Most of what has been written about the now-departing Keir Starmer goes something like this: Keir Starmer was a good and decent man in a job where goodness is seen as weakness and decency as fecklessness. In a more enlightened time, with a political environment that favored legislative results over ideological rigidity, a man like Keir Starmer would flourish. Now, as the thinking goes, Starmer was out of his element. His stubborn refusal to play the games of modern politics meant his leadership—and, by extension, Labour itself—were trampled by the right-wing rage machine of Nigel Farage and his insurgent Reform UK. Now, as Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham trained south to London, Keir Starmer had lost. A tragic hero beset by his own dignity and humility. Or so it goes.

If this narrative reminds you of a certain geriatric American president, you would not be alone. Like Keir Starmer, Joe Biden’s eventual resignation as the Democratic Party’s nominee prompted breathless coverage from the commentariat about how earnestly decent the head of America’s liberal party was. Ignored in these political obituaries was the obvious fact that Joe Biden, like Keir Starmer, had not come to the decision to resign independently or proactively. Both Biden and Starmer buried their heads in the sand in an attempt to drown out the noise from the voters who elected them and the representatives who served them. Only after every ally had defected would these two ostensibly decent men put down their swords and surrender to what had been a political certainty months before.

The real tragedy in the fall of Prime Minister Starmer and President Biden was never that two men faced the consequences of their incessant selfishness. That is politics in a democracy. It is that the world’s foremost liberal parties have become so broken and brittle that men like Joe Biden and Keir Starmer are able to hang on to power for so long at all. That political movements that fought and bled for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised now cower in the face of a far right that aims to maim liberalism. That, most of all, we have confused humility with a hunger for power and decency with a denial that the left can do big things again.

Those of you who pay attention to UK politics will remember what is now seen as the beginning of the end for Keir Starmer’s tenure: the winter fuel allowance debacle. Shortly after entering office in July 2024, Starmer’s office would announce that the stipend seniors in the UK received to help with heating costs would be restricted to pensioners who received other welfare benefits. In other words, the allowance would be sent to those who needed it and withheld from those who did not. To Starmer, this was the exact move that voters had wanted out of Labour—a way to shrink the budget deficit with a scalpel instead of a hatchet. To the public, it was a betrayal of the most vulnerable and a backstabbing of Labour’s message coming into the election.

Starmer would burn enormous political capital only to end up walking back most of the allowance cuts. Even the original reduction would only save roughly 450 million pounds a year—roughly 2% of the deficit Starmer aimed to close. It was the type of political disaster that made Starmer’s reputation as an ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary position strangely stronger. A normal politician—the slimy, vote-for-my-bill-favor-for-your-friend type—would never make such a silly mistake! Right? What else could explain Starmer’s aimless leadership other than a bedrock morality that expected too much of the general public? You will notice that the onus of responsibility in this narrative is not on the esteemed and educated public servant but instead on the lowly, primitive voter.

This is the same line of thinking that allows our liberal parties to become insulated pockets of individuals in pursuit of power. It is what has led both Labour and the Democratic Party to treat winning elections as the end and not the beginning. This is wrong, destructive, and why the populist right is so successful. Behind our veneer of equality, the public can see plainly that our liberal parties have become engines of professional development for a select few. Men like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, for all their innumerable faults and moral depravities, lead parties that bring the rage of their base into their politics. Our liberal wings can do this too, and we must.

Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is not Kamala Harris. Burnham is a proven winner and proficient communicator—someone who can still bring the change Labour promised. Burnham also has the benefit of time, with years to go until he is forced to call an election. If Burnham is willing to be the stalwart of the common man and his common values, he can and will succeed. As threatening as the far-right nativist politics of Nigel Farage are, they are not without baggage. Chiefly, Reform is inexorably tied to Farage and, by extension, beholden to the public opinion of a man with more than a few skeletons in the closet. Take the most recent example of Farage’s undisclosed five-million-pound gift given shortly before he joined Parliament—a scandal that threatens to diminish Reform’s steady rise in general election polling.

It would be a mistake to view Farage’s financial impropriety as a unique aspect of his career or party. Corruption is ingrained into the far-right populist politics of the moment, as our current president shows every day. Here again is where our moribund liberal parties cannot rise to the occasion if we continue to say little and stand for even less. Voters can see that the corruption Farage and Trump engage in—while hideous—is not all that different from Senator X trading stocks or Representative Y voting for a bill that their corporate backer wants passed. That is corruption too.

Too much of the infighting in the liberal wings of our parties is on policies and not principles. Principles come before policies, and we must place a greater emphasis on why you are coming to the decisions you come to rather than what those decisions are. Pundits call this authenticity, but I call this being a human being. It’s why a prison-rejecting, border-denying, interracial-marriage-questioning candidate just beat the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in New York. As insane as that ideology may be—and it is, to be clear, insane—you have to give voters a better option than the political equivalent of a 2004 Honda Pilot with a new paint job and one of those insertable Bluetooth radio plug-ins.

I am sure that Keir Starmer is a devoted husband and stand-up father. I do sympathize with the idea that Starmer was a victim, and not a perpetrator, in his political downfall. Maybe if I had not grown up in the era of Donald Trump and his repugnant and repulsive rhetoric, I would be able to understand the sympathy afforded to Starmer more deeply. Maybe.

What I do understand is that we are in a time of profound danger—for our world, our country, and our party. The more we in the center reject the demands of our voters and deflect the expectations of the country, the more we will lose power and shrink in relevance. Let us shed ourselves of quips about how we are the “Party of Manchin to Mamdani” or the belief that voters don’t actually care about ideology. Let us revel in this current political moment such that when we go to bat for healthcare, for conservation, and for an end to war in all its forms, we are as forceful as we are fearless. Then, and only then, will we rise victorious in this fight over the future.

There are a thousand different rules and red flags one can set in the days between a relationship—drawn from the myriad reflections about why that last relationship failed or fell short. It’s certainly true that by living through a relationship we learn just a little bit more about what we are, and are not, okay with. Take ambition, for instance. Ambition is the combination of countless traits that make someone willing to undergo personal pain for professional gain. Someone is not so much ambitious as they are tenacious, confident, and urgent in a way that is substantively different from someone who tries hard or thinks highly of themselves. Ambition is as much a highly rewarded trait in dating as it is in the workplace because it serves as a signifier for these traits we search for in a partner. After all, who doesn’t want a partner that works hard?

As it turns out, all of that hard work comes at a cost. Every extra hour spent working late nights is an hour not spent raising children, washing dishes, or going on dates. There is a cost—a price you can only feel by living under its weight over the span of a relationship. Whether such a cost is worth it is a question only you can answer, but the question itself is posed in a new and much more concrete way. No longer is ambition a synonym for a stoic success where you holiday in Switzerland and own a summer home in the Hamptons. Instead, it’s 12:03 A.M. and you awaken to your partner sitting at the dinner table, shoulders slouched and back hunched over their MacBook, responding to an urgent Slack message in your cramped one-bedroom apartment.

Sacrifice is a part of every relationship, and ambition is far from unique in its ability to take what we thought we wanted and turn it into a lesson for what we no longer wish for at all. Just as 'ambition' is a placeholder for a hundred smaller traits, a relationship is the sum of a hundred tiny actions of giving and taking. It is when you get that feeling in your stomach that you have done far more giving and a lot less taking that we must stop and reflect on the origin of this discontent.

For this, let’s return to the case study of our ambitious partner. For some, the late nights are a trade-off worthy of sacrifice. Even when we wish our partner would come back to bed, we are at peace with the reality that this is the life they have chosen, and it is the relationship we have entered. For others, though, what felt impressive and attractive at first becomes destructive and difficult in practice. A feeling emerges watching our partner work that something is amiss—that the MacBook screen is magnetizing to them in a way it is not for us. This is where we must be willing to interrogate our introspective self.

Such an interrogation is difficult precisely because it carries the weight of real life in an undeniable fashion. To pursue that pit in the stomach—to treat it as a feeling as real as any other—is to tacitly accept uncomfortable conversations, both with yourself and, potentially, with your partner. This is the type of work that all of our confidently stated “I would never date someone who does X” or “Y is always a red flag” convictions falter under. It is the work of creating standards—a real and firm view of what we want from a partner built on a messy and sometimes contradictory trust of ourselves. After all, this is not a courtroom and we have not sworn an oath of dating. We are not obligated to turn that feeling of neurons saying “this is not for us” into some perfectly spun story of us giving too much and taking too little.

This is where indecision curdles into something worse. The only cruelty one can inflict in courtship is lying—and a decision endlessly deferred becomes its own lie, whether by omission or on purpose. Our partners are always owed a basic level of truthfulness and decency befitting anyone we care for and about. We may very well be conflicted in our feelings towards a significant other—trapped between what we like about them as people and disdain in them as partners—and such indecision is certainly not to be deliberated for the sake of deliberating. Indecision, however, is different from inaction. It is one thing to question our feelings on a partner or how what we thought we valued yesterday is no longer wanted today. It is another to purposefully push away the premise of a question that is either going to be answered swiftly and with dignity now or with bitter feelings and broken hearts later.

Inaction can only come about if we are comfortable enough living without any real knowledge of ourselves or care for our future. It is far harder to stay in a relationship we know does not suit us if we trust our own ability to discern what is good and proper for our own lives. Standards provide this baseline by virtue of our complete ownership of them. Regulating a relationship through online discussions of what-ifs and if-thens is, in this light, an exercise in failure of the self. It is the belief that we are not enough to determine what is enough for us. It is why that MacBook screen is everything wrong with modernity with one partner and the worthy struggle of a striver in another.

Since the days of Nixon, the right has aimed to paint American cities as war-torn ruins with nothing but dangerous disorder. Through this story, they aim to show the nation how, even with complete political control, Democrats are soft on safety and weak on crime. Those who live in our great cities know this to be false—that, by and large, our cities are safe and secure. We know, too, that those who perpetuate this narrative do not care about statistics and will not listen to our experiences. That, of course, is because their aim is not to promote policy recommendations or sway city leadership but to demonize the diversity that our urban areas so proudly hold. They want to tell Americans that it is impossible for those of different backgrounds and countries of birth to live, love, and work in one place. We know this not to be true.

We also know, though, that our cities have more work to do—and that we should not deny the real safety concerns that exist for working people. Even as violent crime has fallen steeply over the last two decades, our urban areas have become encumbered by the rise of homelessness and, by extension, public drug use and unpredictable mentally ill individuals. Americans in cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York have become accustomed to needles on the sidewalk and tents in parks. This is wrong, both for those sleeping on the street and those who briskly walk by. We can do more to make our cities not only look safe on graphs but feel safe on the streets, and we should.

To do this requires first acknowledging that this problem is both real and solvable. The Democratic Party cannot talk about prioritizing working people without protecting working people’s safety. Those without the fortune of Uber or a personal vehicle—the working people who make Sweetgreen bowls and vacuum office floors—are the ones who face the consequences of our inability to act. They are the ones taking the early-morning commuter trains into the city—the time when ridership is lowest and the number of individuals sleeping in cars is highest. Over 45% of subway riders in New York City said they felt safe on trains or in stations. Riders specifically identified quality-of-life problems and erratic behavior as major issues. This should be enough to show us that a few more social workers or another safe injection site is not the right way forward, practically or politically.

It is also, critically, not the right way forward for those who sleep or scream on these cars or on our streets. It is reprehensible to think that this is the best we can do as Americans for our fellow Americans. It is ridiculous to think that we are faced with either making homelessness a crime or losing our parks and playgrounds. We are not. Put simply, we should work to show the rest of America that in our best and biggest cities, we care enough to get you the help you need when you need it, and we are strong enough to prosecute crimes you commit if you commit them. You cannot have one without the other.

The working relationship between highly taxed areas and their taxpayers relies on a fundamental agreement that we pay more to get more: more parks, more services, and more safety. That relationship is breaking down, and it should be the first priority of Democratic leadership at the city, state, and federal levels to restore this balance. In practice, that means, before anything else, working to ensure an end to fare evasion. Fare evasion is the ultimate representation of how our rhetoric is not meeting reality—crippling our transit agencies and destroying a common sense of safety.

In New York, nearly one in ten subway riders were fare evaders, as were nearly half of all bus riders. Those stats are roughly the same across our major metro areas, like San Francisco’s BART and Boston’s MBTA. All three agencies are facing budgetary strains from lower post-pandemic ridership and higher fare evasion. Eliminating fare evasion will not eliminate the chance of dangerous or disorderly conduct on public transit, but it will help stop a small few from doing large damage. The MTA’s Blue-Ribbon Panel report, produced by an expert group created in 2022 to study fare and toll evasion across New York’s transit system, found that fare-evasion stops led to the recovery of loaded firearms and other dangerous weapons. The report also found that, even as a majority of fare evaders were not a threat, a meaningful minority of fare-evasion stops became criminal summonses.

Stopping fare evasion is not stopping the poorest from safely using public transportation. Indeed, it is poor working people in our cities who would benefit most from these individuals not stepping foot on transit at all. Safer public transit also means more full-fare riders who can help supplement reduced and eliminated fares for those who cannot pay. The world’s safest and most successful large transit systems generally do not operate as fare-free, enforcement-free spaces. After all, if it is good enough for Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands, it should be good enough for us.

Of course, a tattered American social safety net poses unique challenges that will demand specific solutions. Hiding poverty on our streets does not erase its strain on our nation’s beating heart—but that does not mean the status quo can continue. Those falling charts I wrote of earlier are only part of the story. Anyone who has visited or lived in a city knows what I am referencing: a man screaming outside a CVS, smoking inside public transportation, or following you for multiple blocks. These are not incidents serious enough to justify filing a police report or notifying authorities, but they do materially affect your view of what is and is not safe on our streets. This is why our cities can simultaneously be safer than at any point in our nation’s history while still feeling not safe enough.

