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The Fury
Tracking Esther down at an after-hours club and marvelling at her artistry, he resolves to propel her into pictures. The number she performs at the club, “The Man That Got Away,” is one of the most astonishing, emotionally draining musical productions in Hollywood history, both for Garland’s electric, spontaneous performance and for Cukor’s realization of it. The song itself, by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, is the apotheosis of the torch song, and Garland kicks its drama up to frenzied intensity early on, as much with the searing pathos of her voice as with convulsive, angular gestures that look like an Expressionist painting come to life. (Her fury prefigures the psychodramatic forces unleashed by Gena Rowlands in the films of her husband, John Cassavetes.) Cukor, who had first worked wonders with Garland in the early days of “The Wizard of Oz” (among other things, he removed her makeup, a gesture repeated here by Maine), captures her performance in a single, exquisitely choreographed shot, with the camera dollying back to reveal the band, in shadow, with spotlights gleaming off the bells of brass instruments and the chrome keys of woodwinds.
Biden authorizes Ukraine to use long-range weapons in Russia.
Consider this: Russia threatened "escalation" and promised attacks on NATO allies if we sent M1A1 tanks. We did, and nothing about their approach fundamentally changed. They made the same threats with HIMARs rocket launchers; again, we did, nothing changed. The Patriot Air Defense system, the cluster munitions, the F-16 fighter jets — over and over and over Ukraine has asked for support that the Biden administration has balked on giving immediately, all while Russia said "if you do this, we are really going to make you pay" — then we eventually do it and Russia doesn’t change its strategy.
Is it risky to bet that Russia will continue to bluff? Of course. Do I think Russia has any interest in widening this war — including a nuclear escalation — beyond the territories in Eastern Ukraine it is now struggling to defend or capture? No. NATO involvement would be a death-knell for Putin's war, and he knows that. Instead, after 1,000 days, the U.S. should start acting confidently, with the understanding that Putin is doing more flexing than punching.
It’s possible that threats exist I don’t fully understand. But with 20/20 hindsight, if I could go back to the first week of this war, I think I would have advocated that the U.S. give Ukraine everything it wanted right away and allowed them to better defend themselves — within their borders, in the skies, and on Russian territory. What we've done instead is create exactly the kind of war of attrition Russia is built to win, spent exorbitant amounts of money on weapons, and allowed a million Ukrainians and Russians to die.
i found millions of YouTube videos that have default camera names as titles (like IMG_0276) and made it into a website where you can watch random ones.
Niche InternetHow Podcasts Became the New Battleground State
It’s widely established by now that Trump, who avoids all forms of unfriendly press, has rounded out his unwavering support from the right-wing media ecosystem by wholeheartedly embracing the “manoverse.” He’s appeared on bro-casts like This Past Weekend With Theo Von, Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant, and the Nelk Boys’ Full Send, among others, deepening a strategy of playing into the aesthetics and grievances of what’s often described as “disaffected young men,” a demographic that makes up a considerable portion of his base. These appearances take the shape of friendly hangouts where Trump and the hosts cover topics like sports, libertarianism, free speech, dads, and conspiracy theories, a topic that connects with the former president’s vigorous deployment of baseless claims. Trump’s campaign is so happy with this approach, apparently, that it seems to have fully integrated the digital subculture to further power its appeal. That’s how we ended up with the comedian-podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe, a.k.a. the host of the podcast Kill Tony, calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend.
in a culture supercharged by micro-celebrity and the internet, messiness is a kind of proxy for authenticity. As reflected by anything from Smartless to Call Her Daddy to any number of other reality-television podcasts, lasting episodes are ones containing moments that feel like you’re looking beyond the veil: a private revelation, the dispensing of tea, an instance of interpersonal friction, the emergence of an inside joke. This stacks the deck for Trump, a chaos agent whose primary gift is a capacity to make loud noises, redirect conversation, and keep your attention.
If Trump has successfully mapped his talent for making mess onto the basic incentives of a podcast, Harris is a classical operator still working with old media tactics. On Call Her Daddy and Club Shay Shay, Harris reiterated many of the same talking points and anecdotes she’s already delivered elsewhere. Speaking to Sharpe on the subject of grief and her late mother, Harris gave the same response as she did to Anderson Cooper during her CNN Town Hall on October 23. “Grief is difficult,” she says. “There are two sides to the coin. There are relationships in your life that touch you deeply, and then to lose that person, it leaves a big void.” It’s a thoughtful answer. It’s also too rehearsed to make a lasting impression on someone who, like Rogan, is interested in off-the-cuff remarks and visceral reactions.
