Is there an interoffice memorandum from the White House to the propaganda machine that states that any time the word โimmigrantโ is mentioned, the words โmurderers, rapists, carjackersโ must be attached? Seems like it. Remember when the Left used to pounce upon every news story where a cop killed an unarmed black motorist? Or worse, a teenager? Horrible stories but also rare and isolated incidents in a nation of 330 million. Yet the constant coverage reached the point where it felt like an epidemic. I can only imagine how frustrating and disheartening that must have been for the overwhelming majority of good cops out there. Right now our Hispanic friends are getting the same treatment. Devout, hardworking, family-oriented people who are assets to this great nation are currently having their worlds ripped apart. There is no them, only Us.
I was listening to Peter Navarro on conservative talk radio the other night. (The Joe Pags Show.) He was pumping his new book, I Went to Prison So You Wonโt Have to: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trump Land. I donโt begrudge him for trying to monetize his 4-month prison experience. I donโt even take issue with the fact that he characterized his fellow low-level prisoners as hardened criminals and horrible people instead of fellow Americans who had made mistakes. He was just trying to play up the whole prison thing. Although I do think his portrayal of the minimum-security camp where he did his time as anything other than โClub Fedโ is highly misleading. But there was one thing he said that was so infuriating, so divisive and inflammatory, that I had to cut my radio off. It went like this: โThey put me in prison. They put Steve Bannon in prison. They tried to put Trump in prison. Then they tried to assassinate him. Twice. They bankrupted Rudy Giuliani. Then they killed Charlie Kirkโฆโ As if all these โtheysโ are the same people. Tribalism is ripping America at the seams. And people are benefitting from the hate and distrust. Itโs good for votes, it riles up the base, it sells books. But at what cost?
Iโm a card-carrying word nerd. Iโve been this way for as long as I can remember. I was fascinated by etymology before I ever learned what etymology wasโthe origin, history, and development of words. Like most things Iโve picked up over the last few decades, I learned this from a book. Back in 2017, the kid in the bunk above me was a galloping drug addict who was too wasted to read the masterworks his grandfather sent faithfully every two weeksโprobably with the hope that luminaries like Will Durant, James Allen, and Marcel Proust might pull his grandson back from the abyss. Who knows? Maybe this tactic eventually worked. There are definitely people in my life who believed and prayed and loved me out of all my self-destructive bullshit. I have no idea what became of this young man. His name was Blake. He was just one of the thousands of people I crossed paths with over the course of this odyssey. As an older prisoner who had walked the same hot asphalt he was travelling, I tried to talk some sense into him. But he wasnโt trying to hear it. So our relationship was mostly transactional. I gave him food and coffee; he gave me books. One of these was a Bartlettโs Rogetโs Book of Rare Words. Something like that. And it was in those pages that I stumbled upon the word autodidact which means โone who is self-taught.โ I immediately scribbled it in my journal. Right next to pachydermatous, multi-hyphenate, and iconoclastic. (Like I said: word nerd.) But self-taught is a bit of a misnomer. Who in this world is really self-taught? Over the course of this decades-long prison bid my teachers have been Plato, Siddhartha, Michael A. Singer, Jesus, James Clear, David Mitchell, Troy Stetina, Anthony Bourdain, Liz Gilbert, Steven Pressfield, The Wall Street Journal, Dave Ramsey, and the thousands of guests on TED Radio Hour and damn near every other show on NPRโฆ I am a seeker. And as this 20-year sentence finally comes to an end, Iโll be sharing a little of what I have learned from studying at the feet of these masters. You might not agree with all of it. You might not agree with any of it. But a writerโs job is to observe and tell the truth. You can find that here on The Life Autodidactic. See you next time. Momentum.
In a recentย essay, I posed a question to readers that Iโve been asking myself for the past year. Itโs a question that every American should be asking themselves, regardless of where we get our news. Whether youโre team Hannity or team Maddow, whether your politics align with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton or the ladies ofย The View. Whether you see the president as Captain America or Adolph incarnate; this simple question can serve as a check on the powerful pull of emotional reactivity, herd mentality, and the algorithmic echo chamber. It goes like this:
Am I wrong about Donald Trump?
My goal is to view this administration and its policies with clear eyes, unaffected by the peripheral noise coming from the left or the right. Not an easy endeavor with such a polarizing figure in the center of the storm. But at the 100-day mile marker of this second Trump term, I think Iโve arrived at an answer. Let me provide some backstory first . . .
