![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/hold-the-line-patriots-1100.jpg\")
My last column named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as my pick for 2028. Take two and call me in 2028, I said. The trouble with that advice, I have since realized, is the date.
\nPolitical momentum is a lot like gasoline. It costs a fortune to get, and it never sits in the tank for long. On Tuesday, November 3, the tank was full. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats, Texas among them, and reached their largest House majority since 2008.
\nMy argument, for which I take full blame, is this. The moment to run Ms Ocasio-Cortez was the midterms. The blue wave was powered by a reactionary, thoroughly fed-up electorate, furious at a president who has sold the country to corporations and billionaires at a steep discount. Had there been a presidency on the ballot, I believe that fury would have carried her into the Oval Office. Instead it produced a crop of new senators, several of whom have already started squabbling about Chuck Schumer.
\nTwo things are likely to happen between now and 2028, and neither will help her. First, Democrats will spend two years repeating the mistakes that drove voters away from them and put Mr Trump in the White House. Voters have short memories for gratitude and long ones for grievance. Second, the momentum will fade. What would have been plenty this November may be nowhere near enough two Novembers from now.
\nBy 2028 the tank may be empty. Worse, nobody in the party will have checked the gauge.
\nThe last column leaned on Newton’s third law, the one about equal and opposite reactions. This one needs his first. An object in motion stays in motion unless something acts on it. Political momentum works the same way, except that in politics something always acts on it, and that something is usually the party that just won. Friction never takes a day off. Only fuel keeps you moving.
\nTuesday ran on the best fuel in politics, which is anger. It is high-octane, and it burns fast. A wave of voters is held together by a mood, and moods have the shelf life of a carton of milk. Gratitude fades. Outrage moves on to the next outrage. And the people who rode the wave into office immediately start doing the things that made voters wary of them in the first place.
\nPolitical scientists have a name for this. They call it thermostatic public opinion. When government runs hot in one direction, voters turn the dial the other way. They did it to Mr Trump on Tuesday. They have done it to Democrats plenty of times before. The thermostat is not partisan. It just has a very good memory for whoever touched it last.
\nThe White House responded to Tuesday by making Stephen Miller chief of staff, which is one way of turning the heat up. Democrats should send him a thank-you note. He may be the most generous fuel supplier they have left.
\nThere is also simple arithmetic. Midterm electorates are smaller, older and more motivated than presidential ones. In 2022 about 46% of eligible Americans voted. In 2024 about 64% did. The tens of millions who skip midterms and turn up for presidents were not part of Tuesday’s mood, and in 2028 they will decide.
\nMy other worry is that Democrats have a talent, honed over years, for wasting a victory. Hand them the keys, and here I am thinking chiefly of the Biden years, and they will find a way to drive into a ditch so spectacular that voters take the keys back and give them to Mr Trump.
\nJoe Biden took office in 2021 with a majority in both chambers and a country eager to be bored again. By that August his approval had slipped underwater during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, in which 13 American service members were killed. It never came back up.
\nWhat followed did not help. Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, the highest in four decades. Crossings at the southern border hit record levels. And then came the debate of June 2024, after which a sitting president was eased out of his own reelection campaign by his own party in the space of a few weeks. Voters noticed that too.
\nTo be fair, Mr Biden passed an infrastructure law, a semiconductor subsidy program and the biggest climate bill in American history. Voters did not reward any of it, because voters judge a government by the prices at the checkout and the feeling in the gut, not by the legislative calendar.
\nTo be precise, I mean the Biden years more than the Obama ones. Barack Obama left office with a Gallup approval rating of 59%, and Hillary Clinton lost anyway, for reasons of her own. But the lesson holds. If Democrats don’t learn from their past mistakes, the voters will teach it to them again, and the last lesson came with Mr Trump’s name on it.
\nThen there is the history that makes timing matter even more for Ms Ocasio-Cortez. Democrats have twice tried to put a woman in the Oval Office, and twice lost to the same man.
\nHillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 2.9 million votes and lost the Electoral College 304 to 227. Kamala Harris, handed the nomination in July 2024 with barely a hundred days to campaign, lost both, with 226 electoral votes to Mr Trump’s 312. He became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.
\nWhich brings up the perennial Democratic complaint. Every time a candidate wins the popular vote and loses the presidency, someone proposes scrapping the Electoral College. A Pew survey in 2024 found 63% of Americans would prefer a straight national vote. And after Tuesday some Democrats are talking about finishing the job by other means. The National Popular Vote compact, under which states pledge their electors to the national winner, now covers 18 states and Washington, D.C., worth 222 electoral votes. It needs 270 to take effect.
\nI oppose it. A national popularity contest would leave many states out of presidential elections altogether. Ours is a republic, and presidents are chosen by the states, sovereign states, not by a raw national headcount. Every state counts. That is hard to swallow when your side loses, but it is how the system is meant to work. It protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority, a danger James Madison described as “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
\nMy last column showed what that looks like up close. In Washington the Puget Sound counties outvote the rest of the state’s 39 counties every time. Call that democracy if you like. East of the Cascades it looks a great deal more like tyranny. A national popular vote would do to the country what Puget Sound does to Washington.
\nDefenders of the compact have a fair reply, and it deserves a hearing. The current system leaves most states out too. In 2024, by FairVote’s count, 94% of general-election campaign events were held in seven swing states, and 32 states got no visit at all.
\nThere is one part of the Electoral College I do find hard to defend. The electors themselves are people we have no say in, and in principle they can overrule our votes. If that can happen, what is the point of voting at all?
\nIt is not a hypothetical. In 2016 seven electors went rogue, the most in a century. Four of them were in Washington, Hillary Clinton electors who refused to vote for her, and the state fined each of them $1,000.
\nIn 2020 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the right of states to bind and punish such “faithless electors,” and 38 states and D.C. now do. No faithless elector has ever changed the result of a presidential election. Still, it seems a strange safeguard that relies on nobody using it.
\nBack to those two defeats. I don’t buy the idea that America won’t elect a woman. In 2019 Gallup found that 94% of Americans said they would vote for a qualified one. Both women also ran as heirs to a sitting Democratic administration and carried its baggage. Mrs Clinton inherited eight years of Obama-era fatigue. Ms Harris inherited Mr Biden’s prices, his border and his debate.
\nWhat I do believe is that a third attempt cannot afford to set off on half a tank. After two near misses, the next woman Democrats nominate will need every drop of momentum going. Tuesday was that momentum, and it was spent on the Senate.
\nMs Ocasio-Cortez knows the history. In September she said she thinks about a run “personally,” citing her age, her identity as a woman and as a Latina. She also said that if she ran and lost, “I would be done.”
\nThen she added a line that would make a fine motto for this column. “Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”
\nLife made things ready on Tuesday. The calendar did not.
\nHistory is on my side, mostly. In 1946 Republicans swept both chambers of Congress on the slogan “Had enough?” Two years later Harry Truman spent the campaign attacking what he called the “do-nothing Congress,” and won.
\nIn 1994 Newt Gingrich’s Republicans took the House for the first time in 40 years. They then shut down the government twice, and Bill Clinton cruised to reelection in 1996. In 2010 the Tea Party wave cost Democrats 63 House seats, and Barack Obama won again in 2012.
\nThe closest parallel to 2028 may be 1988. In 1986, Ronald Reagan’s second midterm, Democrats retook the Senate. Two years later Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, promised voters “a kinder, and gentler nation” and carried 40 states.
\nThe pattern is not perfect, and a fact-checker should say so. The wave party did go on to win the White House in 2008 and 2016, both open-seat races like 2028 will be. But in both years the wave was running against a party that had held the White House for eight years, and voters were simply ready for a change. Momentum rarely survives on its own. It survives when someone keeps refilling the tank.
\nThere is one silver lining. Barring a constitutional crisis, which in this decade I would not rule out entirely, the country is finally done with Mr Trump. The 22nd Amendment limits a president to two elected terms, and Mr Trump has now been elected twice. The 2028 race will be the first presidential election since 2012 without his name on the ballot.
\nHe has spent the year teasing otherwise. In July he told a crowd in Georgia, “I am here to announce my candidacy. I’m only kidding.” Two days later, at a press dinner, he declared his “intention to run for a fourth term.” But asked in August whether he was serious, he said, “I’d love to run, but the law is very strong.” For once, the law and the president appear to agree.
\nThere remains the distant prospect of a sequel. One of his children, or even his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could make a play for the job and turn the family business into a dynasty, à la the Kennedys or the Bushes. I don’t see it.
\nMr Trump has said his family “could be” the next political dynasty, and called Donald Trump Jr. “a very capable guy.” Donald Jr. polls at about 10% in early Republican surveys. He has denied any plans to run, mostly by praising his “buddy JD.” Eric Trump has hinted. Mr Kushner, who runs a private-equity firm and has dabbled in Middle East diplomacy, shows no sign of wanting to shake hands at an Iowa pancake breakfast.
\nNone of the Trump children has their father’s pull, and I doubt any of them ever will, which ought to worry Democrats more than it cheers them. Charisma is not hereditary, as the Kennedys and the Bushes eventually discovered. Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign is best remembered for the moment he asked a New Hampshire audience to “please clap.”
\nAnd the Trump brand was always one man’s act. A dynasty needs heirs who can sell tickets on their own.
\nHere is the catch nobody in the Democratic Party seems to have noticed. For a decade, Mr Trump has been the Democrats’ most reliable fuel. He filled their tank in 2018, again in 2020 and again on Tuesday, and he never sent a bill. In 2028 that supply runs dry. Whatever Democrats plan to run on, it will have to be something they make themselves.
\nMore likely, MAGA will find a candidate who swings the country back its way and keeps the White House in 2028. More likely still, if Republicans are clever enough to manage it, that candidate will sound nothing like a Trump.
\nThe early favorite is JD Vance, polling near 37% in the Republican averages, with Marco Rubio second at about 25%. Mr Vance carries the most risk from Tuesday, since he is tied most closely to an administration voters just rebuked. He has said there is “a chance” he will not run.
\nHistory is not kind to him either. Since Martin Van Buren in 1836, only one sitting vice president has been elected straight to the presidency, and that was Mr Bush in 1988.
\nHere is the scenario that keeps me up at night. A centrist Republican with a leftist flavor, a governor or senator who keeps the party’s base but borrows the left’s best tunes. Someone who backs a ban on congressional stock trading, talks about protecting workers from artificial intelligence, criticizes billionaires and promises to calm things down. Several Republicans are already auditioning for parts of that role. Josh Hawley has already done the first two.
\nNow add two years of Democratic nonsense. Expect plenty of fighting, plenty of anti-Trump and precious little pro anything. The Democrats are already arguing over Mr Schumer. Ms Ocasio-Cortez herself has not ruled out challenging him for his Senate seat.
\nIf the next two years sound like a party running against Mr Trump without running for much of anything, that Republican will not need to win the argument. He will only need to look like a rest. Add a fresh reminder of why voters stopped voting for Democrats in the first place, and Republicans just might hold the White House.
\nThat is how Mr Bush won in 1988, as a continuation that promised to feel different. It could work again.
\nIf you want to know what Democrats plan to put in the tank for the next two years, they have already told us. It is the same fuel as before. Last week the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia, summed up the new majority’s approach in two words. “LAWYER UP.”
\nThe investigations list is long. The Epstein files, the Trump family’s business deals, cryptocurrency, the East Wing, immigration enforcement, the Iran war, Elon Musk.
\nAsked about impeachment in September, Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become Speaker in January, said, “We haven’t ruled anything out.” The reporting on those plans describes no legislative agenda for gas, groceries or health insurance.
\nSome of that oversight is legitimate, and some of it overlaps with my sister’s list. Congressional stock trading and dark money are on it. But a voter who hears two years of subpoenas will conclude, reasonably, that the party’s main product is being against Mr Trump.
\nDemocrats have an obvious excuse. Mr Trump still holds the veto pen, so few big bills will become law before 2029. That is precisely why they should pass them anyway. In 1994 Newt Gingrich turned a list of bills into a campaign.
\nA House that passes a plan for prices and premiums, and dares the president to veto it, has written its 2028 platform in advance. A House that only holds hearings has written the Republicans’.
\nWhich brings me to the point I most want Democrats to hear, and Republicans too. “I’m not Trump, so vote for me” is a slogan, not a platform, and it has nearly expired. Being against something is not the same as being for something.
\nWe know you’re against Mr Trump. So are we. Telling us again is like a mechanic explaining that he, too, dislikes your broken transmission. Lovely. Can he fix it?
\nWe also know some things you have not mentioned, because we live with them. Life has gotten harder for a great many of us. Gas averaged $3.94 a gallon on Wednesday, according to AAA, 87 cents above a year ago. It has slipped back under $4, but only after the first November on record above it. Grocery prices are rising more slowly now, under 2% a year, but from a base that still makes the weekly shop feel like a hostage negotiation.
\nHealth care is worse. A family plan through an employer now costs $28,303 a year, KFF found, and the worker’s share rose 9% this year alone. People who buy their own coverage saw average premiums jump about 26% after enhanced federal subsidies expired, and the average deductible rose 37%.
\nAnd the list runs on from there. Mr Trump does shape our daily lives, as the receipts above make plain. But none of us, standing at the pump watching the numbers spin, wants a speech about the president. We want to know what you will do about the pump.
\nRemember when presidential candidates had plans? Instead of simply loathing their opponents, they told us what they would do for us, on health care, on national security, on the economy. They laid it out, in print, where it could be argued with.
\nIn 1932 Franklin Roosevelt pledged “a new deal for the American people,” and then spent a campaign explaining what it meant. In 1952 Dwight Eisenhower, facing a stalemated war, made his national-security promise in five words, “I shall go to Korea,” and voters knew exactly where he stood.
\nIn 1992 Bill Clinton’s war room in Little Rock hung a sign reading “The economy, stupid,” with “Don’t forget health care” underneath, and the campaign published a book-length plan called Putting People First.
\nRoss Perot bought half-hour slots on network television to walk viewers through charts on the deficit, and 19% of them voted for him, perhaps because of the charts.
\nNow compare 2016. In the final ten days of that race, the Wesleyan Media Project found, roughly nine in ten of Hillary Clinton’s television ads were about character, mostly Mr Trump’s. Only about one in ten were about policy. Mr Trump, for all his faults, told voters what he was for. Build the wall. Bring back the factories. You could disagree with every word and still repeat them at dinner.
\nRepublicans have their own version of the disease. A party that has spent years running against Joe Biden, against “woke” and against whatever cable news flagged that morning is no fountain of white papers either.
\nBoth parties need to rediscover the habit.
\nSo here is my request for 2028. Bring back substantive plans and substantive debate, the kind where a candidate has to defend a number without changing the subject. Deal with the things we live with every day. Tell us how you will bring down the price of gas, groceries and a visit to the doctor, and how you will pay for it. Don’t tell me what you’re against. Tell me what you’re for.
\nBeing against something is not the same as being for something. Voters learned that at the pump. It would be nice if the candidates learned it the easy way.
\nThere is a fair argument that I have this backward, and it deserves a hearing.
\nFirst, Tuesday was not a vote for Ms Ocasio-Cortez. As the last column conceded, many of the winners were moderates, and a fair share of the vote was simply a verdict on Mr Trump. Momentum against one man does not automatically transfer to another person.
\nSecond, two years may help her. She is 37, and would be 39 on Inauguration Day 2029, younger than any president in history. Two more years of building a national campaign, raising money and answering hard questions could make her a stronger candidate rather than a weaker one.
\nThird, the party’s own early polling suggests the wave has not chosen her yet. The leading name in the Democratic averages is still Kamala Harris, at about 24%, with Ms Ocasio-Cortez fourth at around 12%. The market’s favorite this week is Jon Ossoff, who just won Georgia by 18 points and says he has “zero interest” in running.
\nA wave that had settled on her would look different. And in the summer, before the wave, Emerson’s polling had Mr Vance ahead of her in a head-to-head, 46% to 44%.
\nAnd open-seat elections, as noted, have favored the wave party twice in the past 20 years.
\nThose are fair points. I simply think they underrate the Democrats’ talent for squandering a gift.
\nMy view has not changed. I still think democratic socialism, in measured amounts, is the best antidote to a government sold out to corporations and billionaires. I still think Ms Ocasio-Cortez, with Bernie Sanders as role model and mentor, is the right person to deliver it.
