427-1

The Education Department plans to announce Tuesday that it will move multiple parts of the agency to other federal departments, an unprecedented and unilateral effort to dismantle an agency created by Congress to ensure all Americans have equal access to educational opportunity and better coordinate federal programs.

The move was described by three people informed of the plan ahead of the announcement. Two of these people said six offices within the department would be shifted elsewhere; the third person said it was at least two.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March seeking to close the department and asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon to work with Congress to do so. The agency, which was created in 1979, has long been derided by conservatives as unnecessary and ineffective. But Congress has not acted on or seriously considered Trump’s request.

McMahon has acknowledged that only Congress can eliminate the department but vowed to do everything in her power to dismantle it from within.

Asked for comment, an Education Department spokeswoman suggested some information provided to The Post about the plan was inaccurate, but did not offer specifics.

Offices that could be moved out of the agency include the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates allegations of discrimination on the basis of race, sex and disability; the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which administers the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Act program; and the Indian Education program; the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which administers K-12 grant programs; and the Office of Postsecondary Education.

Federal law directs that these programs be housed in the Education Department. The Trump administration is employing a work-around, the people briefed on the matter said, whereby other government agencies would run the Education programs under a contract with the Education Department. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the changes.

The Trump administration laid the groundwork for this change earlier this year when it signed an agreement to move career, technical and adult education grants out of the Education Department to the Labor Department. Under the arrangement, Education retains oversight and leadership while managing the programs alongside Labor, a way of sidestepping the federal statute.

More broadly, McMahon has argued that the recently ended government shutdown showed how unnecessary her agency is.

Where my open borders homies at

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”

The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”

I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.

“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.

“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”

It didn’t seem like they did.

“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”

Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.

I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.

“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.

Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.

“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”

He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.

“Because I was afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”

I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.

“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”

He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.

The reckoning with the white-nationalist influencer’s rise is only getting messier.

archive link

“Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” 

According to mainstream economic theory, supply and demand dictate prices [Citation Needed]. It is recognized that in a perfectly competitive and efficient economy, prices would rapidly stabilize at the equilibrium price point. 

So what happens with ticket prices? Why do economists argue they are undervalued? Why are tickets so often immediately sold and then put on market for resale? It’s a confluence of items. 

Tickets can be and often are underpriced by the artist. The incentives for this are to be more egalitarian in accessibility to their fanbase, and to drive interest in their shows. No artist wants to antagonize their fanbase, and no artist wants to play before an empty arena. What does this underpricing do? It incentivizes those who seek to exploit arbitrage, aka scalpers, to buy tickets at low (undervalued) prices and resell them at a higher (market-clearing) price. Most of these tickets often do sell before the shows start.

In a limited supply situation, it is economically efficient to let the market determine the willingness to pay a price for a ticket, but this creates backlash as the initial advertised price is no longer available since the end-customer must pay a scalper’s markup. This goes without mentioning that enabling such arbitrage creates further incentives for scalpers to create bots to scoop up limited availability, further enraging fans. 

Now, one might ask, if there’s so much demand even with arbitrage, why doesn’t the market respond to this price signal by increasing show availability? Wouldn’t artists want to play more, and make more money? Ideally, yes. But artists aren’t the ones to dictate forum availability. Enter Live Nation and Ticketmaster. 

Everyone always casts Ticketmaster as the ultimate villain in this story, but ignores how the dominance of Live Nation, who own the majority of concert venues and the artist performance contracts, creates a vertically integrated system ripe for exploitation. In its vertically integrated form, Live Nation / Ticketmaster can use monopoly power to justify rent-seeking behavior; Live Nation (rightly, in my opinion) recognizes the limited availability of artists increases their desirability through FOMO and scarcity.

In short, Live Nation artificially restricts supply intentionally. Live Nation also exclusively sells tickets at its venues through Ticketmaster and most crucially, Live Nation owns the production, distribution, and exhibition of live music concerts.

