AI
Friday, July 04, 2025 5:10:55 PM
AYYAAAAAAA! 
Being American
"We Thought We Were Better than This. We're Not.
What the fuck are we supposed to do with Independence Day when everything sucks like this?
Jonathan Larsen
Jul 4
All emphasis, images, links.
July 4: TFN Extra! - Some thoughts on American pride … Supreme Court limits on federal judges fraying at the seams, it seems … Bountiful stupidity emerging about right-wing support for Trump’s bill … New York Times exposes African-born Zohran Mamdani for claiming accurately that he was born in Africa …
IMAGE - The Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, March 20, 2006. (Pascual De Ruvo / Creative Commons photo.)
I’ve never fully understood what it means to be proud of being American. I’m not sure some people even know what they mean when they say it.
What are they proud of? Longitude and latitude? Being part of this specific community? The system of governance? The history? The current government?
For some, surely, it’s unthinking tribalism. Or, ahem, nationalism.
Still, as a fucked-up child of divorce who looks for means of reconciliation, I’m inclined to seek a way today for us, all of us, to feel something positive, because today is a day that asks us to feel good about America, and that can be hard when so many are feeling so disheartened about what we’re doing with our independence right now.
There’s a sense, I think, in which American-ness, including pride, is a burden. American pride can’t exist rationally without belief that America is at least, like, good at something. We’re number one, et cetera. (Cue The Newsroom jeremiad .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJh9t9h6Wn0 .)
These days, that takes some mental gymnastics. Education, building cool shit, helping people, creating beauty, progress and advancement, moral leadership … where exactly are we number one today?
A poll last month found that Americans have — in the poll’s 24 years — never been less proud to be an American. Fifty-eight percent of Americans, fewer than three out of five, are very or extremely proud to be an American. But there’s an interesting split.
Look at the distribution by party, not just today, but since 2001:
GRAPHs
I think there’s a profound difference between being American and an American. And I suspect that’s behind the partisan split.
Republican pride fluctuates only gently with the party of the president. Democrats and Independents, meanwhile, have been on a downward trend since Pres. Donald Trump’s first election, with a rebound under Pres. Joe Biden insufficient to attain the levels seen under Pres. Barack Obama.
Why do Republicans care so little — in terms of their pride — about who’s president? I suspect it’s because they’re proud of possessing, as individuals, an intrinsic element independent of the government: They themselves are American.
Democrats and Independents, it would seem, are responding to whether they’re proud to be part of the group that is Americans. And that, naturally, correlates strongly with what that group, Americans, is doing.
Which, right now, is sucking and being terrible to human beings, especially to those already in need of a hand or a hug.
But, dear Newsfucker, has it not ever been thus? Isn’t our history one long pendulum of sucking and fixing? We have, in fact, survived and arisen from much worse than this.
You don’t even have to go back to the Civil War and slavery. We’ve always oppressed non-white people, non-men people, non-rich people, non-Christian people. Always. Pres. Donald Trump is not the first president to turn the powers of the state against the American people and the other people in America.
Under President John Fucking Kennedy, the Fucking Bureau of Investigation was spying on Martin Luther King and told Attorney General Robert Fucking Kennedy that one of King’s closest advisors was a Communist, so Saint RFK okayed wiretapping the home of — again, can’t stress this enough — Martin Luther King. Anointing heroes in our history can make our present feel that much more unprecedented, insurmountable. Again, the burden of American-ness.
So, no kings and no heroes!
And keep in mind, the America to which Pres. Donald Trump is taking us back is, with some obvious exceptions, not terribly different from an America we’ve known in our lifetimes. Government benefits are going back to roughly the levels under Pres. Bill Clinton. LGBTQ+ rights, too. It’s all bad, but the hole’s only as deep as one we’ve already climbed out of.
It was a Democrat who put “the other” in camps last time. And it’s not as if more recent Democrats haven’t also demonized and mistreated immigrants.
So, two questions. How do we swing the pendulum back faster, stronger this time? And, for fuck’s sake, how can we stop it swinging forever, pin that fucker in a good place?
There’s a reason Thomas Jefferson identified an educated populace as a prerequisite for a non-batshit country. Education used to include instruction in how to think. Not what to think, but the methodologies of critical thinking. Logic and rhetoric?.
None of which, I should note, prevented our past pendulum swings.
Sometimes, education comes simply from recognizing a failed experiment. But even that takes discernment and self-questioning and critical thinking. You can’t hit bottom unless you know it’s bottom.
Americans should have recognized Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) as a liar and a fear-monger. It took seeing the results of empowering him for Americans to learn to reject him.
Americans should have realized Trump was a liar and a con man and a narcissist who would say anything to get power and do anything to keep it. They should have realized politics isn’t a game.
But, again, not enough people did the work it would’ve taken to see through Trump. It’s not fun to recognize that the guy whose words make you feel good is bamboozling you. It’s not fun to calculate the consequences of disengagement.
