Mike McCready

Author: Mike McCready

  • On Accidentally Becoming the Kind of Person Who Says “Marvelous”

    On Accidentally Becoming the Kind of Person Who Says “Marvelous”

    The other day, I horrified myself.

    I told someone something was marvelous. Not ironically. Not as a bit. Just… marvelous.

    I heard it leave my mouth and felt my internal timeline shift. Since when do I say marvelous? When did that replace solid, killer, or the all-purpose cool? At what point did my vocabulary quietly file for social security?

    For most of my life, there were words I avoided on principle. Words that signaled softness, pretension, or—worst of all—enthusiasm. Words that would get you gently, but decisively, bullied by your friends in a bar.

    Apparently, my fear of that judgment has expired.

    This is what aging actually looks like. It’s not gaining wisdom; it’s just caring less about the performance. You slowly realize you’ve earned the right to use words that sound like they belong to a retired British colonel.

    I’m trying a few on for size. No commitment yet. Just a trial period. Here is the current inventory:

    “Lovely.” This word used to belong exclusively to grandmothers and people who own ceramic cats. And yet, here we are. It turns out “nice” is lazy. “Lovely” does the job.

    “Delightful.” I don’t use it often, but when I do, I mean it. Which is unsettling. Nothing delights you by accident. To call something delightful is to admit you are having a good time, which is a dangerous precedent.

    “Pleasant.” An underrated power move. Calm. Unambitious. In a world screaming for attention, “pleasant” is a relief. I used to think it was faint praise. Now I realize it’s the goal.

    “Rather.” As in, “I rather enjoyed that.” This one worries me. It sounds like I’m about to order sherry. But it feels precise. And precision is intoxicating.

    “Sensible.” This one hurt. The first time I described a pair of shoes or a decision as “sensible,” I felt 25-year-old me shake his head and walk out of the room. He’s right to leave. He wouldn’t get it.

    “Content.” Not happy. Not thrilled. Content. This word has no interest in impressing anyone. It’s the linguistic equivalent of staying home on a Friday night because you want to.

    What’s interesting is that none of these words are flashy. They don’t try to win the room. They sit there, comfortable with themselves, wearing a cardigan.

    Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’ve simply reached the age where I can say marvelous without instinctively checking to see if anyone is rolling their eyes.

    I’m not abandoning cool entirely. I’m not a monster. But if something is marvelous, I’m saying it.

  • Why It’s So Hard To Change Someone’s Mind

    Why It’s So Hard To Change Someone’s Mind

    I used to believe facts were currency.

    If I put enough solid data on the table, I assumed the other person would eventually look at the pile, nod, and cash out their wrong opinion.

    This belief lasted longer than it should have. About as long as I believed eating cereal for dinner was a phase, not a lifestyle choice I would later defend vigorously.

    Here’s the uncomfortable reality:

    Facts don’t compete with other facts.

    They compete with identity.

    Most arguments fail not because the evidence is weak, but because the argument is aimed at the wrong target. We assume people are trying to be correct. Usually, they’re just trying to belong.

    Beliefs aren’t opinions.

    They’re uniforms.

    When you challenge someone’s belief, you’re not disputing a fact. You’re challenging their tribe, their past decisions, and the role they’ve been playing for years.

    That’s not a debate.

    That’s a threat assessment.

    This is why evidence loses to belonging.

    Once something becomes tribal, truth becomes secondary. Agreeing with the “wrong” fact isn’t growth — it’s defection. And people don’t defect casually, especially not in public, and especially not online.

    At that point, the argument is no longer about truth.

    It’s a loyalty test.

    This also explains why correcting people rarely works.

    Correction doesn’t feel helpful. It feels like exposure. The brain doesn’t hear new information — it hears you’re in danger. Curiosity shuts down. Defenses go up.

    The cleaner the correction, the harder people cling to the position. From the outside, this looks like stupidity. It usually isn’t.

    It’s self-preservation.

    Changing your mind is expensive.

    It costs pride.

    It costs status.

    Sometimes it costs relationships.

    Admitting you were wrong doesn’t update a belief. It rewrites a story. It forces you to revisit things you said, shared, defended — and sit with the possibility that you were wrong.

    Most people would rather be wrong than embarrassed.

    So bad arguments survive. Not because they’re persuasive, but because they’re safe. They keep you in good standing. They let you avoid that quiet, unwelcome realization — usually late at night — that you might have been played.

