The Index

I've been rewatching The West Wing lately, and it's like visiting a museum of extinct emotions. There's President Bartlet, striding through the corridors of power with his moral compass pointing toward true north, surrounded by staffers who genuinely believe their late-night policy debates might actually improve someone's life by Thursday. The show aired from 1999 to 2006, and watching it now feels like archaeology - excavating the fossilized remains of a time when folks could imagine their world as fundamentally decent, improvable, and oriented toward justice.

Boston Legal told the same story. Alan Shore and Denny Crane sparred over cases that mattered, in a legal system that, while flawed, still seemed capable of surprise verdicts in favor of the little guy. These shows are cultural artifacts from an era when we collectively believed in what I'll call the "upward arc" - the assumption that despite setbacks and frustrations, the long trajectory of Western life bent toward something better.

That assumption is dead. I know this sounds melodramatic, but I think we've witnessed something unprecedented in our shared culture: the wholesale abandonment of progress as a governing narrative. Where we used to tell ourselves stories about systems that could be reformed, institutions that could be redeemed, and problems that could be solved, we now traffic almost exclusively in a paradigm of decay, capture, and inevitable disappointment.

Apple survived Steve Jobs.

Microsoft thrived after Gates.

If Tesla can’t survive Musk, maybe it deserves its decline.

For the billions of users who simply open Safari, Chrome, or Edge and type into the search bar, nothing is likely to change. Defaults rule. The incumbents keep winning. Power users keep jumping ship.

If there is a war, it’s not for the hearts of consumers. It’s for enterprise control, for security credibility, and for distribution partnerships.

Anything else is noise.

Anti-vaxx is a classic upper-class luxury belief.

You reject vaccines, not because you’ve studied the science, but because your zip code has a 97% vaccination rate.

It’s not just that Trump officials don’t know how government works.

It’s that they think you are the fool for expecting them to.

The GOP didn’t get Trumped. It got everything it ever asked for: white, loud, cruel, and allergic to accountability.

Trump’s birthday party gets tanks.

Your grandma loses Medicaid.

That’s the deal.

The Trump doctrine: tweet tariffs into being, walk them back when the market flinches, and pretend volatility is strategy.

Scott Bessent sold you trickle-down garbage in 2017. It didn’t work. Now he’s selling it again—with tariffs, fewer rules, and more lies.

The president is confused, slurring, repeating himself, fixated on Obama, and openly unsure if he’s bound by the Constitution.

The diagnosis is on display.

The crisis is cognitive.

And nobody around him dares to say it out loud.

The Daily Caller, a right-wing propaganda mill masquerading as a news outlet, published an op-ed by Lila Rose on May 2, 2025, titled “The Abortion Pill Is Poison, Not Medicine.” That headline tells you everything. It’s an ideological manifesto loaded with pseudo-medical jargon, emotional blackmail, and outright misinformation. The Caller has long been a vessel for reactionary drivel, but this piece is a particular case study in how the anti-abortion movement launders theological doctrine through the language of public health.

The international immune system is activating. Democracy, flawed and fragile, is developing antibodies against a very specific kind of viral politics. The backlash is electoral, cultural, and institutional. And it is spreading.

The executive order says “protect the innocent.”

What it means is:

Kill reform. Shield abuse. Punish resistance.

Trump just signed an authoritarian wishlist—and we’re breaking it down, line by line.

Instead of confronting fascism, Thomas Friedman invented a whole new political identity based on... squints at notes... Google's self-driving car subsidiary.

You can't make this stuff up.

And nor should you.

My analysis of elite denial...

The U.S. didn’t get conned. It chose the con.

Because every filter—media, voters, donors—was calibrated for charisma.

Not wisdom. Not skill. Not integrity.

Just the loudest guy in the room.

Today in The Index's Meta Media series: Marco Rubio wrote a sweaty little op-ed claiming fact-checking is tyranny. Turns out when you can’t tell the truth, the next best thing is banning anyone who can.

“Freeze the conflict” = Let Putin keep the land he stole.

“Block NATO membership” = Leave Ukraine defenseless.

“Recognize Crimea” = Erase international law.

Trump’s peace plan is a blueprint for capitulation.

The Cold War blocked exports.

It didn’t stop the Soviets.

It built their underground tech ecosystem.

Now it’s China’s turn.

The exhausted majority didn’t leave democracy.

Democracy left them.

It turned into content.

Into noise.

Into a circus run by clowns with Super PACs.

We don’t respond to crises anymore - we run on them.

Governments legislate by siren.

Media monetizes adrenaline.

And we’re too burned out to notice it’s all by design.

Wall Street is used to volatility. It prices risk. It lives and dies by the future tense. But even volatility has its rules—some logic, some signals. Today, the signal is the volatility.

Tariffs are not policy. They are performance—symbols—flags planted in the wreckage of a global order Trump and his far-right allies are intentionally dismantling. Anyone still thinking this is about protecting American steelworkers or rebalancing trade with China hasn't been paying attention—or worse, is clinging to the fairy tale that this movement is tethered to any rational economic theory.

The truth is far more bleak. Trump's tariffs are just the on-ramp to something far more dangerous: the construction of an anti-global, anti-liberal, post-Enlightenment world system. The endgame isn't economic prosperity; it's ideological severance. Strategic decoupling from modernity itself.

The Republican Party isn’t “drifting toward authoritarianism.” It’s sprinting. Third term talk, coup blueprints, Constitution in the shredder. This is the endgame and they’re laughing.

Trust doesn't return with a photo op, a handshake, or deals signed under duress. It is built slowly, consistently, through a pattern of behavior. Trump broke that pattern. He salted the earth. And now he struts through the wreckage, calling it a win.

If you had told me a decade ago that a former president would waltz back into the White House, torch the global economy, slap double-digit tariffs on damn near everything, spook the markets into evaporating over three trillion dollars in a single day, and call it a "booming economy" with a straight face—I would've thought it a particularly cruel and poorly conceived joke.

But here we are.