Verified pro-Nazi X accounts flourish under Elon Musk
MANAGING FINANCIAL INSTABILITY IN 2025
Managing Financial Instability Risks in 2025
Summary
- The analysis positions itself as a warning about economic warfare, not financial advice
Key threats identified:
- Alleged Russian influence over key US political figures including Trump and Musk
- Strategic goal to dismantle US through internal turmoil and financial destabilization
- Bitcoin characterized as an economic weapon in a zero-sum game
- Christian Nationalist alignment with plans to destroy dollar/Fed system
Immediate financial risks for 2025:
- Potential government shutdown due to no budget passage
- Proposed $2 trillion budget cuts by Musk
- US debt default risk as leverage for cuts
- Strategic Bitcoin Reserve proposal threatening dollar stability
Critical timeline identified:
- January 2 2025: Government runs out of money
- January 3: New Congress installation
- January 20: Treasury transition period
- May 2025: Potential default date ("X-Date")
Recommended defensive measures:
- Diversify holdings across bonds, real estate, gold/silver ETFs
- Avoid Bitcoin/crypto investments
- Contact representatives to oppose extreme measures
Additional considerations:
- Moving to another country unlikely to help financially
- Social Security potentially at risk
- Banking system likely to hold but spreading funds recommended
- Resolution depends on mainstream Republicans recognizing and countering these threats
Document context:
- Living document subject to updates
- Written by Dave Troy, presented as analysis of warfare operations
- Includes extensive bibliography and related articles
- Last updated November 16, 2024
A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election | QUT ePrints
A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives
The Cost-of-Living Crisis Explains Everything
headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.
To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.
During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.
the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.
the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.
Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?
Voters do seem to be less likely to vote in their economic self-interest these days, and more likely to vote for a culturally compelling candidate. As my colleague Rogé Karma notes, lower-income white voters are flipping from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party on the basis of identitarian issues. The sharp movement of union voters to Trump seems to confirm the trend. At the same time, high-income voters are becoming bluer in order to vote their cosmopolitan values.
The Biden-Harris administration did make a difference in concrete, specific ways: It failed to address the cost-of-living catastrophe and had little to show for its infrastructure laws, even if it found a lot to talk about. And it dismissed voters who said they hated the pain they felt every time they had to open their wallet.
One last look at why Harris lost the 2024 election.
"The fog of war" is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while living through it.
Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer “why Trump won” or “what happened to the Democratic party” in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I’m trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That’s the goal: not to give a single, definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one.
A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn’t feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth — traditional metrics for measuring economic success — as proof that Bidenomics was working. But these macro numbers didn’t soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats, and very few pundits, seem to have grasped this.
it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance (even in a loss) was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working-class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base.
You Don’t Believe In Free Markets And Free Speech If You’re Demanding Criminal Charges Against People For Their Free Market, Free Speech Decisions
Trump taps RFK Jr. for health secretary position
Kennedy has suggested purging staff at federal health agencies and devoting half of the National Institutes of Health's budget to researching alternative health care.
Trump's pick would put one of the nation's foremost vaccine skeptics in charge of America's health care agencies.
Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again campaign's proposals have already alarmed some public health experts.
Don't Panic
the idea that the next Trump term will ruthlessly implement his awful agenda. For one thing, it’s hard to say that Trump has an agenda. He’s going to rattle the saber about the border and probably find some ways to beef up enforcement, although it’s hard to say to what effect. He seems really intent on this tariffs thing, but that’s an issue that’s going to prompt huge corporate resistance which will in turn create turmoil within the Republican coalition; it seems very unlikely that he’s going to get anything like what he wants at the scale he wants.
The Trump administration was a daily exercise in corruption, controversy, and scandal. Major admin officials seemed to resign by the day. As I won’t stop pointing out, Trump’s signature policy objective (according to him!) was Obamacare repeal, and he was incapable of getting it past his own party in Congress.
