That's not necessarily the halfway point of my life -- most of my grandparents lived well into their eighties, if not beyond -- but it's probably reasonably close.
I'm writing from the labor and delivery room in Sunnyside hospital, where Jill and I are very much in a "hurry up and wait" mode. The next time I return home, I'll be a parent. That also feels very much like a line that divides one's life in half -- before and after kids.
And of course, we're coming up on a major change in American history, one that also feels like it could become a historic before-and-after line -- this time for American democracy itself. The hope is obviously that this is just ("just") four years that need surviving (and I've been reminded that there are worse times to be distracted from the woes of the world by a 0 - 4 year old than 2025 - 2028). But it does not strike me as implausible that the damage that is about to be unleashed upon America is not something that will be contained to just four years. It may not be something that can be healed in my lifetime, or ever. It's very possible we have reached an epochal pivot point, in which much of which many of us have taken for granted about America will lie forever in the "before" time.
I'm basically saying what Alexandra Petri said already, only much less eloquently. But indulge me a little.
It's not often that life so neatly divides itself into such distinct eras. Normally that's a function of narrative convenience or arbitrary labeling. But right now, it really does feel like I stand on a precipice -- for myself, for my family, for my country. It's staggering, and glorious, and terrifying.
It's time for Part II.
That sounds judgmental. And it is, to an extent. But maybe not quite to the extent one thinks.
All of these men were at one point self-identified Democrats. Zuckerberg flirted with a run for President before he realized that nobody, you know, liked him. Bezos positioned the Washington Post as a guardian of democracy before taking it dark.
As these men, and others in their cadre, have pivoted to the right, one narrative one often hears is that they were effectively bullied into changing their views by mean anti-big tech sentiments amongst progressives. This is far too pat (not the least because Republicans certainly held their own in highly publicized attacks on the big tech companies), but what is fair to say is that these men say themselves as having promoted liberal causes and they did not get the adulation and adoration from Democrats that they felt they deserved. They were not feted as heroes. They were not recognized as titans of industry. They were not handed the reins of leadership. They weren't even generally recognized as progressive allies. They continued to face pressure and mockery and criticism -- much fair, some not -- and they were deeply, deeply resentful for it.
It's most obvious in the case of Musk, whose desperation to be liked is transparently obvious and who has transformed an entire social media platform into a Potemkin village of praise for the new tsar. But one sees it across the cohort -- this frustration at not being loved, and the beckoning temptation that if they just sold out then at least somebody would cheer them and make them feel like part of the team.
In theory, this shouldn't matter. For those with requisite moral fiber, one does the right thing because it's the right thing, not because one gets plaudits and cookies from it. But in practice, it is a very ordinary vice to thirst for validation and gravitate towards whatever community seems most liable to hand it out. In the face of that temptation, it takes a strong man to align with a given set of values when others holding those same values can't or won't provide that respect.
And our big tech bro leaders? They are not strong in this way. They are weak -- weak in a way that is very familiar and very human, but weak nonetheless. And we all must unfortunately live with the consequences of their weakness.
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"Do you have any plans?" "Not really, just having a lazy weekend."
I cannot count the number of times I've had this conversation. I love lazy weekends. I like sleeping in and just vegging on the couch with my wife more than 99.9% of possible "activities" I could plan out in the wider world.
This weekend is set to be a wonderful lazy weekend. We have no major tasks to do, no major outings planned. We might grab brunch and drop something off at the post office. I'll watch football. She'll probably play Mario Kart.
On Monday, we go to hospital to begin an induction. When we return, we'll have a baby. He will bring joy, and laughter, and growth, and no doubt many sleepless nights.
But I suspect we won't be having any lazy weekends for a while.
Goodbye, lazy weekend. You will be missed.
Or, you know, it's a Jew thing.
Jewish control over the weather is well-known trope to readers of this series, and few can forget congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene contributing "Jewish space lasers" to the antisemitic dictionary. But a variety of far-left groups now are making their own entry into the genre by tying the fires to America's support for Israel. For some, the rhetoric seems to be one of divine retribution, akin to how Mike Pence thinks of hurricanes ("When US taxes go to burning people alive in Gaza, we can’t be surprised when those fires come home."). Others play the game where America's foreign aid budget is presented as dollars out of hard-working American pockets, or, in this case, the Los Angeles Fire Department budget -- never mind that those pots of money have nothing to do with one another and in any event the widespread meme that the LAFD faced a draconian budget cut last year appears to be false (the fire budget is actually $53 million more than it was last year, but if I fact-checked every subclaim in this series I'd never get any sleep at all).