A little over eight years ago I wrote an essay about Barack Obama leaving office after two terms and how he was going to be a hard act to follow (โA Shining Example,โ Jan. 2017). Full disclosure: I am an Obama acolyte. I started paying attention to politics during his historic 2008 White House run when I was just a couple years into this 20-year prison sentence. I was inspired by his message of hope and change. As a young man who had lost his way, listening to this longshot senator from Illinois riff on everything from kindness to mastery to constitutional law filled me with energy and optimism. He was easily the most gifted orator I had ever heard speak. But it wasnโt just his magisterial flow. It was action too. I wonโt list every triumph in this essay, but one undeniable slam-dunk was his eight straight years of economic growth after inheriting the 2008 crashโan event that cost the world 40% of its wealth. Then, of course, there was the celebrated termination of Public Enemy Number One, Osama Bin Laden. Not that he pulled it off by himself, but still . . . Pretty big deal. On a lighter note, almost 15 years ago, during the birther conspiracy era (when Trump was haranguing him for being an immigrant and demanding he present his birth certificate), President Obama entered a press correspondentsโ dinner pumping his fist and smiling while the band struck up โBorn in the USA.โ A good father, a good husband, a good dude, andโlike the title of that 2017 essay proclaimsโA Shining Example. At least in the opinion of this humble incarcerated scribe. How good of a dude? How shining of an example? Well, in 2016 I sent aย letterย and a couple of my books to the White House from a Florida Panhandle prison and was shocked to receive a response. The president of the United States wrote me back.
In the aforementioned essay I also express hope for the incoming President Trump. Specifically, his business acumen and how it might benefit America. However, I am embarrassed to admit that a couple of days later, in light of a flurry of post-inauguration news stories, I clumsily banged out a somewhat inaccurate and emotionally reactive article called โThe Honeymoon Is Overโ and went on to hammer the president on every corner for the next four years. Many of you who have been reading these posts since the beginning probably remember. Especially those of you who lean Republican and were annoyed by my rants. God bless yโall for sticking around ๐
So . . . long story longer, when Trump was reelected this time, I was committed to not being such a hack, to not making up my mind first and then finding the facts to support my predetermined opinion; but instead listening to both sides, reading everything I could get my hands on, and resisting the temptation to jump to apocalyptic conclusions. For the most part, I have done what I set out to do. Mission accomplished. Kinda.
When I began this essay, my intention was to assess President Trump on all the big issues and his campaign promises at the 100-day markโthe economy, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Iran, immigration, the courts, D.E.I., DOGE, tariffs, Greenland, Canada, China, the culture war stuff . . . But after careful deliberation, I have decided to not issue this report card. There are plenty of smart people that are far more articulate than me with internet access and college degrees and rolodexes full of sources to break down these stories. The good and the bad and the head-scratchers.
You donโt need me for that.
Kindness is my domain. Human connection. Warmth, empathy, redemption, music, books, love, football, family, friendship, laughter, nature, forgiveness . . . Hope. I need to get back to this. Itโs what I want to be writing about.
Am I wrong about Trump? I donโt know. Maybe. His demand that America is getting a raw deal and that the world needs to pay its fair share might benefit the longevity of the empire. But at what cost? Babies dying of HIV in Africa when it could have been prevented for a few extra pennies a day? The evaporation of due process? Copycat authoritarians popping up across the globe? Impoverished immigrants being labeled as murderers and rapists? The fear, the division, the hard-heartedness . . .
Not my thing. And I canโt pretend it is.
Thereโs been a lot of talk over the last quarter century about the ballooning national debt. Especially in GOP circles. โWhat type of legacy are we leaving our children?โ my conservative friends ask. The liberal outcry has more of an environmental bent. โWhat type of planet are we leaving our children?โ Both of these questions have merit. But while we are examining the long-term effects of current policies, we need to take an honest look at the vitriolic rhetoric of our elected leaders as well. All this hate-speak and intolerance. All this vilification of โother.โโ What type of world will our children inherit from us? Regardless of our political preferences, we need to find a way to bring back decency and decorum.
There is no them, only us.