To fix this, we should encourage city leaders to create a specialized municipal court track for repeat public-order violations. By empowering police and transit officers to issue civil-criminal summonses for things like public drug use, obstruction, trespassing, aggressive harassment, and more, we can rapidly expedite the ability to get unwell individuals the help they deserve. Critically, we must ensure that failure to appear for a summons does not mean a failure to receive consequences. Those who receive further public-order violations and whose records show a habit of missing court dates should receive the same treatment as anyone else: jail time.

By ensuring our sticks are as effective as our carrots, we can raise public willingness to help the vast majority of homeless people who are not violent or psychotic. Indeed, by going after this dangerous minority with convicted compassion, we can ensure not only the safety of the general public but also that of other homeless individuals who are otherwise most at risk. This is, to be clear, not a punishment for poverty. Indeed, our current system of letting men and women rot in the street is the real punishment. It is inhumane and incomprehensible to suggest that, in the wealthiest clusters of the wealthiest nation on Earth, the best we can do is provide “safe injection sites.” That is surrender, and it is wrong.

To this end, states must work to expand assisted outpatient treatment, psychiatric conservatorship, and civil commitment for people who repeatedly cycle through emergency rooms, jails, transit systems, and encampments. State legislatures should ensure this commitment has clear standards for behavioral incapacity, like repeated psychiatric holds, repeated arrests or summonses, repeated overdose reversals, inability to maintain basic safety, or persistent refusal of care while deteriorating. If someone repeatedly refuses outpatient treatment and meets a high clinical threshold, the court should be able to order a higher level of care via locked psychiatric treatment, mandatory medication review, residential dual-diagnosis treatment, or conservatorship. We will, of course, need to ensure that due process, periodic review, and independent medical evaluation all happen swiftly and sanely.

This approach is not without evidence. Proactive assisted outpatient treatment has been linked to substantial reductions in inpatient psychiatric hospitalization and hospital days. We also have reason to believe that this proactive approach leads to large reductions in arrests and jail days for participants. This is especially true of status quo responses like safe injection sites, which do not answer the public-order concerns created when visible drug use expands as narcotics enforcement is reduced.

Speaking of the status quo, we must be willing to recognize the practical and political failures of pure Housing First policies. Housing First policies have, undoubtedly, presented some successes in improving housing stability compared to usual services. But their benefits do not outweigh the practical and political implications of suggesting that there is public appetite to help those who repeatedly refuse treatment while continuing to endanger themselves or others. By instituting basic, common-sense mandates for housing options in conjunction with an expansion of said housing options and related treatment opportunities, we can ensure that compassionate conviction is realized on our streets.

We should begin by building a housing assistance program that encourages behavioral and lifestyle improvements and has no tolerance for violence or disorder. To do this, state and city governments should work together to create a tiered Recovery and Order First system.

The first and most basic tier, immediate shelter and navigation beds, should be open to anyone who will accept basic rules. Those rules must make clear that violence, open drug use or drug dealing, carrying weapons, and threatening staff are unacceptable to social service staff and the vast majority of homeless people who want a safe place to sleep. The second tier should include mandatory detox, medication-assisted treatment, psychiatric stabilization, or residential treatment for those who are homeless as a result of addiction or serious mental illness. The third and fourth tiers should incorporate existing infrastructure like halfway houses or supervised recovery housing with built-in guardrails like treatment compliance and work requirements.

One single paragraph cannot encapsulate what would be a lengthy process of legislation that can account for outliers and exceptions. If the goal of Housing First is to give those most disadvantaged in our communities a place to recover safely and securely, then a tiered system like the one above, or one like it, should be just as effective. We should want all of those on our streets to be in housing as soon as possible—and with a more balanced approach, this goal need not be a fantasy. We should also acknowledge the political goodwill we are sacrificing for a fraction of homeless individuals who refuse treatment in exchange for housing. In order to get working people to buy into yet another social investment in a problem that, in their eyes, has only gotten bigger as investments have grown, we must give them new ideas with fresh solutions.

It would be a mistake to look at these solutions through an ideological lens. It is neither moderate nor progressive to want our cities to be safe and our poor protected. The prophets of urban collapse have been wrong for decades. They were wrong when they said integration would destroy our cities. They were wrong when they said immigrants would make civic life impossible. They are wrong now when they say diversity and disorder are the same thing. We do not need, nor do we want, their hateful division that ignores the mechanisms of poverty and sees the poor as a nuisance to be swept away. We will prove to them, as we have for the last six decades, that our cities will not bow or break to their rhetoric—and that the places built by working people will once again work for those who live in them.

In writing about oneself, one is pulled between two tensions. The first is rooted in the self—fueled by the euphoric pleasure of talking about our own opinions and experiences. As much as we may find our insights from our last relationship to be so obviously fascinating, the audience needs more. Which brings us to the second constraint, a need to find universal feelings in individual experiences. After all, we aren’t writing a diary entry. There has to be some root cause—some novel mix of feelings and thoughts—that invites readers to take what we have learned and apply it to themselves.

Staying balanced on this trapeze of prose is a difficult task that demands both concentration and conviction. Any hesitation or slip-up, and an author falls into the abyss of boring writing, never to return. They write essay after essay attempting to turn the mundane into the magnificent—about how they realized strangers have lives after people-watching at a cafe window. We have all, at some point, read a piece on Substack that leaves you with the unshakable feeling that the word “dichotomy” was not, in fact, the natural way to describe how the black coffee sat still in the mug. Its pervasiveness on this platform only confirms how alluring it is to play dress-up with your prose.

I say this all because, over the last few months, I’ve had to write, rewrite, and write anew an enormous number of college transfer essays. These essays are more an exercise in academic sadism than any real attempt at understanding an applicant better. You’re given five hundred words to convince someone you’ve never met, at a school you’ve never gone to, about a future you cannot predict. You end up writing sentences about how “ecstatic” you are to enroll in “POLS384: Industrial Steelwork in Yugoslavia.” Needless to say, it can get very boring.

There is nothing I hate more than boring writing. Boring writing is a scourge because it has no common trait. Boring writing can be cloaked in verbosity or stripped down to functionality. It can be found in a play just as easily as it can be in a paper. You can read an author and immediately feel the hour they spent before publishing dressing up every sentence with words they’ve never said out loud but thought would look good on paper. Or, just as easily, you can read a piece and be left astounded at how a human being could write with such lifelessness—how no secret is left hidden or feeling left implied.

Boring writing loves to fester in the constricted. It’s why when we log onto LinkedIn we suddenly become infected with the prose of a lobotomized robot. It makes sense, though. I think good writing—that being interesting writing—is found in a certain openness. An openness that, by definition, requires us to be able to write without a word count or the looming fear our boss may see that we are not solely focused on turning raw data into actionable insights.

You can understand why these colleges have prompts and word counts. Harvard will get over 1500 applications this year with fewer than a dozen seats to fill. If every student is writing five thousand word soliloquies about how joining the tennis team made them want to study accounting, there would be no way to evaluate every applicant. So, bad writing prevails out of a certain pragmatism—a conscious choice that we would rather have a human look at five hundred words than a large language model scan through five thousand.

But bad writing also emerges out of an understanding—one that every college brochure about “holistic admissions” loves to advertise—that there is some undeniable quality about us that makes these small odds not so small. It’s easier for our brains to imagine ourselves sitting in one of the twelve seats Harvard offers than swimming in the vast ocean of polite rejections. One seat! Can it be that hard? Could it not be you? Is it so hard to imagine that in those smoke-filled admissions meetings in Cambridge that your file, your essays, and your story make it out? Surely not!

In these hopes we find ourselves, once again, on the trapeze. At the other end is that recognition—that verification from the outside world that we are all we thought we were—and below us, a fall into the void of rejection. You are told by those who love and care about you that to even walk on the trapeze is admirable—that even in that void you will find meaning and success. They remind you that to reach the other end, no matter how great, is ultimately not up to you. If you’re anything like me you nod your head and smile, accepting their logic on its face while still deep down believing that falling is not how your story ends.

On my nightstand is my favorite page from my favorite book, Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes. Out of all the men profiled in the book, the sections on a young Joe Biden always stood out to me. There was some quality of Biden at this age that I felt connected to in a way that the other men, no matter how successful or ambitious, failed to. The way Biden, even as a kid, had an ability to look into the future—a future that, even then, he knew ended in the Oval Office—and use it as fuel. The way that underneath a very real sense of public service and familial pride lay an anger that the world worked in ways nobody wanted to admit. The way his resentment of rejection mixed with the hunger for vindication to create a man who kept at it.

I want to tell you that, over these months of waiting for a response, I have kept this frame close as a reminder that I, and only I, will be the one who determines where I end up. We all love a story of an underdog who proves that falling off that trapeze is not the end—that agency and intellect are really all you need. The reality, as much as it pains me to admit, is not as glamorous. Deep down, I know that no matter how hard I work and how much I succeed, I will never not be a little bitter. I will always wish that Harvard, Yale, and all the other selective and secretive schools had seen what I see in myself—that I could swim in the River of Power. That, if I were to be honest, is why I wake up to page 501 each and every morning.

Maybe this contradiction is why those admissions essays feel so lifeless—why those pieces about the self come off so stiff. Instead of thinking about how scary and hopeless the void below is, you focus on putting one foot in front of another. As long as you are walking and not falling, you can keep believing that you will reach the other end. Until you don’t, and what looked from above like the safest path becomes so obviously flawed from below. Only then can you see that what was needed was not careful choreography but courage. Courage to say that you really do want to be seen, celebrated, and vindicated.

I do not know how to code. Coding is a task that always seemed shelved away for the summer, when my schedule would free up and I could dedicate myself to hours of Python tutorials on YouTube. Then, summer would come and go, and my coding knowledge would still begin and end at the “Hour of Code” events we would have in elementary school. This was, I think, due to a very simple problem that reaches out far beyond just coding: what I wanted to do could never overcome how long it would take me to learn the skills to do it. Every fun website or cool piece of software lay on top of what would be not just one summer, but many summers of Python practice in my room. So, the ideas stayed ideas—things I would do when I had the money to pay a team of coders and the time to see it through until the end.

This is where I want to tell you about the first time I used a large language model—colloquially known as AI—to code something. My writer brain wants so badly to point to this exact date at this specific time when I sat down at my MacBook, and by pure happenstance saw an ad for ChatGPT—that I spent all night making those spunky websites and cool apps I daydreamed about as a kid. The thing is, I can’t remember the first time I used AI to code me something. I don’t even recall the first time I used it at all. It seems as if Claude1 and ChatGPT entered my life and rooted themselves in my MacBook hotbar with no intention to leave.

I say this because, whether you view this technology as the end of human usefulness or the beginning of a world free of cancers and carnage, our role as the general public is that of an audience. We are the ones who watch Sam Altman muse about the billions he will make before the apocalypse he will bring about. Even the apologetic and ever-concerned Dario Amodei still can’t seem to stop himself from quoting whatever multiple of white-collar jobs he has decided will be destroyed. The lack of agency that any of us have over how and where this technology is integrated, and by extension the jobs it will create and many more it will destroy, makes for an understandable anxiety. It’s a unique type of anxiety too—the sense that every time Claude makes your 9-5 that much easier, it is, at the same time, filing your unemployment benefits in six, twelve, or eighteen months.

This is a feeling that I have been too late and too detached from understanding, and it feels only right to lead with it in this piece. The vitriol so many feel towards this technology is the opposite of the Mennonite-scared-of-the-future-simpleton that those who work in and around this technology want to believe. It is, in fact, the men in suits promising a society where money does not matter and who, curiously, still have stashed vast fortunes who want to destroy the social fabric of the last two centuries. Which, of course, makes the reactions of anger and fear that have erupted in data center discussions at city halls across the country so understandable. If the general public has no way to stop the train from reaching its destination, then all we have left is to throw ourselves onto the tracks in the hopes we can slow it down, even just a bit.

Yet, even as I write about the big storm cloud over our nation’s collective conscience, I still cannot bring myself to hate this technology. There has never been a technology before that leaves me with so much awe—that empowers me with so much agency. I find myself nearly every day doing something new and creative that, in the before times, would require a degree just to start. It would be a lie to say I do not love it.

I feel like Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—a spoiled brat whose every wish is answered and request granted, but with the gnawing worry that I will pay for this in some way. I think that the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory analogy is a useful one here, because it highlights just how much this technology is a multiplier for the best and worst qualities of ourselves. Our best qualities, like craving connection with another who cares about us, can just as easily be turned into our worst—ending our days by telling Claude what we did and who we saw. It was only Charlie2 who, bound by his own restraint, was able to enjoy the responsibility his peers could not.

I, for instance, never have used and never will use AI to write or re-write anything I post here. It is simply incomprehensible, as anyone who creates anything will tell you, to imagine automating any part of the creative process. Even if I thought Claude or ChatGPT could write a piece exactly in my voice—something so identical nobody but me would know—I would not do it. That’s because writing is what I love to do. Writing gives me meaning in a way nothing else does, and surrendering that so I could post more often or at greater length is antithetical to why I do this. I will, though, ask Claude before I post if it has any suggestions on a piece. If I find those suggestions to be useful—as I often do—I will go back in and fix them myself.

