jd vance is president btw

Unfortunately, we now know what a Millennial American president looks like. That, and a meditation on the importance of your choices now.

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Trump Administration Texted War Plans
The Attack Plans That Shared on Signal
“audio version of group chat”
“This is real”
We are clearly in the the “move fast, break things” era of government, which is to say: this is very Millennial, which we’ll get into momentarily. Love daily Watergate!

What Will You Do?
Rumeysa Ozturk: What we know
Who are the students Trump wants to deport?
Columbia Student Hunted by ICE Sues
Trump cuts legal help for children traveling alone
A year ago, we were deep in student protests. Now, the protestors are being kidnapped. Because this violence is individualized as “quiet” disappearances, we’re experiencing a silent Kent State massacre. This is the second expression of such disappearing, as the same is happening with migrants being caught and catapulted out. Which brings us to the last item: remember how my mom works as a lawyer, protecting migrant children? Funding for her agency disappeared, meaning many were furloughed — and kids are being abandoned. Help them out here.

Global leaders rising in polls
"relationship Canada had with States is over"
Flights between Canada and US down 70%
Climate investors see bargains from Trump
EU calls for households to stockpile 72 hours
Scenes from the other side of the mirror, where (Liberal??) leaders are getting poll bumps from Trump, climate investors are getting bargains, and Europe is holding its breath for war. Are we creeping toward a liberal nationalism era?

Turkey’s Opposition Calls for Boycott, Protests
Turkish opposition rallies in defence
A rejection of Erdoğan’s autocracy
Sure, (AI generated) Pikachu and Joker pictures — but the protests and boycotts in Turkey after the Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s imprisonment are more proof of today’s autocratic landscape and the power(lessness) of the people. That said: the crowds this weekend were huge.

UAE, Qatar, Oman among world’s safest places
Safety Index by Country 2025
Via Semafor, every stupid fucking ”happiest places” report and similar “findings” always ask the same question: for who? For rich people? Because these lists are about creating narratives, as seeing a place like North Korea as “safer” than, say, France or Brazil is ridiculous. As I’ve written before, any “best country in the world” story is a hybrid of propaganda and cultural colonialism. Related and not, also from Semafor: white South Africans are interested in moving to the US “for asylum” based on a Trump order around discrimination of whiteness.

Myanmar earthquake: Deaths pass 1,000
Huge South Korea wildfires kill 27
Carolina wildfires: High winds, low humidity
Three big disasters this week.

My brain has become infected with an upsetting fact that I am going to infect your brain with: the most powerful Millennial in the world — and perhaps ever — is JD Vance.

This is obvious but it has to be said as such. I realized this a few weeks ago, angry about some stupid Trump thing as I picked out clothes for the following day, thinking about how great it would be to have Millennial leaders, to have AOC or Ilhan Omar in the White House. Then, lightning struck: we already have that. Not them, no, but we have a Millennial: JD Vance. We complain and complain and long and long for younger leadership and, yet, somehow the world is living under the rule of a literal forty year old. This means we’ve entered the era of a Millennial presidency, as big theatrical speeches in Greenland suggest who is really in charge. Paired with Zuckerberg, we’re seeing what Millennial power looks like in real time as Trump himself reduces to figurehead, to mascot and plaything, instead of brain. That means Vance and his very public persona (versus the “quiet” and invisible VP of modern times) is perhaps the real president. We may be looking at our situation quite wrong, dogging on other generations for not pulling their weight when Millennials hold a smoking gun.

We talked about this on the most recent Hip Replacement as it had been eating at me, which co-host

Ben Dietz

and guest

Dejaih Smith

of

Silence, Brand!

helped to unpack. (btw: I have a podcast now.) He’s not a “traditional” Millennial on the surface, no, in that he supports the worst ideologies on the planet. But: he’s in an interracial relationship. He’s a working class success story. He worked in — and is shaped by — tech. He had a blogging era! He had (successful) Hollywood dreams! He literally has a LinkedIn! He eats fish tacos with fried avocado! He has a fucking BEARD!!!!!!!!! He is the ultimate Millennial “Just asking questions!” older brother pig man, the outsider who isn’t actually on the outside, wielding a Libertarian chaos unique to Millennial male malaise.

