Mike McCready

Tag: history

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • We Don’t Know Who Shot Charlie Kirk, So Let’s Be Wary of What We Say

    We Don’t Know Who Shot Charlie Kirk, So Let’s Be Wary of What We Say

    We don’t know who shot Charlie Kirk. We don’t know why. That hasn’t stopped social media from turning into a rumor carnival, with some voices — maybe bots, maybe just trolls — openly calling for civil war. And guess who loves that? Russia and China. They don’t have to fire a shot if they can convince Americans to do the dirty work themselves.

    The playbook is simple: flood the zone with fake suspects, doctored headlines, and AI-generated nonsense. Stoke fear, anger, and mistrust until we’re too busy hating each other to notice who’s lighting the match. Chaos is cheaper than tanks, and it travels faster on Wi-Fi.

    And sure, it’s not impossible that a foreign adversary had a hand in this. Iran has already been caught plotting assassinations on U.S. soil — from John Bolton to Donald Trump himself. Could Kirk have been a softer target? Maybe. But notice that word: maybe. Even saying it out loud is speculation, and speculation without evidence is just free labor for the disinformation machine.

    So here’s the ask: don’t do their work for them. Don’t share every outrage bait headline that confirms your darkest suspicions. Don’t treat speculation as gospel. If you really want to serve your country in this moment, the most patriotic thing you can do is… wait.

    Because foreign adversaries don’t need us to lose a war. They just need us to lose our heads.

  • What Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Means for America

    What Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Means for America

    (And why it should terrify us—not along party lines, but as citizens.)

    Charlie Kirk, was assassinated today at Utah Valley University. This comes just weeks after a shocking double assassination in Minnesota—two state legislators gunned down in what’s now being investigated as a politically motivated attack. You’d be forgiven for losing track. That’s how fast the temperature is rising.

    Before anything else, I want to express my deepest condolences to Charlie Kirk’s family, friends, and supporters. No matter where you stand politically, no one deserves this. And no country should normalize it.

    But what this isn’t—what this cannot ever be—is just another political tragedy we scroll past. This is unfiltered desperation and failure seeping into our public life.

    We’ve had assassination attempts before—on Trump, on members of Congress—but killing a political influencer in broad daylight on a campus? That’s crossing yet another line.

    We need to stop pretending that violence is a random accident or “outlier.” Hatred isn’t burbling under the surface—it’s flooding the streets. Killings like this don’t just raise eyebrows; they expose how far tribalism has eroded civility.

    Meanwhile, the very infrastructure meant to prevent this—our domestic terror intelligence—is being dismantled. The FBI has slashed staffing in its Domestic Terrorism Operations Section and shuttered its tracking database on hate crimes and school shootings. Prevention is now reactive.

    You feel the threat more clearly each day. You wonder: if someone like Charlie Kirk can be killed in public view, are you next? Are we?

    This wouldn’t be happening if people believed the system still worked. But they don’t. Polls show falling trust in elections, in the press, even in whether your vote matters. Add in constant messaging from the top that institutions are rigged—or worse, that they’re enemies.

    When people believe their voice can’t be heard they begin to feel violence is the message.

    I’ve seen people openly whisper and tweet about civil war. That used to sound unhinged. Now it sounds like something that could happen. And that’s the most dangerous whisper echoing across this country.

    So Where Do We Go from Here?

    If you want to say this is just “rhetoric,” know this: it is already worse than rhetoric. It’s violence.

    If you want to say the FBI or justice system can handle this alone, know this: they’re being de-funded and starved of resources.

    If you want to say elections still matter, ask yourself: what message are you sending when you don’t defend them?

    We need to demand more than prayers. We have to demand two simple things:

    1. Rebuild counterterrorism infrastructure. Money. Personnel. Tools. No more willful ignorance. Don’t allow this to be the beginning of events that give a certain someone the excuse he’s seeking to declare martial law.

    2. Restore faith in institutions. Hold elected officials accountable for their rhetoric. Defend objective fact. Support independent media.

    Because right now, we’re living in what feels like a slow-motion breakdown—not of ideas, but of the very architecture that held democracy together. And when that collapses, violence becomes communication.

    So, yeah: Civil war talk? It’s not crazy anymore. It’s proof that our political ecosystem is cracked open.

    And if that isn’t a moment when decent people across all divides come together—voting, organizing, standing in unified outrage—then what exactly were we saving democracy for?

  • Gen X: We Were Supposed to Be Too Sharp for This Sh*t

    Gen X: We Were Supposed to Be Too Sharp for This Sh*t

    There’s a very specific kind of shame in watching a country fall apart and realizing your generation was supposed to stop it.

    We were the skeptical kids. The “don’t fall for it” crowd. We grew up with irony, sarcasm, and a healthy distrust of institutions. We made fun of cults. We rolled our eyes at televangelists. We knew better.

    At least, we thought we did.

    We were the last analog generation—and the first digital one. We knew how to rewind a cassette and reboot a modem. We brought the internet into being, and with it, the promise of better information, smarter systems, and a more connected world.

    We gave the world Google, Amazon, YouTube.

    We gave it Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, the Wu-Tang Clan.

    We built the platforms. Designed the interfaces.

    We were supposed to be the bridge between what was and what could be.

    But now?

    We’re watching the whole thing buckle—and pretending we’re just observers.