\nBut the timing worries me. Democrats have two years to prove they learned something from 2016 and 2024. That means delivering what my sister asked for in her letter, the stock-trading ban, the disclosure rules and the campaign finance reform, rather than spending two years in a family argument about who sits at the head of the table.
\nIt also means walking into 2028 with a plan we can read at the kitchen table. What happens to our gas, our groceries and our health insurance, in numbers, with the bill attached.
\n“Not Trump” was enough for a midterm. It will not be enough for a presidency, because Mr Trump will not be on the ballot. Being against something is not the same as being for something, and in 2028 the thing you are against will be gone. You cannot fill a tank with “not Trump” when there is no Trump.
\nIf they waste those two years, the momentum of Tuesday will have leaked away by 2028, and the Republicans will have found someone pleasant to run.
\nThere is one way to keep some of the momentum. Ms Ocasio-Cortez cannot be on a ballot that has already been counted, but she can start the engine. Mr Trump announced his 2024 campaign on November 15, 2022, a week after a disappointing midterm, and the head start served him well. She has said she will decide after the midterms. Well, the midterms are over.
\nOn Tuesday the voters filled the Democrats’ tank for free. In 2028 they will want to know what they bought.
\n", "date_published": "2026-11-11T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-11T00:00:00-07:00", "image": "https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/hold-the-line-patriots-16x9.jpg", "tags": [ "2028 election", "momentum", "Electoral College", "National Popular Vote compact", "faithless electors", "congressional oversight", "Robert Garcia", "Hakeem Jeffries", "policy plans", "gas prices", "grocery prices", "health care costs", "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez", "Hillary Clinton", "Kamala Harris", "Joe Biden", "JD Vance", "Marco Rubio", "Donald Trump Jr.", "22nd Amendment", "midterm waves", "1988", "George H.W. Bush" ] }, { "id": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/deliver-the-accountability/", "url": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/deliver-the-accountability/", "title": "We Delivered the Votes. Now Deliver the Accountability.", "summary": "A letter to Senate Democrats asking them to vote against Chuck Schumer as their leader in early December. Put your name on it, send it to your senators and pass it on. Contact details for every senator in the caucus are here.", "content_html": "Call to Action
A letter to Senate Democrats asking them to vote against Chuck Schumer as their leader in early December. Put your name on it, send it to your senators and pass it on. Contact details for every senator in the caucus are here.
Take the letter and send it to your senators
", "date_published": "2026-11-10T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-10T00:00:00-07:00", "tags": [ "Senate Democratic leader vote", "Chuck Schumer", "letter to Senate Democrats", "contact your senators", "Senate Democratic caucus", "2026 midterms" ] }, { "id": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/take-two-and-call-me-in-2028/", "url": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/take-two-and-call-me-in-2028/", "title": "Take Two and Call Me in 2028", "summary": "Democrats won both chambers in a rout, and this column's skepticism went out with the tide. Within days the winners were fighting over Chuck Schumer, and my sister, Sarah Wells of Tacoma, Washington, wrote to her senators demanding reform first.", "content_html": "![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/seattle-ferry-2016-1100.jpg\")
Eight days ago, in this space, I compared the Democrats’ promised blue wave to a British summer and observed, with some satisfaction, that 49 Senate seats is what most people call losing. Democrats then went out and won 54 of them, against 44 for Republicans, with Alaska and Mississippi still counting and Democrats narrowly ahead in both. They flipped seven seats, Texas among them, where James Talarico became the first Democrat the state has sent to the Senate since 1988. In the House they had 253 seats to the Republicans’ 162, with 20 races still uncalled, their largest majority since 2008.
\n(Those counts were current as of Friday afternoon, November 6, and are still moving as the last ballots are tallied.)
\nSusan Collins, who had outlasted most of Maine’s lighthouses and several of its fisheries, lost.
\nThis column never predicted the result, but it sneered at the people who did, which in a fair world counts for about the same. The pollsters were right and my eyebrow was wrong. I would like the record to show that I said so before anyone else could, which is the closest a columnist gets to an apology.
\nLinda, our weary voter from last time, turned out too. Linda was a composite. The turnout was not. She was evidently less tired than I gave her credit for, or perhaps only tired of something in particular. Exit polls put President Trump’s approval at 38%, on course for the lowest of any president at a midterm. Whatever she was rebuking, she used both hands.
\nThe one forecast I made with confidence was about what would happen next. Whoever won, I wrote, both parties would be fully occupied with each other, and Linda’s problems would be left on the doorstep. Four days in, that one is holding up nicely. The only surprise is that the winners started with themselves.
\nMy sister, Sarah Wells, lives in Tacoma, Washington. She is a lifelong Democrat, which in Tacoma is about as remarkable as owning a raincoat. Within days of the result she wrote to her two senators, Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, and then forwarded the letter to me, perhaps suspecting where it might end up.
\nIt is not a gentle letter. Mr Schumer, she writes, “has not been our ally, much less our champion.” The only thing he has shown a talent for leading, in her telling, is the Democrats’ surrender. She wants her senators to vote against him, publicly, and to explain themselves to the people who elected them.
\nShe has company. Mr Schumer, who has led Senate Democrats since 2017, told reporters the day after the election that he would be reelected majority leader. At least five incoming Democratic senators have said they will oppose him, and a couple more have declined to commit. The vote is expected in early December by secret ballot, which is the traditional way a party says one thing in public and does another in private, and which explains why so many senators are suddenly very relaxed about their courage.
\nFive rebels will not topple him, and nobody has stepped forward to run against him. The freshmen have enough votes to grumble and not nearly enough to win.
\nTo be fair to Mr Schumer, he says his priorities will be lowering costs and rooting out corruption. Sarah’s letter asks for exactly that, with the details attached. She wants a ban on congressional stock trading, tougher financial disclosure and penalties with teeth. The difference between them is that she wants the promises in writing before the vote, and he would prefer to be trusted. She has met politicians before. So, unfortunately, have I.
\nHer third demand is the one I keep coming back to, the way a tongue keeps finding a chipped tooth. She asks for an aggressive campaign finance agenda to curb billionaires, corporate PACs and dark money. On that we agree entirely. Where I go a step further is in what I think it will take to get there.
\n![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/phoenix-chansley-2020-1100.jpg\")
Start with the action. Elon Musk put roughly $474 million into these midterms, by a New York Times tally, making him the largest disclosed donor in modern American politics. More than $200 million of it went to Texas alone, in a failed bid to elect Ken Paxton. Public Citizen counted 515 donors who each gave at least $1 million to super PACs this cycle. Together they supplied more than 70% of the money those groups raised from individuals, companies and nonprofits.
\nIn a country of 340 million people, a crowd that would fit comfortably in a high school gym writes most of the checks.
\nThis is where a decade of courtship was always heading, although courtship is too polite a word. President Trump has never hidden his fondness for the very rich, and what began as flirtation has ended in a sale, with the rest of us as the merchandise. Mr Musk ran the president’s cost-cutting crusade from inside the government, fell out with him in a very public tiff in 2025, and then came back bearing a checkbook, which is how most billionaire romances end.
\nThe romance has paid well. The 2025 tax law was the president’s signature achievement, and the Congressional Budget Office found that it left the poorest households worse off on net, largely through cuts to Medicaid and food aid, while most of the benefit flowed toward the top. An early analysis by Yale’s Budget Lab, counting the president’s tariffs too, put the cost to the poorest tenth of households at more than 6% of their income a year, while the richest tenth came out ahead. Linda’s groceries, it turns out, were helping to pay for somebody else’s yacht.
\nBefore anyone on my side of this argument gets smug, the rich are not a one-party problem. The Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with Chuck Schumer, took $244 million this cycle from just 44 donors, a crowd that would fit comfortably in a stretch limousine. Counting candidates and outside groups together, Democrats appear to have outspent Republicans this year, by roughly $5.5 billion to $5.1 billion. And one of the party’s eager 2028 hopefuls, JB Pritzker, is himself a billionaire, which at least spares him the indignity of asking one. My sister put it in five words. “Different parties, same broken system.”
\nNewton’s third law holds that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I have a political version, and I hold it with some conviction. For every billionaire who buys a seat at the table, there will be an equal and opposite socialist who wants to tax the table. Push hard enough on one end of the country and the other end pushes back. Newton was describing physics. I am describing a prescription.
\nThe reaction already wears a Bernie Sanders sweatshirt. Mr Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent much of the last two years on their Fighting Oligarchy tour, drawing crowds from Denver to Idaho that the party’s consultants had assumed existed only in fundraising emails. Ms Ocasio-Cortez has said she is seriously considering a run for president. Democratic Socialists of America chapters in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago have already passed resolutions urging her to.
\nThe group claims more than 125,000 members, enough to fill a very long meeting about meeting procedures, and at least seven of them will sit in the new Congress, the most in its history. Los Angeles has just elected a democratic socialist mayor, and Seattle has had one since January.
\nBy one tally, Mr Musk’s own super PAC featured Ms Ocasio-Cortez in nearly all of its online appeals. Few people have done more to raise her profile than the man who spent nearly half a billion dollars trying to beat her party. Newton would have enjoyed that.
\nSo here is my confession, made in a column that began with one. I think this reaction is the best antidote we have to an administration that has auctioned off the country, and come 2028 I expect to support it.
\nMy own view, and I should stress it is mine, is that the dose should come from Ms Ocasio-Cortez, with Mr Sanders, now 85, in the role he seems born for, role model and mentor rather than candidate. Not everyone who wants the medicine agrees on the brand. Some in the DSA have bristled at the air of inevitability around her, and the group has yet to settle on anyone.
\nI am not a socialist, and I do not plan to become one. I support socialism the way a man with a migraine supports ibuprofen. You take it when the pain arrives, you follow the label, and you do not take it with breakfast every day for the rest of your life just because it worked once. Plenty of people in the movement take it daily and swear by it. I respect them. I have also watched what happens to a city that doubles the dose.
\nSo what is actually in the bottle? For me the measured dose looks something like this. Tax the very largest fortunes hard enough that no single one can buy a Senate race. Let Medicare bargain down the price of far more prescription drugs than it does today. Offer a public option for health insurance alongside the private kind. Build housing the market will not, at a scale that dents the rent. Enforce antitrust law against companies big enough to write their own rules.
\nAnd raise the federal minimum wage, which has sat at $7.25 since 2009, long enough to qualify for a pension.
\nThe test for every pill is Linda’s kitchen table. The last column found her worrying about groceries, deductibles and a car repair she had been putting off since spring, and health costs topped Americans’ domestic worries this year. A pill that does nothing for her bills is just a slogan with a childproof cap.
\nThe overdose is easier to describe, because I have seen it. It looks like treating the police as the enemy, the drug market as a lifestyle choice and every employer as a suspect. It looks like Seattle.
\nEvery medicine comes with a leaflet of side effects. Seattle is mine. It is the right place to read the leaflet, because Seattle is where Newton’s law has been running in miniature for a decade. The Seattle area is home to two of the largest fortunes on earth, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s, and Seattle is the city that elected Kshama Sawant.
\nMs Sawant joined the city council in 2014, an economics teacher and avowed socialist, and spent ten years as its only one. She was the reaction made flesh. She pushed the city to a $15 minimum wage. She championed a head tax on big employers, nicknamed the Amazon tax, which the council passed unanimously in 2018 and repealed within a month after Amazon bankrolled a referendum against it. She came back in 2020 and helped win the JumpStart payroll tax, which now raises more than $200 million a year.
\nWhen Amazon poured $1.5 million into the 2019 council races and backed her opponent, she won anyway. Action, reaction.
\nSeattle never elected many socialists. It did not need to. A city picks up the flavor the way a stew picks up garlic, and the ideas Ms Sawant shouted through a megaphone became the furniture of local politics. The same goes for the state. Most of Washington’s 39 counties vote Republican, but the Puget Sound counties outvote the rest with room to spare, and Olympia governs to suit them. What follows is what happens when the reaction runs with nobody minding the dose.
\nThe most famous overdose came in June 2020. On June 8, after days of clashes with protesters, the police walked out of their East Precinct on Capitol Hill. Protesters barricaded several blocks and named them the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP. Mayor Jenny Durkan told CNN the city could have “the summer of love.” She later said it was a joke.
\nFor the people who lived and worked there, the city had in effect handed over the neighborhood and wished them luck. When someone broke into Car Tender, a family auto shop on the edge of the zone, and started a fire, the owner and his son called 911 by their count 19 times. Nobody came.
\nThen the shooting started. Horace Lorenzo Anderson, 19, was killed near the barricades on June 20, and protesters said the medics they called for never arrived. Nine days later Antonio Mays Jr., 16, was shot seven times in a Jeep while police cars waited about a block away. Volunteers drove him off in search of help, and officers did not reach the Jeep for roughly four hours. His killing remains unsolved.
\nPolice retook the precinct on July 1, and within weeks a majority of the council had pledged to cut the police budget in half. The city later paid $3.65 million to settle a lawsuit from neighborhood businesses and residents, after a judge found it had failed to preserve officials’ text messages from those weeks.
\nThe quieter doses did more lasting harm. After the state Supreme Court struck down felony drug possession in 2021, the legislature’s replacement left possession largely unenforced for two years, and in 2023 Seattle’s council voted 5-4 against letting its own city attorney prosecute public drug use before reversing itself that September.
\nThe results are on display at Third and Pike and Third and Pine, a couple of blocks from Pike Place Market, where the city’s best-known open-air drug market greets the tourists.
\nAlso in 2021, the legislature barred most police chases, so a car thief who simply kept driving usually got to keep the car, until a Republican-backed initiative restored pursuits in 2024.
\nSeattle lost more than 700 officers in five years. It has since raised starting pay to nearly $118,000, the third highest among America’s big cities, and still has only 863 patrol officers ready to deploy. Money fixed the paycheck. It has not fixed the reputation of a city that spent 2020 promising to halve its police budget.
\nNone of this was a billionaire’s doing. That is rather the point. A reaction aimed at concentrated wealth ended up landing on a mechanic, a teenager in a Jeep and a tourist stepping around foil on Third Avenue.
\n![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/seattle-homeless-2017-1100.jpg\")
Homelessness is where the reaction should have shone, and where it most needed my sister’s kind of accountability. King County’s latest count found 18,365 people homeless on a given night, up 9% since 2024 after a 26% jump in the two years before.
\nIn 2023 the regional homelessness authority priced a five-year plan to end it at $11.8 billion, which works out to well over $100,000 per person per year. That lends some weight to a familiar Seattle quip that the region could simply hand every homeless person the money. The plan was never funded, which may be the only reason the quip has not been tested.
\nWhat has been tested is the bookkeeping. In October an outside audit found a $16.7 million hole in the authority’s accounts that it cannot recover, and one Seattle councilmember called for dissolving the agency outright. Meanwhile the city’s contract for a new shelter village in Interbay swelled from $1.3 million to almost $4 million, and in September Pallet, the Everett company that built it, shut down with a day’s notice, leaving operators to handle repairs from an online handbook, which is one way to teach self-reliance.
\nAsk where the money went and Seattle will tell you that you lack compassion. Generosity with nobody counting the pills curdles into something that looks a lot like the greed it set out to cure, only with nicer slogans. The billionaires would recognize it at once.
\nKatie Wilson took up the baton. A democratic socialist who helped build the campaign for the JumpStart tax, she narrowly unseated Mayor Bruce Harrell last year on a campaign about affordability, best remembered for an ad about a $7 slice of pizza. Ten months in, nobody has reported the pizza getting any cheaper.
\nHer aim at the rich has been enthusiastic and her accuracy less so. When Washington passed its new tax on high earners, she greeted news of millionaires leaving with a cheerful wave goodbye.
\nShe called for a boycott of Starbucks, Seattle’s most famous export apart from grunge and rain, which is a bit like the mayor of Detroit boycotting cars, then reversed herself and conceded it had done more harm than good, just as the company announced a major expansion in Nashville.
\nMeanwhile the millionaires were not the only ones waving. Downtown office vacancy reached 36.5% in the first quarter, Cushman & Wakefield ranked the Seattle market the emptiest of any major American city, and business groups blame the payroll tax at least in part.
\nAnd when a shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival killed three people in July, the only official word for roughly five hours was a single post from the mayor’s account.