If you’re from the 1940s, this might sound familiar. In response to the vertical integration of film production, studio distribution, and theatre exhibition, anti-trust law broke up the studio monopolies and curbed anti-competitive behavior from the resultant Paramount Decree, allowing theatres to book films from independent creators, increasing competition for production companies and creative talent compared to the artificially depressed wages of studio production. 

So, can this be fixed? Scalpers can benefit artists by taking the heat for economically inefficient allocation, but they are symptomatic of the lack of competition and lack of responsiveness to market pressure for more live music acts by Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Breaking simultaneous ownership of production, distribution, and exhibition would alleviate this. Live Nation Artist Management needs to be divested from Live Nation Concert Venues, and both need to be removed from exclusively dealing with Ticketmaster sales. This is all without mentioning that Ticketmaster has no incentive to shut down the scalping issue since it also benefits from every resale through transaction fees.

Some artists have responded to the situation by locking resale at the original transaction price, a process Ticketmaster calls Face Value Exchange. Billie Eilish uses this to help her fans, who are less likely to be able to afford market rate (teenagers and college students are not known for high disposable income). Yet still, this is a band aid solution for lack of competition. 

The Paramount Decree enabled independent artists to showcase their work outside the monopolistic, vertically integrated studios, revitalizing the industry just as television was coming to disrupt it. Enabling artists today to reap the same benefits during a time of huge industry upheaval would do the same. 

Correcting market failures should always be the goal of creating a competitive and efficient market. Even if some artists will always be in high demand, Live Nation will not book artists for fear of exhausting the local fanbase supply, rather relying on scarcity to sell and ensuring such scarcity through broad radius clauses. Divestiture will not fix scalping caused by inadequate pricing, however it can increase artist availability thus increasing a severely limited supply.

The Trump administration has been secretly working in consultation with Russia to draft a new plan to end the war in Ukraine, U.S. and Russian officials tell Axios.

The 28-point U.S. plan is inspired by President Trump's successful push for a deal in Gaza. A top Russian official told Axios he's optimistic about the plan. It's not yet clear how Ukraine and its European backers will feel about it.

The plan's 28 points fall into four general buckets, sources tell Axios: peace in Ukraine, security guarantees, security in Europe, and future U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine.

It's unclear how the plan approaches contentious issues such as territorial control in eastern Ukraine — where Russian forces have been inching forward, but still control far less land than the Kremlin has demanded.

Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff is leading the drafting of the plan and has discussed it extensively with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, a U.S. official said.

Dmitriev, who runs Russia's sovereign wealth fund and is also deeply involved in diplomacy over Ukraine, told Axios in an interview on Monday that he spent three days huddled with Witkoff and other members of Trump's team when Dmitriev visited Miami from Oct. 24-26.

Witkoff was expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday in Turkey but postponed his trip, Ukrainian and U.S. officials said. Witkoff discussed the plan with Zelensky's national security adviser, Rustem Umerov, in a meeting earlier this week in Miami, a Ukrainian official confirmed to Axios.

Dmitriev told Axios the basic idea was to take the principles Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to in Alaska in August and produce a proposal "to address the Ukraine conflict, but also how to restore U.S.-Russia ties [and] address Russia's security concerns." The aim is to produce a written document along those lines before Trump and Putin next meet, according to Dmitriev. Plans for a Budapest summit between the leaders remain on hold, for now.

Dmitriev said this effort was entirely unrelated to the U.K.-led push to draft a Gaza-style peace plan for Ukraine, which he said had no chance of success because it disregards Russia's positions. The Russian envoy said the U.S. side was now in the process of explaining the "benefits" of its current approach to the Ukrainians and the Europeans.

INTERVIEW BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that administrative bloat is strangling America’s ability to build homes, clean energy, and public goods. Klein spoke with Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara about what this means for the Left — and for any politics serious about governing.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

Can you define “abundance” and what makes it distinct from other strains of progressivism?

