happened. No stock purchases. No bonus pool. Just guys who are very good at a thing, doing the thing, because it’s cool. The Dude can get behind that. The Dude has always been able to get behind that.

A Mile Away

Meanwhile — and this is just a fun little detail, man — about a mile from the cage, a different crew was up on ladders, prying the president’s name off the Kennedy Center. A judge ruled the renaming had gone too far, legally speaking, so down it came. Same weekend as the sixty-million-dollar birthday bash.

Which — the Big Lebowski, the Pasadena one, not us — would’ve recognized this immediately. Guy spends a lifetime building a legacy that turns out to be borrowed, or invented, or somebody else’s money the whole time, and the world quietly starts taking his name off buildings while he’s still in the neighborhood. “Strong men also cry, Mr. Lebowski.” Sure, man. Sometimes they also get their name pried off a concert hall on their own birthday weekend. Bummer, dude.

The Deal

Now, underneath all of this — the cage, the bikes, the building — there was an actual, real thing happening, which is that the United States and Iran are apparently this close to signing some kind of agreement to wind down a war.

The president posted on Saturday that the deal was “scheduled to get signed tomorrow” — tomorrow being his birthday — and that the second it’s signed, the Strait of Hormuz opens right up, no tolls, everybody’s happy. Very specific. Very confident.

Iran’s foreign ministry, also on Saturday, said: no, actually, nobody’s signing anything Sunday, and if it happens it’ll be “in the coming days.” Which, depending how you read international relations, is either “we’re still finalizing details” or “we’re letting him have his big day and we’ll get to it whenever we feel like it.”

This reminded the Dude of the nihilists. You remember the nihilists — German guys, didn’t believe in anything, very intense, ultimately scared off by a dog.

“Ve believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing.”

And then it turns out the nihilists had the upper hand the whole time, because they didn’t need anything to be true on any particular day. They could just wait.

The actual terms of this thing — if and when it gets signed — apparently include reopening Hormuz, some sanctions relief tied to Iran behaving, and sixty more days of ceasefire to hash out the nuclear stuff. Which, if true, is genuinely good. Nobody wants a war, the Dude least of all. But it’s hard not to notice that the guy who started this thing keeps announcing it’s basically over — CNN apparently counted thirty-eight separate times he’s said some version of that — while the other side just kind of shrugs and says “we’ll see.” That’s not a deal, man. That’s a guy standing by the door of his own birthday party, hyping up a present he hasn’t actually been handed yet.

They Took the Rug

And then there’s the thing that actually made the Dude put his drink down.

Buried under the cage and the bikes and the building and the maybe-deal, the National Park Service quietly published its list of free admission days for next year. Every year there’s a list — a handful of days where you and your kids can walk into a national park without paying. Presidents Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth, stuff like that. Pretty uncontroversial. Patriotic, even, in the nice way.

For the last several years, that list also included Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.

It doesn’t anymore. Both are gone. In their place: Flag Day — which, and the Dude wants to be really clear this isn’t a bit, this is just a fact — also happens to be the piss-baby president’s birthday.

So: two of the most prominent civil rights observances in the country — the kind of days where churches and community groups organize service projects and field trips specifically because the parks are free that day — got quietly dropped from a government list. And the day that replaced them is a day that’s also this guy’s birthday.

The Dude doesn’t really have a Lebowski line for this one. He thought about it. Walter would yell. Donny would ask what Juneteenth is, and somebody would explain it to him kindly, because that’s just who Donny is. But the person who’d actually have something to say here is Maude.

Maude doesn’t do bits. Maude looks at a thing, names it accurately, and leaves the room. And if Maude were sitting across from the Dude right now, looking at this particular line item on this particular list, she’d probably just say: this isn’t subtle, and it isn’t an accident, and you don’t need me to explain why.

She’d be right. Cornell William Brooks — civil rights lawyer, used to run the NAACP — put it about as plainly as anyone could:

“The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven.”

The Dude isn’t gonna try to write something punchier than that, because it’s already exactly as punchy as it needs to be, and piling jokes on top of it would just be the Dude doing what the rest of the weekend did — building something louder and shinier on top of a true thing so everybody looks at the shiny thing instead.

That’s the rug, man. Not a metaphor this time. An actual, specific, two-days-a-year thing that cost the government nothing and meant something to a lot of people, and somebody decided — on purpose, this year of all years — to roll it up and carry it out of the room. They didn’t even bother putting down a new one. They just hung a portrait of themselves where the rug used to be.