That’s the Millennial context of this moment, representing an evolution of our story. This is what it looks like when an embittered Millennial runs shit like an embittered Millennial would: organized, quiet, chaotic, yet somehow “effective” in using old and new media as cudgels to dominate all conversation, to be the thing that everyone hates — which is the long running Millennial story. He has channeled that Millennial rage into an outlet he could mold, joining someone like Stephen Miller to revamp an old brand in his image: a lost Republican party. “I wasn’t as critical of my party in 2016,” he told Financial Times in 2018. “But when I look at tax reform, when I look at healthcare reform, I see Trump as the least worrisome part of the Republican party’s problem, which is that we are basically living in the 1980s. We are constantly trying to resurrect domestic policies from the 1980s.” Again: the smoking gun. None of this is “about Trump” but instead about Trojan horsing agendas, which happens to be the radical Project 2025. What’s more Millennial than working around systems to upgrade an old system to a new one? He is private equity’ing in less than a decade, proof that anyone can ascend with the right help, which also means: you, like Kat Abughazaleh, like Gabriel Boric, should do something.

Then: the whole Signalgate situation, a conversation where Vance was focused on larger messaging and communication while using proper sentence casing but not punctuation (or emojis, which Gen X Michael Walz employed). But the fact that this all took place on Signal is another Millennial smoking gun, proof of the “shitpost-based government.” That’s why we have an unusually sharp, disgusting social-media-as-fascism White House: AI Ghibli depictions of immigrant deportations; a Valentine’s meme about deportations; incorporating killer dogs into the agenda. Vance may not run these accounts, no, but it’s clear that things like this “come from him” or his world given his smart entry into the JD Vance meme discourse — which all came from the right to begin with. His pushing for AI, his techifying the White House, his quiet-but-aggressive imperialism: like any good Millennial, he is doing his job with little credit as he awaits the moment to seize the throne.

This, as I’ve said before, is why JD Vance is the real horror show of these times: he’s playing by all the rules so that he can eventually have it both ways, pushing himself as a working class “progressive” Republican in 2028, to easily sweep the seat only to further advance this nightmare. Yeah, yeah, Gen Z are punitive and conservative and, yeah, yeah, old people are too — but the Millennial version has it both ways. That is why Vance is so scary: he can code switch like no one else. As is the story of a generation, we await our power era but, unfortunately, it’s already here — and the title holder, like the other title holders, aren’t someone we’d want to claim.

Kat Abughazaleh is running for Congress
"I'm running for Congress."
To the above: I’ve started leaving comments on videos of people with great politics, who are frustrated, to say that they should run for office. We need more change like this as there is such a reality gap in Congress. Kat is…an icon in the making!!

Steph Curry, Michelle Obama create a sports drink
Not to be that friend who’s too woke but a former first lady releasing some Prime competitor as the world burns says a lot about the pee pee poo poo politics of the left. Embarrassing bourgeois capitalists!

Bryan Johnson's Anti-Aging Made Subjects Sick
"How Bryan Johnson Exploited Workers"
The obvious “Bryan Johnson is bad” moment has arrived, despite his Netflix doc and his shitposter angle (that is kinda working). See also: linking “let them” to enabling fascism.

In Japan, Absent God Sounds Warning
No comment: “They have loyally written these descriptions every winter since 1443….For the past seven winters, the Miwatari has failed to appear because the lake didn’t freeze.”

Nigeria lost textile market to Chinese imports
This ties directly to the rise of Shein as Nigerian textiles are cotton while the Chinese textiles are polyester — aka plastic. That’s why things from places like Shein are cheaper! Very bad for you and the planet!! Unless you are a tardigrade!

'God Warrior' Marguerite Perrin reflects
A much needed update, for all of us brain rotted, dark-sided gargyles.

Do you eat a meal in 20 minutes or less?
Reminder to eat slower, less for health (but not not that) but to “not optimize” that time, to enjoy the eating as much as the cooking, to generally not stare-at-a-screen “just because.”