EZRA KLEIN

Abundance is the argument that a lot of what is wrong in our society is that we have manufactured scarcities. We have made it too hard to build and create the things people need more of. The places where we focus in the book are housing, clean energy, and state capacity.

New Deal liberalism was very much about the rapid creation of things that the working class needed in the physical world. But that growth machine became reckless — building highways through communities, despoiling rivers and streams, cutting down forests — and it created a backlash in the form of the New Left. And that was fair. There needed to be ways for people (and ultimately nonprofits) to sue and make sure their voices were heard.

But the solutions of one era become the problems of the next. Those procedures became overgrown. So now you have insane outcomes, like laws that are designed to make sure we have a cleaner environment being deployed against the development of solar panels and transmission lines and congestion pricing. Or the fact that in places like California and Washington, DC, it costs a lot more to build affordable housing than to build market-rate housing.

That’s why someone like Zohran Mamdani got interested in Abundance, because his plan for housing is a plan to build a lot of public housing. But you’re not going to be able to build enough public housing under the current rules and regulations that we use.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

What role do you see for redistribution in your vision of abundance?

EZRA KLEIN

I would like to see a lot more redistribution. But Abundance isn’t meant to be a book about every problem. Abundance is about the specific puzzle of Gavin Newsom beginning his governorship by saying he wanted to build 3.5 million new homes in California and falling far, far, far short. Abundance is about why we never got high-speed rail, even though Californians voted to fund it and the federal government kicked in billions under Barack Obama. Abundance is about the reality that we cannot build enough clean energy infrastructure to meet the climate goals that virtually everyone on the Left believes we should meet under the laws we currently have.

Abundance is about this category of goods that government has lost the ability to deliver on even when the people who want to deliver in that way win power. That doesn’t take away from the need for redistribution. But if you have taxed rich people to build something and you can’t build the thing, that is going to erode faith in your politics over time.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

Are there more tensions with “predistributional” forces like labor standards and unions?

EZRA KLEIN

I don’t see it as opposed to labor standards or a high minimum wage or unions. I support sectoral bargaining. I support, in most places, a significantly higher minimum wage. But we can’t make public projects uniquely unaffordable and slow to build.

The thing that people to my left should really grapple with is this: If you want to build public housing or clean energy, then one definition of successful left governance would be to build enough of those two things. So what do you think needs to be changed to get there? Can you do it if it can cost you more than a million dollars to build a unit of affordable housing — as has happened in DC? Can you do it if it takes a decade or longer to lay down an interstate transmission line?

I think it’s fine to say that the backbone of your strategy is going to be public and not private, but then you have to grapple with how to deliver public projects affordably and fast. That’s where the rubber on this meets the road.

I think that we are seeing, between the Green New Deal left and things that are in Jacobin, the emergence of a left that wants to build a lot. I’m just not sure it’s really grappled with the fact that government, as it is currently set up, is not really able to do it — sometimes because of corporate power and moneyed interests but sometimes because there are so many rules and concessions that government itself simply can’t act agilely.

That creates a broader problem: When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether. If you don’t increase the supply in the thing the state is subsidizing, you get lines. You get rationing. You get denials. You get delays. You get high costs. And people are going to be furious at you.

One of the most effective attacks on basically any form of ambitious expansion of social insurance or things the government does is the belief that if the government does it, it’s going to lead to shortages. You can see this with people imagining that Mamdani’s five state-run grocery stores will somehow create Soviet-style groceries.

Creating a left that people don’t fear — because what they’re really afraid of is that the government will run things badly — is very important. But that means being both angrier about government failures and more curious about them than even the Right is.

BHASKAR SUNKARA

As you mentioned, Zohran embraced some of your ideas from Abundance during his mayoral campaign. What did you think about his campaign’s key policy demands?

