Daily Bafflements

• Say “hullo” to our thirtieth issue, a breezy look at the collective panic afflicting the nation in election year! As John Summers writes, “Sober pundits intone, how do we balance liberty and security, freedom and security? We? Balance?  The bywords of America in 2016 are more like plutocrats and jittery.” Today we roll out Kade Crockford’s salvo “Keep Fear Alive,” on the trillion-dollar business that is the national security state, and Corey Pein’s “Everybody Freeze,” which examines the craze for heads-on-ice that is sweeping Silicon Valley. Look out for salvos by David Graeber, Astra Taylor, Tom Frank, and Evgeny Morozov, among others, as well as liberating stories by Ottessa Moshfegh and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, poetry by Dulce María Loynaz, Edwin Muir, and Natalia Ginsburg, and more. And, after all that, why not subscribe?

• “For all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months,” writes Tom Frank in The Guardian, “I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness.”

• Who’d have thunk it? Dystopic people-rating tools are still in business.

Daily Bafflements

 • Today in ostriches, their heads buried in the sand: “The future is clearly coming much faster than science had expected,” writes Bill McKibben in the Boston Globe.

There is legislation pending in the House and Senate that would end new fossil fuel extraction on America’s public lands. Senator Sanders has backed the law unequivocally; Secretary Clinton seemed to endorse it, and then last week seemed to waffle. Donald Trump has concentrated on the length of his fingers. 

Well, that’s a bit uncharitable, Bill. He’s concentrated on his short fingers and on cultivating fascist salutes. 

Donald Trump, Trickster God

The witch-doctors of the electoral season have utterly failed in their essential task; that is, to explain the alarming spectacle that has befallen the land like a sudden eclipse. Political reporters, consultants and pundits are flailing in astonishment as “the unthinkable becomes inevitable.” You know what I’m talking about. 

The old conventional wisdom held that Donald Trump’s campaign was a joke soon to be forgotten, that the bratty-rich-kid-turned-reality-show-star was unelectable—even in a Republican Party primary where a large share of the electorate believes the sitting president is a Manchurian candidate engineered by the all-powerful Islamic Illuminati.

The revised conventional wisdom says party leaders and other institutional elites failed to consider Trump with the seriousness he deserved, thus enabling his rise in a crowded field of flawed candidates. Which is yet another bogus argument. Not only does it deny agency to voters, it presumes that with a little time in the rhetorical gym, a chinless wonder like Trump’s bygone punching bag, Jeb!, might have gained preternatural charisma and convinced the public that he was a superior substitute to the patented original Trump brand.

Daily Bafflements

 • In case you felt let down after price-gouging pharma bro Martin Shkreli escaped a congressional hearing after rolling his eyes and invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid answering even a single substantive question, fear not. As Jaya Saxena reports, some witches have put a hex on Shkreli, “and it seems to be working.” Says one such witch, “I don’t have a direct line to him, but someone did post an article that he lost a lot of money trying to purchase rights to a Kanye album that wasn’t released. Or, he lost Bitcoin, which I guess translates to real money. I hope that it’s working.” So do we.

• After Mitt Romney’s speech denouncing Donald Trump as a “a phony” and a “fraud” yesterday, we found ourselves reminded of Rick Perlstein’s Baffler no. 21 salvo, “The Long Con,” chronicling Mitt’s own mendacity. After all, the former candidate who yesterday invoked Reagan’s “time for choosing” had an “apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public.”

• More and more Uber and Lyft drivers are finding themselves in debt to the company store after the “ride-sharing” corporations offered them pricey car leases through partner companies and then slashed fares and driver pay.

Your Media Future: Cheesy and Skeezy

For decades, American parents and authority figures have fretted over how the goddamn kids in their lives might be induced to pull themselves out of TV’s stupefying thrall and start really living. Now, however, media worthies are feverishly trying the opposite tack: to get our cyber-savvy, platform-proficient young people to bask once more in the boobtoob’s deathly blue glow.

Yes, “millennials”—as we understand they’re called—are the target audiences for two new TV startups, Jon Steinberg’s Cheddar network, which will specialize in business news reported from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and Vice Media’s fledgling cable network, Viceland, which will apparently broadcast Vice’s easily lampooned roster of international muckraking dispatches alongside a torrent of native ads championing the youthful authenticity of the skeezy Vice brand.

Both startups, in other words, are breathtaking exercises in generational cynicism, borne of a vast cultural armada of lazy theorizing about who millennials are, and what it is they think they want—and, more important to the media business, what they can be made to think they want.

Daily Bafflements

• “Just imagine this scenario: It is the first day of class and I, the professor, walk into the classroom, throw my bag on the table; the bag sags open, showing the glimmer of a concealed, holstered gun,” writes Keffrelyn Brown in Pacific Standard. It’s a scenario students and teachers at the University of Texas will have to deal with this fall. Thanks to the state’s concealed carry law, Brown must now consider how the conversations she has in her classroom will change if her students are armed.

• How, exactly, do you get people excited about a private space race among various plutocrats and corporations? Well, Google has tackled that lofty problem by funding a series of documentaries on its Lunar X Prizes, helmed by Star Wars director J. J. Abrams. In a flourish of cosmic brand synergy, the “Moon Shot” series will premiere on Google Play.

• “Is Ben Carson’s campaign a scam?” we asked recently—the primary bid did, after all, funnel a lot of donors’ money into vendor companies owned by staffers’ family and friends. If so, the candidate will be laughing all the way to the bank: Carson’s seven-hundred-thousand-strong donor list could reportedly sell for millions to one of the remaining GOP candidates.

Daily Bafflements

• Today in Super Tuesday hangovers: Donald Trump wins big, bringing him to a total of 315 delegates, giving him a 110 delegate lead over Ted Cruz and a 200-something lead over Marco Rubio. While we encourage you to start crafting a plan for where and how you’ll flee the country if (or when) he gets elected, take a brief moment to indulge in our latest installment from “Political Cartoons.” After all, nothing says “fun” in times of pure, unadulterated terror like drawing Chris Christie sucking on the soggy Cheetos fingers of a giant, KKK-loving Godzilla with a tiny-ass dick.

• Hillary Clinton found herself face-to-face with yet another voter over her “superpredator” comments in 1996—this time in Minnesota. Although Clinton has gone to great lengths to make it clear that the superpredator is dead and gone, Natasha Vargas-Cooper reported a few weeks ago on one aspect of the myth that has somehow managed to stick around: life sentences for juvenile offenders. 

• Great news, everyone! If you’re in New York City—specifically Manhattan—the NYPD has quietly announced it’s going to quit arresting people for public urination and drinking in public! Pop them bottles, but maybe hold off on . . . you know, that other activity.

This Trumpzilla Cartoon Won’t Fix a Thing

Politics is hard, and we need some straightforward and literal way to handily process the ever-shifting alliances of power in an election season. To that end, The Baffler has employed expert comic mind David Rees to give a visual rendering of the day’s signature political controversies. The only problem is that David can’t draw, so his cartoons are word pictures—which is to say, words. He does, however, warmly urge Baffler readers to submit their own visual interpretations of the scenes he describes, so that we can get away with calling this a cartoon feature, and meet our quota of user-generated content on the Baffler website. 

Image submissions from our previous cartoon: Scalia at the Pearly Gates.