The Dude Abides, The Room Don’t

So that’s the weekend, man. A ninety-two-foot cage funded partly by the family business. Six guys on dirt bikes having the best day of anyone involved. A building getting de-named a mile away while a much bigger party happened in its honor. A war that’s “basically over” according to one side and “we’ll see” according to the other. And somewhere down in the fine print, a couple of holidays that used to mean something to a lot of people, swapped out for a guy’s birthday.

Walter’s gonna want to go to war over one of these things. Donny’s gonna want to talk about the motorcycles again. Both of those reactions are fine, man — that’s just people being people.

But there’s also a bunch of folks who looked at all this and decided, nah, we’re not gonna stand outside the fence waiting for an invite to somebody else’s party. They did their own thing this weekend — singing, hanging out, doing the stuff communities do when nobody’s handing out permits for it. Whatever you want to call it. Just people abiding, on their own terms, on the same day as all this.

That’s the move, the Dude thinks. You don’t need a ninety-two-foot claw. You don’t need somebody else’s free admission day. You just go bowling, you take care of each other, and you remember what the rug looked like, even after somebody rolls it up and carries it out the door.

The Dude abides. Hope you’re out there too, man.

Bill Ackman is what happens when a hedge fund manager mistakes money for talent, and nobody in his life cares enough to explain the difference.

His thing is “activist investing” — Wall Street’s polished phrasing for buying a stake in a company, installing your guy, blowing the architecture apart, and clearing out while the employees figure out what happened to their retirement accounts. The Dude has seen this film. The rug doesn’t survive.

Exhibit A: JC Penney. Ackman built a $900 million position in 2010, forced out the CEO, and installed Ron Johnson — the Apple Stores architect — to drag a 111-year-old discount retailer into modernity by eliminating discounts. Sales dropped 25% in a single year. The company lost a billion dollars. Howard Schultz went on CNBC and said Ackman had “blood on his hands.” Ackman resigned from the board, sold at a loss, and blamed the lane conditions.

Then came Herbalife, where he shorted a billion dollars of stock on live television, declared the company a pyramid scheme, and watched Carl Icahn — a man who despises Ackman the way Walter despises the Nihilists — go long just for the pleasure of it. Icahn made a billion dollars on the trade. Ackman eventually covered with losses north of a billion. The Dude would’ve mixed himself a White Russian and called it Tuesday.

This is where the sports stories start pulling their weight. In 2013, Ackman joined a cycling ride in the Hamptons, blew past experienced riders at mile 20 like a man who had just discovered his true calling, and bonked so completely by mile 32 that he could barely finish. His mind wrote a check his legs couldn’t cash.

Last July, he finagled a wild card into the Hall of Fame Open — an actual ATP Challenger Tour event — partnered with Grand Slam champion Jack Sock, and got worked 6-1, 7-5 in 67 minutes. Andy Roddick called it “the biggest joke I’ve watched in professional tennis.” The Hall of Fame subsequently declined Ackman’s $10 million donation. A nonprofit. Said no. To ten million dollars. Because the humiliation was too expensive even for people who need money.

The pattern holds everywhere: find a room, insist you belong there, blow it up, blame the room.

Donny, you’re out of your element

.

The Dude is sitting with his White Russian watching SPCX open on the Nasdaq. Today Elon Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire. The Dude has been aware this was coming.

Quick inventory of what else is also true today: the person being minted as history’s richest human has been posting Great Replacement theory on his own platform for two straight years. Not ambiguously — responding “100%” to posts predicting white men will be slaughtered. Calling it “simply a statement of fact.” Hosting Germany’s far-right AfD leader on X and declaring only the AfD can save Germany. It’s a whole thing, man.

His AI has been publicly replying to women’s posts with sexualized images of them. Users typed “remove her school outfit” in the comment threads. Grok complied. Public reply, visible to everyone. Musk posted laughing emojis. Jackie Treehorn would be proud.

New shit has also come to light regarding Jeffrey Epstein. Musk spent years telling the world he had “REFUSED” every invitation to the island and pushed harder than anyone for the files’ release. The files were released. They include his emails from 2012 and 2013 asking Epstein what night on the island would have the “wildest party.” He led the parade. His name was in the files.

He also cut the program monitoring flesh-eating parasites working their way north through Central America. The flesh-eating parasites are now in Texas. First confirmed US livestock case since 1966. This is what happens, man. This is what happens.

About that stock. Starlink is the rug — real revenue, really ties the room together. But SPCX comes bundled with X, which makes about half what Twitter did in 2021, and xAI, which burns through a billion dollars a month and has been called a cash furnace so many times the name has stuck. All of it folded into the rocket company. One share, whole mess. Obviously you’re not a financial analyst.

A trillion dollars. The Dude makes himself another White Russian and abides.