Trump's MAGA allies gloat Project 2025 "is the agenda"
Musk Turning Into the Mar-a-Lago ‘Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave’
Donald Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Inflation
I readily agreed that positive news about jobs, G.D.P., and Biden’s efforts to stimulate manufacturing investment—of which there was plenty—wasn’t receiving as much attention as it deserved, particularly compared with the voluminous coverage of inflation. But I also pointed to governments from across the political spectrum in other countries, such as Britain, Germany, and France, that had experienced big rises in consumer prices. Inflation, it seemed, was poison for all incumbents, regardless of their location or political affiliation.
According to the network exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, seventy-five per cent of the voters in last week’s election said that inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship during the past year, and of this group about two-thirds voted for Donald Trump.
According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”
Immigration, the culture war, Trump’s reprobate appeal, and other factors all fed into the mix. But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave. This is a complex issue that can’t be fully addressed in a single column. But one place to start is at the White House itself, where staffers at the Council of Economic Advisers (C.E.A.) and the National Economic Council spent a lot of time analyzing the inflation spike and examining options to deal with it.
Why, despite falling inflation, was public sentiment about the economy and the President still so sour? “We quickly realized that wasn’t just about the inflation rate,” Ernie Tedeschi, a former chief economist at the C.E.A. who left the Administration earlier this year, told me. “People were still going to the store and seeing high egg prices and high milk prices.” Even when an inflationary period peters out, prices don’t magically return to where they were before it began.
Most U.S. economists, including those associated with the Biden White House, remain skeptical about the efficacy of price controls, which they believe can lead to serious distortions and shortages. “I try to be humble, but I don’t know how they would have helped,” Tedeschi said. “People complained about inflation. If we had done price controls, they would have complained about shortages. It would still have been pinned on the President.”
Even if there was no simple policy fix for the political problems facing the Biden Administration, could it have done a better job of addressing voters’ concerns rhetorically? William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Clinton Administration, said last week that Biden should have pivoted much earlier from emphasizing job creation to focussing on the cost of living. “He was trapped in a very traditional ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mind-set,” Galston said. “It was a fundamental mistake.”
Though Biden’s record on G.D.P. growth and employment creation is genuinely praiseworthy—since January, 2021, the economy has added sixteen million jobs—there is perhaps something in this criticism. For a time, it did seem that the White House wasn’t sufficiently acknowledging the frustration and anger that the inflation spike had generated. Still, beginning last year, Biden spoke out a lot more about high prices, and he sought to place some of the responsibility on corporate graft. He announced measures to crack down on “junk fees,” and criticized “shrinkflation” and “price gouging”—getting very little credit for it in the media or anywhere else. The Administration also tried to advertise the pathbreaking steps it had taken, through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, to lower health-care costs: capping the price of insulin for retirees, empowering Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays for some drugs, and introducing limits on out-of-pocket costs.
After Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she vowed that reducing the cost of living would be her first priority. She also outlined a number of proposals designed to help low- and middle-income families, which included expanded child tax credits, a new subsidy for first-time home buyers, and allowing Medicare to help cover the cost of home care.
Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on.
David Shreve: The irony of American political economics
Summary: Shreve analyzes the paradox between economic performance under Democratic versus Republican administrations and public perception of economic competence. He presents substantial statistical evidence showing Democratic administrations consistently outperforming Republican ones across multiple economic metrics, while explaining how Republicans have successfully maintained a reputation for superior economic stewardship through specific messaging strategies and tax policies.
Since 1949, job growth under Democratic presidencies has been more than twice as large as that during Republican administrations (2.47% to 1.07%). Excluding public sector jobs, the advantage is even greater (2.55% to 0.97%). Other key averages reveal a similar distinction during this period: Real business investment growth advanced 6.58% under Democratic presidents and 2.98% under their Republican counterparts; real personal income — excluding government transfers — increased 2.66% and real economic growth per capita (net domestic product) advanced 2.6% under Democratic chief executives, but only by 1.41% and 1.28%, respectively, under Republican leaders. Inflation has also been much more modest under Democratic presidents (2.91% compared to 3.28% under their Republican counterparts), with an even more decided advantage when volatile energy and food markets are excluded (2.87% compared to 3.59%).