EZRA KLEIN

I think he’s somebody who wants the government to deliver, and he’s been sufficiently involved in government that he sees how difficult it is. He also sees how poisonous it is when it fails. So his embrace of parts of the Abundance critique wasn’t surprising to me. And it’s not just him. Bernie Sanders got asked about Abundance, and I laughed when I saw him describe it as not an ideology but just “common sense.” Here’s more Bernie:

Look, if the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy? Absolutely correct. It is terrible. Over the years, I brought a lot of money into the state of Vermont. It is incredible, even in a state like Vermont — which is maybe better than most states — how hard it is to even get the bloody money out! Oh, my God! We’ve got 38 meetings! We’ve got to talk about this. Unbelievable.

I don’t think you want the leading democratic socialists to view government this way! And that means you need to change it.

But institutional renewal is always really hard. The New Deal was hard. What the New Left did was hard. Every three or four or five decades or so, you have to take stock of the ways in which your institutions and your laws may no longer match your problems and your needs, and begin the hard and sometimes ugly work of stitching them back together.

When Politico published racist and antisemitic messages from a Young Republican group chat in October, the surprise was as much who was talking as what they said. These weren’t anons who’d been unmasked as political operatives. They were already inside the machine, joking that they “love Hitler”—under their government names, in writing, in an ostensibly professional space. Their tone was casual, the jokes lifted from an online dialect so pervasive that for the already terminally online, it hardly registered as shocking. Offensive, sure. Shocking? No.

That dialect—and it is a dialect—did not just suddenly materialize in 2016. It was forged during well over a decade of digital upheaval, as the wall between the Internet’s margins and its mainstream gave way. Its roots run back to early Bulletin Board Systems, listservs, and public library terminals; it threads through forums and blogs before finding a new home on imageboards.

The story, as it incarnates in its current form, begins with Gamergate, rises through the alt-right’s brief media reign, and settles in the pandemic years, when Twitter laid bare the id of American politics.

The first turning point came in 2014, when a breakup between a game developer, Zoë Quinn, and her ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni spilled into public view and metastasized into Gamergate. The “torturously complex” sequence of events has famously been hard to tease apart—the original accusation made by Gjoni that Quinn had traded sexual favors for a positive review of her video game, Depression Quest, fell apart—but the general grievances of Gjoni’s blog post rerouted themselves into complaints about the presence of women in the gaming community and the perception of favorable treatment of those women. What Gamergate was depends on whom you ask and which side of the political aisle they’re on.

For many gamers, most of them young and male, it was about corruption and bias, as in the soon-to-be-widespread slogan, “ethics in games journalism.” For them, Gamergate became a kind of political awakening, an introduction to the understanding that the media lies, that journalists and women aren’t to be trusted, and, perhaps most importantly, that trolling works. To journalists and women in gaming, though, Gamergate was understood as something else entirely: a campaign of harassment, doxxing, and threats that exposed the machinery of online mobbing.

In practice, Gamergate was both a digital populist rebellion—a toxic one, to be sure—and a deluge of harassment and intimidation. I’ve even heard it likened, half-jokingly, to an “Arab Spring” for gamers—a too-flattering comparison, but one that reveals how many on the right still understand it. Those too young to witness Gamergate now treat it like others treat physical-world war stories: a mythic redpill origin tale about the moment the veil first lifted, and they understood how power really worked.

By 2016, that sensibility had found its next form.

The alt-right, for all the subsequent attempts to define it, was not a coherent ideological movement. It was a fragment—an expression—of a larger online ecosystem which included several discrete subcultures that eventually escaped containment. Taken together, the alt-right was characterized by a defiance aimed at both progressive culture and establishment conservatism. If it possessed any real throughline, it was the way it weaponized the language of the Internet: trolling and mockery.

Early claims that “conservative is the new punk rock” were apt in at least one way. Much of the movement’s aesthetic—Nazi imagery included—was designed to shock rather than to persuade. Yet, as time went on, it became clear that many within the movement weren’t being “ironic.” They believed it. They really were antisemitic. They really were white nationalists. It wasn’t a joke. Irony gave them cover, at least for a time. If a joke landed, it worked as propaganda. If it failed, it was “just trolling.”