It’s not fun to feel like you have to take everyone else’s opinions and welfare and existence into account. Once upon a time, you could share your stupid, racist joke with friends and that was the end of it.
Now, we’re all publishers with potentially infinite audiences, and so that inner censor has to be working all the time. Which, again, isn’t fun. But it’s not so much the canceling that bothers the (rich) people who’ve allegedly been canceled; it’s the expectation that they should be considerate of other people.
That they should have to do the unfun work of thinking for one fucking second about other people’s feelings and perspectives and having a decent respect for the opinions of others.
The burden of thinking about others — all others! — can feels like a cage, the farthest thing from liberating.
But, in fact, a decent respect for the opinion of others is an essential element of liberation, of independence. It’s literally why we got a Declaration of Independence.
What exactly compelled the founders to issue the Declaration of Independence 249 years ago? Let’s jump in the Wayback Machine .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine_(Peabody%27s_Improbable_History) .. and find out!
“When in the Course of human events… [blah blah, freedom] … a decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
In other words, they felt an obligation to make a case for what they were doing! For their actions to be legitimate, they needed to know that their argument could survive scrutiny. It didn’t mean they had to convince everyone, but they were obliged to make the argument.
Respecting the opinions of humankind doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It means we recognize that others are capable of reason, and of different perspectives, and that therefore we ought to subject our rationales to those opinions.
This is work! It’s a burden. Not fun. Which is why Trump and MAGA don’t like doing it.
But it’s also what gets us better outcomes. It’s been, historically, how we fix things.
Keeping things fixed fixed, pinning the pendulum on the side of good, requires us to change the dynamics that keep our pendulum of stupidity stupidly swinging. That means dropping some of the frameworks that both parties embrace.
Politics is not bad. Military leaders and business leaders do not have credentials that automatically make for good politicians. Our government shouldn’t do everything possible to prevent every possible harm. Safety is not more important than everything else. Other people aren’t the threat.
The real threat is what we’ll do out of fear of other people. The only thing we have to fear, et cetera.
We should not be united with each other. Thinking we should be is another framework — an un-American framework — that we need to drop. For decades, Democrats have exalted bipartisanship and compromise and civility and working together and unity. That’s a mistake that helped get us here and we need to lose that shit not just from our current discourse in this moment, but from the entire curriculum in perpetuity.
You are not obliged to be one with anyone, to seek unity with anyone, to compromise with anyone. Read that again (kidding, you don’t have to). You are supposed to be who you are, fight for what drives you, make your case for the futures. That’s why America was created with pieces set against each other.
Three branches. Independent offices. Contraposed interests. Competing constituencies and incentives. Fifty mostly stupid states.
America is not the result of people coming together as one. America is the thing that happens when everyone in it fights each other to form a more perfect union. Out of those many, us, comes that one, us. That does not mean any of us need to stop being who we are. E pluribus unum means we are one in our multitudes, not that we stop being multitudes.
Trump has weaponized a notion that some Democratic leaders have propagated for decades: That national unity requires agreement, consensus, etc. This is how the political middle became sacred ground, simply — infantilely — because it’s the spot closest to all the others.
Unum is what happens not when we abandon our convictions, but when we have a decent respect to the opinions of humanity, which compels us to submit our convictions to those opinions.
This is what makes Trump — and every other president’s autocratic tendencies and actions — so abhorrent. So un-American. The utter lack of respect for the opinions of others but also for the system that demands it. The Declaration of Independence is a gripe list of all the varying competing authorities not being heard by the king! It’s not a demand that America have its own king.
What we fought for then and fight for now is the right to keep fighting each other. Which, I get, is hard to feel excited about! “Wait, we’re fighting for the right to argue forever?!?” Well, yeah! That’s democracy, amirite?
But it shouldn’t bring us down. What is life if not navigating our fellow humans, and what are the joys of life if not the fruits of that journey?
How we talk and think about life and politics is a choice. And there’s a bit of a trap in it at the moment.
We want no one to be invisible, so we amplify and share every single instance of pain and woe. Which makes those instances feel more real than unremarkable everyday life.
We don’t want to minimize pain and suffering, so we search for strong words, intensifiers, to characterize them. Which risks making everything sound like the end of everything. Medicaid is not ending. Neither are food stamps. It’s really important for people to know this!
Historical perspective matters, too. This country has seen much worse. We were born of land theft, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Our foundation includes racism, sexism, and a class-based caste system. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” Yikes!
But even if it were ever thus, that doesn’t mean we’re doomed. The world is a lot better than it used to be! Humanity is capable of progress, both as a community and as individuals.
Every human starts off as a drooling, shit-spewing, howling, stupid, greedy, callous moocher who contributes nothing to the gross domestic product, doesn’t want to work, sucks nutrients out of another human being’s body, can’t hold up its own head, has a literal soft spot in its skull, and won’t finish making its brain for a quarter century. We can still be proud of them when they learn to ice skate!