    I’m not exempt. I’ve held losing positions far longer than I should have because exiting felt like admitting defeat. Doubling down feels like strength, even when it’s just damage with confidence.

    Facts still matter.

    Just not on the timeline we want, and not in environments where being wrong carries a social cost. Facts work when accepting them costs less than ignoring them.

    Most public arguments fail for a simple reason.

    They think they’re debating information.

    They’re negotiating identity.

    And until we’re honest about that, we’ll keep wondering why the facts were solid…

    and the argument went nowhere.

  • Why a Photo from 2004 Looks Like It Was Taken Last Tuesday

    Why a Photo from 2004 Looks Like It Was Taken Last Tuesday

    You can look at a photo from the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s and instantly know the decade.

    Not the year.
    The decade.

    It’s in the lapels. The hair volume. The posture. Even the font on a street sign in the background feels time-stamped. Blur the faces and you’d still know where you were in the timeline.

    Now try that with a photo from 2003. Or 2012. Or last Tuesday.

    Remove the cell phone model from the frame and you’re guessing. A photo from 2004 could be from 2024. Step back far enough and the last twenty-five years collapse into a single, flat visual moment, like a hotel hallway designed to offend no one and be remembered by no one.

    Yes, digital photos don’t yellow. Everything looks permanently “now.”
    But the stagnation isn’t technological. It’s cultural.

    The monoculture is dead.

    For most of the 20th century, there was a current. You either swam with it or against it, but everyone was responding to the same force. In the 70s, you wore the polyester or you rejected it. Even rebellion was legible—because you knew exactly what it was rebelling against.

    Now? Every style that has ever existed is available simultaneously, usually for about fifteen dollars and free shipping. Nothing ever leaves. Nothing has to mean anything. We aren’t inventing new aesthetics—we’re just curating better playlists of the past.

    There is one exception, of course.

    Historians won’t struggle to date photos of people in MAGA hats and merch. Those will be instantly identifiable as 2015–2025—preserved in high resolution, forensically searchable, and destined to cause a very specific kind of generational embarrassment.

    Our cities followed suit. Neutral palettes. Exposed brick. The same sans-serif fonts everywhere. Drop a café from Brooklyn into Berlin or Barcelona and no one would blink. We built a global architecture of anywhere—comfortable, inoffensive, and, like Taylor Swift, impossible to date.

    So if fashion, architecture, and culture no longer mark time, what does?

    Politics.

    It’s the last remaining monoculture—the one thing we all still see, whether we want to or not. When culture fragments into a thousand niches, collective attention has to go somewhere. It went to the fight.

    The past had eras defined by how we looked.

    We have a long, endless present defined by what we scream at each other.

    And if future historians want to date our photos, they won’t look at the hemline or the haircut.

    They’ll look at the panic in our eyes.

  • “I’m Not Racist. I Just Tolerate Racism for the Other Stuff.”

    “I’m Not Racist. I Just Tolerate Racism for the Other Stuff.”

    I’ll spell out the defense I keep hearing—then I’ll set it on fire.

    You say:
    “I don’t think of myself as racist. I even agree Trump says racist things. But I vote for him anyway because his other policies are better for America. The alternative—Democrats in power—would be far worse. I don’t like the racism, but I’m willing to hold my nose.”

    Okay. Let’s sit with that.

    What you’re really saying is that racism is a trade‑off you’re willing to accept. That it’s a cost of doing business. That the people harmed by it are… acceptable collateral damage.

    You’re not denying the fire.
    You’re just arguing the house was worth burning.

    Here’s the problem: racism isn’t a side dish. It’s not an unfortunate personality quirk you can fence off while enjoying the “serious” policy agenda.

    It is the agenda.

    Immigration policy that sorts humans by skin tone?
    Foreign policy that divides the world into “nice countries” and “shitholes”?
    Law enforcement policies that assume threat by melanin?
    Voting rules that just happen to disenfranchise the same groups every time?

    That’s not a glitch. That’s the operating system.

    And once you accept that some Americans matter less than others—once you normalize cruelty toward a group because it’s politically convenient—you’ve already crossed the moral line you claim to stand behind.

    You don’t get to say “I oppose racism” while empowering it.
    You don’t get to say “I’m not racist” while voting for racial hierarchy because you like the tax policy.
    You don’t get to outsource your conscience and then act surprised when the results come back ugly.

    This isn’t about personal purity. It’s about basic moral math.