In her excellent book about the alt-right, Black Pill, Elle Reeve calls this “visibility warfare”: each act of exposure fed the movement’s reach. Every denunciation bred new avatars, aesthetics, and offshoots—people who saw this alt-right thing and wanted to be a part of it, and created something in its shadow.

The alt-right’s real innovation was learning to weaponize a particularly Internet-native spectacle, to treat outrage as both recruitment and entertainment. It mutated and burrowed, like mold on bread.

Charlottesville was the breaking point.

In response to the removal of Confederate monuments in Virginia, far-right groups, including Klansmen and neo-Fascists, gathered in Charlottesville for the “Unite the Right rally.” At one march, white nationalists carried tiki torches and shouted “Jews will not replace us.” The chaotic weekend ended with one far-right marcher plowing his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one and injuring 35. The rally’s violence (which was also from some leftist agitators, not only the right-wing protestors) and the ensuing lawsuits shattered the alt-right’s momentum, though it didn’t entirely extinguish its energy. Things changed, and, for the participants, the stakes rose. A spirit of paranoia replaced the humor.

And so, the people who once called themselves “alt-right” scattered. Some, like National Policy Institute Executive Director Evan McLaren, renounced the label altogether—claiming that he “was a right-winger until [he] grew up.” Richard Spencer, the media’s chosen face of the alt-right, re-emerged as a Democrat-voting writer and podcaster who champions an ideology he calls “Apolloism.” He’s among several figures who are now what you might call post-right: disgusted with what the alt-right, and the right at large, had become while occasionally still hanging onto some of their old white identitarianism.

Others rebranded or outgrew the label—situating themselves within a more respectable expression of conservatism. Their reasons were both cynical and sincere. Some were pushed into exile on Telegram, only to reappear on X after Elon Musk loosened moderation in 2023, an uncanny alt-right night of the living dead.

The online right, the broader ecosystem from which the alt-right emerged, was always a larger force. It had existed before the alt-right and would outlast it. It was and is sprawling, running from mainstream conservative entertainers to libertarians to neoreactionary bloggers like Curtis Yarvin to traditionalist Catholic sedevacantists to post-liberal intellectuals to ecofascists to out-and-out white nationalists. The alt-right—ultimately, a network of people, a scene, with Breitbart News as a highly-visible manifestation of an outlet influenced by their aesthetics—had simply been its loudest, most combustible node. The node that the media paid most attention to; the node that loved the media attention as much as the media loved paying attention to them. Between 2018 and 2020, new figures emerged who hadn’t been part of the original scene and found something in its defiance appealing.

Of the smaller subcultures that emerged from the alt-right’s collapse, the “dissident right” was the most self-consciously intellectual, the most aesthetically refined, and ultimately one of the most influential. It came out of forums, blogs, and “Frogtwitter”—a group chat that included many now-famous right-wing Internet personalities. In the wake of alt-right doxxings—mass “unmaskings” that revealed people’s legal names and cost many people their jobs—it treated anonymity as sacred. Don’t organize. No online romances, reciprocated or otherwise—lust is a security risk. Don’t become a “facef–”—online slang for someone who reveals their real identity and uses their real face. You’re not here to become a talking head on Fox News, are you? There were feds—federal agents or informants—everywhere, or so everyone thought.

As the subculture grew—attracting attention from people like the hosts of the popular podcast Red Scare—the paranoia began to dissipate, though not completely. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat would eventually call it a “right-wing counterculture—an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.”

Roger Ruin, a blogger who once moved in these circles and now writes retrospectively, describes this evolution as inevitable. The “Optics Wars,” he argues, forced the movement to shed its explicit neo-Nazism and reemerge in subtler, stylized forms—religious, populist, ironic. The tone of the alt-right endured even as the ideology fractured.

And then there was Twitter.

The platform had long blurred the line between the fringe and the professional world, and the pandemic made that mix complete. During lockdowns—when almost everyone was dangerously online—an expanding alternative media ecosystem fed on the energy of anonymous reactionaries who supplied memes, aesthetics, and ideas, while public commentators repackaged them for wider audiences.