Of the 11 U.S. recessions we’ve endured over the past 75 years, 10 began in Republican presidential administrations; only Jimmy Carter — embracing Republican-style fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy much more completely than any other recent Democratic president — presided over a “Democratic” recession. The two “double-dip” recessions of 1980 and 1981-82, straddling the late Carter and early Reagan administrations, are almost indistinguishable in their policy origins.
We are reminded consistently by pundits, journalists and scholars that tax cuts represent what may be our most readily available and useful tool for economic stimulus. Flat, or flatter, taxes, we are told, are the only means to the achievement of tax simplicity and tax compliance.
Even on the question of who tends to favor lower or higher taxes, it is easy to be deceived. When income taxes are reduced (at the federal and state level) and the entire tax code is rendered less progressive as a result, two things happen almost automatically: other much more regressive taxes rise to fill the vacuum created by universally demanded (if not readily acknowledged) public services and consumer demand falters as higher taxes begin to fall on those compelled to spend all that they earn. Overall economic activity and prospective revenue growth, in turn, begin to stagnate, triggering a vicious cycle of tax rate increases (among the untouched regressive tax vehicles), just to maintain public services and economic activity.
Republican politicians have stumbled upon a remarkably effective political strategy: preach tax cuts as the be-all and end-all of successful economic policy; ignore the ways in which federal income tax cuts often lead to increased tolls, fees and property, sales, and excise tax increases; relinquish all but rhetorical opposition to the federal deficits created by federal tax cuts; and cap it off by hinting repeatedly that more could be done — allegedly to great effect — by reducing government spending directed at “undeserving” and “unambitious” poor people of color.
Republican political leaders have their cake and eat it too, riding a diffuse anti-tax sentiment to political victory. Actual results in this game don’t often matter, at least as long as their Democratic opponents succeed in staving off the most precipitous decline with safety nets and the preservation of some progressive fiscal policy elements.
Begun quietly with what Republican activist and Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski called the “Two Santa Claus Theory” — under which Republicans could counter the Democratic social spending Santa Claus with their own tax-cutting Kris Kringle — this approach promised political “success” even amid policy failure, for opponents could be pinned with the deficits and damage it produced.
Exploiting normal psychological tendencies to imagine that “more money in my pocket” and “less money in theirs” simply must be good policy, the widespread ignorance of actual public spending and significant intergovernmental fiscal policies (where federal change forces state and local change, or vice versa), and the compelling notion that personal economic opportunity or success must be derived from personal talent and initiative (rather than significant public policy reform), the “Two Santa Claus” strategy has buoyed a Republican Party that has consistently delivered sub-par results.
Trump says he’ll set up an anti-woke task force in US military to monitor generals
Why doesnt gay porn show tops putting on lube?
Racism, misogyny, lies: how did X become so full of hatred? And is it ethical to keep using it?
It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.
We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.
“What we’ve seen,” says Ed Saperia, dean of the London College of Political Technology, “is controversial content drives engagement. Extreme content drives engagement.” Creating toxic content became a viable livelihood, which my 16-year-old, on football X, noticed way before I did: people saying patently wrong things for hate-clicks.
high-attention tweets go straight to the top of the For You feed, driven by a “black box algorithm designed to keep you scrolling”, as Rose Wang, COO of another rival, Bluesky, puts it, but the user experience is screeds of repetition on topics tailored to annoy you.
We saw the real-life effects of this when misinformation over the identity, ethnicity and faith of the killer of three young girls in Southport incited explicitly racist unrest across the UK this August, such as hasn’t been seen since the 70s. X, Mulhall says, “was a central hub not only for creating the climate for the riots, but also the organisation and distribution of content that led to riots”.
Governments, meanwhile, have no reliable redress, even when, as Mulhall puts it, “decisions made on the west coast of America are demonstrably affecting our communities”. In April, Brazil’s supreme court sought suspensions of fewer than 100 X accounts, for hate speech and fake news – mainly supporters of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, disputing the legitimacy of his defeat. X refused, and declined to represent itself in court. On Monday, the court unanimously upheld a ban on the entire platform, arguing that it “considered itself above the rule of law”. It’s extraordinary that Musk didn’t do more to avoid that, from a business perspective, but it may be that there are things he values more than money, such as immunity from governmental or democratic constraint.