I still don’t know how to code. I don’t think I ever will. But I do know that as long as I am alive, I will write. Whether that is in the Oval Office or the unemployment office, writing is a pillar that allows me to not worry about the rest. I believe we all have the capability and responsibility to find what writing is to me, now more than ever. With this, the future that AI brings seems to me to lose its scariest component: our place in it. There is no such thing as surrender and no such feeling as uselessness if you are grounded in the creation of something uniquely you. To be anchored by meaning in a world adrift is, I think, all we can ask for.

The body of the UGM-109 Land Attack Missile is a hefty mix of aluminum alloys and graphite epoxy plastic. Its fuselage and wings are forged from a lightweight alloy that lets the missile survive the nearly 600 pounds of thrust erupting from its turbofan engine. When fully operational, the UGM-109 weighs over three tons, boasting a wingspan of nearly eight feet and a height more than twice that. The warhead payload—the part that makes the missile a missile—can carry a thousand pounds of explosives. Upon impact, the missile can demolish structures and leave heaping craters of dust and debris up to twenty feet in diameter. Most of us know the UGM-109 Land Attack Missile by its nickname, the Tomahawk missile.

The Tomahawk missile is a testament to the incredible ingenuity of the American military supply chain. The missile is a complex piece of engineering requiring suppliers from across the country to produce and transport parts and components to Raytheon’s main production facility in the Arizona desert. That massive turbofan engine is produced by a facility in Pontiac, Michigan and owned by Williams International, an aircraft manufacturer. In East Camden, Arkansas, off Highway 274, Raytheon produces over 115,000 solid rocket motors a year, many of them destined for the dry Arizona desert where the Tomahawk is built. A more dangerous world has meant more work for the residents of little towns and hollowed cities like Pontiac and East Camden—places left behind over the last twenty years of globalization.

Take Pontiac, for example. In the early twentieth century, Pontiac was one of many small towns turned into bustling cities as automakers flocked to the Midwest. General Motors hired tens of thousands of workers, many of whom were coming home from service in the Second World War. For the following three decades, Pontiac would continue to grow in size and population, reaching almost ninety thousand residents in 1970. Pontiac though, like many cities in the region, would begin to experience a slow and painful decline. The hiring spree of automakers was slowing down, and even contracting, leaving a city that had become reliant on the growth of these companies to provide for its citizens. In 2001, Pontiac would see the Detroit Lions pick up and move their stadium back to the Motor City.

What had been a slow hollowing out from the inside became a rapid descent into financial catastrophe during the Great Recession. The city was placed under the oversight of an Emergency Financial Manager appointed by the state government. In order to balance the city budget, officials were forced to drastically revise contracts with local labor unions alongside a mass sell-off of city assets. The city was forced to sell assets like parking meters for pennies on the dollar. Pontiac sold its water treatment plant for a little over fifty million dollars, and outsourced its garbage collection. The city laid off over eighty percent of its workforce—going from six hundred employees to fifty—adding insult to injury for a region already deeply familiar with the concept.

There’s a reason you haven’t heard the story of Pontiac, Michigan: it isn’t unique. Pontiac is one of hundreds of cities turned to towns and finally crushed into husks—places smashed by the whims of the private sector and shrugged off by the political class. In 2016, it was places like Pontiac that helped deliver Donald Trump his shocking upset victory. Places that believed in his message that America had tried to do too much for too long, and had paid the price.

On the morning of February 28th, life in Minab, Iran went as it had every other day. Minab is a city in the Hormozgan province—a hot and dry region in the southeast—where roughly seventy thousand people live. Hormozgan is an area of enormous importance to the elite Iranian military unit known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the IRGC. The region directly overlooks the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for the world’s supply of oil. That has made Minab a critical component of the IRGC’s naval operations, and subsequently a key target for U.S. and Israeli forces.

Up until 2016, the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school was another part of the sprawling IRGC operations in Minab. Near the end of the year, though, satellite imagery showed the compound was walled off, with new entrances created to allow for students to enter. A year later, a soccer pitch was constructed in the courtyard. The building itself was repainted with an image of pink flowers and green leaves, a reference to the school’s name of “The Blessed Tree” in Arabic.

The Iranian school week starts on a Saturday. Classes at Shajareh Tayyebeh started in the morning. Roughly 170 students and teachers were in the building this Saturday when news of American and Israeli strikes began to reach staff. The school called home to parents, telling them to come pick up their kids for an early dismissal. The war had begun.

The first UGM-109 Tomahawk missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school at approximately 10:45 A.M. The first missile did what Tomahawks are supposed to do, erupting in a fiery explosion, killing dozens of children upon impact. The school’s principal moved the remaining group of surviving girls into the prayer room and once again phoned parents pleading for them to pick up their kin. Then, another Tomahawk missile pierced into the prayer room. The principal and remaining children were killed. If any of the children did happen to survive the debris of a two-story building crushing down upon them, the third and final strike would have ended what little chance they had at survival. Over 170 people, almost all of them children who had yet to reach double-digits, were dead.

As parents slowly arrived at what had once been a safe space—a place even the horrors of war should not reach—their cries began to spread. The smoke was still rising from the thousands of pounds of explosives that had been laying into the building just minutes before. Those cries—of fathers and mothers who had no part in this war—are the same cries that reverberate across every conflict. It is the cruelty of war in its purest form, and the evil of violence left naked. Those children—most of whom would have no idea who the American President or Israeli Prime Minister that started this mess were—would become just another number.

Minab, Iran is not all that different from Pontiac, Michigan. Two cities, comprised of people overcoming economic hardship in the pursuit of a fairer life. Two cities wrapped up in the machinery of war, whose leaders had ignored their poverty up until it served a purpose. The people of Minab and the people of Pontiac are not complicit in the slaughter waged in their name. They did not ask for this war. The people of Pontiac are no better now that the bodies of the schoolgirls of Minab are six feet under. They are not safer, nor richer, nor healthier. Life will go on as it has for the last fifty years, surrounded by the husk of an America that looked within for its fortune and cared about its own more than anything else.

Life will go on in Minab, too. The parents of the little girls who had their whole life to live—to see an Iran of freedom and fairness—will remember the barbarism of the American military. They will still have the beds their girls slept in, and the clothes they would dress them in. They will still have to go to work the next day in a country with a worthless currency, watching the missiles made in Pontiac and East Camden light up the sky above them. Their lives will have to go on, even if they so wish it would not. Even if those parents of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school wish every night before bed that it was the parents in Pontiac who suffered their fate. Only then, they must think, could one know how it feels to watch their child wave them goodbye before school only to see that same arm poking through a mess of concrete and rubble.

There can be no common American purpose if we are spending a billion dollars a day fighting another country’s war while places like Pontiac have to pimp out their parking meters out to stay afloat. That billion dollars a day should be going to new parks in Pontiac, to treatment facilities for the tens of thousands of addicted and afflicted victims of a drug shipped from China, produced in Mexico, and sold on our streets. But it won't. It will still be tiny towns like Pontiac dotting the country, watching a geriatric old man or woman shooting a short-form video about "affordability." Every four years a man or woman will stop by for a few hours and talk about how they aren't a politician—how they are the ones that will finally bring change.

Every day in between, a few hundred people will get in their cars and drive to the Williams International facility. They’ll go to work assembling those massive turbofan engines. They’ll come home tired after a long day’s work. As the blue LED of their phone shines on their face, they might read about how American forces are bombing some poor country a thousand miles away. While they scroll, they might see a few grainy videos of bright lights shooting down onto a tan landscape. Maybe they will even see the aftermath of such a strike—the same screams the parents in Minab had when they knew their child had been buried and burned alive. At some point, though, they will turn off their phone they lease, in an apartment they rent, laying on a mattress they financed, and go to sleep.

Kierkegaard wrote of the power of a “poetic memory”. A way for one to hold the richness of the past without being numbed by nostalgia—letting the natural romance of a narrative live in its imperfection. I’m not sure, though, if the idea of a poetic memory is more a creation of a brilliant writer or the observation of a committed theologian. Indeed, Søren Kierkegaard was both of these, and his work and research naturally borrowed from each other.

I say I can’t tell because we, as a species, already approach history with a poetic memory. It is the very foundation of any culture in every society to cultivate the past into a narrative which allows us to make sense of the present. Nationalism itself is just another more vitriolic flavor of a poetic memory—one in which the state, by virtue of its existence, is perpetually absolved of sin.

Kierkegaard was a theologian, however, not a historian. A theologian would derive the idea of a poetic memory not from crowns and charters but from the Almighty and his apostles. Whereas history is meant for all of us, religion is intended for just one. A shared faith still underlies an individual belief that salvation is achievable—like how siblings can live separate lives while still being bound by their blood. This makes the power of a poetic memory much more a process in which the individual is responsible for producing. A citizen can live their entire life without worrying about borders and battles, but we all have to wrestle with the past. Kierkegaard, a devout Christian and student of the New Testament, no doubt borrowed from the religious concept of salvation in crafting this term. Even without a higher power, one still has to put faith into something—in this case the future—for their wellbeing.

One thing that a poetic memory lacks that religion does not is morality. If one cheats on a previous partner, they can easily come up with myriad reasons as to why their infidelity was not inexcusable. Religion, at least, operates on a moral grounding on which its followers are, in theory, supposed to live by. Some argue that religion is necessary for morality to mature—that unless bound by some greater power we would be liable to destroy each other. I used to think such an argument was ridiculous.

Increasingly, though, I wonder if I was mistaken in my certainty—if the core of this argument does have some undeniable truth to it. Even if religion itself is not vital for virtue, some structure of higher authority is. Once one goes beyond that—even one who still subscribes to a more amorphous higher power—they lose the ability to control themselves. It’s a question that strikes at power, and our ability to conjure a poetic memory which allows us to reconcile what we will do for our future. It’s also a question that I think can only be asked and answered by those who come from less than they have reached—the strivers of society like myself.

At the beginning of the ascent, your morality does not interfere with your momentum. You can, really, have it all! But, as happens in all of our lives, things get boring. The fifth invitation to speak at a fancy conference in a fancy place becomes more of a social remittance back towards a group you worked so hard to rise above. So, you begin to harbor just the smallest seed of resentment towards the society that built you. You start to hold not just a poetic memory, but a poetic mythology. Whereas the former is the romanticization based on some accepted version of the truth, the latter is far less restrictive. What if, instead of being a byproduct of a lot of work and even more luck, your success was more innate? What if you were always meant to be this? What if your very drive was not some mushy mix of grit and fortune but an innate, and even supernatural, inheritance to what made money and built status?

In this view, our earlier question on if religion is a precondition for morality turns out to be an entirely backwards way to look at it. Let us return to the church itself as an example. Imagine the Catholic Church of old as a triangle, with a practicing Catholic commoner at the bottom and the Pope himself at the very top. The closer to the top one is, the closer they are to God. They speak for him, they represent him, they are the ones who distill his will onto the world. So, it should reason, they are also the ones most likely to know that God would understand their indiscretion in whatever vice it would present as. God would see that the indulgence of vanities were necessary to show the common man the boundless beauty of heaven. Their power becomes the precondition itself, not out of an abject immorality but a kind of morality that treats the continuation of one’s status as something inherently moral. You have to do what you have to do.

I’m thinking of this question so much after finding myself spending an entire weekend on www.justice.gov reading the trove of documents, emails, and videos of Jeffrey Epstein. It seems like virtually everyone in power knew Epstein, and at the very least allowed for his existence in their social circles. But we’re adults, and we know the full story. We know that when Epstein writes “you have my permission to kill him.” he isn’t speaking in metaphors. We understand that when Epstein emails about a girl staying at the Four Seasons attempting to blackmail a group of Russian oligarchs, his “suggestions?” are anything but innocuous. Yes, we knew Jeffrey Epstein was evil, but reading the diary of one of his victims, is another type of elite-child-rapist-sex-slave-trafficker type of evil. Maybe I’m young and naive, but I didn’t think that level of evil existed in our time.

I’ve thought a lot about those in Epstein’s circle—men who I admired—who did nothing. They jeer and joke with him over email, often outright admitting that they knew what went on behind closed doors. And it leaves me feeling profoundly sad. The type of sad you experience as a kid when you finally accept that Santa Claus is not the one putting those gifts under the tree. It’s less a horrible shock and more a grim acceptance that there are certain truths to this world that, like it or not, you have always somewhat known to be true. We all knew that many of our politicians were far from family men, and our business leaders’ philanthropy more calculated than kind.

But if you’re like me, you still hold out hope. You hold out hope that the ambition that flows so vivaciously through your veins does not have to be tainted—that you can have it all without losing yourself. Ironically such a belief becomes almost religious in the faith one puts into it. The ascent towards power—these years which I am living now in waiting—is all worth it because we tell ourselves that when we do reach it, all will be clear. Our success rewarded, our imperfections hidden, leaving us only to bask in the respect of our peers and the admiration of the public—a poetic mythology fit for a powerful person.

I find myself asking time and time again whether that hope is as earnest as I wish it to be. Is my hope a genuine desire for a world that does exist but of which I have not yet found, or is it a type of poetic memory in motion? Am I, even now without the titles, or the status, or the money I feel so confident I will have, letting on less than I know? Did it really require millions of emails and tiny black boxes for me to reconcile what is plainly evident in our day to day lives? Power and status have always demanded absolutes from those who were not born into it. It has always asked more, and more, and more, until that unspecified moment where we all finally say “enough, I have what I want in life”.

And I want to say that such a line for me is found in the relationships I have, and that is certainly true to an extent. I want a great partner to marry, tremendous friends to enjoy life with, and a job that makes me feel like I am alive. But, I can have all of that without the spotlight. Many do. So, I’m left to wonder why. Why does my brain crave that attention? Why does it need that status? Why do I feel so deeply that my name is meant to be preceded by President, and then, Former President? I wish I knew.