American independence is the freedom to be dumb and the freedom to learn. Eternal vigilance means keeping the lessons front and center to reduce the dumb backsliding, the pendulum swings. We fucked that up, so now we have a lot of work to do.
Both to undo the damage, and to cement the lessons.
So maybe being American or an American isn’t the only way to derive pride from our nationality today. Maybe we can also decide that being American, being in America, means we exist within a machine that we can use for good or for ill. After all, it’s a little weird to be proud when you haven’t done anything.
So maybe we can decide that being American is more than a thing we are or are a part of. It’s a thing we do. It’s the doing itself.
In which case, the way to be proud of being American is by doing.
What We Can Do
As always, TFN’s got resources for getting involved and informed.
I just added this: Activist training, starting July 16. (h/t)
Getting involved — the doing — can often feel daunting, like you’re responsible for going out and changing the world. So I suggest thinking of it as helping. Who needs help out there?
It can be as simple as spreading the word about whatever matters to you, educating and enlightening your fellow humans.
Share The Fucking News
It can be political: Signing up with a group that does local or national advocacy about an issue you care about. Volunteering with Our Revolution or your party of choice. Campaigning for a candidate you like (but that you recognize is human and flawed and will break your heart).
It can also be not political (shh: everything’s political): Volunteering at a soup kitchen or as a tutor. (Fun fact: Supporting independent journalism and commentary also counts!)
RELATED Young Europeans are down on democracy, new polling finds. Don’t panic, though, because Germany — the one where it really, really matters — still has the highest faith in democracy: at 71% for democracy. Danke!
And most of European Gen Z still support democracy: 57%. The weakening numbers, though, don’t reflect a failure of democracy. Democracy is, as a Newsfucker pointed out the other day, GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. At the moment, oligarchs are stuffing the in-chute with garbage.
Democracy isn’t the problem. What we’re doing with it is the problem. If older folks want younger folks to like democracy a little more, maybe do better things with it.
Remember That Supreme Court Ruling That Ended Democracy? It Didn’t
In my live video .. https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/big-bullshit-bill-passes .. yesterday, I talked about how Pres. Donald Trump’s bullshit has a bit of an advantage: His stuff lands hard, early reporting focuses on its bignesses, and we all freak out.
It’s worth waiting a day or two for the dust to settle before panicking (which, never do). And we’re seeing that with last month’s Supreme Court ruling limiting how much federal district judges can limit the federal government.
Politico has a whole writeup on how that ruling didn’t affect every way those judges can constrain the Trump administration. Just on Wednesday, a federal judge — illegitimate because appointed by Pres. Barack Obama but somehow still wearing the robe and wig — ruled against Trump banning asylum claims on the southern border.
How could this judge do that? Magic! For one thing, the Administrative Procedure Act — named when laws still had boring, grownup names as decreed in Leviticus — lets judges block agencies from doing shit they can’t do. And if Trump’s got a problem with that, he can just look up the precedent in Trump and His Emotional-Support Clowns v. Suck It, et al.
Trump Bill Funds Landmines for Him to Step On
One way Pres. Donald Trump got his dimwitted emotional-support clowns to go along with a bill that does everything that they once vowed to commit seppuku to stop when Barack Obama was president was by promising them that he in his magic mightiness will, y’know, break the law in ways that his emotional-support clowns will like.
Specifically, Politico reports that Trump promised them that even though he didn’t eliminate all solar and wind tax credits, he, Trump, will step in to block some of those credits if individual projects try to get them in the states represented by said emotional-support clowns.
In other words, local communities are now gonna see individual companies and job-creation projects die at the hands of Trump and his locally elected emotional-support clowns. Not as part of some big sweeping, hadda-be-done national initiative, but on the merits, when those merits include helping their personal, good, not-urban, not-you-know communities.
Good luck with that at the polls next year.
Media Watch: More Mamdani Bullshit
The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/nyregion/mamdani-columbia-black-application.html .. yesterday reported that Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identified on his Columbia University application as both Asian and African American.
He is both. He has Indian parents and was born in Uganda.
But because Mamdani doesn’t fit squarely into the round-peg holes of college applications or journalistic thinking, this is now a Scandal™. And it took the Rupert Murdoch media less than one day to dig up video of Mamdani saying in his campaign that it would be misleading to identify himself as African American.
You Newsfuckers are too smart to need TFN to newsfuck the fact that checking a box on a college application is a different context than a mayoral race. For fuck’s fucking sake.
To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with a journalistic outlet looking into the background of a leading mayoral candidate. There’s nothing wrong with them publishing what they find.
Where the NYT-fucked-up part comes in is in the prioritization — was this really more important than tons of other shit that wasn’t looked into? Did these facts really merit a story, let alone the headline, let alone the front-page placement?
The NYT’s answers to these questions say something about the paper’s values and priorities. The “story” has zero to do with anything substantive that will affect people’s lives. It’s prurient fodder for readers and commenters to give them their next distraction when they’re done with Wordle. That says something about what matters to the Times.
