I love to live in America, a country where every day you wake up feeling like Pete Hegseth personally knocked you in the face with a skateboard, and you get to play my favorite little game, “Am I Dying?”

Is it the stress of knowing my health care costs are rising, and so are the costs of my medications?

The rising cost of literally everything due to tariffs? The only thing Trump hasn’t put a tariff on is stupidity, because that would amount to a tax on the wealthy.

Was my pillow positioned incorrectly, thereby causing a pain in my body so severe that it has me confessing to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby?

Is it allergies, which have gotten worse thanks to global climate change and a country that thinks polluting the environment has no consequences?

Is it the knowledge that the administration is sending armed ICE agents into people’s homes without warrants and disappearing them without due process?

Perimenopause?

Blond influencers on Instagram keep telling me to wake up early, splash my face with spring water, and eat more protein. But no amount of protein powder is going to defend me against the rising tide of authoritarianism. Maybe I need some creatine?

At no point has eating more boneless skinless chicken breast made me feel better, and the water in Iowa is poisoned, so at this point I’m just going to take up smoking, swallow seven Tylenol each morning, and bathe in red dye #3 until the microplastics in my brain become sentient and take over.

Welcome, my friends, to the Dingus of the Week newsletter. Each Friday, I make fun of someone or something in the news that has made our lives just a little or a lot worse.

In a time when Jimmy Fallon is being a coward and Stephen Colbert is being canceled, I think it’s even more important to make jokes and to laugh at the army of lobotomized incels running our country. To quote the late and great Molly Ivins, “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.”

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This week, Dunning-Kruger poster boy Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called all the nation’s generals into a room to give them a 40-minute speech that could have been a three-minute TikTok, which could have been a 10-second skateboard to the nuts, or alternatively, an email.

Traditionally, the military does not like to gather all its top commanders into one room because it’s too tempting to our greatest enemies, who continue to target America, our freedoms, and our way of life.

By which I mean other white men.

But Pete, who looks like a nondenominational youth pastor just seconds away from being discovered on Grindr, had an important message that could not be an email, a Zoom call, or a TikTok.

For days leading up to the event, news commentators wondered what the message could be that was so important. What could the man who looks like if Yakety Sax was a person and also drunk have to say to the leaders of the greatest military presence in the world?

Well, listen up chucklefucks, because Pete Hegseth downed a 32oz of vodka and rolled onto that stage and delivered a rousing address to the military that makes the St. Crispin’s Day speech look like a PowerPoint from Brenda in HR.

What did he tell them? Not to get fat.

It’s not like I had high hopes for Hegseth. Trump’s second administration is run wholly by crooks, dorks, brainworms, and sentient lip filler. But Hegseth, a man so sauced even Prego won’t jar him, spent millions of taxpayer money on the day the government shut down to gather everyone together and tell them to stop being so fat.

Anyway, here’s Pete Hegseth hitting himself in the nuts.

@trendy_viewz#PeteHegseth accidentally flipping a #skateboard into his nuts on live TV

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And now for something good

This week, past DotW winner Eric Adams dropped out of the NYC mayoral race, leaving America’s largest village in want of an idiot. RIP to the campaign of a man who made Mr. Bean look like Albert Einstein. (New Yorkers, the nation is counting on you to bear in mind that Andrew Cuomo has spent tens of millions of dollars of your money to defend himself in multiple sexual harassment lawsuits. Please do the right thing.)

The beloved children’s television show “Reading Rainbow” is coming back. This time, the host will be Mychal Threets, the internet’s favorite librarian.

Happy Taylor Swift Day to all who celebrate.

And Philadelphia has its first queer women’s sports bar!

Mark Duplass launched a production fund for queer filmmakers.

Garrett Bucks and Sarah Wheeler have a new podcast. And you know what? That’s very good news.

Like so many ambitious girls who grew up to be called “difficult” women, I loved Jane Goodall. And while I am sad that she died this week, she led an incredible life.

In response to the president’s repeated attacks on the First Amendment, Jane Fonda is reviving a Cold War-era activist group. I really loved the deep dive that one of my favorite podcasts, You Must Remember This, did on Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg. It’s worth listening to recall the smear campaigns that the FBI orchestrated against these women and how so many people believed them and still do.

Nicole Kidman, welcome back.

Something I am enjoying

This week, I am in Maine to run a writing workshop hosted by the MidCoast Villager. The Villager is a small, local, independent newspaper run by my friends Alex Seitz-Wald and Willy Blackmore, who edit the paper, and Lucia Graves, who works on the marketing side.

What a delight to see my friends and spend time in the beautiful world they live in. I ate at Primo, one of the best restaurants in Maine, and made so many jokes about “airy balls” I thought I was going to get kicked out of the place.

The workshop was designed to drive revenue to the paper, which, like so many small newspapers in America, is struggling. But we need these papers and these voices. We need to tell these stories because they are a record of our lives and the things that give them meaning. And even if these stories feel small and inconsequential, in the overwhelming onslaught of a world of genocide and attacks on our democracy, they are the very texture of our lives. Sure, maybe a story about road construction on Highway 1A isn’t the most glamorous thing to write, but it’s far more important to the people who need that highway to get to work than a profile of a famous actress. Every story about a new restaurant is the story of someone’s dream, someone’s future hope. Every story about a high school athlete is a story of triumph. Every story about a local artist is the story of artistic freedom and vision. And every single time we write a story that tells the truth about our lives, even just the fact that we existed, and ate food, and had one glorious night, we leave a reminder that we lived and that we mattered.

🏠 I recently conducted a survey about this newsletter, and so many of you told me you wanted more essays on single parenting and homemaking. You asked about how I am muddling through all of this *waves at the world* with kids. And about how I co-parent with someone who, let’s just say, when Roe was overturned, served cupcakes to celebrate all the babies who wouldn’t be murdered anymore. I live this political divide in ways so deeply personal that it’s a blood, flesh, and tears reminder that politics is not some abstruse power game. The news isn’t some hysterical abstraction. These are our lives.

🏠 So this newsletter is about all of that.

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This week, two men with saws came and cut down my children’s playset and hauled it away.

I had tried to give away the playset for free to anyone who wanted it. I posted pictures online and had family after family come look at it and ask me skeptical questions about its safety, would it fall? Would it give their kids splinters? Was it sturdy? Was it right for a 5-year-old? What about a 10-year-old? What was the weight limit? What was the age of the playset?

I didn’t know the answers to those questions. The playset was here when we moved in, and I couldn’t find its equivalent online. I told them how my kids loved it when we moved in in 2019, how it was their hideout in 2020, how we painted the inside with stars and tree branches, how they made broomsticks out of old branches and duct tape and rode on the swings with their sticks and pretended like they were witches. How it held together when my daughter ran up there crying after her birthday party was canceled in 2020 and then again in 2021. How it held me when I sat in the swing after being fired, and I had days of emptiness and fear. How it had survived the inland hurricane of 2020, and the neighbor’s tree just missed smashing it into pieces, and how it sheltered the fairy world we’d built underneath it, and how that, too, had survived. And look, there were still little fairy people hiding in the dirt, although they were fading and worn.

None of these were assurances enough for parents who wanted facts, statistics, schematics, and weight limits.

I heard one woman whisper to her father, who had come to test the playset with her, “It’s not worth the risk.”

It’s ironic, I think, in a state that overwhelmingly votes to preserve gun rights and takes away food assistance for kids, that everyone who comes here is so worried about the safety of the playset. And I am a little angry because of course, it’s safe; it has been for us! But also, I know she’s right: Things that are safe for a moment aren’t always safe forever.

The playset was here before I bought this house. I don’t know how old it was, and maybe it wouldn’t have been safe for another family. Maybe it would have been a risk rather than a rescue.

So I paid those men to chop it down and haul it away.

I bought my house in 2019. I’d walked through it with my realtor and immediately wanted it because of the back porch, the trees, and the oak floors, and how, when my daughter saw it, she said it looked like a witch’s cottage. But I was a single mom, living off freelance work and books, and even though I had been paying a rent much higher than my mortgage would be, and had two years of tax returns showing I was stable, I couldn’t get a loan unless I had a job offer. I’d been interviewing for jobs for over a year because I needed health insurance. And two places assured me they were going to make me an offer — soon. But those offers hadn’t come through yet. So I didn’t have the loan, and I couldn’t make an offer. The house was soon listed as sold.

Four weeks later, it was back on the market again. The prospective buyers hadn’t really wanted an old house after all. I went back to the bank; this time, I was employed. My local newspaper had given me an offer to work full-time for $49,000, which put me just under the poverty line for a family of three. But it was what the bank needed, so I got the loan. And I got the house.

Six months later, when the world shut down, this house became our refuge.

The first thing I did when I heard about the shutdowns happening across America was to buy a trampoline for my kids. I did not have the money for it. But I bought it anyway. If our world was going to shrink to the size of this house, I wanted us to have some fun.

And how many days that year did I sit at the kitchen table trying to work while my kids played outside? Watching them jump on the trampoline and climb in the playset. My daughter took old curtains from the basement and hung them in the playhouse. She took blankets up there and made nests for herself and her brother, and they sat there in a world where they felt safe, while I watched from a world that felt out of control.

My son began having nightmares in March of 2020 and stopped sleeping in his bed. He told me he dreamed of evil red balloons that flew in the sky and hovered over him and his sister. He said he didn’t know what the balloons would do, but he was scared. And I asked him, where was he safe in the dream? And he said in his playhouse. So I told him to dream about the playhouse.

For centuries, women could not own property. And even once they could, it was hard. Hard to get a line of credit at a bank without a man’s signature. Impossible to get a loan without some approval, some backing, some signoff from a man. When I told a friend who owns his own business how hard it had been to get the loan, he was confused. He’d gotten his home loan when he was in debt up to his eyeballs with his first restaurant. Maybe I’d done something wrong?

When I left my marriage, my husband accused me of ruining the home. But hadn’t I been the one who’d painted it; cleaned it; organized and arranged it? That home still stood and still does. Another wife now arranges pillows and vacuums rugs. Most of the walls are still the same color I painted them 20 years ago.

Homemaking is the domain of women, a service we are supposed to render in service of men. Something I am reminded of every time I try to fix something in my home. “Is it just you?” They’ll ask. “Is there a husband who needs to sign off on these decisions?”

Just us, is the answer. Just the three of us. This is our home; this is where we feel safe.

