Two Podcast Appearances and One Provocation
On mindless techbros and feckless Democratic Senators.
Hi folks,
This will be a short post. Just surfacing briefly, halfway through the pile of midterms I have to grade, to share a couple of links and a few of thoughts.
1.
Gil Duran is one of the best reporters on the holy-shit-the-tech-billionaires-are-trying-to-do-what-now beat. His newsletter, The Nerd Reich, is one of my go-to reads.
He has just launched The Nerd Reich podcast, and I was delighted to join him and Brooke Harrington for the first episode. You can listen to the podcast, or read the transcript, here.
(Also, I read Brooke Harrington’s latest book, Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism a couple weeks ago. It’s a great read, I highly recommend it.)
Personal highlight: I came up with a Zombie Keynes joke on the fly that I’m really quite proud of.
2.
I also appeared on Matt from Lost Tempo’s podcast earlier this week.
We covered a lot of ground, discussing politics, technology, and the path I took from environmental organizing to writing diatribes about the tech barons. Lost Tempo has been one another one of my favorite newsletters for a long while now, and it was especially fun to have the chance to chat with him.
Personal highlight: The podcast title (Burgers and Ketamine) relates to a joke that I probably should feel a little bad about, but almost certainly won’t. Give it a listen and you’ll see what I mean.
3.
I posted the following to bluesky last night. I’d like to elaborate on it a bit more below.
Under normal conditions, I believe it to be both reasonable and strategic for Democratic leaders to think a couple of steps ahead and not take costly actions that result only in brief, symbolic victories.
And, regarding the Continuing Resolution (see here for details), it does seem to be the case that if we look a couple steps ahead, the situation is much more fraught for Democrats than it first appears.
In normal times, the way this CR fight would work is that (1) the Dems have a clear demand (Kick Musk’s illegal operation out of Washingon and stop impounding funds!), (2) they refuse to vote for cloture until that demand is met, (3) then the government shuts down, and (4) eventually Trump has to cave, because a shut down government makes him and his party look incompetent and prevents them from realizing their aims.
These are not normal times.
WIRED published an extremely relevant piece earlier this week (WIRED continues to kill it right now. So impressed with them.). Elon Musk is hoping for a long government shutdown, because if the government is shut down for more than 30 days, then that triggers an opportunity to implement permanent Reduction in Force (RIF) plans across multiple agencies. His goal is to destroy the administrative state, and a government shutdown can potentially create a route to achieving that goal.
This messes with the Democrats’ leverage. You can’t directly prevent authoritarians from destroying the government by threatening to withhold their capacity to keep the government running.
…
That being said, I still think the Democratic leaders are making a substantial, costly mistake. And that’s because they continue to behave as though these are normal times.
If you do not fight, then there is no fight for the media to cover.
If you do not fight, then activists and (the last few remaining) reporters who state plainly what is happening sound like they must be exaggerating.
The plan cannot be to just wait for November 2026 and then win some seats in the midterms. Trump and Musk have been in office for less than two months. If they are not stopped or significantly slowed, there will be no recognizable government left.
They have already destroyed agencies that were created through Congressional mandate.
They have already hollowed out the FBI and the Justice Department, replacing civil servants with ideologues who choose loyalty to Trump over loyalty to the country.
They have already started abducting protestors for engaging in acts of political speech! (Read John Ganz on the abduction of Mahmoud Kahlil. This could not be more serious.)
In times like this, the sheer act of public resistance has inherent strategic value. It is not merely a short-term, symbolic victory. You have to be seen resisting, to make clear that we are in fact living through abnormal times.
If our elected leaders give up, then that sends a message that either (a) there is no hope or (b) this is all, in fact, fine. That is the polar opposite of what leadership requires in this moment.
Democratic leaders have a moral duty to fight. I’m not saying that a government shutdown will not potentially play into Musk’s hands. It indeed might. But voting for cloture and handing Musk a blank check also plays into his hand.
Chuck Schumer and the Democratic caucus have one choice right now: act like feckless cowards, or do not act like feckless cowards.
That’s not a great decision to be faced with. When those are your only two options, things have gone well and truly wrong. But [gestures everywhere] look where we are, fellas. You’re the leadership. You do not get to pretend your way to different circumstances.
Showing some spine here won’t save American Democracy. But it’s a necessary first step. If they can’t manage to do so, they should resign from leadership and make way for someone who can.
That’s it from me for now. I needed to get that off my chest. Back to grading.
Be well,
-DK
As someone who has been very critical of the vague calls for Democratic leaders to DO SOMETHING to demonstrate how Serious this is, the best defence I can imagine for them is that they need to be able to function in what's left of Congress, so options to talk are being kept open. But they are doing stunningly badly at explaining their reasoning to their base. They are either ignoring the anger or don't see it. Not sure which is worse, but they may be in for a nasty suprise in 2026 if they don't bother to engage with their base.
Given that the people who got us into this mess (the Democrats) cannot be the people to get us out of this mess, how is it not actually hopeless? There is no opposition party. Should we hope for some liberal general to stage a coup?