Be less crazy. As the sun set on Election Day, 2021, it became clear — to anyone who wasn’t literally paid to not understand — that America was pissed. After a year of Democratic control, both political and cultural, Republicans not only swept Virginia, but regional seats throughout New Jersey, where Governor Murphy nearly lost a race no one bothered to follow, and Democrat Steve Sweeney, a twenty-year incumbent in the State Senate, lost to a truck driver who ran his campaign for 153 dollars. Up in antifa country, Ann Davison, a law-and-order Republican, won Seattle’s DA race, and in Minneapolis, the epicenter of our national defund movement, voters rejected a ballot measure to replace the city police department with social services. According to polling data, which could not have been more clear, voters had two requests: 1) “unfuck the economy” and 2) “be less crazy.” Alas, our national commitment to crazy runs deep, and this month’s sprawling conversation on the economy saw not an answer to the concerns of voters so much as a convergence of their worst anxieties.

Let’s talk about inflation.

First of all, it’s happening. This is an important point, as questions pertaining to inflation were considered something of a vaguely conspiracy-sounding right-wing talking point as early as this summer.

Inflation panic is a Republican scare tactic, wrote Paul Krugman in March. It’s not happening. It has sort of never happened. Hell, I’ve never even heard of it — what are we talking about again? By August, Krugman understood how an idiot, a dimwit, an actual moron might be alarmed by all the data indicating exceedingly bad inflation, but this was not real inflation, he insisted, because America needs free pre-Kindergarten, which is infrastructure (don’t ask, I genuinely have no idea).

Then it was November. Our trillion-dollar paint job was safely signed by the president, the election was over, and ok wait a minute this looks like pretty bad inflation — lol — but Here’s Why That’s Okay.

MSNBC kicked the ball a little further. Inflation? Love the stuff. Thank God for inflation, to be honest. They’ve since entirely reworked their story bait, but the original framing was simply:

Inflation, runs their argument, is a sign Americans are getting richer. Everything costs more because we have more. Just look at our empty shelves, another healthy sign of our economy. Stores aren’t running out of stuff because of our separate, crisis-level supply-chain crunch, which Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen did another great job covering in a thread that starts here:

No, stores are running out of stuff because we’ve all got so much money. What’s that you say? Our national labor shortage might also be contributing to the problem? Oh no, dear, it’s not a “labor shortage.” That language is offensive now. This is an “anti-work movement.” Another amazing thing!

In my last wire, I touched on the Atlantic’s suggestion that our real crisis was consumerism. This week, the sentiment was echoed in Bloomberg.

The problem isn’t that we can’t buy things. The problem is we want to buy things. More importantly, do you know who cares the most about buying things? Rich people. And we hate rich people.

Sarah Jeong’s take is, of course, aggressively stupid. Rich people all bought stock last year and took out mortgages. Their “parasitic” assets are killing it, and their debt is presently evaporating — along with the dollar. At the moment, they love inflation. But for anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck with a little in savings, or struggles to buy groceries, inflation is a disaster. To her credit, this is something Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at least seems to understand. Unfortunately, she’s insane.

The only way to stem inflation catalyzed by our having printed many trillions of dollars out of thin air, she suggests, is to print many more trillions of dollars. Elsewhere, a Biden policy advisor suggested something similar when pressed by George Stephanopoulos. The first thing we need to do, he said, is vaccinate five-year-olds (???). Then we need to sign another spending bill.

There has been a hurricane of economic incoherence and misinformation from our media and government. The purpose of the misinformation is obviously to protect the current administration from criticism, and to convince Americans to support the aggressive Congressional spending agenda. But the story behind the story is every take I’ve cited, from the “what inflation” Krugman chronicles to sweet, simple Sarah’s “the poors love expensive shit” sideshow, has been ruthlessly ratio’d online. Overwhelmingly, people know this stuff is bullshit, and they’re over it.

The smarter folks in media and government have begun to realize they can’t just shout “things are great” and force Americans to trust them anymore. They need something else. They need something powerful, and ancient. What they really need is a scapegoat.

And no one makes a better scapegoat than a billionaire asshole.

What goes up Musk come down. A little over a week ago Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tom Cotton introduced their Orwellian “Platform Competition and Opportunity Act,” the Democrats’ first serious attempt at anti-trust legislation. The purpose of the bill is to prevent large tech companies from acquiring, or “swallowing” says Cotton, their competitors, as acquisitions of this kind “crush competition” (seems fine?), expand a dominant company’s market share (this definitely seems okay) and “harm working Americans” (CITATION NEEDED). Reason’s Robby Soave smartly broke the whole thing down last week. The bill is poised to target every company with annual net sales over 600 billion dollars. Crucially, if a company surpasses these sales after the bill passes, it won’t be impacted by the legislation. Two companies too small to fail? Target, which is headquartered in Klobuchar’s Minnesota, and Wal-Mart, which is headquartered in Cotton’s Arkansas. Amazon, which competes with both, is of course being targeted, but not because inexpensive household goods harm Americans. Amazon is being targeted because Americans love it — too much.

