Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 9)

Twice a year or so, I compile a playlist of recent music I’ve been enjoying as a kind of personal time capsule. Here’s the latest, featuring some favorite songs from 2025 so far.

Lots of recent articles I haven’t shared here yet! First up, I’m in the Unpopulist talking about Superman, MAGA, and Grant Morrison:

To start with the obvious—and with a once unobjectionable aspect of the character that the current crop of right-wing commentators find deeply upsetting (more on that below)—Superman wasn’t born here. He is an immigrant, an alien, a refugee, a baby sent via rocketship from a dying planet to come crashing uninvited into the arms of America. His Kryptonian biology and the rays of our yellow sun would eventually make him stronger than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet, but it’s the benevolence of Smallville farmers Ma and Pa Kent that make him Superman. To take the story literally, America’s most iconic superhero spent his youth as an undocumented farm worker.

From the very beginning, the story of Superman—originally co-written by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both sons of Jewish immigrants—is the promise of America: no matter where you come from there is room for you here to become your greatest self. The fantastical hero they created together in Cleveland may have looked like a corn-fed Kansas farmboy—a Black or Jewish Superman wouldn’t have flown in 1938—but it’s no coincidence that he came from another world.

Also at Unpopulist, I wrote about tariffs as a tax on delight:

We often think about tariffs as merely increasing prices, which is certainly bad enough. But you can also think of them as forcing regression to a less prosperous time. One of the most notable ways American life has improved in recent decades is our abundance of higher quality and more varied food and drink. Tariffs threaten to reverse that progress.

For the Examiner, I reviewed Penn Jillette’s fun new novel Felony Juggler:

“Bob Dylan never really did it, he never hopped a train, but I really did,” writes Poe Legette, the protagonist of Felony Juggler, a new novel from magician, upright bass player, and author Penn Jillette. Or maybe it’s Jillette talking. The line between Poe and Penn is blurry. The book draws heavily on Jillette’s years as a street performing juggler and self-described “carny trash” before he hit it big as the talkative half of the magic duo Penn and Teller. There are no TV shows or glitzy Vegas theaters here; this story takes place on street corners and at Renaissance fairs of the 1970s, any place a loudmouth with three clubs and a dialed-in routine could make a little cash.

For Inside Hook, I reviewed the stellar new mixer from Ooni:

For those of us who are into making pizza, the past decade has been an exciting era of innovation for the final minutes of the process: most notably, the invention of home ovens capable of reaching temperatures in excess of 900 degrees, bringing true Neapolitan-style pizzas right to our backyards. There’s been less innovation aimed at the crucial first few minutes, the time when flour, water, salt and yeast come together to make a dough. That changes with the release of the new Ooni Halo Pro Spiral Mixer, a versatile appliance that’s designed specifically with great pizza in mind.

Lastly, in June I traveled to Warsaw to give a keynote presentation at the Global Forum on Nicotine covering tobacco harm reduction and the media. You can stream it here.

Back in 2022, I wrote a big feature for Reason magazine about how tobacco policies were tipping past mere regulation to enter a new era of actual prohibition. As part of that story, I interviewed drug policy expert Ethan Nadelmann. Here’s what he had to say:

“I think that people in tobacco control, including in the harm reduction community, have become kind of comfortable with how to live with an illicit market,” says Ethan Nadelmann, founder and former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “But I think that they’re not conscious that there can be a tipping point when you keep pushing more and more of the market into the underground, into the prohibitionist market, where it’s entirely unregulated. The more intensive the prohibitions, the higher the profits go.”

[…]

Tight restrictions on tobacco are, as Nadelmann notes, criminogenic: By forcing buyers and suppliers into illicit markets, they create crime where none previously existed. Even if possession of tobacco products remains legal, many small-time dealers likely will be drawn to the illicit trade. That will expose them to harassment by cops, potentially violent confrontations, arrest, and incarceration. Judging from what has happened with the drug war, crackdowns on “loosie” sales, and enforcement of outdoor smoking and vaping bans, the impact of the new restrictions will land most heavily on racial minorities and people of modest means.