    If your preferred policies require dehumanizing people to function, then the policies are rotten.
    If your vision of America only works when certain people are kept out, kept down, or kept afraid—then the vision is the problem.

    History doesn’t grade on intent.
    It grades on impact.

    And the impact of “I don’t love the racism, but…” has always been the same.

    So no—maybe you don’t feel racist.
    But you’ve decided racism isn’t a dealbreaker.

    And that distinction doesn’t mean nearly as much as you think it does. For all intents and purposes, it makes you a racist.

  • I Fed My Entire Life Into ChatGPT and All I Got Was… Insight? Closure? Mild Humiliation? Hard to Say.

    I Fed My Entire Life Into ChatGPT and All I Got Was… Insight? Closure? Mild Humiliation? Hard to Say.

    At some point in adulthood, a man has to confront the paper trail he’s been leaving behind since childhood — the journals, the planners, the frantic lists written in moments of optimism and panic. Most people shove theirs in a box and wait for their kids to one day throw them out.
    I, on the other hand, uploaded mine into ChatGPT.

    Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
    If you give an AI 40 years of your handwriting, it will happily psychoanalyze you without even blinking.

    And yes, ChatGPT can read handwriting now.
    Let me repeat that for the people in the back:

    ChatGPT. Can. Read. Handwriting.

    Cursive. Print. Scribbles.
    The stuff I wrote in 1986 when my hormones were louder than my personality.
    The frantic 1991 Barcelona planner pages that read like I was being chased by creditors, self-doubt, and the ghost of my future obligations.
    The Day One digital entries chronicling my existential crises, business collapses, emotional resurrections, and occasional triumphs.

    It gulped it all down and said, essentially:
    “Thanks, Mike. Delicious. Here’s your life.”

    Apparently other people are doing this too.

    I thought I was being innovative — the first man to hand his entire autobiographical archive to a machine.
    Turns out, no.

    People across the internet are feeding their diaries, old letters, family archives, grief journals, therapy notebooks, and even high-school love notes into GPT. Some want closure. Some want clarity. Some want to rediscover who they were before life flattened them into mortgage-paying, sleep-deprived adults.

    We’re all out here saying, “Hey AI, decode me,” like it’s the world’s weirdest confessional booth.

    And honestly?
    It works.

    The Throughline of My Life, According to My AI Biographer

    After reading everything from my baby book to my Barcelona meltdown years, ChatGPT came back with a diagnosis I didn’t expect:

    I am a man who has been trying to get his life together since 1981.

    Not in a sad way.
    In a charming, heroic, repetitive way — like if Sisyphus had a Franklin Planner and high hopes.

    Every notebook, every decade, every entry seems to include some variation of:
    “Tomorrow I get my shit together.”

    It’s practically my family crest.

    The other throughlines didn’t surprise me as much:

    • I reinvent constantly.
      Apparently I have shed more skins than a reptile with commitment issues.
    • I archive everything.
      Why live a life when you can also footnote it?
    • I’m brutally hard on myself.
      If anyone else talked to me the way 1991 Mike talked to me, I’d block them.
    • Beneath all the ambition is a tender streak.
      Who knew? Not me.
    • I care too much and forgive too slowly.
      A winning combination if you enjoy emotional turbulence.

    But the most unexpected observation?

    Despite everything — the failures, the reinventions, the wrong turns — the same hopeful, restless kid is still in there.
    The one who wants to do something meaningful.
    The one who believes tomorrow’s list might actually work this time.
    The one who thinks the next version of himself might finally be the one who sticks.

    The Unlikely Threads

    Every life has themes. Mine has… tangles.

    Here are a few of the threads GPT pulled on — the ones I didn’t notice until a machine laid them out like evidence:

    1. The Eternal Reset Button

    I am the human embodiment of “Okay, starting Monday.”
    This has been going on for forty years.
    Consistency is my inconsistent superpower.

    2. The Archivist Instinct

    I documented my life long before influencers made it fashionable.
    Except I did it with spiral notebooks and regret instead of ring lights.

    3. The Geography of Reinvention

    Nebraska → Spain → New York → Barcelona → My companies → The Music Industry → Trading → Writing → Whatever’s next.
    My life story reads like someone was trying to outrun themselves — and accidentally became interesting.

    4. The Reluctant Optimist

    Every time I wrote a harsh entry, there was always this little shimmer of hope.
    Some people have grit; I have recurring optimism with a head injury.