There’s a lot more wrong with the NYT’s handling of this whole thing, causing still more people to become disillusioned with the paper’s values. If you wanted a rabbit hole .. https://bsky.app/profile/purplechrain.bsky.social/post/3lt4b37qhtc2a , you’re welcome.
Three Quickies
* Hey, all you new gambling addicts born from government deregulating gambling, you wanna bet whether Pres. Donald Trump’s taxes gambling? No, I’m not gonna give you odds on it … fuck, man, get some help. But as of now, you’re gonna get taxed on your gambling losses. Which, let the record show, is most gambling. (Don’t gamble, kids.)
* Tons of old folks just got an email from Social Security about how Donald Trump is New Jesus and ended taxes on Social Security for almost everyone. Both are lies. The Associated Press, the folks punished for saying “Gulf of Mexico,” explain .. https://apnews.com/article/trump-congress-big-bill-tax-social-security-adea287e00c7c553f69f3667d3ef78cc .
* Just because it’ll take us a while to learn how Pres. Donald Trump got Republicans to fall in line doesn’t mean we should relegate those lessons to history. To wit, the low cost of bribing today’s Republicans: The New Republic rounds up .. https://newrepublic.com/post/197596/trump-won-house-republican-budget-holdouts-free-merch .. Republicans going into the White House as pissed-off nos on the bill and walking out happy yeses toting Trump swag. Photos and signed souvenirs. As Politico notes, the congressional right-wingers who caved yet again are now officially jokes. Or — as TFN will hopefully remember that I called them yesterday — they are now and forever the hardy-har-hardliners.
Recommended Reading
Pres. Donald Trump’s big boneheaded bill is a political bust. Not just because it’s unpopular.
Pres. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was unpopular, too. Now it’s not. Because it helped people. And because it was an expression of popular values that could be seen in its results. Think FDR and the New Deal.
But as Politico Senior Political Writer Charlie Mahtesian writes .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/02/megabill-trump-realignment-missing-analysis-00438034 , Trump’s bill doesn’t have any of that. And as TFN Senior Political Writer me writes, Trump’s bill is a tacky, tawdry mish-mash of shit no one wanted individually, let alone in an overpriced gift basket. It’s the legislative equivalent of his interior-decorating instincts.
IMAGE - White House photo presumably using some sort of shielded lens.
Considering everything Trump has achieved politically, his bill does nothing to lock in that political reordering for even one fucking day after he’s gone. And the fact that TFN pointed out last month that Trump is now Pres. George W. Bush only with worse manners has nothing to do with me choosing this quote from Mahtesian:
“This was the moment to announce the arrival of what could be a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. The time
to deal a crowning blow to a feckless opposition party that remains convinced the only thing holding it
back is ineffective messaging. Instead, the White House produced a domestic policy bill that could
have just as easily been produced by any generic Republican administration.”
I may have quoted too much from Mahtesian to make it worth you reading in its entirety, but if you wanna wallow in his beatdown of the bill, dive right in!
TCB
FUTURE NEWSFUCKING I’ll be on The Nicole Sandler Show — free! — right here, on Monday at 3:30pm eastern time.
And yesterday’s live bull session was so much fun I’m thinking I’ll maybe do another. Any interest? Thoughts? LMK!
MORE INDEPENDENCE DAY It’s hard today not to tie my own independence — with TFN and the Jonathan Larsen Substac .. http://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/ .. where I do my original reporting — to the decision by almost two-thousand (!) of you to support my work financially. I mean it when I say each post, each journalistic revelation, is due to you, however you support TFN and my newsfucking. E pluribus fuckem.
Without you I’d be yet another aging ex-journalist sending out cover letters with fake typos and fake passion for building brands and telling the exciting story of AI’s potential. Without you, tens of thousands of people wouldn’t have TFN every morning. The world wouldn’t know what I’m revealing on my other Substack.
That’s not only my independence, it’s yours, too. I mean, holy shit, think about it. In a world dominated by corporate media, a tiny handful of people — i.e., Newsfuckers — acting independently of but in concert with each other every day bring into this world independent journalism that they/you choose. That’s independence, too!
And every time I start to sweat that support is trailing off, you telepathic fuckers sense the subliminal panic in my pitches and, sure enough, more of you step up. And it’s just enough that, so far, I’ve been able not to do some of the stuff that I so hate about some other journalism and commentary.
* The paywalls — yet another moment that no one needed in their lives to remember they don’t have the money to get just one tiny fucking piece of information on the other side of a paywall.
* The constant commodification of you — in a culture that defines you monetarily at every turn, the financial support of you paid Newsfuckers gives me the independence not to hit you up for fucking cash at every fucking turn, which is why I bury the pitch down here, even though it means casual readers won’t even see it.
You also give me the independence to speak with you candidly about money, and the independence not to resort to cheesy depressing pitches that insult everyone’s intelligence and just make for more sadness in the world.