Around the same time, I wrote a separate article predicting that the spread of statewide bans on flavored tobacco products would lead in the near future to the incarceration of sellers, pointing to Massachusetts as one of the places where it would likely happen first. Massachusetts banned all flavored products, including menthol cigarettes and non-tobacco flavored e-cigarettes, effective in 2020. While selling forbidden products is itself only a misdemeanor, the move to illicit markets also violates state tax laws. And not paying excise taxes is a felony offense.

Since the Massachusetts flavor ban has encouraged a massive illicit market leading to numerous seizures and arrests, it was only a matter of time before one of those sellers ended up behind bars. This month, it happened. My latest piece for Reason looks at the case of vape shop owner Ashraf Youssef, who is now serving six months in the House of Correction.

As noted in minutes from a local Board of Health meeting, Youssef was frequently selling flavored products:

In December of 2021, for example, a “Tobacco Control Manager stopped at the establishment, witnessed the sale of flavored tobacco products, and found 300 disposable flavored vapes.” And in March of 2022, “The Marlborough Police Department was sent to investigate suspicious activity in the parking lot of AAA Smoke & Vape. They determined the business has a car parked outside where patrons can walk up & purchase flavored vape products for cash.”

These violations led to fines and suspension of his license, which is how tobacco control advocates ideally imagine such enforcement working. But since he was also bringing the products in illicitly from out of state, he simultaneously violated tax laws, leading to a guilty plea for attempted tax evasion and a sentence of six months behind bars.

Although violating the flavor ban is not technically the statute that put him in jail, the outcome is the same. And it’s exactly what many of us — Nadelmann, myself, the ACLU and other organizations — warned will happen when prohibitionist policies force products onto the illicit market. Nor will this case be the last: there are at least two other felony prosecutions underway in Massachusetts arising from the sale of flavored tobacco products, these two even more unambiguously related to the state’s creation of illicit markets.

There are other pragmatic reasons to be skeptical of bans on flavored e-cigarettes, most notably that they appear to result in more people smoking far more dangerous conventional cigarettes. To those reasons we can now add another, which is that by banning voluntary transactions between consenting adults, they create crime where none existed before. It’s a familiar consequence of prohibition, and it shouldn’t be surprising to find that it applies to nicotine and tobacco too.

I have a really fun new feature at Slate digging into some very strange coffees:

The weirdest coffee I’ve ever tasted is one I found at a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, last fall. Like many coffee enthusiasts, I usually buy beans based on the country of origin or the reputation of the roaster, but that day something different beckoned. It was a bag labeled “watermelon co-ferment” from Quindio, Colombia. “Coffee and watermelon flavors eloquently mingle,” promised the label.

I brought the beans home with no idea of what to expect. I’m used to picking up subtle tasting notes in coffee, a hint of cacao, or even blueberry. This was something else entirely. As soon as I opened the bag, aroma of watermelon erupted forth. In the cup, that flavor dominated every other aspect. This was no hint of fruit. This was hyperreal watermelon, amped up to 11. Drinking this coffee felt closer to sucking on a Jolly Rancher candy than sipping a standard cup of joe. I’d never tasted coffee like this. I wasn’t sure coffee should taste like this.

The piece digs into the intriguing and controversial practice of co-fermentation, fermenting coffee beans alongside other fruits and spices. If you’re a coffee lover, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

Over at Liberal Currents, I have a new piece up on Portland, protests, and pardons, defending the city from right-wing stereotypes and making the case that the 2020 protests here in no way justify Trump’s mass pardon of the Capitol rioters:

If one insists on drawing comparisons, it’s also worth emphasizing that the 2020 protests in Portland and the January 6 protest at the Capitol differed in their aims. The former were at bottom a response to the homicide of George Floyd at the hands of police; to the extent that protesters were united by any single aim, it was to demand reform to violent policing. The Portland protests were fundamentally democratic, a visible expression of popular sentiment intended to influence elected officials and raise the salience of the issue.

The January 6 protest, in contrast, was explicitly anti-democratic. The aim was not to influence politics through persuasion but rather to forcefully overturn American voters’ decision to elect Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Every legal avenue for challenging the results, no matter how ludicrous or conspiratorial, had already been tried and rejected, often by judges appointed by Trump himself. All that remained was the threat of violence against Congress and the vice president for carrying out their constitutional duties, which the rioters eagerly undertook with actual violence against Capitol Police and threats of hanging for figures like Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

Read the whole thing here, and read Liberal Currents generally. It’s an essential publication right now and Adam Gurri is doing fantastic work publishing it.