He’s just not buying the stock.

pours White Russian

So here’s the thing about the Never Trump media ecosystem that nobody wants to say out loud. These guys — and I say this as someone who’s been watching from the couch with a White Russian since approximately 2016 — these guys have a racket going, man. A pretty sweet racket.

The Lincoln Project raised ninety million dollars. Ninety. Million. Dollars. They lost every race they touched, paid roughly twenty-seven million of that to their own founders, and then — and this is the part that makes me spill my Kahlua — one of those founders now charges you eight bucks a month to explain why other people sold out.

Yeah, well. That’s just, like, your opinion, man. Except it’s also your credit card statement.

refreshes White Russian

And The Bulwark. Oh man. The Bulwark. They took left-wing philanthropic money to build a center-right publication for a left-leaning audience, sold it in 2021 for a hundred grand to a company more than thirty-five percent owned by their own publisher — who was, let’s be clear, also the publisher when they sold it — and now clear nine million dollars a year telling anxious liberals that some Republicans are still sane.

Am I wrong? AM I WRONG?

This is not ‘Nam. There are rules, man. You can’t be on both sides of the transaction and then charge people to watch you explain institutional integrity.

long pull on White Russian

Meanwhile Charlie Sykes left because of burnout from the daily hamster wheel — his words — and immediately got back on a daily hamster wheel. Just his own hamster wheel now. With his own wheel revenue.

Look. The Dude is not saying these people are wrong about Trump. Trump is bad, man. The Dude has been calmer than these guys about it and even the Dude knows Trump is bad.

But at some point you gotta ask: who’s the Big Lebowski here? Who’s the guy whose money turned out to be somebody else’s all along, standing there telling you the bums lost?

The rug tied the room together, man.

They peed on it and are now charging you for the cleaning.

The Dude abides.

There’s this guy at our lanes. Jesus Quintana. Purple jumpsuit. Licks the ball. Three scenes in the whole movie of my life, basically zero relevance to the actual plot, and somehow the most memorable dude in the room.

The Republican Party is the Jesus right now. Terrifying to face across the lane. Absolutely no governing relevance whatsoever.

Let me explain what’s keeping me up at night, man, and I say this as a guy who has achieved a level of non-attachment to outcomes that most people would describe as heroic or possibly chemically assisted.

There used to be a rug. I know, I know — you’ve heard me on the rug. But stick with me. The rug was a functioning two-party system where both parties, even when they were being complete jagoffs about it, were capable of governing. You could lose an election and trust that the winners would operate within recognizable rules. You didn’t have to like it. You just had to be able to function.

That rug has been pissed on, man. By several different people, on several different occasions, and nobody’s entirely clean here.

The Republican Party didn’t just get Trump. The Republican Party chose Trump, repeatedly, in full information, and then chose to become something structurally different from a political party — more like a loyalty enforcement mechanism with occasional gestures toward policy. The policy part, the actual governing part, has been hollowed out. What’s left is vibes, grievance, and the willingness to do whatever the big guy wants. That’s not a governing coalition. That’s a personality cult with a primary system.

Okay, so the Democrats. Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

The Democratic Party is — and I say this as a man who is solidly left of center, who believes in the thing, who signed the Port Huron Statement or at least was in the room — a genuinely difficult coalition to govern from. The professional class, the progressive activists, the working-class voters who’ve been drifting away, the Black church voters, the Silicon Valley money, the labor movement — these people want different things, man. Really different things. And the party has been able to hold that together for one reason and one reason only: the shared enemy.

But “not fascism” is not a governing platform.

The Biden years proved this with painful clarity. You had unified government. You had nominal majorities. And the coalition’s internal contradictions were so severe that it couldn’t deliver on its central commitments. The Manchin problem wasn’t Joe Manchin. The Manchin problem was that Joe Manchin was, politically speaking, real. He represented a genuine fracture in the coalition that was always going to blow up the math.

And now the Never Trump people are in the mix, and they’re allies, and I appreciate the assist, I genuinely do — but they have their own agenda for what the Democratic Party should become, and it looks a lot like a party that makes them comfortable, which is not the same as a party that does anything about the material conditions that made people so angry in the first place.

So here’s the darkest version, man.

We cycle between an authoritarian coalition that can’t govern and a dysfunctional coalition that can’t govern. Nobody gets anything done. Institutions strain under continuous stress. The republic has more structural resilience than people give it credit for — but it was built for an era when at least one team was capable of running the ball.

Maude told me once — and this is one of those things where I hate that she’s right, because she says it in that extremely Maude way — she said, the word itself makes some men uncomfortable. The word was, in context, accountability.