Independence, it weirdly turns out, comes from depending on each other. Thank you.
https://thefuckingnews.substack.com/p/being-american?utm=
Being American "We Thought We Were Better than This. We're Not.
What the fuck are we supposed to do with Independence Day when everything sucks like this?
Jonathan Larsen
Jul 4
All emphasis, images, links.
July 4: TFN Extra! - Some thoughts on American pride … Supreme Court limits on federal judges fraying at the seams, it seems … Bountiful stupidity emerging about right-wing support for Trump’s bill … New York Times exposes African-born Zohran Mamdani for claiming accurately that he was born in Africa …
IMAGE - The Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, March 20, 2006. (Pascual De Ruvo / Creative Commons photo.)
I’ve never fully understood what it means to be proud of being American. I’m not sure some people even know what they mean when they say it.
What are they proud of? Longitude and latitude? Being part of this specific community? The system of governance? The history? The current government?
For some, surely, it’s unthinking tribalism. Or, ahem, nationalism.
Still, as a fucked-up child of divorce who looks for means of reconciliation, I’m inclined to seek a way today for us, all of us, to feel something positive, because today is a day that asks us to feel good about America, and that can be hard when so many are feeling so disheartened about what we’re doing with our independence right now.
There’s a sense, I think, in which American-ness, including pride, is a burden. American pride can’t exist rationally without belief that America is at least, like, good at something. We’re number one, et cetera. (Cue The Newsroom jeremiad .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJh9t9h6Wn0 .)
These days, that takes some mental gymnastics. Education, building cool shit, helping people, creating beauty, progress and advancement, moral leadership … where exactly are we number one today?
A poll last month found that Americans have — in the poll’s 24 years — never been less proud to be an American. Fifty-eight percent of Americans, fewer than three out of five, are very or extremely proud to be an American. But there’s an interesting split.
Look at the distribution by party, not just today, but since 2001:
GRAPHs
I think there’s a profound difference between being American and an American. And I suspect that’s behind the partisan split.
Republican pride fluctuates only gently with the party of the president. Democrats and Independents, meanwhile, have been on a downward trend since Pres. Donald Trump’s first election, with a rebound under Pres. Joe Biden insufficient to attain the levels seen under Pres. Barack Obama.
Why do Republicans care so little — in terms of their pride — about who’s president? I suspect it’s because they’re proud of possessing, as individuals, an intrinsic element independent of the government: They themselves are American.
Democrats and Independents, it would seem, are responding to whether they’re proud to be part of the group that is Americans. And that, naturally, correlates strongly with what that group, Americans, is doing.
Which, right now, is sucking and being terrible to human beings, especially to those already in need of a hand or a hug.
But, dear Newsfucker, has it not ever been thus? Isn’t our history one long pendulum of sucking and fixing? We have, in fact, survived and arisen from much worse than this.
You don’t even have to go back to the Civil War and slavery. We’ve always oppressed non-white people, non-men people, non-rich people, non-Christian people. Always. Pres. Donald Trump is not the first president to turn the powers of the state against the American people and the other people in America.
Under President John Fucking Kennedy, the Fucking Bureau of Investigation was spying on Martin Luther King and told Attorney General Robert Fucking Kennedy that one of King’s closest advisors was a Communist, so Saint RFK okayed wiretapping the home of — again, can’t stress this enough — Martin Luther King. Anointing heroes in our history can make our present feel that much more unprecedented, insurmountable. Again, the burden of American-ness.
So, no kings and no heroes!
And keep in mind, the America to which Pres. Donald Trump is taking us back is, with some obvious exceptions, not terribly different from an America we’ve known in our lifetimes. Government benefits are going back to roughly the levels under Pres. Bill Clinton. LGBTQ+ rights, too. It’s all bad, but the hole’s only as deep as one we’ve already climbed out of.
It was a Democrat who put “the other” in camps last time. And it’s not as if more recent Democrats haven’t also demonized and mistreated immigrants.
So, two questions. How do we swing the pendulum back faster, stronger this time? And, for fuck’s sake, how can we stop it swinging forever, pin that fucker in a good place?
There’s a reason Thomas Jefferson identified an educated populace as a prerequisite for a non-batshit country. Education used to include instruction in how to think. Not what to think, but the methodologies of critical thinking. Logic and rhetoric?.
None of which, I should note, prevented our past pendulum swings.
Sometimes, education comes simply from recognizing a failed experiment. But even that takes discernment and self-questioning and critical thinking. You can’t hit bottom unless you know it’s bottom.
Americans should have recognized Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) as a liar and a fear-monger. It took seeing the results of empowering him for Americans to learn to reject him.
Americans should have realized Trump was a liar and a con man and a narcissist who would say anything to get power and do anything to keep it. They should have realized politics isn’t a game.
But, again, not enough people did the work it would’ve taken to see through Trump. It’s not fun to recognize that the guy whose words make you feel good is bamboozling you. It’s not fun to calculate the consequences of disengagement.
It’s not fun to feel like you have to take everyone else’s opinions and welfare and existence into account. Once upon a time, you could share your stupid, racist joke with friends and that was the end of it.