\nFairness demands a few footnotes in prose. Remote work and tech layoffs emptied office towers everywhere, and downtown Seattle finally gained occupied space in the third quarter. Homelessness has risen by about a quarter across the whole state since 2022, not just in Seattle. And the harshest review of Ms Wilson’s first hundred days came from the left, in a University of Washington student paper column complaining that she had delivered on none of her signature promises. When one side calls you too socialist and the other says you are not socialist enough, you have at least achieved bipartisanship.
\nThe lesson is not that the medicine is poison. Seattle took a strong dose for the right reasons, against fortunes that genuinely do too much to bend its politics, and then forgot that a dose is supposed to be measured.
\nNone of that has talked me out of the medicine. Seattle’s $15 minimum wage was once denounced as a job killer and is now so ordinary that other cities copied it. The JumpStart tax pays for housing. Researchers who have studied homelessness city by city find that it tracks housing costs more than addiction or poverty, and Seattle’s tech boom sent housing costs soaring whoever sat on the council. Voters keep choosing the left there, and not by accident.
\nThe bigger point is Tuesday. Democrats ran on affordability and against oligarchy, the very message the left had been pushing for years, and won a Senate seat in Texas.
\nHere, though, I should heed my own warning from last week, that midterm winners routinely mistake a rebuke of the other side for a mandate of their own. Many of Tuesday’s winners were no socialists. James Talarico is a former seminarian and state legislator, and Roy Cooper, who flipped North Carolina, is a two-term former governor of the cautious variety.
\nWith the president at 38%, a fair share of Tuesday was simply a verdict on him. The reaction pushed. It did not push alone.
\nThe argument against me comes from both directions, which is usually a sign of a moderate or a fool. From the right, the case is that there is no safe dose. Business groups in Seattle say the payroll tax helped empty the towers, and one suspects Starbucks did not pick Nashville for the barbecue. Tuesday, they would add, proves the point. Mr Musk’s nearly half a billion bought him almost nothing. Mr Paxton lost, Ms Collins lost, and the man who could afford anything could not afford Texas. Voters cured themselves, and nobody had to nationalize a coffee chain.
\nFrom the left, the complaint is that you cannot take socialism as needed. The democratic socialists now organizing for 2028 want a candidate committed to a socialist economy, not a pain reliever. And some Democratic strategists think the whole thing is a fantasy. One told The Hill that anyone expecting a DSA or progressive candidate to win in 2028 might also be interested in buying a bridge.
\nThose are fair points, and some of them land. A few land rather hard.
\nI grant most of it and keep the prescription. Here is the thing about Newton’s third law that rarely makes the bumper sticker. The two forces act on different bodies, so they never cancel each other out. That is precisely why the reaction matters. Without an opposite push, the billionaire’s push simply moves the government wherever he likes, as the past two years have shown. The socialist pushing back is the only thing keeping the furniture in place.
\nThe danger is the overdose. Push too hard from the other end and the person in the middle gets shoved from both sides, and that person is Linda. A billionaire who tries to buy a Senate seat and a mayor who waves the taxpayers goodbye are both treating the public as something to be managed rather than served. The trick is to take enough of the medicine to break the fever without ending up in Seattle’s waiting room.
\nIt can be done. Milwaukee elected socialist mayors for most of the half century after 1910, and they were remembered less for revolution than for sewers, clean water, public parks and famously honest books. Their critics called them sewer socialists. They took it as a compliment. That is what a measured dose looks like.
\nWhich is why Sarah’s letter matters more than any candidate. Ban members of Congress from trading stocks. Make them disclose what they own. Drag dark money into the light and put real limits on how much any one person can spend buying an election. That is preventive care. Remove the lever the billionaires pull, and you need a good deal less medicine for the headache.
\nSome of it is closer than you might think, and some of it much further. In July the House passed a ban on members buying new stocks, 232-198, though Republicans attached a voter ID requirement that Democrats called a poison pill, and it now sits in the Senate.
\nReal limits on election spending are harder. Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, independent spending on elections has been treated as protected speech, so serious limits would take either a different court or a constitutional amendment. That is preventive care measured in decades.
\nNone of it requires a revolution, only something far rarer, a Congress willing to vote against its own interests.
\nAnd the headache will be back. One bad night at the casino does not mean the house has stopped winning. It means the house has learned which tables to avoid. Most of those 515 donors will return in 2028, with long memories and deeper pockets.
\nDemocrats now hold the House, the Senate and a rare opening. They have two years to do the preventive work before the next attack arrives. If they spend it waving Mr Schumer through in December and doing little after that, the billionaires will be back by 2028 and I will be back at the medicine cabinet, reading the label more carefully this time.
\nMy sister ended her letter with a sentence better than anything in this column, so I will leave it to her.
\n“We delivered the votes. Now we expect you to deliver the accountability.”
\nNewton never had to stand for reelection. Her senators do, and they have until December.
\nSarah Wells of Tacoma, Washington, sent the following letter to Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray in the days after the November 3 election. It appears here as she wrote it.
\nAfter Tuesday’s historic blue-wave election, I am writing as a lifelong Democrat and one of many Americans demanding meaningful change in Democratic leadership. Across the country, grassroots activists and ordinary voters have been expressing their frustration with corruption, corporate influence, political complacency, and an establishment that seems more interested in protecting its own power than representing the people.
\nThis election was about defeating Republican extremism and standing in opposition to fascism. But Democratic leaders should not mistake that victory for an endorsement of the political establishment or a mandate to continue business as usual.
\nYet Chuck Schumer appears eager to claim this historic landslide as a victory for his leadership. It is not his victory. It belongs to the grassroots movement that organized, mobilized, and stood up against fascism. This is our victory. The people’s victory.
\nSchumer has not been our ally, much less our champion. He seems to believe that his position within the party establishment entitles him to continued leadership. It does not. Leadership must be earned through accountability, courage, and a willingness to fight for the people who put Democrats in office.
\nFor far too long, politicians from both parties have prioritized the interests of foreign governments, billionaires, corporations, and the Epstein class over those of ordinary Americans. These are public servants who have forgotten whom they are supposed to serve.
\nChuck Schumer represents the very problems that have eroded public trust in establishment politics. Republicans and corporate establishment Democrats may claim to stand on opposite sides of the political divide, but too often they serve the same wealthy donors, corporate interests, and entrenched power structures. They perpetuate a system in which political influence is bought and sold, the powerful are shielded from accountability, and ordinary Americans are left fighting for scraps. Different parties, same broken system, and the same people paying the price.
\nSchumer does not deserve to be crowned the next leader of Senate Democrats. The only thing he has consistently demonstrated an ability to lead is the Democrats’ surrender. He does not represent the grassroots movement that helped deliver Tuesday’s historic victory, and he has no right to treat that victory as an endorsement of his leadership.
\nThe selection of the next Senate Democratic leader must be transparent and accountable to the voters who made this victory possible. While Senate Democrats formally elect their own leader, their constituents deserve to know whom they intend to support, why they support that person, and what commitments they will demand in return.
\nWe did not deliver a historic blue wave just to hand power back to the same establishment that has repeatedly failed us. We voted for change, and we expect to see it.
\nSenator, I am asking you to make the following commitments publicly and unequivocally:
\nThe American people did not deliver this historic victory to reward an entrenched political establishment. We voted for a fundamental change in whose interests our government serves, and we expect Democratic leadership to reflect that demand.
\nI am asking you to publicly state whether you will oppose Chuck Schumer, identify the specific anti-corruption reforms you will require of any candidate seeking your leadership vote, and commit to withholding your support from anyone unwilling to pursue those reforms. I expect these commitments to be made publicly before the Senate Democratic leadership election, not after the decision has already been made.
\nYour constituents deserve more than vague assurances, carefully worded statements, or promises of change that disappear once the election is over. We deserve a direct answer, a public commitment, and leadership willing to confront corruption even when doing so threatens the interests of its own party.
\nWe delivered the votes. Now we expect you to deliver the accountability.
\nSarah Wells
Tacoma, Washington
![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/n722bd-2024-1100.jpg\")
I have not watched an airplane video in five days, and I have never been more aware of airplanes.
\nThat is not fear. I will board the next flight without fuss. It is something stranger. A crash involving nine people I never met, in a state I do not live in, has quietly rearranged my YouTube habits. So let us start where they did, at 35,000 feet over Florida, on a Sunday, on the way to a vacation.
\nAbout ten minutes before the end, her stepfather has said, the first officer sent her boyfriend a text. He was also a pilot.
\nI’ve got turbulence, I’ve got ice.
It reads like weather chatter between professionals, which is what it was.
\nShe was Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras, and she was 20. She had wanted to fly since she was a girl and, by her family’s account, earned her license while still in high school. At an age when most of us were struggling to park a hatchback, she was in the right seat of a jet. In a clip shared after her death, she said she liked being different from everyone, and thought it was cool. It was.
\nNext to her sat the captain, Jeff Gregory, 55, an experienced pilot from Pennsylvania. The man in the left seat is usually the last name the public learns and the first one investigators study. He deserves better than to become a line in a probable-cause report.
\nAt about 12:47pm Eastern the crew was on the radio to controllers in Miami. The recordings, since played on every network, are calm to the point of boredom. Outside it was −53°F.
\nWe’re managing the ice, but it is moderate turbulence.
The controller said he was working them into his airspace.
\nBehind them, presumably, the cabin was doing what cabins do. Adam Robinson, 45, was an Austin entrepreneur, founder and chief executive of Retention.com and RB2b, two marketing-technology firms. His wife, Helen Sharp, 40, appears in the coverage chiefly as “his wife,” the usual injustice of headlines about a tech boss and his family. She was a good deal more than that. She had started her own communications firm, Influential PR, and a pottery studio under her own name, and in September she announced that the family was making Aspen, Colorado, its permanent home as she turned to ceramics. The families’ own statement is fairer than the headlines. It says simply that they were deeply loved and will be missed endlessly.
\nTheir children were Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2. A relative, Anthony Robinson, wrote on Facebook that they were “the light of their lives.” At those ages a biography is mostly favorite snacks and bedtime negotiations. That is rather the point.
\nLooking after them was Anita Maria Cetina, their nanny. Nannies rarely make the news. This one made the family tribute, which is the better honor. She “showed us a legacy of unconditional love and devotion,” the families said.
\nAnd along for the trip were Charmi Fehr and Rachael Reed, a couple and friends of the family, who co-owned a hotel in Honduras. Their families called them “full of joy and adventure,” people who “loved their people fiercely, fully and without hesitation.” Somewhere ahead, the Bahamas were waiting.
\nThen came rain, and a request to climb. Then the call came.
\nWe’re descending 8,000. Mayday, mayday. We’re descending 10,000 feet per minute.
This is the moment the story stops being weather and starts being news, and it is worth asking why it grips us so. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, has spent decades showing that people feel far more for one named victim with a face than for statistics about thousands. In one 2007 study with Deborah Small and George Loewenstein, adding numbers to a single child’s story actually reduced sympathy. Slovic calls the flip side “psychic numbing.” The more who die, the less we feel per death.
\nNine is, if this is not too grim a word, a sweet spot. It is small enough to know each by name and large enough to be a catastrophe. Two of them were small children. One had barely left her teens. And every one of them was going on vacation, which most of us have done more times than we can count. That familiarity does the rest. We feel most for the people whose places we can imagine taking. Few of us can picture ourselves in a war zone. Nearly all of us have boarded a flight with a carry-on and a fractious toddler.
\nDeclare an emergency, 722 Bravo Delta. We are in an overspeed condition, descending 20,000 feet per minute.
Then silence.
\nCNN reckons about 90 seconds passed between that dull report of ice and the silence, and that the jet fell more than 27,000 feet in roughly a minute. A federal investigator said on Monday that the jet likely began breaking apart before it hit the ground. The cause is for the National Transportation Safety Board to establish, and it will take its time.
\nWhat the recording does establish is character. Mikaela Schluth, a friend of Ms. Filgueiras since middle school, told CBS she was proud of how her friend “was able to stay calm and give information, up until the last minute.” Listen and that is what you hear. A 20-year-old reads out, clearly, the numbers of her own death so that someone on the ground would know. Few of us will ever be that composed about anything.
\nThere is a mercy buried in those figures too, and it is permissible to say so. Ninety seconds is not long enough for a long ordeal. And the end, at that speed, came faster than any nerve could carry the news.
\nMost crash coverage follows a template. There is a tail fin poking out of a field, a scorched length of fuselage, the reassuring shape of a machine that failed. The template comforts because it implies a story. Here is the plane, something went wrong, and experts will explain.
\nThis one broke the template. The pictures show a crater beside a busy road, filling with water, ringed by debris small enough to pass for litter. There is no wing. There is no tail. The aircraft and the nine people in it seem simply to have stopped existing. The impact broke water mains and flooded the area. The county opened its emergency operations center, and some 600 neighbors were forced from their homes.
\nThen there is the dashcam. At around 12:50pm, on South Military Trail between Cresthaven Boulevard and 10th Avenue North, a passing motorist’s camera caught a few grainy frames of the jet’s final instant. It has aired widely since. It is barely a flip-book. Yet the mind, which abhors a gap, animates it anyway, and runs it again at three in the morning. We are gripped less by what the pictures show than by what they refuse to. A wreck can be understood. A hole cannot.
\nWhich explains the swiping. A cockpit thumbnail, a landing compilation, a cheerful video about a vintage Cessna. Thumb, swipe, gone. Call it sensible dosing. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that people who watched six or more hours a day of coverage reported more acute stress than some who had been at the finish line. Grief, it turns out, can be streamed. Mine has settled into a background hum. It is quieter than the mourning we keep for people we know, more like a stomach that has had enough of something and is politely declining seconds.
\nHere is the thought that feels as if it ought to come with an apology. There is comfort in the fact that they went together.
\nA mother, a father and two very small children spent their last minute in the same small cabin. The children were not left behind to grow up in the shadow of a headline. The parents did not survive to bury them. Nobody had to make the phone call, or take it. On paper it is monstrous, an entire family erased, not a chapter closed but the whole book. And yet. Families are supposed to face the hard things together, and in the hardest possible thing, these four did.
\nThat instinct is very old. In 2005 archaeologists digging at Eulau, in eastern Germany, opened a grave 4,600 years old. Inside lay a man, a woman and two boys, aged about eight and five, placed facing one another. DNA tests, published in 2008, showed they were mother, father and sons, the oldest genetic evidence of a nuclear family yet found. Their skeletons bore the marks of a violent raid. They had died together, and someone who loved them took the trouble to bury them that way, turned toward each other, for good.
\n“Their unity in death,” the researchers wrote, “suggests unity in life.” Forty-six centuries on, nobody knows those people’s names. We know only that they were kept together, and that whoever buried them thought that mattered. It is hard to think of a better rebuttal to the idea that finding comfort in it is a modern sentimentality to be ashamed of.
\nModern medicine has reached much the same conclusion. When Karen Steinhauser and colleagues asked patients, families and doctors what makes a good death, in a large study in 2000, freedom from pain ranked near the top, and so did having family present. The nine aboard that Learjet were granted no choice and precious little warning. But they seem to have met both standards by accident. Short, and not alone.
\nThe guilt, I suspect, comes from confusing comfort with approval. Finding one sliver of grace in a catastrophe is not being glad of it. It is how people have always managed to look at the worst things. You find the one corner of the picture that is not entirely dark, and you hold onto it. Whatever Emma and Charlie understood in that minute, their mother and father were there.
\nThe counterargument deserves a fair hearing, and it is not stupid. Roughly 40,000 Americans die on the roads each year, by federal count, most of them unphotographed and named only in the local paper. Children die every day in places cable news cannot find on a map. On that view, pouring feeling into one private jet full of well-off strangers is not empathy but sentimental tourism, steered by whichever producer had the best crater footage. A sharper version says the dashcam frames are, frankly, a snuff film in slow motion.
\nSome of this is fair. Attention is not handed out justly, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But the argument proves less than it claims. Feeling something for nine people does not steal feeling from anyone else. Grief is not a fixed budget. And the alternative, a public that greets nine deaths with a shrug because the number is small, is not more virtuous. It is merely more tired.
\nThese stories grip us because they hand us a picture with no explanation, a family we recognize, a young woman we wanted to see go far, and an ending too fast to argue with. We fill the gaps ourselves, and what we fill them with is us. Our own children on our own flights, our own last minute, whoever we would want in the next seat.