What I do know is that there is this part of me that will never stop wanting. I know that it is this part that has turned so many good and earnest strivers into corrupt and duplicitous elites. I know that I do not want to live that life, but I also know that on some level the goals I have will force me to bend what I’m willing to do. And that, I know, is exactly where a poetic memory turns poisonous. When you can meet with a man who you know is abusing children out of an excuse that the money he will give your candidacy or charity is worth it. When you can go to his dinners, and respond to his emails, and joke about his impropriety because, after all, what can one person do? The answer, as the Epstein Files show, is quite a lot.

I am not a patient person. Whereas one’s lack of patience may usually connect to a similarly poor temperament, my shortage reveals an unnerving anxiety. Beyond the bounds of what I think is likely lies a dreaded uncertainty—a terror my brain will, it seems, do anything to avoid. If a waiter has taken longer than expected to bring me my check, I will assume he’s forgotten about us. My brain, pleased to have definitively and incontrovertibly diagnosed the situation, will then wonder how much longer I should wait before I get up. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? An hour? Can any waiter get me my bill? How does one get a bill? If I don’t pay my bill, and they close, will I be locked inside? Hold on, is that our waiter? And on, and on, until the certainty my brain seemed to, only a moment ago, hold with such ferocity dissolves as the waiter comes to our table with the bill.

My brain never does seem to learn the lesson from these situations. No longer hypnotized by the unknown, it snaps quickly back into the internal monologue that runs my life. My consciousness has returned control, and it is entirely uninterested in discussing why or how this happened, or might happen again. No! The situation is resolved. Sometimes, though, the situation is not resolved. Sometimes my brain is forced to undergo what it may hate more than anything in this world: ambiguity.

Ambiguity is the older brother of uncertainty, but with a fancy Ivy League degree in Communications and a motorcycle. Whereas uncertainty promises some hidden clarity within it, ambiguity proudly rejects the idea that clarity is to be wanted at all. No, ambiguity instead suggests that the real excitement is found in not knowing—in letting the lazy river of life drift you along from event to event. Even if ambiguity may often hide some deeper emotion—or more accurately a mix of conflicting ones—it considers it none of your business to find out. Unlike its little brother, ambiguity gets to play coy when it wants to play coy, and be bold when it wants to feel bold. And, as most older brothers are, ambiguity is cool. It knows you know it’s unkempt and unfair, and it knows you will keep wanting anyway.

I’ve been thinking about ambiguity after my Instagram feed has become flooded with a very specific type of post: a wall of text either decrying, acknowledging, or celebrating a “situationship”. Some ask rhetorical “would you rather” type questions where one answer is cartoonishly violent and the other is about your situationship taking a day to respond. Others are character descriptions specific enough to be a tool for the viewer: hit like and maybe that person will see. Maybe you need your own motorcycle and then, and only then, will this ambiguity become tolerable.

I am, needless to say, not the target audience for this content. Still, I find myself oddly captivated by these posts. There’s something about them that I find so incredibly alluring—a way of thinking so radically different from my own that it feels almost alien. This alien feeling of course does not come from the idea of an unrequited courtship—liking someone who does not like you back is a universal experience. These posts are so different, I think, because they go past that. They venture out into the vast empty space of relationships where the connection is enough to start something but not to sustain it. In this, surrounded by the bodies of relationships old, is a definite romanticization. That—the inclination to romanticize what I would find to be so dreadful—is the origin of my interest.

My need for immediate answers is not restricted to a slip of thermal paper and a twenty-five percent tip. I revile the type of relationships, if you can even call them that, in which these videos revel. I revile it not out of judgment for others’ decisions but out of a perfectly clear-hearted and decidedly self-centered view on what is needed to make a life of real substance. A life that is worth living in the moment and reminiscing after it—a richness of people, places, and things all stacking upon each other.

But let’s take a step back. Before I explain why these traits are non-negotiable in a partner, I want to first specify why exactly the former is so lacking to me. Firstly, and most importantly, a partner who cannot give us certainty in their decisions and clarity in their personality is not a partner at all. Instead, you are a prisoner—locked in a cell that you can always technically leave but to which you’ve grown inured. You’ve grown accustomed to whatever deficits you once rejected in your suitor, no longer feeling any true unhappiness when a message is left on delivered for twelve hours. That angst has been replaced with a faux despair, going through the motions of real discontent and all the while deriving your sense of superiority from this interaction. You, the emotionally-intelligent-earnest-communicator, left at the altar again with only your good intentions to blame.

By doing this, we are surrendering our most important trait: kindness. Deriving meaning in the absence of what another has is not actually creating anything for ourselves. We are not funnier because another is not, nor are we smarter, but we certainly are crueler. We lose that ability to look at another’s Instagram account without immediately deciding if this person is performative or pretentious. We analyze every story as if it was posted for our eyes only. We take what we want from their actions—or perhaps their non-actions—and leave the rest as a sorry coincidence.

Maybe, though, that shy cruelty is in part what I am so drawn to in the first place. There’s something undeniably enticing about feeling that you are in some type of in-group comprised of people whose only fault is being too aware. By bemoaning what they don’t have, you’re also showing what you do. All you are asking for is reciprocity—a hope that even without firm labels, you can still have all the good parts of “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” that tether people. Because, without that, a situationship is still ultimately just two people, each with two different sets of reasons, living two different versions of a relationship.

In a way, I think my need for certainty is no different than this need for exactly the opposite. Whether you get on a motorcycle of your own and ride alongside ambiguity, or you play eye tag with a waiter for thirty minutes, you are demanding something which cannot be demanded. That is easier for me to write than to understand. I am certainly always going to be someone that believes a situation is better shaped by me than anyone else. I am never going to love the twelve hours spent pretending the person I’m talking to is working an all-nighter in a coal mine. But it is, I increasingly think, not only a waste of time to try and insulate yourself from others’ actions but a waste of life. So, I am trying to let go of that—to stay in the moment of the situationship, or relationship, or whatever term you want to use to describe what pulls us towards another.

I write a lot about realism—about being able to separate what we wish the world was from what it actually is. Realism is a passive line of thinking that ironically requires quite a bit of action to commit to. That’s because, in part, a realist’s way of thinking can be at times a bit drab. Life is sometimes very cruel for very little reason, and the untinted glasses of a realist offer very little solace in this fact. It’s why I try to make it extra clear in my foreign policy pieces that, regardless of my policy recommendations, I still do hope that the oppressed of this world may prevail over their oppressors. There is simply no other choice for those who want to make this world a better place than to hold that innate kindness and consideration.

I say all of this because we are in one of those times where the truth, in all its disheveled honesty, is more helpful than an agreeable fib. I’m talking today specifically about artificial intelligence, and what it means for young people like myself. I think we are doing a tremendous disservice to people my age by ignoring where this technology is going, even if where it is going is scary and unpredictable. From the very top of universities down to the individual student, there is both a lack of understanding of what AI can do today, how it can be used in new and creative ways, and where and how it will be applied tomorrow. This has led to a sorry middle ground divided between AI skeptics who refuse to use this technology entirely out of fear or denial, and oblivious super-users who have surrendered their sentience to ChatGPT.

I’m somewhere in the middle. I use Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini daily at this point, and it has made me more productive than I thought possible. I’m able to experiment in new domains, like coding, in ways that would have taken me an entire degree to get close to. I also try to curate my feed on X to be centered around those working in this field at the frontier labs. Put another way, I know enough about these tools to know that whatever life I had planned to lead in 2023 is no longer a viable pathway. I do believe there will be new types of jobs, and that we will avoid the worst-case scenario of mass unemployment leading to dramatic civil unrest, but people my age should be thinking twice about if the future they want is a future they can have.

This all leads me to the title of this piece, and a thesis which I won’t pretend to hedge against: Law school is a dangerous bet in 2026. It’s a bet that willingly ignores the capabilities of artificial intelligence today, tomorrow, and in ten years. It puts not only a heavy financial burden on young people—a burden excused by the lucrative earnings of lawyers past—but takes bright and talented individuals away from new opportunities that can make them more money and give them more meaning. I’m going to detail and flesh out all these points below, but I once again want to emphasize I take no pleasure in putting down others’ dreams. With that said, let’s begin.

METR, which tracks the ability of LLM models to perform tasks autonomously without oversight, helps demonstrate the point I’m making. GPT 3, released by OpenAI in 2021, was the first time most in the general public had heard about AI in the way we know it today. GPT 3 could operate by itself for less than fifteen seconds, barely being able to answer questions coherently and accurately. Now, less than half a decade later, Opus 4.5 can run for over four hours on tasks before the chance of failure is greater than of success at a given task.

This chart also highlights just how rapidly these advancements have compounded onto each other. Whereas it took more than a year for GPT 3.5 to barely reach a minute before failure, it took less than nine months for Opus 4.5 to achieve an additional 180 minutes on OpenAI’s o1. You don’t need to be a technical mastermind to play this out into a future where models can run on their own for an entire work day, completing tasks previously given to junior-level employees.

This is already affecting software engineering fields and computer science jobs alike. There simply isn’t a reason to hire, train, and employ a graduate fresh out of college if a more senior-level employee already has access to a team of junior coders via Claude Code. As technological diffusion reaches more fields, like law, the ladders of economic mobility that have existed for decades will gradually, and then suddenly, be destroyed. These are jobs like paralegals: low-paying, task-heavy jobs which require research and synthesis skills that LLMs of today can already do.

This doesn’t mean that junior-level employees are done for, but it does by definition contract the amount of hiring firms are doing. Whereas a firm might hire a dozen junior associates to synthesize case law or sift through thousands of pages in discovery, said firm could hire just one or two associates tasked with verifying the output of an LLM. It can be difficult to determine exactly how and where these cuts in employment can hit across firms. That’s why it’s particularly important to largely take prognostication out of this and work with the facts we have at hand and let you decide what you think will happen.

Right now, Claude Opus 4.5 can search a custom database—whether raw text, PDFs, spreadsheets, or a mix—that a user provides and synthesize the findings. This can be done within an enterprise, like a large law firm, to protect client confidentiality and ensure accuracy to the source material. Claude can then take this synthesis and turn it into a Powerpoint, a PDF, a .Docx, or a .xlsx without much trouble. Claude can also operate inside a browser and operate autonomously on your own Google tabs. It can send emails, keep tabs on Slack, and go back and forth with your colleagues on your behalf. Claude can also, just recently, be plugged directly into Excel and work solely with the information you provide it.

This can all be done, with the debut of Claude Cowork, without the explicit instruction or handholding of a human counterpart. You simply tell Claude what you need, where you need it from, and in what format you need it. The best way to discern the quality of its response is to test it for yourself. I’d encourage you to sign up for a Pro plan to see how Claude does performing your own tasks at work. My bet is that Claude will do better to on-par with yourself with some minor variance depending on what you ask.

I don’t need to throw numbers or wax vaguely about the future for you to then understand that the contraction I’m talking about looks less like predicting Doomsday and more like predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Even if junior employment stays the same at large firms by virtue of increased productivity, smaller firms will suffer. There is only so much pie to be sliced up before someone walks away with less than they started with. This is important on a macro scale for our policymakers in transitioning these workers, but it’s absolutely critical for young adults making the biggest financial and time commitment yet of their lives.

I’m a subscriber to the idea that we will find new ways and new jobs for those displaced by this technology. Societies are surprisingly sturdy things, and a return to some type of neo-feudalism that some have predicted is unhelpful and unlikely in my view. Still, we should give some preliminary thought as to what these new types of jobs will look like and ask for. Will domain expertise in contract law be useful if we have systems more intelligent than any human with access to every brief on any case? Probably not, and that’s okay! Jobs change, and skills with them.

As a generally risk-friendly person, I understand the strategic value of taking on debt now with the belief that the prestige or skills you gain will make it a worthwhile bet. It’s a bet I’m personally riding my future on as I transfer from the University of Kansas to a more prestigious, and expensive, school on the East Coast. We live in a world of Balenciagas and Burger Kings, and pretending otherwise is a waste of time and energy. Normally, this would be enough for me to justify law school for those select few elite schools even as I advised against it more generally—and I’ll be honest that this advice may still hold.

That only holds, I think, if you treat the time spent in law school as a binary and the opportunities outside of it as non-existent. I think it’s a profound mistake to, in this time of massive social and economic upheaval, spend any more time than you have to credentialing yourself. This may seem a bit backwards to how the status quo operates. Indeed, law school applicants historically rise as economic conditions falter—as has happened over the last year. For more typical economic turbulence, such a decision makes sense. Needless to say, this is anything but typical.

The technological lag that AI adoption and implementation will take is going to allow for an opportunity unseen since the internet for young and talented people who grow up using the technology. Like university administrators too old to find ways to use AI naturally, the companies of today are too saddled by the practices of yesterday to truly use AI in novel ways. Every minute spent in law school is a minute you are not spending in the workforce, where your ability to use AI to improve the quantity and quality of your work can and should put you ahead of the pack.

Foregoing law school also saves you the economic burden that pursuing a JD inevitably forces one into. At both private and public law schools, the rate of tuition adjusted for inflation has risen exponentially. The average student now leaves law school with over two hundred thousand dollars spent on tuition and living expenses—with the vast majority needing to take on loans to achieve this. Your ability to operate in a risk-accepting way is profoundly hindered by this financial reality, making you less able to operate in a risk-accepting mindset.