    5. The Overdeveloped Sense of Responsibility

    My journals reveal that I’ve been blaming myself for global events, interpersonal dynamics, and weather patterns since adolescence.

    So… was it worth it?

    Honestly, yes.
    Handing my life to ChatGPT didn’t break me, ruin me, or reveal that I’m a secret sociopath.
    Instead, it gave me something I’ve never had before:

    A clear view of the narrative arc beneath the noise.

    It showed me the patterns I repeat.
    It showed me the parts of myself I carry from decade to decade.
    It showed me that the kid who wrote, “I hope I become someone someday,”
    actually did.

    Not perfectly.
    Not cleanly.
    But unmistakably.

    Tomorrow I’ll try to get my life together again.
    Some traditions shouldn’t die.

  • I Was Offline for a Week. Now Hitler’s Back.

    I Was Offline for a Week. Now Hitler’s Back.

    I’m late to this. I’ve been offline, living like it’s 2003. No news alerts, no rage-scrolling, no exposure to a single influencer or pundit. It was glorious. But then I plugged back in and saw it: Young Republican leaders caught in group chats saying “I love Hitler,” joking about gas chambers and rape, sneering about “watermelon people,” and casually tossing around words like “faggot” and “retarded”—like they were just swapping fantasy football picks.

    A decade ago, even whispering something like “I love Hitler” would have ended your political career, your public life, your dating prospects, your gym membership—hell, even your WiFi password might’ve stopped working out of pure moral inertia. Now? You get a wink, a shrug, and maybe a spot on someone’s podcast.

    This isn’t just about antisemitism, although it is deeply, virulently that. It’s deeper. It’s a willful rejection of decency itself. Like they’ve looked straight at the moral floor and said: “Nah. Let’s keep digging.”

    And look—racism isn’t exactly a new bug in the human operating system. It’s baked into our wiring. Infants as young as six months show preference for faces of their own race. One study even found that children tend to trust people who sound and look like them. Tribal bias is an evolutionary leftover—like the appendix, or Twitter.

    But the whole point of civilization is to override our worst instincts. We educate. We empathize. We evolve. We try to beat that tribal lizard-brain back into its cage, one generation at a time. Or, in the more cynical version of human progress, we just wait until all the bloodlines blend into one and racism becomes logistically impossible.

    MAGA seems uninterested in either path.

    I have MAGA friends—smart ones—who are slowly, quietly backing away from Trump. They don’t say it aloud, but I can see it. They’re starting to wince at the Proud Boys merch and the screaming matches at school board meetings. But they still can’t quite let go. They’ve convinced themselves MAGA is the “lesser of two evils,” that the left is so deranged that they must cling to the burning ship out of duty.

    But here’s the uncomfortable truth: while one of those “evils” is arguing over pronouns, the other one is now literally flirting with Nazi ideology. Not metaphorically. Not “like Nazis.” Actual Nazi language. Actual Nazi aesthetics. One staffer literally put a swastika-shaped American flag on his Capitol Hill office wall, like it was an ironic dorm poster.

    The GOP took a hard right, blew past Reagan, sideswiped Goldwater, and now fishtails somewhere between Franco and full-blown fascism, headlights off, tiki torch on.

    And still, my MAGA friends won’t change the channel. Even when they know they’re being lied to. Even when they feel the disgust in their gut. Tribalism is a hell of a drug. It overrides reason. It punishes doubt. It turns moral nausea into partisan loyalty.

    That’s how people who never would’ve said the word “Hitler” outside a history class end up defending it as a “joke.” That’s how the descent happens—not in a single leap, but in a thousand rationalizations, one meme, one tweet, one group chat at a time.

    This isn’t just a MAGA problem. It’s a human problem. We are all wired to pick sides and defend them, even when the facts rot out from underneath us. The only antidote is constant moral clarity—across the board, not just when it’s convenient. When you see people celebrating cruelty, racism, and violence, you don’t stay quiet. You don’t look for whataboutisms. You say: No. That’s not who we’re supposed to be.

    Because once the tribal drums drown out your conscience, you’ll look up and realize you’ve been goose-stepping for a while—and didn’t even notice the rhythm change.

  • What Makes Trump Bad at Business, Life, and As President?

    What Makes Trump Bad at Business, Life, and As President?

    I don’t build companies anymore. I may go back someday. When I found myself with time on my hands, I decided to learn a new skill. Now. I trade gold on the financial markets.