\nAt Eulau, someone filled a hole in the ground with a family facing one another, and left it that way for 4,600 years. Forty-six centuries from now, nobody will know these nine names either. One hopes someone will at least know they were together.
\n", "date_published": "2026-11-05T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2026-11-05T00:00:00-07:00", "image": "https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/n722bd-2024-16x9.jpg", "tags": [ "aviation", "grief", "media", "attention", "family", "Learjet", "Palm Beach" ] }, { "id": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/give-me-your-tired/", "url": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/give-me-your-tired/", "title": "Who Switched Off the Lamp?", "summary": "The typical person arriving at America's southern border is no longer a Mexican looking for work. Since 2016 most have come from further afield: Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Ecuador, Colombia and beyond.", "content_html": "Let me say something I never expected to write: I would like to see Ilhan Omar deported.
\nNot because she deserves it. Not because I dislike her, her politics or her hijab, which seems to occupy the president rather more than it occupies her. I say it because nothing else seems capable of waking up the people who could actually stop what is being done to migrants, and because the administration appears determined to try it anyway.
\nFor two years the fight against mass deportation has been carried mostly by people with no lawyers, no platform and no vote. A detainee cannot call a press conference. A day labourer cannot subpoena an agency.
The facts, such as they are. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that the federal investigation into Ms Omar is aimed at stripping her citizenship and eventually removing her. Federal agents have searched her Washington home. The president has said she could face jail or deportation. His border czar, Tom Homan, has said denaturalization is possible if she lied during the process. Her office calls the whole affair politically motivated and without basis in law. No court has found against her, and as of this writing no charges have been reported.
\nHere is the grim logic. For two years the fight against mass deportation has been carried mostly by people with no lawyers, no platform and no vote. A detainee cannot call a press conference. A day labourer cannot subpoena an agency. Remove a sitting member of Congress, someone with committee seats, a press office and several hundred thousand constituents, and every one of her 434 colleagues must suddenly ask who is next. Senators would rediscover due process. Governors, judges and chief executives who have found the subject awkward would find silence impossible. The fight would stop being about whether migrants deserve sympathy and start being about whether citizenship means anything at all. That is a fight the powerful cannot sit out, because it is about them.
\nI hope it never comes to that. But to understand why it might take a congresswoman on a plane to make Washington care, you need to understand who the migrants are, what they have survived, and how the country they were running towards changed its mind.
\n![\"Migrants](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/sasabe-002-1100.jpg\")
Ask a certain sort of American to picture a migrant and he will picture a young Mexican man. He is about two decades out of date.
\nIn fiscal 2000, Mexicans made up 98% of the people the Border Patrol caught at the southwest border, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2016, non-Mexicans outnumbered them for the first time. By 2018, they made up more than six in ten. Meanwhile the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants living in America actually fell, by about 2 million in the decade to 2017.
\nThe new arrivals came from everywhere. Between 2021 and 2023, the biggest increases in border encounters were Venezuelans, Colombians and a large category CBP simply labels “other countries.” Chinese encounters rose more than fifty-fold. By fiscal 2024, the top ten nationalities included Venezuela, Guatemala, Cuba, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, El Salvador and China alongside Mexico. Further south, people from Afghanistan, India and a dozen African countries were turning up in the Panamanian jungle.
\nMexico still sends many, and its share rose again as other routes were choked off. But the border is no longer a story about one neighbour. It is a story about a hemisphere, and increasingly the world.
\n![\"Against](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/sasabe-004-1100.jpg\")
Nobody leaves home with a toddler and a plastic bag because the weather is nicer in Phoenix. The reasons are specific, and grim.
\nMexico. In a 2022 IOM survey cited by the Council on Foreign Relations, nine in ten Mexican migrants said they left because of violence, extortion or organized crime, much of it concentrated in Guerrero, Chiapas and Oaxaca.
\nGuatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Gangs tax small businesses, recruit children and kill those who refuse. In Guatemala’s “dry corridor,” years of failed harvests have left subsistence farmers choosing between hunger and the road.
\nVenezuela. Hyperinflation, food shortages and an authoritarian government whose security forces have been accused of serious abuses. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left since 2014, roughly a quarter of the country. Most cite economic collapse; many cite fear.
\nCuba. A shrinking economy, shortages of food and medicine, and a state that punishes dissent.
\nEcuador. Once among the region’s calmer places, it posted Latin America’s highest murder rate in 2023, driven by drug gangs.
\nHaiti. Armed gangs control much of the capital, the state has largely ceased to function, and a series of disasters has stripped away whatever cushion families once had.
\nColombia. A long internal conflict that never fully ended, plus insecurity and slow growth.
\nThese are not people seeking luxury. They are seeking the things most Americans never think about: a front door that locks, a wage that buys dinner, a school that is open, a street their children can walk down. If your house were on fire, you would run too.
\nThere are closer places to run, and many do. Colombia has taken in millions of Venezuelans; so have Peru, Brazil and Chile. Most of the world’s displaced people never leave their own region.
\nBut America remains the magnet for reasons that are flattering to it. Its economy is the largest in the world and keeps generating jobs that its ageing native workforce does not fill. It has courts that, for all their delays, still sometimes rule against the government. It has diaspora communities in nearly every city, which means a cousin with a sofa and a lead on work. And it has a reputation, built over two centuries and printed on the base of a statue, as the place that takes people in. Reputations outlive the policies that earned them, which is part of the tragedy that follows.
\n![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/sasabe-006-1100.jpg\")
For many, the journey begins in South America and runs through the Darién Gap, the roadless strip of jungle and mountain joining Colombia to Panama. A decade ago only a few thousand people a year attempted it. In 2023, more than half a million did, according to Panamanian figures reported by the Migration Policy Institute, most of them Venezuelans, along with Ecuadorians, Haitians and growing numbers of Chinese, Indians and Afghans.
\nThe crossing on foot takes four to ten days. Migrants climb steep, muddy slopes, ford rivers that rise without warning, and run out of food and clean water within days. Broken bones are routine. Drowning is common. Bandits rob them, and Doctors Without Borders treated more than 200 victims of sexual violence there in just the first part of 2023. There is no phone signal, so there is no calling for help.
\nThen comes the long haul north through Central America and Mexico, by bus, on foot or on the roofs of freight trains, past cartels that kidnap migrants for ransom and officials who sometimes do the same for less. Journeys stretch from weeks to many months. Families spend their savings, then borrow more, paying smugglers whose business model depends on their desperation.
\nSome never arrive. The International Organization for Migration counted at least 1,233 deaths on migration routes through the Americas in 2024, its deadliest year on record: 523 at the US-Mexico border, 174 in the Darién Gap, and 187 at sea between the Caribbean and American shores. The IOM itself says the true number is likely far higher, because the desert and the jungle keep their own counsel, and most of the dead are never named. The US-Mexico border has been described by the IOM as the deadliest land migration route in the world.
\nThose deaths happen in the Sonoran Desert, not far from where I write. People die of heat in the same hills that suburban Arizonans hike for fun on cool mornings.
\nIt is tempting to tell this as a morality play with one villain. The record is messier, and more instructive.
\nIn 1986 Ronald Reagan, a Republican, signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized about 2.7 million people while also penalizing employers who hired undocumented workers. George W. Bush spent much of his second term pushing a comprehensive reform with a path to legal status, and lost to his own party.
\nDemocrats have hardly been pacifists. Barack Obama’s administration carried out more than 432,000 removals in fiscal 2013, a record that earned him the title “deporter in chief” from immigrant advocates. Joe Biden, after opening his term with promises of a humane system, signed an order in June 2024 that effectively closed off asylum at the southern border whenever crossings averaged above 2,500 a day.
\nIn early 2024, a bipartisan group of senators led by Republican James Lankford negotiated the toughest border bill in decades: more agents, faster asylum decisions, and emergency powers to restrict crossings during surges. Donald Trump, then a candidate, came out against it and urged allies to vote it down. They did, twice. The bill failed 43-50 in May 2024, well short of the 60 votes needed. Whatever one thinks of its contents, it showed that a deal on regulation was within reach, and that it was killed less for what it did than for whom it might help politically.
\nThe pattern across both parties has been regulation with a hard edge: manage the flow, deter the reckless, process the rest. Until recently, nobody in power proposed that the flow should simply stop.
\nAlongside the enforcement, there was a parallel effort to offer people a legal door instead of a desert. The Biden administration created a parole programme for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans that let people with an American sponsor fly in legally rather than walk through the Darién. It expanded the CBP One app so asylum seekers could book appointments at ports of entry rather than wading the Rio Grande. It extended Temporary Protected Status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians whose countries were unsafe to return to. And it set the refugee ceiling at 125,000 for fiscal 2025.
\nThese programmes were imperfect, sometimes chaotic, and not always popular. But they reflected an idea with deep American roots: that if people are going to come anyway, it is better, safer and more orderly to give them a legal way to do it than to make the smugglers rich.
\nThe second Trump administration has taken a different view, and pursued it with vigour.
\nRefugee admissions for fiscal 2026 were capped at 7,500, the lowest in the programme’s history, and most of the slots were reserved for white South Africans, whose government denies they face persecution. The parole programme for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans was terminated, and in May 2025 the Supreme Court allowed that termination to proceed while litigation continued. Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans and Haitians was cut back or ended.
\nThen came the deportations. By the end of July 2026, ICE and CBP had deported about 980,000 people, according to the Migration Policy Institute. About eight in ten had no criminal conviction. Among those who had lived in America for at least two years, seven in ten had none. These are not, by and large, the “worst of the worst.” They are neighbours, coworkers and parents.
\nBorder encounters, meanwhile, collapsed to their lowest level since 1970, a fact the administration cites as proof that its approach works and its critics cite as proof that people fleeing danger have simply been left to it.
\nThe human cost has spilled beyond migrants. About 60,000 people are now held in immigration detention, and 29 died in ICE custody in the first half of fiscal 2026 alone, already a record, according to government data reported by NPR. Two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January. US citizens in Arizona and elsewhere have reported being detained.
\nAnd now, reportedly, a sitting member of Congress.
\nDefenders of migrants like to say America was founded by immigrants. It was, though the phrase skips some awkward passengers. The people already here were not consulted. Millions of Africans came in chains, not by choice. And the founders’ first naturalization law, in 1790, limited citizenship to “free white persons.”
\nStill, the founding generation did express an ideal, even when it fell short of it. George Washington wrote in 1783 that America should be open to “the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.” That line was aspiration rather than policy, but aspirations matter. They are the standard a nation sets for itself, and the one it can be held to.
\nNor has the country ever lived up to it consistently. The Know-Nothings of the 1850s raged against Irish Catholics. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred an entire nationality. The quota laws of 1924 were designed to keep out Italians, Jews and Eastern Europeans. In 1939, America turned away the St. Louis, a ship of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany; many of its passengers later died in the Holocaust.
\nSo the honest story is not that America once welcomed everyone and has now turned cruel. It is that America has always fought with itself over this question, and that the welcoming side has usually won in the end, and been proud of it afterwards. Nobody today defends the Chinese Exclusion Act. Few will defend this era, either, once it is over.
\nThe Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, meant to celebrate liberty and the friendship between two republics, not immigration. It was Emma Lazarus who gave it a different job.
\nIn 1883, Lazarus, a New York poet from a long-established Jewish family, was asked to write a sonnet for an auction to raise money for the statue’s pedestal. She had been volunteering with Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia, many of them held on Ward’s Island in miserable conditions. What she saw shaped what she wrote. Her poem, “The New Colossus,” recast the statue as a “Mother of Exiles” and gave her these words:
\n\n“Give me your tired, your poor,\nYour huddled masses yearning to breathe free,\nThe wretched refuse of your teeming shore.\nSend these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,\nI lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The poem was largely forgotten after her death. In 1903 a friend, Georgina Schuyler, campaigned to have it cast in bronze and mounted inside the pedestal. Over the following decades, as ships full of Italians, Poles, Greeks and Jews steamed past the statue into New York harbour, the poem became the statue’s meaning.
\nNote what it asks for. Not the skilled, the vetted or the wealthy. The tired, the poor, the homeless, the wretched. It is an invitation to precisely the people America now spends billions keeping out.
\nMany of the loudest supporters of mass deportation describe themselves as Christian patriots. It is worth taking them at their word, and reading what their book says.
\nThe Hebrew scriptures are blunt. Leviticus 19 commands that the stranger who lives among you be treated as native-born and loved as yourself, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The theme recurs again and again: the widow, the orphan and the foreigner are the three groups God singles out for protection.
\nJesus was more direct still. In Matthew 25, he describes the final judgment, in which people are separated by one test: did they feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, care for the sick and visit the prisoner, and did they “welcome the stranger”? Those who did, he says, did it to him. Those who did not are sent away. Notably, the passage contains no exemption for strangers who arrived without paperwork.
\nPaul, in his letter to the Romans, tells believers to “practice hospitality.” The letter to the Hebrews, traditionally though not certainly attributed to Paul, urges Christians not to neglect showing hospitality to strangers, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” The Greek word used, philoxenia, literally means love of the stranger. Its opposite is the root of a more familiar word: xenophobia.
\nEven the soldiers get a say. The motto of the US Army Special Forces is “De Oppresso Liber,” usually translated as “to free the oppressed.” It is an odd country that engraves that on its green berets and then cannot find room for the oppressed when they show up on their own.
\nAnyone who has travelled in the Muslim world knows what comes next, because they have been on the receiving end of it.
\nHospitality in Islam is not a pleasantry. It is a religious duty. The Koran repeatedly commands kindness to the wayfarer, the traveller far from home. A well-known saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad holds that whoever believes in God and the Last Day should honour his guest. Across the Arab world, Turkey, Iran and Central Asia, travellers routinely find themselves fed, housed and refused the chance to pay by strangers with far less than they have. In the Bedouin tradition, a guest may be sheltered for days before anyone thinks to ask his business.
\nAnd so we arrive at an irony that would be funny if it were not so expensive. Some of the Americans most fearful of Islam, many of whom have never left the country and have therefore never sat at a Muslim family’s table, are the ones most determined to abandon the very virtue that Islam and their own Bible share. The faith they fear practises the hospitality their scripture commands. They have it the wrong way round, and they do not know it, because they have never been anywhere to find out.
\nThat is not true of all Christians, or all conservatives, and it would be unfair to suggest it was. Many churches are among the most dogged defenders of migrants in the country, running shelters and legal clinics while their own congregations argue about it. But it is true of a loud and powerful slice of American public life that has fused faith, flag and fear into a single identity, and kept the fear while losing the faith.
\nWhere we have been: a country that argued about immigration constantly, sometimes shamefully, but that generally believed a person’s willingness to work and build a life here mattered more than where they were born. Reagan, in his farewell address, described his shining city on a hill as having doors open to anyone with the will and heart to get here. That was a Republican president, not a radical.
\nWhere we are: a country where the president calls a congresswoman and her friends “garbage,” where refugee slots go mostly to white South Africans, where deaths in detention set records, where American citizens are killed at protests and a congresswoman’s citizenship is under review. The language has shifted from managing migration to purging migrants. That is not a policy disagreement. It is a change in what the country believes about who counts.
\nWhere we need to go is not to open borders. No serious country has them, and pretending otherwise hands the argument to the other side. It is back to a system that is firm, fair and humane all at once:
\nLegal doors that actually open, so that people do not have to choose between a smuggler and a jungle. Sponsorship and parole programmes like those just dismantled were built to do exactly this.
\nEnough immigration judges and asylum officers to decide cases in months rather than years, so that those with real claims are protected quickly and those without are returned quickly, without camps.
\nSerious investment in the conditions people flee, from anti-gang policing to drought-resistant farming, because the cheapest refugee to help is the one who never has to leave.
\nEnforcement aimed at genuine threats, rather than at gardeners, nannies and parents dropping children at school.
\nAnd a public language that treats migrants as people, because the policies follow the language. They always have.
\nReaders will want to know which party offers the best route back. Honesty requires an unsatisfying answer before a clearer one.
\nNeither party has clean hands. Democrats under Obama deported people at record rates, and under Biden ended up restricting asylum in ways their own base called cruel. Republicans under Reagan and Bush, by contrast, were once the party of amnesty and comprehensive reform.
