Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.
The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.
That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.
Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left.
Usually I’m the one arguing that we have to do cost-benefit analysis, that it’s impractical and incoherent to value every life at infinity billion dollars. And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely economic analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs. Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably the right call. Still, I didn’t want to win this hard. People are saying things like “COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how bad things will be.” I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.1
Rather than rescue this with appeals to age or some other variable making these deaths not count, I think we should think of it as a bias, fueled by two things. First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see2. Second, controversy sells. We fight over lockdowns, lab leaks, long COVID, and vaccines, all of which have people arguing both sides, and all of which let us feel superior to our stupid and evil enemies. But there’s no “other side” to 1.2 million deaths. Thinking about them doesn’t let you feel superior to anyone - just really sad.
This is the same point I try to make in my writings on charity. A million lives is a statistic, but some random annoying controversial thing that captures the public interest is alive and salient - it’s easier to remember a story about a charity that turned out to be corrupt, or offensive, or just cringe, compared to the one that saved 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 lives. Even the people who do remember the 10,000 lives have to fight to avoid both-sidesing it - “Well, this charity saved 10,000 lives, but that charity said something cringe on Twitter, so overall it’s kind of a wash”. In the end people average out the whole subject to “Wait, you support charities? But didn’t you hear about that one that turned out to be corrupt? Can’t believe you’d be into something like that.”
I freely admit I don’t know where I’m going with this. If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar. I’m not recommending you do anything differently, just remarking how weird it is that this doesn’t automatically come up more of its own accord.
I’m being weirdly hypocritical or self-contradictory here. If people had known at the beginning that 1.2 million people would have died, they would have proposed policies much stricter than what actually happened - and I think those policies would have been wrong. But in the real world, it’s as if two opposite mistakes cancelled out - one, where people demand we choose lives over any amount of money when they’re explicitly making the comparison, and a second where people never make the comparison because they just sort of ignore any number of real-world deaths.
People might complain about their relatives dying, but I think you’re more likely to get told to “read the room” when complaining that your grandma died at 75 than when complaining that you lost your job or suffered learning loss or something.
DHS is violating a court order to remove a group of detainees to South Sudan, lawyers told a federal judge on Tuesday.
Around one dozen people — including a person with a removal order to Myanmar and a person with a removal order to Vietnam — were loaded onto planes and sent to South Sudan on Tuesday, court filings say. The deportations are either currently in progress or have already taken place, lawyers for the group wrote.
The ruling that DHS is allegedly violating in this case is clear. Last month, U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy for the District of Massachusetts ordered DHS to give individuals set to be removed to a country that is not their own written notice in a language they understand, and to offer them the chance to contest their removal. That included providing the detainees a window of at least 15 days in which they could challenge DHS’ efforts to remove them to a third country.
Attorneys in the case said in Tuesday’s filings that DHS did not do that when it allegedly removed people to South Sudan.
Per one declaration, an ICE official on Monday afternoon emailed an attorney for a man with a removal order to Myanmar. The email told the attorney his client would be removed to South Africa. Ten minutes later, according to the declaration, ICE told the lawyer that it wished to rescind its email. Then, around two hours later, the document says, ICE told the lawyer that his client would in fact be sent to South Sudan.
On Tuesday morning, the lawyer emailed the detention facility where his client had been held. An ICE officer replied that the client had been removed “this morning” to South Sudan.
In another case described in Tuesday’s court filings, lawyers attached an email from the wife of a person with a removal order to Vietnam. Per that account, ICE officials told detainees that they were to be sent to South Africa, before returning to correct themselves and tell the group of their true destination: South Sudan.
“I called my husband’s ICE officer and was told that he’s been ‘booked out’ but the officer didn’t know where he was sent,” the email reads.
Attorneys for the group say that the situation “blatantly defies” earlier court orders. It also comes after the Trump administration tried to remove a group of detainees to Libya in potential violation of the same order in the same case. Per the filing, the man with a removal order to Myanmar had been part of the group that was slated to be removed to Libya before the judge blocked that attempt from succeeding.
