The GOP Is Not a Political Party—It’s a Cult

Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is absolute. In two runoff primaries in Texas this week, Trump-backed Attorney General Ken Paxton beat incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn to become the Republican candidate for Senate. Cornyn has been a dutiful MAGA servant in the Senate, but Paxton, whose tenure as AG has been marred by corruption scandals and rank extremism, is an election denier, so he got Trump’s endorsement and eventually won.

In the other Republican runoff, election denier Mayes Middleton beat Republican Representative Chip Roy in the race to replace Paxton as AG. Trump didn’t endorse in this race, but he once again seemed to favor the election denier over the dutiful MAGA servant. Clearly, the best way into Trump’s Republican Party remains falsely claiming Trump won the election he obviously lost.

And once you’re in, you’re all but guaranteed victory. Across the primary spectrum, Trump-backed candidates are wiping the floor with Republicans Trump dislikes. GOP Representative Thomas Massie lost his primary last week, and all Massie did was call for the release of the Epstein files. (OK, he also opposed the Iran War.) Massie promptly hightailed it to Costa Rica, where he was spied this week vacationing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, another MAGA Republican who didn’t even bother to run in a primary after she also pissed off Trump by calling for the release of the Epstein files.

I’ve never seen a president with this kind of control over his party, certainly not one with a 34 percent approval rating. Trump is a stunningly unpopular, lame-duck president (or should be, if the Constitution is to be believed), and yet Republicans who support every one of his awful and unpopular policies are getting thrown out of office for not showing enough loyalty to the Dear Leader.

What really gets me is that the fealty demanded by Trump isn’t even being backed up by any overt acts of violence. Crossing Joseph Stalin or Maximilien Robespierre or Augustus Caesar would get you jailed and, likely, killed. Trump hasn’t needed to enforce party discipline using any of those methods. He threatens people with… mean tweets? And they all crumble before him. And the ones who don’t “self deport” to Costa Rica.

The GOP is not a political party—it’s a cult. I don’t know what to do about that, or how to fight it—and I feel like anybody who tells you they do is lying.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Speaking of Ken Paxton, the Texas AG is now coming after the popular online platform Discord, accusing it of being a “hunting ground” for child predators. For the uninitiated, Discord is a social-media app used primarily by gamers that is particularly useful for voice chatting during gaming sessions. It’s not a thing I let my teenager use (yet), but it’s also not the place where I am most concerned about child predators. That place would be Roblox, which I’ve tried to warn parents about multiple times in this space. But what’s really interesting about Paxton’s move is that Discord is one of those safe spaces for the troglodytes of the white-wing manosphere. (It’s safe for non-trolls too, as long as you join more thoughtful servers.) These are the kinds of guys who vote for Republicans because they hate “woke” Democrats, yet they never seem to care that it’s Republicans who consistently push the regulations that try to bring these gaming spaces under government control. They’re so obsessed with hating women and LGBTQ+ people that they don’t even recognize which political party supports free expression.
• South Carolina Republicans rejected a redistricting plan that would have erased the majority-Black district currently represented by Jim Clyburn. People have been calling this a rare post-Callais “victory” for Black folks, and it is, but it’s also very hard to draw a map in South Carolina that weakens Clyburn but still protects his congressional neighbor, Republican Representative Nancy Mace.
• Trump apparently wants to make federal workers sign nondisclosure agreements as a way to prevent leaks. I’d say the idea is flatly unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court won’t agree with me. It made staffers sign NDAs after the Dobbs leak. 
• The lawyer representing a tourist from Washington State who was captured on video throwing a large rock at an endangered sea lion in Hawaii says his client was trying to protect sea turtles. I’ve seen the video. I don’t see any sea turtles. I do see a giant asshole who I hope gets prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And then I hope they reform the law to make even more draconian punishments available.
• UC Berkeley’s law school has adopted what is probably the most restrictive AI ban we’ve seen in higher education. Students are prohibited from using AI even to check their grammar. While I am no fan of using AI in law, my gut tells me that Berkeley has gone too far.

Inspired Takes

Grace Ginsburg shared an intensely personal essay in The Nation about her decision to take GLP-1s. I don’t want to summarize her piece, as it’s a complicated struggle between a feminist rejection of body shaming and her own desire to like how she looks. Instead, I’ll share a little bit of my journey, as I’ve been on GLP-1s for over a year now, and between that and a lot more exercise, I’ve lost about 50 lbs.