The homes women share with men are not safe. Thirty percent of marriages involve intimate partner violence. This doesn’t count the instances of emotional and financial and verbal abuse.

But making your home on your own isn’t easy. Women still face discrimination when buying homes. Despite the fact that single female homeownership eclipses men, we pay more for our mortgages and often sell our homes for less.

I wasn’t ruining a home, as my husband had said. I was making a new one. And what I had done wrong was imagine that instead of trapping me, this house could be my freedom. That instead of hiding me away, it could be my harbor.

And it has been. In a state people leave, in an America destroyed by violence, I have created something beautiful.

But every act of creation is an act of demolition.

So the playset is gone, making room for what I hope will be a fire pit where my children and their friends will sit on summer nights surrounded by all the flowers I hope to grow. And I know demolition means loss, but it also means creating space for possibility. I am so happy my kids have lived long enough to outgrow a playset. What a gift to watch children age in a country that criminalizes their identities and watches them die in school shootings. If I can imagine a future here in this backyard, I can build it.

On Sunday, I write an essay and then offer up a buffet of internet reads curated by me and my assistant editor, Isabella.

These are paywalled because, well, this newsletter is a full-time job. And your money creates jobs for me and Isabella jobs in a state where there aren’t many jobs in the media. It also helps us be independent in a time when independent voices are being silenced.

Today, I am not paywalling the essay. Please read, and subscribe if you can.

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I saw it like so many other people, on a video on my phone. I was on Instagram and a friend had reposted a video of Jorge Gonzalez, an employee of the Bread Garden in Iowa City, being thrown to the ground and arrested by two men, identified in the video as ICE agents.

The Bread Garden is a Whole Foods-like market located on the pedestrian mall. The Bread Garden is a central hub for the small college town. At any moment of any day, the patio is occupied by students doing homework or professors eating sandwiches and flipping through pages of books. Across the mall is a playground, newly redone with rubber padding and colorful climbing equipment.

Gonzalez is an immigrant whose son is an American citizen. He came to Iowa earlier this year to join his partner, to start a family, and to begin a new life. He reported regularly to ICE and was being monitored with an ankle bracelet. If they wanted to detain him, they knew where he lived. They knew how to find him and bring him in without violence or intimidation.

Instead, plainclothes officers, who did not identify themselves, went into the crowded market right at the beginning of the lunch rush, attacked Gonzalez, threw him to the ground, and arrested him.

My son saw the video and said, “Isn’t that illegal?” Yes, I said, but no one can enforce the laws when it’s the police breaking them. That night, during their nightly phone call, I overheard my kids’ dad tell my son that Gonzalez must be a bad guy, must have done something bad.

I didn’t shout, “Whatever helps you sleep at night, asshole.” But I wanted to. Maybe I will next time. There seem to be no rules to the cruelty; maybe there should be no more rules to my civility.

Iowa City is sometimes, jokingly or not so jokingly, referred to as the People’s Republic of Johnson County. It’s one of the only safe Democratic strongholds in a state that still wants to believe it’s purple, but is in fact, deeply, deeply red. I have friends who talk about how they want to move somewhere better, somewhere bluer, somewhere safer.

Gonzalez isn’t the first person arrested without cause in the middle of the day, by men not in uniform. He won’t be the last. And this is happening in places that didn’t vote for Trump, that protested him, that held and hold demonstrations and rallies.

Johnson County, where Iowa City is located, is where Jon Green, the county supervisor, defied the governor’s orders and refused to fly the flag at half-staff for Charlie Kirk. In defense of Green’s stance, another supervisor, Mandi Remington, stated, “Johnson county is home to a diverse community, including many who were the direct targets of Kirk’s rhetoric. To honor him with our flags would be to dismiss the harm he caused to our neighbors and constituents.”

“Supervisor Green’s stance affirms that our county will not elevate voices that work to strip others of dignity, freedom, and belonging. I believe this decision is a principled one, rooted in respect for the people of Johnson county and the constitutional values we are sworn to protect.”

Nowhere is safe.

That’s the point of these public arrests. They’re a show of force. A statement that is supposed to make us afraid.

These aren’t just arrests; they are disappearings by an authoritarian and secret police that answers to no one except the whims of an increasingly vindictive president who is going after his political opponents, weaponizing our government against us.

On Friday, I went to a protest against ICE and I heard Gonzalez’s partner speak about the violence of losing him, of what it means to have someone you love to just be taken away in the middle of the day with no answers, no recourse. The unknowing of it. The confusion. The understanding that this is the government, and there is no one to appeal to. No higher authority. There is only us. Us to stand up to this.

After the rally I spoke with the lawmakers in attendance, some of whom want to plan trainings so people can interfere with ICE next time. So they can, if not stop them, stand up to them. And I spoke with other politicians who talked about the harassment they’re receiving for even speaking out against it. Not just online, either; they’re the targets of vitriol from their neighbors, who might come up to a politician’s mother at church and tell her to get her kid to shut up. Somehow worse are the people who encourage moderation, the ones who are supposed to be the leaders, who say, “It’s not that bad. Just be civil. Just be polite.”

After the protest, I walked to get lunch with a friend, and her phone pinged. There had been another arrest, Ian Roberts, the superintendent of the Des Moines Public Schools, who was born in Guyana and grew up in Brooklyn. He was also an Olympic athlete.

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Last week, Ezra Klein was runner-up for Dingus of the Week for surgically removing his own spine and tossing it in the garbage disposal of punditry. As I wrote then:

​​…no one was working harder to aid and abet the cause of fascism than Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, who rushed to defend Charlie Kirk’s legacy from Kirk’s own words. Literally no one was asking him to do this, but he was like, “Oh, we need a reasonable centrist to provide a veneer to hate? I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!”

It’s the stupidest Hunger Games of all time.1

And I thought I was done writing about Klein and his backbone of soggy toilet paper. But he was back this week with a new proposal: Democrats, stop running on abortion rights.

Here was his full quote:

My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.

Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.

That’s right, you little weasels: A white guy with a beard is here to tell you how to win an election. So put down your matcha lattes or whatever bisexual beverages you drink and LISTEN UP. Here is the plan: To stop authoritarianism, you must give up all your rights. And by “you” Ezra Klein means anyone not him.

Oh you don’t get it? Let me explain again, because I think there was vegan cheese in your ears. In a country where people’s rights are being stripped away and an authoritarian president is actively silencing voices of dissent, Klein’s brilliant idea (derogatory) is to toss even more rights overboard.

Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice he’s willing to make!

Klein is arguing that Democrats must run candidates who oppose a policy that is so popular even Republicans showed up in red states to pass measures protecting the right to an abortion.

A Pew study this year found 85 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Abortion rights are one of the few things Americans agree on, alongside hamburgers are good and Mitch McConnell is bad.

As you can see, Klein — who is so much smarter than you, with your little pea brain — has made a compelling case: We must simply toss your rights off this boat, as though sacrificing Jonah to the whale, to calm the storms of fascism in America.

What a choice to look at the vast hellscape of American democracy and think, “Okay, the solution is depriving half these people of even more of their rights.”

Ezra Klein is so quick to yeet people’s rights out the window you have to wonder how much he actually believes in them. If Ezra Klein had to make Sophie’s Choice he’d be like “fuck all dem kids.”

If Klein were King Solomon and two women each claimed the same baby was theirs, his solution would be to take away their right to health care and tell them Charlie Kirk was a hero.

Faced with the Gordian Knot, Ezra Klein would interview three pro-knot pundits and write a 700-word op-ed arguing that dialogue with the knot is the only way to fix America.2

Ezra Klein in the French Revolution would spend the entire time chiding the sans-culottes for not wearing pants.

Ezra Klein during the Salem Witch Trials would be like, “I saw Goody Proctor getting health care!”

With Democrats like these, we don’t need Trump and his supporters to take our rights away. We’ll do it ourselves.

Dingus Runner-Up: Jeremy Carl

A Trump State Department nominee has been busy cleaning up his past on social media, where he promoted the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy, said Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted, and accused all Democrats of being evil fascists.

In any other era of American history these tweets would get him sent off to run the Heritage Foundation. But it’s Trump’s America, so really the dingusry here is that he tried to delete them and did a crap job at it. Also, if he’d doubled down on them and gotten some lip filler, he could be running the Department of Homeland Security.

Where are those dinguses now?

Ryan Walters, a two-time dingus winner whom you may know as that perpetually damp-looking man from Oklahoma who thinks the Bible belongs in classrooms and porn belongs on his work computer, has resigned his role leading Oklahoma’s schools. That must have been some serious (alleged) porn, my guy.

Cancel culture has gone too far when men simply cannot (allegedly) watch porn on their work computers during meetings. But Walters, unlike Carl, parlayed his right-wing extremism into a job with a conservative nonprofit. And I am sure he will be back.

And now for something good

Global philanthropies are working together to make a promising HIV treatment more widely available.

While not a cure, researchers have been able to treat Huntington’s for the first time, offering a glimmer of hope for people who suffer from the disease and their families.

MacKenzie Scott literally cannot give all her money away. But she’s trying, bless her. This week she donated $70 million to HBCUs.

Chicago gets an all-women’s sports bar!

There is some great news for rabies vaccines!

And the worst person we know, past dingus winner Ted Cruz, actually made some good points.

Fat Bear week continues! Fat Bear week is sponsored by the National Park Service and is like a March Madness bracket where bears go compete for the fattest among them right before hibernation kicks in. This year there is a bear named Flotato, because he naps and floats. Here are some pictures of Flotato, our bear king. If Flotato doesn’t win, I’m going to make January 6 look like a 5-year-old’s birthday party, I swear to god.

Just a reminder that while politicians and pundits continue to let us down, we are the hope here in America. Shout out to all the people protesting ICE. Are you all chiropractors? Because you are out here showing us what a spine looks like.

Ayman Soliman, an Egyptian hospital chaplain, finally won his release after being jailed and threatened with deportation.

Something I am enjoying

This summer, I finally got my backyard landscaped to handle some lingering derecho damage to the retaining wall and fence. And while I was at it, I had the back patio redone, and, I am ashamed to admit, a water feature put in. (It runs off recycled rainwater!)