โMay 5, 2025
[This essay is the fifth and final part in the Continental Rift series first posted on March 24, 2025…]
Bureaucracy. What comes to mind when you see these eleven letters? Itโs strange how certain words are claimed by political movements. Imagine Biden claiming the investigation into his son, Hunter, and the infamous laptop a โwitch-hunt,โ or Hillary Clinton referring to her internet server scandal back in 2016 as a โhoax.โ The thought of a Democrat using this MAGA vernacular is almost as jarring as the thought of Trump calling Mar-a-Lago his โsafe spaceโ or signing his executive orders โhe/him.โ
I know all about bureaucracies. I am currently living in one: the Federal Bureau of Prisons. (And if right now youโre imagining me riding around in golf carts while getting stock tips from former investment bankers, think again. I live in a crumbling dungeon that was built during the Great Depression. I can stick my arms out and touch both walls of my tiny cell. The water is murky, thereโs black mold in the showers, and the air tastes like asbestos. But thatโs another essay . . .)
After the inauguration, when Elon Musk and his merry band of tech nerds rode deep into the heart of government bureaucracy, the media outlets on the left portrayed them as a bunch of 20-year-old, nose-ringed, purple-haired college kids who, best case scenario, were threats to national security. Worst case scenario: they were hellbent on destroying longstanding programs like Medicare and Social Security. Of course, conservative talk radio and Fox News hosts labeled this as typical lib hysteria, overlooked the occasional error made by the DOGE teamโlike adding an extra zero to the amount savedโand cheered on the chainsaw-wielding Musk as he slashed and burned his way through USAID, the Center for Disease Control, and various other American institutions.
As my fellow prisoners and I await the great and terrible artificial eye of DOGE to train its laser-focused pupil on the 8-billion-dollar budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, there are two conflicting camps of expectation.
Ironically, itโs the Fox News MAGA majority who are abuzz with boundless optimism. They believe that Elon will drastically reduce the budget by shutting down prisons and allowing anyone with less than three years remaining on their sentence to finish up on home detention. And since Trump signed significant criminal justice reform into law in 2018 with the First Step Act and then pardoned 1600 Jan-Sixers on his first day back in office, there is plenty of cause for hope.
Across the unit, at the CNN television, my liberal brothers have a much gloomier outlook. They fear that less money will result in less guards which will result in less programs and inevitably more lockdowns. They take Trumpโs tough-on-crime campaign promises at face value and worry that, even as American citizens, they too could end up in an El Salvadorian supermax due to federal prison overcrowding.
Where do I stand? Iโll give you one guess and two hints. (Itโs neither left nor right.) If Mr. Musk begins hacking away at the FBOP, prisons will absolutely be shut down. Will this translate into people going home, or will they simply be transferred to other facilities? Hard to say. But itโs important to point out that prison profiteers like the GEO Group were key donors to the Trump war chest in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And Iโm guessing that they would love nothing more than a fat federal contract to take over the Bureau of Prisons. But what would it say about this country if the same corporations who were lobbying Congress for tougher laws and longer sentencesโnot in the interest of justice, but in the interest of their own bottom linesโwere the same companies who were receiving multi-billion-dollar contracts to warehouse the nationโs prisoners?
In many ways, it feels like America is not entering a โgolden ageโ as the president proclaimed at his inauguration, but something more akin to the Dark Ages. Especially when it comes to the hidden world of corrections.
Hereโs a newsflash for anyone just waking from a coma: Project 2025 is in full effect. The president did a masterful job of distancing himself from the controversial 900-page manifesto in the run-up to the 2024 election, but he wasted no time in installing its framework on his very first day back in the White House.
From the DOGE dismantling of the administrative state, to the war on D.E.I., to the defunding of Ivy League Universities, to J.D. Vanceโs speech before our NATO allies in Germany, to this massive immigration return-to-sender effort, to the recent tariff grenades lobbed into the global market; from the melting ice of Greenland to the Panama Canal; from our old buddy Canada to our new buddy Russia, all the way down to the Gulf of America, one thing is abundantly clearโthis is not your fatherโs Republican Party . . .
This is not even your Uncleโs Tea Party movement. In fact, this current Trump administration barely resembles the last Trump administration. And to debate the motives and tenets of these bygone political philosophies as if applicable to this new shape-shifting MAGA machine is to argue with the stirred dust and lingering exhaust of a bus that has already roared past.
The old left/right paradigm of Blue Dog labor unions versus corporate executives, the liberal anti-war movement versus GOP defense hawks, Democrat entitlement caucuses versus small government Republicans, the leftist lawyer lobby and right-wing venture capitalists, Main Street and Wall Street, pro-life and pro-choice, even black and white . . . These once bold-line divisions are suddenly thin and grey, as politically relevant in 2025 as Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.
