"For 10 years, I’ve been hearing that we needed to fight fire with fire, to oppose Trump by becoming him, to protect our supposedly sacred liberal institutions by taking some shortcut..."

"... that carved a destructive path straight through them: cracking down on speech, abandoning the norms of journalistic objectivity, making unprecedented use of prosecutorial power. These were bad ideas in their own right, and they did absolutely nothing to stop Trump."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "When the rule of law becomes rule of lawfare/Friday’s Bolton raid and the rebuke of Trump’s $500M fine show what happens when justice is not impartial" (WaPo).

Bad ideas... and they did absolutely nothing to stop Trump. But what if they had stopped Trump? That was the biggest of the ideas, and it might have worked. McArdle asserts that now — now that Trump is back with a vengeance — now we should see that neutral principles are best. If only the lawfare hadn't backfired, it would have been delightful to go on ignoring them.

Delightful for whom? Who are we talking about? Not McArdle herself. She's reporting on what she'd "been hearing" for 10 years. She also says "it was depressing watching so many people on the left thrill to this abusive lawfare." Well, "so many people on the left" think a lot of awful things, including that the so-called "rule of law" is a con.

Did the ordinary liberals of America buy into the fight-fire-with-fire approach? Let them take responsibility, not merely gesture at the "many people on the left." But it's not as though admitting you were wrong now will carry any weight. You played a game of tit for tat and now you're sad that the game continues.

ADDED: Trump plays openly, on Truth Social, just yesterday:

"A famous economist once remarked: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.'"

"That epigram, issued by Robert Solow in 1987, became the subject of a lot of debate among economists in the 1990s.... A decade later, another famous economist made a similar observation about the internet — actually, a prediction: 'By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.' That was Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.... We’re now hearing similar questions about artificial intelligence...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Are we in an AI bubble that’s getting ready to pop? The promised AI revolution isn’t here yet. But it’s a smart bet that productivity gains will follow" (WaPo).

And this caught my eye: "A friend who is a lawyer... asked a chatbot to draft a document, and though the draft needed work, he estimated it had saved him two to four hours of typing. I asked him what he did with the extra time. He pleaded the fifth." Pleaded the Fifth, eh? That makes it sound as though he billed the client for the 2 to 4 hours it would have taken to do the work traditionally!

It's not just the "typing" that the AI did for him. It also composed material into solid standard English, wrote the citations in the required form, put the substance in some sort of order, and probably much more. It wasn't just "typing" he'd have been doing during those hours. 

McArdle is using the word "typing" in a way that reminds me of Truman Capote's famous insult to Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." Oh, Jack wasn't just typing typing. He was typing typing. 

"And that is why you should be concerned about what Colbert’s cancellation means for American democracy..."

"... not because it’s a sign of a corporation bending the knee to a would-be dictator, but because it’s a sign of the unbundling of the American public. Ensconced in our homes, watching our custom-tailored streaming feeds, we simply have fewer and fewer things in common.... And America needs a shared national story, a common understanding of something, to hold together as a nation.... [A] lot of what we are doing is consuming tailored content, curated for us by a personal algorithm. In some ways, the Colbert show was a symptom of that shift. The sharp leftward lurch that consumed American media companies was driven by social media algorithms that rewarded left-wing political hot takes with high engagement. Media companies followed those rewards precisely because they were no longer catering to a truly mass audience but to niche fandoms. Having come of age in the long shadow of truly mass media, many of the people in those institutions might have thought they were moving public opinion into the progressive future, but in fact it was fan service for a narrow demographic. Now the algorithms have changed, and so have young people, who rarely turn on their televisions today.... [W]e have no obvious successor to the unifying force that late-night shows used to be. America might no longer want the 'Late Show.' But it needs some way to hear the same stories, laugh at the same jokes and gather around the collective water cooler to talk about what they mean."

Writes Megan McArdle, quoted in "Why the ‘Late Show’ cancellation worries me about the American public/The loss of Stephen Colbert’s show is another sign of how we are losing our shared ties" (WaPo).

Everybody laughed at the same joke that was that kiss cam couple. That was "a common understanding of something," holding us "together as a nation."

TV has died, but the stories get out, through TikTok and other media. More things have an opportunity to go big, and the dispersion is fast. What was television, really, by contrast? 

"As a gay man I applaud this decision. The court may be acting in bad faith, they may be hostile to gay rights, but..."

"... this ruling will help protect gay kids and gender non-conforming kids from this insane gender ideology that suggests that they may have been born in the wrong bodies if they don't fit some retrograde heterosexual gender role. You can't argue on one hand that gender is 'fluid' and on the other that it is somehow fixed in small children who have yet to experience puberty. This is madness, especially as we know these medical procedures lead to a lifetime of medical issues and a shorter lifespan. Only an adult can make these decisions for themselves."

