patrick.net

@JoyceCarolOates
You're pretty smart. You have to be to be a writer.

If you try, you will understand that Trump was elected to spite you.

Why would anyone want to do that? Think. Feel.

Voters are not stupid or evil.

They're resisting the cruelty and contempt of the woke left.

Dec 25, 2025

You read last week’s essay by Jacob Savage in Compact. It was an aching lament, which allowed its readers to feel a pang of injustice, maybe for the first time. It wouldn’t have made a ripple as a polemic. But once you’ve realized that injustice took place, what to do about it? John Carter wants you to get good and angry, and sue every organization who participated into oblivion.

"Once again class action lawsuits and DOJ investigations are an obvious strategy. Proving discrimination in the case of any individual applicant is usually impossible, but demonstrating systemic discrimination should be very easy at the statistical level. Did a corporation have a DEI policy? Did white men comprise an obviously tiny fraction of new hires during the Cancelled Years? OK then, the organization is guilty of illegal discrimination, and we are now fining you one googolplex dollars; since you can’t pay that, your assets now belong to the plaintiffs, and everyone who works at your company is out of a job."

The low overhead and parasocial branding of podcasts makes them resistant to any conventional institutionalization. A TV or radio program might change hosts over the years, but podcasts are largely inseparable from the personalities of the podcasters. The People’s Policy Project isn’t a podcast, but it’s funded via a podcast platform. (Bruenig also has a successful podcast with his wife Liz1.) Current Affairs looks more like a conventional magazine, but as the 2021 blow-up showed, Robinson maintains outsized personal control over the organization, and as anyone who peruses the site knows, his lengthy blog-like screeds regularly grace its pages.

In one sense, the success of these enterprises supports Robinson’s assertion that “white men are doing fine.” People like him, Matt Bruenig, Will Menaker, Matt Christman, and Brace Belden are all evidently thriving—finding audiences and making money. But, in light of Savage’s argument, it does seem notable not only that they are all thriving outside of mainstream legacy institutions, but also that their projects have all avoided institutionalization—an imperative Robinson made explicit when he reasserted his personal ownership over Current Affairs. Because this seems to be how—as brash, assertive, opinionated white males—they avoided becoming casualties of the identitarian pressures that overtook elite professions in the 2010s.