Iโm going to have to interrupt my own essay here. It sounds like I know what Iโm talking about, doesnโt it? This smug, professorial tone; my OโReillian command of current events, that impressive bus metaphor a couple paragraphs ago . . . Do not be misled. I have no idea whatโs going on. I donโt think anyone does. Not Elon Musk, not Speaker Johnson, not Senator Thune, not even Melania. Is he running for a third term? Will he actually defy the courts on some of these immigration rulings? Are these tariffs for real? Or just the art of the deal?
No idea.
Maybe thatโs the draw of having a reality show in the Oval Officeโthe danger, the intrigue, the daily cliffhanger episodes. โWill the worldโs longest running democracy survive? Tune in tomorrow to find out.โ
But I keep returning to a single question. It has almost become a north star for me amid the chaos of wildly swinging markets, tariffs threatened and then almost immediately rolled back, DOGE firings and DOGE rehirings, the hyperventilating on CNN and the cheerleading on FOX News. It is a question that every Democrat, every Republican, and every independent with firm political opinions should be asking themselves. Not just once, but daily. With every new headline. Itโs a question for anyone in pursuit of the Truth. And it goes like this . . .
A quick observation regarding the Dow. Itโs a been a little over 48 hours since the president declared April 2nd, 2025 โLiberation Dayโ and imposed tariffs on all of our trading partners across the globe, a move that has caused the market to shed six trillion dollars so far. The biggest drop since Covid.
This Covid connection is ironic because 2020 is the same year we opened a Robinhood account and began buying a little stock every month. In the process, this humble prisoner learned all about the discipline of investing and what some call โthe most powerful force in the worldโโcompound interest. Watching this account grow has been one of the most exciting experiences of my life. The S&P 500 had back-to-back years of over 20% growth in 2023 and 2024, and the handful of stocks that I picked were doing even better than that. We were right at double the total amount we invested after last yearโs presidential election. Optimism was high and the markets reflected this. But most of those gains have been wiped over the last couple months, culminating with these extremely painful last few days.
I keep thinking about a Wall Street Journal article I read back in January about Warren Buffet and how while everyone was busy buying stock, the Oracle of Omaha was selling. I wish I would have followed his lead right about now. And if my little Robinhood account has been so thoroughly decimated over the last couple days, I can only imagine what some peopleโs retirement accounts are looking like this morning. Not selling now though. Not panicking either. Weโll keep chugging along, month by month, sticking to the script, taking advantage of the discounted prices. When youโre committed to the long view, you donโt get caught up in all the Bull and Bear headlines. Weโll survive. America will rebound. Potentially stronger than ever with a trade policy that benefits this nationโs workers and consumers. Sounds like this is the endgame. But these are admittedly dark days.
The president recently advised America to โhang toughโ in a Truth Social post. What he is attempting to do is extremely bold and a massive gamble politically. Iโm pretty sure those independent voters and swing states who were the tipping point in the โresounding mandateโ that swept him back into office did not have a crashing stock market or a global recession in mind when they pulled the lever. Conservative media outlets are appealing for patience, albeit with nervous smiles. What else can we do but wait and see and try not to watch those plummeting red numbers on the ticker? But itโs hard not to wonder how thunderous the outcry would be if the Biden administration issued these same tariffs, or if it was Obama who was counseling us to โhang tough.โ
Imagine a scenario where an American was removed from society for 20 years. Weโll say it was voluntary, for the purposes of this essay. No internet, no cable television; his main source of information, the ABC World News at 6:30pm EST every night along with the political roundtable shows on Sunday mornings. Kinda like a social experiment in a controlled environment that examines the prolonged effect of the legacy media on the human brain. What would this personโs political opinions and beliefs look like based on his daily diet of news consumption? How might his worldview be shaped after a couple of decades of David Muir, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos?
Dystopian as it may sound, you actually do know someone like this. You are currently reading his words.
When it became fashionable to distrust the media and โfake newsโ became a national catchphrase, I didnโt get it. Why would anyone not trust Cecilia Vega? Why would respected journalists like Jonathan Karl and Martha Raddatz tell bald-faced lies to the American people? I still donโt believe they would. But a couple things happened over the last few years that at least caused me to reevaluate my blind trust in network news. The most alarming and egregious of which happened during the January Sixth riot . . .
