Friends,

I had dinner recently with a group of political operatives — sophisticated people who for years have been advising politicians and candidates. During dinner they shared with me their fantasy, which they gave 30 percent odds of becoming a reality within the next four months.

In my dinner companions’ fantasy, Trump’s failed war will elevate gas and food prices so high and long that much of the Republican base will begin turning against Trump. And Trump’s mental problems will become even more obvious.

Faced with all this, JD Vance promises Marco Rubio that he’ll appoint him vice president if Rubio joins Vance in seeking to oust Trump under the 25th Amendment.* Rubio agrees.

Vance and Rubio then approach House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune for confidential discussions in which they broach the possibility. Johnson and Thune give Vance and Rubio their tacit support.

Vance and Rubio then get Pete Hegseth to sign on, promising Hegseth that he’ll keep his job. They get Todd Blanche to sign on by promising him he’ll be appointed permanent attorney general.

Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, and Blanche are what Thune and Johnson need to make the 25th stick.

This arrangement serves everyone’s interests. For Vance and Rubio, it avoids what could be a messy 2028 primary election in which the two are pitted against each other. As president, Vance gets a head start on being elected president in 2028. As vice president, Rubio is heir apparent in 2032 (when Rubio will be only 60 years old) or in 2036.

As president and vice president, Vance and Rubio end Trump’s tariffs and his war, which have caused prices to soar, upset the Republican base, and turned much of the world against America.

Hegseth gets the job security he’s desperate for. Blanche gets the promotion he covets.

Republicans in the House and Senate get rid of Trump, who’s become an albatross around their necks and who they fear, if he remains in office, will cause them to lose control over the House and Senate in the midterms — and could lead to a congressional rout in 2028.

The plan is finalized when Trump is away at Mar-a-Lago. It’s executed in a conference call to Trump — during which Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, Blanche, Johnson, and Thune notify Trump he’s no longer president.

Trump screams, hollers, pounds his Mar-a-Lago desk, and threatens legal action, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s out of office.

I listened intently as my dinner companions spelled all this out. “So you really think there’s a 30 percent chance of this happening?” I asked them.

“Could be higher if the war continues,” one of them said, and the others agreed. Another of them thought the odds already higher.

“I can’t decide whether to be elated or worried,” I responded.

They laughed, but I was serious.

_____

** To remind you: Section 4 of the 25th Amendment states that “whenever the Vice President and a majority of … the principal officers of the executive departments … transmit to the president pro-tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” Section 2 of the 25th Amendment states that “whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

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Friends,

Last Thursday, populist Democratic candidate Graham Platner shook up the Democratic establishment when his primary competitor, Maine Governor Janet Mills, suspended her Senate campaign amid polls showing her badly trailing Platner, an oyster farmer who had come out of nowhere to win a national following.

Platner is the latest example of the rise of anti-establishment outsiders in the Democratic Party — a trend that also includes self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who last year defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor.

Yet the Democratic establishment — corporate Democrats, wealthy Democratic donors, entrenched Washington “centrists,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer — still don’t get it.

Hell, the Democratic establishment didn’t get it a decade ago when Hillary Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee (and, not incidentally, Jeb Bush was considered a shoe-in for the Republican nomination).

I remember interviewing voters about their political preferences in the late spring of 2015, in the Rust Belt, Midwest, and South, for a book I was then writing. When I asked them whom they wanted for president, they kept telling me Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Often the same individuals offered both names. They explained they wanted an “outsider,” someone who would “shake up” the system, ideally a person who wasn’t even a Democrat or a Republican.

The people I met were furious with their employers, with the federal government, and with Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and enraged at those at the top. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis or the Great Recession that followed it.

They kept reiterating that the system was “rigged” in favor of the powerful and against themselves. They didn’t oppose government per se; most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and roads and bridges. But they hated “crony capitalism” — large corporations using their political clout to gain special favors and changes in laws that often hurt average people.

The following year, Sanders — then a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries — came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses. Had the DNC not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging its financing in favor of Clinton, Sanders would probably have been the Democratic nominee in 2016.

Trump, then a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elected office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America. Granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and he had some help from Vladimir Putin, but he won.

Something very big was happening in America: a full-scale rebellion against the political establishment.

That rebellion continues to this day. Yet much of Washington’s Democratic elite is still in denial. They prefer to attribute the rise of Trump and, more broadly, Trumpism — its political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, and cultural populism — solely to racism. Well, racism is certainly a part of it. But hardly all.