I spend at least 80 percent of my time at home on my back porch. Even when it’s cold and snowy, I’ve been known to wrap up in a robe, stuff chips in my pocket, grab a heated blanket and have some whiskey out there. The porch was the reason I fell in love with this house. And the backyard has these two gorgeous pine trees that somehow survived the derecho, and we put up a hammock between them, where my kids play a game they call “legitment” where they spin each other around in the hammock until I’m sure someone is going to die.

Perhaps, in hindsight, I picked the best summer of my life to do this project. Road construction in front of my house, plus the backyard construction, plus being busy as hell, meant my house has been perpetually dirty and I’ve been stressed out. In my defense, usually when you ask a company to do a big project, they are like, “We will fit you in … in 18 months.” When I was trying to get renovations done on my bathroom, I had to beg the company, “Please do it before my son hits puberty!” And they did, barely.

But the backyard is done now. And the past couple of mornings I’ve spent outside in a chair, reading books, listening to the water, trying to forget about the decline of man.

And yesterday, I took some time off to plant an offensive amount of hydrangeas. It occurred to me that when the apocalypse settles in, the survivalists who camp out at my house will curse me for focusing on pretty flowers over vegetables, but I’ll be too busy being conscripted into nannying for Andrew Tate’s kids to care.

On October 22, 1844, thousands of Christians in England, in New York and across the Midwest gathered in fields and on hillsides, desperately waiting for the sound of heavenly trumpets and for the Lord Jesus to bring them up into the heavens.

The day had been prophesied by a New York farmer turned Baptist minister, William Miller. Miller fought for the Americans during the War of 1812 and was present at the Battle of Plattsburgh, where the Americans, who were severely outnumbered, defeated the British. After witnessing the horrific devastation and loss of that battle, Miller concluded that the Americans had won only due to the mighty hand of God.

After the war, Miller returned home and faced even more loss — the deaths of his father and sister. In despair, he spent years researching, trying to calculate the coming of the Lord, who would save him and his followers from the misery of war and disease. At first, Miller determined Christ would come on March 21, 1844 — but then, no, he apologized; he’d gotten it wrong. It would be in April — nope, sorry, more apologies. He finally settled on October.

But Jesus never came. The Millerites were devastated. As one faithful follower, Hiram Edson, explained, “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.”

The day is known as the Great Disappointment. No one was saved from the misery of their lives.

Miller, the father of the Seventh-day Adventists, was not the first nor the last minister to declare, in a time of social and political upheaval, that now is the time when Jesus will rescue the faithful.

I grew up in fear of the rapture. In the red-brick Baptist churches of Texas, where fans stirred the thick, hot air, our voices rang over the chords of the piano as we sang, “People get ready, Jesus is coming.”

It was the 1990s, and the siege on Waco had happened only an hour away. It was a sign, our pastor preached, of a world in which the government would take up arms against its citizens. A time in which no one who believed was safe. The governments of the world were hostile to Christians; we were hunted and persecuted across the world. We were surely in the end times.

In this period of millennial panic, between 1995 and 2007, Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins published their breakout series, the Left Behind books, which gave a vivid narrative to the supposed end of the world. In that series, persecuted white male Christians were the heroes — aided, of course, by converted women who also happened to be hot.

The books were published by Tyndale House Publishers, a niche Christian publishing company, but they captured the American imagination beginning in the Clinton administration and lasting through two wars in Iraq, Y2K panic, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That end, also, never came.

This year, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, my kids’ private school sent an email to all the parents, urging us in this “dificult time” to seek Christ, our only hope and refuge, noting, “At the same time, we should not be surprised by hardship. Paul reminds Timothy that ‘there will be terrible times in the last days’ (2 Timothy 3:1).”

Kirk’s death, the school administrators believe, was a portent of the end times.

Over the weekend, I saw TikTok videos and Instagram reels of people obsessing over the end, desperate for Jesus to come save them. And of other people desperate for Jesus to come collect his mess. The rapture was supposed to happen on September 23, 2025.

This obscure prophecy of South African Pastor Joshua Mhlakela gained a foothold in an America blind with panic. A nation in which the victors declare themselves the victims and the victims are afraid to say much of anything. It’s a world in which facts do not matter. Conspiracies have permeated our everyday lives. And we all feel hopeless. A type of end-times theology has even seeped into the liberal worldview, where people are prepping for a climate apocalypse.

As easy and as fun as it is to mock the idea of the rapture, especially for people who aren’t Evangelicals, apocalypse theology affects us all. An apocalypse theology is not only used among the faithful to justify abandoning the wicked to their own fates; it’s also used to justify abandoning red states, or relinquishing our power to authoritarian forces rather than fighting them.

The proliferation of the belief in another rapture speaks to the pervasiveness of the politics of pain. It’s a narrative that centers on the grievances of the powerful, while the voices of the vulnerable are muted. “Deliver us,” the faithful cry, while the government whips up a sense of grievance and fear to strip rights away from trans people, immigrants and women. The justification is found in the logic that these are wicked times. The tribulations of Biblical proportion are upon us.

This past Sunday, at the church I used to attend, the pastor preached that Christians ought to seek our hope in Christ and his second coming. The world is a wicked place, he said. We should not trust governments or people, only Christ.

Watching that video this week, I saw a roomful of people who’d primarily voted for Trump washing their hands of the results. They were declaring themselves the victims, although they’d voted for the victimizers. They used the death of Charlie Kirk to claim persecution of men — Christian men who “innocently” chose to speak out. Erased from the narrative were other forms of violence — the racism, the transphobia, the militarization of ICE against Americans.

Because an end-times theology, as tempting as it is to embrace, is a kind of deus ex machina. It’s a belief that a disastrous end or a swift rapture into the heavens helps us escape our responsibility to our neighbors and our world. Apocalypse logic argues. What can we do?

While researching God Land, I spoke to a farmer who believed in climate change and climate apocalypse, but saw it as part of God’s plan for the end times. He didn’t feel a responsibility to the earth. It would all end anyway.

The world is ending. So the faithful stand on hills, raise their hands, and await the Lord, while ignoring their neighbors.

This end will not come. We will still have to wake up tomorrow, facing the consequences of the world we created.

Further reading:

A Public Witness

Chris Tomlin’s Worshipwashing of Charlie Kirk

The memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sunday (Sept. 21) functioned as a stand-in for Sunday worship. The service officially started at 11 a.m. local time, but several Christian worship artists sang hymns and contemporary worship songs for two hours before that as people entered the football stadium that’s home to the Arizona Cardinals. More worship s…

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a year ago · 395 likes · 13 comments · Brian Kaylor

As America drifts into a dictatorship, at least we can take comfort in the fact that we are being led by men and women who have replaced their souls with red hats and their hearts with a single bitcoin and brains with vats of beef tallow.

Villains are going to villain. We expect them to be villainous. What pisses me off are all the well-meaning people rushing to help them. Like, I know it seems like the slide into fascism is inevitable, but do you really have to roll out the red carpet? Like, do you have to whip out your coat and put it over the puddle, so JD Vance doesn’t get his shoes wet as he sashays away to get us all fired?

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Dingus Runner-Up: Ezra Klein

This week, no one was working harder to aid and abet the cause of fascism than Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, who rushed to defend Charlie Kirk’s legacy from Kirk’s own words. Literally no one was asking him to do this, but he was like, “Oh, we need a reasonable centrist to provide a veneer to hate? I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!”

It’s the stupidest Hunger Games of all time. Tracker Jackers, but it’s just a host of podcast bros who cannot grow facial hair wearing ill-fitting khakis to follow you around demanding you debate your right to not die of sepsis in a parking lot.

Lizard mutts, but it’s just the president’s Cabinet, and you have to pretend like they’re helping the economy while they chew on your lower intestine.

Jabberjays, but it’s just a bunch of blond women with lip filler telling you how much they love being a stay-at-home girlfriend while they rake in thousands from Instagram posts sponsored be DefinitelyWon’tMakeYouCrapYourself cooking oil.

“I’m a wife and a mama!” is the last thing you hear before you bleed out through your ears.

Klein wrote a whole column arguing that Kirk had done “politics right.” Which is completely accurate if you ignore everything Kirk ever said or did or stood for. Like if you completely ignored the virulent racism, the homophobia, and the transphobia, the history of racism in Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and the iffy way it skirted campaign finance laws, then sure. That’s politics done right.

Plastic bags have more structural integrity than Ezra Klein, and a lot more backbone.

Ezra, buddy, did they give you a gold star for being such a good bootlicker? Does it help you to be the dictator’s favorite little boy?

Ezra Klein in 1916: “Grigori Rasputin Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”

I would make Klein the dingus, but Ta-Nehisi Coates already took him to the cleaners, writing of Kirk in Vanity Fair:

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

This country and our pundit class are so good at ignoring the words of Trump and his supporters. For years now, we have had leaders who will stand up and say things like, “I am going to punch babies in the face.” The headlines then read, “Republicans vow to reach out to American children.” Then, a year later, when a baby gets punched, everyone is shocked, surprised, and upset by the black eye. But inevitably, the pundit class will write effusive columns noting that perhaps fewer babies would get punched if only the liberals weren’t so self-righteous about it.

Centrists lining up to go chide liberals, while Republicans make jokes about the murder of politicians, and cheer on the deportation of lawful permanent residents of the US.

Dingus of the Week: ABC

But this week, the real dingus was ABC, which put Jimmy Kimmel on indefinite leave after the president complained about one of Kimmel’s jokes and FCC chair Brenden Carr threatened to pull ABC’s license.

And you know it’s a bad time in America when a man who used to host a show called “The Man Show,” which featured women with big boobs jumping on trampolines, is considered too liberal.

It’s a bad day in America when the guy who made his career on a show with “Juggy Girls” is now the one holding it down on our rights. Like if I have to go to bat for a problematic white male comedian, at least make him funny, like Dane Cook.

Okay, what happened was that on his ABC show, Kimmel observed, “The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

Kimmel added, “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

In response, Carr went on Benny Johnson’s podcast to threaten to pull the license from ABC and its affiliates for Kimmel’s crime of making fun of the president. You can understand why Carr, a public servant, would talk to Johnson. Johnson is a good, trustworthy, corn-fed Iowa boy who also happens to be accused of being verbally abusive to staff, and has also been accused of a plagiarism or two. You know, a good Midwestern guy (derogatory).

And ABC immediately capitulated, putting Kimmel on indefinite leave.

Carr claims to believe the FCC should champion free speech, but my good man, is free speech in the room with us right now? Did you help all the free speech when you threatened to fire the men for speaking?