Now, we’re all publishers with potentially infinite audiences, and so that inner censor has to be working all the time. Which, again, isn’t fun. But it’s not so much the canceling that bothers the (rich) people who’ve allegedly been canceled; it’s the expectation that they should be considerate of other people.
That they should have to do the unfun work of thinking for one fucking second about other people’s feelings and perspectives and having a decent respect for the opinions of others.
The burden of thinking about others — all others! — can feels like a cage, the farthest thing from liberating.
But, in fact, a decent respect for the opinion of others is an essential element of liberation, of independence. It’s literally why we got a Declaration of Independence.
What exactly compelled the founders to issue the Declaration of Independence 249 years ago? Let’s jump in the Wayback Machine .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine_(Peabody%27s_Improbable_History) .. and find out!
“When in the Course of human events… [blah blah, freedom] … a decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
In other words, they felt an obligation to make a case for what they were doing! For their actions to be legitimate, they needed to know that their argument could survive scrutiny. It didn’t mean they had to convince everyone, but they were obliged to make the argument.
Respecting the opinions of humankind doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It means we recognize that others are capable of reason, and of different perspectives, and that therefore we ought to subject our rationales to those opinions.
This is work! It’s a burden. Not fun. Which is why Trump and MAGA don’t like doing it.
But it’s also what gets us better outcomes. It’s been, historically, how we fix things.
Keeping things fixed fixed, pinning the pendulum on the side of good, requires us to change the dynamics that keep our pendulum of stupidity stupidly swinging. That means dropping some of the frameworks that both parties embrace.
Politics is not bad. Military leaders and business leaders do not have credentials that automatically make for good politicians. Our government shouldn’t do everything possible to prevent every possible harm. Safety is not more important than everything else. Other people aren’t the threat.
The real threat is what we’ll do out of fear of other people. The only thing we have to fear, et cetera.
We should not be united with each other. Thinking we should be is another framework — an un-American framework — that we need to drop. For decades, Democrats have exalted bipartisanship and compromise and civility and working together and unity. That’s a mistake that helped get us here and we need to lose that shit not just from our current discourse in this moment, but from the entire curriculum in perpetuity.
You are not obliged to be one with anyone, to seek unity with anyone, to compromise with anyone. Read that again (kidding, you don’t have to). You are supposed to be who you are, fight for what drives you, make your case for the futures. That’s why America was created with pieces set against each other.
Three branches. Independent offices. Contraposed interests. Competing constituencies and incentives. Fifty mostly stupid states.
America is not the result of people coming together as one. America is the thing that happens when everyone in it fights each other to form a more perfect union. Out of those many, us, comes that one, us. That does not mean any of us need to stop being who we are. E pluribus unum means we are one in our multitudes, not that we stop being multitudes.
Trump has weaponized a notion that some Democratic leaders have propagated for decades: That national unity requires agreement, consensus, etc. This is how the political middle became sacred ground, simply — infantilely — because it’s the spot closest to all the others.
Unum is what happens not when we abandon our convictions, but when we have a decent respect to the opinions of humanity, which compels us to submit our convictions to those opinions.
This is what makes Trump — and every other president’s autocratic tendencies and actions — so abhorrent. So un-American. The utter lack of respect for the opinions of others but also for the system that demands it. The Declaration of Independence is a gripe list of all the varying competing authorities not being heard by the king! It’s not a demand that America have its own king.
What we fought for then and fight for now is the right to keep fighting each other. Which, I get, is hard to feel excited about! “Wait, we’re fighting for the right to argue forever?!?” Well, yeah! That’s democracy, amirite?
But it shouldn’t bring us down. What is life if not navigating our fellow humans, and what are the joys of life if not the fruits of that journey?
How we talk and think about life and politics is a choice. And there’s a bit of a trap in it at the moment.
We want no one to be invisible, so we amplify and share every single instance of pain and woe. Which makes those instances feel more real than unremarkable everyday life.
We don’t want to minimize pain and suffering, so we search for strong words, intensifiers, to characterize them. Which risks making everything sound like the end of everything. Medicaid is not ending. Neither are food stamps. It’s really important for people to know this!
Historical perspective matters, too. This country has seen much worse. We were born of land theft, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Our foundation includes racism, sexism, and a class-based caste system. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” Yikes!
But even if it were ever thus, that doesn’t mean we’re doomed. The world is a lot better than it used to be! Humanity is capable of progress, both as a community and as individuals.
Every human starts off as a drooling, shit-spewing, howling, stupid, greedy, callous moocher who contributes nothing to the gross domestic product, doesn’t want to work, sucks nutrients out of another human being’s body, can’t hold up its own head, has a literal soft spot in its skull, and won’t finish making its brain for a quarter century. We can still be proud of them when they learn to ice skate!
American independence is the freedom to be dumb and the freedom to learn. Eternal vigilance means keeping the lessons front and center to reduce the dumb backsliding, the pendulum swings. We fucked that up, so now we have a lot of work to do.