Tell me you have no respect for artists without telling me you have no respect for artists, running your life through a machine that will spit out an image of you in the style of a movie director whose movies you haven’t really seen but that you think will “look cute” on Instagram. Share it on the internet, happily. Do it again with claymation. Do it again with puppets. Have a machine do all your writing, have a machine become you too. Have it make pictures instead of taking pictures. Have it design a room instead of trying something out, instead of collaborating. Sell yourself to the lowest bidder! Let the government sell this too. Tell artists you hate them to their face. Tell them you never cared for creativity to begin with.

Tell me you hate people without telling me you hate people, that you’re eager for ease but also to sacrifice those you think are “disposable.” First artists, then workers. “A senior lawyer told me it was already becoming harder to persuade clients to pay for the time of junior lawyers,” Financial Times wrote this week. “Because they thought AI could do the work instead. The juniors, meanwhile, were reluctant to use the new tools because they were concerned that they would reduce their billable hours, and they would miss out on the practice they needed to progress.” Don’t stop there: have a machine psychoanalyze someone you’re dating. Have a machine divorce you from the world. Replace governments with chatbots. Eliminate connection, eliminate life, eliminate yourself. Gaslight people into believing unchecked capitalism delivers liberty, as

Kate Woodsome

wrote recently, when decades of research shows it shackles people to financial and emotional insecurity. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” Hayao Miyazaki said in 2016. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” And yet: some do not.

Become lost. Isn’t that what you want, by outsourcing your own intelligence, your own creativity, your own taste? “Who benefits from a generation of people who don't have an attention span and find critical thinking really difficult?” the activist and author

Mikaela Loach

asked earlier this month. “How are we going to really understand why the billionaire class is a problem if we aren't even getting those first steps of learning to challenge things and learning to understand them properly?”

Know that everything is related. There are real wars and there is real violence but there are also real battles for the souls, for morals. Which side are you on? Blaming multi-million dollar losses on a twentysomething who made a post supporting Palestine? Opening a restaurant with a person who is single handedly ruining the lives of millions? Speaking out against the suppression of artists while suppressing the artists and causes that are being suppressed? Abandoning limits on businesses that are enabling fascism? Literally giving into lawlessness when you are a keeper of the law? These are all related. “This is, more than anything, a plea for principled leftists to rise en masse and not just decry but disrupt a nation helmed by gleeful genocideers,” the writer Kaveh Akbar wrote this week. “I’m writing frantically, aware my prose is ugly…I want to be understood.” Somewhere, someone inputs this into a large language model, to craft a caption for a branded post in the same style.

This isn’t about intelligence but, in ways, it’s about taste: every choice, big or small, is political. Fitness, dieting, education, trends, social media, shopping: all are political acts. What you eat, how you get somewhere, who you associate with: everything. What you do is what you love — and what you hate. What do your choices say?

“Fine. Ass. Girl.”
“almost the abracadabra”
“someone with this pfp”
“the energy we need”
“WAIT HUH”
“? no”
“like a lovely lesbian couple”
”gays always kinda the same”
“some sugar in his saratoga”
Gay posts, for the culture (and the best take on Drag Race now). I’ve been thinking about “sugar in his saratoga” all week. Bless you, Jaboukie.

“I’m gonna hold your hand”
A more conservative world means we’re entering a gaydar drought atop of a literacy crisis because…y’all. Don’t play in my face and tell me Pedro is straight in 2025!!

“doing Michael Jackson”
“Kiera Knightleying”
“queening out”
“looking camp in the eye”
The absurdity of The Floor videos is great although the rise of The Floor videos is a rotted culture item given the show is intellectually bankrupt.

“song without words”
I saw this Naomi Watts clip and was like “CUTE!!” but I didn’t connect that this was promotion for the adaptation of (ICON!!) Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend which came out on Friday and, woo wee, it looks like shit. They made it into some Lifetime romcom dog movie!! DEATH. TO ALL OF THEM.

“Charli XCX in Prime Video”
“Rachel, listen to me”
No further comment, your honor.

“coming home with me”
Kids toys are really mature these days, huh?

“the murphy toilet”
Would love a bookshelf murphy toilet actually. It just makes sense!

And, finally, me at the dentist.

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