    When I first made that shift, I was terrible at it. Worse than most. Because I came in wired like an entrepreneur—obsessed with control, allergic to surrender. In business, that mindset serves you. You see what isn’t there yet, and you make it happen. You bend the world until it fits your plan.

    But markets don’t bend. Gold doesn’t care about your plans. It doesn’t care who you are. The market humbles everyone eventually.

    Even back when I built companies, though, I never lied to myself about the numbers. You could spin the story, but the math still had to work. That was the line between ambition and delusion.

    And that’s where Donald Trump went off the rails.

    Trump was never really in the real estate business. His true product was himself—the myth, the name, the attention. The buildings and casinos were just props in a lifelong campaign for validation. When your ego is the business, you can’t afford to face reality.

    That’s why he’d make a terrible trader.

    When the world doesn’t fit his story, he simply changes the story. When a recent jobs report came in weak, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and called the numbers “phony.” When intelligence briefings on the Iran strikes contradicted his claim that America had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, he dismissed the analysts and replaced them with loyalists. Each time, he traded truth for ego protection.

    It’s the same reason his casinos collapsed. The Taj Mahal was financed with nearly $700 million in junk bonds at 14% interest—a structure that guaranteed failure unless fantasy-level profits rolled in. When the math didn’t work, he doubled down instead of cutting losses. That’s not risk-taking. That’s denial.

    In trading, denial kills faster than bad luck. You can’t fire the chart. You can’t rebrand a losing position as “fake news.” You take the loss, you adapt, you move on.

    When I started trading gold, I had to unlearn my old wiring—the instinct to fix what’s outside my control. The market doesn’t reward force; it rewards alignment. You win when you stop fighting the tape and start listening to it.

    Trump never learned that lesson. He can’t. His entire existence depends on never admitting he’s wrong. He’s trapped inside the one product he can’t afford to discount: himself.

    That’s why he was a bad businessman.

    It’s why he’d be a disastrous trader.

    And it’s why he’s a dangerous president.

    Because on the world stage—where power, pride, and perception collide—his refusal to face reality doesn’t just cost him money. It costs nations time, credibility, and lives.

    In the end, the markets always find the truth. So does history.

    And the truth always settles the account.

  • Spain’s Quiet Flex

    Spain’s Quiet Flex

    Spain isn’t just “doing okay” while the rest of Europe nurses a hangover — it’s Europe’s outlier in a good way. Since early 2024, Spain has been growing at roughly three percent a year while the eurozone plods along near one. Credit markets noticed: S&P bumped the sovereign in mid-September, and within days Moody’s and Fitch followed suit. When all three ratings agencies are suddenly in a good mood about you, it’s usually because the story is real, not vibes. 

    The growth mix isn’t mysterious:

    • People: Spain opened the door while others slammed it. Net immigration has averaged around six hundred thousand a year since 2022, mostly working-age and heavily Latin American — which makes integration faster (language, culture, networks). That’s not a talking point; that’s the math. It’s also a big reason employment has hit records and consumer demand is sturdy.  
    • Power: Cheap, abundant renewables have turned Spain from a sunny tourist postcard into an energy-cost arbitrage play for industry and data-heavy services. In 2024, renewables supplied a record ~56% of electricity, and year-to-date 2025 has pushed higher. That lowers input costs and draws capital. (The grid, yes, needs beefing up after the April outage — and investments are now flowing.)  
    • Policy follow-through: NGEU funds have been deployed into real stuff (infrastructure, modernization), and earlier labor reforms tightened up job stability. Brussels’ baseline: Spain can still clock around 2.6% growth in 2025 — in Europe, that’s sprinting.  

    Now for the adult supervision: per-capita gains lag headline GDP, productivity is still yawning, and unemployment — although falling to around 10% — remains among the eurozone’s highest. The fix isn’t a new slogan; it’s a pipeline: streamline rules, crowd in long-term risk capital, and upskill into higher-value services (IT, finance, engineering). That’s where you turn an immigration-led demand pop into durable per-capita prosperity. 

