Saturday Digest at the Circus

The week philosophy met reality

Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash

Something crystallized this week. The philosophical work and the political documentation converged in ways that felt less like separate tracks and more like parts of the same diagnosis.

Let me walk you through what we covered.

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First, a response to the constant feedback about my writing.

People keep telling me to write shorter. Simpler. Less repetitive. And I keep not doing it—not out of stubbornness, but because the things they’re criticizing are deliberate choices.

The density isn’t accidental. The refrains aren’t memory lapses. The length comes from showing work rather than just presenting conclusions. When I approach an idea from multiple angles, it’s because different minds need different entry points.

I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m trying to build something that actually holds up when you need it to—frameworks for thinking through complexity that don’t collapse the first time you face sophisticated manipulation.

If that’s not what you’re looking for, there are plenty of other options. But if it is, the approach makes sense once you see what it’s for.

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Then the philosophical piece I’ve been working toward for months.

David Hume identified something nearly three centuries ago that keeps getting forgotten: you cannot derive “ought” from “is.” No amount of factual observation or rigorous calculation can tell you what you should value.

This week I applied that insight to two movements that think they’ve found ways around it: Effective Altruism’s claim that utility calculations can determine optimal morality, and progressive virtuocracy’s claim that moral insight about oppression can determine what justice requires.

Both are sophisticated. Both are well-intentioned. Both arrive at the same authoritarian conclusion through different routes: “Therefore I should decide for you.”

EA says: “I’ve calculated better. Therefore I should rule.”

Virtuocracy says: “I’ve understood injustice better. Therefore I should rule.”

Democracy says: “Neither calculation nor moral insight grants political authority over others.”

Hume’s guillotine falls on both.

Available to paid subscribers.

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But while I was working through abstract philosophy, concrete events kept providing perfect case studies.

Tucker Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes—a 26-year-old Holocaust denier who calls for “Total Aryan Victory”—and treated him with the deference reserved for serious intellectuals. Not challenging him. Not exposing him. Platforming him.

This matters not because Fuentes has power now, but because Carlson is building the infrastructure to give him power. The same way he built it for Trump. The same way he’s building it for himself.

Meanwhile, conservative Jews are treating a democratic socialist who visited a synagogue as a greater threat than the actual Nazi Tucker just introduced to millions of Americans.

The cognitive dissonance is staggering. And suicidal.

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While Tucker normalized Nazis, the Democratic establishment was busy proving my point about dead frameworks.

Hakeem Jeffries held a closed-door meeting telling Democrats to ignore constitutional violations and focus on “kitchen table issues.” Federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions? Stephen Miller calling judicial review “insurrection”? Military operations over civilian infrastructure? All “noise.” All “distractions” from what polls well with swing voters.

This is management thinking applied to existential crisis. Focus groups as substitute for vision. And it’s failing for the same reason it’s been failing for a decade: you cannot fight concentrated economic power while depending on that same concentrated power to fund your campaigns.

The framework is dead. But the people operating it can’t admit that without destroying their positions within it. So they keep optimizing within constraints they won’t name, workshopping messages that sound like fighting without threatening anyone important.

Meanwhile, the base organizes outside the framework. Protests multiply. Boycotts impose costs. Energy builds around candidates the establishment actively opposes.

The gap between what people need and what they’re offered keeps growing.

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Then Republicans started having their own reckoning.

Heritage Foundation staffers began subtweeting their boss with “NAZIS ARE BAD” memes after he defended Tucker’s Nazi interview. Erick Erickson—who spent years defending conservative movement orthodoxy—started publicly calling his own side cowards for accommodating antisemitism to court zoomer votes.

And DHS posted propaganda videos of federal officers styled to look like SS commanders. Long black trench coats, slicked hair, black-and-white cinematography, text declaring “WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED.”

They’re not hiding what they are. They’re advertising it.

This is what happens when you spend years dismissing warnings as hysterical while accommodating anyone who hates the same people you hate. When you’re too busy worrying about pronouns to notice actual white nationalists building power in your coalition.

The call was coming from inside the house. They just weren’t listening.

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And this morning, I published something I’ve been working through for years.

I was once libertarian. The idea that people should be free to pursue their own ends seemed beautiful and obvious. Then I started finding problems with the underlying philosophy that I couldn’t resolve.

When you make property rights inviolable, when you treat any democratic constraint on property as illegitimate, you create systematic concentration of power in private hands. The libertarian response—”but these are voluntary exchanges!”—only works if you define coercion so narrowly it excludes most of how power actually operates.

And the intellectual tradition descended from Rothbard and Hoppe doesn’t deny this. They embrace it. They’re explicit about building “covenant communities” where property holders exercise absolute authority. The neo-reactionaries aren’t betraying libertarianism—they’re following its logic to its conclusion.

Classical liberalism offers what libertarianism promised but couldn’t deliver: recognition that liberty requires just institutions, that property rights serve human flourishing when embedded in frameworks of mutual obligation, that freedom for all requires democratic constraint on concentrated power.

I’m not declaring victory over libertarians. I’m documenting a philosophical failure I lived through myself.

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What Happens Next

Subscribe to the paid tier for The Guillotine Still Falls—the philosophical foundations this week’s work rests on. Get 15% off here for immediate access.

Share what resonates. Argue with what doesn’t. Stay engaged with the work, whatever that looks like for you.

And recognize that this isn’t one person’s project. It’s an ongoing conversation about what constitutional democracy requires and whether we’re willing to do the work of maintaining it.

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The wire still holds. The center can be held. The work continues.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And some things need saying even when—especially when—saying them costs something.

The circus continues. So do we.

—Mike