Amid the live ABC News footage of gallows being erected, chants of โhang Mike Pence!โ, police being beaten with Trump 2020 flags, windows being busted, and members of Congress stacking tables and chairs as barricades, another ominous clip was woven into the feedโthe image of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jrโs fiancรฉe at the time, laughing and dancing at what appeared to be a party in the West Wing. I think she might have even had a champagne flute in her hand.
This was a tipping point for me. The moment when my disgust and outrage boiled over. The fact that this family of billionaires from Queens, New York, had convinced rural America that they were somehow their champions was bad enough, but now they were celebrating as democracy collapsed? Unreal.
So I did what every other writer does in times of distress and despairโI grabbed my pen and wrote about it. The result was a scathing indictment of this modern-day Nero fiddling in the Oval Office while the Capitol burned. I titled the essay Final Act of Cowardice, slapped it in an envelope, and mailed it out to be posted on the Malcolm Ivey website.
A year later, I was watching ABCโs โThis Week with George Stephanopoulosโ when a guest mentioned in passing how the footage of Guilfoyle dancing was actually from a previous White House function and did not occur on Jan 6. Wait, what? This seems like something that should have been vociferously condemned, investigated, and corrected in the interest of capital T, Truth. Instead, barely a footnote.
Shortly after this revelation, I watched a former White House staffer testify before the House January Sixth Committee that the president had to be restrained by Secret Service in order to be kept from joining the rioters/insurrectionists/sightseers that day. Restrained. An allegation that Trump vehemently denies, but thatโs not the point. I accused him of cowering in the safety of his office while his supporters and Capitol Police paid the consequences for his reckless words and his inability to admit defeat. I even included it in the title of the essay. While it is inarguable that all those peopleโand America as a wholeโdid pay a hefty price for his reckless words and inability to accept defeat (he still doesnโt), I doubt that even his most vocal critics would classify him as a coward. Donald Trump is many things, but a coward is not one of them. The world learned this in real time on July 13, 2024, when his kneejerk reaction to an assassination attempt was to pop back up, raise his fist, and yell, โFight! Fight!โ
Sidenote: The intent of this essay is not to capitulate. Iโm not a tech oligarch seeking to expand my empire, or a Democratic senator in a red district, or an Ivy League dean in fear of losing federal funding. Iโm just a prisoner. A guy whoโs changed his life while serving his time and hopes to reenter a society not teetering on the brink of civil war, economic collapse, crumbling infrastructure, and totalitarian government. But Iโm also a writer. And a writerโs job is to tell the truth.
Back to last yearโs MAGA rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One of the interesting things about this day in relation to the media was how the crowd quickly turned on the press correspondents who were covering the event. โYou did this!โ they shouted in the eerie aftermath of the shooting. Of course, the journalists they were referring to were pretty much everyone except Fox News.
Ever since I arrived at my first federal prison last year, Iโve been fascinated by the cable news experience and how the reporting varies on a given topic depending on which channel youโre on. Itโs like two different countries almost. In a federal joint, this difference is further underscored by the fact that televisions are segregated like Jim Crow Era water fountains in the Deep South. The โwhite TVโ is mostly Fox News interspersed with a little History Channel here and there when the 24-hour news cycle gets redundant. The โblack TVโ is mostly BET with either MSNBC or CNN for news. Each station is transmitted through headphones. Flipping back and forth between the two has been a revelation for me.
For instance, when CNN was reporting on the marketโs recent nosedive due to tariff fears and consumer uncertainty, Fox was hammering transgender athletes competing in female sports . . . When Fox is highlighting how we are 39 trillion in debt with a 1.9 trillion deficit and how itโs fiscally irresponsible to borrow money just to give it to other nations via USAID, CNN was talking about a looming โconstitutional crisisโ and how the current administration might defy judgesโ orders . . . When the editor of the progressive Atlantic magazine was accidentally invited to a Signal group chat full of Trumpโs highest ranking Cabinet members who were discussing the planned bombing of Houthi rebels two hours before it happened and sending each other muscle emojis as the targets were struck, Fox News quickly pivoted to a high-ranking MS-13 gang member who was nabbed just outside of D.C.
