The Status Quo Needs Shaking Up

Hey everybody—it’s Tim sitting in for JVL today.

I want to try to tie together some of the themes that JVL explored last week in his underappreciated (and in some quarters unfairly maligned) newsletters on “enshittification” and Graham Platner, and put more of a campaign lens on them. We’ve been talking a lot about how voters are looking for outsiders and fighters who may not map along the ideological lines expected by social media warriors engaged in factional political fights, so I wanted to hash out that notion a bit. I think there are going to be parts of this thesis for everyone to love and hate, and I’m open to revising and extending—so give it to me in the comments like usual.

On a sad note, I also wanted to offer a tribute to Jason Collins, who died last night. The New Jersey Nets legend came out before his last season in the NBA, making him the first openly gay athlete in professional American team sports. That last year he wore the number 98 to honor Matthew Shepard, who was murdered in 1998. Tragically, doctors found last fall that Collins had an advanced brain tumor, which took his life yesterday at the too-young age of 47. It’s been thirteen years since Collins came out and I think it’s a testimony to his courage that so few have followed his path. Much love to Collins; rest easy queen.

Xx
Tim

1. The Epstein Files Lesson

Last summer the campaign to release the Epstein files seemed dead. Trump’s coverup had worked, with minimal pushback. The Republican party was going along with it. He had moved the conversation onto other absurdities. (Nuuk invasion imminent!) On June 15, 2025, the degenerate Polymarket bettors gave the files an 11.5 percent chance of becoming public.

But then a pair of House gadflies, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), decided they weren’t going to just let the sclerotic establishment brush the files under the rug. They said “eff it” and pressed forward, blowback be damned. Ro’s Democratic colleagues rolled their eyes behind his back. Some thought he was engaging in conspiracy-mongering. The president began actively campaigning against Massie, smearing him in grotesquely personal terms.

You know where this story goes.

It is true that we don’t yet have everything that the victims wanted. But accountability for the perpetrators has begun (abroad, at least), and when the Democrats take the House next year, maybe at long last some accountability will come here at home.

There are a lot of lessons one could take from this about how to “do politics,” but the one I want to focus on today is the importance of having politicians willing to buck conventional wisdom—and endure bullshit attacks, even from their own side—if you actually want to achieve meaningful change in our current system.

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This isn’t how politics used to work. For a century, the way to get results was to play the inside game, slowly build relationships, hash out deals with bigwigs—often from the other party—and gain enough power to bring home the bacon.

But that mode of politics has crumbled over the last three decades. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the weakening of the parties’ gatekeeping power, the internet, John Thune and Mike Johnson castrating themselves for Trump, the unitary executive theory, democratic enshittification, negative partisanship, geographic sorting, and other social contagions have created an extinction-level event for inside-game politics while making voters feel like their representatives are less responsive than ever to their concerns.

I have to say I don’t particularly love this. My natural state is small-c conservatism. In a different universe I’d be the guy with the bullhorn at one of those Incremental Change rallies that Sarah likes to talk about:

What do we want?

Policies that improve people’s lives on the margins without risking catastrophic damage or loss of liberty!

When do we want it?

In the due course of time!

But you may have noticed that we aren’t in a world where incremental positive change is happening. In fact, in many parts of our society it feels totally out of reach.

2. Creative Destruction

As the failures of American politics have become painfully obvious—from Congress’s inability to make policy to the political parties being helmed by octogenarians to the inefficiencies that are driving Californians to move to red states—frustration with government’s lack of ability to do anything might just be the one thing that everyone can agree on, from Mamdani stans to Abundance bros to the MAGA hordes that believed Trump would, if nothing else, be a man of action.

Our government is creaky, literally: As of its convening last year, this Congress has the most members above 70 years old in American history, and the average age of American governors is even higher than that of Congress. Americans made their feelings about the gerontocracy abundantly clear in their rejection of Joe Biden in 2024. And their frustrations are well founded. Think about it: Who is more likely to push for real change and needed reforms? Octogenarians who have been in the machine their whole life or younger outsiders who are incentivized to challenge the entrenched systems?

This is a situation ripe for creative destruction and disruptive innovation, to borrow terms from economics. There are obviously limits to this argument. There are good kinds of creative destruction and bad ones, as we’ve learned over the past decade. (And I find myself getting a little uncomfortable writing sentences that could’ve been penned in Breitbart circa 2015.)

But—to hijack a