That Klobuchar and Cotton would attempt to use the power of the federal government to kneecap a business competing with large employers in their state is not surprising. Cronyism is as American as apple pie. But it’s notable that their fraudulent moralizing on fair competition, a concept the senators clearly don’t believe in, has received so little pushback from Republicans. After years of aggressively partisan censorship from the technology industry’s social media platforms, including the censorship of a Biden-critical New York Post story just before the last presidential election, which ultimately culminated in the quite insane deplatforming of a sitting president, right wingers have determined tech is run by woke communists who hate them.

In any other moment it would have been unthinkable for Republicans to happily invite a Democratic operative before Congress to argue she herself should be empowered to censor the internet (I believe they called this woman a “whistleblower”). But today it’s a politically sensible move. Republicans are messaging to their constituents that they’re fighting Facebook. Their constituents, who believe Facebook, and by extension the entire industry, wants to hurt them, don’t care what cronyist anti-trust legislation at home means for the economy, or global competition, or conflict with China. They don’t care that a “whistleblower” in Washington also wants to censor them. They just want to punish Mark Zuckerberg.

Amidst this increasingly hostile environment, the sort of bubbling anti-tech stew our media has finally, after years of trying, manifested into reality, some in the industry are nonetheless refusing to apologize to the politicians, intellectuals, and global bureaucrats who have failed their way to authority for the last fifty years. A few weeks back, Elon Musk threatened to give the United Nations 6 billion dollars on the single condition the director of their World Food Programme (WFP) share a transparent, precisely-detailed plan for how the money would be spent to end world hunger. The man of course could not provide the plan, because while he runs the UN’s “end world hunger” program, he has clearly never actually thought about ending world hunger. Then, this month, Elon ran a Twitter poll.

The hivemind said yes, and so, on a whim, Elon liquidated billions in stock. But for politicians who have made a political career of punishing the big bad billionaires for being billionaires, rather than improving the lives of the working class, a useful enemy paying taxes could not stand.

Senator Wyden is the author of Congress’ now-defunct pre-income tax (literally a tax on assets that haven’t yet been sold, which is to say income that hasn’t yet been made), and these days he hasn’t had many victories. His loser record remains untarnished.

Wyden speaks with the inherited voice of a prior century’s authority, an age long before Americans lost their trust in our major institutions. Elon speaks in internet — irreverent, anti-authoritarian, and, most importantly, current. His victory was juvenile (let’s not pretend it wasn’t), but I guess that was the point. That was the insult. By refusing to show respect, Musk denied Wyden the only thing the man had left. He was also not done.

Bernie Sanders has taken issue with the space program for years, a gripe so entirely impractical it can only be ideological, which I argued in American Spaceman, Body and Soul. That the man also finds abhorrent the concept of wealth made his public meeting with Musk inevitable. Last week, that meeting looked like this:

What followed was a spectacular clash of Bernie Bros and Elon fanboys. Tens of thousands of screaming crazy people: an ocean of genderqueer communist anime fairies, disembodied Che Guevara heads, and furry sex workers with pronouns and mental illnesses in their bios at war with tech enthusiasts, dank Pepe GIFs, apostate cartoon bunnies, and Ancient Greek statues. Another skirmish in the Great Clown War of 2021. No one won. Oddly, no one ever seems to win.

We’ve barely recovered from a pandemic, on the other side of which we now find ourselves at odds with a nuclear superpower across the Pacific, and a budding economic crisis. Why are we attacking our most productive men and women? With so many aspects of our country broken, why punish the industry that’s working? For the Klobuchars and Cottons of the world it’s basically rational. It’s they and their constituents against the country. Gross, but at least it makes sense. Whatever. For ideologues, however, it’s something deeper.

The technology industry in general, and a man like Musk in particular, represents a blastoff to space, and proof incarnate that the static world is a lie. Technology demonstrates that growth is not only possible but possibly boundless, and our destiny — the destiny of humanity — could be great. You can be great, too, if you set your mind to it. These ideas, firmly at odds with the track record of our bureaucratic management state, make technology founders incredibly dangerous. Not only should men like this not exist, but here they are belittling the static statists publicly, along with everything they represent. Statist ideologues want men like Musk to fail. I think they need men like Musk to fail. I believe they will do everything in their power to make men like Musk fail. That’s just who they are. We can’t change them. We can only stop them.

Sensible industry workers, people of every political party who just want things to work, apolitical Instagram influencers, even, who simply want their goddamn brunch back, who simply want to scroll their feed in peace again without some crazy bullshit in the news, have to start demanding more from their leadership.

Then, I think it’s also time take a breath and be less crazy.

-SOLANA