The allegations suggest that the Trump administration is taking another opportunity to flout the rule of law. It’s part of a campaign to stage high-profile removals of undocumented migrants, but also to flaunt the power of the executive branch over the last section of government that is still attempting to reign its powers in: the judiciary.
The status of the deportation flights is unclear. In a motion, attorneys ask the judge to bar the government from removing the detainees, and to order their return if they’ve already been sent to South Sudan.
An attempt by DOGE to assign a team to the independent Government Accountability Office was rejected Friday. The GAO is part of the legislative branch and not subject to DOGE's request.
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the growing Gen Z gender divide. Women are becoming more liberal and less religious, while men are becoming more conservative and more religious. Last week, Vox ran an article about this, suggesting that the increased religiosity among young men is a driving factor in their rightward turn.
It’s a theory. I guess. But I’d argue it’s the opposite. Men are becoming more conservative because they’re mad at feminism, and subsequently becoming more religious as a result. Conservatism, for the most part, requires religion and makes very little sense without it. Social conservatism in particular.
The fact is, young men are currently in thrall to a variety of hyper-religious influencers who promise them that religion can make the patriarchy great again. Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Nick Fuentes are trad Caths (Catholics who like to pretend Vatican II never happened), Charlie Kirk and Joel Webbon are Evangelicals, Andrew Tate is Muslim. I’m not sure what flavor of religious Tim Pool is, but he’s previously tweeted that “It should be illegal not to believe in God,” so …
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These influencers are not just making young men more misogynistic or more racist — although they are, Blanche, they are! — they’re also making them more religious.
It’s a thing that’s been going on for years. Many of the men who had initially made a name for themselves as debauched “pick-up artists” started becoming devout religious fundamentalists right around the time women started pushing back against rape culture and feminism started another wave. The more angry men have become about women, the more they’ve turned to men who tell them that God wants them to be in charge of everything and for women to get back in the kitchen.
It’s not rocket science. Nothing makes people more conservative (and thus religious) than having a group of people to hate based on their immutable characteristics.
On the other side of the coin, women — save for those who want to become tradwives themselves — are going to be less interested in a belief system that wants to subjugate them. I’m not saying all religions seek to subjugate women, though it does seem like a fairly common denominator, especially right now.
It’s what I say all of the time: People love you for the way you make them feel about themselves, and they gravitate towards things and people that tell them the story they want to hear about themselves. If you’re a man and you’re feeling bad, and you think things would have been better for you at a time when women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant — which, fair, eliminating competition from half the population would give most people an edge in life — then you’re going to gravitate towards a belief system that tells you it’s the “natural order” for your wife to be subservient to you.
Because it’s really not just that men are becoming more religious in general — they’re not out here becoming Methodists or Episcopalians — they’re specifically gravitating towards fundamentalist churches that espouse a patriarchal view of the world. It’s a view that now allows them to proudly and openly say that they do not think men and women are equal, that they don’t think women should be in the workplace, that they think we should stay home and have babies instead. It’s a lot easier to say abhorrent things if you think God is standing behind you, giving you a big thumbs up.
This is not without precedent. In the 1940s, you had women going to work because of WWII. In the 1950s, you had the rise of evangelicalism and a nationwide cultural push to get them out of there and back to the kitchen.
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, you had the women’s rights movement and the Civil Rights Movement. One minute later, you had born-again Christians realizing that it was God, actually, who needed to ban interracial relationships at Bob Jones University. It’s also when Protestants decided they were anti-abortion, too, whereas it had previously just been “a Catholic” thing. In the 1990s, there was increased acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, Rodney King, a new Black Power movement, and third wave feminism. Then, in the 2000s, you got purity rings and purity balls and people demanding Creationism be taught in schools.