    How Madrid plays its power in Europe

    Spain’s “soft power” used to be sunshine and tapas. Today it’s growth, grid, and people — a combination that gives Madrid surprising clout in EU tables where sluggish peers need a positive outlier. The message Spain quietly sends in Brussels: we can cut emissions, grow faster than you, and do it without slamming the door on newcomers. That lets Spain lean into:

    • Energy bargaining: With wind/solar scaling and interconnectors improving, Spain can punch above its weight in talks about EU power markets, grids, and decarbonization timelines. The subtext is “we’ve shown this can work — now fund the pipes.”  
    • Fiscal credibility: Upgrades from S&P/Moody’s/Fitch improve borrowing optics just as Europe re-tightens fiscal rules. That buys room to keep investing while others cut.  
    • Migration realism: While some capitals grandstand at the border, Spain’s labor-market-first posture is adding capacity exactly where Europe is short. That makes Madrid the practical voice when migration inevitably returns to the EU agenda.  

    What could blow this up? Politics and housing. Sánchez governs with dental floss; big reforms are a knife fight. And if rents keep outrunning wages and public services stay tight, tolerance for high inflows could fray — fast. The economic story is strong; the social license needs maintenance. 

    The scoreboard (for the macro geeks)

    • 2025 growth: Bank of Spain and the European Commission are in the ~2.6% camp; the government’s latest revision is a hair higher after a better-than-expected Q2. Either way, Spain is still outrunning the bloc.  
    • Labor: Unemployment near 10.3%, lowest since 2008 but still elevated versus EU peers. Youth unemployment remains sticky.  
    • Energy: 56% renewables in 2024, roughly ~59% so far in 2025 — with grid investment pledged after the spring blackout.  

    Catalonia: where things actually stand

    Madrid bet on de-escalation and legal normalization. The Amnesty Law for the 2017 independence cases passed and, crucially, Spain’s Constitutional Court upheld it on June 26, 2025. Application is case-by-case: many have already benefited, while high-profile figures like Puigdemont are still working through the process. Politics, not prisons, now dominates. 

    On public sentiment, support for independence has eased off its highs, bobbing around ~38–40% in 2025 surveys, with the Socialists (PSC) leading regionally and pro-independence parties recalibrating. Translation: the temperature is lower, the question isn’t “UDI tomorrow” but “what’s the next workable status that keeps growth and dignity intact?” 

    Bottom line: Spain’s edge right now is a rare mix — demographic momentum, green electrons, and steady EU cash channeled into the real economy. If the ruling class can keep the coalition intact, scale skills faster than rents, and turn grid upgrades into a 2030 powerhouse, Spain’s “quiet flex” becomes structural. If not, it risks being remembered as a great run of form that never quite converted to per-capita lift. I’m betting the former — but only if they keep treating immigration as an asset and productivity as the main event. 

  • Stop Calling It a Democracy! (Wait… Why?)

    Stop Calling It a Democracy! (Wait… Why?)

    You may have noticed a curious trend lately. Some of our friends on the right no longer refer to the United States as a democracy. That word, they insist with increasing vigor, is leftist propaganda. No, no—we’re not a democracy, they say. We’re a Constitutional Republic! As if they’ve just uncovered a glitch in the Matrix that invalidates everything from Schoolhouse Rock to centuries of American political thought.

    So what’s going on here?

    Well, I did some digging. And the main reason this talking point is echoing through the right-wing influencer ecosystem is that they believe calling the U.S. a “democracy” is part of a sinister leftist plot to abolish the Electoral College. You heard that right. The logic goes: if we keep calling this place a democracy, people might start thinking majority rule should actually mean majority rule—gasp—even in presidential elections.

    This line of reasoning usually shows up in social media debates where someone on the left refers to American democracy being in peril, and someone on the right jumps in with a “correction”: “We’re not a democracy. We’re a constitutional republic.”

    Now, I don’t want to be unkind, but if you’re one of the folks who thinks this is some sort of mic drop, I gently suggest you request a refund from your high school civics teacher. Because you’re not wrong—you’re just… not quite right enough to be taken seriously.

    Let’s break it down:

    America is, in fact, a democracy—that’s the genus. The species is constitutional republic. Think of it like this: If you have a dog at home, that’s the overall category. Golden retriever is the type of dog you have. Saying “the U.S. isn’t a democracy; it’s a constitutional republic” is like saying “that’s not a dog—it’s a golden retriever.” Technically true, but also deeply unserious.

    There are different flavors of democracy around the world. Some countries are parliamentary democracies (like the U.K. or Canada), others are social democracies (like Sweden or Norway), and some are semi-presidential republics (like France). We, for better or worse, are a constitutional republic with representative democracy baked into the cake.