In 2024, Democrats didn’t even get to choose their nominee from the primary process, since Biden dropped out after a dreadful debate performance and was replaced by Kamala Harris — leaving some Democrats feeling like higher powers were picking their nominee.

The anti-establishment groundswell has by now spread to independent voters — who are now a whopping 45 percent of the electorate and have moved sharply against Trump. It’s one of the most dramatic shifts in recent political history.

Trump’s approval rating among independents now stands at 25 percent, while 68 percent of independents disapprove of him. In 2024, independents were evenly divided, with 48 percent voting for Harris and 48 percent for Trump. In 2020, independents favored Biden by 9 percentage points.

The Democratic establishment still doesn’t see the groundswell — or is actively fighting it.

In Iowa, whose primary is June 2, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is quietly backing state Rep. Josh Turek against state Sen. Zach Wahls. That’s probably a mistake. Turek is a good candidate, but Wahls is a young, dynamic progressive — similar to Platner in his ability to inspire and rally. (In Iowa, independents who want to vote in the Democratic primary need only declare themselves Democrats by June 2.)

In California, whose primary is also June 2, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just rejected Randy Villegas as its preferred nominee for the 22nd Congressional District and instead endorsed doctor and assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains. Villegas, known as a strong progressive, has been endorsed by the congressional progressive caucus and the congressional Hispanic caucus’s campaign arm. “This is about party leadership and D.C. elites putting their thumb on the scale for who they know will bend the knee to party leadership and corporate interests,” Villegas says.

In Arizona, whose primary is July 21, the DCCC has endorsed Marlene Galán-Woods in a Democratic primary to replace Representative David Schweikert, the Republican who is leaving Congress to run for governor. The DCCC rejected Amish Shah, a doctor and former state legislator who won the primary in 2024 and came within a few points of defeating Schweikert. (That year, Ms. Galán-Woods finished third in the primary.) Shah has been leading Galán-Woods by a 3-to-1 margin in the only public poll of the race. Shah says Democrats should stop backing the party apparatus if they want to win the House majority.

In Michigan, whose primary is August 4, the DSCC is backing Rep. Haley Stevens, who’s in a tight race against rival Abdul El-Sayed. Also probably a mistake. El-Sayed is another young progressive who’s showing a remarkable ability to galvanize Democrats and independents. (Michigan has open primaries in which any voter can participate.)

I could go on, but you get the point.

If Democrats fail to connect with the frustrations of average hardworking Americans and decide instead to side with big corporations and Wall Street, they’ll have given up the most crucial opportunity in a generation both to take back control of Congress and to lead the way on a new progressive agenda.

What does this anti-establishment surge — including the remarkable growth of independents and their sharp rejection of Trump — mean for the presidential race in 2028?

For one thing, it suggests that the current presumed Democratic frontrunners — Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom — are frontrunners only because of their name recognition. As voters find out more about the alternatives, it’s unlikely that either of them will make the cut.

For another, it suggests that anti-establishment candidates are the ones to watch.

Obama chief of staff and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel told a packed crowd at the Milken Institute Global Conference this week that the biggest challenge both parties have faced over the last quarter-century has been the battle between establishment forces and anti-establishment forces.

Emanuel was correct. But he then went on to suggest, absurdly, that he’s anti-establishment. Emanuel’s cozy ties to corporate America, his closeness to Citadel founder Ken Griffin (who praised Emanuel from Milken’s main stage), and even Emanuel’s presence at the Milken conference, belie his claim.

But the mere fact that Emanuel thinks it important to claim anti-establishment creds underscores that the biggest force in American politics today — and in the Democratic Party — is anti-establishment rage at political insiders.

Despite the Democratic establishment, a younger and more charismatic generation of populist and progressive Democrats is on the way to winning primaries and general election races across America. If Graham Platner beats Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, which seems likely, he’s the kind of candidate who (in my humble opinion) will be the future of the Democratic Party.

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Spring’s warmer weather lures people outdoors – and into possible contact with ticks that spread Lyme disease.

Already, the 2026 tick season is booming. On April 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that emergency room visits due to tick bites are at their highest level since 2017. That may portend an especially severe season for Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses.