We are dying from all this freedom. We are choking on all this free speech. We are literally asphyxiating on the First Amendment.

But it’s ABC that is the real dingus here. Recently, ABC, which is owned by Disney and ergo has so much cash it’s the equivalent of 27 Bezoses, settled a lawsuit with Trump after he sued the network when George Stephanopoulos incorrectly stated that Trump had been found liable for “rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. Trump was actually found liable for sexual abuse. They could have spent one half of a Bezos and fought this, but no. ABC settling so quickly, without even a fight, did not augur well for this new era of American dingusery. I’ve had farts with more perseverance than ABC.

If only there were some sort of historical precedent that we could look at and learn from? But alas!

What is all the money good for if you can’t use it to fight creeping autocracy? What are you using the money for, ABC? Are you using it to train ants for a live-action A Bug’s Life?

Or did it think it could appease the beast by bending to its every whim? Did it think that if it made one sacrifice, the administration would pat its leaders on the head and let them continue on with business as usual? Did those leaders think that by sacrificing a George to the angry orange god, they could save a James?

Or is this an “every fortnight we sacrifice one man into the volcano to appease the hungry gods of free speech” kind of a situation?

Like when the Republicans said they wanted to make this a Christian nation, I guess I didn’t realize how many people would be hanging off crucifixes.

Me, looking at all the free speech in America.

On a more serious note:

Every week for the past five years, I have written a Dingus of the Week. It began as a way to make myself laugh at a time when I was at my lowest. I, too, had been fired from a media job. Then, my crime was telling my boss not to publish an op-ed that argued unarmed Black people deserved to be shot. For that, I was labeled “insubordinate.” That, coupled with the backlash campaign to my work mounted by local Republicans, meant I was out just a year after I started the job.

After that, I started this newsletter as a way to support myself and my kids, because there were no more media jobs in Iowa. And the Dingus of the Week was part of that endeavor, because I’ve always believed that if you can laugh, you can survive. Maybe a joke can’t change the world, but it can make it better and more inhabitable. If you laugh, you know you are going to be okay. And problems you can laugh at are problems you can beat.

Attacking the laughter, taking away the jokes, is a way of stripping us of our humanity.

So, I will keep making my little jokes here. I will keep saying Jared Kushner looks like a wet paper towel, and I will keep saying Trump’s Cabinet is a collection of expired dairy products, and that RFK Jr. is a worm-addled Habsburgian prince of the collapsing American empire.

And as long as I am independent, let me just take a moment to say: We are living under the most corrupt administration that America has ever seen. It makes Watergate look like a high school prank. And the way Kirk’s death is being manipulated into an excuse for an authoritarian crackdown on teachers, journalists, comedians, and so many more people is both craven, pathetic, and dangerous. And any centrist who plays cuck to this charade should be ashamed.

And I’ll see you all in hell.

Thank you for supporting me.

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And now for something good

Local Johnson County Supervisor Jon Green defied the governor’s orders to fly the flags at half staff in honor of Charlie Kirk. And it’s nice to see someone willing to use the power they have to call bullshit on the absolute nonsense that is happening. You simply do not have to do what you are told. You don’t have to hand it to anyone. You don’t have to capitulate to the violence of an unjust order.

People in power only have that power because we give it to them. So, we can take it away. We can refuse to comply. We can stop trying to keep the peace. There is none.

So thanks, Jon Green, for reminding people, even for a moment, that we have a choice. We can do our best to gum up the works of this fascist project called the Trump presidency.

Every time Rudy Giuliani suffers, an angel gets its wings.

Literally, a whole-ass study proved that unions are good.

Lisa Cook continues her fight against Donald Trump. Good for her.

Fat Bear week is upon us! And this refers to literal bears, not the burly gay men. Although this newsletter vehemently and ardently supports all kinds of bears.

Shut it down.

Something I am enjoying

When my son started preschool, he hated it. He’d so much prefer just staying at home and reading books all day. And when I’d pick him up, I’d ask him how his day was, and he’d say, “terwibble.”

At that time, he also loved it when I sang him “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which is a folk song about the Great Depression, where the narrator imagines a hobo’s paradise. “Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the cigarette trees/ The soda water fountain.”

Every night when I sang that song before bed, I changed the lyrics to imagine his paradise. “Where your sister always shares/ And you don’t have to wear your clothes, you can wear your underwear.” Because he thought everything was “terwibble,” I began making him tell me one good thing that I’d try to make up a verse about. Some days it was cookies, soccer, cats, puppies, snuggly blankies, no school, and sisters not being violent. Whatever it was, I’d try to make up a little verse about his paradise in that moment.

He’s 12 now, and we still sing “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and every night that I get to put him to bed, we imagine new ways the world can be better, new joys to extend, new happinesses we never want to end.

I am sure one day soon he won’t want me to sing it to him. And like with so many moments, I won’t know when my last day will come. So every night I get to put him to bed, I make up little utopias just for us. And I am so happy for every moment I get to do it.

On October 23, 2019, I sat in a room with Charlie Kirk in the Iowa Student Memorial Union.

I told him I was going to record the conversation. He directed his assistant in the room to start recording. “That way, you can’t misquote me,” he said. He smiled, like he’d already won an argument we hadn’t yet had.

Kirk was in Iowa to do what he did for years — hold town halls and debate college students to prove to them how indoctrinated and woke they all were. The town halls turned into video clips that went viral, showing Kirk getting the last word on issues like Palestinian rights, healthcare, Christianity, and the Second Amendment.

I wanted to interview Kirk because I’d spent the past two years writing profiles of men in the conservative movement — Tucker Carlson and Richard Spencer. I suppose I was also there because I was looking for answers. My own marriage to a man who had been mostly moderate and libertarian in the way a lot of white men were in the early ‘00s had fallen apart in 2016 when he became a Trump supporter. And the raw, unnamed rage of the political era leaked into my life.

In those past three years, my work had become a target of male rage online as neo-Nazis doxxed and harassed me, sending me photoshopped pictures of Pepe the frog raping my avatar and a target over my head. In my personal life, my ex was sending emails telling me I was ungodly for leaving him, that I was ruining everything. That I wasn’t a good mother, and I should just leave him to raise the kids.

Between the two, I preferred the online harassment. It hurt less.

If I could know what had happened, if I could know what had made these men play at hate like a game of Uno, I could offer a better explanation for this vituperative rage that was throbbing like an infection just beneath the skin of America.

Kirk was then 26, and already his organization, Turning Point USA, was giving a voice to something within politics. TPSUSA had been established as the conservative counterpart to MoveOn.org. But it was more than that; it was an organization that existed to bring down those bastions of liberalism — universities. And here was Kirk, a living, breathing, fuck-you to higher education. He hadn’t needed college, and look at him now, bringing down those smug elites, one at a time. Like shooting cans off a log.

TPSUA was under scrutiny for its funding and its tactics, which seemed to be playing fast and loose with campaign finance laws. And there were already allegations of racism that reached the core of the organization.

To understand conservative men, I needed to understand what created them. So there I was.

I was working for my local newspaper when I asked for an interview. I’d be given a few moments with Kirk, they said, right before the event. So I showed up. Showed my credentials and was escorted to the conference room, along with a photographer, to where Kirk was waiting.

I’d watched a lot of videos of Kirk to prepare, and it hadn’t seemed like he was particularly charismatic or skilled; he was simply normal in a way that made other young men feel they could be like him. What interested me more was the machine that made him; that was propping him up and using him as an avatar for what a young man should be. Not just independent of liberal institutions but caustic toward them. Self-made. White. A conservative David fighting the Goliath of liberalism, one viral video at a time.

He looked like he’d been made in the mold of Tucker Carlson — a conservative pundit, normal enough to wear jeans, professional enough to add a suit jacket. He seemed ready to fight. I asked him about how he got started and why he did this work. His answers were boring and practiced. He talked about his Iowa roots. He claimed to have family from Marshalltown. They’d lived there since the 1700s, he said. (White settlers didn’t come to the land until 1838.)

Then I asked about who was funding him. That’s when he leaned over the table and launched into a rant about the lies of liberal media.

The recording has been lost. My notes from the day just say, “Mad at me with questions about funding. Denies any wrongdoing on Trump campaign. Pivots to Biden’s crimes.” A man named Andrew, who worked in communications for TPUSA, pulled Kirk from the room.

I walked out feeling like I’d wasted my time. I’d learned nothing. I’d seen nothing more than a young man irritated by questions about his organization. If I wrote he got mad at me, then I’d just be another triggered lib. If I wrote about his defensiveness, then I’d just be another lying media elite.

The rage bait machine needs an endless stream of takers. And Kirk was already good at saying things that would irritate and inflame his audience of too-online 20-somethings looking for the cheat codes to prove their superiority. Write what happened, and they’d be there trying to take me down and take my job. Write anything else, and I’d be Facetuning the project of mainstreaming racism and misogyny. It was a rhetorical trap, and I was so tired of trying to get free.

The Memorial Union was already filling with spectators. Some were curious students. Others were there to protest. A handful supported Kirk. But there were far more people there to gawk and to be entertained. Rage gets clicks and gets people to attend events on a school night.

And it wasn’t just students. There were rows of Republican party donors and local politicians, like state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann and former US Rep. Bobby Schilling. All adults who wanted the jouissance of watching those smug liberals get owned.

And that’s what they saw.

Kirk mocked the protesters but claimed to be an “ambassador of decency.” He called college a cartel and insisted students just needed to be taught how to do jobs, not taught how to think. When a student asked him how he could believe Jesus rose from the dead, Kirk stated that math proved there was a higher power. When someone asked about him being called a racist, he said the term “white privilege” was racist.

He answered questions without answering. Won debates without really engaging. And he didn’t lose his cool the rest of the night, maintaining always the tailored appearance of hate. The calm demeanor of racism. The appropriateness of illogic.

I walked out of the hall thinking to interview some protesters. Maybe I’d learn something. But when I walked over to where they stood silently outside the doors, holding signs and linking arms, I saw a group of people yelling at them.

“How many genders do you think there are?” I heard an older man yell in the face of someone who appeared to be in high school. Other people stood around him, laughing, smiling, while the protesters were stoic, silent.

I tapped the older man on the arm and asked him for an interview.