It’s been a while since I read Susan Faludi’s Backlash, but it’s the same idea. It’s just hitting particularly hard this time, due to social media and our lack of a shared popular culture. Part of the reason the fundamentalist nonsense calmed down after a while was because people made fun of it. After all, who wanted to be the Church Lady? But now there’s nothing that everyone watches or listens to, and the Right has been working hard at trying to make its own culture. It has not gone well, obviously, but they’re certainly trying.
How long will this last? Hard to say. Longer than before, probably. I will say that, homophobic as they are, I think the lack of women going along with them might be a problem at some point.
It’s pretty hard to be a patriarch all on your own.
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The point about the increase in religious affiliation among young men going almost exclusively to the more culty/traditionalist sects is certainly interesting. I consider almost all religion to be garbage that's only a force for good occasionally and by coincidence, so I haven't thought too much about it. It makes sense.
Listen to most of D.C.’s elected officials talk, and you’ll hear them describe the old RFK stadium site as a decrepit waste of valuable space. They’re not wrong, necessarily: The 64-year-old stadium on the east end of Capitol Hill hasn’t been used for sports since at least 2017, and it’s largely surrounded by a sea of parking lots.
That’s what makes the 190-acre site a seemingly blank slate for the ambitious $3.7 billion proposal to build a new stadium for the Washington Commanders, alongside a slew of new bars, restaurants, hotels, parks, and homes. But RFK isn’t completely empty: A world-class pole vaulting facility and community skate park are still used every day.
This active community of athletes is now facing an uncertain future, as the parcel of land they sit on could soon be replaced by what would become the stadium’s Plaza District.
Neither are yet in panic mode about any impending evictions, but they are fighting to make sure they’re not left out of the conversation on the future of RFK.
“This is prime real estate. It’s a no-brainer: there’s no way they’re going to let us stay here,” says Edward Luthy, who developed the pole vaulting facility. “But we want to continue saying, ‘Hey, don’t forget, we want a toehold somewhere if we can have it.’”
A pole vaulting paradise
You can be forgiven for not knowing there is a pole vaulting training and competition facility in D.C.; I certainly didn’t until recently. But to simply say it exists is to undersell Luthy’s single-minded effort to create it – and the long list of records, championships, and elite athletes it has produced.
The Michigan native started his own pole vaulting career in high school, continuing it into the military and college. When Luthy, now 52, moved to D.C. in 2008, he started working with local universities to both continue his own training and coach others through the D.C. Vault club he created. In search of more suitable space for the sport, Luthy was connected to Events D.C., the city’s sports and convention authority – and, conveniently enough, the manager of the RFK site.
Some seven years ago, Events D.C. gave him a small site on a stadium parking lot on the corner of East Capitol Street and 22nd Street NE. Even back then Luthy was aware that his new home might not be permanent. “I raised the idea, ‘Well, what about if this space gets redeveloped?” he recalls.
At the time it was a possibility, albeit a distant one. The lease D.C. had with the federal government limited the site’s use to sports and recreation, and initial redevelopment plans floated almost a decade ago envisioned the site as a hub for athletics and outdoor recreation. (Congress has since changed the lease to allow housing and retail.)
So Luthy got to work building out his dream pole vaulting facility in the shadow of RFK, investing more than $100,000 of his own money to buy top-shelf equipment (each pole, and there are dozens, can cost close to $1,000) to create what he says is one of the only stand-alone pole vaulting centers in the country that is certified by World Athletics for national and international competition. (On June 27-28, it is hosting a Pole Vault Championships.)
“I basically designed the facility to handle everything from six-year-olds through Olympic-level athletes,” he says. “We try to make it really engaging for all of them.”
When he’s not working his day job as a cartographer for the D.C. government, Luthy trains athletes from across the region and a wide swath of universities and schools. And when he sees athletes with distinct potential, he says he’ll offer them a free place to stay and work with them as much as is needed. “We’ll train all night if we have to,” he says.
It shows: Luthy says he’s coached three national record holders. And he is always looking for new talent; when I stopped by to chat with him earlier this month, he pointed to Asha, a 12-year-old D.C. student Luthy thinks will “break the world record some day.”