State health departments reported more than 89,000 cases of Lyme disease in 2023, the last year for which data is available. But public health experts believe that close to 500,000 people in the U.S. get Lyme disease every year.

As an infectious disease doctor with experience treating some of this infection’s long-term outcomes, I know that Lyme disease can be tricky because people often don’t notice tick bites and may overlook early symptoms of an infection. But left untreated, the infection can cause serious lingering – and even permanent – health issues.

Here’s what you need to know about Lyme disease to stay safe this season:

What causes Lyme disease?

Lyme disease, named after the Connecticut town where the disease was first identified in 1975, is caused by a group of bacteria called Borrelia – most often, the species Borrelia burgdorferi.

Deer ticks – also called black-legged ticks, and members of a group called Ixodes – transmit the disease after feeding on an infected animal, usually a bird, mouse or deer. When they then bite a person, they can transmit the bacteria into the person’s bloodstream.
Usually, the tick must attach for 24-48 hours to transmit the bacteria causing Lyme disease.

Where and when does Lyme disease occur?

Lyme disease can occur in most regions where deer ticks live.

These ticks are most active in late spring, summer and fall – usually April to November in most regions. They emerge when the temperature is above freezing. In years when winter is shorter, ticks can emerge earlier. And they may be active year-round in regions where freezing temperatures are rare.

Approximately 90% of U.S. cases are reported from states in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic from Virginia to eastern Canada, and Upper Midwest regions including Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. A few cases occasionally pop up in California, Oregon and Washington.

Since 1995, the incidence of Lyme disease in the U.S. has almost doubled.

Warmer weather and changes in rainfall patterns now allow ticks to survive in new regions of the country – and for longer periods. But even in regions where ticks lived before, Lyme disease has become more common due to increases in deer populations. As woodland areas are increasingly being developed, it may be bringing the habitat of deer and mice closer to people, increasing the risk of transmission.

Lyme disease symptoms to watch for

Early symptoms of Lyme disease – fever, muscle aches and fatigue – generally emerge within three to 30 days after a tick bite. Another classic symptom in the first month is a target or bull’s eye rash at the site of tick bite, which occurs in about 70% to 80% of cases.

Other rashes following a tick bite can also occur. Some may be due to irritation from the bite, and not necessarily an infection.

If you know you’ve had a tick bite and experience flu-like symptoms – or if you see a bull’s-eye rash, whether you know you were bitten or not – it’s important to check with your healthcare provider about whether you should be treated with antibiotics.

A blood test for antibodies can help confirm the infection, but it can sometimes yield a false negative result, particularly in the first couple of weeks of the disease.

In most people, the rash goes away on its own. However, treatment may shorten its duration and is important for preventing other symptoms. A two- to four-week course of antibiotics can generally treat Lyme disease. Severe cases might require intravenous antibiotics.

A promising new vaccine for Lyme disease is currently being tested. In March 2026, Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company developing it, announced that in a late-stage study, the vaccine prevented the disease in 70% of people who received it.

Later Lyme symptoms

If left untreated, the bacteria that causes Lyme can spread, potentially causing longer-term symptoms. About 60% of people who get Lyme disease and don’t treat it can develop arthritis.

In rare cases, Lyme disease can also affect the heart and the nervous system. Inflammation in the brain or the tissues surrounding it, called meninges, can cause headaches and neck pain, as well as balance issues and memory and behavior changes. It can also cause nerve damage that results in numbness, tingling and muscle weakness.

These symptoms can appear right away or much later – sometimes months to years after infection. And in cases where the disease wasn’t promptly treated, late-stage symptoms can linger even after antibiotics kill the bacteria.

Scientists don’t fully understand why, but one intriguing study found that some particles from the bacteria’s cell wall leak into the joints and can persist after treatment, spurring ongoing inflammation and arthritis symptoms.

Another reason for Lyme’s long-term effects is that it can trigger autoimmune disease, which is when the immune system attacks its own cells. What’s more, because the nervous system may be particularly sensitive to damage caused by the bacteria and related inflammation, it may take an especially long time to heal. In some situations, the damage could be permanent.

Preventing Lyme disease

Until a vaccine becomes available, there are steps you and your family can take to help protect against Lyme disease:

• Use tick and insect repellents such as DEET and picaridin, which can be applied to skin, and permethrin, which is sprayed onto clothing, to keep ticks at bay. Treating clothing with permethrin may be especially beneficial, since the substance withstands several washes.