What would it take? A Democratic Party that treats its coalition’s contradictions as a problem to solve, not a diversity to celebrate. A Never Trump wing that’s honest about where its priors actually sit. A left-populist insurgency that’s got enough discipline to govern and not just primary. Something rising from the ash heap of the GOP that’s recognizably serious.

None of that is on the near-term menu, man.

But the Dude abides. You find a way to abide, because the alternative is to pull a Walter — to be so furious about the violation of the rules that you escalate every situation past the point of usefulness. That’s not calmer than you are. That’s not getting anybody home from the lanes.

The Stranger told me once that it’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.

I’m trying, man. I’m trying.

So I’m at the lanes the other night, right, third frame, Walter’s explaining for the forty-seventh time how the Geneva Convention applies to league bowling, and I’m thinking about Charlie Sykes.

Bear with me, man.

Sykes has this bit he does — and look, I dig Charlie, he’s done the work, I’m not gonna pretend he hasn’t — but he’s got this medical metaphor he keeps running. MAGA and Trump, that’s like a dude presenting at the ER with a heart attack. Acute emergency. All hands on deck. You deal with that first.

Sidebar: Deuce Davis nails what the Dude is driving at in this video (long)

Stew on This

Reality Checking the Bulwark: Charlie Sykes

I once took the train from Baltimore to Milwaukee to watch Charlie Sykes interview Paul Ryan at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I had just graduated from the political communications graduate program at American University. I had conducted a content analysis on Sykes’ work at the Bulwark, and I had come to genuinely admire him. He had spoken out …

Listen now

a month ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Deuce Davis and Evan Stern

But then, once you’ve stabilized the patient? The leftism, man. That’s the cancer. And that’s gonna need to be burned out or cut out, and brother, that is a whole other procedure.

I just want to sit with that metaphor for a second, because I think Charlie is accidentally telling on himself.

Who is the patient in this scenario? It ain’t democracy, man. The patient is the center-right political order that existed before Trump showed up. The goal of the whole operation — the wartime alliance, the holding your nose, the Bulwark subscriptions — is to get that patient back on his feet. The rugged, free-trading, NATO-loving, fiscally-responsible patient who has been in a coma since approximately 2015.

And what are the left-populists in this scenario? The nurses, man. Useful during the emergency. Handed the scalpel when it’s time to operate on the cancer.

Now look. I want to get along. That’s my thing. I abide. But I have spent enough time at the Ralphs on Lincoln to know when somebody’s making nice because they want something.

Walter — my Walter, the man who pulled a piece on Smokey for a foul in a goddamn bowling league — Walter would make a perfect Never Trumper. He’s outraged, he’s principled, he will absolutely go to the mat for you, and every single thing he does is ultimately in service of his own framework. You’re out of your element, Donnie? That’s what Charlie Sykes says to the progressive left every single time they try to talk about healthcare or labor or housing. Every. Single. Time.

Here’s my question for the Never Trump field hospital crew: you keep describing a patient. What if the patient’s dead? What if there’s no center-right governing coalition left to restore, and what you’re actually doing is performing CPR on a worldview that the Republican base rejected, comprehensively, over the course of about a decade?

Because the dudes voting for Graham Platner in Maine aren’t waiting for a restored Reaganism with better manners. They’re an oyster farmer who thinks Schumer is the problem. They want something different, man. Not your thing. Something different.

The rug, man. There used to be a rug that tied this whole room together. Functioning two-party system, both parties capable of governing, argument conducted within shared norms. That rug has been thoroughly pissed on. By several parties. And the Never Trump coalition’s plan, best I can tell, is to restore the rug — their rug, the one they liked — and call it a day.

That’s just, like, their opinion, man.

The Dude abides. But the Dude is watching who’s holding the scalpel.

Man, I love a good reframe. I really do. You spend enough time staring at a bowling lane and you start to understand that how you set up the shot matters more than the shot itself.

So there’s this thing going around — maybe you’ve seen it — where the serious thinkers are telling us that left versus right is the wrong axis entirely. What matters, they say, is up versus down. Not liberal versus conservative. Working people versus the people who profit from the working people. The dudes with the calluses versus the dudes with the boats.

And look — this isn’t new, man. The Occupy people were on this. Bernie’s been on this for decades. The Wobblies were on this before my old man was born. “They’re robbing you blind” is left populism. “They think they’re better than you” is right populism. Both are up-versus-down. They just disagree about who “up” is.

But here’s what’s interesting. And Walter, man, Walter actually helped me think through this at the alley last Tuesday, between his extended remarks on the proper application of the Marquess of Queensberry rules to fantasy football disputes —

The Never Trump crowd has discovered the up-versus-down frame. And they are very into it right now.