    That means:
    We elect people to make decisions for us (representative democracy),
    Those decisions are limited by a founding document (constitutional),

    And, despite what your uncle insists, the will of the people is supposed to matter.

    That doesn’t mean pure majority rule. Nobody’s suggesting we run the country by Twitter poll (though let’s be honest, that might still yield better outcomes than certain state legislatures). But it does mean that the people—yes, all the people—are meant to be the ultimate source of authority. That’s the beating heart of any democracy, constitutional or otherwise.

    The right’s sudden allergy to the word “democracy” isn’t really about semantics. It’s about power. More specifically, it’s about preserving minority rule through institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate—where a few hundred thousand voters in Wyoming get more say than millions in California. And let’s not even talk about gerrymandering. (No, really, let’s not. My blood pressure.)

    So the next time someone tells you that “we’re not a democracy,” feel free to smile politely and respond: “That’s not a dog—it’s a golden retriever.” Then, if you’re feeling generous, you can remind them that the Founders literally used the word “democracy” in their writings—Jefferson, Madison, Franklin—all of them. They warned about its dangers, yes, but they were also building toward it, not away from it.

    This wordplay trend might seem harmless, but words matter. Pretending we’re not a democracy opens the door to justifying all kinds of anti-democratic behavior. If the people don’t really matter, then voter suppression, gerrymandering, and minority rule start to look like features, not bugs.

    And when a former president is back in office promising to be “your retribution,” that’s not the time to start downgrading the concept of democracy. That’s the time to defend it like it’s the last golden retriever on Earth.

  • When the MAGAverse Starts Salivating Over Violence, You Should Pay Attention

    When the MAGAverse Starts Salivating Over Violence, You Should Pay Attention

    The assassination of Charlie Kirk should have been a moment of unified horror. A line no one crosses. A point where even the most jaded among us stop the memes, take a breath, and agree that political violence is off-limits.

    Instead?

    MAGA took a torch to that line.

    They didn’t mourn. They mobilized.

    Overnight, Kirk’s death became a rallying cry—not just for justice, but for vengeance. Not just against the shooter, but against everyone not wearing a red hat. The same people who once screamed “false flag” at every mass shooting suddenly found deep clarity: This was the left’s fault. This was Biden’s America. This was war.

    You could feel it pulsing through Telegram threads and X posts like a glitch in the Matrix: This wasn’t grief. This was glee. A strategic opportunity. The narrative hardened within hours—before the body was even cold: “The left did this. The media did this. The FBI did this. Now it’s time to respond.”

    And that’s when I started to feel really uneasy.

    Because underneath the performative rage and red-faced shouting, you can detect something quieter—and far more dangerous: calculation.

    There are elements on the far right who want unrest.

    Not just because it makes for good fundraising, or because it fires up the base.

    But because chaos can be useful.

    If society feels like it’s spinning out, you can justify extraordinary responses. Crackdowns. Curfews. Maybe even martial law.

    Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Trump already floated the idea of postponing the 2020 election. His allies pushed martial law as a real option after he lost. There’s precedent—not legal precedent, but emotional precedent—for crossing these lines when the moment feels just unstable enough.

    And now?

    We’re teetering.

    The institutions meant to hold the line are wobbling. Public trust is cratering. FBI resources for investigating domestic terrorism were gutted not long ago—dismissed as political overreach by the very people who now act shocked that political violence is escalating.

    They didn’t want the threat exposed. Because some of them saw political gain in pretending it didn’t exist.

    But here we are.

    Kirk is dead. Other politicians have been assassinated. People online are openly calling for civil war like it’s just a slightly spicier sequel to January 6.

    And the temperature keeps rising.

    The truth is, when elections feel rigged, when facts feel fluid, and when citizens feel voiceless, violence starts to look like a microphone.

    That’s not a left-wing or right-wing problem. That’s a human problem. And it’s one we’ve seen before—in history books, in failed democracies, in collapsing regimes where conspiracy becomes currency and strongmen promise “order” in exchange for obedience.

    You think that couldn’t happen here?

    It’s already trying to.

    And when MAGA influencers start spinning assassinations into political momentum—not in spite of the violence, but because of it—it’s not just disgusting. It’s terrifying.

    This is the moment where we need to get our damn heads on straight.

    Because if we keep feeding this beast, it won’t stop at speeches or Senate hearings. It will demand more blood. More enemies. More obedience.

    And once the fire gets hot enough, it doesn’t care who it burns.