• Wear long-sleeve shirts and pants while you are gardening, hiking or walking through grass or woods to prevent tick bites. Wearing light-colored clothes makes ticks more visible, and tucking your pants into your socks can also prevent the little buggers from traveling from your pants, shoes and socks onto your legs.

• Remove your outdoor clothes immediately. Washing and drying clothes at high temperature can help kill any ticks that managed to hitch a ride. And a quick shower immediately after spending time outdoors can wash ticks off the skin before they have a chance to attach.

• If you spend time outdoors, perform daily tick checks, paying special attention to warm areas like your armpits, neck, ears and underwear line. If you find a tick attached, pull it off with tweezers, holding them perpendicular to the skin.

• If you find a tick that may have been on the skin for more than 36 hours, ask your healthcare provider whether a dose of preventive antibiotics – generally given within 72 hours of the bite – would be appropriate.

Lakshmi Chauhan receives funding from NIH.

Friends,

You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime.

You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job.

You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job.

But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press.

A few days ago, a senior White House official told Politico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned.

Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worse press agent.

He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences. The report included claims that his security detail struggled to rouse him due to intoxication several times in the past year and that he drank heavily at a private club in Washington. Bureau employees expressed concerns that his behavior posed a threat to public safety.

I doubt it’s Patel’s excessive drinking and absences that are making Trump upset; it’s that they’re being reported, and that Patel has made them even bigger stories by suing The Atlantic over them.

Last week, Patel added to the drinking story when he erupted at NBC’s Ryan Reilly who asked Patel at a press conference whether, as The Atlantic also reported, he feared he had been fired when he was unable to log into his government computer.

“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” Patel added, “you are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”

Worse yet, from Trump’s viewpoint, is that some of Patel’s drinking has been in the public eye. One video showed him drinking a beer, banging his fist on a table and celebrating with the US men’s hockey team at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.

Nothing gets Trump angrier than when one of his underlings is caught doing something stupid on videotape. After the video of Patel spread on social media, Trump called Patel to convey his discontent, Politico reported.

Soon after Patel sued the Atlantic, the New York Times reported that the FBI had been investigating Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson was the New York Times journalist who revealed that Patel had used a swat team to protect his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, when she was invited to sing the national anthem at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. And that Patel had “ripped into” the swat team’s commander when the team left after it became apparent there was no threat to her.

It’s not that Patel misused government funds on his girlfriend. Or that Patel exploded at the FBI swat team’s commander. Or even that Patel ordered an investigation of the journalist who reported this. No, it’s that all of this became a national story — twice. Such self-generated negative press infuriates Trump.

The same day that the Times reported on the FBI’s investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, NBC reported that a federal judge in Texas had tossed out a defamation case brought by Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi. Patel had brought the case over Figliuzzi’s remark on “Morning Joe” that Patel had been “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”

More self-generated negative press: Not that Patel has been doing the nightclub circuit and disregarding his job, but that he invited a story about it by suing Figliuzzi.

Similarly, it’s not that Patel has repeatedly wrongly accused people of federal crimes (announcing someone had been arrested for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk when the real murderer hadn’t yet turned himself in, and that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University shooting, only for that individual to be released hours later).

It’s that Patel’s wrong accusations were widely reported, making Patel — and, indirectly, Trump — look dumber than dirt.

Patel simply doesn’t know how to keep a low profile. Like so many others in the Trump regime, he made his name by promoting himself. As a frequent guest on right-wing programs before Trump appointed him FBI director, he pushed conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack.

But the occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t want his underlings engaging in self-promotion and vindictive lawsuits. If anyone’s going to be self-promotional and vindictive, Trump wants it to be himself.

Patel has been trying to win back Trump’s favor by escalating FBI investigations into Trump enemies. But so far, the investigations haven’t yielded adequate evidence to indict, another mark against him in Trump’s book.

A week ago Sunday, Patel promised that the Justice Department would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election, stating on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “We’ve got all the information we need, we’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under [acting] Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”

Patel’s plea was obviously directed at Trump.

I doubt it will work. Patel will soon be locked out of his computer for good.

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On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - and the United States lost its collective mind. Newspapers ran headlines about Soviet nuclear weapons raining from orbit, and schools held duck-and-cover drills. Eisenhower's approval rating cratered and the smartest people in Washington agreed that America had fallen behind, for good, the free world was in terminal decline, and their enemies were about to launch space-faring Nukes.