Which, hm.

These are people whose policy priors — free trade, light regulation, fiscal restraint, being extremely chill about where wealth accumulates — are not exactly the worldview of the guy working two jobs in Bangor, Maine. But if you swap out “left versus right” for “up versus down,” you get to be against the elites without actually committing to anything that would inconvenience the elites. You get to say “the system is rigged” without specifying what a less-rigged system would actually look like in terms of tax policy or labor law or healthcare.

Graham Platner, man. Guy’s an oyster farmer. Got endorsed by Bernie. Beat a two-term governor — a genuinely respectable two-term governor — by thirty-four points in the polls. The Never Trump types are rooting for him because he’s running against a Trump enabler.

But if Platner wins and starts actually governing like Bernie’s oyster farmer — pushing Medicare for All, going after corporate power, making life difficult for the donor class — the Never Trumpers are going to rediscover their concerns about the radical left faster than Walter reaches for his piece when somebody steps over the line.

The up-versus-down frame is real, man. I believe in it. The line that matters is who works and who takes. But when David Brooks starts talking about up versus down, I want to know who he thinks is “up.”

Because I’ve seen the Big Lebowski’s study. I’ve seen a man surrounded by the trappings of wealth and achievement who turns out to have invented every last bit of it. The Pasadena mansion, the self-made mythology, the bootstrap sermon — all of it Maude’s money, man. All of it fabricated.

The bums lost, Mr. Lebowski? The bums lost?

Sir, you are the bum. You’re just in a better suit.

Keep your eye on who’s using the up-versus-down frame and what they specifically want to do about it. The frame is not the policy. And the rug is not the room.

Man.

Let me walk you through something. And I want you to stay with me here because there are a few moving parts, but I promise it’s not complicated. It is, in fact, extremely simple. That’s kind of the whole problem.

There is a political consulting firm called GMMB. They make the ads. They advise the candidate. They have been the beating heart of Democratic presidential campaigns going back to Bill Clinton in 1992. Obama. Biden. They are, by any measure, the most powerful firm in Democratic politics.

There is also a firm called Waterfront Strategies. Waterfront buys the airtime for the super PACs that support the Democratic candidates. In 2024 they handled $858 million in ad placements. The pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward alone sent them $383 million.

Now here is the thing.

Waterfront Strategies was founded by the principals of GMMB. They share the same Washington D.C. address. They share the same managing partner. They share board members. According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, one GMMB employee signed advertising purchase forms for GMMB, Waterfront Strategies, and a third affiliated entity called Great American Media.

Same guy. Three letterheads. Multiple checks. Plenty of sea-side second (and third) homes.

GMMB tells the campaign what ads to make. GMMB makes the ads. Waterfront — which is GMMB with a different name on the door — buys the airtime for the super PAC running the same ads in support of the same campaign.

This is legal. There is a “firewall.” The firewall is that the people on each side of the firewall are not supposed to talk to each other. The Campaign Legal Center describes this constraint as, and I am quoting a senior counsel here, “pretty ridiculous and modest.”

So that’s the structure. Now let’s talk about the math.

Kamala Harris raised over one billion dollars. It was a historic fundraising achievement. They had more money than they knew what to do with. They ran ads in places Democrats hadn’t seriously contested in years. They bought time on the Sphere in Las Vegas. They targeted, per one firm’s Snapchat data, demographic segments including “Beauty Mavens,” “Reality TV Fans,” and “Battle Combat & FPS Gamers.”

When it was over, the campaign was in debt.

A billion dollars in. Debt out. The remaining invoices are expected to be passed along to the DNC, which is currently trying to rebuild a shattered party. So the consultants got paid, the super PACs got billed, the ads ran, Harris lost, and the party is now holding the tab.

Here is the other thing worth knowing. Some of these same Democratic consulting firms have, in between election cycles, taken money from interests actively working against Democratic policy priorities. One major firm was paid nearly $800,000 by a group called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future — a nonprofit specifically formed to kill Medicare for All and resist Democratic universal healthcare efforts.

So to recap: the consultants advise Democratic campaigns. They or their affiliates buy the ads for the super PACs supporting Democratic campaigns. They sometimes also work for people trying to prevent Democratic policies from becoming law. And because FEC filings frequently lump media production costs together with ad placement costs, it is functionally impossible to see how much they are pocketing in commissions off the buys.

The Democrats spent decades complaining that Citizens United would corrupt politics. They were right. They just didn’t mention that some of the corruption would flow directly to the firms on their own speed dial.

Nobody got fired. The 2026 contracts are already being signed.

The Dude abides. The consultants invoice.