Donald Trump may have shocked the US legacy media by speaking directly to voters with coarse, increasingly unhinged messaging, but if we think a contented population, secure in a prosperous future, would have embraced his authoritarian lurch, we’re dreaming. Rage is out there, whether social media bankrolls it or not, and “all the mainstream platforms were generally failing on hate speech”, Mulhall says. “They didn’t want this content but they were struggling to deal with it. Then they would step up a bit after a Charlottesville [the white supremacist rally in 2017] or Capitol Hill.”
“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”
Musk’s commitment to free speech is jaw-droppingly unconvincing: he used it to reject Brazil’s demands, yet readily acceded to Narendra Modi’s demands in India, and suspended hundreds of accounts linked to farmers’ protests there in February this year. “Things like free speech are instruments to Musk, rather than principles,” Mulhall says. “He’s a tech utopian with no attachment to democracy.”
Musk has been named in a cyberbullying lawsuit brought by the gold medallist Imane Khelif. The boxer, who was born female and has never identified as either trans or intersex, was subjected to libellous claims about her gender by numerous public figures – British politicians, JK Rowling, Donald Trump – all on X. Andrew Tate, meanwhile, may have been charged by the Romanian authorities with human trafficking and rape, but his online misogynist fantasies of women as a slave caste, which have immense global reach, have attracted no censure greater than de-platforming, by YouTube, Insta, TikTok and Facebook – while the impact of these bans was lessened, even undone, by his freedom to operate on X
The main hurdle has been that people migrate in packs and until recently weren’t migrating fast enough. If they do, and Saperia is right, Bluesky and Threads (which now has 175 million active monthly users), will ultimately supplant X. Will it be the same? It can’t be – the free-for-all of the open web, from which Twitter created its famous “town square” discursive experience (anyone could chat, and look, the Coastguard Agency and CNN were also right there) has been replaced by a social media idea Saperia calls the “dark forest” and Wang describes as “you find your people in small spaces, and work together to build an experience that you want – basic human building blocks of interaction
PDF to Brainrot | MemenomeLM
converts a pdf of information into a tiktok explainer video with casual explnations over ADHD stimulation runner videos
‘The Interview’: Nancy Pelosi Insists the Election Was Not a Rebuke of the Democrats
I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump. It’s clarity of the message, and if that’s what Bernie’s talking about, and that’s what Joe Manchin’s talking about, we weren’t clear in our message as to what things are, then I agree with that. And that was one of the concerns I expressed about saying we haven’t put forth what was done. It’s our legacy, too. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] The rescue package. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] Infrastructure Bill. [Pelosi bangs on the table again.] The CHIPS Act. But that didn’t come across as well as it should have. So I think if you’re talking about messaging, you’re talking about communications, that’s one thing. If you’re talking about what we stand for versus what they stand for, the public’s in for a big surprise.
I think that any vice president is, like it or not, tied to the record of the president. I think what Biden did was great, and being tied to his record is a great thing but not the way the record was perceived. This is a record of job creation. Sixteen million jobs as opposed to the record of her opponent who had the worst job-creation record since Herbert Hoover. Yes, 16 million jobs, turning around inflation, all the things that we did to build the infrastructure of America, reduce the cost of prescription drugs.
President Trump has promised to use the Justice Department and the attorney general to go after his perceived enemies. He has said that over and over again, and you’re one of them. Well, you would think that that would be enough reason for people not to vote for him. But that’s what he said. So when people say to me, “Why do you think our democracy is in danger?” I’ll say, well, let’s define our democracy. What is democracy? Free and fair elections? Peaceful transfer of power, independence of the judiciary, the rule of law, all of those kinds of things are part of a democracy. So if he’s going after those things, and thank God, the only, shall we say, peace of mind that we have today is that we don’t have the assault on the system that would have been there had Kamala Harris won. That isn’t right. It shouldn’t be that way. And that he would say — maybe thought it, might even want to do it, but to say it and the American people will say, “That’s OK with me ”?
Inside the Collapse of Venture for America
In the beginning, VFA was an institution beloved by many of its fellows. “It was a wonderful way to leave college and enter the real world because you’re surrounded by a community and there’s support from the organization,” says Jamie Norwood, co-founder of feminine hygiene brand Winx Health. Norwood and her co-founder, Cynthia Plotch, are a VFA success story. They met as fellows in 2015 and VFA eventually helped them launch their company with a grant and advisement. “We always say, Winx Health would not be here without VFA,” Norwood says.