For knowledge workers like would-be lawyers, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. The former is largely a mental one in accepting the changing times and moving with, not against, them as they continue to shift. A lot of this will become apparent as others across the white-collar space use AI in new companies and organizations—providing a path for others to follow behind. You don’t have to be Steve Jobs to try your hand at using these tools of knowledge for your own enrichment. You just have to be willing to take what you can from the moment that has arrived.

Even at its most cynical level, where I am both wrong in the opportunity and advice, law school will still be there. You can only gain by taking a few years to ingratiate yourself into a workplace before junior employment shrinks or is entirely cut off. You’d be well off to invest that time and money back into a different, but still just as interesting and rewarding, profession in a similar field.

In writing about AI, you are bound to be more vague than you would like. We are projecting into the future and, while grounded by evidence and projecting with caution and care, are bound to be wrong somewhere along the line. Maybe these autonomous systems get caught along the way, or perhaps the scaling laws that have led to linear advancements in model quality diminish or stop altogether. A realist can and should be able to accept uncertainty for what it is while still operating on some forward projection.

No one person is going to have the specific answers as to what someone who planned to become a lawyer should now do. Even if AI is radically different in terms of disruption and potential, the path to success is still as difficult to define as it always has been. There will be some who go to law school and use AI to become wealthy from their work and wise in the courtroom. There will be others who forego law school only to attend regardless in five or ten years. Outliers and exceptions are always tantalizing but rarely useful in guiding young people through any time of crisis. Thinking about your ability to operate exceptionally in whatever the moment brings, though, is.

Right now, thousands of miles from our shores, the people of Iran are showing the world what real courage looks like. It is a courage built out of desperation. A courage created after decades of incompetent leadership and incalculable violence. A courage that is shown in every young Iranian who is taking to the streets of Tehran and risking their lives in the process. It is time for the United States to support this courage, protect these protesters, and right the decades of wrong we have inflicted upon this great and historic people.

If you’re an avid reader of my work, you may be surprised to read the above paragraph. If there is one theme I have written on more extensively, it is the need for a restrained American foreign policy. I still believe, more than ever, that our country is in dire shape, and that no amount of detained dictators can change that. No one is more aware of our disastrous foreign policy in the Middle East in particular than myself. I have even written specifically about how the United States cannot, and should not, fight a war against Iran to protect Israel. It is not our fight, and it is not our job.

I think that can all be true, while also believing that what is happening in Iran is fundamentally different than sending NATO planes into Libya or American troops into Baghdad. Right now, as I type this, Iranian security forces are maiming and massacring Iranian men and women without care or caution. Over ten thousand Iranians are estimated to have been arrested and hundreds, at least, killed. Those that will be jailed can expect to face the full array of torture, violence, and abuse that the Iranian regime has mastered over their rule. It is just the latest betrayal that a withering Ali Khamenei has committed for his decaying state—and if the people of Iran succeed, it will be his last.

There is, I believe, a way for America to operate on the world stage with a rational morality. I don’t want to live in a world where stronger countries can bully weaker ones into submission. The issue is that, for decades, Americans have been lectured about “democracy” and “liberation” and been left with disaster after disaster. It has led to a line of conspiratorial thinking emanating from both the fringes of the left and the right that subscribes to a sort of “noble savage” view of global politics. For the right, this is expressed in the same boring racism and xenophobia by sixteen-year-olds who like to LARP as a Crusader Knight online. For the left, it’s shown through an uncanny ability to blame America for every problem on Earth. Because, as we all know, a young Iranian can’t possibly be unhappy with their government without being ordered by their masters in Washington.

I believe in a very basic idea: that every citizen of every country has the same autonomy as any other. Iranians are risking, and losing, their lives to fight for a better future. If we can help them in that fight without risking American lives or sinking American resources, we must do it.

Firstly, and most importantly, President Trump should make clear that the United States will not invade, will not send troops, and will not engage in any military action against Iran. The Iranian regime is already blaming foreign interference for the deaths of protesters, and military action will only serve to unite the regime as it did following the Twelve-Day War. The President must also ensure that Israel follows American direction and does not strike Iran with the expectation of American assistance or defense. This is absolutely critical both for the security of our service members and to avoid the risk of regime change by American force.

Rhetorical support can only go so far, though. The internet blackout imposed by Iranian authorities has made it nearly impossible for the outside world to witness the atrocities being committed. President Trump is right to work with Elon Musk in bringing Starlink internet to the country. Internet access is only one part of ensuring Iranians can share, spread, and organize as they wish. The President should, in addition, direct the Treasury Department to issue guidance to American tech companies to temporarily zero-rate the hosting costs for high-bandwidth VPN servers for Iranians. Tehran must understand that attempts to silence the Iranian people into submission are fruitless.

By opening the lines of communication between the outside world and Iran, American intelligence agencies will have a clearer idea of the provinces where killings are reported. This information is critical for the President to fully exercise the MAHSA Act, passed by Congress in April of 2024, in sanctioning the IRGC leadership. Legal action against the assets, and sanctioning against the family members abroad, of these criminals will put pressure on the chain of command. These actions are made most effective when the threat of U.S. military intervention is taken off the table—a fate that would mean, at best, civic exile and at worst, criminal action.

No action can be taken for the Iranian people without remembering the exigency of these protests in the first place. Young Iranians, distraught over a failing economy and worthless Rial, have taken to the streets out of desperation. If we want to see an Iranian government that respects the will of the Iranian people, we must allow for the Iranian diaspora to support those inside the country. To do this, the Treasury Department should immediately issue a general license, an authorization that allows for otherwise prohibited transactions on sanctioned states, to allow for the transfer of personal remittances into Iran. Perpetual protesting is not a sustainable course of action for any party, and if general strikes occur across the country, there will need to be financial assistance to ensure workers do not have to choose between starvation and submission. This can all be accomplished without a dollar spent by Washington.

These are the types of actions that I envision when I write of an American First foreign policy. It is everything that its little brother, the America First movement, promises to be but fails to deliver on. It believes, above all, that American lives are the most precious responsibility of American leaders. It sees through the brittle brutality of the America First movement and believes in defending those we can, when we can. It is an understanding of the world as it is—that America cannot be everywhere and do everything.

But the world as it is today does not have to be the world as it could be tomorrow. From Tehran to the Twin Cities, there are men and women, young and old, risking their lives to stand up against despotism. Sons and daughters of the nation who, whether they wave flags of stars and stripes or of lions and suns, share a common fight. A fight against weak old men who have lived long and horrible lives. Let us ensure this is a fight in which we prevail undeniably victorious and unambiguously prosperous.

There was a voice in my head on the day I cast my ballot. It told me that this was a moment of extraordinary danger. A moment where our world stood at the knife’s edge of war, and that maybe, extraordinary moments necessitated extraordinary action. That action, for me, would be to vote for the man that promised to prevent a third world war. A man who told young men like me he would not send us to a shallow grave in Taiwan or Kyiv. A man who promised that America would, finally, look within.

I could not bring myself to, in the end, vote for President Trump. I took some solace, though, in the peace I thought his Presidency would bring. I thought, naively, that the President understood the stakes of this current moment—that whether by ego or empathy he would use the awesome power of America with restraint and respect. I was wrong. President Trump has pushed our world into a new age of lawlessness and lethality by overthrowing Nicolás Maduro. He has set the rules for an era he will not live to see, and by doing so has handed so many young men across this world the shovel for those shallow graves. This era will be one of chaos and carnage—one that will make the imperfect morality of the rules-based international order look like the pinnacle of civilization. We must all be ready for what this means.

Donald Trump is not going to stop at Venezuela. The President is serious about Greenland. He is serious about Cuba. He is serious about Iran. He is serious about Mexico. The Democratic Party must, then, be as steadfast as he is serious. We must once again be a party that believes America, in the words of Joe Biden, should lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. A party that, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, believes we must either love each other, or we must die. A party that thinks peace does not require a preamble—whose leaders do not couch their criticism with soliloquies on how Maduro, or any other dictator, had it coming.

To be frank, I don’t care how bad of a man Nicolás Maduro was. I don’t care how poorly he ran his country. I don’t care if he went to bed every night a happy dictator. I care about America. I care about the fact that out of every five dollars spent in America, one is spent on healthcare. I care about the fact that the average young American is coming out of college with forty thousand dollars in debt. I care about the fact that our cities have become infested with drugs and overrun with homelessness. So, you will have to excuse my lack of interest in making sure that oil refineries in Caracas are operating at the efficiency they need to be.

Why is it so hard for those in our party to admit this? Why must it be that only the far-right and the far-left get to be agents of change while those near the center wallow away? It does not have to be this way. We must realize the rage that so many in this country feel and respond with the responsibility it requires. A responsibility that rests, most of all, on action. Action that makes our streets safer, our children healthier, and our lives less expensive. These are the issues of our time—and they are issues that will not be forgotten no matter how many dictators we detain or capitals we capitulate.

When two elements are at odds and irreducible, the only solution is strength. There has never been any other solution in history, and there never will be. When the Democratic Party refuses to be strong in pushing for peace, the people of this country will look right. When the Republican Party refuses to be strong by focusing on America, this country will not know where to look. It is this moment where we find ourselves now, a nation without a leader and a country without a purpose. The strongest country in the history of the planet has been turned into its most expensive bounty hunter.

The danger of this cannot be overstated. For all the talk the Democratic Party has made about democracy, we still cannot seem to comprehend that democracy for democracy’s sake is not enough. It is supposed to be a means to an end, an end to ensure that the state would not be pilfered by the privileged. If our current delineation of democracy is an ideology fully realized, then it is an ideology that is ripe to be swept away in the turning tides of our current moment. We should all work to ensure this is not the case.

There has not been a war fought by this country since there was a Kingdom of Yugoslavia that has not been looked back on with terrible regret, and its supporters with horrible anger. This is why, even with knowledge that everything I write today can and will be used against me tomorrow, I say this truth with complete confidence. I am against war. When I cast my ballot in November of 2024, I hoped Donald Trump was too. How wrong I was.

In late 2023, parents of students at Westfield High School in New Jersey received a terrifying email. School administrators, the letter read, had been alerted that a group of male students had created and distributed AI generated pornography of their female classmates. The images looked indistinguishable from real life—their faces and bodies plastered onto videos and images without their knowledge. It marked one of the highest profile incidents yet of a technology, known as “Deepfakes”, that threatens to plunge American society into the depths of sin and sacrilege the likes and scale of which we have never seen. Congress and President Trump must act now to defend American children and women.

The trajectory of deepfake technology is, in many ways, the same as the larger artificial intelligence industry. The underlying technology of deepfakes, allowing users to alter videos with different speech or actions, was possible but impractical. Making a quality deepfake required extensive compute requirements that were out of reach for the average consumer. Even if a user did acquire the hardware, they were still limited by the enormous amount of photos and videos needed of a subject to create a deepfake. The threat to high-profile figures like celebrities and politicians was real, but the average person appeared safe.

Suddenly, though, breakthroughs in machine learning quickly snowballed into massive advancements in artificial video creation. The compute needed to create a quality deepfake was reduced to just a high-end desktop computer. Instead of gigabytes of images and videos, a user could now create a convincing deepfake from a single image. A proliferation of open-source software allowed users without coding proficiency to quickly download and begin producing massive amounts of the most disgusting and deplorable content known to man. The floodgates had opened—never to be fully closed again.

Celebrities and politicians have faced the worst of this crisis so far. A pornographic deepfake of Taylor Swift reached over 47 million views on X before it was taken down. Similarly vile videos of actress Sydney Sweeney and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have been posted, deleted, and reposted on popular platforms as well. Those outside of the spotlight, like small-time influencers on TikTok or Instagram, have no agency to get these behemoth platforms to act on their behalf. Critically, though, content like this continues to spread on shady pornographic websites where moderation is near non-existent.

Elected officials at the state level have made progress in incorporating deepfakes into existing legislation, but more action is needed. Defense attorneys have successfully argued that deepfake videos, even if they are sexually explicit and contain children, are, in technicality, a victimless crime. This cannot go on. State legislatures must rapidly amend their Child Sex Abuse Material legislation to incorporate, as officials in Kentucky and Alabama have, virtually indistinguishable depictions of child pornography. Legislators should also follow the lead of states like California, New York, and Florida and expand private rights of action to allow for statutory damages. As it stands, victims of deepfake technology must prove a material loss—a nearly impossible ask for children and non-celebrities.

Progress remains frustratingly fragile at the federal level. The TAKE IT DOWN act, signed by President Trump in late May, remains the foundation of federal deepfake regulation. The bill mandates social media platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery within 48 hours of receiving a valid notice, along with making the act of knowingly publishing such content a federal crime. This is a strong first step from the President in protecting our families and children, but enforcement will be critical. The FTC must follow their end of the bargain and ruthlessly enforce these protections and relegate this content to the bowels of the web. More legislation is needed to give victims of these heinous crimes the agency they so desperately need. Congress should pass the DEFIANCE ACT, championed by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, giving victims the ability to sue perpetrators for statutory damage. Victims must have the ability to protect themselves and their reputation while creating a robust financial deterrent. Otherwise, those that live in anonymity will continue to manufacture harm and escape justice.

Giving victims the agency they deserve is only one part of ensuring we protect women and children from this technology. Congress should raise adult-victim nonconsensual deepfake production from its current maximum punishment of two years in prison to more adequately represent this crime against humanity. If you engage in creating these deepfakes, and you are caught, you should expect to spend ten times that amount in jail. Congress should also work to enact mandatory minimums for aggravated cases like distribution for profit, large scale dissemination, or linkage to sextortion. Officials must additionally strive to make production of this material a registrable sex offense under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. Taken together, these actions would ensure that the penalties of this content follow the monsters that created them for the rest of their lives—just like it will for their victims.