Writes John02116 in the comments section to the Megan McArdle column, "The ACLU bet big on a trans rights case. Its loss was predictable. A Supreme Court ruling shows trans advocates failed to see the fragility of the liberal consensus" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can see the big disconnect between the column and the comments).

An even more strongly worded comment comes from JR Colorado:

"Suddenly, while they were drinking their coffee...."

GenX here. Three people I knew died in the towers, human beings just like Taylor Lorenz, who got on the subway and went to work one day and then suddenly while they were drinking their coffee they had to decide whether to jump or burn to death.

Not a fucking punchline. https://t.co/drIyJJxgfn

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 30, 2025

"On Tuesday, federal employees got an email with the subject line 'Fork in the Road,' inviting them to resign..."

"... in exchange for getting to work from home — probably on administrative leave — until Sept. 30. It was very similar to an email Twitter employees got shortly after Musk took over, down to the same subject line. But while the Twitter email saw employees resign in 'droves,' the current round is unlikely to have the same effect. The Trump administration is about to discover why reforming the government is so different from — and so much harder than — reforming the private sector.... Federal workplaces... select people who are risk-averse and willing to trade higher pay and autonomy for a job that offers excellent benefits and a low likelihood of getting fired.... These are not mercurial young tech workers, ready to flounce off to the next start-up if management isn’t to their liking. These workers are older... with an average tenure... three times longer than that of a typical private-sector employee. And their jobs often have no equivalent in the private sector. I will be surprised if many of them resign.... [T]hese kinds of buyouts often see star performers leave while the laggards cling to jobs they can’t easily replace...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Trump, Musk are about to learn why reforming the government is so hard/Musk’s cutbacks at Twitter might have worked. The federal government is a different beast" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Star performers and laggards — are those the 2 groups? Just because you're not a highly energized risk-taker doesn't mean you're a slow-moving loser. What sort of person belongs in this bureaucracy?

"Americans are too ornery to fall for TikTok propaganda/Banning TikTok may be legally sound but not really necessary."

Writes Megan McArdle (at WaPo)(free-access link).

I am wary of Chinese control over such an influential app and, potentially, its user data. But the internet is spying on us all the time, and I presume the Chinese already get a hold of a lot of that data. As for the Chinese influence over what we see... the Chinese government will surely slip some subtler nudges in among the makeup tutorials and cat videos.... But if you think that kind of gentle sculpting is so effective, you need to explain why the more overt efforts of countless establishment institutions, including our major social media companies, failed to get the American public to mask up, lock down and repudiate Donald Trump. I suspect the Chinese propagandists will simply discover what Americans already know: We’re too ornery to be controlled by anyone, including an algorithm.

We are affected by speech, and speech is important because it affects us, but the way it affects us is infinitely complicated. It's cute to use the word "ornery," but it doesn't express what we really are, and it's deceptive to refer to "control," because even if we can't be "controlled," we are open and vulnerable to complex influence. I'm "ornery" enough to resist this assurance that speech doesn't matter. I defend freedom of speech because speech does matter. 

And it troubles me to see "makeup tutorials and cat videos." People who talk like that are revealing that they don't use TikTok. They don't know what it is. I could show you thousands of things that are not transitory fluff, but just as an example, let me show you this man:

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

Megan McArdle went to see the Matt Walsh movie "Am I Racist?"

You know, so did I, last week, and I didn't even blog about why I wasn't blogging about it. But I'm telling you now because I have the hope that reading McArdle will liberate my thoughts on the subject. 

The headline is "You might not enjoy ‘Am I Racist?’ You should watch it anyway. In the mockumentary, Matt Walsh is concerned that he is racist. Awkward moments follow" (WaPo)(free access link).

Ok, first, I don't agree that it's a mockumentary. I think the word "mockumentary" refers to a scripted (or improv) fictional movie that takes the form of a documentary, like "Spinal Tap" or "Best in Show." It's a great comedy category. I love it. But "Am I Racist?" films real people who are being themselves within a situation that the filmmaker sets up. It's in the category of pranking. The classic example is "Borat." The central character is pretending to be something he isn't, perhaps for sheer comedy, perhaps with a political agenda, and the idea is to extract something revealing from people who are not in on the joke. 

McArdle writes:

About that revolution....

I love Talkin Bout a Revolution, but “we’re going to rise up and overthrow the system” was not exactly a novel musical theme by the late 1980s. https://t.co/QHYivpHvGL

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) February 7, 2024

"Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds."