Norwood and Plotch went through the standard VFA admissions protocol, which was rigorous. It required two written applications, a video interview, and in-person interviews at an event called “Selection Day,” many of which were held in New York City and Detroit over the years. By the end of each university term in May, accepted fellows would get access to Connect, VFA’s job portal, and have until November to land a job. For each fellow hired in a full-time job, VFA received a $5,000 placement fee, paid by partner companies. This fee became a crucial revenue stream for the organization—effectively wedding the professional success of its fellows to its bottom line.
Selection Day interviews were conducted by judges who often pitted interviewees against each other. Candidates were told to organize themselves in order of least to most likely to be successful, or according to whose answers had the most value per word. The format felt ruthless. “People cried” during the interview process, Plotch remembers.
The problems with the business bled into the fellows’ experience in 2023 and 2024, leaving them disenchanted, financially struggling, or expelled en masse from the program for reasons they believe were beyond their control. Despite a multitude of financial red flags, VFA leadership still insisted on recruiting for the 2024 class. “The talent team was traveling nonstop, using prepaid Visa cards since the corporate cards didn’t work,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.
Onboarding fresh recruits became increasingly crucial if VFA was going to survive. The organization asked companies for placement fees upfront in 2023, according to internal VFA documents and conversations with former employees. The policy change gave companies pause. Fewer companies signed up as partners, meaning fellows weren’t getting jobs and VFA was losing money.
In the spring of 2023, “there were 15 jobs on opening day,” for a class that eventually grew to over 100 fellows, the former director explains. Gabriella Rudnik, a 2023 fellow, estimates that when training camp began in July 2023, less than half of her peers had jobs, “whereas in previous years it would be closer to like 80 percent.”
Fellows were made to pay the price for the shortage of companies partnering with VFA in 2023. “We weren’t getting more jobs on Connect, and that’s what led to so many fellows being off-boarded,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.
Traditionally, VFA gave fellows a deadline of November of their class year to find a job, which typically meant a few stragglers were given extra help to find a position if they were late. In those rare cases during earlier years, fellows were offboarded by the organization, a former director says.
In previous years, expulsion was a much more serious and infrequent occurrence. “Removal from the fellowship was not something done lightly. During my tenure, we instituted an internal investigation process, similar to an HR investigation,” says the former executive who worked at VFA from 2017-20.
In total, at least 40 fellows from the 2023 class were expelled for failing to get jobs that weren’t available, according to research by former VFA fellows who tracked the number of fellows purged from a Slack channel. Records of their participation were removed from the VFA website, the fellows say.
Many fellows had made sacrifices to be part of the highly selective and prestigious VFA, which cited acceptance rates of around 10 percent of applicants. “There were fellows who turned down six-figure jobs to be a part of this program, and were told that the program that Andrew Yang started would live up to its reputation,” says Paul Ford, a 2024 fellow.
Though internal documents show that VFA was slowly imploding for months, in all external communications with fellows, the nonprofit still maintained that 2024 training camp would take place in Detroit.
“From an ethical perspective, it does reek of being problematic,” says Thad Calabrese, a professor of nonprofit management at New York University. “You entered into an arrangement with people who don’t have a lot of money, who believed that you were going to make them whole. Then you’re going to turn around and not make them whole.”
Biden and Sanders meet union organizers amid labor turmoil
Why millions voted for both Trump and progressive policies
Bernie Would Have Won
AI summary: This article argues that Trump's 2024 victory represents the triumph of right-wing populism over neoliberalism, enabled by Democratic Party leadership's deliberate suppression of Bernie Sanders' left-wing populist movement. The piece contends that by rejecting class-focused politics in favor of identity politics and neoliberal policies, Democrats created a vacuum that Trump's authoritarian populism filled.
Here’s a warning and an admonition written in January 2019 by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker: “If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that's stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It's on us to outmaneuver them and win.”
There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.
But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.
The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people.
These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life.
On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.
Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures.
The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests
The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.
What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.
The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.
Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.
The Manosphere Won
Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.
in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.
What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.
the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.