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I am not in the business of giving politicians advice. But I will say that if the experience of Lincoln suggests anything, it is that there can be no real success without principle — ironclad and unyielding. You can tweak your message and follow the polls as much as you’d like, but unless you stand for something greater than the sum of your platform, your maneuvers and machinations will be for naught.

The most important section of the whole interview, I would argue, is where Coates explained how it is he decides what to do. He said, “All I can go to is my role as a writer, and my role as a writer is to state things as clearly as I possibly can, to make them in such a way that they haunt, to state truths and to reinforce the animating notion of my politics—which is that all humanity is equal and is worthy of that.”

The world he thought he lived in turned out to be very different from what he’d imagined it to be. He’s learned that far more of his fellow Americans are willing to do far worse things than he suspected.

The truth is that Harris lost the presidential election by 1.5%, and in a post-Covid headwind that threw out parties in power, she outperformed incumbents in most countries.

Through gossamer tributes, Kirk’s cruel condemnation of transgender people and his racist throwback views about Black Americans were no longer anathema but instead are being treated as just another political view to be respectfully debated — like a position on tax rates or health care policy.

Our industry faces the most sophisticated, venomous, creeping evil in America’s history. There’s no standing above this conflict. No impartial observers. If you’re on the sidelines you’ve made a choice and must live with it.

When we decline to speak ill of the dead, it’s because we have compassion for the living. In this respect, I am sorry for Kirk’s children. I don’t know if Kirk was a good father, but if he was, that does little to mitigate the damage he did to other people’s children. I can only hope for the sake of his kids that they have role models who will teach them that it is wrong to profit off the dehumanization of people because of who they are.

Kirk was fine with murder as long the right people were dying.

His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them.

Today, fundamental model providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are in a position equivalent to that of Microsoft in the 1990s and 2000s. They are now responsible for ensuring that all the computing power brought to market each year is consumed.

And the frame for me is when we started The Verge, the only thing we were ever going to start was a website.

Increasingly, you’ve got to find other sources of inspiration to make a website – which by the way are still the coolest fucking things ever.

Adding to my befuddlement is the fact that he’s every single stereotype of a loathsome shitheel from the last one hundred years of popular culture, all at once—the ignorant blowhard at the end of the bar, the entitled silver spoon trust fund asshole, the clueless boss who does nothing but create crises for his employees to clean up, the lecherous old man, the vapid self-important celebrity, the penny pinching miser who stiffs the honest working man, the oily corrupt politician, the cowardly bully, the draft-dodging faux-patriot, the scumbag crook who gets off on a technicality. He’s almost literally every repugnant trope from generations of literature, movies, and TV shows. This is the man— the clown, the ignoramous—who ends our Republic?