Then, eleven years and 8 months later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. One small step, etc.

Folks in 1957 had at least some reason to be afraid, and the fear was grounded in something real: you could measure the gap in rocket technology down to the pound of thrust. But the people who responded to that fear by building things (the Apollo program, the engineers who decided the problem was solvable) landed on the moon. The people who responded by predicting doom were forgotten before the decade was out.

I can't think of a better summary of the argument I'm trying to make here...

In the last 15 years, a specific kind of intellectual posture has taken hold everywhere. I've started calling it "competitive pessimism" - which might not be perfect, but it's the best I've got.

Whoever can list the most reasons something won't work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say "I think this could go well," you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology.

Pessimism reads as intelligence now.

Optimism reads as naivety.

This has gotten so baked into educated Western culture that most people don't notice they're doing it. But it's toxic, all the same.

Where this came from

The instinct has some logic to it, I'll be fair about that.

The 21st century opened with the dot-com crash, which wiped $5 trillion off the NASDAQ between March 2000 and October 2002. Then September 11th, and the Afghanistan War, and then the Iraq War. Then the 2008 financial crisis, which destroyed 8.7 million American jobs in eighteen months. Then Obama! And then Trump. Then a pandemic that killed over a million people in the US alone. Climate reports from the IPCC kept landing, each one worse. If you paid attention to any of this, bracing for impact started to look like base common sense.

The internet of course poured a gasoline on all of it. In 2012, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman at Wharton went through about seven thousand New York Times articles and tracked which ones readers actually emailed to their friends. The anxious // angry pieces won. The hopeful writing just sort of...sat there. The platforms didn't need an academic paper to work this out. Doom = clicks. Doom = ad revenue. Doom got you a booking on Joe Rogan. Pessimists built media empires, and optimists built water treatment plants in sub-Saharan Africa and nobody wrote a magazine cover about them.

Pessimism is useful and I won't be glib about that. You want a pessimist reviewing the specs on the I-35W bridge before it goes up. You want a pessimist reading your bloodwork. Risk assessment is a discipline that saves lives every single day. What happened over the last two decades is that risk assessment slid from being a discipline into being a disposition; worry stopped being something you ~did and became something you ~were.

And that's where the trouble started.

What the doomers predicted

In 1894, the Times of London published a calculation: at current rates of growth, the city's streets would be buried under nine feet of horse manure by the 1940s. The math was technically on the money: fifty thousand horses working in London at the time, each producing 15 to 35 pounds of dung per day, with a population growing...the arithmetic pointed one way.

What nobody at the Times knew was that Karl Benz, tinkering in a shop in Mannheim, had already patented a gasoline-powered vehicle eight years earlier. The car scaled up, the manure problem disappeared and a completely different set of problems showed up in its place.

Thomas Malthus did the same thing a century earlier, in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. Population grows geometrically, food arithmetically, and therefore - famine is mathematically inevitable. He published this at the start of the Agricultural Revolution. Paul Ehrlich doubled down in 1968: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," he wrote on page one of The Population Bomb, "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

Well, food production tripled instead.

Peak oil in 2005, same story; the doomsday logic was always internally consistent. The world just did not cooperate.

I know I'm cherry-picking here. Listing reversals is easy. Plenty of problems didn't get fixed. Plenty of hopeful people were dead wrong. But the doomers were also wrong, and the doomers didn't build anything while they were busy ~being wrong.

The optimists who failed at least generated attempts.

This is the asymmetry I keep snagging on.

Why it feels smart to be grim

In 1984, a psychologist at Berkeley named Philip Tetlock started cornering experts at conferences and asking them to make specific, testable predictions.

• Would the Soviet Union collapse within five years?
• Would inflation top 6%?

He accumulated tens of thousands of these forecasts from 284 political scientists, economists, and government advisors, and after twenty years he scored them all against reality. Most of the experts performed about as well as "dart-throwing chimpanzees" -- Tetlock's line, not mine. The very worst forecasters were the folks with One Grand Theory™️ who bent all incoming data to fit it.

Nobody puts the careful, uncertain forecasters on television.

"I see arguments on both sides and I'm not confident" doesn't fill a segment.

This is an ongoing complaint of mine.