The President must use his existing sanctions authorities against persons and entities who host this content or create this software abroad. There must be no safe harbor for these individuals. They are terrorists whose sole aim is the destruction of a free and fair society based on consent and cooperation—and they should be treated as such. Existing federal terrorism definitions around intimidation or coercion of a civilian population clearly qualify. It should be made clear that you cannot escape the might of the American military no matter how hard you try. You will be brought to justice, and you will be treated as the hostile presence you are.

The poor girls of Westfield High will not be the last victims. Left unregulated, all of us will face the pain of watching our loved ones lose their digital dignity. It does not matter who you are, or how private you think your life may be. Unless action is taken on all stages of this crisis, we will let the worst instincts of man live without punishment or prosecution. It is incumbent on those less at risk to this technology—especially men—to stand up and protect those who cannot otherwise. We must act together, in unison, and hold the light of liberty to illuminate even the darkest of corners.

For almost my entire life, I’ve wanted nothing more than to be grown. Grown enough to where if I walked into a room, my ideas would be the thing that was challenged. Not the way I looked, or the shrill treble of my adolescent voice. Just me. I never understood why the merit of my thoughts could not overcome the mouth that expressed them. Why should it matter how old I was if I had something genuinely useful to add? Would I really have to wait five, ten, fifteen years until I could exercise the potential I felt so deeply I had?

There is, ultimately, only so much you can do before the two-digit number hovering over your head gets in the way. Some of this is statutory—my goal of being a Senator at thirty, or President at forty, is still over a decade, at least, away. There is nothing I can do, save for staying alive, that will do much of anything to make this wait any faster. In many ways, I am grateful for such a limitation. I am someone who will always, instinctively, want to put the pedal to the metal. I want to go, go, and go until I have either completed what I set out to do or I have surrendered to it completely. If there is anything central to my sense of self, it is this undeniable fervor to do more and more work.

Although, even the word “work” always fails to capture my relationship with it. I love working! I love to learn about the things I am interested in, and I doubly love to find a way to put my own feelings and thoughts inside of them. That may be why I have always had such a magnetic attraction to the humanities—particularly politics—and why I’ve also felt so terribly uninterested in the natural sciences. The natural sciences, with their defined formulas and equations, always felt so limited. I felt boxed in, powerless, and, most dreadfully of all, bored! I knew that I would not be an engineer, or a physicist, because I could not possibly surrender myself to it in the way I could for politics.

Politics, though, challenged me. There will never not be a part of me that is amazed that ideology is even real. Real in the sense that one person can believe—know deep inside themselves—that the world is not working the way it should. Real enough that with this certainty, one person could transform a nation into something grander. Something that would outlast one man, or one idea, but would become the foundation of life for every man, woman, and child. That is something that, to this day, still inspires a tremendous awe in me.

It could be that feeling of awe that tempers my subconscious’s unrelenting urgency—that allows me to accept those institutional barriers to power. Rarely ever do I consider the fact that I am nineteen, and to be honest, I see no reason to. What good does it do to chain yourself to the expectations of another? What fun is it to lay in the mud of youth? You might argue that there is a certain freedom that comes from just being nineteen. Society expects nothing of you, other than that you will, eventually, grow up. With time you will have a job, then a partner, then a family, and then your freedom in your twilight years. I don’t hold judgement for this lifestyle, but I won’t pretend it makes any sense to me. I want to do everything, and I want to do it now!

I think what I find so foreign about this path is that it assumes there are two selves: a youthful, free-spirited one, and a realist, rational one. These two selves can never meet in the light—you must either be enjoying the fruits of youth or planting the seeds of adulthood. This is the great disservice that living to your age does. It rips apart your sense of self—dissects it into tiny pieces for each stage of life—and in doing so robs you of the full totality and unpredictability of life. You feed from a trough of low expectations and laziness until, one day, you find that you can no longer dive your mouth into the basin. You are twenty-four and have no idea what you want out of this life.

You may think such a message is abrasive or naive. I would argue, though, that I am asking for a very simple thing: to know yourself. There’s a certain fear that I’ve slowly realized so many young people have towards asking oneself what they want in life. They squirm and sidestep—their body physically ejecting the concept of looking at their life from the outside. I worry that this ignorance, however much a function of their place in life, has lifelong repercussions. They are thrown into the world without knowing why they feel the feelings or think the thoughts they have.

It’s important to remember that you can hold contempt for a societal misgiving while also holding empathy for those trapped inside of it. A sneering elitism is, I’ve often found, covering for the same lack of meaning that the less accomplished face. There is no substitute for meaning—not awards, not money, not titles. Meaning is the only thing in this life that can provide you with the certainty to dare to be great. Meaning, and meaning alone, can overcome the barriers of life that tell you that because you were born in X and went to school at Y, you can only ever be Z.

These are the barriers that I always hated with such a passion. Their informality was especially enraging to me. It felt like a punishment. A punishment that I had stepped out of line in a march that would tell me what I would do and what this world could be. I refused to march. I still refuse. As much as I would like to pretend this was some grand philosophical battle, or inner conviction of what would be right, the reality was much simpler: it made no sense. It made no sense that I should be governed by meaningless mediocrity. It made no sense that someone else could tell me what I could or could not do, or when I could or could not do it.

This is something that I always battle with when writing about ambition—if having “it” is something I had particular control over. I realize that my situation is unique. I’ve known what I wanted to do since was in third grade, and I’m aware of what it means to get there. I am the son of two brilliant parents. I had a wonderful childhood where I was encouraged to learn. I was challenged intellectually in school. To ignore this is to engage in the type of narcissism that the worst leaders, and most naive young people, live in.

But there is also a part of me that feels undeniably self-created. Something in me that instinctually flinches towards trying, and inevitably sometimes failing, for more. It allows me to be certain that I will, with good work and a kind heart, be so much for so many. It is what supersedes the barriers, both informal and formal, that govern so much of our lives. It is what, I believe, will allow me to keep the youthful energy of no expectations with the unadulterated strive to become great. I think we should all strive to maintain this synchrony.

I was born on July 4th, 2006. Nineteen years, five months, and five days by the time this is published. Sometimes, if I am to be honest, I like to believe it is anything other than chance that I was born on the birthday of a country I believe I will lead. A sick country saved by its son—born and inexorably tied together. It’s a nice thought. A cynic would say this is the logical endpoint of my endless wanting for more—that only by reaching the summit could I see the futility of the trek. They would be wrong, I think. My wanting to be more is to show, through force of will and earnest effort, that anyone can be great—that you hold the key to the shackles of expectation chained across your ankles.

Young Americans, Europeans, Russians, and Ukrainians plead for peace in Ukraine. We plead to the generation of leaders who have promised us so much and delivered so little to act upon their most basic humanity. To see the reality of this horrible war as an act of incalculable suffering that must end, not as a pawn in the last moribund days of the contemporary international order. We refuse to sacrifice our futures and our families so that a few powerful men can profit in power and prestige from slaughter. The time has come for this class of elites to decide: are they willing to sacrifice their careers, and their countries, to the banality of fascism and totality of destruction in order to keep the slaughter going? Make no mistake, that is the path we are on.

If the far-right parties of Europe agree on anything, it is that the war in Ukraine has been a disaster for the average European—and they are right. The AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, and Reform Party in the United Kingdom all have promised to cut aid and prevent troop deployments in Ukraine. All three parties are expecting major gains in future elections, with the National Rally and Reform predicted to achieve outright majorities. The rise of these parties, according to the leaders of Europe, represent a fundamental threat to the post-war European order. Yet, at the same time, these officials refuse to do anything of substance to stop their rise. This begs the question: are these far-right parties truly the “extreme” threat that statesmen like Emmanuel Macron accuse them to be? Or is the threat extreme only to an agenda of endless war and unaccountability?

I, like many my age, view these parties to be a fundamental threat for a fair and free Europe. Like many my age, though, I do not hold much sympathy for the foreign policy of the last eighty years. Like many my age, I see the war in Ukraine for what it is: a tragedy that needs to end. A tragedy that, if left to its own devices, threatens to envelop our world in another, and perhaps final, world war. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron may be safe in their bunkers with their families, but the average citizen does not get to enjoy the pampered protections of power. We are the ones who will be sent to die in a trench by a drone operated in Moscow. We are the ones who will face food insecurity and economic catastrophe from an economy in war-footing.

Let us, once again, quickly rid ourselves of the innumerable fallacies and accusations that those who defend this war propagate. Firstly, and most importantly, is the argument that the survival of Ukraine is a bellwether for a safe and secure Europe. Russia, operating in the role of a Marvel villain, will apparently march into Poland after suffering over a million casualties and taking only a quarter of Ukraine—that is unless Putin, in his Death Star hovering over the Kremlin, is stopped. Of course this argument, despite its endless recitation, is already proven false! Russia has been stopped. They have not marched into Kyiv and taken the country.

There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin is an evil man. Any leader who slaughters his own people is. There are, though, many evil men in this world living and dead. George Bush sent young men like myself to die in a desert. Benjamin Netanyahu used a national tragedy to advance his conquest over women and children in Gaza. Xi Jinping has cracked his totalitarian whip of censorship on the free people of Hong Kong and Tibet, and he looks to do the same in Taiwan. This is a world of cruelty and unfairness. That does not mean we should excuse such crimes—in fact the sole goal of any society should be to extinguish it entirely—but it should engender some basic rationality from all of us.

That rationality would make clear that despite his complete lack of morality, Vladimir Putin is not a dumb man. He is a leader, who like most every leader, holds inside a bottomless envy of the great men of history. That is what allows such a man to ignore his morality and make the reasonable assumption, which almost every major intelligence organization shared, that Ukraine would fall quickly and the West would, eventually, forget and forgive. When this assumption was proven demonstrably false, he pivoted. Putin understood that no matter how slow the victory, he outnumbered Ukraine in men and outproduced them in defense. He understood that the leaders of the West wore the mask behind which there was no face—that the drums of war would be too loud for the average American and European to ignore. He was right.

Accepting that such an evil man could astutely analyze a geopolitical reality is difficult. It is unfair, and I sincerely mourn for the Ukrainian people who have lost so much. It is out of that sympathy that I also see the false morality of those who claim that the 28-point-plan proposed by the United States is a complete surrender to Russia. This argument, which was promoted by legacy media outlets as well as many politicians, somehow argues that Russia, with the clear upper-hand, should be expected to take a deal that is less beneficial than continued war. Again, if you were to take the names of the countries and leaders, and explained the proposed peace plan in objective terms, no reasonable person would contest that the country with a clearer track towards victory would get a better deal than the country destined for defeat. Why that is controversial is a deeper more prescient question than endless posturing of “fairness” and “capitulation”.

Again and again the leaders of Europe have kicked and screamed when the Trump administration has pushed for peace. Peace is appeasement! Peace is surrender! Peace is inviting Putin to pause and re-arm! Yet, they never seem to offer another solution as to how Ukraine, with less and less men, and a smaller and smaller economy, can win this war. That is, obviously, because they do not have a solution. They only wish not to be embarassed at their dinner parties and galas. They believe, like every other aspect of their life, that the world they want is the world they should get. They are the chosen ones who future generations will compare to the giants of the early twentieth century, standing up against the forces of tyranny with a united populace behind them.

If the leaders of Europe continue to entrench themselves into perpetual war, and ignore the leadership of the United States, it would beg of us to reconsider why we sacrifice prosperity at home for their protection. The argument, as it has been said, is that by footing the bill for Europe we are securing enormous influence among a region that was for most of human history ensnared in endless internecine conflict. There is some truth to this argument, and the inarguable success of institutions like the European Union reflect this. Europe is richer, safer, and more powerful united than divided. Yet, this unification also came at a cost.

While European social democracies have enjoyed robust healthcare and infrastructure by not paying their defense bill, America has suffered. We have watched our cities become infested with drugs and overcome by homelessness, our people battered and beaten by exorbitant healthcare costs. Again, the argument for this trade was that American leadership in Europe outweighed the harm at home. We should, then, expect Europe to understand that as a result of this endless support we have the right to enact our vision of the continent. We have the right to expect that when an American President pushes for peace, that Europe gets in line behind us. Such an expectation has been brutally rebuked.

If the United States does not act, radically and rapidly, to push this war into a peace, we will continue to risk another great war. This war will not be the one that these leaders across the Atlantic dream about when they lay their heads at night. There is no Churchill waiting to organize Europe, nor is there a Hitler hell-bent on worldwide domination to unify against. Instead we look to be repeating the first World War—the war ignored by history because it was about no ideology and no fight for freedom, just the legacies and lives of the unelected elite. It erupted out of an ignored tension, expanded by ignorant leadership, and only extinguished after incomprehensible bloodshed.

Twenty million died in that war. Twenty million men who would have been fathers of children and sons of the nation. Twenty million young boys who did not have the wealth to escape conscription and who believed that their leaders would protect them. Twenty million mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, who would watch their blood leave and never return. That is why we push for peace in Ukraine, and in Gaza, and in every corner of this Earth where blood is spilled.