My review of Henry Oliver’s new book Second Act is also out:

There’s a joke that goes around on Halloween about dressing up as a gifted child. “What are you supposed to be?” people ask. Punchline: “I was supposed to be a lot of things.” If that joke resonates with you, then you may want to pick up Henry Oliver’s new book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life.

Read it here, or here without a paywall.

2024 was the best year for seeing live music I’ve ever had, especially since I got to share it with my wonderful girlfriend who’s always up for a concert. Somehow we made it to more than 40 shows together. To remember it, we made a playlist with a song each from 59 artists we got to see live. Maybe you’ll find some new favorites here too, especially if you’re into indie or Americana.

Once or twice a year I like to make a playlist of recent music I’ve been digging. Here’s the latest, covering the last six months or so. See my summer playlist for the first half of the year!

As always, these are the books I enjoyed most in 2024, not necessarily books that were released this year.

Non-fiction

Question 7, Richard Flanagan — A (mostly) non-fiction book from an incredible novelist blending personal memoir and meditations on the invention and use of the atomic bomb. Highest recommendation for this one, especially if you’ve read his The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Civic Solitude, Robert Talisse — The third in Talisse’s unintended trilogy on what ails American democracy and what to do about it. This one is more about cultivating personal habits than systemic fixes, which some readers may find dissatisfying given the vast urgency of the problem. It works as a standalone volume as it also refreshes his earlier work, but I’d still recommend starting with Overdoing Democracy for his analysis of polarization (which he revisits in the current book).

The Harm Reduction Gap, Sheila Vakharia — Solid statement of harm reduction principles from a practical and academic perspective. Unlike some other harm reduction advocates, Vakharia follows the principle through to tobacco and nicotine.

The Absinthe Forger, Evan Rail — A few years ago, the niche community of absinthe enthusiasts was rocked by a grifter who abused their trust, meticulously forging fake pre-ban bottles and selling them to collectors for thousands of dollars. Rail spins an engaging tale digging into how and why he did it, with informative absinthe history too.

Black Hole Survival Guide, Janna Levin — Short, fun, very readable introduction to black holes, how they work, and what we still don’t know about them.

Second Act, Henry Oliver — A mix of case studies and social science examining the lives of notable late bloomers. Review forthcoming!

All That Happiness Is, Adam Gopnik — Gopnik’s The Real Work was one of my favorite books last year. This is a delightful, super short (62 pages) companion piece on the pleasures of learning new skills and pursuing secondary passions.

How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy — I’ve not yet completed the aim of the title, but I’ve made progress! A case for demystifying and democratizing songwriting.

Fiction

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez — Highly recommended for writers and dog lovers. Don’t be put off by the synopsis if you’re expecting a sappy pet story, it’s much sharper than that. Read it before the movie comes out in 2025.

Wrong Way, Joanne McNeil — Topical exploration of self-driving cars, innovation hype, and the laborers who make it work from one the most insightful writers on the internet and technology

Land of Milk and Honey, C Pam Zhang — A private chef invited to cook sumptuous meals for the ultrarich after a global environmental catastrophe with a stockpile of the last of the world’s great ingredients? I’m in.

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney — If Rooney’s latest is divisive, count me on the pro side. I’ll second this NYT review .

North Woods, Daniel Mason — Whenever I travel somewhere new, I enjoy reading novels set there on the trip. This year that was the forests of New England. Remarkably stylistically versatile, I loved these interconnected tales of the various people who came to inhabit a single secluded cabin in Massachusetts over centuries.

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin — And finally, though unintentionally, I found a favorite novel set in my home of Portland, Oregon.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a holiday gift guide, but maybe you (like me!) are a bit behind on gift-buying this year and could use a few suggestions. Here are a few food and drink items I’ve been enjoying lately, and that you or your loved ones might like receiving too!