"I think, for example, of my fellow Post columnist Lawrence H. Summers, who was forced out as president of Harvard several years ago after he speculated, at a small private seminar, that one possible reason for the underrepresentation of women in elite science and engineering programs might be that their ability was less variable than men’s. So while both sexes perform about as well on average, the women might tend to cluster near the middle, while the men are overrepresented at the bottom and the top — the latter being where elite programs draw from."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "The world could use more jerks" (WaPo).

When did you first become sensitized to the mocking of women?

I wonder, this morning, as I scan the comments on yesterday's post, "Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness... [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy."*

Here's what I'm seeing (boldface added):

Sebastian: "Exuberant mockery of women, subversion of common sense, and in-your-face-take-that-deplorables-middle-fingerism....

Michelle Dulak Thomson: "[A]ll I can say is that he doesn't traffic in 'whimsy and joy.' He is a sick individual who mercilessly mocks women. Which is evidently OK these days...."

"Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness... [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy."

"Where Matt Walsh offers enemies, Dylan Mulvaney aspires to exuberance. She suggests the possibility of making yourself, and the world, into something better, while [Matt] Walsh promises, at best, only the dour satisfaction of being right about how terrible everything is. It isn’t surprising that the kids are choosing Mulvaney over that. But Walsh is right, his followers cry. Even if he were, it wouldn’t justify his tactics. In the court of public opinion, truth is not necessarily a sufficient defense."

Writes Megan McArdle in "For conservatives, Dylan Mulvaney should be a role model" (WaPo).

Also: "Conservatives... understand that bullying has cost progressivism a lot of support among moderates, including on issues surrounding transgenderism, where successful efforts to stifle public discussion of basic questions — such as 'What Is a Woman'? — have led to resentment and backlash rather than consensus...."

ADDED: I've got a new post based on some of the comments in this post. Writing that new post, I noticed my use of brackets in the post title above — "[s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty" — makes it seem as though McArdle might have used the masculine pronoun "he." No, she had "She," and I needed to switch to a lower-case "S." I just deploying brackets in the conventional way editors do when cutting down a quote. Nothing substantive.

200 journalists and writers release an open letter to the NYT to raise "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”

Hell Gate reports.

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people....

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

Hell Gate has an interview with Jo Livingstone, "an award-winning critic and writer who helped organize the open letter."

Here's the open letter. I'll highlight what I think are important parts:

"Last week, in a conversation with colleague Gail Collins, [Bret] Stephens argued that a couple with a combined income of $400,000 a year doesn’t necessarily have a lifestyle we’d describe as 'rich.'"

"'They’re scrimping to send their kids to college, driving a Camry, if they have a car at all, and wondering why eggs have gotten so damned expensive.' 'Granted,' said Collins, which was the most fascinating part of this exchange.... How have liberals gotten so comfortable with the idea that $400,000 a year — more than what 98 percent of the population makes — is really just a middle-class income?..."

Writes Megan McArdle in "The $400K conundrum: Why America’s urban rich don’t feel that way" (WaPo).

"People moved to coastal cities because that’s where the good jobs were.... This went on so long that the appeal of central cities..."

"... came to seem almost a law of nature, effortless and eternal. Unfortunately, the pandemic broke the virtuous cycle.... I suspect cities have fallen prey to the same delusion as those people who carefully pack up their laptops while the plane fills with smoke: They are looking around at other people, most of whom seem to be acting pretty normally.... Yes, crime might have risen, and residents might be darkly muttering about moving to the suburbs. But when haven’t city-dwellers threatened to move to the suburbs if the mayor didn’t fix their pet problems right away?... It would be understandable for mayors to look at all the people who have stayed and thought, 'Well, that’s not so bad.'"

Writes Megan McArdle in "Mayors are missing a window to address the remote-work revolution" (WaPo).

"[I]n 1960, more than 9 in 10 Americans accounted for in the census were White — and of the remainder, the overwhelming majority were Black..."

"In 1960, schools could have given underrepresented minorities a boost, allowed some minorities such as Asian Americans to be overrepresented, while retaining a representative White majority. But today, Harvard University’s own internal research has suggested that Asian Americans would make up 43 percent of an admitted class if only academics were considered. Allowing Asian numbers to grow in accordance with their academic overperformance, while keeping affirmative action in place, would presumably have left the White majority substantially underrepresented. That might be morally justified on various grounds, but it is politically untenable.... America can ask some members of the White majority to step aside in favor of underrepresented minorities with lower grades and test scores. And in the name of procedural fairness, America can ask disappointed White applicants to suck it up when they were outcompeted for university places by overperforming minority groups. But America cannot ask both those things at once — not when the numbers get so big and the stakes so high."

