Jay Hoffmann

While Rome burns, they’re busy drafting strongly worded letters to the arsonists, pausing only to scold the citizens who dare suggest using the fire extinguishers. Their position would be merely comedic if it weren’t so catastrophically dangerous—like watching someone respond to a home invasion by suggesting the burglar fill out a visitor’s form.

“What leverage do we have?” Jeffries asks—apparently unaware that he’s providing his own epitaph. The leverage of moral clarity. The leverage of democratic legitimacy. The leverage of millions of citizens demanding their representatives actually represent them. But perhaps that’s too much to expect from leaders who’ve grown so comfortable in their donor-funded cages that they mistake their chains for jewelry.

Hasan Minhaj and Ronnie Chieng both had a segment in their recent comedy specials about 30 - 40 somethings falling trap to algorithmically pushed alpha male content that makes men question their place in the world and reframes equity initiatives as a zero sum game that they are losing out on. There is something about our time and our generation that make us vulnerable, and I'd be willing to bet that most American men have noticed the shift, or even seen it turned to themselves. Something about the way the world has moved on, or begin to loosen the grip, and men feeling like they are left behind, true or not.

And even if you are a billionaire, it seems, you are just as vulnerable to that type of thinking and that turn into this toxic blend of nihilism, misguided self-improvement, and surface level skepticism that's little better than our parents refrain, "you can't say anything anymore". Just look at Zuck.

If there was a playbook for how to be a jackass in 2025, I’m pretty sure we would see all of its chapters at play in Zuckerberg’s behaviour, and he would also have a good chance to appear on the book cover, wearing his dumb Aut Zuck aut nihil shirt.

I recently had a chance to go back and read Jane Mayer’s incredible profile on David Addigton, Cheney’s right-hand man during the Bush years. She outlines the power-play that Cheney and Addington engaged in, pulling from a Reagan era playbook to expand the powers of the Presidency to extralegal judicial rulings and commissions, and even to spying on U.S. citizens. An incredible read.