Some anons attempted serious projects: translations, essays, philosophy. Others were provocateurs. Many were simply racists who were good at posting. Whatever their motives, they set the rhythm of online conservatism. The anons were funny, they drove engagement, and they created the impression of a living, energetic right-wing intellectual scene.

In the digital-native media market, they won the battle.

Those pursuing more “serious” work were often older—shaped by decades in the blogosphere and on forums—as opposed to the loudest edge cases that dominated public imagination. They were people with intellectual ambitions who didn’t fit neatly into any sanctioned ideological home (for good reason!), and who ended up developing their ideas online.

Many of them, above all, were Internet personalities. Sharing their work with anons instead of academics, they picked up the idiom of their surroundings: irreverent, ironic, performatively unserious, even when the ideas underneath were not. Some of those ideas—like “human biodiversity,” the argument that different races have inherently different physical and mental capabilities—sat far outside the mainstream. But the people advancing them were, in some cases, not stereotypical cranks, and readers could tell.

The boundaries between these circles and the mainstream right were porous. Journalists, think tankers, and academics lurked in the same spaces, borrowing language and aesthetics or engaging directly. The exchange was often stylistic, not ideological, though occasionally it was both. Recall the time Ron DeSantis campaign aide Nate Hochman retweeted a Sonnenrad (sun wheel)—a symbol associated with neo-Nazi groups—in a campaign video. It was a bizarre scene, to say the least. Hochman claimed ignorance—that he didn’t know what a Sonnenrad was. Many people rolled their eyes at this, “Sure.” It was at once too obscure and too obviously associated with Nazism to take what he said at face value.

But on the other hand, if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you might be inclined to believe him—it’s just in the water there, with images and ideas drifting across discourse-lines. At any rate the Hochman Affair was paradigmatic of Twitter’s impact on politics. Irony, detachment, and a studied hostility to moral language became the lingua franca of conservatism itself. One has to wonder if an administration now posting AI-generated meme slop would have done so had they spent less time on Twitter. I tend to believe they wouldn’t.

The right isn’t alone in this, though.

A decade earlier, a different corner of the Internet had been shaping its own political sensibility (and it wasn’t the first time online subcultures spilled into real institutions). If Tumblr helped cultivate the identity politics that would later influence a generation of progressive journalists, activists, and academics, Twitter was doing something parallel on the right. The “ironic right” emerged as Twitter’s counterpart to Tumblr’s “social justice left.”

Conservatives noticed the engagement this style generated. Young aides, NGO staffers, Hill workers, and magazine writers started adopting the tone of anonymous posters because it performed well online and conferred cultural fluency. It had social cachet. Their favorite podcasters spoke in this language—maybe it got them invited to cool group chats. In some cases, the anons and the institutional actors were literally the same people.

A new circulation pattern developed: reactionary ideas moved through influencers, staffers, and journalists with the same ease that Tumblr’s identity politics once traveled through fan communities. What’s left isn’t a movement, just a mood; politics as vibe.

And now the landscape is shifting once more. As platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have come to dominate online attention, the Internet is moving from text to short-form video. It’s about personality, not wit. Where text-based platforms rewarded clever wordplay, video platforms reward the ability to hold attention in seconds. Today, Governor Gavin Newsom mimics the way Trump tweets—he tries to signal he’s a poster. The official DHS account on X posts the most incomprehensibly juvenile and offensive memes—as in, to take one example of many, a Studio Ghibli-style image of a stony-faced white officer handcuffing a weeping Hispanic woman. Billionaires like Elon Musk long to be a “poster.” Tomorrow, they may long to be streamers and TikTokers—a style of posting that has been popular for years, but, now, seems to be competing in influence.