More broadly, I was just thinking about how the immediate right-wing pivot to blame the fires on "DEI" (by which they mean, the fire department has women in its leadership) reminded me of classic antisemitic conspiracy theorizing -- the immediate impulse to find the Jewish connection and shriek "this explains everything!" Whereas some pin every bad thing in the world on "the Jews", others do the exact same thing but plug in "diversity" or some other analogous buzzword as their "explanation of first, middle, and last resort". Remember when the Wall Street Journal blamed the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank on the fact that it had one (one!) Black director in its board? It's the same play. The conspiracy theory "explains everything" because it always "explains everything", because that what a conspiracy theory is -- it is a way to immediately, reflexively, and automatically explain anything and everything by reference to whatever it is you hate.
The "wildfires are caused by DEI" takes the rhythm of an antisemitic conspiracy theory and applies it to a new context. But while I certainly enjoyed basking in that familiarity, it is always reassuring to know that someone would go the OG route and blame the Jews and Jewish institutions directly. Not that I had any doubt it would go that way -- it always does, sooner or later.
Bad legal arguments bother me. And more specifically, lawsuits that are filed not because there's an actual colorable legal claim, but as a form of press release -- a ritualized airing of grievance trying to drape itself in the seriousness of a lawsuit -- strike me as intolerably obnoxious and abusive. Many defamation suits fit this profile (who needs SLAPP when there's Rule 11?), but there are others. And too often I see people cheer these suits (at least when they fit the right ideological profile), and I hate to see it -- these lawsuits serve no purpose other than to allow gloryhounds to chest-thump their virtue while wasting time and resources, not just of the judiciary, but of the very social movement they claim to be advocating for.
One example is the "class action" lawsuit recently filed against two Bay Area Democratic Representatives claiming that their votes in favor of aid to Israel caused emotional distress to constituents who believe that Israel's conduct in the Gaza war constitutes a genocide. As a matter of law, the suit is patently frivolous -- it is obviously foreclosed by the Speech and Debate Clause, and a moment's reflection should make anyone with half a brain recognize that enabling disappointed constituents to sue their representatives for their congressional votes is a capital-B Bad Idea. The suit has no chance of succeeding and serves no purpose other than to generate headlines, and that is not the purpose of the judiciary. I don't know if the named plaintiffs are willing participants in the charade or are genuinely deluded into thinking there is valid legal claim here, but if it's the latter, then they're being exploited in a terribly grotesque fashion. Either way, I hope the lawyers who filed it are sanctioned.
But lest anyone get too smug, this is not a sin with any particular ideological proclivity. A federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania just dismissed a lawsuit filed against Haverford College alleging a hostile environment against Jews on campus. The dismissal was based on the fact that the pleadings were, in so many words, a sustained rant rather than an attempt to communicate a cohesive legal complaint.
At this stage, a court would typically review the relevant facts. I cannot cogently do so here due to the sprawling and disorganized character of Plaintiffs' Amended Complaint, which appears to detail every frustration and disagreement of Jewish students and faculty that has occurred at Haverford over the last year. It spills pages of ink on lengthy frolics about events on other college campuses and about ideological debates. Rather than isolating instances of harassment and logically relating them to the elements of a hostile environment claim, Plaintiffs set forth a running list of grievances that reads more as an opinion editorial than it does a legal complaint.
I am familiar with this sort of "legal" writing, and I am glad to see a judge call it for what it is. It's written by lawyers who forget that their job is to craft a legal complaint and instead view the courts as a suitably august forum for airing every point of grievance and riding every ideological hobbyhorse they've ever encountered. In some ways, the Haverford case is worse than that Bay Area one, because in the former the judge agreed that some of the allegations might have presented cognizable claims under Title VI but couldn't move forward on them because they were buried inside such an amalgam of irrelevant ranting that they failed to present an actionable complaint. The (potentially) valid grievances of the Jewish plaintiffs at Haverford were, in effect, sacrificed so that their lawyers could play soapbox orator. They treated the lawsuit as one big press release, and everybody -- their clients included -- is worse for it.