I didn’t really want to talk to another shouting man that day, but I was worried something violent would happen. I was worried something would erupt and someone or something would get hurt. That all these words would manifest into something more ugly, more vile. Something no video edit could turn into an “lol pwn” or post with a #winning.

His name was Bill Montgomery. He’d spotted Kirk as a young conservative activist, and together, the two of them had founded Turning Point in 2012.

“Why? Why did you want to found this group?”

Montgomery told me about his daughter, who had gone to college and come back questioning everything that he believed in. These colleges were turning children against their parents and their country, he told me. His daughter barely spoke to him. He blamed her professors. “But isn’t she an adult?” I asked. “Isn’t she capable of thinking for herself?”

I recently chatted with the newspaper photographer who was there that night, following me around. He remembered me talking to Montgomery, and he also remembered that at one point, I asked Montgomery a question, and he turned to the photographer and said something to the effect of, “Can you believe these women?” But the exact question was lost to time. I do remember him thinking the photographer was my boss and saying they should get better reporters.

I don’t remember being mad at Montgomery. He seemed a little broken. He’d seen a world he didn’t like, and he was going to fix it, and fix it, until the next child of some other lost man went to college, but this time they wouldn’t come back with uncomfortable questions that demanded answers. This time, they’d fall in line.

Further reading:

• Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk.

• on rewriting Kirk’s legacy

• In 2017, Jane Mayer took an investigative look into TPUSA for The New Yorker.

Below the paywall are some thoughts about an Iowa feminist writer whose work has been forgotten, except by Iowans, and what it means to write from the Midwest. There are also a lot of links to interesting stories from me and my assistant editor, Isabella. As always, thank you for subscribing. Your subscriptions support me, Isabella, our editor, and the launch of a new podcast, which will drop in October.

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This week, America is mourning yet another instance of political violence. Another maniac caused widespread terror. And in the wake of that violence, Americans are asking themselves, “What has this country come to?”

Of course, I am talking about another school shooting in Colorado, where two students are in the hospital after a teenager with a gun opened fire and then took his own life.

Of course, I am talking about Putin launching drones over Poland, pushing the world closer to wider wars.

Of course, I am talking about the ICE raids.

And of course, I am talking about Charlie Kirk’s murder at Utah Valley University.

Pundits have been decrying the political violence. The plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer; the storming of the Capitol; the attack on Paul Pelosi; the assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the assassination of Melissa Hortman and shooting of John Hoffman; the arson attack against Josh Shapiro.

But every day, the very same people decrying the political violence are enacting political violence: taking away trans rights and reproductive rights, violently arresting immigrants in the streets, and threatening all-out war on US cities. America was founded by and on political violence.

This violent country is made only more brutal by the violence that hides under the guise of “just asking questions,” and those questions are often about the right of Black, brown, and trans people to live. And guns. Always the guns.

And Now, the Dingus of the Week: Twin Towers Teas

If you identify as a human, this has been a hard week. Also a bad week for moderately sentient robots, because kids don’t use them to cheat in school over the summer, which must be a terrible feeling. Kind of like Henry VIII once the gout hit, or Al Capone once the syphilis hit.

So out of respect for everyone, I found a low-stakes dingus that I think we can all agree was working hard for America.

A store (whose name I will not reveal, because we don’t need to doxx these patriots), that this week was selling “Twin Towers Teas.”1

The teas were a special to commemorate 9/11. Nothing says the “strength of our nation, America” like tea — a beverage we famously tossed into the sea as part of our nation’s founding.

Yes, these absolute patriots created a drink so that we will never forget how awful that day was. Because these so-called teas sound worse than a terrorist attack in your mouth. Pomegranate and coconut, two of the key ingredients in these drinks, are not native to the United States, but that’s okay, because I am sure that the store selling these drinks loves immigrants. So, nothing to worry about here.

Still, we must ask: What do these drinks actually taste like? Freedom? Tariffs? That quintessentially American metallic flavor of back-of-the-throat panic over not being able to pay your medical bills?

The really good news is that these drinks are named after Tower A and Tower B. So any real American has to buy both. But you only get to buy Tower B after the toxic collapse of the first tower has imploded your guts and your tastebuds.

One can only assume that once you drink both teas you automatically grow a pair of wraparound sunglasses, don a Blue Lives Matter t-shirt, and get a divorce.

But in true patriot spirit, here is a list of other 9/11-themed foods (beyond Freedom Fries, of course) I’d love to see:2

Dirty Bomb Martini

Terrorist Taco – You cannot eat it; you can only shoot it.

Wontons of Mass Destruction – These tiny delicious pockets of flavor will give you diarrhea more explosive than your uncle on the Fourth of July after seven beers. Just kidding; they actually don’t exist.

Lasagna bin Laden – He’s hiding in there!

Flight 93 – 93 shots of beer. Domestic, of course.

Fried Valerie Plamtations

Rudy Giuligazpacho – Show America your love by drinking a soup colder than the heart of NYC’s fifth-worst mayor. If you spill it on yourself, you can kind of look like you have Giuliani’s melting face.

Spanikopatriot Act – Layers of flaky FOIA dough, filled with cheese and spinach.

TSAlfredo – This is a normal dish, but before you can eat it, the restaurant gropes you and rifles through your valuables. Also, you’re only served 3.4 ounces of liquid.

WARdorf salad – Again, this is normal food, but you cannot stop eating it, it goes on forever and ever, and it costs $911 trillion.

Lady Liberty Fingers – She’s pointing at you and accusing you of not loving America ENOUGH.

Condoleeza Rice

Dingus runner-up:

Also, as part of my very deep and serious joke-making process, I Googled “Foods that start with A” and was given this result.

And now for something good

I really appreciated this thoughtful response to the week’s news by , who wrote in his newsletter:

“Life is not precious in our world. If it were, we would not disappear human beings and pretend that doing so solves social problems. If it were, we would not rest until everybody was fed and clothed and housed and loved. If it were, we would not be so skittish at naming the patterns of caste and exclusion that still define our lives. If it were, we would not coronate the people we do, reward the behavior we reward, applaud any work that draws us further away rather than closer together.”

There is no great way to transition from that thoughtful and insightful essay and into the next good thing, so I am just going to say, DRUNK RACCOON!

A couple exchanged vows over a Chili’s Triple Dipper, and I have new relationship goals now.

Trans teens sued the state of Iowa and won.

Also, science says it’s actually great to let your kids just watch Bluey, so if you need to do that this weekend, you have my permission and science’s permission. It’s good for them. Now, go take a little nap.

New Mexico becomes the first state to offer free childcare.

Octopuses are ambidextrous but tend to use their tentacles like we use our arms, favoring one side over another. And I know the world is bad, but it’s also filled with weirdness and wonder.

Something I am enjoying

For almost three years, I have been on the board of the Iowa Abortion Access Fund. I joined after Roe was overturned because I felt like if I was going to write about the Iowa I wanted to exist, then I needed to do the work to make that happen.

I no longer go to church, but I was raised Baptist, and part of me still believes that faith without works is dead. And if we want the world to be a better place, we have to do the grassroots, uncomfortable, unglamorous work to make it better.

And this summer, I got to live that in a very real way.

In the spring, the executive director of the fund had to step down for personal reasons. As a result, I spent the summer running the Iowa Abortion Access Fund. It has been laborious, time-consuming work — all the unexciting things, like making sure bills get paid, emails get sent, job postings are written and posted, meetings attended, rules followed, interviews are held, everything is put to a vote, we document, we take notes, people’s ideas are heard, frustrations aired, and conflicts resolved. The work of making the world better is often boring, repetitive, drudgery, and so, so necessary.

I have never run a hiring process, but I kept telling the rest of the board, if Pete Hegseth can run the Department of War, then I can do this, with their help. And they did help. It was a team effort.

More than once, I cried from being so tired and burned out. My laundry is in shambles. So are the floors of my house. I haven’t cooked many real meals this year. We’ve been living off pasta and takeout.

On September 8, our new executive director, Beaufield Berry, started her job. She’s incredible. She’s a mother, an artist, an activist, and someone I am so proud to have run our organization.

Thus ends the summer I ran an abortion fund. What did I learn? I think I learned that the work of community requires putting ego aside. It requires listening and kindness when you want to rage, and it requires putting your foot down and making decisions when you’d rather not be in charge at all. It requires research and collaboration. And it requires showing up when you’d rather hide in bed. At some point, I resolved that even my 40 percent was better than no one’s 0 percent.

Everyone in America right now is despairing. We are afraid and worried. And we should be. It’s very worrying out there. But finding something you believe in and doing that work even when it is annoying and exhausting is the only way I know to make this place better.

To celebrate, this evening I will be toasting with a drink of brandy, apple cider, lemon, and ginger beer.

In a TV ad for lagging Republican NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, his wife, Nancy, states, “They tell us New York is safe, but women know better.”

The ad shows black and white footage of women on the subway, as Nancy Sliwa, a lawyer, says, “Rapes are up by 40 percent. Felony assaults are at an all-time high… Every day women risk harassment and assault just going to school, to work, just living our lives.”

Nancy Sliwa then appears beside her husband. “Curtis and I have always fought for women,” she says. “And we will keep defending them, because no one has to choose between supporting their family and protecting their life.”

Nancy Sliwa is blond and white, and her invocation of the specter of violence that haunts the good white women of America is a tried and true political tactic.

There is an insidious logic to the ad. Life for women certainly feels more dangerous than it did before. As I write this, the right-wing media cycle has been dominated by the murder last month of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in Charlotte, North Carolina. (This is during a week that has otherwise featured the publication of several quite grim economic reports; the release of more Epstein documents; an Israeli strike in Qatar, a U.S. ally — oh, and Politico ran a story about the Treasury secretary threatening to punch out the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But I digress.)

The ad sort of has a point. Reports of rape are on the rise in NYC, but not by 40 percent. The real number is closer to 20 percent, and this is primarily because last year, New York passed a law expanding its definition of rape. A CBS report notes that, even accounting for that change, there is a small percentage increase in reported rapes, but this could be because more people are reporting them.

In any case, you should look hard at any crime statistics coming from a man who faked crimes in the 1990s to make himself look like a hero.

But the Sliwas’ ad feels effective because it can, in fact, be quite scary to be a woman in America. The raw pain of gendered grievance oozes out of every social platform — TikTok videos where people describe awful dates and Facebook groups where women ask, “Are We Dating the Same Man?” Even the few conservative influencers I follow post memes about men being bad. It is bad.