Both to undo the damage, and to cement the lessons.
So maybe being American or an American isn’t the only way to derive pride from our nationality today. Maybe we can also decide that being American, being in America, means we exist within a machine that we can use for good or for ill. After all, it’s a little weird to be proud when you haven’t done anything.
So maybe we can decide that being American is more than a thing we are or are a part of. It’s a thing we do. It’s the doing itself.
In which case, the way to be proud of being American is by doing.
What We Can Do
As always, TFN’s got resources for getting involved and informed.
I just added this: Activist training, starting July 16. (h/t)
Getting involved — the doing — can often feel daunting, like you’re responsible for going out and changing the world. So I suggest thinking of it as helping. Who needs help out there?
It can be as simple as spreading the word about whatever matters to you, educating and enlightening your fellow humans.
Share The Fucking News
It can be political: Signing up with a group that does local or national advocacy about an issue you care about. Volunteering with Our Revolution or your party of choice. Campaigning for a candidate you like (but that you recognize is human and flawed and will break your heart).
It can also be not political (shh: everything’s political): Volunteering at a soup kitchen or as a tutor. (Fun fact: Supporting independent journalism and commentary also counts!)
RELATED Young Europeans are down on democracy, new polling finds. Don’t panic, though, because Germany — the one where it really, really matters — still has the highest faith in democracy: at 71% for democracy. Danke!
And most of European Gen Z still support democracy: 57%. The weakening numbers, though, don’t reflect a failure of democracy. Democracy is, as a Newsfucker pointed out the other day, GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. At the moment, oligarchs are stuffing the in-chute with garbage.
Democracy isn’t the problem. What we’re doing with it is the problem. If older folks want younger folks to like democracy a little more, maybe do better things with it.
Remember That Supreme Court Ruling That Ended Democracy? It Didn’t
In my live video .. https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/big-bullshit-bill-passes .. yesterday, I talked about how Pres. Donald Trump’s bullshit has a bit of an advantage: His stuff lands hard, early reporting focuses on its bignesses, and we all freak out.
It’s worth waiting a day or two for the dust to settle before panicking (which, never do). And we’re seeing that with last month’s Supreme Court ruling limiting how much federal district judges can limit the federal government.
Politico has a whole writeup on how that ruling didn’t affect every way those judges can constrain the Trump administration. Just on Wednesday, a federal judge — illegitimate because appointed by Pres. Barack Obama but somehow still wearing the robe and wig — ruled against Trump banning asylum claims on the southern border.
How could this judge do that? Magic! For one thing, the Administrative Procedure Act — named when laws still had boring, grownup names as decreed in Leviticus — lets judges block agencies from doing shit they can’t do. And if Trump’s got a problem with that, he can just look up the precedent in Trump and His Emotional-Support Clowns v. Suck It, et al.
Trump Bill Funds Landmines for Him to Step On
One way Pres. Donald Trump got his dimwitted emotional-support clowns to go along with a bill that does everything that they once vowed to commit seppuku to stop when Barack Obama was president was by promising them that he in his magic mightiness will, y’know, break the law in ways that his emotional-support clowns will like.
Specifically, Politico reports that Trump promised them that even though he didn’t eliminate all solar and wind tax credits, he, Trump, will step in to block some of those credits if individual projects try to get them in the states represented by said emotional-support clowns.
In other words, local communities are now gonna see individual companies and job-creation projects die at the hands of Trump and his locally elected emotional-support clowns. Not as part of some big sweeping, hadda-be-done national initiative, but on the merits, when those merits include helping their personal, good, not-urban, not-you-know communities.
Good luck with that at the polls next year.
Media Watch: More Mamdani Bullshit
The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/nyregion/mamdani-columbia-black-application.html .. yesterday reported that Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identified on his Columbia University application as both Asian and African American.
He is both. He has Indian parents and was born in Uganda.
But because Mamdani doesn’t fit squarely into the round-peg holes of college applications or journalistic thinking, this is now a Scandal™. And it took the Rupert Murdoch media less than one day to dig up video of Mamdani saying in his campaign that it would be misleading to identify himself as African American.
You Newsfuckers are too smart to need TFN to newsfuck the fact that checking a box on a college application is a different context than a mayoral race. For fuck’s fucking sake.
To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with a journalistic outlet looking into the background of a leading mayoral candidate. There’s nothing wrong with them publishing what they find.
Where the NYT-fucked-up part comes in is in the prioritization — was this really more important than tons of other shit that wasn’t looked into? Did these facts really merit a story, let alone the headline, let alone the front-page placement?
The NYT’s answers to these questions say something about the paper’s values and priorities. The “story” has zero to do with anything substantive that will affect people’s lives. It’s prurient fodder for readers and commenters to give them their next distraction when they’re done with Wordle. That says something about what matters to the Times.