And then there's the reputation factor. If you predict a catastrophe and you're wrong, nobody circles back to check - and your wrong call just dissolves. If you predict things will work out and they don't, that shit follows you around forever. The lopsidedness of the payoff alone is enough to push smart, careful people toward the darkest possible forecast even when the evidence is genuinely mixed.

Being wrong about doom costs you nothing.

Being wrong about hope costs you your career.

Hope as a decision

Cornel West split optimism and hope into two separate things...

• Optimism is a spectator sport, in his framing. You watch the data and decide whether the trend lines look good.
• Hope is a commitment to act as though improvement is possible, because without that commitment you guarantee it isn't. Nobody serious is claiming things will get better on their own. In fact, things can only get better if enough people act as though they might.

Every hospital that got built started with someone saying "we can treat those people." Every civil rights movement and every vaccine that reduced suffering began with someone who looked at a bad situation and decided to treat it as a problem to solve, and a problem that ~could be solved.

"What about the problems that didn't get solved? What about the optimists who were wrong?"

Well, what about them?

The optimists who were wrong still attempted something.

The pessimists who were right attempted nothing.

And the world runs on attempts, not on accurate // profound predictions of failure.

The permanent bracing costs

At the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman spent decades studying what he called "learned helplessness." He found that people who explain bad events as permanent and personal, baked into the fabric of reality, are more likely to become depressed and less likely to keep trying. I should know. That about accurately describes my emotional state for most of my 20's.

The cultural pessimism that passes for intelligence has the same structure - if your default explanation for every problem is "systems are broken and people are selfish, so nothing will ever be different," you've adopted a worldview that is indistinguishable from despair, and you might call it realism but it produces the same behavior as hopelessness.

When pessimism becomes the default in public conversation, it starts building the world it claims to be describing. People who believe nothing can be different don't vote, don't volunteer, don't start companies, don't run for office, don't build the thing that might have mattered.

Pessimism at scale is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rebecca Solnit put it well in Hope in the Dark: "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is something you do."

The stubborn, irrational case

In 1903, Simon Newcomb - a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins and probably the most credentialed scientist in the country - wrote a widely-read essay arguing that powered heavier-than-air flight was a practical impossibility. And on December 17 of that same year, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew four times at Kitty Hawk. The longest flight lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. Newcomb never revised his position.

Pessimism is more accurate in the short term - almost always, I'll give it that. Things do go wrong in roughly the ways people predict they will. But optimism is more productive over decades. Optimism is the thing that generates attempts, and without attempts nothing changes.

Blind cheerfulness ignores evidence, crashes planes, builds the Humane AI Pin and bankrupts companies. Nobody wants that. But the choice to look at bad data and act anyway, because sitting still is the one move that guarantees the bad outcome, is a noble one.

The most dangerous idea I keep running into is that there is nothing to be done. It's the one idea that, if enough people hold it, comes true - and I refuse to treat that as a serious intellectual position. I refuse to let Quiet Quitting become the dominant intellectual model of our age.

I would rather be wrong about what we're capable of than right about why we shouldn't bother trying...

Friends,

The Justice Department has just launched a criminal investigation of Cassidy Hutchinson. Remember her?

Hutchinson was the young, courageous former White House aide whose testimony before Congress implicated Trump in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Not surprisingly, her testimony enraged Trump. So, the Justice Department is now accusing Hutchinson of having lied to Congress, which is a criminal offense.

It’s just the latest example of Trump’s vindictive and perverse use of the Justice Department to go after people he perceives to be his enemies.

Who’s been assigned to carry out this vicious investigation? Not anyone in the criminal division, which you might expect would have expertise in pursuing a criminal case. No, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, has assigned the case to the Civil Rights Division, which in normal times focuses on civil rights abuses like police misconduct and racial discrimination.

Blanche has given the case directly to Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon, an unblinking Trump loyalist, has emerged as an effective advocate for Trump’s agenda.

She’s also reputedly on the shortlist to be Trump’s next attorney general.

So, what do we know about Harmeet Dhillon?

Although she’s taken on the investigation of Cassidy Hutchinson, in January Dhillon refused to investigate the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

Dhillon’s decision not to investigate Good’s killing marked a sharp departure from past Civil Rights Division chiefs, who have always moved quickly to probe shootings of civilians by law enforcement officials.

Four senior DOJ civil rights officials resigned over Dhillon’s refusal to investigate.

