Michael Sanchez

🚨 Hasan Piker and Chris Rabb Lay Out the DSA Playbook for Using the Democratic Ballot Line Against the Party This clip is a clean look at the socialist left’s bizarre frenemy relationship with the Democratic Party. Hasan opens by attacking Democrats directly. They “don’t love you,” “don’t care about you,” and “don’t care about your interests.” But he does not tell people to leave the party. He tells them the Democratic primary is the battlefield because it “determines the trajectory of the Democratic Party.” Then Chris Rabb picks up the thread. Rabb says he “identif[ies] as a democratic socialist,” but is “running as a Democrat because the system creates this narrowness.” In other words, the Democratic label is not the identity. It is the vehicle. Rabb makes that even clearer moments later. He says Democrats may share the same label “in this moment,” but “we are very different.” Then he tells voters, “You don’t have to love the Democratic Party to vote for me. I do not care because I’m not here for the party. I’m here for the people.” The result is a strange but increasingly effective hostile partnership. The DSA needs the Democratic ballot line because third-party politics is a dead end. The Democratic Party keeps absorbing candidates who openly reject it. And over time, that one-way arrangement lets the socialist left take more ground inside the party while still pretending to be outsiders. But what do Democrats actually get out of this arrangement?

Democrats, stop. Please. This is the road to hell.

Republicans have set aside $42 million for attack ads against Graham Platner in Maine’s Senate race: “He’ll no longer be able to live in the state after we thoroughly beat the sh*t out of him.”

I understand why, but it's annoying that the Stevens & McMorrow camps are relentlessly messaging against each other rather than against El-Sayed or (gasp) Mike Rogers. The CIA used to rig elections globally, but Elissa Slotkin can't winnow the field to one mainstream Dem?

BREAKING: The DOJ has indicted David Morens, a former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, "for his role in a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in connection with COVID-19 research grants"

The Avignon Papacy reference is the detail that demands attention. An American defense official invoked a 14th-century episode in which the French Crown physically relocated the papacy to Avignon and controlled it for 67 years - as an implicit model for what happens to religious institutions that oppose state power. That's not a slip of the tongue. That's a studied historical reference deployed deliberately in a room with the Pope's senior diplomat. The message was not subtle. Leo heard it. He spent Holy Week delivering what papal scholars described as a sustained theological argument about the nature of power and imperial violence. On Palm Sunday he said Jesus rejects the prayers of those who wage war. On Easter Sunday - the same morning Trump posted his expletive-filled threat on Truth Social - Leo told world leaders to lay down weapons. On Tuesday he called the civilization threat "truly unacceptable" and asked citizens directly to contact their elected representatives. The White House's response to the Pope's Tuesday statement: "The Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing." The first American pope will spend America's 250th birthday on Lampedusa with migrants. One Vatican official told The Free Press: "The Pope may well never visit the United States under this administration." The Pentagon summoned a cardinal and invoked the Avignon Papacy. The Pope responded by asking 1.4 billion Catholics to call their congressmen.

I doubt that anyone I know steals from Whole Foods, but the milieu that the article depicted, where it's normal for perfectly well-off people to steal things because why not, was really upsetting to read about, so I actually want to try to earnestly explain why you shouldn't do this just in case there's someone out there who has never had it explained to them. When a business opens - or really, as soon as a business starts making plans to open - a defining question for the business is how it will collect payment for the goods or services it provides. If you trust the people you sell to, you can be pretty relaxed about this; send people an invoice, most of them will pay it on time, any who don't will pay it a bit late. You have to think about convenience and mistakes but not about people trying to cheat you. This saves you so, so much defensive planning to make sure you get paid. It's so much easier. But if you're selling to the general public, you do have to think about people trying to cheat you. You have to structure the physical store so that it's hard for them to steal. You have to not carry some items that you'd like to sell, because they'd also be attractive targets to steal. If people swap price tags between items, you can't use stickers. If people put things on in the dressing room and wear them out, you need to pay someone a full time salary to monitor the dressing room. The world that we all live in is much poorer than the world we'd live in if people didn't steal. The stores don't carry things that they could carry if people didn't steal. They don't use pricing and inventory systems that would be way easier and more convenient if people didn't steal. But it could be much worse! If I walk down to my local Whole Foods today, items on the shelves won't be locked behind sheafs of plastic - that is only worth it when the background rate of stealing is much higher than it is at my local Whole Foods. When more people steal, businesses have to further intensify security, or go out of business. When you shoplift, you directly and unambiguously impoverish your community. You make prices higher for everybody else, you make stores less usable for everybody else, or you make businesses not viable that would otherwise be viable. The direct impact each time is small, but it's a lot larger than the direct impact of taking some trash out of the trash can to throw on the ground, or pouring just a tiny bit of poison into your local river, and most people have a deep, instinctive abhorrence of antisocially wrecking your community like that. So don't steal. The other thing that it seems possible some people might not understand is that while you might have a social circle that is incredibly nihilistic and cynical and thinks that everybody steals, in fact this is not true. Most people do not steal. Most people, if they learn that you steal, will lose more respect for you than you had to lose. I don't know anyone who has shoplifted except 'as a kid/teenager'. It is not always the case that virtue is rewarded and vice is punished but even before you bring the legal system into it, the risk-reward tradeoff of having everybody you know know that you steal things sometimes is absolutely terrible. Who would hire someone who steals things? Who would trust them around a vulnerable person? Who would want to live in a society with someone who will delightedly and routinely wreck it for the slightest personal benefit? I hope that "Gina" turns her life around. I hope that Gina realizes that she needs to. And if you have been told that it's just a corporation or that having ethics is lame or that if you think about it, other bad things happen too, like wage theft, so that means stealing is okay, I hope you really, actually, think about whether you'd accept any of those as excuses for anything else.