Similar to our current political climate, one side is clearly rooting for the other to fail. But contrary to popular belief, I donโt think that the media brass โhatesโ Donald Trump. I think he is the only hope of prolonging their inevitable demise, even if ratings are currently down. Just today, Iโve been listening to coverage of him floating the idea of a third term. And another story about him going after the nationโs largest law firms. This is headline gold for news organizations. And every day, itโs something new and disruptive. No other president is giving the media that.
And then there is radio . . .
My friends on the right will disagree with this, but one exception to all this partisan media animosity is NPR. Yes, certain shows, hosts and guests obviously have their own views. But there is nothing remotely polemic or political about Science Friday or A Way with Words or Hidden Brain or Marketplace. I owe so much to National Public Radio. Far from home, in solitary confinement cells, through hurricanes and wildfires and cancel culture and presidential elections and war and pandemics . . . NPR has been an amazing source of fact-based education. They are part of the reason an autodidact prisoner like the author of this essay even knows what โautodidactโ means ๐ Unfortunately, NPR and PBS are now in Trumpโs crosshairs. I hope the opposition can find a way to resist him on this. Time will tell.
Thatโs it for this week. See yโall next Tuesday. Stay safe out there.
Iโve been on political hiatus since the election. You might not have noticed out there in the real world of pricey eggs, Tesla terrorism, plummeting markets, transgender athletes, and airplanes loaded with shackled Venezuelan nationals zipping across the sky, but itโs true. In fact, the last thing I said that was even remotely political was a short post on the day after the election that went like this:
โSo after pulling off the greatest political upset of all time in 2016, Trump has just engineered the greatest political comeback of all time in 2024. And it looks like Republicans will occupy both chambers of Congress to get his agenda rolling, along with a Supreme Court already stocked with his appointees. Anyone who has ever read my essays and books knows I am not a fan. But he won. Both the electoral and the popular vote. America has spoken. Now itโs time to move forward. Trump is no traditional Republican. Heโs the ultimate wild card. These next four years are going to be interesting. While Iโm worried about how his second term will affect the judicial system in the long run, I am happy for the J-Sixer who lives in my unit who is now in line for an immediate pardon. I am happy for American businesses. Happy for the economy. Happy for those war-torn nations on the other side of the world that he has promised to bring peace. But most of all Iโm happy for those of you who have wished and wanted and waited for this since he last left office. My friends. My family. You know who you are. I love yโall regardless of who is in the White House. Stay safe out there. There is no them. Only us.โ
Many things have changed in the whirlwind first two months of this second Trump administration. And it would be easy for me to write a scathing disquisition on the policies that I find revolting. Iโm sure I will at some point. But for now Iโm resisting my reactionary tendencies, listening to a lot of Brian Kilmeade and Bill OโReilly on the local Fox News affiliate as a counterbalance to my normal NPR diet, and trying to get a full grip on that slippery thing we call โThe Truth.โ
One thing I do find fascinating about this pivotal moment in history is how my brothers and sisters on the Left are currently wandering the political wilderness, licking their wounds, fighting amongst themselves, seeking a sign, awaiting a hero to emerge and point the way forward. Josh Shapiro? Wes Moore? John Fetterman? Gretchen Whitmer? Pete Buttigieg?
Whoever it is needs to speak directly to blue collar American males. No matter how you feel about Donald Trump, I think we can all agree that heโs done a masterful job at making it unmanlyโif not downright un-Americanโto vote Democrat. Itโs no coincidence that he was receiving standing ovations at UFC fights, Nick Bosa of the 49ers was doing the Trump dance after sacking opposing QBs, Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Dana White . . . All the alphas were backing Donald.
Iโve been banging this drum for years. Long before the current wave of eggheads and pollsters and pundits started pontificating about this phenomenon in the aftermath of the 2024 election. The following are links to just a few of the essays Iโve written on the subject, dating back to 2018 . . .
There are other labels and perceptions that Democrats will have to overcome during the next four years as well. Regardless of who they anoint as their fearless leader, there are some tough questions they are going to have to ask themselves. About class and race and gender and labor and the economy and the environment and education and the direction this nation is headed. They appear scattered at the moment. Lost. Adrift. But then so did Republicans on January 7th, 2021.
These next few essays will be examining the Left and the Right and where weโre going from here. Guaranteed to offend. My apologies in advance ๐ Wishing you momentum.
โMarch 23, 2025
[This essay is the first in the Continental Rift series. See Continental Rift II…]
Malcolm Ivey / Author 