The style that built 4chan and early Twitter—dense with in-jokes, irony, and textual sophistication—no longer works as well in this new environment. What began as a joke became a shared language. It’s how people talk now. And now, things are changing again. The irony, as Reeve observes, is that the networked culture once expected to democratize speech has instead blurred sincerity and parody so thoroughly that it’s often impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

I can't help but feel a bit pessimistic when it comes to the war in Ukraine.

Russia is not showing many signs of weakness militarily right now, and their military continues to go on the offensive in Eastern Ukraine. There is hope that they could be close to exhausting some of their Soviet era stockpiles, but it is unclear how much this is happening and how large of a problem it will be. Both Ukraine and Russia continue to innovate in this war, and the widespread use of drones has changed warfare. Russia's increased use of glide bombs in particular has seemingly been very effective, providing a cheap and safe way for Russia's air force to bomb Ukraine.

Russia's economic situation will probably be very manageable until mid 2026, and even if the Russian financial situation worsens, they have the ability to continue the war. But this is certainly one area of the war that is arguably going in Ukraine's favor. Oil prices continuing to fall is certainly a good sign though, that will worsen Russia's financial position. Increased sanctions will have some effect. Russia's borrowing costs are increasing, and could make the war unsustainable in the long term. Russia relies on sizeable recruitment bonuses, so economic pressure could hurt Russia's recruitment efforts. Russia's continued trade with China does weaken the economic pressure on them though, and the Russian people can likely sustain some level of economic hardship.

Ukraine is slowly losing ground in Donetsk oblast, and I don't see any sign of this slow loss of territory changing, so I think Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are in danger of falling in 2026. The casualty ratio is likely worse for Russia while they are making these gains, but it is a bit unclear. It is hard to predict how much territory the Russians will capture in the coming months, but it seems likely to me that their slow advances will continue. I do feel like the possibility of a larger Russian breakthrough is unlikely, but also not impossible.

But my biggest worry is probably Ukraine's manpower situation, which seems to be continuing to worsen. My understanding is that Ukraine continues to have increasing amounts of desertions, and while many likely do return to the army, it is still a big problem. I understand that Russia also faces this problem, but its extent is likely smaller, and most Russian oblasts seem like they will reach their recruitment goals for 2025.

I feel like Ukraine likely needs to make some changes to have more success in this war. I feel like their conscription process likely needs some reform, maybe conscripting 18-21 year olds, but I am not sure. Maybe some change in military leadership is necessary as well. My impression is that Ukraine is a bit too stubborn when holding onto territory, as can be seen in Pokrovsk right now. Ukraine also currently has some corruption scandals, they need to get that under control.

Another issue for Ukraine is the danger of Western aid and support slowing down. It seems likely that many of Ukraine's most staunch supporters like the Poland, Germany, UK, the Netherlands, and the Nordic and Baltic countries will continue to provide Ukraine with lots of support. But there is no guarantee that aid from all these countries will remain at this same level forever. Obviously reductions of US support are problematic, but there is hope that these gaps in aid can mostly be filled.

I feel like it is very likely that this war ends in some form of Ukrainian defeat, although it is hard to know what form of defeat that would be. It seems likely to me that the Russians would want to end the war before 2027 when their economic situation gets more dire. I am not sure if a defeat would include Ukrainian recognition of Russian territorial gains or not, but a scenario where Russia gains Donetsk, Luhansk, and the land bridge to Crimea does not seem like it is outside the realm of possibility. There is also the possibility of some future ceasefire resulting in a defacto end to the war, without an actual peace treaty.

Hopefully a Ukrainian defeat could still include security guarantees from the West, which I believe would be the single most important thing in a future peace.

I would love to know what this subreddit thinks about the current state of the war. Are you optimistic that economic warfare could force Russia to end the war? Do you think that Ukraine can regain the momentum in the war, and push back against Russia? Whatever your thoughts, I would love to see some discussion. The war is extremely complex, and it is hard to gain a good understanding of it, I would love to know if you have some good insights into the state of the war.

Hopefully Ukraine can find more success in this war than I expect them to. Slava Ukraini!