Another point of pride is Ashton McCullers, a 19-year-old who grew up in D.C. and now attends Howard University on a full scholarship – all because of pole vaulting. Yet he found the sport by complete happenstance. McCullers had actually shown up to the skate park next door, but was intrigued by the people nearby using long poles to propel themselves over crossbars 10 feet above the ground.
“I saw them jumping. [Luthy] opened the gates and I walked in here, just stumbling across the line. He was like, ‘You’re a natural,’” he says.
“I just wanted to communicate to the mayor that it’s helping a lot of kids,” he says. “Eddie, he comes out here every day after work and he just busts his ass. Kids will come out here taunting him. He doesn’t care. He’ll let them in, let them jump, try to experience it. He wants the community to try it because he knows it pays for a lot of these kids to go to college.”
Luthy remains optimistic that he will find a new location for the facility if the Commanders deal moves ahead as planned – potentially somewhere else on the site. The proposed plan included an $89 million indoor sports facility alongside existing outdoor sports fields, and he says he’s caught the attention of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office and Ward 7 Councilmember Wendell Felder, who told me he’s supportive of helping move the facility elsewhere.
Through it all, the single-minded determination that Luthy showed in building out the facility is extending into finding space for a new one.
“The reason we were at the [public meeting at Eastern High School] was to make sure we were in front of everyone’s face to remind them we’re here,” Luthy says, “so when the development plans start coming we’re not forgotten.”
One of the city’s few skate parks
Jeremy Stettin grew up skating at Maloof Skate Park, where he now teaches others to do the same. (Martin Austermuhle)
Jeremy Stettin is on a similar mission, trying to ensure that the neighboring Maloof Skate Park also survives in some form if the Commanders stadium and surrounding amenities are built out. (The current plan, if approved by the D.C. Council, would see construction on the stadium and some surrounding parcels start as early as next year, for a 2030 opening to the public.)
Stettin, 24, spent his formative years living near H Street NE and skating at Maloof, the 15,000-square-foot skate park designed by professional skateboarder Geoff Rowley for a skateboarding competition in 2011 and opened to the public the year after. He has since turned it into a side hustle of sorts, teaching skateboarding classes to kids and adults of all ages after he gets done with his day job as a sales engineer.
“I feel very indebted to this park,” he says. “I would be a very different person without it.”
Stettin started hearing rumors of possible redevelopment plans at RFK two years ago, and he attended an early community meeting where nearby residents discussed what could come of the sprawling campus. “I could tell that unless we said something to stand up for the park, they were not going to plan anything with us in mind,” he tells me.
Since then, Stettin has taken it upon himself to become a spokesman-of-sorts for the future of the skate park. It can feel like an uphill battle; skateboarders, he admits, are not the “most civically engaged demographic.”
But he says it’s a deeply important resource for the community.
“It offers a place that is safe,” he says. “You look at the demographics of who typically comes here, many of the regulars are in high school, the exact demographic that the city spends ridiculous amounts of money to reach and do programs for. We have the skate park, and it’s creating a positive environment for people who use it.”
It’s also one of just a handful of skateboarding options in D.C.; there are small parks in Takoma and the Palisades, and a larger one in Shaw. And while Maloof is the largest park available, it’s showing its age and in need of repairs. Its fate also comes amidst other challenges for D.C. skaters, primarily from preliminary plans for the redevelopment of Freedom Plaza – a skateboarding mecca both locally and internationally.
Stettin hopes that city officials can accommodate a new park somewhere else on the RFK campus. At a public meeting in Ward 5 on Wednesday, he asked for a commitment from city officials that they wouldn’t simply demolish the skate park. He didn’t get exactly that, though he did seem to force the issue into conversation.
“I take that to heart,” said Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker. “We don’t want to displace productive uses of the site.”
If not for the skateboarders, says Stettin, then he hopes they’ll agree to that for everyone else’s sake.
“I’ve heard people complain about skating on public property. They do that when they don’t have a skate park to skate at. Your city either has a skate park,” he says. “Or it is a skate park.”