Bull in China Stirred Cocktail Set — If you’re shopping for a budding home bartender, you can’t go wrong with gear from Bull in China. This set has everything they need to start mixing serious stirred cocktails in style: mixing glass, bar spoon, Hawthorne strainer, and a precise bell-shaped jigger. These are the same tools I personally use at home.

Straightaway Cocktails 12 Nights of Cocktails — For those more inclined to let someone else do the mixing, Straightaway’s set of 12 holiday canned cocktails is a fun choice. A solid variety of spirit-forward or citrusy cocktails to open up for a different surprise each night.

Lagg Corriecravie Edition Scotch — Lagg is the new second distillery from Isle of Arran Distillers, this one focused on peated whisky. Though still young, I really like the assertive peatiness of their standard Kilmory edition. For holiday gifting, however, the Corriecravie is the way to go. Finished in oloroso sherry casks and bottled at 55% abv, it’s a rich delight that’s perfect for chilly winter nights.

Wilderton Citrus Aperitivo — Wilderton’s bitter red aperitivo has long been one of my favorite non-alcoholic spirits and they just added a lighter citrus bottling to their line-up too. It’s fantastic on ice with soda water. As complex as any cocktail, it’s perfect for non-drinkers or for anyone looking to drink less alcohol.

St. Agrestis Phony Negroni — Relatedly, I love the “Phony Negroni” series from St. Agrestis. Fizzy bottled Negroni variations ranging from classic to smoky or coffee-flavored, I love having a few of these on hand in the fridge.

Aeropress XL Coffee Maker — I imagine that the product team at Aeropress had a meeting at which someone pitched the idea, “What if Aeropress, but bigger?” If you’ve already brewed on the standard Aeropress, you know exactly what to expect here. Finally, a convenient way to make Aeropress coffee for two!

Black and White Roasters Esteban Zamora Cinnamon Anaerobic Coffee — You’ve probably never had coffee like this before. I certainly hadn’t. The Costa Rican coffee is fermented with ground cinnamon during processing, and that cinnamon aroma carries through the roast and into the cup. It’s unique, delicious, and totally seasonally appropriate. (Should you make an Irish coffee with it? Absolutely.)

Outin Nano Portable Espresso Machine — My usual advice when people ask me how to brew coffee at home is to stick to manual brewers and leave espresso to the pros, but I received a review model of this handheld espresso machine this summer and I’ve been having fun with it. With the larger portafilter option (which is what I’ve been using), it makes much better espresso than I expected; bright, flavorful, and with respectable crema. It’s battery-powered and small enough to bring along for travel or camping, though with a couple caveats: as with any espresso machine, it’s very grind-sensitive, so you need to a good grinder to go with it. You’ll also need to bring a small spoon or tool along to clean out the portafilter after brewing. But I expect that anyone who likes to tinker and can’t do without espresso on the road would enjoy having one of these.

Mala Market Sichuan Pepper — Quality Sichuan pepper is a total gamechanger for Sichuan cooking. This is nothing like the stuff you get at a typical Asian grocery, which is often full of hard seeds or even occasional thorns. These have hardly any seeds and incredible citrusy, floral aroma.

50 Hertz Tingly Peanuts or Brittle — For ready-made Sichuan pepper snacks, I love both the peanuts and toffee nib brittle from 50 Hertz. Get ready to tingle!

Pullman Loaf Pan — A Pullman loaf pan was never on my radar as an item I would need, but after borrowing one from a friend I had to get one for myself. There’s just something satisfying about baking a perfectly rectangle-shaped loaf of bread, which is enabled by the locking lid. I’ve been using mine consistently for making dense Iceland rugbraud.

Ooni Koda 2 Max Pizza Oven — The price admittedly makes this one a bit of a stretch, but if you really like someone who’s into pizza and has the space for it, the new Ooni oven is a dream to cook with. It’s got a much bigger deck than other models, allowing for more even heating and huge pies. I wrote a more detailed review for Inside Hook, but suffice to say it’s hard to go back to any other oven after spending the summer cooking with it!

Raising the Bar — I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug my own book, Raising the Bar, written with my friend Brett Adams. We designed this to be an extremely practical guide for getting started with home bartending, stocking your bar one bottle at a time and detailing the new cocktails you can make when adding each bottle to your collection. It would pair great with the Bull in China cocktail kit (hint, hint).