But the violence that women have to fear is rarely coming from unhoused people or immigrants. The bulk of it is coming from the people in charge. Women have fewer rights, and they’re being forced from their jobs. Rising prices, the reduction of the Child Care Tax Credit, stagnant wages and never-ending cuts to the social safety net make it harder to support a family now than it was even five years ago. Women and mothers are being violently yanked off the street, not by immigrants, but because they are immigrants. (Or because they look like maybe they might be immigrants. The Supreme Court said that was fine.)

This week, the president made comments suggesting he doesn’t think domestic violence is a crime. The newly rebranded Department of War is run by a man who may or may not believe women should be allowed to vote.

The actions of the GOP are branded as protecting women. (As was the Clinton-era crime bill.) Even the logic of depriving married women of the vote is pitched as a sort of benevolent protectorship.

But that protectorship is coming at the loss of our rights; the scapegoating of trans people; violence toward immigrants and the unhoused. In this world, only white women get to feel protected — and only then if it’s not their husbands they need protecting from.

And despite the PR campaigns of trad wife influencers, this bargain is never what it says it is. Give me public transportation and a weird boss over an overbearing husband any day. At least with the boss, I have money, and with that money, some freedom.

Yes, there is violence being done to women. But despite a handful of cherry-picked and well-publicized stories, the threat to cis women is not from trans people or immigrants. It’s the state-sanctioned violence that strips us of our right to a safe and legal abortion. It’s the destruction of the social safety net. It’s the violence of the National Guard patrolling our streets and ICE deporting people without due process.

Patriarchy and power rely on stoking the flames of our fears of the other. Fear is intended to make us compliant. But what we should fear the most is the men who use our bodies as a cover for their violence.

🔗Further reading

✍️Moira Donegan wrote about Trump’s comments about domestic violence.

📖 My friend Sarah Weinman has an incredible book about the history of marital rape in America that will be published in November. You can hear us chat about the book on my This American Ex-Wife podcast.

✍️Also, as points out with this story about the Epstein files, the real violence against women is being done by the men who are claiming to protect them.

📈 300,000 Black women losing their jobs is also a kind of violence.

Before we begin, if you haven’t yet taken the reader survey, please do. I know the link was broken in the Friday email. So if you clicked and saw that it was disabled, I am very sorry. BUT PLEASE TAKE MY READER SURVEY. I promise you, I am listening.

After the paywall is a little essay on what I think the point of telling the truth is and why I refuse to modulate my voice. There is also a cornucopia of links from me and Isabella, who helps me with the newsletter.

This week, as I was casually scrolling the internet in the morning while reading my morning dose of newsletters, I saw a post on Substack notes chiding newsletter writers for their tone when talking about masculinity in America.

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This newsletter cannot exist without subscribers. If you love the Dingus and look forward to it every week, become a paying subscriber. If you can’t afford to subscribe, then like this, share it, and forward it to your richest friends. Except probably not Malcolm Gladwell.

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This week, Malcolm Gladwell, the very wealthy bestselling author and staff writer for the New Yorker, said he’d been forced to say trans women belonged in women’s sports.

And wow, poor little baby. Malcolm, are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital? Should we call your mom to come pick you up?

What did the bullying look like, Malcolm? Is the bullying in the room with us right now?

Gladwell, whose work has been repeatedly debunked by legions of exhausted social scientists, but who somehow still gets heralded as a genius, went on “The Real Science of Sport” podcast with host Ross Tucker and sports journalist Mike Finch.

In the interview, Gladwell talked about being on a panel about trans women in sports hosted by Tucker in 2022. Tucker, who is a vocal opponent of trans women competing in women’s sports, voiced his opinion at the event, but Gladwell said that he felt too “cowed” and “ashamed” at the time to say he agreed with Tucker.

This explanation, much like The Tipping Point, is a bunch of gilded word turds — crack the shiny surface and it’s just a bunch of shit.

Gladwell already tipped his hand in 2019 by retweeting Tucker’s long-winded analysis of the issue, calling it “smart.”

Then, three years later, Tucker had Gladwell on a panel to talk about the issue, and Gladwell, a wealthy man who has yet to suffer any sort of consequence for churning out takes with the intellectual rigor of a conversation at RFK Jr.’s dinner table, felt “cowed” into silence?

The man wrote a whole book praising military tactics that target civilians. He glorified military atrocities! No one asked him to. Everyone was just minding their own business, and Malcolm Gladwell, Kool-Aid Man, burst through the wall and was like, “Hey! Here is a book about how I think bombing cities is genius!”

If you are ashamed of something, my guy, be ashamed of yourself.

A major part of Gladwell’s career has come from convincing legions of dinguses that they could overcome any lack of talent by simply spending 10,000 hours doing something and becoming an expert. Repeated studies have debunked all of this.

Also, Gladwell’s latest opinion really undercuts his own theory, because even if he spent 20,000 hours studying this issue, he’s still wrong. Nevertheless, he persists.

I have written about this topic before, so I won’t bother repeating myself. There is no threat posed by trans women competing in sports. But you know what does threaten women? The fact that I have fewer rights in 2025 than I did five years ago.

It’s truly distressing that in 2025, as our cities are invaded by a tyrannical despot who is actively rotting in front of our eyes, the purported great minds of our era are too busy rotting in a stew of transphobia to do anything about it. Who convinced these absolute losers that targeting less than 1 percent of the population with unfounded hate made them interesting and anti-orthodox?

Kids are dying of gun violence at school and these absolute TED Talk-pilled poster boys for Dunning Kruger are like, “Well, actually, it makes me interesting and not a total creep to talk about a stranger's hypothetical hormone levels on a podcast.”

Also, how is this dingus’s tipping point common decency? Like, people said to him, “Hey, this is a complex issue that doesn’t really affect many people at all. Let’s let trans women play and not spread transphobic rhetoric?” And one of the wealthiest writers in the world responded by curling into a ball and crying, “Help, help! I’m being repressed!”

There are truly no bounds to the desperation of the planet’s most fortunate people. So hungry are they to experience one actual minor inconvenience so they can crow about being victimized that they’re forced to pull fake problems out of the ether. Yes, the wealth enjoyed by certain prominent authors would surely buy a lot of therapy. And yet! Here we are.

I can’t wait to explain this period of history to my grandchildren as we sit around a campfire, armed to the teeth, fearful of the roving hordes of sentient AI-bots coming for our potable water. “Yes, sweeties, women were dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots, but Gavin Newsom and Malcolm Gladwell really hated trans women, so we had to talk about how one swimmer got a fifth-place win over some blond girl while they passed laws taking away our vaccines, and we died from the measles. But hey, at least a subpar college athlete got to take fourth place.”

Dingus Runner-Up: The People Who Emailed to Explain Burning Man to Me

Last week, after I wrote an incredible (if I do say so myself) newsletter roasting the attendees of Burning Man — or as I like to call them, “All my friends’ ex-husbands” — I got no fewer than three very long emails explaining Burning Man to me. All the emails were basically, like, “Burning Man is about inclusion and acceptance, you stupid slut!” Even more people reached out on Substack notes to call me humorless and boring.

Which, yes, definitely, ranting at a stranger online makes you the fun one. That’s right. No, no, keep explaining in 900+ word emails about how Burning Man attendees aren’t the most exhausting chuds on the planet. This all makes perfect sense, you absolute haboobs.

To quote Coldby in the Discord, what we have here is infinite nesting dingii.

And now for something good

Another day, another lawsuit.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming is “deeply concerned” about RFK Jr.’s handling of the CDC. And yeah, my man, it’s very concerning. Maybe stop clutching your pearls and do something?

Women should not have to talk about the worst things that happened to them to make everyone care. That said, I am always so grateful when survivors tell their truths.

A court ruled that Trump’s tariffs were illegal. Now, the actively decaying president is asking the Supreme Court to intervene.

Let’s all bully our politicians a little more.

Dinosaur body armor? DINOSAUR BODY ARMOR!

Remember to take my reader survey

Please don’t make me beg. I mean, I will beg, but don’t make me! Just take the survey.

Something I am enjoying

This week, I got very sick and spent a lot of time sitting in bed, high on cold medicine, watching Department Q, which is a dark British crime drama full of a lot of mean people. And I loved it.

I also made this potato soup recipe, and it received rave reviews from my kids, which is the highest of praise.

Also, despite feeling like my throat had been stuffed with flaming pieces of straw, I am enjoying that it is shorts and sweater season.

Five years ago, I was fired from my newspaper job for telling the editor not to publish an op-ed that argued unarmed Black people deserved to be shot by the police. They never published the op-ed, but I was fired for “insubordination.”

As a single mom living in Iowa — where there are not a lot of jobs for writers — with no backup income, I was terrified of losing my house, my livelihood, and my voice.

I started this newsletter, and in five years it has grown from just a couple of hundred readers into a community of more than 72,000 readers.

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We made a fiery, feminist manifesto a bestseller; we launched a podcast with over 100,000 downloads; we’ve raised thousands of dollars for abortion access in Iowa and for trans mutual aid.

And as I get ready to make some very exciting new changes to this space, I want to hear from you.

That’s right. This time, men, it’s okay to yell at me (and women and they/thems, you can yell, too!)

So, please fill out my survey. I promise I am listening.

Take the survey

No, really, take the survey 😭

On Wednesday, I got a text message from my brother telling me about a school shooting two blocks from my niece’s school.

“She’s okay,” he wrote.

But she’s not. Not really. None of us are.

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Today’s Dingus of the Week was handpicked by newsletter reader Tom. Tom has been a longtime reader of MYAM, a supporter of Team Corn Sweat, a Democrat in Iowa, and an active member of the Flyover Discord, and has been lobbying me for years to make Burning Man the Dingus of the Week. In sum: Tom is out here doing the work. Tom’s persistence paid off, because I’m exhausted and I simply cannot fight another man this week. Also, it’s a good pick. Tom is a paying subscriber to this newsletter, and if you, too, want to wear me down and lobby me to take on your own personal grudges (Stefany from HR?) in an email that is blasted out to nearly 72,000 people, become a paying subscriber.

