Okay, so here’s the thing, man.

There’s a cabinet secretary. Nine kids. Used to get chucked around an MTV pool for money before he ran off to regulate the country’s trucks and planes. This guy signs off on a taxpayer-adjacent reality show, sits his eighteen year old down in the kitchen on camera, and tells her that Harvard has basically industrialized the process of taking a good kid and turning her, and this is the actual phrase, “perverted and contorted.” Twice. Man workshopped that line in the mirror.

Then they turn the comments off on the video. He wants the whole country to watch him defend his daughter’s soul on television, but God forbid the country actually replies to him about it. That’s not a father protecting his kid, man. That’s a guy protecting a clip.

Then he drives to the actual campus, talks to an actual priest, and by the end of the same goddamn episode he’s telling the camera he’s come around, maybe a strong kid can handle it after all, maybe eighteen years of raising her right was enough. The whole corrupting-young-minds bit lasted exactly as long as it took him to show up and meet somebody nice. That’s not a principle. That’s stage fright.

So where’d the kid land? University of Chicago. Same place her sister went. And I’m not gonna shit on Chicago, it’s a hell of a school, it’s the one FIRE actually ranks near the top of the entire country for free speech, which, if you squint, is the single most on-brand outcome available to a guy who just spent an episode saying he wants his kid exposed to real ideas instead of one viewpoint. Funny how that worked out for him.

But here’s what’s actually going on under the rug, man. Nobody in that family said no to the machine. Nobody turned down the brand, the resume line, the thing that opens every fucking door for the rest of your life regardless of what you had to swallow to get it. They just shopped for a version of the same machine that wouldn’t embarrass dad on cable news. Harvard was too expensive politically. Chicago was on sale. Same rug. Different room.

That’s the tell. If this was really about keeping her soul clean, you send her to a state school, a Catholic university, someplace that isn’t also a hall pass into finance and law and the entire American ruling class. You don’t do that. The thing being protected here was never her soul. It was the credential. Just wearing a jersey dad can defend on Fox.

One more thing, and nobody in that kitchen scene is thinking about it. This show is bankrolled in part by a nonprofit that takes money from Boeing, United, and Lyft, three companies that report to Sean Duffy’s actual day job. Guy spends the episode worried about institutions professionalizing corruption, meanwhile he’s out here soft launching vertical integration between his regulatory portfolio and his content calendar. Nobody clipped that part for Twitter. I clipped that part.

Anyway. Kid’s going to a great school. Dad got his content. Boeing got its placement. Everybody wins, in the way everybody always wins.

The Dude abides.

The Dude Shitposts

Same Trophy, Different Bumper Sticker, Man