1. Well, this sucks.

2. Going for an evening bike ride last night on eerily empty streets as the ominous Portland crows flocked into my neighborhood, the feeling it most reminded me of was the last night out in March 2020 before the COVID shutdowns took effect. “See you on the other side,” is what we said to each other then, knowing we were entering a dark and uncertain era. I saw that phrase come up again last night, though it’s less clear what it means now.

3. I’m sad for our country. I knew a Harris win would likely be narrow, but I did honestly think we were better than this, that enough Americans would be repulsed by Trump and what he stands for to make the right decision. I was wrong.

4. Democrats are going to be justifiably bitter about this election, but no one who matters is in denial about the result or suggesting that the votes are fraudulent. Harris isn’t going to be on the phone with Democratic officials demanding that they “find” enough votes to flip the state, she isn’t going to sic a violent mob on the Capitol, and she isn’t going to concoct some constitutionally dubious scheme to hold onto power. If she were to try any of that, Republicans would rightly condemn her as unfit for office and a threat to democracy.

5. I’ve graded Biden on a curve because all I really wanted from him was to stop Trump and considered any other good he accomplished just gravy. For a brief time it seemed he’d achieved that. It’s all I really wanted from Harris too, but neither of them could pull it off.

6. If I were to put an optimistic spin on this, it’s that inflation is the mindkiller. As Matt Yglesias noted last week, this is a terrible environment for incumbent parties:

The most important context for this race — what broadly distinguishes the family of takes you should pay attention to from those you should dismiss — is what’s happening internationally. The UK Conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian Liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right party lost its first post-Covid elections in Australia. The incumbent coalition in Germany is hideously unpopular. This means that if you’re asking “How did Democrats blow it?” or “Why is this even close?” you’re asking the wrong question.

You can tell a nuanced story about how post-pandemic inflation was a global phenomenon, that it started high in the US but is now below the rate in many peer countries, that we avoided economic scenarios that could have been much worse, and that America ultimately experienced an enviable economic recovery. (I made that case here two weeks ago.) But that’s a story that only high-information voters are going to listen to. For everyone else, “prices low under Trump, high under Biden” is all that mattered.

That’s not rational and it doesn’t make anything suck less in the near-term, but if you want to make a case that Democrats lost because of factors that will become less relevant as memory of inflation fades and other issues become more salient, I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to take some small comfort in that.

7. Unfortunately that’s definitely not the whole story. Along with anti-incumbent bias, there was another major worry I had going into the election, which was about the information environment. I’ve struggled to come up with the right metaphor for this and the best I’ve come up with is “dark energy.” Borrowing the term from cosmology, dark energy is a kind of energy that exerts massive influence on the universe but isn’t observed directly; its existence is inferred from phenomena that are hard to make sense of without it.

This strikes me as a decent metaphor for the declining influence of traditional media to shape narratives and the rising influence of social media, right-wing alternative media, podcasts, etc. If you read mainstream media coverage of Trump and wonder how on Earth anyone could support him, this is part of your answer. The MSM narrative isn’t landing. Stories from less legible kinds of media are.

To put in bluntly, over the past decade I’ve seen a lot of people I know whom I considered smart and reasonable getting swayed by and focused on some of the dumbest shit imaginable. My worry leading up to Tuesday was that my anecdotal experience is more widespread than I’d have liked to believe, and that’s been borne out by the results. This is a really hard problem to solve and I wish I had an answer for it, but I don’t.

8. To render this metaphor completely on the nose, I’ll note that one of main points of evidence for the existence of dark energy is the observation of a “redshift.”

9. This year as in 2020, I was one of the handful of people affiliated with the libertarian movement making a vocal, public case for voting against Trump and supporting the Democratic nominee. All things considered, I’d much rather have spent the next four years as the online punching bag for libertarians whenever President Harris did something dumb than be the guy whose warnings about Trump will be tested by reality.

10. On the flipside, the people who’ve been saying Trump won’t be so bad because he’s too incompetent or lazy to follow through on his threats are going to see their predictions tested too.