Writes Megan McArdle in "Why the architecture of affirmative action was always destined to collapse" (WaPo).

"Can the women’s movement be as effective without the word ‘women’?"

Asks Megan McArdle (at WaPo). 

Ironically and amazingly, McArdle goes about trying to answer this question without using the word "transgender" — or even "gender"! It is out of deference to transgender men (and transgender women) that we're seeing this avoidance of the word "woman." But McArdle is doing her own form of avoidance in this critique of avoidance.

Let's see how she does it:

Historically, the “women’s movement” was mobilized around what sociologists call a “thick” identity. Womanhood influenced almost every aspect of your life, from the biology of menstruation and childbirth, to how you dressed and acted, to your social roles....

But if you're a transgender woman, you don't have the menstruation and childbirth component, and if you're a transgender man, you don't dress and act and perform social roles in a manner that expresses womanhood. So in the transgender-focused view of the world, the "thickness" becomes series of thinner layers.

"Male puberty makes you taller, confers greater muscle and bone mass, larger heart and lung capacity relative to your size, and more hemoglobin...."

"Most people will never have what it takes to compete at the elite levels of high school, college or professional sports. That’s not an argument for kicking the genetically blessed out of the league so that those of us who are slower and weaker can experience the thrill of victory. One might add that it is particularly not an argument for kicking out people who face as many other disadvantages in their lives as trans athletes do. But if you like that answer, you should probably ask whether women’s sports should exist at all. After all, we didn’t create separate leagues to reinforce the special feminine identity of female athletes; if anything, women’s athletics was supposed to break down such divisions. The separation is a nod to biology: After puberty, biological women can’t compete with similarly gifted biological men.... [Do we] think it’s important for cisgender women to have a place where at least a few of us can experience the thrill of victory. Maybe that isn’t an important social goal. Or maybe it is, but just not as important a goal as trans inclusion. Either way, that question will have to be asked and answered — out loud, where everyone can hear it."

Writes Megan McArdle in "We need to be able to talk about trans athletes and women’s sports" (WaPo). 

The easiest solution is not to talk about it. Not only does it seem undesirable to say anything that could feel hurtful toward transgender people, but it's also quite unpleasant to need to say anything about the physical inferiority of women. The only way even to consider excluding transwomen from women's sports is to forefront the athletic inferiority of the female body. To have this conversation is to be transformed into a bunch of Bobby Riggses. But to fail to have the conversation is to say we don't need a special category for the female body and the whole women's sports movement was about nothing.

I thought maybe it would facilitate the conversation to speak of "the female body" instead of "women" or "ciswomen" or "natural women." As McArdle points out, women's sports isn't about how much "like a woman" the athletes feel inside. Indeed, it seems probable that many of them don't identify with what the culture traditionally considers feminine. And the women's sports movement was about transforming traditional gender roles: You could feel very very boyish and you're as womanly as the girl who revels in girliness. Isn't that the ideology of the women's sports movement?

The separate category exists because of the bodily differences and not at all because of inward feelings.... or does it? Maybe sports is really only about how people feel inside. You have to do something outwardly for it to be sports, but you do it for the feelings. If the women's sports movement was about boosting the feelings of women — women, who are inherently inferior at sports! — then how can you turn around and be unkind to the transgenders?

"At least a dozen cities have set homicide records this year. The scale of the killings is recapitulating the worst moments of the United States’ 20th-century urban crisis."

"And if we can’t stop it, we’ll also end up with the kind of over-the-top political response that we have spent decades regretting. That was the era when Bernhard Goetz, the 'Subway Vigilante,' became a New York folk hero for shooting a group of young men who demanded $5. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton left the presidential campaign trail to be home for the execution of a severely brain-injured convict. A few years later, as president, Clinton would help spearhead passage of the infamous 1994 crime bill, which ended up dogging both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during their presidential runs because the modern era blames it (somewhat unfairly) for mass incarceration. The younger progressives who called out Biden and Clinton tend to view the law-and-order politics of that era as pure sadism — or else as a racist, 'New Jim Crow' backlash that served to keep Black Americans separate and unequal.... Crime control is arguably a prerequisite for many items on the progressive policy agenda. Want people to support higher immigration? Reassure them that foreign gangs are not going to reassemble on American streets. Want people to move to dense, walkable urban neighborhoods where their carbon footprint will be smaller? Those neighborhoods won’t be very attractive if there are many criminals walking around, too. And of course, people are most likely to support a reformist criminal justice agenda when crime is low. If many people you know have been victimized, you tend to err on the side of keeping offenders in jail."

Writes Megan McArdle in "Street crime has distorted our politics before. If we don’t get it under control, it will do so again" (WaPo).