\nBut parties are judged by what they do now, not what they did then. Today, the Republican Party is led by a president whose administration has cut refugee admissions to a record low, ended humanitarian parole, deported nearly a million people, most without criminal records, and is reportedly seeking to denaturalize an elected opponent. Its congressional majority killed the most serious bipartisan border bill in a generation at its leader’s request. Whatever its members privately believe, the party as an institution is the engine of the current policy.
\nThe Democratic Party, for all its timidity and its record, is the only major party currently defending legal pathways, refugee resettlement, TPS and due process for migrants, and the one whose members are on the receiving end of the denaturalization threat. If the goal is a return to a welcoming but orderly system, the electoral arithmetic points mostly in one direction.
\nMostly, but not only. The most effective defenders of migrants have often been outside party politics altogether: churches, synagogues and mosques running shelters; lawyers working for nothing; business owners who need workers; mayors and sheriffs who refuse to treat their neighbours as quarry. And the country will not get back to its better self without some Republicans, the heirs of Reagan and Bush, finding their voices again. Reform that passes on party lines will be undone the next time power changes hands. Reform that passes with both is the kind that lasts.
\nSo the practical answer is: vote for the party that is currently defending migrants, and press it hard to be braver; and support every Republican willing to break ranks, because the long road back needs both.
\nFairness demands I argue with myself, and there is plenty to argue with.
\nWishing deportation on a real person as a tactic is ugly, even when the harm is coming anyway. Ms Omar has children and a life, and she is not a chess piece. Shocks can also normalize: if a congresswoman can be removed and the republic keeps humming, the lesson may be that resistance is pointless. And the law is not on the government’s side; a citizen cannot simply be deported, and denaturalization requires a federal court to find fraud, a high bar rarely cleared.
\nSupporters of the current policy would make a serious case that deserves an answer rather than a sneer. They would argue that a nation has the right and duty to decide who enters, and that the surge of 2021 to 2023, with more than 2 million border encounters in fiscal 2022 alone, overwhelmed cities from New York to Chicago and strained schools, shelters and hospitals. They would note that smuggling cartels profit from every crossing, so a closed border starves them. They would point out that border crossings are now at their lowest level in more than half a century, and that fewer crossings mean fewer deaths in the desert. They would say that low-wage American workers bear the brunt of competition from undocumented labour. And they would say, with some justification, that voters in 2024 chose this policy at the ballot box, and that democracy means accepting that.
\nMany who hold these views are not racists or xenophobes. They are people worried about order, wages and the rule of law, and lumping them together with the bigots is both unfair and a reliable way to lose elections. The honest disagreement is real: how many people, by what process, at what speed, and at what cost to whom.
\nThis column’s reply is that order and decency are not opposites; that the system before 2025 was flawed but fixable, and a bipartisan fix was killed for politics; that deporting a million people, most with no criminal record, while slashing legal pathways, is not restoring order but redefining who belongs; and that the language coming from the top, about “garbage” and “swaddling hijabs,” is not the language of people worried about wages.
\nWhich brings us back to the question this whole tour has been circling. Where does the real threat to America come from?
\nFrom the Venezuelan mother who walked through a jungle with her children because the alternative was watching them starve? From the Guatemalan farmer whose fields stopped growing anything? From the Haitian nurse who left because the gangs reached her clinic? They bring, overwhelmingly, the values Americans claim to prize: hard work, faith, family, and a ferocious belief that tomorrow can be better than today.
\nOr does it come from within, from a political culture that wraps itself in the flag and the cross while discarding what both were meant to stand for? From people who quote scripture but skip Matthew 25, who salute the Special Forces but forget their motto, who visit the Statue of Liberty and never read the plaque?
\nEmpires and republics alike have rarely been brought down by the desperate arriving at the gates. They are more often hollowed out by citizens who forget what made them worth arriving at.
\nThe lamp is still there, beside the golden door. It just needs someone to switch it back on.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-31T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-31T00:00:00-07:00", "image": "https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/sasabe-002-16x9.jpg", "tags": [ "immigration", "migrants", "asylum", "ICE", "deportation", "Ilhan Omar", "Darién Gap", "Statue of Liberty", "Emma Lazarus", "hospitality", "Christianity", "Islam", "refugee policy", "border policy" ] }, { "id": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/wake-me-in-2028/", "url": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/wake-me-in-2028/", "title": "Wake Me in 2028", "summary": "The American voter is tired, and not the sort of tired a long weekend fixes. Democrats head into Tuesday's midterms with a handsome poll lead and their favorite nautical slogan, despite a record of blue waves that turned out to be puddles.", "content_html": "![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/phoenix-election-protest-2020-1100.jpg\")
Picture a voter. Call her Linda. It is a Tuesday evening in October, and her phone has just buzzed for the fourth time since dinner. A candidate she has never heard of, running in a state she has never visited, needs $5 before midnight or democracy will end. Democracy was due to end last Tuesday as well. It has proved remarkably durable.
\nLinda switches on the television. A man in a good suit tells her this is the most important election of her lifetime. She is 58. By her count she has now lived through roughly twenty of the most important elections of her lifetime, which makes her either very lucky or very tired.
\nEither way, both parties will be fully occupied with each other. Linda’s problems will be left on the doorstep, like a parcel nobody signed for.
She is very tired. It needs no clever name. It is fatigue, plain and simple, and it is the condition of a country that has been campaigned at without pause for the better part of a decade. Ordinary tiredness lifts after a weekend off. This kind never does, because the campaign never stops. Linda is not alone. She is, for practical purposes, the median American voter. And on Tuesday she will be asked, once again, to choose between two parties that both insist they have the cure.
\nThe first symptom is the forecast. This autumn the blue wave is back, and Democrats are surfing it with gusto. To be fair, the numbers give them cause. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll taken October 19th and 20th found them eight points ahead on the generic congressional ballot among likely voters. Reuters/Ipsos put the gap at 11 points this week, with President Trump’s approval at a dismal 32%. Traders on Kalshi gave Democrats roughly an 80% chance of a “blue wave,” helpfully defined as at least 218 House seats and 49 in the Senate.
\nForty-nine Senate seats, it should be noted, is what most people call losing. A wave that leaves you short of control is less a tsunami than a pleasant afternoon at the beach. And even Marist’s lead has slipped from 12 points among registered voters in September. Linda has seen this film before. She knows how the ending tends to go.
\nSo, presumably, do Democrats, though they have shown little sign of remembering it. In 2016 Hillary Clinton led most national polls for months, booked a convention center with a literal glass ceiling for her victory party, and woke up to President Trump. She won the popular vote by nearly three million and lost the Electoral College 304 to 227, having declined to visit Wisconsin in the general election on the reasonable theory that it was already hers. It was not.
\nIn 2020 the party forecast big House gains and instead lost seats. In 2024 Kamala Harris, handed the nomination with barely a hundred days to spare and without the inconvenience of a single primary vote, lost all seven swing states and the popular vote for good measure. Her election night speech at Howard University was delivered the following afternoon, which rather summed up the campaign.
\nIn fairness, waves do sometimes arrive. In 2018 Democrats gained 41 House seats. But even then the Senate declined to join in, and Republicans picked up two seats there. The lesson is not that waves never happen. It is that a party which announces them in advance tends to spend the morning after explaining why the tide went out.
\nThe trouble is not the forecast so much as the script behind it. For a decade Democrats have campaigned chiefly as the party that is not Donald Trump. This worked once, in 2020, by a whisker. It failed twice at the top of the ticket. Undeterred, the 2026 pitch rests on the same sturdy foundation: the president is unpopular, therefore vote for us.
\nThe supporting cast is equally familiar. Democracy is on the ballot, again. The other side is extreme, again. Celebrities have been wheeled out with the confidence of a general who has never studied his own defeats. Nothing wears a voter down like repetition, and Linda could now recite the ads in her sleep, which is mostly where she watches them. What she actually worries about rarely makes the script. Gallup found health care costs topped Americans’ domestic worries this year, with 61% fretting about them “a great deal.”
\nLest anyone think this a one-party affliction, Republicans have hardly been studying either. Their midterm convention in September promised $5,000 payments before wandering off into cartels and socialism. House Speaker Mike Johnson conceded that the job on living costs “isn’t finished yet.” That is one way of putting it. Another is that it has not started.
\nHere is the one forecast this column will make with confidence. If Democrats take the House, January will bring subpoenas, hearings and murmurs of impeachment, met by vetoes, executive orders and a White House delighted to blame Congress for everything, including the weather. If Republicans hang on, Democrats will retreat to the courts and the cable studios and carry on shouting from there. Either way, both parties will be fully occupied with each other. Linda’s problems will be left on the doorstep, like a parcel nobody signed for.
\nThis is less a moral failing than a design feature. Polarization and gerrymandering have shrunk the number of competitive seats, so control of Congress turns on a handful of districts. The result is a legislature built for permanent campaigning rather than governing: slim majorities, strict discipline, and compromise treated as treason by the primary voters who decide most seats. It is a ship designed to roll, and its passengers are, understandably, green.
\nAnd here is the cruelest twist. For all the noise, Tuesday is not even the main event. It is a dress rehearsal. The 2028 presidential campaign begins, in practice, about ten minutes after the last House race is called. Politicians who spent the autumn heroically “focused on the midterms” will discover a sudden and passionate interest in Iowa diners and New Hampshire town halls.
\nWhat matters is less who wins Tuesday than what they do with it, and history offers a warning to anyone tempted to treat the midterms as a preview. In 1994 Republicans swept Congress, picked a fight over the budget, shut down the government and handed Bill Clinton a comfortable re-election in 1996. In 2010 a Tea Party wave delivered the House to Republicans. A debt-ceiling brawl duly followed, and Barack Obama won a second term in 2012. Midterm victors routinely mistake a rebuke of the other side for a mandate of their own. Voters, it turns out, are perfectly capable of rebuking twice.
\nThe pattern is not iron. Democrats won Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, and Republicans took the House in 2022 before Mr Trump returned in 2024. But the record is mixed enough to make one thing plain: a midterm win is a lease, not a deed. Whoever holds Congress in January will spend two years either earning it or reminding voters why they wanted a change. On recent form, bet on the reminder.
\nA dress rehearsal needs a cast, and here both parties have a small problem. Neither has a leading man, or woman, for 2028.
\nRepublicans at least have names. Vice President J.D. Vance is the presumed heir, yet an Emerson College poll in May put him at 36% among Republican primary voters, a single point ahead of Marco Rubio at 35%, with roughly 15% undecided. Heirs apparent are usually rather more apparent than that.
\nFor Democrats it is a free-for-all. Nobody has formally entered, and no standard-bearer has emerged to bear any standards. The roster of the interested reads like the guest list for a party nobody has agreed to host: Governors Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Andy Beshear and Josh Shapiro; Pete Buttigieg; Senators Mark Kelly, Ruben Gallego, Chris Murphy, Cory Booker and Jon Ossoff; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Ro Khanna; Rahm Emanuel. Mr Kelly has the fattest war chest, at over $22m. And Kamala Harris has said she is considering a third run, which suggests the lessons of 2024 have been filed somewhere very safe indeed.
\nA crowded field is not necessarily a weak one. Mr Trump polled around 1% early in the 2016 cycle, and Bill Clinton did worse in 1992. But for Linda, a sprawling primary means two more years of debates, attack ads and pleading texts before anyone has even been nominated. The understudies are already warming up in the wings.
\nMeanwhile, the real drama is playing out at Linda’s kitchen table, and it has no intermission. Inflation ran at 3.4% in August. Gas topped $4 a gallon over Labor Day weekend for the first time on record. Rent, insurance premiums and prescriptions have not consulted the generic ballot, and show no sign of doing so. On Wednesday morning Linda will still be paying for groceries, deductibles and the car repair she has been putting off since spring, whatever color the House turns overnight.
\nThat is the quiet scandal of this election. Both parties spend billions telling Linda how much they care about her costs, and almost nothing actually lowering them. The campaign is the product. Governing is the packaging it comes in.
\nSo on Wednesday her phone will buzz again. It will be a candidate for 2028. He will need $5 before midnight. He will tell her it is the most important election of her lifetime. And Linda, cured of nothing, will put the phone face down and go to bed. She has, after all, been told to get some rest.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-30T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-30T00:00:00-07:00", "image": "https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/phoenix-election-protest-2020-16x9.jpg" }, { "id": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/the-liberation-nobody-will-call-by-its-name/", "url": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/the-liberation-nobody-will-call-by-its-name/", "title": "The Liberation Nobody Will Call by Its Name", "summary": "Hamas has ruled Gaza by force since 2007, after winning a single election in 2006 and then seizing the territory from its rivals in eight days of street fighting. It is financed by Iran and sheltered by Qatar and Turkey, and it has attacked Israel for more than three decades, often from beneath scho…", "content_html": "![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/gaza-tunnel-2014-1100.jpg\")
The largest liberation effort in the Middle East today is being carried out by the one party almost nobody is willing to credit with it. Israel’s war against Hamas is usually described as a matter of security, sometimes as a matter of revenge, and, in the more excitable corners of the internet, as something far worse. It is rarely described as what it also is: the removal of an armed tyranny from two million people who never chose it and have never been permitted to un-choose it. Israel is defending itself, certainly. It is also, whether it gets the thanks or not, freeing Gaza’s civilians from the people who have ruled them at gunpoint for nearly two decades.
\nThis is what liberation would actually look like. Not a parade, but the ordinary freedoms of a place where you can chant against your rulers without a visit from masked men, where aid money buys cement for homes rather than tunnels, and where a hospital is only a hospital.
That is an awkward sentence to write in polite company, which is perhaps why so few people write it. The war is narrated as a contest between two parties, Israel and “the Palestinians,” with Hamas cast as a regrettable intermediary, like a landlord everyone complains about but nobody thinks to evict. The landlord is the problem. The tenants are the ones who stand to gain most from his departure.
\nHamas was founded in December 1987, at the start of the First Intifada, by the cleric Ahmed Yassin and a few associates, as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its 1988 charter called for an Islamic state across the whole of historic Palestine. A 2017 revision polished the prose without getting round to recognizing Israel’s right to exist, which is a bit like a burglar updating his business cards. America, the European Union, Britain, and a long list of others designate it a terrorist organization. This is less an accusation than a summary of its CV.
\nThe CV is long. Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing in April 1993 and spent the Oslo years trying to blow the peace process apart, bus by bus. In June 2001 one of its bombers killed twenty-one people, mostly teenagers, outside a Tel Aviv discotheque. In March 2002 another killed thirty people at a Passover seder in Netanya. Rockets began flying in 2001 and have rarely paused since. Then came October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, and carried roughly 250 hostages back into Gaza. Thirty-odd years of this is not a “cycle of violence.” It is a business model, and Gaza’s own people have been its first and longest-suffering customers.
\nIt is often said that Hamas was elected. It was, once. In January 2006 it won a large majority in the Palestinian legislature, to the evident surprise of Washington and Jerusalem. What came next tends to be left out of the retelling.
\nHamas rejected the international conditions for recognition, a unity government came and went, and by June 2007 the two main factions were shooting at each other in the streets. Human Rights Watch documented that in eight days Hamas seized every security installation and the main government offices in Gaza. Detainees were tortured and beaten, Fatah rallies were broken up by force, and the courts more or less stopped working. Fatah officials were jailed, killed, or chased out. Hamas’s defenders say it was getting its retaliation in first against a Fatah plot, and there is evidence Washington was arming Fatah for just that sort of thing. It hardly matters. A party that wins a vote and then settles the question of who governs with rifles has told you which of the two it believes in.
\nThere has been no election in Gaza since. (There has been none in the West Bank either, which says little for the alternatives and nothing at all for Hamas.) This is the plainest sense in which ending Hamas’s rule is a liberation: Gazans did not get to keep the one vote they cast. They got a regime instead.
\nTyranny on this scale is not cheap, and Hamas has never had to pay for it alone. Its senior backer for most of the past twenty years has been Iran, which by the State Department’s reckoning sends around $100 million a year to Palestinian militant groups, Hamas chief among them. Tehran turned off the tap in 2012, reportedly at $23 million a month, when Hamas declined to cheer for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and turned it back on in 2017. One Israeli estimate put Iran’s support at $350 million a year by 2023.
\nQatar has housed Hamas’s political leadership for years, and its emir pledged more than $400 million in 2012 alone. Turkey hosts senior Hamas figures, declines to call the group terrorist, and has been named by Israeli intelligence as the base of an Iranian-run money-changing network that moved hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza. That one of these patrons is a major non-NATO ally of the United States and another is a full member of NATO would be satire if it were not simply the arrangement.