There’s a common joke around Washington that every Senator, when they close their eyes to rest at night, imagines themselves as President. Unlike the House, which has nearly five hundred bodies stuffed into a chaotic chamber, the Senate is different. It’s the older, more sophisticated brother of the legislative branch—the cherished offspring of the Founding Fathers meant to act as a backstop to petty politics. Still, though, even as a Senator you are merely one of a hundred people. Your power exists inside the margins, notching important but ultimately small wins on legislation directed by the President. Even with the prestige of the Senate, you are still expected to fall in line with your party. You are, even in the oh-so-important Senate, another pawn in a chess game happening inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It makes perfect sense, therefore, that under the quiet of night a Senator would dream of something bigger. A world where they no longer take orders, but make them. A world where they are the ones controlling the pawns—moving the pieces across the board in a way the current President, no matter the party, never could. How amazing it would be! Their success, which of course would be guaranteed, would be coterminous with the success of the country. America needed someone who knew the system from within but could lead it from above—how fantastic was it that they fit the bill? They were the savior! This was more than a daydream—this was the future! Our future!

As the sun rises over the Potomac, and with it the realities of party politics, these dreams recede back into the subconscious of a Senator. When asked what they think about a given issue they instinctively defer to their party leadership. After all, in the grand scheme of things, the pawn is at least a piece on the board. To risk losing that—to march across the board for salvation—would risk complete irrelevance. Your gamble could gift you nothing but a lowly spot on cable news, arguing about the issues you once had a vote on. A permanent stench of ‘Former’ on your prestigious status of Senator. No, those dreams would stay hidden until the next night when you can, once again, allow yourself to see your destiny.

I, of course, am not a Senator. I do not know if at the end of a long career in the body, if these men and women wish they had acted different—if they wish they had tried, even once, for the job they dreamed of. Was their dance with destiny subverted by their fear of failure? Or was it that this dance never existed? That they were only ever to be one of a hundred in a branch of more than five hundred. One has a choice, then, between two markedly different paths.

The first is one of rationalization. The beyond is no longer believable. You point to the myriad obstacles, both real and imagined, to feed the fear you hold inside. You have a family! A career! A good life! The glory of winning suddenly becomes an indictment of those who did not back away from the beyond, who saw the unwritten future as theirs to write. A hollow humility envelops your sense of self—built with a gratitude you do not feel for a life you have not lived. Often this is brought out with a manufactured appreciation for the small things in life, as if enjoying pleasant weather or a day with family is only possible by surrendering your individuality. This is, of course, a tragedy.

The great lie that a life of comfortability aims to convince you of is to equate positive feelings with meaningful ones. In it lies an argument that the stressors of life are manufactured and that only love—however vague that may be—is the only feeling worth chasing. The logical extension of this view is so evidently false that it begs a closer examination.

Humanity, it would have to be argued, has somehow escaped the apparently undeniable meaning of simple pleasures and set up a system of social structures that, by some miracle, has survived thousands of years of human evolution. How has the magnetism of power and prestige characterized every society in every time in human history? Instead, could it be that the very core of our humanity is not some reductive animalistic instinct for what we are born into and instead a true desire to be more than one human could ever hope to be? I would argue it is the latter. The true contentness that so many claim to have is fundamentally impossible without first attempting to impress yourself upon our world.

Let us return to our imaginary has-been Senator. At first, it would seem impossible for a figure who achieved so much to ever tread this path of resignation. There is some truth to this—becoming a Senator is far from easy no matter your background. My point is not to say that any true appreciation of your life is impossible without exhausting yourself completely. Instead, I would argue that the barometer for meaning is entirely relative to the individual. Our Senator may view the seat itself as the greatest honor and, outside of the occasional daydream, feel their life to be truly fulfilled. I would never attempt to argue that such a feeling is wrong morally or empirically.

Most of us all fall on this first path. A few, like our Senator, do find their potential to be realized in the minute. Most, however, can never know for certain whether this path was truly the one they were meant for. There can be no certainty as to if they could have lived fuller and done more. Yes, ultimately this life is one that an individual chooses, and yes, this life is comparatively harmless. I do not hold pity for these people, and nor should you, because this very sympathy only ensnares a stalled life to remain inert. On a group level, this is a tragedy that demands an urgent pivot, but as for the individual, it is nothing to be mourned. Life moves on.

Thankfully, there is another path. That is the life of a relentless, painful, but ultimately triumphant conviction in your individuality. The future operates outside the power paradigms of our current reality—it is both remarkably amorphous and strikingly tangible. By anchoring your purpose onto not just one goal, but to an unbreakable belief that you are meant to be something, you can accomplish the absolute. It asks of you nothing else but a true faith in yourself.

Imagine, now, that when our Senator lays their head to rest they dream not of how good of a President they could be, but how certain it is that they will be President. This can feel pedantic at first—on the surface the thought itself has barely changed. Herein lies the real power of a conviction of your place in the future, and the undeniable superiority of this second path. The thought itself—the certainty—drinks from the same belief of capabilities that allowed a Senator to become a Senator in the first place. This is not to be mistaken with ambition which, while undoubtedly important, can lack a certain security in one’s place in the world. If you live only off ambition, you will live only in the current and the past. It will chain you to the material and prevent you from racing into the future at the pace it demands.

If the first path is marked by resignation and reconciliation with defeat, this second path is instead one of a necessary, arguably unwarranted, conviction. Conviction is the engine that powers anything of substance. It is a remarkable, undeniable, and impenetrable shield from numbness. It invites itself into every relationship you have, every title you hold, and every decision you make. Once you choose this conviction you not only see the fatality of forfeiting what your life can and cannot be, but the true limitless nature of your future. It is yours and only yours to shape, unencumbered by jealousy of others on the same path it focuses the whole of your world into one thing—you. The future looks not like a daunting nightmare hovering over your individual but an invitation to claim what is rightfully yours.

I understand fully that such a statement can be read as some type of naive egotistical view of the world that is bound to fail. It’s true that the line between self-belief and self-delusion is thin and easy to cross. I would counter this, however, by first denying that a life of manufactured pleasure is any less narcissistic than the occasional delusion of grandeur. By resigning your future to others you are thereby signaling just how much you cannot unchain your fear of failure. You cannot dare to proudly stand up and fight for your purpose—so much so that you would rather die a premature death.

Believing you have the potential to be great is a selfless endeavor that protects others from harm. If you believe you are great, if you know are meant to be The One, then you will need an enormous amount of assistance. This is what builds communities from the nation to the neighborhood—one individual willing to bear the burden of failure to provide something better for the group. That is what proves the pain of conviction right even in the most dreadful of setbacks. You know that if you do not claim the future you will allow another to do it for you—and you will live under whatever it is that they create. That is not bravery, or peace, or meaning. It is surrender and capitulation.

The first step to running for President is to believe you can be President. It doesn’t require a Senate seat to believe this future can be yours. I believe I am meant to be something. I know I am. I could assuage your creeping annoyance by pointing to the work I have done or the things I have sacrificed, and maybe that’s the strategically adept move. To be honest, though, my unabated sprint for the future is built off of an inner conviction deeper than any GPA or internship. I want the future for myself because I know that I can have it. I know that the engine in me does not cower from any crowd or any title. I am proud of that because it is not unique to me. I am not rich, I was not born with some innate giftedness. I have fought for what I have and I will fight for that future on the path of conviction. You have that fight too.

If you were to create a machine that could simulate the 1988 Democratic Presidential primary a thousand times, I would bet most of those simulations would leave you with Gary Hart as the nominee. Hart, the Democratic Senator from Colorado, the runner-up for the nomination four years before, was the clear front-runner for months leading to Iowa. His opponents, a smattering of coastal politicians like Senator Joe Biden, and Governor Michael Dukakis, seemed destined to earn their epitaph on the ever-expanding grave of “Also ran:”. The only thing stopping Hart from winning, was himself.

Gary Hart was a man who needed to be understood. Needed it more than most politicians do. For Gary Hart, running for President was a duty. A responsibility. Gary Hart would never—could never—be the cool, calm, and collected politician who could get your son a job as thanks for your work in Iowa. No. For Gary Hart, the work of the campaign—of his ideals and value—was all that should be enough. This was the Presidency. The toughest job in the world. A job so stressful that eight years of it turned a fresh-faced Barack Obama into a grizzled veteran of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For Gary Hart to survive, he had to be himself: a man who, just by the stroke of luck, had his ambitions aligned to his morals.

It would be through character that Gary Hart would win the nomination. Grit. Honor. It should speak to Hart’s obsession with this natural statesmanship that his original campaign announcement was scheduled to take place on his porch. Hidden away in the mountains of Colorado, with TV vans adorned with the major network logos, with lumbering satellites welded onto the top, the Hart campaign for President would begin. You could also argue that this campaign was larger than just one office. It was a vision of America that Hart wanted—wished so bad to be true that he believed it was real—to see.

For years, since he made his name as the young and fashionable campaign manager of the young and fashionable McGovern 72’ campaign, Hart never could be comfortable with letting the world into his personal life. He could talk for hours about the need for diplomacy with the Soviet Union, about his plan to keep American jobs, about anything you cared about knowing. That was the “Ability” in “Elect Ability”. If you asked about his family? His backstory? Forget it. That was private—and more importantly—irrelevant. Why would that matter? Was Lee Hart, Gary’s wife, running for President? Of course not.

To a raucous media though, this resistance to opening up signaled a story. It was as if Hart was holding a ribeye over a pit of hungry lions—how could they not swipe their paws and grab it? For months the Hart campaign would be dogged by stories of a candidate that the media just could not understand. Journalists were careful to not overstep—to name directly what exactly they found so odd about Hart—but the drip of stories seeped into the foundation of an already apprehensive candidate. The media was against Gary Hart! Wanted him to not just lose, but to be battered! humiliated! The three-letter hounds wanted a reminder to all other candidates that the almighty media had a responsibility to investigate the personal lives of men who wanted the nuclear briefcase.

That’s where Hart would find his end. A story would release—one of those journalists who had badgered the campaign for the last year—accusing Hart of the cardinal sin of pre-Clinton politics: an affair. The evidence was damning: Hart with a woman many years younger on his lap. To make it better, Hart was wearing a shirt that said ‘Monkey Business Crew’. It was perfect! The media was right! Hart was hiding something—something disqualifying—and he thought he could outsmart the media. America was defended! Democracy was preserved! The checks had checked! The balances had balanced!

There’s a lot more to write about Gary Hart, and I would recommend you read the brilliant ‘What it Takes’ by Richard Cramer to learn more. For the purposes of this piece, though, I think the basic story is enough. It’s a story of a man who wanted to have it both ways. Gary Hart wanted to be President, wanted the recognition for his humbleness. He wanted—believed—that this country would see him for what he was. It wouldn’t matter that some New York journalist wanted to break the next Watergate. Americans could see! They could see why it wasn’t unreasonable to ask for a bit of privacy. Why his modest home life was just that—modest—not some cover for a darker conspiracy!

Perhaps if Hart had been more friendly with the media—more willing to play ball—that he could avoid the monkey business he became engulfed in. Perhaps Hart could’ve politely declined the photo he so eagerly posed for. It speaks to how deeply Hart believed that personal matters should stay personal that a photo like that even exists. It reflects a man whose hubris had not only grown so tall to think he could become President, but that had grown so wide that he believed he was an intractable force.

In truth, I think my fascination with the story of Gary Hart is how much he reminds me of myself. I find myself struggling with the same clash that I believe brought Gary Hart to be the frontrunner for the nomination, and then dragged him to the footnotes of history. It’s a belief in yourself that is different, I believe, than many of those who run for President. A belief that you, yourself, can will a different world into existence. A feeling, deep down past humility and humanity, that you are meant to be something bigger than one person.

Whether I admit it or not, this belief is the fuel that powers my internal engine of ambition. It’s a scary belief, because of how easily it is to be proven wrong. My standards for myself—for what I think I can achieve—are so high that I find myself worried if I have set standards that no human can meet. Can I become a Governor in my thirties? A Senator? If I don’t, will I be a failure? If I do, will I still be recognizable? I don’t know. I don’t think you can ever know until you kneel at the altar of ambition and give everything in service to it.

For the last three years, the world has avoided the worst in Ukraine: a direct conflict between NATO and Russia. Even during the nearly five decades of the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union did not engage in direct combat. A conflict in 2025 would, almost assuredly, mark the beginning of the largest, and deadliest, war since 1945. It would bring an outmatched Russia against an unorganized NATO, with the looming spectre of nuclear war as real as it has ever been in human history. The stakes cannot be higher, and the need to act cannot be more urgent to exercise the levers of diplomacy before we are engulfed in the rage of war.

As President Trump appears to cede the responsibility of peacemaking, and protection, to Europe, the need to deliberate American intentions in the region has never been more clear. We should, as President Trump has pursued, task European leaders to take the bulk of their continental defense to allow for the United States to address our peripheral security needs, including the threat of China and the security of South America. However, the United States must be clear when, and where, we will defend our NATO allies, and what that defense will look like. We cannot allow a paroxysm of escalation, brought by fiercely anti-Russian Eastern European states, to define and dictate an American response.

This danger is only increasing following President Trump’s expressed approval of Russian aircraft being shot down after repeated incursions over the last month. We are rapidly reaching a point where, for instance, Poland will shoot down a Russian aircraft over Polish airspace, prompting Russian forces to escalate in a tit-for-tat fashion, prompting more shootdowns. This escalatory cycle could, in the course of weeks, bring NATO and Russia into an inescapable spiral towards mutual destruction. The United States must make clear that unless clearly attacked by Russian forces, the United States of America will not intervene to defend Eastern European allies.

The most damnable part of this entire dilemma is how flatly un-democratic it is. The American people, quite clearly and reasonably, have felt lied to time after time by disastrous and dangerous interventionism. We are first told that the defense of Ukraine is measured, and that our security establishment has our best interests at heart. Then, after escalating slowly and steadily, we are told that there is simply no other choice but to act decisively to deter even more carnage! We have been, according to these elites, pushed to a conflict we had no part in exacerbating and no choice but to intervene in. When such a conflict does not bring the dividend of democracy we are promised, and while Americans still sleep on our streets addled by foreign drugs, we are told to not disrespect the valor of those who died to defend us thousands of miles away.

