You Cannot Be Serious

1. You Cannot Be Serious

“You are not serious people.” One of the greatest lines from Succession could easily be applied to Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Pentagon. But here’s the rub. America’s most unserious people are systematically sidelining its most serious assets. One such example from the NYT (Gift Article): Hegseth Closes Pentagon Office Focused on Future Wars. It’s called the Office of Net Assessment and it’s populated by some of the best and smartest people in the country working on plans to protect us and our children from worst case scenarios. Many of them have turned down seven figure salaries in the private sector out of a sense of sacrifice and duty. Like so many of the public servants being reassigned or canned willy-nilly by those often ignorant of what they even do, they deserve our admiration, not the politically-motivated wrath of unserious people.

+ How unserious? “Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website, part of a broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its online presence.” You can delete information from websites, but you can’t delete the real threats facing the country. And I’m dead serious when I say we’re a little less safe today.

2. Chuck Roast

When a sports team fails, players are cut and coaches are fired. The same doesn’t go for political parties. Instead, the pent-up frustration just keeps penting. And right now, the pent is too damn high as Democrats are eating their own over the decision whether or not to support a GOP bill to avert a government shutdown. The choices are both pretty bad: Shut down the government or acquiesce to an administration that seems hell bent on deleting it. As Cory Booker explained, “We are in a perverse, bizarro land where we’re having to decide between letting Donald Trump wreck the government this way or wreck the government that way.” Chuck Schumer has opted to wreck it by voting to support the GOP stopgap spending bill. The decision has set off something of a generational war between younger and older Dem leaders. NYT (Gift Article): Young Democrats’ Anger Boils Over as Schumer Retreats on Shutdown. “Younger Democrats are chafing at and increasingly complaining about what they see as the feebleness of the old guard’s efforts to push back against President Trump. They are second-guessing how the party’s leaders — like Mr. Schumer, who brandishes his flip phone as a point of pride — are communicating their message in the TikTok era, as Republicans dominate the digital town square. And they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming. In other words, the younger generation is done with deference.” (Mos def.) The divide, it’s worth noting, is not entirely generational. Nancy Pelosi has split with Schumer: “Let’s be clear: neither is a good option for the American people. But this false choice that some are buying instead of fighting is unacceptable.”

+ This headline is unlikely to cool the Chuck roast. Trump praises Schumer’s “courage” in backing spending bill. Here’s the latest on the Senate vote on bill to avert government shutdown ahead of midnight deadline.

3. Gov Will Keep Us Together

Some listeners may have been a tad dubious when Trump proclaimed that the theme of his inaugural speech would be unity. But give credit where credit is due: Our allies are ushering a period of extreme unity. It just doesn’t include us. WaPo (Gift Article): Trump is pushing Canada and Europe closer together. Sadly, unity is not the only thing our (former?) allies might be unifying around. FP: An Unreliable America Means More Countries Want the Bomb. “For the last eight decades, the United States has served as a security guarantor to many countries in both Europe and Asia. Trump insists that Washington has received the short end of the stick from these arrangements, since it was the U.S. nuclear arsenal that served as the ultimate deterrent in defense of the United States’ allies. The massive upside of U.S. security guarantees, however, including for Americans, has been the astonishing containment of nuclear proliferation elsewhere.” (Not what we had in mind when conservatives promised a focus on the nuclear family.)

+ In the great journalistic spirit of both-sidesism, let’s not ignore the unity when it comes to spirits. AP: Trump’s tariff wars forge rare bipartisan alliance in Kentucky as bourbon makers fear escalation.

Get the NextDraft App or Newsletter Here

4. Weekend Whats

What to Watch: Let’s celebrate our Canadian neighbors and watch Shoresy on Hulu. There are four seasons of this spinoff from a show called Letterkenny that features our hero, Shoresy, who joins the Sudbury Bulldogs of the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization (aka The NOSHO) on a quest to never lose again. It’s not necessarily for everyone. You have to be able to “set the tone.” You’ll quickly know whether it’s your kind of thing. Drop the gloves and find out.

+ What to Pod: These days, I like to hear Michelle Obama’s voice more than ever. Luckily, she has a new podcast with her brother. And a bonus, Issa Rae is their first guest. Check out, IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.

+ What to Book: “The novel explores the global financial crisis, through the eyes of a business reporter turned poet.” It probably goes without saying that there’s also a lot of marijuana involved. Jess Walter: The Financial Lives of Poets.

5. Extra, Extra

Good Old College Trial: “More than 50 universities are being investigated for alleged racial discrimination as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs that his officials say exclude white and Asian American students.” (It’s important to note that this, like the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, is about a broader attack on universities specifically, and expertise in general, and an attempt to silence critics. It’s not about wokeism. It’s about putting a sleep-hold on institutions. That’s why this is part of the same story. The Atlantic (Gift Article): The NIH’s Grant Terminations Are ‘Utter and Complete Chaos.’)

+ Not Buying It: “Consumer sentiment in the U.S. sank this month, as worries intensify over what the tariffs, government layoffs, funding cuts and immigration restrictions that President Trump has introduced might mean for the economy.”

+ Doge-matic: “Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI.” No one is covering this story better than Wired: Inside Elon Musk’s Digital Coup.

+ Dark Tank: In today’s episode of How Corrupt? … This Corrupt!, we present this from the WSJ (Gift Article): Trump Family Has Held Deal Talks With Binance Following Crypto Exchange’s Guilty Plea. “Representatives of President Trump’s family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would put Trump in business with the firm that pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering requirements.”

+ Read in the Original English: “In an effort to put his ‘America first’ stamp on the nation’s speech, US President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order making English the country’s official language. It marks the first time in the US’s nearly 250-year history that the nation has had an official language. Yet, on this small 9.6-square-mile island surrounded by the swirling waters of the Atlantic, residents still speak what is arguably the most English version of English in the country – and many Americans don’t understand it.” The US island that speaks Elizabethan English.

+ Trim Job: “Tesla Cybertruck deliveries reportedly on hold because the trim is flying off.” (No biggie. Cybertruck owners are used to not getting any trim.)

6. Feel Good Friday

Happy Pi Day. As we do every year, we’ll celebrate by watching my wife recite the first 314 digits of Pi while taking shots of tequila. (Akira Haraguchi once recited 100,000 digits of Pi in Tokyo, but he was sober, so it didn’t count.) BTW, just so you don’t think stupid politics is anything new: Indiana’s House of Representatives Once Voted Unanimously to Change the Value of Pi.

+ Looking for a reason to believe. Ted Lasso is coming back for a Season 4 on AppleTV (hopefully he can explain what’s going on in Severance), and Spinal Tap 2 will be released in September.

+ Warriors’ Stephen Curry reaches 4,000 career 3-pointers. (I missed the 4,000th because I had to pick up my daughter at the mall. But luckily, I caught the first 3999.)

+ Brilliant young minds honored in prestigious science competition.

+ California Woman is Reunited with Beloved Cat 2 Months after Wildfire Destroyed Home.

+ Patients with long Covid regain sense of smell and taste with pioneering surgery.

+ Vice President Vance gets booed at the Kennedy Center.