\nThe money did build things in Gaza. It built tunnels, rockets, and a payroll of fighters. What it did not build was much in the way of freedom for the people paying the price for it. Cutting that pipeline, which Israel’s campaign has done more to accomplish than a decade of Western diplomacy, is not only good for Israel’s security. It is the end of a subsidy for the oppression of Gaza’s own civilians.
\nThe defining military fact about Hamas is that it fights from behind the people it rules. This is no longer merely Israel’s claim. It is on the record from sources with little affection for Israel.
\nIn 2017 UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, found a tunnel under two of its boys’ schools in the Maghazi camp and protested to Hamas. In 2021 it found another cavity seven and a half meters beneath a school and condemned the armed groups for putting pupils and staff at risk. In January 2024 American intelligence agencies said they were confident that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had used Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, and the tunnels under it to run command operations, store weapons, and hold hostages. The evidence released fell short of proving Israel’s grander claim that Shifa was the beating heart of the whole enterprise. Still, “merely a command post with some hostages” is a thin defense for a hospital.
\nThe law is clearer than the commentary. Using civilians as shields is forbidden outright, and a hospital used to attack the enemy loses its protection once a warning has been given and ignored. The law does not let the attacker off lightly; Israel remains bound by the duties of distinction, proportionality, and precaution, and should be held to them. But nor does the law accept the comfortable fiction that the side which wages war from a schoolyard bears no responsibility for what happens in it. A state shelled from beneath a hospital can either absorb the shelling forever or act and risk exactly the casualties its enemy has arranged. Hamas has built its strategy on the wager that democracies will choose the first, and that when they choose the second, the world will blame them for the bodies.
\nHere, too, the liberation argument holds. A population used as sandbags is not a population that is free. Every tunnel under a school is a statement about how much Hamas values the children above it, and the answer is: about as much as the concrete.
\nWhich brings us to the heart of the matter. If Hamas is a threat to Israel, it has been for nearly two decades a far more intimate threat to Gaza.
\nGazans have tried, at real personal risk, to say so. They protested Hamas rule in 2011 and 2012, again in 2019, and again in the summer of 2023, and were met with arrests. In March 2025 an anti-war march in Beit Lahia turned into something Gaza had not seen on that scale: thousands of people in the streets chanting “Hamas out” and calling its fighters terrorists. The protests spread to Jabalia and Khan Younis, then faded under the sort of pressure that included intimidating the journalists trying to cover them. When the October 2025 ceasefire took hold, Hamas’s first act was not to rebuild a single house. It redeployed some 7,000 fighters to reassert control, rounded up suspected collaborators, and picked a fight with a rival clan. Liberators, one notes, do not usually begin peacetime by arresting their own public.
\nThis is what liberation would actually look like. Not a parade, but the ordinary freedoms of a place where you can chant against your rulers without a visit from masked men, where aid money buys cement for homes rather than tunnels, and where a hospital is only a hospital. None of that is possible while an armed movement answerable to Tehran and Doha keeps a monopoly on force. Removing Hamas is not the obstacle to a decent future for Gaza. It is the precondition. Every serious plan for the territory, including the American-brokered one now limping along, assumes as much. Hamas’s civil administration formally stepped down in July of this year, and a deal to disarm the militant factions followed at the end of that month, conditional on reconstruction and Israeli withdrawal. Whether it holds is another question. That it was needed at all is the point.
\nNo conversation about this war gets very far before someone says “genocide.” The charge deserves to be taken seriously, partly because serious people make it and partly because the word is too important to spend carelessly.
\nThe case against Israel is not trivial. In December 2023 South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention, and in January 2024 the court found the claim plausible enough to order provisional measures, including steps to prevent incitement and to let aid in. In September 2025 a UN commission of inquiry, which does not speak for the UN itself, concluded that Israel had committed genocide and accused Benjamin Netanyahu, Isaac Herzog, and Yoav Gallant of inciting it. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, among them the use of starvation as a method of war. By August 2025, famine had been confirmed in Gaza City.
\nNote what the warrants say, and what they do not. Genocide is a crime of intent: the deliberate attempt to destroy a people, in whole or in part, as such. Killing a great many people, even recklessly, even criminally, is a different offense, which is why the prosecutors in The Hague charged war crimes rather than genocide. The World Court, for its part, has yet to rule on the merits at all. Israel filed its defense in March of this year; South Africa has until November 2027 to reply, and Israel until May 2029 to answer that. A verdict should arrive, at this rate, somewhere around the next war.
\nThe contrast is worth drawing. Armies bent on extermination do not, as a rule, drop leaflets telling their targets where to flee, or sign ceasefires that let food in. The party in this war whose founding charter and whose October morning come closest to an intent to destroy a people as such is not Israel. It is Hamas.
\nNone of which acquits Israel, and it should not be read that way. My own view is plain. Israel has a sovereign right to defend itself, and some of what it has done goes well beyond defense. Starving a population is not self-defense. Nor is the steady drip of lethal strikes after a ceasefire has been signed, nor ministers who talk about Gaza’s people as though they were a demolition problem. Some of these acts may well be crimes, and if they are, the people who ordered them should answer for them in a court. Self-defense is a licence, not a blank cheque. But a crime is not a genocide, and a word stretched to cover everything is left with nothing to describe the next time it is truly needed.
\nA liberator who commits crimes along the way is still a liberator, but a compromised one. The remedy is accountability, not abandoning the people waiting to be liberated.
\nNone of this makes the cost anything less than appalling. By late September the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas and whose figures should be read with care but not waved away, reported nearly 74,000 Palestinians killed. Israel has lost more than 2,000 of its own. More than a hundred humanitarian groups warned this month that the ceasefire exists largely on paper, with over 1,400 people killed since it began and aid still choked. Israel’s control has crept from about half of the Strip to around 65 percent. A liberation that kills the liberated must answer to the hardest possible standard, and the case made here is only as strong as Israel’s conduct is scrupulous. Israel’s friends should insist on that standard rather than wave it away; a rescue that ends in permanent occupation is not a rescue.
\nBut the moral arithmetic of war cannot be settled by body counts alone. If it could, the side most willing to sacrifice its own civilians would win every argument, and Hamas understood that long before its critics did. The question is not only who is dying, but who arranged for them to be standing where the bombs fall.
\nStrip away the noise and the proposition is simple. Hamas took Gaza by force, held it by fear, financed itself through foreign despots, and spent its people’s lives as ammunition. Ending that rule protects Israel. It also frees the Palestinians of Gaza from the longest-running and least-discussed occupation in their recent history: their own government’s.
\nAsk Gazans today whom they blame for their condition, and Hamas, one reporter found this month, is not the first name they give. Liberators are seldom thanked by the liberated, least of all while the rubble is still warm. Then again, nobody in Gaza has been asked their opinion of anything since 2006.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-25T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-25T00:00:00-07:00", "image": "https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/gaza-tunnel-2014-16x9.jpg" }, { "id": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/where-everybody-knows-your-grievance/", "url": "https://aaronwells.me/notebook/where-everybody-knows-your-grievance/", "title": "Where Everybody Knows Your Grievance", "summary": "A political chat room in one of the internet’s oldest corners, where everyone who mentions an age is between the mid-fifties and the early seventies. Over six days they told one another to die sixteen times. The room, it turns out, explains the people far better than the people explain the room.", "content_html": "![\"A](\"https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/apple-iie-irc-1100.jpg\")
At 6:55 a.m. on a weekday, a man in his early seventies tells a chat room that he has microwaved yesterday’s coffee and is about to take his six pills. He reports his blood sugar. He wishes the team good morning. The team, such as it is, consists at that hour of perhaps a dozen people scattered from the Gulf Coast to Western Canada to somewhere in East Asia, most of them retired, several of them unwell, all of them awake. Within twenty minutes one of them will have called another a cunt, a third will have announced that he is adding a fourth to his ignore list (“permaban, thx”), and a fifth will have posted, for at least the sixth time that week, a four-part obscenity about Israel, the president, and their “subhuman” supporters, ending, as it always ends, with “Free Palestine.” Then someone will ask about smoked brisket.
\nThe research on retired people and the internet finds that being online is associated with about a third less depression, with the biggest effect for those living alone; the research on loneliness finds it kills at a rate comparable to the things your doctor warns you about.
This is Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, a protocol written by a Finnish student in 1988 and abandoned by nearly everyone else before the first iPhone. It has no profiles, no photographs, no threads, no likes, and no algorithm. It is text, in a window, in the order it was typed, and if nobody keeps a log it is gone the moment it scrolls off the screen. The network on which this particular room sits was created in the early 1990s by a schism from an older network, which is how networks were created then. The room itself (I will call it the Channel, for reasons that will become clear) is a political channel for people who have been thrown out of other political channels. Its name is a joke about exile. Its regulars wear their bans from the respectable rooms the way other men wear regimental ties.
\nI came to the Channel’s logs with a brief that asked, more or less, what sort of person spends his days in a place like this, and what a psychiatrist would make of him. The honest answer to the second question is that a psychiatrist who has not examined a person is not allowed to make anything of him, and the professional code that says so, the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater rule,” is about the only rule in this story that anyone observes. So this is not a diagnosis of anybody. It is a description of a room, assembled from everything said in it over six consecutive days, read line by line, counted, and then read again. The room, it turns out, explains the people far better than the people explain the room.
\nStart with how few of them there are. Across the six days, 141 different nicknames spoke. Forty-nine of them showed up on one day only and were never seen again; twenty-two were there every day. The five busiest nicknames produced a quarter of everything said, the busiest ten produced 42 percent, and the busiest twenty produced 63 percent. Economists measure inequality with a number called the Gini coefficient, on which perfect equality is zero and one person having everything is one. For talk in the Channel it is 0.71, a figure that would embarrass most countries. On any given morning “the Channel” means a dozen people, and over a week it means perhaps 40, with the rest drifting through like weather.
\nThe busiest of all is a woman in her late sixties I will call Alder, who wrote 1,775 messages in six days, which is one every four minutes across the entire week if you don’t sleep, and about one a minute during the seven unbroken hours she spent there on the last day. Behind her come Bramble, a cheerful retiree who can discuss the Federal Reserve and the historical Jesus with equal confidence until something sets him off; Cypress, a union man in the Southwest in his mid-fifties whose contribution to any debate is to announce that he is no longer listening; Dogwood, who asks questions like “do you really want a Black woman putting in your IV?” in the flat tone of a man ordering lunch; and Ebony, who believes that both American parties are run from abroad and that voting signals consent, which he withholds.
\nThen there is Juniper. Juniper is, by a comfortable margin, the person in the room most likely to type “I support Hitler” to see who flinches. He has a tidy prose style and a plugin that automatically votes yes whenever the Channel holds a vote, which I will come to.
\nThe ages are the thing. Nobody in the Channel is young. Kauri, the man with the six pills, is seventy-three. Alder is sixty-eight or sixty-nine, depending on which day you ask. A combative veteran who goes by Viburnum is sixty; Cypress is fifty-six; Larch, the most erudite and most violent-tongued man in the room, turned fifty-four during the week. Two men served, or didn’t, in the Vietnam era; one drew lottery number 28 and has never forgiven the war for ending before it could take him. Several have grandchildren. One has been married for thirty years. One simply says he is old. One reports that two nurses were just round and he played the piano for them, and that his sister is the only relative he has left. The youngest-seeming regular refers to his undergraduate degree in the past tense and to his wife in the present. A visitor on the last day asked, not unkindly, whether the Channel was for the elderly. Nobody answered him, which was an answer.
\nWomen are few and conspicuous. Nine of the sixty or so people who said anything of length presented as women, among them Alder; Foxglove, who posts the four-part obscenity; Jasmine, a centrist Democrat from the Midwest who says please; Oleander, who writes in capitals about Medicare copays; and Eglantine, who describes herself, with a cheerfulness the room does not deserve, as the resident transgender woman. The two most active women in the Channel are also, by every measure I could construct, the two most attacked people in it. We will get to that.
\nGeographically the room spans a dozen American states, at least four Canadians, a couple of Britons, a Dutchman who posts long passages about the Carthaginians at one in the morning, a man in India, a student in Southeast Asia, a Canadian working for an Israeli nonprofit, and a man in Australasia who would never visit America. Several of the people most exercised about American politics are explicit that they are not American. This bothers the Americans, who say so, and does not bother the non-Americans, who say that too.
\nPolitics, mostly, and mostly the American kind: the president, the Epstein files, the November midterms, a congresswoman from Minnesota whom one faction wants deported and another wants canonized, and a state campaign advertisement that occupied one man for three hours. That is 30 to 40 percent of every day. Israel, Gaza, Zionism, and Jews take another 10 to 35 percent, depending on who is awake. On the first evening a single participant’s arrival turned a quiet afternoon into a four-hour argument about Gaza that ended only when she went to bed. Insults, feuds, and talk about the Channel itself take 10 to 15 percent. Race, immigration, and gender take 5 to 13 percent, religion 2 to 12, and personal life, which here means brisket, bell peppers, blood sugar, and the dog, 2 to 10. Sex, drugs, conspiracy, and technology get a few percent each, which is less than you would guess and about what a bar gets.
\nThe words agree with the readers. Political vocabulary turns up 14 times per thousand words, more than twice as often as religious vocabulary and nearly three times as often as profanity, which is itself running at five per thousand, a rate that would get you removed from most places with chairs. The pronouns are the tell. “I,” “me” and “my” appear 23 times per thousand words; “you” and “your” appear 22 times. In a room where people discussed things, you would expect the first number to dwarf the second. In a room where people discuss one another, they match. The Channel is not a conversation about politics. It is a conversation about the people in the Channel, conducted in the vocabulary of politics.
\nThe media diet is what you would expect of men who learned the internet when it was a hobby. Over six days they shared 223 YouTube links, 108 links to the site formerly called Twitter, 27 to Reddit, 26 to Wikipedia, and 17 each to the Guardian and Yahoo, with the wire services, the broadsheets, Fox, NPR, and Snopes trailing in single figures. Five men posted more links than the other 136 people combined. A few participants, Alder chief among them, paste whole paragraphs of news copy and fact-checks into the room, which the others treat as cheating. It is really a bid for authority in a place that has no other way to award it, and it works about as well as a laminated certificate.
\nIf you took the abuse out of the Channel you would not have a quieter Channel; you would have a blank screen with the occasional brisket. The readers who went through the logs line by line counted roughly 190 separate incidents of insult, slur, threat, sexual harassment, or contempt for a whole category of human being, which works out to one every forty minutes around the clock, and considerably more often than that in the mornings. A cruder count by machine gives a floor for the worst of it.
\n| What was counted | Times | Who did most of it |
|---|---|---|
| Mental illness or medication used as an insult (“psycho,” “mentally ill,” “take your meds,” “needs medication”) | 136 | Cypress, Bramble, a newcomer called Ironwood, Alder, Juniper, Dogwood |
| Slurs, overwhelmingly one word for intellectual disability | 104 | Larch (23 of them), Cypress, Ebony, Ironwood |
| Threats and wishes of physical violence (“should be shot,” “break you in half,” “punch in the face,” “kill her”) | 29 | Burdock, Foxglove, Juniper, Tamarack |
| One particular word for a woman | 28 | Alder (24 of them) |
| Telling someone to kill themselves, or to die | 16 | Larch (8 of them) |
A machine count of five kinds of hostile language over six days, 185,315 words of human conversation. The bots are excluded.
\nFour things stand out from that table, and the most important is the first line. In a room where at least half a dozen people have mentioned psychiatric medication, chronic illness, autism, or a breakdown, the most popular insult is that your opponent is mad and should take his pills. Everyone uses it. The operators use it. Juniper’s habitual sign-off on anyone who annoys him is a pill emoji and the words “someone needs medication.” On the night one of the regulars disclosed that he is autistic and that he expects nothing from life except more of the same, another participant asked him, within the minute, how he could be sure he wasn’t simply retarded. Nobody objected. There was a vote on at the time.
\nThe abuse is not random noise. It runs in scripts, and the scripts are stable enough that after two days you can predict the afternoon from the morning. There are six of them.