We are increasingly, both as a country and as a world, acting as if the threat of nuclear conflict is a bygone problem. Such a belief ignores the basic facts. In 2017, President Trump nearly engaged in direct strikes against North Korea, prompting Dictator Kim Jong Un to believe his regimes survival was dependent on inflicting enough damage to deter the United States from further aggression. In 2022, the United States viewed the threat of Russian nuclear detonation against advancing Ukrainian forces as a real threat. Senior Russian commanders were openly discussing the logistics of a battlefield detonation, including discreetly transporting such a weapon to avoid U.S. detection. This worrying trend should be more than enough to engender a global push, led by the United States, for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

I want to be clear here that I am not, and never would, apologize for Russian aggression. I believe the murder of innocent civilians and the encroachment of sovereign soil are abject evil no matter if their name ends with Bush, Putin, or Netanyahu. We must remember that these exercises are not a game where one side wins and another loses. We are on the denouement of global catastrophe. We all can feel, and see, that this world is on a march towards war once again. What will we do to fix it? Will we bury our heads in our ideology, burrowing deeper the more untenable this world looks? Or will we admit that we have a chance, at the dawn of a new world, to see the world as it is and not as we wish.

Note: This piece was originally intended for the University of Kansas Trade War Lab, where I lead our communications team. If you enjoy my work, or want to know more about trade politics, I’d encourage you to subscribe to our Substack!

When Tim Cook landed in Hanoi in April of last year, the mood was celebratory. For years, Apple had relied on a vast, finely tuned supply chain embedded in China, its economic elder to thYe east. That investment helped transform China’s economic landscape, drawing in waves of foreign capital and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. But Cook, whose rise to CEO was shaped by his mastery of supply chain logistics, was in Vietnam for a reason. Beyond sipping egg coffee and posing for photos with local fans in Hanoi, the visit signaled a broader strategic shift: Vietnam, not China, is now being cast as the potential next great industrial partner for companies eager to de-risk in the face of deteriorating U.S.–China ties. For Hanoi, the chance to replicate China’s FDI-driven transformation is without precedent. The question is whether it can move fast enough to attract and sustain the attention of high-profile executives and revenue-rich firms like Apple.

Talk of Vietnam as the next hub for American investment predates the current diversion between Washington and Beijing. President Obama lauded “the skyscrapers and high-rises of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City,” linking Vietnam’s growth story to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although President Trump would withdraw from the TPP on his first day in office, he, too, courted Hanoi—hosting the second U.S.–North Korea summit there in 2019. President Biden, ever interested in expanding the traditional diplomatic might of America, reclassified the relationship between the two countries to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, paving the way for increased American investment in Vietnam’s burgeoning tech sector.

For American officials across administrations, Vietnam offers familiar allure: a young workforce (nearly 70% of the population is of working age), a median income still below China’s, and a reformist trajectory that, on paper, echoes the early days of China’s boom. Since 2010, FDI has surged nearly 70%, drawing in the likes of Intel and Coca-Cola. But while Vietnam courts foreign capital, its approval process remains cumbersome, saddled by ownership caps and opaque administrative hurdles. Vietnam holds no formal national security review, relying on the Communist Party’s authority to ensure risk and security. The Department of Planning and Investment (DPI) works as the first of a long bureaucratic chain; a reminder that the investment attraction of today is still not fully embraced by the political elite. The perpetual cautiousness endemic to the authoritarian state still holds restrictions for foreign enterprises, an environment some have argued is not dissimilar to the same Chinese foreign investment laws that Western companies and governments have grown uncomfortable with.

In order to unlock this economic dream, though, Vietnam must work to fix its infrastructure, which has been plagued by dated and decaying bridges, roads, and ports. The country has already forfeited over 2.5 billion dollars as a casualty to Vietnamese officials fearful of violating strict and broad anti-grafting laws, delaying infrastructure upgrades further out of sight. Domestically, the government has become mired in similar bureaucratic delays, failing to invest a quarter of its own public funds on infrastructure from 2021 to 2023. Unlike China, whose economic comeuppance was unique in both the scale of its population and the delay in allowing foreign investors access to its markets, Vietnam now has to compete with a host of other countries looking to gain off of China’s loss. India, which has also become central to Apple’s iPhone production, has worked to roll back restrictive labor and land acquisition laws in an attempt to court the same market that Vietnam looks to for its economic future. Another competitor, Malaysia, has established tax-free special interest zonesand worked to bring tech giants like Google and Microsoft to house their cloud infrastructure.

Despite hopes from American officials that increased trade could sway Hanoi away from Beijing and toward Washington,the country has remained steadfastly uninterested in picking a side. Pragmatism, not shared dreams of a socialist future, has defined Vietnam’s working relationship with China as the two countries have deepened their relationship. Trade with China now makes up nearly a third of total trade, up nearly fifteen percent from the previous year and cementing two decades of China being Vietnam’s largest import partner. President Xi Jinping has sought to bring Vietnam into a larger coalition against what he describes as “unilateral bullying” emanating from President Trump’s widespread “retaliatory tariffs.”

Those tariffs, which when initially announced promised to decimate Vietnam’s trade relationship with the United States through an astounding 46% tariff on imports. Vietnamese steel products are already hit with more than a four hundred percent markup, an industry that President Trump has long considered core to revitalizing American manufacturing. Attempts to placate President Trump from Hanoi, including facilitating the deportation of Vietnamese nationals and opening its market to Trump-favorite Elon Musk’s Starlink, have still failed to result in a new comprehensive trade deal before the ninety-day tariff suspension ends. While the President and his advisors had boasted of a slew of trade deals that would mend political and economic fences, the administration has secured just one deal so far, with the United Kingdom. For Vietnam, the threat of losing the United States, their largest single export destination, could erase their economic ascent and serve to heighten reliance on Chinese markets.

Tim Cook’s visit may have lasted only a few days, but for a country whose economic future is tied to the global trade order, the sense of both promise and uncertainty is equally strong. Vietnam will have to play politics in a way that China, whose accession to the World Trade Organization was shepherded by the United States, will not. The authoritarian state still has to bring economic vitality to placate the younger and more pragmatic generation of Vietnamese who have grown up in an era of internet access and in a country still reeling from the devastating war less than half a century ago. As the Gulfstream G650, Cook’s private jet of choice, took off from Noi Bai International Airport, few could have expected what would come of the global trade system that could both give and take away the future of a hundred million Vietnamese.

I have a persistent daydream of me in the future, with my arms raised against the backdrop of a large American flag. It’s a campaign rally, and there’s a crowd. I can hear them, and I can see me. I can see my smile—how happy I look. How everything seems like it makes sense. It has become a guiding star for my future. When I feel discouraged, or I feel myself meandering, I think about that image. When I succeed, and I feel like I’m inching closer to this dream, I feel euphoric. I feel like I have been chosen to lead and bring the America that I know exists. For a very brief moment it feels as if President Charlie Andrade—arms hoisted in celebration—is in front of me.

If I were to be honest, no part of me is more important to my sense of self than my ambition. My belief that I can do more, on a bigger scale with more eyes watching me, provides an enormous layer of protection against self-doubt. Without ambition, I don’t think I would do most of what I do today. It requires a level of faith that you are, against all odds, truly meant to do more than what you come from.

Ambition, as it exists in American culture, is both virtuous and singular. Unlike certain feelings like jealousy or joy, ambition spreads across one’s sense of self. There are cruel ambitious people just as there are kind ambitious people—with few similarities outside of their want for the ever-evasive “more.” In America, we reward ambition and risk-takers with an enormous opportunity to fail. Just look at our venture capital community—an industry willing to lose millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars on nothing more than a charismatic founder and a good-on-paper idea. Our country has, I would argue, largely for the best, embraced the idea that ambitious people carry a fire inside them that cannot be either enflamed or extinguished by anyone else.

In this way, ambition is also a very lonely emotion. To be proudly ambitious invites you onto a stage you often feel you didn’t ask for. To start with, some percentage of the population will always resent you for chasing your future with defiant optimism. Their insecurity can be plainly evident, but the feeling of being “other” is still powerful, and I believe a major reason that many young people are not outwardly ambitious is because of this ostracizing. At the same time, another part of your world will treat your ambition with a cartoonish valor—like a tragic hero in a play they are watching from offstage. It’s almost as if your belief in yourself has been commoditized, and your success is in some way seen not as a reflection of your own ability but as another’s ability to see it. Both are difficult, but inevitable, in the pursuit of one’s imagined future.

Overcoming these feelings is something I’m just beginning to understand and adapt to. I’ve never felt that my political aspirations are a reflection of some inner need to provide myself with a nicer future. I live an extraordinarily pleasant and privileged life as it stands, and outside of a few luxuries, I don’t believe I would find much satisfaction by using my ambition to enrich myself with dollars and diamonds. Rather, I have come to view my ambition as a tool to provide those I love with the life they deserve.

We all know people who have spent their lives toiling away at a career they hate, just to see their already wealthy life grow ever wealthier. We see in their eyes the lack of meaning, and in their smiles the lack of joy. Careerism in this light has entered their soul like a virus, latching onto the supposed virtue of ambition to advance itself through the mind. This ambition of self, rather than of soul, can easily become one’s way of being, inside and outside the workplace.

If you want to harness ambition in a way that is both everlasting and actually fulfilling, the solution is to recognize your life as a foundation for others. In my case, I view my political aspirations as a real way to help make the lives of those I know and love—my family, friends, and partner—and those I love but do not know—my fellow Americans—better. I’m not afraid to say that helping others makes me feel better about myself. We should be comfortable admitting that giving is a symbiotic act. Otherwise, we will chase self-aggrandizement without fail, under the false belief that we are not truly deserving or capable of virtuous giving.

Hopefully one day that daydream will become a reality. I believe it will, and I continue to spend my days working toward that dream. If I’m wrong, I will still have lived a life pursuant to a fundamental kindness—one that allows me to provide and lead outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It will all, as it always has, be for those who have supported me. That is where true ambition really lies.

America is no longer on the path toward political violence and vitriol—we have already . The question is not whether America can turn away from this scourge, but whether we can turn back entirely. If we cannot, this country will continue to fade—slowly, and loudly—into itself.

We cannot be vague about the forces of domestic evil that seek to tear our common America into separate Americas, where one side commits all evil and the other all good. These ideologues exist on both the far left and the far right, and they represent much of what is wrong with modern America. The far right embraces its hatred and robs our American heritage of its valor to promote division. The far left believes that a moralistic claim to America permits violence and lawlessness with righteous impunity. These camps are led by figures who see our country as a rotting carcass to pick at, grabbing the last stringy pieces of flesh for their own benefit. They have declared war on America, and we must declare war on them.

Our war must be fought with kindness and courage. We must dismantle the noxious infrastructure of outrage and lies that pulls the American people away from one another. Social media corporations have wiped their hands of our blood with their dollars and fomented the greatest divide this country has seen since the Civil War. They have platformed extremism, given credence to hatred, and stoked violence. To prevent another assassination like that of Charlie Kirk or Melissa Hortman, we must, once and for all, push for real regulation and verification on social media platforms. Congress must require these companies, like Meta and X, to implement identity verification for all users. The privilege of anonymity has been contorted into a defense of endless violence—it must end. With real identity verification, we can remove bad actors who stoke division and prosecute those who profit from the dissolution of this union.

Our media apparatus has a responsibility to act in good faith for a struggling democracy. I was angered to see The New York Times promote the ramblings of extremists like Representative Nancy Mace and ignore the broad majority of members of Congress—Republicans and Democrats alike—who mourned the death of Charlie Kirk. A free press has the right to report on what it wants, when it wants, but our largest outlets should recognize that a free press is a privilege of a functioning democracy. In the wake of national tragedies, journalists should be aware of their substantial role in determining which conversations exist and how they unfold over time.

It profoundly scares me, as someone who expects to hold a role as public and partisan as Charlie Kirk’s, to see the glee many on the left expressed over his death. First, it is embarrassing and pathetic. Celebrating slaughter reflects the same inner evil that so many on the left claim to find disgusting. I do not believe this celebration stems from deep psychological morbidity, but rather from the hyper-online left’s role-playing of a coherent ideology. The belief that because someone does evil they deserve evil is, in itself, a damning indictment of one’s own goodness. Most of these people are children without real beliefs or values, so I will spare them the worst of my criticism, but I will not hide my pity for the cruelty and embarrassing naïveté they display.

We must also remember that political tragedy is not an excuse to attack political opponents in retribution or to target unrelated individuals irrespective of ideology. If President Trump, as he has done in the past, uses this national tragedy to advance his own attack on this same America, we must resist with courage. I have faith that almost every American can recognize that the killing of Charlie Kirk is abhorrent, and that his killing does not grant the President license to go after Democratic organizations. Political violence can serve as an accelerant to authoritarianism, but the United States is not on the verge of totalitarianism or dictatorship.

We will get the leaders we deserve. If we are a country where sharing your views is an invitation to lead in your neck, then we are not a country at all. We will be under the despotic rule of extremist, anti-American individuals whose intelligence is so low, and morality so nonexistent, that they think they can control the virus of violence. They cannot. I mourn Charlie Kirk’s death as a fellow American, just as I mourn Melissa Hortman and the children of Annunciation Catholic School. For their sake, we must begin the assault on these traitorous ideals, whatever their ideology.