Dhillon also refused to assign civil rights attorneys to investigate the subsequent Minneapolis shooting death by two federal agents of Alex Pretti. Instead, she tapped a lawyer who handles civil investigations involving workplace discrimination.

Yet a few weeks after Good’s killing, Dhillon took on the investigation of a group of people (including journalist Don Lemon) who had protested Good’s shooting by disrupting a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The protesters had targeted the church because a pastor there, David Easterwood, was identified as the local ICE field office director.

Dhillon characterized the disruption as a “desecration of a house of worship” and therefore a violation of federal civil rights laws. By April, nearly 40 people faced federal charges in this case of conspiracy against the right of religious worship.

Dhillon has also been the force behind condemning universities for allowing what she deems “antisemitic” protests — and withholding research funding unless they agree to explicit measures supposedly to prevent antisemitism.

Last summer, the The New Yorker published an extensive piece on Dartmouth College titled “How Dartmouth Became the Ivy League’s Switzerland,” claiming that Dartmouth President Sian Beilock had successfully avoided Dhillon’s ire — and the federal funding cuts that have threatened Harvard and Columbia — by adopting a “neutral” position on Trump’s attempt to take greater control of higher education.

Dhillon calls Dartmouth “one of the good guys” in higher education. (Rather than neutral Switzerland during World War II, a more accurate analogy for Dartmouth’s response to Trump under Beilock would be Britain under Neville Chamberlain, who appeased Hitler.)

I was a Dartmouth trustee in the 1980s when its president, James O. Freedman, who was Jewish, endured the antisemitic barbs of an ascendant right-wing student group headed by Dhillon, then a Dartmouth student. (Other members included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza.)

In 1988, Dhillon, as editor of The Dartmouth Review, published a column depicting Freedman as Adolf Hitler under the headline “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann” — a play on a Nazi slogan, “One Empire, One People, One Leader,” but substituting and misspelling Freedman’s name for “Fuhrer.”

Using the analogy of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the column satirically described how “Der Freedmann” and his associates rid the campus of conservatives. The column referred to the “‘Final Solution’ of the Conservative Problem” and to “survivors” of the Dartmouth “holocaust” and described Dartmouth conservatives being “deported in cattle cars in the night.”

A drawing on the cover of the following issue of Dhillon’s Dartmouth Review also depicted Freedman, who had been critical of The Review, as Hitler.

I saw how much Dhillon’s publication hurt Freedman. As a Jew, he not only felt personally attacked but also worried about the effects of Dhillon’s publication on Jewish students at Dartmouth.

Granted, this was 1988. Dhillon’s history of publishing such antisemitic crap doesn’t necessarily cast her recent crusade against campus antisemitism as hypocritical. It’s possible that her undergraduate escapade into antisemitism caused her such remorse that she subsequently experienced a conversion of sorts and became committed to ridding universities of similar acts of bigotry.

But nothing in her history after Dartmouth or her official biography suggests such a conversion. The most probable explanation for her turnaround is simple ambition.

Dhillon grabbed the opportunity to become assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights and agreed to use the charge of antisemitism as a weapon to carry out the Trump regime’s war on prestigious universities — not because they’re hotbeds of antisemitism, but because the authoritarian right considers them hotbeds of leftist ideology.

JD Vance said in a 2021 speech titled “The Universities are the enemy,” that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” He never mentioned antisemitism.

Dhillon admits that her overall vision is not just slowing down civil rights in America but “turning the train around and driving in the opposite direction,” as she told the conservative Federalist Society after her appointment as head of the division.

She has eliminated federal oversight of police departments accused of discrimination, once the centerpiece of the Civil Rights Division’s work.

She has directed universities to end all types of affirmative action, once defended by the Civil Rights Division.

She is now suing states to acquire voter databases in an effort to disenfranchise minority voters. The Civil Rights Division once existed to protect their voting rights.

Harmeet Dhillon is no advocate for civil rights. She’s a legal hack for Trump’s cruel agenda of attacking Americans trying to stop ICE and Border Patrol agents from doing their worst, of seeking to destroy academic freedom in American universities in favor of Trump’s narrow view of what should be allowed, of undermining equal opportunity for people of color, and of prosecuting anyone — like Cassidy Hutchinson — with the courage and integrity to stand up against Trump’s despotism.

Harmeet Dhillon is the last person who should be running the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. She should never become attorney general — which means Trump will probably nominate her.

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