\nThe ironist. Juniper’s method is to post a short declarative sentence whose content is monstrous and whose tone is bored. Over the week he announced his support for slavery, for racism, for the killing of cyclists, for Hitler, and for the genocide of everyone who thinks like one particular woman. He is “free to act as a racist,” he explained, in the course of an argument about civil rights. He calls this fucking with people, and when someone calls him a troll he affects astonishment. It is a cheap trick and an effective one, because the thing that would make it a joke, the wink, is left out on purpose, and some people in the room cannot see a wink in text if it is drawn for them. Two of his lines that week were not obviously jokes at all: the hope, addressed to Foxglove by name, that a foreign intelligence service would hunt her down and silence her for good, and, two minutes later, his support for “the extermination” of that state’s critics. Later the same day he ordered her to shut up on the grounds that he was a man and therefore her “literal superior.” He will tell you this was satire. She did not take it that way, and the record does not say which of them is right.
\nThe pursuer. Kauri, of the six pills, is the gentlest soul in the room for twenty-three hours of every day. He greets people by name. He hugs them in parentheses. He reports on his butternut squash. And then he sees Juniper, and something in him that has been waiting goes off. The injury is a single one, and it is old: Juniper once called him a pedophile. Over six days Kauri directed more than fifty hostile lines at Juniper on this subject, from “fuck you” on the first evening through “eat shit and die,” twice, to an all-capitals announcement that he had sent the logs of Juniper’s “chat” to a state police force, and finally, on the last afternoon, after a long passage about cleaning his bathroom carpet and discovering how weak he had become, the regret that he was no longer physically able to beat Juniper himself. Juniper’s reply, every time, is the same Bible verse about wholesome speech, followed by “Grow up. Move on,” which is to say, the thing most precisely calculated to prevent either. On the fifth day Juniper restated the original accusation in front of everyone. Kauri denied it and said a third man’s logs had proved Juniper a liar; the third man said both that the logs showed it was nonsense and that he had personally brokered a truce; a fourth man said Kauri had a history of exactly that kind of remark. None of this is checkable. All of it is the architecture of the week.
\nThe carpet-bomber. Alder produces more hostile language than anyone, including twenty-four of the twenty-eight uses of the word in the fourth row of the table, a death wish or two, and, aimed at Dogwood, a four-line verdict that he has no family, no love, no friends, and no children. Read in isolation she is the worst person in the room. Read in order she is almost always the second person in any exchange. The attacks on her, and they are daily, concern her sex, her age, her looks, her marriage, her illness, and her right to speak: she is told to know her place, “woman”; that a man would break her in half; that another had never hit a woman but would make an exception; that she never had the cancer she described; that she must have failed as a mother; that the amendment giving women the vote should be repealed. She answers with artillery. The Channel’s resident bot, asked by Juniper why she is so hostile, replied that she had traded persuasion for “cathartic carpet-bombing.” Asked by her what Juniper’s problem was, it said he treats the room as a “cheap provocation arcade: insert insult, receive attention.” It is a measure of the place that the most perceptive critic in it is a script.
\nThe deadpan bigot. This is a chorus rather than a soloist: Dogwood, Tamarack, Burdock, and Cypress, with walk-on parts for Kauri, Viburnum, and Wisteria. The register is the one you hear from a man who says he is just asking. Over the week the chorus asked whether anyone wanted a Black nurse near a vein, called the civil-rights movement a tremendous mistake, explained that whites make and non-whites take, proposed rounding up Jews, asked why Jews are Jews if they are so smart, declared that only men should vote and work, suggested trans people leave the country, and repeated the business about Haitians and pets. The Holocaust was minimized three times and inverted once. The most extreme sentences of the week, though, belonged to a quieter man I will call Sorrel, who writes long realist essays in which he speaks as “we” on behalf of the United States, and who proposed in the same calm paragraphs that everyone who embraces the Palestinian cause be “genocided,” that Gaza be used as a training ground for robots until no one is left in it, and that the solution to Canada was to leave no humans alive there. Nobody kicked him. Somebody asked whether genocide wasn’t a bit harsh, and the conversation moved on to golf.
\nThe sloganeer. Some people arrive with a sentence instead of a greeting. Foxglove’s is the four-part obscenity, posted at least six times that week and parodied, in the end, by an operator who used the same form to curse the Chinese Communist Party. Acacia’s is a line of Star of David emoji blessing Israel. Zelkova’s is “Zionism = racism,” which he will post thirty times in succession if left alone, and he is generally left alone. Cypress’s is procedural: he types, in the syntax of a client command, that he has added someone to his ignore list, then adds a line of review (“utterly worthless”; “you are a uniquely retarded retard”). He did this seventeen times on one Saturday. Everyone knows he is not actually ignoring anyone, because he keeps answering them, and the practice is known in the room, with real affection, as the fake ignore. These are not messages. They are the chat equivalent of a man clearing his throat to let the bar know he has arrived.
\nThe moralist. The heaviest word in the Channel is “pedophile,” and it is used the way a child uses a stick. Bramble spent three hours of one afternoon calling Viburnum a pedophile supporter over a campaign advertisement. Nettle asserted that supporters of one party are pro-pedophilia; Quince replied that she was a lesbian who denied God and was going to hell. Tamarack observed that an entire ethnic group is mostly pedophiles. Damson called Wisteria a pedophile protector. Mulberry suggested that Dogwood should not live near a middle school. The only person in the room to object on principle, that flinging the word around cheapens the harm done by the real thing, was Alder, in between carpet-bombings. Two philosophers, Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, have a term for moral talk whose purpose is to display the speaker’s own virtue rather than to address anything. They call it grandstanding. It is cheap to produce, impossible to refute by text, and the Channel runs on it.
\nThe targets, in all this, are not evenly distributed. Alder and Foxglove between them absorbed the misogyny; Foxglove also received the racialized sexual abuse, including a third-person action describing a slap on the buttocks, delivered by two men at once while an operator laughed and then, after a pause, said “ew.” Two Jewish regulars were called fake Jews and genociders by a third. An elderly man who had mentioned his nurses was told to die online so that the others could watch. And a newcomer called Ironwood was told to kill himself within one minute of arriving, for reasons that bring us to the management.
\nThe Channel has rules in the way that a parking lot has rules: there is a sign, nobody has read it, and enforcement depends on who is around. Technically it is a moderated room, which means you cannot speak until an operator or a bot gives you “voice.” The bot opens a five-minute vote whenever an unvoiced person joins. Twenty-nine such votes were held during the week. Most attracted two or three voters. Juniper’s plugin cast an automatic yes in every one of them, including several held while he was plainly away from his keyboard, which means the Channel’s only democratic institution has, as its most reliable participant, a man who is not there.
\nAbove the bot sit four operators who did anything that week: Myrtle, whom the others call the founder; Rowan, who is the nearest thing the place has to a conscience; Hawthorn, who is funny; and Gentian, who issued the week’s only warning, which was to tell Alder not to paste private messages into the room. Between them they removed people from the Channel 10 times in six days, against the 190 incidents. The 10 are instructive. Tamarack was kicked within a minute of an antisemitic slur, and again, three days later, within two minutes of a second one. Ironwood was kicked within a minute of a homophobic slur. So was Clover, the man with the nurses, for a pun on the name of a bomber. Spruce went for an ethnic slur plus “fuck you.” Viburnum went after telling Foxglove she was a “Chinese communist bitch” with a sexual remark about Asian men attached. Ebony went twice, once for “greasy fucking alien” and once, after Rowan politely asked the room whether anyone minded, for evading a previous ban. One kick was automatic, for repeating the same line three times. Only one, Ironwood’s second, was for sustained conduct rather than a word.
\nThat is the whole price list, and it is remarkably clear. A slur against a race, a religion, or a sexual orientation will cost you a minute’s exile, promptly and reliably. Telling a woman you would beat her, telling a man to shoot himself, proposing the genocide of a people, denying the Holocaust, announcing that you have reported another member to the police: free. The members have read the list more carefully than the operators have. When Myrtle rebuked a man for a lesbian slur and announced that rule No. 1 was to be kind to each other, Kauri asked within seconds why a comparable word for gay men had passed without comment a moment earlier. When Clover was kicked for his pun, Alder asked why another man who had just used an equivalent word on him was still there. And when the question of Ebony’s banned alter ego came up, Hawthorn gave the operators’ philosophy in one sentence: he would ban the man, but since the founder didn’t seem to care, he couldn’t be bothered either.
\nIn the absence of management, three things fill the gap. The first is the ignore button, which almost everyone uses and several announce, with the result that conversations proceed among people who cannot see one another’s lines, like a dinner party in which half the guests are wearing earplugs and all of them are shouting. The second is the vote, which is nominally a gate and in practice a popularity poll, and which Larch used to express his feelings about a newcomer by voting no and adding that anyone voting yes was as stupid as the newcomer was. The third is the bot, and the bot deserves a paragraph of its own.
\nThe bot was installed to post the title of any link anyone shared. Somewhere along the way it acquired a language model, and the Channel discovered that it would answer questions. It is now the room’s oracle (the boiling point of a scale, the date a word changed meaning, the odds on the Senate), its referee (asked to rank the chatters, to say who is the most hostile and why), its ghostwriter (it will summarize the last hour on request, and the summaries are better than the hour), and its informant. The last is the problem. On command, the bot will list every nickname it believes has connected from the same place as a given user. The list is wrong, frequently, because of the way the internet shares addresses, and the bot says so itself. On the fourth morning a man ran the command on Ironwood, who had just arrived claiming to be new. The bot produced eleven names. Within the same minute Ironwood had been told to kill himself and, four minutes after that, had been kicked for the slur he returned. Juniper noted, correctly, that the bot’s alias tracking was unreliable and mangled his own. Nobody was listening. The one piece of software in the room that could have made it kinder has been turned into a machine for confirming that the stranger is an old enemy, which, in the Channel, is the only kind of stranger there is.
\nEvery IRC veteran believes that half the room is the other half in disguise. In the Channel this belief is a religion, and like most religions it is mostly wrong and occasionally, maddeningly, right.
\nThe technical evidence, which I assembled from nickname changes, client identifiers, masked hostnames, and the things people said about themselves, resolves 141 nicknames into something like a hundred people, and nearly all of the shrinkage is boring. The network drops connections constantly (“what is wrong with this network,” Larch asked, after being renamed for the fourth time in a morning), and when it does, your client comes back under your name with a number stapled to it, or under the spare name you set up in 2004. Alder has such a spare, and on the last afternoon, when someone accused her of hiding behind it, she explained with some heat that she was not in disguise, that everyone knew who she was, and that the spare name comes back automatically when her connection dies. Foxglove has one too. A man I’ll call Viburnum changed his name once, to an old favorite. A woman called Bryony, the student overseas, changed hers six times, which is less a disguise than a mood ring. An operator renamed himself with capital I’s in place of lower-case L’s, for reasons that are presumably amusing on his screen. Two regulars whose nicknames are the names of CIA programs turn out to share a residential connection, which means either that one man has two hobbies or that a couple in a coastal state have very similar ones.
\nThe maddening cases are three. Burdock, who spent one morning attacking Alder’s looks and her cancer, was shown by Juniper to share a client identifier with a new nickname that had just been voted a voice; Juniper then welcomed Burdock back under his own name, and Burdock said thanks, buddy. Ebony, the man who does not vote, was described by the operators as the latest of five or six banned accounts belonging to one person, amnestied at some point, and was kicked for evasion; a nickname with a different connection and an identical worldview appeared the following day. And Juniper himself, musing on the fifth morning about whether some chatters bring alternate nicknames into the room to agree with themselves, added, with a smiley, that he does.
\nAgainst those three stands the room’s general conviction that nobody is new. “There are no new chatters,” Mulberry announced on the last day, in the tone of a man stating the boiling point of water. “This routine may have worked 20 years ago.” Newcomers are run through the bot’s alias list on arrival and greeted by the name of whichever old enemy the list suggests, and a stranger who insists on being a stranger is treated as the most suspicious kind of all. The scholars who study sock puppets in online communities, Srijan Kumar and his colleagues at Stanford and Maryland, found that real ones are rare, hard to spot, and behave in specific, measurable ways. The Channel has solved the problem by assuming everyone is one, which has the great advantage of never being disproved.
\nHere is a thing you cannot see by reading, and can only see by counting. When a person in the Channel begins a message with someone else’s name, he is addressing that person, and over six days there were 1,353 such messages. Draw them as arrows and you get a map of who talks to whom. The map does not look like a conversation. It looks like a wheel with most of the spokes missing.
\nA few people receive nearly all the arrows: Bramble (144), Alder (124), a headline-pasting liberal called Gorse (120), then Foxglove, Hawthorn, and Juniper. A few people fire nearly all of them. Quince, an evangelical who argues in the manner of a man labeling logical fallacies on a whiteboard, addressed Gorse by name 85 times during the week. Gorse addressed Quince by name not once. Quince addressed Alder 40 times, Hawthorn 34 times, and Bramble 32 times, and received, by name, zero, zero and zero replies. Privet addressed Bramble 38 times and got nothing back. Burdock addressed Alder 26 times; she answered with insults to the air. The only reciprocal relationships of any size in the room all involve Juniper, who does at least name the people he baits.
\nWhat this describes is not dialogue but pursuit: a handful of men spending hours typing another person’s name at the top of sentences that the person declines to acknowledge, in front of an audience that has stopped reading. IRC makes this possible in a way that no other medium quite does. There is no reply button to show you have been ignored, no read receipt, no thread that peters out. You can address a man for six days and never learn that he has had you on ignore since the first. Quince, for what it is worth, is perfectly civil about it. He is a man bearing witness. The witness does not require a congregation.
\nHaving said that nobody will be diagnosed, I owe the reader some account of who these people seem to be, and the fairest way to do it is to describe the parts they play. Psychiatry has, in the back of its big manual, a vocabulary for describing personality in terms of traits rather than disorders, and I lean on it below only as a vocabulary. A role is not a condition. Most of the people in the Channel have played more than one of these in a single day.
\nThe ironist has already been introduced. Fluent, cool, scriptural, bored, and in control of the room’s attention at almost no emotional cost to himself. The cost is paid by the people who take him literally, and he has noticed that they do, because he keeps doing it.
\nThe pursuer is the warmest man in the room until he isn’t. The injury is real to him, the arena is the only one he has, and the pursuit, from “fuck you” to the police report to the wistful observation that he can no longer manage a beating, is in its way a chivalric romance. He is in his seventies, chronically ill, alone with a dog, and increasingly aware of his own weakness. The channel is where he reports his blood sugar to people who do not answer and his rage to a man who answers with scripture. It is, I think, where he is most alive.
\nThe carpet-bomber is the room’s center of gravity and its principal target, and those are not two facts but one. She is partially disabled. She has had a serious illness with lasting consequences and, by her account, a second that nearly killed her. She has buried a parent with dementia and is working up to calling a friend in hospice. She mentions, in passing, in the middle of being told that she must have failed as a mother, that she was raped. She says she has never in her life lived anywhere she felt safe, and declines, politely, to explain. She was also the only person all week to say that calling people pedophiles is beneath contempt, and she said it while being called a nasty woman. She observes that the Channel improves the more cannabis she smokes. I believe her.
\nThe deadpan bigots come in four varieties and share one feature, which is that nothing you say to them lands. Dogwood’s register is the shrug; he has told the room he is on his best behavior so that he can keep using IRC, that he had a breakdown at college, that he gets an injection every month, and, on one afternoon that the readers flagged and I flag again, that he has imagined beating someone with a hammer, that he would be chatting from a psychiatric ward if they let him, and that a famous recent assassination attempt was “a missed opportunity.” Tamarack says he is good at yanking your chain and does nothing else. Burdock combines the week’s most direct threats against a woman with a schoolboy’s deference to the operators (“sorry sir”). Cypress narrates his bus rides and his workplace by the race of the people on them and announces whom he is ignoring, which, since he goes on answering them, is a way of announcing himself. The psychologists who study trolling have a phrase for the reward these men are after: negative social potency, the pleasure of moving other people in a direction they did not choose. It is the only power available in the room, and they have it.
\nThe volatile intellectual is the saddest case and, I suspect, the most self-aware. Larch can write the week’s best paragraph on the sociology of antisemitism at nine in the morning and tell a man to blow the back of his skull out at twenty past. He said that he was “dead serious” in wanting one opponent to kill himself and would not feel bad if he did. He also said that he loves being angry, that he is something of a fascist, that a friend had been taken off life support the day before, that his mother has buried too many relatives in two years, and, at the end of a bad morning, after demanding in capitals that everyone shut up and let him think, that this channel turns everyone into assholes. He is right about that, and he is Exhibit A.
