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- Sunday Service: 5/11/25
Goooooood Monday morning! Yes, this week I am shifting from a night to a morning release. I’m still tinkering in the first few weeks of the site, but just like that little underdog project known as the Death Star, we’re getting there.
Life is a series of lessons, briefly interrupted by meals and naps and realizations that the summer sun is coming up as you’re going to bed. I experienced all of those this weekend, but as a new week approaches it’s time to get back to the lessons. LESSON: You can stay out incredibly late for work events to catch up with friends and talk shop, but don’t forget that your small children do not care. Two hours into your only REM cycle, they will chuck a magna-tile into your skull while asking if you can make pancakes. And as your body starts to involuntarily convulse from insomnia, just remember… you can have it all!
Also, before we dive into Story Number One, let me do a quick plug. I’m doing a show at the Austin TV Festival — it’s A Late Night Show with Greg Iwinski. I’ve been making my own late night shows for years, but this one is going to be something really special. If you’re coming to the Festival or you’re around Austin on May 30th, grab a ticket.
Okay! Story Number One: Easy To Explain Nefariousness:
As always, Story Number One is available for all subscribers, and paid subscribers have access to Stories One through Five.
There’s a lot of new open maliciousness coming from our government right now. You’ve almost certainly seen it — but as we careen toward a midterms that can only be one of three things,* it’s important to think about how any of this evil lands with normal people.
(*a mammoth rebuke, an apathetic approval, or a canceled election)
Some of the stuff going on right now is hard to explain. Trump building up a crypto coin and having his family go around the world to boost investment in it… sure that’s bad, but that also seems like something the Trumps have been doing forever. Or his fake trade deal with Europe, his global commitment to 10% tariffs… that’s stuff that you have to explain. It’s the Tush Push of bad government.
“What’s the Tush Push?” Uhhh wow, nerd??? Guess you never saw the Eagles win a championship? So double nerd because you don’t know Taylor Swift or sports? The Tush Push is a simple thing that seems like it’s against the rules (a guy in football just gets behind and pushes another guy through the line to get a first down) but you can’t actually explain why it’s against the rules without digging into an explanation of stuff like what an inside line backer does.
Things that are clearly wrong, but that you can’t explain exactly why they’re worse than the norm, are not things that’ll keep Trump voters home or lose him any elections. So it’s almost grimly funny that the administration has moved to easy-to-explain levels of tearing apart our country. Here are some that anyone could explain:
The FDA Commissioner “hinted” there just wouldn’t be a covid booster for kids this year because they couldn’t “in good faith” vaccinate kids. SCORE ONE FOR TEAM “STOP HUMORING IDIOTS AND INSTEAD DRIVE THEM INTO THE WILDERNESS WHERE THEIR BAD IDEAS BELONG!” This is incredibly easy to explain even without having to go into the backstory of how RFK Jr grew up torturing animals like he’s auditioning to play Weston in a new live-action version of Perelandra.
Trump announced he’s using an executive order (his only way to even pretend to accomplish anything because his Congressional majorities are still stuck trying to pass a basic budget)1 to “lower prescription prices.” Now here’s one where maybe you have a friend or uncle or coworker who pulls their head out of their screen and goes, “Wow great job Trump, my meds ARE too expensive!” Because they are!2 But the reason no other President has done this is because (a) you can’t legally and (b) it doesn’t work! So when a person in your orbit pulls a “You gotta give it to Trump, he’s bringing prices down…” you can Just Ask Questions. Like… “How?” and “Is that legal?” and “Can the President just change how much things cost by signing a piece of paper, and if that’s true why can’t he just make gas free or make a Whopper cost 99 cents again?”
Even without constant TV commercials replaying clips about foreign airplanes and no vaccines and your kids still have too many dolls, Trump’s approval has cratered from the commanding 49.5% majority of the election down to his Ride Or Die crew of 37% of America. And I don’t think his mistake is, politically, “doing evil things.” He campaigned fairly explicitly on doing evil things and a bunch of people liked it. It’s that he’s doing evil things that can easily be explained to people as hurting them. People want a comfy nap, and POTUS is raring back with a fist full of magna-tiles.
STORY NUMBER TWO: THESE COLORS DON’T RUN (BUT THE WHITES DO?)