11. For an indication of how much worse a second Trump administration can be, consider the shift from appointing a flawed but competent technocrat like Scott Gottlieb to the FDA in 2016 to letting anti-vax kook RFK Jr “go wild on health.” I’ve written more criticism of the FDA than most people, but this is not a promising path to reform! The word to remember is “kakistocracy.”

12. One of the best frames for thinking about Trump remains Josh Barro’s prescient description of him as a “tail-risk” candidate way back in 2016:

[If] Trump were a stock, then you’d be demanding a risk premium to buy him. 

In fact, Trump calls for a huge risk premium because, while he probably wouldn’t be a disastrous president, the low-probability disasters that he might cause would be immensely costly. Some of them involve nuclear weapons and global mass deaths. Pricing those risks in properly should push his share price comfortably below Clinton’s, even if you think she is very bad. […]

People are failing to price in the small risk that a Trump presidency could cause us to lose everything we value, and that scares the hell out of me.

The first three years of the Trump White House were a self-inflicted shit show, but they got to coast on generally favorable conditions. The pandemic showed how ill-equipped they were to deal with an actual crisis. (The singular exception being Operation Warp Speed, which makes the Republican turn to anti-vax all the more infuriating.) Conditions look way more challenging this time around: ongoing and potential wars, ballooning deficits, avian flu, just to name a few anticipated problems. The chances of a tail-risk catastrophe are way higher than anyone should be comfortable with.

13. Free market types loved to denigrate Harris’s anti-price gouging proposals, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Trump floating some kind of price controls to deal with problems caused by his own tariffs, deportations, or inflation isn’t far-fetched.

14. A question I’ve been asking longtime friends from libertarian circles is whether the “libertarian movement” still exists. The consensus is that the movement as we knew it is dead. The fusionist alliance with the right has been killed by national conservatism, and Trump exposed how many so-called libertarians were motivated more by contempt for the left than by any real commitment to liberty. The detached stance of the 2000s, marked by equal disdain for left and right, is tired and out of touch. Nominally libertarian institutions carry on but there’s not enough there to energize and rejuvenate the distinct movement that grew out of the post-World War II and Cold War environment.

15. The modern libertarian movement spent most of its history attuned to the threat of socialism; it has failed to adapt to the autocratic threat from the American right.

16. In The Individualists, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi provide a much more capacious and wide-ranging description of libertarianism as a constellation of commitments that are interpreted in different ways in different eras: private property, skepticism of authority, free markets, individualism, spontaneous order, and individual liberty. These ideas are worth preserving and fighting for, but I’m not sure that those of us who advocate them should short-hand to the term “libertarian” outside of an academic or specialized context for a while if we want to be accurately understood. For practical purposes we’re just liberals now.

17. In the Bush and Obama years, if all I knew about someone is that they self-described as libertarian, I would assume we agree on a decent amount and would be curious to meet them. Now? Not so much, and maybe quite the opposite.

18. Libertarians should be energized by opposition to Trump, the most genuinely fascist threat to the United States of our lifetimes. Many of the ones I know and admire will be. But for many others, I expect that the tech money sloshing around on the new right and the appeal of being a “heterodox thinker” will win out.

19. The libertarian (if we can call it that) project that has most risen to the occasion of facing up to the Trump era is Shikha Dalmia’s The Unpopulist and there’s not really a close second.

20. If you’re looking for a small and underfunded publication to support financially that’s doing good work, a very worthy choice is Liberal Currents! (Yes, I write for them occasionally.)

21. In the time ahead there’s going to be a lot of reflection about what Democrats might do differently to win elections in a country that is tilting right. But popularity isn’t everything. Welcoming immigrants, defending women’s rights, respecting trans and other LGBT people, fighting police abuses and mass incarceration, standing up for democracy and the rule of law, and advocating peace and trade, to name just a few, are all principles worth fighting for even when they take some hits in the short-term.

22. Read Ken White today.

23. I hope I’m wrong about how rotten the fruits of this election are going to be. But regardless of whether the worst possibilities come to pass, this was the election in which there was no longer any illusion about who Trump is. Tens of millions of Americans looked at his racism, his sexual abuse, his corruption, his lawlessness, his stupidity, his dishonesty, his cruelty, and his assault on our democracy and decided they’re OK with it, maybe even wanted it. I won’t regard any of them the same way ever again.