There’s a lot more wrong with the NYT’s handling of this whole thing, causing still more people to become disillusioned with the paper’s values. If you wanted a rabbit hole .. https://bsky.app/profile/purplechrain.bsky.social/post/3lt4b37qhtc2a , you’re welcome.
Three Quickies
* Hey, all you new gambling addicts born from government deregulating gambling, you wanna bet whether Pres. Donald Trump’s taxes gambling? No, I’m not gonna give you odds on it … fuck, man, get some help. But as of now, you’re gonna get taxed on your gambling losses. Which, let the record show, is most gambling. (Don’t gamble, kids.)
* Tons of old folks just got an email from Social Security about how Donald Trump is New Jesus and ended taxes on Social Security for almost everyone. Both are lies. The Associated Press, the folks punished for saying “Gulf of Mexico,” explain .. https://apnews.com/article/trump-congress-big-bill-tax-social-security-adea287e00c7c553f69f3667d3ef78cc .
* Just because it’ll take us a while to learn how Pres. Donald Trump got Republicans to fall in line doesn’t mean we should relegate those lessons to history. To wit, the low cost of bribing today’s Republicans: The New Republic rounds up .. https://newrepublic.com/post/197596/trump-won-house-republican-budget-holdouts-free-merch .. Republicans going into the White House as pissed-off nos on the bill and walking out happy yeses toting Trump swag. Photos and signed souvenirs. As Politico notes, the congressional right-wingers who caved yet again are now officially jokes. Or — as TFN will hopefully remember that I called them yesterday — they are now and forever the hardy-har-hardliners.
Recommended Reading
Pres. Donald Trump’s big boneheaded bill is a political bust. Not just because it’s unpopular.
Pres. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was unpopular, too. Now it’s not. Because it helped people. And because it was an expression of popular values that could be seen in its results. Think FDR and the New Deal.
But as Politico Senior Political Writer Charlie Mahtesian writes .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/02/megabill-trump-realignment-missing-analysis-00438034 , Trump’s bill doesn’t have any of that. And as TFN Senior Political Writer me writes, Trump’s bill is a tacky, tawdry mish-mash of shit no one wanted individually, let alone in an overpriced gift basket. It’s the legislative equivalent of his interior-decorating instincts.
IMAGE - White House photo presumably using some sort of shielded lens.
Considering everything Trump has achieved politically, his bill does nothing to lock in that political reordering for even one fucking day after he’s gone. And the fact that TFN pointed out last month that Trump is now Pres. George W. Bush only with worse manners has nothing to do with me choosing this quote from Mahtesian:
“This was the moment to announce the arrival of what could be a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. The time
to deal a crowning blow to a feckless opposition party that remains convinced the only thing holding it
back is ineffective messaging. Instead, the White House produced a domestic policy bill that could
have just as easily been produced by any generic Republican administration.”
I may have quoted too much from Mahtesian to make it worth you reading in its entirety, but if you wanna wallow in his beatdown of the bill, dive right in!
TCB
FUTURE NEWSFUCKING I’ll be on The Nicole Sandler Show — free! — right here, on Monday at 3:30pm eastern time.
And yesterday’s live bull session was so much fun I’m thinking I’ll maybe do another. Any interest? Thoughts? LMK!
MORE INDEPENDENCE DAY It’s hard today not to tie my own independence — with TFN and the Jonathan Larsen Substac .. http://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/ .. where I do my original reporting — to the decision by almost two-thousand (!) of you to support my work financially. I mean it when I say each post, each journalistic revelation, is due to you, however you support TFN and my newsfucking. E pluribus fuckem.
Without you I’d be yet another aging ex-journalist sending out cover letters with fake typos and fake passion for building brands and telling the exciting story of AI’s potential. Without you, tens of thousands of people wouldn’t have TFN every morning. The world wouldn’t know what I’m revealing on my other Substack.
That’s not only my independence, it’s yours, too. I mean, holy shit, think about it. In a world dominated by corporate media, a tiny handful of people — i.e., Newsfuckers — acting independently of but in concert with each other every day bring into this world independent journalism that they/you choose. That’s independence, too!
And every time I start to sweat that support is trailing off, you telepathic fuckers sense the subliminal panic in my pitches and, sure enough, more of you step up. And it’s just enough that, so far, I’ve been able not to do some of the stuff that I so hate about some other journalism and commentary.
* The paywalls — yet another moment that no one needed in their lives to remember they don’t have the money to get just one tiny fucking piece of information on the other side of a paywall.
* The constant commodification of you — in a culture that defines you monetarily at every turn, the financial support of you paid Newsfuckers gives me the independence not to hit you up for fucking cash at every fucking turn, which is why I bury the pitch down here, even though it means casual readers won’t even see it.
You also give me the independence to speak with you candidly about money, and the independence not to resort to cheesy depressing pitches that insult everyone’s intelligence and just make for more sadness in the world.
Independence, it weirdly turns out, comes from depending on each other. Thank you.
https://thefuckingnews.substack.com/p/being-american?utm=
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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