\nThe apologist argues like a man who has read one book about logic and all of another about God. He holds that abortion and homosexuality are objectively immoral and that slavery is not inherently so; he runs a prison ministry; he addresses people by name 266 times a week and is addressed back by name about 15. The moralist is cheerful until a trigger appears and then turns the word “pedophile” into a cudgel for three hours, with a particular taste for using it on men who have mentioned their nurses. The sloganeers have sentences instead of personalities, except that Foxglove, under the slogan, turns out to be perfectly capable of a long and civil argument with Jasmine about primaries, which suggests the slogan is armor rather than skin. The strategist, Sorrel, writes about genocide the way other men write about tax policy, and women, he notes in passing, do not usually decide things on the basis of reason. The conspiracists, Wisteria above all, have one explanation for everything, including the Channel, which Wisteria says was founded as a foreign propaganda operation and whose logs, he adds, are sold to the group in question. Hawthorn’s reply to this, that if it was his job he ought to be getting paid, was the best line of the week and the only one that made the conspiracist pause.
\nThe fantasist is Bryony, the student overseas, who told the room that a world-famous billionaire calls her his wife, that she has sent him a three-figure sum in cryptocurrency and gift cards, that this is real love, and that he has exposed himself to her. The room’s response was to ask whether he was well endowed, to tell her to stop typing (that was an operator) and to speculate about which group home she had come from. Whatever is true about her story, somebody has stolen her money, and nobody in the Channel said so.
\nThe diarists are the old men and women who report their pills, their copays, their hearing, their housework, and their pets to a room that does not answer. They are the Channel’s most regular members and its most alone, and they are the reason the place is not simply a sewer. The management, finally, are the operators and the long-serving regulars whose characteristic contribution is contempt for everyone, including each other. Hawthorn is immensely entertained and, in his own words, to hell with everyone else; Rowan, in a parody he apologized for within ten minutes, declared the whole group retarded; Mulberry reports that not a single idea has been shared in six years. They hold the only formal power in the room, and that is why they don’t use it. A man who used it would have to admit he cared.
\nNobody in the Channel, in six days, said they wanted to die. A good many said they wanted somebody else to. That is the headline, and the small print is worse.
\nBetween them the regulars disclosed two cancers, a period of paralysis, chronic heart, spine, and head injuries from a road accident, diabetes, autism, attention deficit disorder with a stimulant at the maximum dose, benzodiazepines for sleep, a monthly injection, a college breakdown, and in-home nursing. They disclosed daily cannabis, past solitary drinking by the gallon, psychedelics, and decades of tobacco. They were accused of being drunk, by one another, roughly once an hour. They mentioned a friend on a ventilator, a friend in hospice, a father lost to dementia, a father imagined in heaven playing chess, and a sister who is the last of the family. They mentioned doubled copays, a job with no eight-hour day, a bus stop next to a homeless encampment, and a student’s stolen gift cards. One woman disclosed a rape and another a childhood she will not describe, and both did so in the middle of being attacked, because in the Channel there is no other time.
\nAnd every day, 136 times a week, they tell each other to take their meds.
\nOne of them put it better than I can. Before she logs on, Eglantine said one morning, she feels two things: the stress of knowing the place will raise her stress, and the need to vent. “It’s not mentally healthy.” An operator replied that this was the Channel in a nutshell. Another regular called it a madhouse. Everyone concerned was back the next morning, and the morning after that.
\nIt would be easy to leave it there, with a room full of difficult people being difficult, and a good deal of writing about the internet does. But the room explains more than the people do, and the research literature, which is older and better than most people assume, explains the room.
\nStart with where they are. IRC was the conversation layer of the internet when these people learned the internet, and their references, the old Windows clients, Usenet, channels that died in the Clinton administration, bans from rooms nobody else remembers, are the references of people who have been here for twenty-five or thirty years. For them the medium is not retro. It is where they have always talked, and the gerontologists’ finding that older people’s internet use clusters in a few familiar, text-heavy places is simply the Channel described from orbit.
\nWhat they have built there is what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a third place: not home, not work, a bar or a barbershop or a corner café, where conversation is the main activity, the regulars have seats, the newcomer is tolerated on sufferance, and the mood is low-stakes and playful. Oldenburg wrote in 1989 and thought television was killing these places. He did not imagine one would survive in a text window, but the Channel meets his criteria line by line, down to the leveling: a union man, a media professional, a former paralegal, a man who may or may not work in the nuclear industry, and a man who plays piano for his nurses argue as equals, which they would not in any room with chairs. The daily openers, the hugs in parentheses, the brisket, the ballgame scores: that is bar furniture. Several of them call it a tavern.
\nThen there is what the medium does to people, which has been studied for twenty years by people who knew what they were looking at. In 2004 the psychologist John Suler described what he called the online disinhibition effect and listed its ingredients: you can’t be seen, you can’t see them, nobody is in charge, the whole thing feels like a game, and you read every line in your own head in your own voice. Every ingredient is present in the Channel at full strength. Eight years later two Israeli researchers, Noam Lapidot-Lefler and Azy Barak, put people in a lab and varied the ingredients one at a time, and found that the single biggest cause of hostility was the absence of eye contact. IRC has never had eye contact and never will.
\nThen there is the company. The experiment that everyone who writes about trolls should read was run at Stanford and Cornell in 2017 by Justin Cheng and colleagues, who found that two things each raise the odds of an ordinary person trolling: being in a bad mood, and having just watched someone else do it. Together they roughly double the rate. The Channel supplies both, continuously, from six in the morning. You can watch the mechanism work a dozen times a day: a slogan lands, the mood drops, and within ten minutes people who were comparing smokers are wishing each other dead. Social psychologists have a model, the ungainly acronym is SIDE, for what anonymity does inside a group: it does not free you from norms, it binds you tighter to the group’s. The Channel’s norm is contempt. And Cass Sunstein’s law of group polarization, that like-minded people who talk together end up further out than they started, applies here in an unusual form. The Channel is not like-minded about politics. It is unanimous about one thing only, that everyone present is a fool, and that is the proposition on which it has polarized.
\nSome of the people, let us be honest, are also just like that. The literature on who enjoys trolling is consistent across several studies and two continents: the trait that predicts it best is everyday sadism, the pleasure of someone else’s discomfort, with a dose of manipulativeness and a shortage of the kind of empathy that feels rather than calculates. The deadpan chorus and the ironist fit the description to the letter; they know exactly what will hurt, which is why it does. But the same literature insists on the other half of the picture, which the Channel illustrates better than any sample: most of the hostility is reactive, the most prolific user of the room’s worst word is also its most harassed member, and under these conditions, as Cheng’s title put it, anyone can become a troll. Most people in the Channel have.
\nSomething has also gone wrong with the jokes. The linguist William Labov, studying ritual insults among boys in Harlem in the 1960s, noticed that the game only works if the insult is obviously untrue: your mother is so fat is funny precisely because nobody’s mother is that fat. Later researchers found the same thing about teasing between friends: it stays play as long as there is a wink. The Channel’s insults are mostly true. People really are old, ill, poor, alone, and foreign, and the wink is mostly missing. So it is a game in which some players are playing and others are being hurt, and at any moment nobody can be sure which is which. The humor researchers distinguish affiliative humor, which brings people together, from aggressive humor, which does the other thing; the Channel’s is almost entirely the second kind, and it correlates, in the literature as in life, with worse relationships, not better.
\nAnd then there is the management, which is the biggest cause of all, because the simplest explanation for why people do something constantly is that nothing happens when they do. A slur costs a minute. Everything else is free. The operators have said, in the room, that they can’t be bothered, and the members have taken them at their word.
\nOne last thing, which the trolling studies miss because they are about students. Several of the angriest men in the Channel are old, sick, and short of the things that used to earn a man respect, and their fights, every one of them, are about respect: being called a pedophile, being told to grow up, being laughed at by a younger man with a tidier prose style. The pursuit of honor through insult is as old as men with nothing else to pursue it with. A text window in which the audience never leaves and the injury is always on somebody’s record is the perfect place to pursue it and the worst possible place to win.
\nIt would be a cheap ending to call the Channel a pathology, and it would be untrue. It supplies company at hours when its regulars have none. It supplies argument, which several of them plainly relish, and news, and a bot that knows the boiling point of things. It supplies an identity, with a name, to people who may not have many. It supplied, on the fifth morning, in the middle of a brawl, a quarter of an hour in which a man whose friend had just come off a ventilator and a woman who could not face calling the hospice talked to each other about how badly the West handles death, and nobody interrupted them. One member learned there how to manage a relative’s medical equipment. Another was talked through nicotine replacement at three in the morning. The research on retired people and the internet finds that being online is associated with about a third less depression, with the biggest effect for those living alone; the research on loneliness finds it kills at a rate comparable to the things your doctor warns you about. If the Channel keeps a dozen isolated people talking every day, that is not nothing. What nobody has measured is the price of spending every one of those days being told, by people you count as friends, to die.
\nThe fixes are not mysterious. A rule about conduct rather than vocabulary, enforced by operators who are not themselves in the fight, would change the price list overnight; the experimental literature says that watching abuse causes abuse, so less of the first means less of the second. Telling another person to kill themselves should be a bright line, if only because someone in the room now reports it as a daily experience and asks that nothing be done about it. The bot’s alias list should be switched off, or kept for the operators, because it is wrong often and used within seconds to justify attacking the new. The automatic yes vote should go, because a vote one man always wins is not a vote. And the “take your meds” joke deserves the same treatment the operators already give to slurs, for the obvious reason.
\nNone of this will happen, because doing it would require the people with power in the room to admit that they care what happens in it, and the entire ethos of the Channel, from the founder down, is that caring is for the respectable rooms they were thrown out of. The last word belongs, as it usually does, to one of them. Asked whether the place was unhealthy, an operator said that was the Channel in a nutshell. He was still there at midnight.
\nThis piece is drawn from a complete log of the Channel covering just over five days in early October 2026, captured by a chat client connected to the room. The log contained 22,919 lines, of which 19,214 were human messages totaling 185,315 words from 141 nicknames. There is one gap of about six and a half hours on the fifth day; whether the room was silent or the capture failed is unknown.
\nEvery line was read, one day at a time, against a fixed template: a timeline, a profile of everyone with fifteen or more messages that day, every incident of hostility with aggressor, target, and any intervention, group dynamics, topic shares, signs of distress, identity evidence, and verbatim excerpts. Language-model tools assisted that reading under the author’s direction; every quotation and paraphrase that survives here was checked against the raw log by a person. The counts of words, links, addresses, and hostile phrases were made by software over the full corpus, using simple, published word lists rather than anything proprietary, and are floors, not ceilings. Nicknames were resolved to people from nickname changes, client identifiers, masked addresses, account cloaks, and the participants’ own statements, and each resolution is graded above as certain, strong or alleged.
\nThe Channel and its network are not named. Every participant appears under a pseudonym chosen to resemble no real handle; the key is held by the author and will not be published. Alternate nicknames are described, not named. Locations are given by region, ages by band, and medical disclosures are reported in aggregate except where a single generalized disclosure is essential. Distinctive lines are paraphrased, and verbatim quotation is confined to short, generic phrases that could not identify a speaker. Accusations made by one participant against another, including the accusations of pedophilia that run through the week, are reported as accusations and not as facts, and the most serious are described only in general terms. None of this is a substitute for consent, which was not sought and could not practically be obtained; the author has tried to follow the Association of Internet Researchers’ guidance that public availability does not dissolve a person’s reasonable expectations.
\nNothing in this article is a clinical opinion about any person. The vocabulary of traits is borrowed from the alternative model of personality in the DSM-5 and is used descriptively. Where a statement’s sincerity is undecidable, it is flagged.
\nCorrections: errors of fact, attribution, or paraphrase can be sent through the contact page at aaronwells.me and will be corrected with a note recording the change.
\nAmerican Psychiatric Association. (2017). The principles of medical ethics with annotations especially applicable to psychiatry, Section 7.3.
\nAmerican Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.), Section III, alternative model for personality disorders. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
\nBuckels, E. E., Trapnell, P. D., & Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Trolls just want to have fun. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 97–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.016
\nCaplan, S. E. (2003). Preference for online social interaction: A theory of problematic Internet use and psychosocial well-being. Communication Research, 30(6), 625–648. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650203257842
\nCheng, J., Bernstein, M., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., & Leskovec, J. (2017). Anyone can become a troll: Causes of trolling behavior in online discussions. Proceedings of CSCW 2017, 1217–1230. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998213
\nCotten, S. R., Ford, G., Ford, S., & Hale, T. M. (2014). Internet use and depression among retired older adults in the United States: A longitudinal analysis. Journals of Gerontology, Series B, 69(5), 763–771. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbu018
\nCraker, N., & March, E. (2016). The dark side of Facebook: The Dark Tetrad, negative social potency, and trolling behaviours. Personality and Individual Differences, 102, 79–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.06.043
\nDanet, B., Ruedenberg-Wright, L., & Rosenbaum-Tamari, Y. (1997). “Hmmm… where’s that smoke coming from?” Writing, play and performance on Internet Relay Chat. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2(4).
\nDonath, J. S. (1999). Identity and deception in the virtual community. In M. A. Smith & P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in cyberspace (pp. 29–59). Routledge.
\nDouglas, K. M., Sutton, R. M., & Cichocka, A. (2017). The psychology of conspiracy theories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 538–542. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417718261
\nfranzke, a. s., Bechmann, A., Zimmer, M., Ess, C., & the Association of Internet Researchers. (2020). Internet research: Ethical guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf
\nGoffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor.
\nHardaker, C. (2010). Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication. Journal of Politeness Research, 6(2), 215–242. https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2010.011
\nHerring, S. C. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis. In S. A. Barab, R. Kling, & J. H. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 338–376). Cambridge University Press.
\nHolt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352
\nKeltner, D., Capps, L., Kring, A. M., Young, R. C., & Heerey, E. A. (2001). Just teasing: A conceptual analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 229–248. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.127.2.229
\nKumar, S., Cheng, J., Leskovec, J., & Subrahmanian, V. S. (2017). An army of me: Sockpuppets in online discussion communities. Proceedings of WWW 2017, 857–866. https://doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3052677
\nLabov, W. (1972). Rules for ritual insults. In Language in the inner city (pp. 297–353). University of Pennsylvania Press.
\nLapidot-Lefler, N., & Barak, A. (2012). Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye-contact on toxic online disinhibition. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 434–443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.10.014
\nMarch, E. (2019). Psychopathy, sadism, empathy, and the motivation to cause harm: New evidence confirms malevolent nature of the Internet Troll. Personality and Individual Differences, 141, 133–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.01.001
\nMartin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00534-2
\nOldenburg, R. (1989). The great good place. Paragon House.
\nO’Sullivan, P. B., & Flanagin, A. J. (2003). Reconceptualizing “flaming” and other problematic messages. New Media & Society, 5(1), 69–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444803005001908
\nPaolillo, J. C. (1999). The virtual speech community: Social network and language variation on IRC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4(4).
\nReicher, S. D., Spears, R., & Postmes, T. (1995). A social identity model of deindividuation phenomena. European Review of Social Psychology, 6(1), 161–198. https://doi.org/10.1080/14792779443000049
\nReid, E. M. (1991). Electropolis: Communication and community on Internet Relay Chat [Honours thesis, University of Melbourne].
\nSest, N., & March, E. (2017). Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy. Personality and Individual Differences, 119, 69–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.06.038
\nSoukup, C. (2006). Computer-mediated communication as a virtual third place. New Media & Society, 8(3), 421–440.
\nSteinkuehler, C. A., & Williams, D. (2006). Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as “third places.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4), 885–909. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00300.x
\nSuler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321–326. https://doi.org/10.1089/1094931041291295
\nSunstein, C. R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9760.00148
\nTajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.
\nTausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 24–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09351676
\nTosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12075
\nZimmer, M. (2010). “But the data is already public”: On the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12(4), 313–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-010-9227-5
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-11T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T00:00:00-07:00", "image": "https://aaronwells.me/img/notebook/apple-iie-irc-16x9.jpg" } ] }