The lawyers suing Haverford aren't stupid, at least in the traditional sense (they attended Harvard and U. Chicago Law).* But they decided that this issue was too important for them to act as lawyers, and instead decided to act as demagogues. That's despicable. It's an abuse of the judicial process, it's unfair to Haverford College, and it disserves the Jewish community they nominally purport to defend.
* They literally just took down the link to the bios of all their attorneys,
First and foremost, there is the actual, literal victim -- the person robbed or cheated or abused -- followed by the victim's family and loved ones.
But I think after that, the persons hurt most, and hurt in a distinctive and devastating way, are the perpetrator's family.
When someone is arrested for a serious crime, it is normal for the media to seek commit from the perp's loved ones. On occasion, you'll see someone seize upon a letter written by perpetrator's mother to the judge pleading for clemency, juxtaposing the letter's description of the perp (which is, of course, written through the lens of parental love) against the usually vicious facts of the underlying offense. How out-of-touch, how classless, how blind.
For my part though, I have no idea what we expect them to say. The position they are in seems unbearably cruel, and I hate -- hate -- the people who treat the family as an easy target. It is of course true that a serious crime doesn't become less serious because a person you love committed it. And yet, it strikes me as unreasonable to demand a parent partake in what would otherwise be the obvious, perhaps even obligatory, practice of condemnation. In concept perhaps there is a tightrope one can walk of still expressing love while in no way diminishing the underlying offense; in practice I doubt it's possible to anyone's satisfaction. A columnist who concentrates on a convicted arsonist's volunteer work and urges others to see him in the light may be guilty of himpathy; the arsonist's father is not. The acquaintance who remains friends with the serial catfisher may be judged harshly for not cutting someone who hurts others out of his life; the swindler's mother should not be. This doesn't mean we abide by the parental perspective -- we know full well it is skewed -- but they're not wrong to hold it. They are in a fundamentally unfair and cruel position; the best thing we can do is just ignore them.
And that, too, is part of the cruelty. At least the primary victims have an obvious claim to our empathy, care, and concern. The perpetrator's family has, at best, a much shakier claim to emotional support. The fact that this order of prioritization is obviously justified -- of course we care more about the immediate circle of victims than we do about the feelings of the perpetrator's family -- in some sense compounds the wound; they don't even have the salve of knowing that their social abandonment is unjust. Or worse -- we know families come in for attack by people who think they must in some way be culpable too, looking for ways to accommodate a thirst for retribution that cannot be solely slaked on the body of the actual wrongdoer. They are blamed for not anticipating the misconduct, or they are blamed for somehow facilitating it, or they are blamed for not cutting loose the bad guy once his crimes became clear.
Of course, occasionally the family really will have been complicit in a direct way (the parents who give their obviously disturbed teenager free access to firearms, for instance). But more often than not, they are victims who are not treated as victims. And I suspect there is, lying underneath everything else, a feeling of betrayal -- surely, they had to know that doing these dreadful things would hurt us; was our relationship of love not enough of a reason to refrain? What a terrible thought, and how much more terrible to have to endure it alone.
I'm soon going to start raising a son. I hope he turns out to be kind and smart and generous and every other quality one would hope to have in a person. I hope that for all the obvious reasons (I'd hope that everyone turns out that way!), but also for the more (selfish?) reason that if he doesn't turn out that way it would be heartbreaking, and I don't know what I would do. Brining a child into the world means committing to unconditionally love someone you haven't even met yet -- that is a terrifying vulnerability, when you think about it. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of the time it goes fine -- most people, whatever foibles and missteps they might make as part of a normal human existence, don't do anything so egregious as to provoke this sort of crisis. But if it goes wrong, boy does it go wrong.
As one moves away from the most intimate circles -- parents, spouses, siblings -- the obligation to be clear-eyed about the wrong waxes, while the indulgence we might concede for one who loves the perpetrator probably fades. But in any relationship of love -- familial, romantic, platonic, even political -- it hurts when someone or something you love does something objectively cruel, shameful, or even monstrous. It hurts because it is wrong, and it hurts because nobody's empathic attention will be focused on you, and it hurts because you know at some level that this loneliness and abandonment isn't even unjust, and it hurts because all of that means that even trying to articulate this sense of loneliness and abandonment and pain is inevitably going to be viewed as trying to wrongfully redirect care and concern from those who need and deserve it more.
What a terrible cruelty to endure.