Also, be it known: I do listen to men, sometimes. And it might take four years. BUT I DO LISTEN.1

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Have you ever wanted to do MDMA with a bunch of tech bros in an outdoor stewpot of mud and piss, with the vibe set by the worst electronica imaginable, and some guy named Trey is demanding to take you to the consensual Orgy Dome while a totem pole of precariously stacked vehicles looms above you? Well, get your ass to Burning Man.

Burning Man is Fyre Festival for people on ketamine.

Burning Man is like a trade show for DJs, where men who have nicknamed themselves “Lampshade” and “Cheeze” will tell you that The Matrix is a good idea, actually.

Burning Man began in 1986 and was initially conceived of as a weeklong countercultural festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, at a spot that Burners call the Playa, that centered art and free expression. Now, it’s basically glamping for every man who was behind the 2008 market crash and their third wives.

To be fair to Burning Man, the Orgy Dome, which was destroyed this year by a massive dust storm called a haboob (I know — you can’t make this shit up), is still more stable than the housing market these men built.

But at Burning Man, these men are not concerned with consequences or what evil AI robots they’ve currently unleashed upon humanity, squaring our electricity bills, sucking up our water and convincing the worst person you know that ChatGPT is Jesus and they should definitely become a prophet. No, they’re too busy shirtcocking.

Don’t know what that is? It’s walking around with a shirt but no pants on.

This is Disneyland for fucksticks.

Back to the Orgy Dome, which is a real thing. You can have an orgy on a bunch of mattresses floating on a mud swamp* with a bunch of strangers who think #MeToo went a little too far. (*Actually, given the haboob situation this year, it may have been more like a pack of horny chinchillas writhing around in their dust bath.)

If that doesn’t sound sexy, then wow, are you contributing to the male loneliness crisis? Treyvis Williamford McMuffin III (his playa name is Panty Dropper) has to vote for Trump now because you’re so uptight.

Don’t worry, though, the Orgy Dome organizers vow to rebuild. And I for one find that to be an inspiring testament to the strength, resiliency and potency of their will. And their dicks.

Burning Man is the EPCOT of Trump’s deregulatory agenda. And if your dream is to be mansplained to about the paleo diet and have a 56-year-old man contemplate the nature of reality while he grabs your ass, then it can be your EPCOT, too.

Young people at Burning Man? A bunch of nepo babies cosplaying as Marxists. Their family money comes from strip-mining Appalachia, but they’re going to go on shrooms and tell you about how they’ve found strength and inner peace in these trying times by going offline, eating organic food, connecting with nature, and drinking raw milk.

Also, Burning Man is dangerous. People die there. And injuries are so common SFGate reports that attendees can come out with piles of medical debt. And like, imagine your name is Pepper McFadden and you have to create a GoFundMe because you broke your arm falling from the top of a 70-foot-tall Labubu made from Poppi cans while high on nitrous, wearing a My Little Pony backpack and no pants.

I know all of us are God’s children and we all deserve lifesaving medical care, but this does make it challenging to stand on principle.

While researching Burning Man, I discovered that in 2023, Diplo and Chris Rock evacuated (along with many others) because of heavy rainfall. The two said they walked for six miles before hitching a ride out in someone’s truck. Apparently, that was a very controversial move! Let me quote from Zapper Jones, your Reddit guide to Burning Man:

Last year, when someone had turned on a lightning effect at the Fluffy Cloud stage, Diplo stopped the music, dropped his headphones and started running away like Forrest Gump into the darkness of Deep Playa. The Reason was that apparently he is terrified of rain and has massive cloud cover anxiety. Look, anyone who Bailed out early because of the rains of 2023 should have never been allowed back. I have ZERO respect for anyone who turned their backs on the community and ran away. There was no valid reason for anyone to leave. Work is not a valid reason for leaving. If you got fired from your job because you went to Burning Man, then you need to get a different fucking Job. Did you need to leave early because you brought kids? If your kids can't spend a few extra days in the rain then you should have never fucking brought them along in the first place. Or maybe you just need to get new kids. Either way, None of Ya'll should ever be welcomed back.

Petition to give Zapper a Pulitzer. Because that is the funniest paragraph I have ever read in my entire life. The whole post is absolutely incredible.

Don’t Diplo out, fucksticks. Not even for your kids.

And now for something good

In Iowa, Catelin Drey, a Democrat, won a special election for a House seat, breaking the Republican supermajority. They still have a majority. But Drey’s win, I think, is a model of what an outspoken woman can do with a social media platform, an incredible ground game, and an actual strong liberal stance. People want to vote for people who stand for something.

Kari Lake has been barred from removing the head of Voice of America.

Whoever is heckling Susan Collins, keep it up.

Tina Smith.

What I am enjoying

This week, I got to do a lot of exciting behind-the-scenes MYAM work that I will talk about very soon. In the meantime, I got to scream my head off at my daughter’s first high school swim meet and watch her win every single one of her events.

My god, the adrenaline rush. I totally understand Tonya Harding’s mom now.

Also, I haven’t had much to drink lately. But on Tuesday night, I did break open a bottle of Bødalen Whiskey, which is made in Minnesota, and had a small glass on my back porch and enjoyed the cooler weather.

Also, this review was one hell of a way to learn that Elizabeth Gilbert was the inspiration behind the most perfect movie ever made.

Diplo, out.

Nearly 72,000 people subscribe to this newsletter. But under 10 percent are paying subscribers. If you like this newsletter and support it, become a paying subscriber. I promise, this is the only time I’ve written about Taylor Swift and will most likely be the last time. (Unless you’d like me to write about her more. In which case, let’s talk.)

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Where were you when you heard the news that one of the most talented and wealthy single women in America was getting married? Me? I was trying to read a book, just 24 hours after getting dumped by a guy who was uncomfortable with my career.

The deluge of posts, hot takes, videos, and memes already beginning to flood the internet have little to do with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce themselves. Grown women posted that they were crying. The Wendy’s account on Threads posted, “I can’t believe we got Travis Swift before we got gta6.” The New York Times did a push alert; so did ESPN. The president wished the couple “a lot of luck” during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

From the wedding of Isabella and Ferdinand to the union of Mr. and Mrs. Swift, every highly publicized union is idealized because it makes a fairy tale feel like it’s within reach. Sometimes that fantasy is wealth, beauty, glamour, or a distraction from poverty. In this case, what resonates for many women — who will undoubtedly be scolded for fawning over this royal American wedding — is that this fairy tale features an ambitious and successful woman actually finding a supportive partner.

I don’t know either of these people. And I am not convinced this isn’t some sort of very successful business deal. But who cares? Taylor Swift writes great songs about shitty men and profits from it; good for her!

Also, most of our parents married for worse reasons than record sales.

I am also not trying to project into the interiority of the lives of these celebrities. But the image they are projecting to us is that a successful woman has found a supportive partner, one who eagerly fawns over her new album cover while interviewing her for his own podcast.

This reality is far from reality for most American women.

Since January, 212,000 women have left the workforce, while 44,000 men have joined it. Women’s participation in the workforce peaked as flexible work-from-home policies allowed them more readily to juggle career and family. But under the Trump administration, those policies are being rescinded. Meanwhile, laws that gut reproductive rights and narrow access to childcare, healthcare, and SNAP benefits will do more to push ambitious, educated women out of the workforce and limit their economic power and personal freedom. And a spiritual leader who opposes women having the right to vote has the ear of the president’s Cabinet.

Women who do succeed are often punished for it. Studies show that women who out-earn their husbands are 33 percent more likely to be victims of domestic violence and 22 percent more likely to be victims of emotional abuse.

Women who out-earn their husbands still do more childcare and domestic labor. And overwhelmingly, studies show that male partners, no matter how much they earn or how little they earn, how much they work, or no matter how flexible or inflexible their jobs are, are still not doing much domestic labor or childcare.

These are all passive forms of punishment for women who seek career success and financial security. Women who speak out are often met with outright misogyny or cutting remarks.

And all of this is happening as social media posts and think pieces declare the end of ambition, from #girlboss to #girlmoss. Author Stefanie O’Connell, who has a new book about ambition coming out in 2026, observed in her newsletter:

As a millennial woman reckoning with my own disillusionment with the 2010s girlboss era, its obsession with hustle culture, and the broken promise that getting what you want is as easy as asking for it, I too became obsessed with this reevaluation of ambition. During the five years I spent researching and writing my own book about it (out in 2026), I watched as these anti-ambition trends took hold… and evolved — from the #softlife to #feminineenergy to the #tradwife (short for “traditional” wife) — each promising to unlock a new layer of leisure, satisfaction and meaning as it limited women’s ambitions to a smaller and smaller window.

I, too, have struggled with ambition. I have a lot of it and it isn’t going away. But I am also exhausted. I’m so sick of succeeding in spite of everything around me. I’m tired of having a job and still doing the majority of the emotional and domestic labor for my kids while my ex, who is remarried, complains about how I maintain the shared calendar.

Every time I succeed, there’s a downside. The hate mail gets worse. The man I am dating backs away. A tabloid publishes a scathing story about me. I’m so, so tired.

The fantasy that Swift and Kelce are selling isn’t romance; it’s not even equality. It’s a fantasy world where a woman can be successful and her partner won’t be mad about it.

This Tuesday, my daughter will start high school.

This is a huge milestone for us for all the normal reasons. Somehow, the baby that had to be vacuumed from me is making jokes about the Epstein list and giving me the finger. She’s almost as tall as me.

She’s exchanged pull-up diapers for pull-ups on the bar. She’s just two months away from getting her school permit. And already her days are filled with practices and activities that have nothing to do with me. So much of her life these days is not for me to write about. It’s her life and her journey, and I am so lucky I get to tag along.

In so many ways, I became a writer because of my kids. I had been writing for years before they were born. I’d been working for different websites for years and went to graduate school all in the years before she was born. But I found my voice when I had my kids. I am not saying this is necessary for all writers. I am saying, for me, having my daughter fundamentally changed something in me. I think it made me hungrier and sharpened my sense of purpose.

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There isn’t much bipartisan consensus in Texas these days. Still, both parties can agree that the Dallas Cowboys have a snowball’s chance in Laredo of winning the Super Bowl, and Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Dustin Burrows is a little weasel.

Burrows became speaker after winning more Democrats over to his side than Republicans — 49 Democrats and 36 Republicans.

According to the Texas Tribune, “In his acceptance speech after winning the gavel, Burrows promised to protect the House as an independent institution, where lawmakers could disagree with each other without fear of repercussions and get a fair shake, even if they’d opposed him.”