In keeping with my general view that the boring, “normal” aspects of Trump-era governance are under discussed, I wanted to make sure that Slow Boring isn’t sleeping on House Republicans finally rolling out actual legislative text about their reconciliation mega-bill.
There is a ton happening in this legislation — it’s such a mishmash that their acronym for it is BBB, or Big Beautiful Bill — but the tl;dr is that it stinks. Here’s why:
The “official score” of the Ways & Means Committee draft says that it will add $3.8 trillion to national debt, but that goes up to $4.6 trillion if you include the cost of higher interest rates. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that this relies on phase-out gimmicks and the true cost of making all this stuff permanent is $5.3 trillion, which rises to $6.2 trillion when you include interest rate costs.
One of the most profound things I ever heard about politics from an old hand was “all numbers that end in ‘illion’ sound the same to normal people,” so I want to emphasize that we are talking about $6,200,000,000,000 here, which is a very large number.
Right now, 3.7 percent of GDP is dedicated to paying interest on the national debt. That’s not exactly an immediate crisis, but policy makers should be trying to make that number go down rather than up.
The bill contains an expansion of the Child Tax Credit that costs $229.5 billion but is structured so as to provide no benefits for low-income families — including low-income families with working parents and earned income.
While members of the top 10 percent of the income distribution will see a 3 percent boost to their after tax earnings, the bottom 20 percent ends up paying higher taxes, because the cost of Trump’s tariffs is larger than the paltry benefits they get from the tax bill.
That’s not counting the cost of losing Medicaid benefits, the cost of higher interest rates on car payments because of the debt load, or the cost of large cuts to nutrition assistance.
Everyone expected the legislation to substantially repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s spending on various decarbonization initiatives. And, indeed, money for electric cars is gone. Money to subsidize solar and wind production is gone. But they went further than expected and are also offering “a deathknell for advanced nuclear commercialization” and advanced geothermal.
One of the big ways Medicaid cuts are enacted in this legislation is through stringent work requirements with big bureaucratic hurdles. Note that the reason this scores as saving money is that studies indicate that Medicaid work requirements do not induce additional work, people simply end up dropped from the rolls. Mike Johnson keeps characterizing this as a question of “able-bodied young men” getting a swift kick in the ass. But you know and I know and Mike Johnson knows that able-bodied young men don’t go to the doctor. The monetary savings here are coming, almost by definition, at the expense of the people who are consuming health care services.
The center-right Tax Foundation says the new debt incurred by this bill is so large that it will reduce the capital stock and therefore reduce wages and productivity. The upside, in their view, is that by increasing after tax earnings (even though wages and productivity fall), people will work longer hours, so GDP rises. On the other hand, most of the additional production ends up going toward making interest payments to foreigners.
As I said, this is really bad.
When you’re doing pure political position-taking, it’s smart to just say popular stuff. But when you’re actually governing, you need to try to do things that make sense.
But Republicans started with a core idea — fully extend the Tax Cut and Jobs Act — that costs a lot of money. And rather than acknowledge that the 2025 macroeconomic situation is different from 2017, and that means it’s hard to do TCJA extension without difficult tradeoffs, they added in a bunch of expensive, gimmicky Trump campaign promises. Then, they wanted to offset the cost of this extremely expensive commitment while minimizing political blowback. So they came up with a mix of just not offsetting it ($3.8 trillion), using gimmicks and not fully counting correctly (an extra $2.4 trillion), and a vicious attack on programs for poor people.
Some provisions of this legislation (like the EV rollback or limiting Medicaid provider taxes) I would find defensible in the context of a package to reduce the budget deficit. But to partially offset the cost of a regressive tax bill that blows a multi-trillion dollar hole in the deficit, while doing absolutely nothing to address the cost of population aging? It stinks! As I’ve said before, lots of right-of-center people have noticed that Trump is sloppy and ignorant when it comes to trade policy, but they should wake up to the fact that it’s not just trade.
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