    We post memes about how great it was to grow up drinking from hoses, while an entire generation can’t afford rent, let alone a mortgage.

    We forward videos about “the good old days” while Gen Z drowns in debt, climate fear, and medical bills for anxiety disorders they inherited from watching us lose the plot.

    And who’s in charge now?

    Trump. Again.

    President 2.0.

    This time with fewer guardrails, more power, and even less shame.

    And standing right behind him, RFK Jr.—now Secretary of Health—gutting the CDC, firing career scientists, and rebuilding America’s public health policy around gut feelings and internet comment sections.

    We used to point at the USSR and say, “Those poor people don’t get real news—just government propaganda.”

    Now we’ve got half the country cheering for our own state-run media, rage-bait headlines, and “alternative facts,” while willingly ignoring everything they know is true.

    We’re not living in 1984. We’re living in something dumber.

    A self-inflicted propaganda state where people know it’s bullshit—and eat it up anyway.

    And Gen X?

    We were supposed to be immune to this.

    Too jaded. Too sharp. Too allergic to fascism.

    We were supposed to be the firewall.

    But we ghosted.

    No Gen X president because the boomers.

    No major Gen X political movement.

    No defining generational stand.

    We just kept scrolling.

    Kept reposting.

    Kept telling ourselves we were “above it.”

    But the truth is—we’re blowing it.

    We were there when the rot was setting in.

    And we didn’t stop it.

    We let the dumbest grifter of our lifetime sell America a cheap hat and a fake war on reality.

    We watched as housing became a luxury, healthcare became a subscription plan, and truth became a punchline.

    We let RFK Jr. cosplay as a truth-teller while he dismantled actual science.

    And now, with AI about to automate our jobs, scrape our souls, and deepfake us into oblivion, we’re busy sharing memes about the 80s while billionaires plug themselves into immortality servers.

    We were supposed to be the generation that didn’t fall for bs.

    Instead, we’re managing the collapse like theme park actors refusing to break character while the rollercoaster catches fire.

    And yeah, I’m a bit crispy about all of this.

    Not just at Trump. Not just at RFK Jr.

    But at us.

    We were supposed to be too sharp for this sh*t.

    We were supposed to know better.

    We were supposed to do better.

    And if we don’t wake up—right now—history won’t even remember our failure.

    It’ll be too busy documenting the fallout.

    So come on Gen X. It’s time!

  • From Beacon to Bully: America’s New Foreign Policy

    From Beacon to Bully: America’s New Foreign Policy

    There was a time when American leadership meant something more than military might or economic muscle. It meant moral weight. A compass. At our best, we didn’t just throw our power around—we tried to stand for something.

    That version of America—the one that championed democracy, human rights, and the rule of law—is fading fast. What’s replacing it is colder. Meaner. And much more transactional.

    We used to build alliances. Now we issue ultimatums.
    We used to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. Now we fast-track visas for white South Africans and detain brown migrants in outsourced Central American prisons.
    We once told autocrats they couldn’t jail dissidents without consequences. Now we tell them we admire their strength—and ask for cheaper oil.

    And when the world asks what happened, the answer is simple: America stopped leading with its values. We started leading with threats. With muscle. With grievance.

    We became the kind of country that guts its diplomatic corps in the middle of a global crisis. That fires 1,300 career foreign service professionals in a single week, like they’re office temps, not the architects of American influence abroad.

    And the man carrying out that purge? Marco Rubio.

    Yes, that Marco Rubio. The same one who once gave eloquent speeches about human dignity and moral clarity. The son of Cuban immigrants who defended foreign aid, democracy promotion, and immigration reform. The rising star who called Donald Trump a “con artist” for demonizing the very people Rubio claimed to represent.

    Today, that man is dismantling the very institutions he once praised. He’s torched USAID, shuttered human rights programs, defunded diplomatic broadcasting, pulled the U.S. out of UNESCO, and labeled peaceful protesters “lunatics.” He’s implemented social media surveillance for visa applicants, fast-tracked refugee status for the far-right’s pet narratives, and signed deals with authoritarian regimes to incarcerate migrants off-site.

    In short, he’s become a blunt instrument for Trump’s foreign policy—one that replaces values with vengeance, and diplomacy with dominance.

    It’s not that America’s interests have changed. It’s that we’ve stopped pretending they’re tied to our ideals. Human rights only matter when they serve us. Democracy is optional. And if you’re a dictator with oil or leverage, congratulations—you’re invited to the table.

    Rubio didn’t start this trend. But he’s riding it hard. Because somewhere along the line, ambition replaced principle. The man who once wept talking about immigrant families now uses the word “invasion.” The man who warned against tyrants now enables them. The boyish idealist who once seemed like the future of a better GOP now exists to prove it never really existed.

    And look—he’s not alone. Plenty of politicians lose themselves chasing power. But Rubio’s transformation is more than personal. It’s symbolic.

    Because if even he couldn’t hold the line—if even someone who spoke so fluently about America’s promise could be seduced into bulldozing it—then we’re not just dealing with a few bad actors.

    We’re dealing with a culture shift.

    We’ve stopped asking, “What’s right?” and started asking, “What can we get away with?”

    We’ve stopped inspiring the world—and started threatening it.

    And unless we course-correct soon, the country that once lit the way for others may find itself not just feared—but forgotten.