*whomp whoooomp*

Let’s see how that promise is working out.

As speaker, Burrows has pushed through every item on the GOP-led agenda; is overseeing the incredibly gerrymandered redistricting process; and imprisoned a Texas representative inside the Capitol building.

This week, Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier wasn’t allowed to exit the Capitol after she refused to be shadowed by an armed escort. Collier and other Democrats fled the state to delay a vote on the redistricting process in Texas. This is a time-honored protest tactic in Texas.

And it was deployed this time to draw attention to the craven power grab happening in the state.

According to the Texas Tribune, “...the map dismantles Democratic strongholds around Austin, Dallas, and Houston and makes Democrat-held seats in South Texas redder — all without seriously jeopardizing any of the 25 districts Republicans already control. The proposed map also would push a handful of Democratic members of Congress into seats already represented by other Democrats, setting up possible primary battles between long-serving members of the Texas delegation and younger newcomers.”

Collier and other Democrats fled the state and delayed the vote for two weeks. They returned after lawmakers in California vowed to do the legislative equivalent of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” in their state and gerrymander right back — this time for the Democrats.

When Collier returned, Burrows insisted that she and other lawmakers could only leave the Capitol building if they were followed by a 24-hour police escort. Tell me more about the party of small government, will you? Collier refused those terms and was imprisoned on the Capitol floor until the vote happened on Wednesday.

Remember what Burrows said about being fair and letting people disagree with him? Turns out what he meant was, “Fall in line or I’ll detain you and violate your constitutional rights.”

It’s arguable that Burrows’ actions are not supported by law.

But what is not arguable is that he’s a smarmy bottom-feeder with the moral integrity of dog vomit.

I’ve seen mollusks with more spine than Dustin Burrows.

And listen, I wasn’t present in the back-door negotiations that led to Burrows being elected speaker. Perhaps there was the idea that a Burrows-brand House would hurt less than one led by a more hard-line Republican.

But if 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that there is no negotiation with terrorists, or the whiny little cave-dwellers who promise they are reasonable and then just go about treating habeas corpus like a roll of Charmin. There isn’t a softer, gentler, more sane Republicanism that you can deal with. When your choices are being smothered to death with the flag or choked out on the Constitution, does it really matter? If your murderer says sorry at the end, does that make you any less dead?

Dingus runner-up:

In a normal week, trying to bribe a reporter by putting $160 in a chip bag would make you the top-tier dingus. But in 2025, that level of crispy, idiotic corruption barely ranks. My favorite is the lawyer essentially saying, “Let’s just forget this all happened. Friends just give each other money in chip bags. It’s normal. No worries!”

And now for something good:

This week, James Dobson joined Hulk Hogan in the league of dinguses who died before they could be properly roasted here on Earth. But that’s okay, because I know he’s roasting in hell. Where Lyz fails, the devil prevails.

Dobson was the head of Focus on the Family, an Evangelical nonprofit that is responsible for at least 65% of what is wrong with most American adults. Turns out, we needed him to focus a little less on the family.

Dobson, a homophobic misogynist with a face like God turned it in at 11:59 on the sixth day of creation, spent his one wild and precious life arguing that parents should beat their children and their dogs. And I know, because it was his books that led to my being terrorized by a wooden spoon that had “Spare the rod, spoil the child. Proverbs 13:14” written on the bowl, which over the years became cracked and broken from being used to hit me and my siblings.

But that’s not his only contribution to America’s evils; Dobson did everything he could to make the lives of gay people worse. Sir, the only thing threatening about the gay agenda is that you might have to use some moisturizer.

He lived 89 years too long. And I hope he’s found a home in that great gender-neutral bathroom in the sky.

I do not know this woman, but she is innocent.

The Onion is bringing print back.

Every day Alex Jones gets closer to losing his empire, we all get closer to returning to the warm light of God’s love.

Maryland is rejecting the Trump administration’s efforts to censor what schools can teach.

And Gavin Newsom is working really hard to shake those dingus allegations. I am not retracting his title, as he is the No. 1 winner of the Rahm Emanuel Award for Politicians With Heads of Hair and Hearts of Craven Ambition, but I am appreciating the memes.

And a judge ruled that Florida needs to shut down Alligator Alcatraz.

Something I am enjoying

It’s the week before school starts, and I’ve spent the summer running an abortion fund.

And I am exhausted. I took most of the week off to parent my kids — back-to-school shopping, endless appointments for eyes and teeth and, well, everything else. Then, next week, I begin working on some VERY exciting changes at this newsletter.

Which I hope to be able to tell you all about soon. In the meantime, I took Wednesday off to do laundry, fold clothes, drink red wine and scream-sing Celine Dion.

My favorite fair food is the spicy pickle dog from the Pickle Dawg truck. It’s a dill pickle covered in spicy cream cheese, wrapped in pastrami, covered in batter, and deep-fried.

The first bite is crisp, warm, and crunchy with a little bit of peppery heat. I look forward to it every year.

When we talk about the foods of American fairs, we talk about excess and quantity. It’s novelty, nostalgia, and class, all deep-fried and put on a stick for our collective consumption.

So many of the foods are designed to make us laugh, to invert expectations, like deep-fried butter, fried beer, and fried jelly beans. They also seem to mock us by deep-frying cultural stereotypes. In 2022, a vendor at the Iowa state fair was selling the Iowa Twinkie, which was a jalapeno filled with pulled pork, corn, and cream cheese, wrapped in bacon, smoked with sweet and sticky BBQ, then finished with ranch

And while these foods can seem indulgent and exciting, they may also elicit disgust and disdain. I think that is on purpose. Fair foods bait you to try them with novelty, mocking you if you hate them. The foods almost invite you to moralize about nutritional value, fats and carbs and caloric consumption and in response, these foods laugh at you with their fried profligacy. They are not real foods in the sense that you would eat them every day. They are surreal foods — excessive, bizarre, and delightful, existing only in one world: the world of the fair.

Fair foods find their origins in the celebration of abundance that drove attendance to fairs around the turn of the 20th century. In her article “Eat Me at the Fair,” historian Francine Kirsch describes how food installations at fairs were in part an advertisement for a state to attract people to move there. Look at us, Iowa could declare with an attention-getting palace of corn. We are a land of growth. A land where you can harvest enough corn to build a kingdom.

Historically, it has been through food exhibitions that new foods have captured the American imagination. Fairs are sites of cultural exchange and cultural flattening, a place where, through humor, we negotiate who and what we are through what we eat.

Kirsch writes, “If the food exhibits at later fairs were particularly lavish, their genesis can be seen in drawings made at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial.” Here in the Agricultural Building, Mary Todd Lincoln’s favorite confectioner Henry Maillard displayed a 15-foot-tall sugar spire covered with edible historical figures. At one booth, a mammoth grape vine from California grew toward the ceiling. The New Hampshire booth displayed stuffed hogs that when they were alive had weighed 1,307 and 1,253 pounds. And this was the same fair that launched the butter sculpture trend when Caroline Shawk Brooks delicately carved Iolanthe.

Taken together, these food exhibits “reflected America’s exuberance at its coming of age best,” Kirsch writes. “And that desire to have and be the biggest would truly take hold in more ways than food in the century to come.”

But were they only about size, scale, and excess, I don’t think state fair foods would have nearly the grip they do on our culture. They are also about humor and desire.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his writings on the carnival, described it as a space outside the everyday, one that is both temporary and freeing for lower classes often oppressed by the usual social order. Here, laughter is a key element, and is built on the subversions of expectations. Whereas in the outside world, we are expected and cautioned to eat more salads, in the world of the fair, that salad is on a stick. Cows are made of their own butter. It’s silly. It’s fun. It’s dark. It’s complicated. Who cares? It’s the fair. And how often is food allowed to be fun? How often are we just allowed to eat and enjoy it and eat some more?

In the oppressive superego of keto, Weight Watchers, protein goals, carb-free, and Noom, state-fair food is our culinary id — a grotesquely joyous display of all that is forbidden and still desired. Waffles and Snickers, battered and fried and put on a stick. Bacon dipped in chocolate. It’s fried and sugary and, unless it’s corn or coleslaw, there is rarely a vegetable to be found.

While fair foods reinforce American identity, they also reveal that our identity is changing.

Because beyond the smorgasbord of deep-fried consumption, fair foods are also the space in which our cultural identity is mediated, processed, put on a stick, and sold back to us.

In Trump’s America 2.0, where DEI is under attack and masked ICE agents are rounding up immigrants, food is both a negotiation of identity and exploitative capitalism.

And, like the food, these conversations can feel a little gross. Last year, at the fair, I went to find a hyped-up Korean BBQ vendor, only to find it was run by a very white couple. I made assumptions. They profited. And I wondered at the people who would take a culture’s food, sell it, and then vote for a president who vowed to deport the same immigrants who brought that food to America in the first place.

Are people more likely to try new foods at a fair? Will it make them more open to other cultures and foods? It’s hard to know. But despite the moralizing, it won’t go away. Egg rolls with bacon and ranch are here to stay. Fiesta wontons. Korean corn dogs.

I can’t tell you if this is good or if it’s bad, only that this is America.

In this world already turned on its head, it’s easy to introduce new foods and change the narrative about who and what America is. The safe space of the familiar fair, combined with the gleeful embrace of novelty foods, creates an environment rich for experimentation.

Every year, new foods are introduced to the fair. This year, at the Iowa State fair, amid all the usual fried concoctions, there are also bacon chicken ranch egg rolls, potato half & half Korean corn dog, and a Saigon lobster dog. The Minnesota State Fair offers a variety of foods that fuse cultures and traditions, like a steamed bun with lutefisk and hoisin sauce, hot honey cheese sticks, and a dill pickle cheese curd taco.¹ Other state fairs, too, are embracing and selling more diverse ranges of food, offering a safe environment for people to try new things and experience new flavors.

Fair food is America inverted, a mirror image reflected back to itself in its greasy plenty, mass-produced and served up hot.

This essay is an edited and updated version of a newsletter that I wrote in 2023.

Deep-fried food takes:

"Toward a Theory of American Festival Cuisine” (Eater)

“Fried, Fatty, and Fanciful: State Fair Foods” (Modern Farmer)

“Eating While Politicking Is Harder Than It’s Ever Been. Here’s Why.” (Politico)

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