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- Welp. It Got Worse.
Welp. It Got Worse.
Surely *this* escalation of authoritarian power will have consequences.
Greg Iwinski
June 08, 2025
Hello again and welcome to the best 1000 words of your week, unless you have received one of these:
A love letter from a person an ocean away.1
A letter from the IRS explaining your return was too small.
A reverse-traveling time capsule explaining that things do in fact work out and society exists in the year 2500.
A job offer a significant distance away (possibly near the person who sent you the love letter).
A reverse-traveling time capsule explaining the 3 biggest publicly traded companies of 2500 and/or the winners of each March Madness.
A forward-traveling time capsule explaining “where the gold at.”
There is always a lot happening, here’s some stuff that isn’t getting a deep dive but makes it on the board tonight:
The President is doing a travel ban for 12 countries that’s going into effect this week and no one organizationally is prepared for. But it really hits a lot of Trump itches at once: it hurts brown and Black people a lot, it reinforces white nationalism, and it’s inflammatory to stoke his base and create justified outrage that’s louder than talking about inflation and how tariffs are insane. It’s everything rolled into one, and it’s a great one to bring up to the people in your life who pretend to hate Trump but then conveniently bring up Hannity talking points.
The Republican budget bill is in the Senate and it’s a mess. Lots of Republicans in the House voted for it without reading it, and then had to make public statements. MTG had a nice long tweet about how “if she had known” a decade long prohibition on AI regulation was in the bill she just voted on she wouldn’t have voted yes. And now some Republican congressmen, worried about what the energy subsidy cuts would do to their states, are begging their Senate counterparts to fix what they broke. So… it’s going great!
Reporters are starting to ask if having a terrible President means tourists will cancel plans to come to the Olympics and the World Cup. And uhhh seems like yeah? If they way they respond to protest is through jackbooks, you’re probably not hopping on a trans-ocean flight if you’re part of “the global majority.” Maybe that means cheaper tickets for us, or maybe Trump decides he’s using the Air Force to bomb the stadiums because we didn’t get a nation by nation tribute paid to how great he is!
NEWS ITEM: You may have noticed that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are fighting! As soon as Musk left Washington DC and got back to his compound / Minority Report milk-bath he started letting tweets rip about the budget bill. TLDR - he thinks it’s bad! But for, like, totally different reasons than you do! LET’S GO TO THE BOX!
Elon says the budget is full of “pork,” which normally means when a congressman gets a government contract in their district by sneaking it into a bill on something unrelated. But because Elon understands the American government like a guy who just got off the Apartheid Express, we don’t know that he really knows what “pork” is other than “spending I don’t like.” And the thing is… he had an entire semi-legal team who spent 3 months erasing spending they didn’t like that had already been congressionally approved. He had a license to kill pork for a full quarter of 2025 and now he’s complaining that 30-50 feral hogs are running into his yard!
It is good when your enemies fight. Unless they are Godzilla and Mecha-Godzilla and you live underfoot. But in this case I think it’s actually good — they’re distracted and bloodletting each other and two sloppy idiots will surely only get more sloppy.
There’s been “internet chatter” (which means I’ve seen at least 12 people online say it, as opposed to starting this “everyone is saying”) about how caring about / being happy these guys are fighting violates the Good Person Fighting The Bad Guys rules and means someone is a distracted accomplice by falling right into the conservative trap. And we need to save time here and just say that that argument is dumb. It is good, it’s fun to see them swing, and it’s wild to watch a rich immigrant call the sitting President of the United States a pedophile… after he spent a quarter billion helping him get elected. And that’s also what makes it so good, that Elon doesn’t get that going “you' hung out with epstein what a creep” doesn’t land as well when you’ve had your kid crawling around his desk for three months.
Okay! Time to hurdle over the paywall!