Unlike a lot of people who are “morbidly obese,” which is, somehow, the literal medical term for my weight class, I’ve never been particularly morbid about it. I’m fat (a word I much prefer over “morbidly obese”), which I view as unfortunate, but I have the body-confidence of a man half my size (and the general unwavering self-confidence of a mediocre white man). I’ve made my weight part of my “personality.” More important, I’ve enjoyed the lifestyle of a fat person: eating what I want, when I want, not obsessing about the mirror or the scales. Hell, I didn’t even own a scale until I started down this path. I look at people who spend hours at the gym every day and nibble salads for lunch with pity more than envy.

But as I got older, my weight really started to negatively impact my health. Not in the “oh noes, heart attack and stroke” sense, but in a day-to-day “my knees can no longer support my massive frame” way. It was affecting my quality of life and my decision-making: I, like, wouldn’t go up the stairs to check on my kids because I didn’t want to walk up the stairs. Once your lifestyle starts preventing you from doing what you want to do in life, it’s time to at least consider change.

So I started on the wonder drugs and hired a personal trainer out of concerns for my short-term health and quality of life, not because of societal pressure (admittedly, so much harder on women than men) to look different. Two years ago, I needed a cane if I was going to have to walk around for more than a few minutes. Last summer, I walked over 100,000 steps at Disney World without any form of assistance beyond comfortable shoes. My plan is working, more or less.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the benefits have been exclusive to my personal health and well-being. The feedback loop based on how I look has been… shocking and intense. Some people, both strangers and even friends, treat me better (even though I’m still objectively fat) just because I’m not as overweight. People are nicer to me. People smile at me more often. People say I seem “happier,” even though I am objectively despondent about trying to eke out a living under white-wing fascism. I feel almost as if I’m in the Eddie Murphy sketch where he pretends to be a white man. I don’t think it’s just in my head, as, again, my (high) opinion of myself has not changed.

And I’m a guy! Male privilege means I can look like an ogre and still win a popularity contest and become the president of the United States. I can only imagine what this feedback loop is like for women.

I was ambivalent about taking GLP-1s before I started. But I cannot deny that the social life of a slightly less fat person is better than before. I always suspected that to be true but, man, am I dismayed by how true it is.

Worst Argument of the Week

On Thursday, the Supreme Court released its decision in Rutherford v. United States, a case about the First Steps Act, which sought to address mass incarceration. The case involved two men who had been sentenced to 32-year and 57-year mandatory minimum sentences prior to the passage of the act. If they had been sentenced today, they would have likely received 14-year and 32-year sentences. They applied for compassionate release because of the disparity between their sentences and the current standard.

You don’t need me to tell you that the six Republicans on the Supreme Court are “compassionate” only to white folks who use God as an excuse for their bigotry. The prisoners were denied compassionate release, 6–3, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing the majority opinion for the Republican klavern.

Barrett got stuck on the fact that the First Step Act was not made retroactive. Congress could have (and, I strenuously argue, should have), but it did not. Indeed, the fact that Congress could have made the act retroactive, and purposefully did not, is Barrett’s strongest point.

But the First Step Act wasn’t really the issue in this case. Instead, the core legal issue was an opinion from the US Sentencing Commission, which found that courts could look at disparities between the First Step Act and sentences issued prior to its passage when considering applications for compassionate release.

Barrett and the Republicans on the Supreme Court rejected this guidance and instead prohibited courts from considering such disparities when reviewing compassionate-release applications. Put another way, the Commission said judges could think about the gross hypocrisy of one sentence versus another, and Barrett effectively said, “No, judges are not allowed to think about reality.”

Rutherford v. US is thus another case where practical realities don’t matter to Republican justices committed to their ideological obsessions. It’s also another power grab by the Supreme Court over the administrative state. An agency merely said that one issue could factor into a judge’s opinion, but Barrett and the Supreme Court superseded that guidance (which they’re not supposed to do) and ordered judges to stick their heads in the sand.

One of the Federalist Society’s greatest victories has been convincing Republican judges that ideology should trump reality at all times. They’ve created an entire army of jurists who view facts as unimportant distractions—to say nothing of judges like Neil Gorsuch who just make up whatever facts they need to support the outcomes they prefer.

If the Democrats ever reform the judiciary, it will be important for them to appoint judges who believe in such controversial ideas as “Black people and women-people are people-people and should get people rights.” But we also desperately need a new cadre of judges who think about how their decisions play out among real people and not in law review articles.

What I Wrote

Jim Crow suffered a temporary setback in Alabama this week when a panel of district court judges rejected an unconstitutionally racist map put forward by the Alabama legislature. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the ruling will last. That’s because the Republicans on the Supreme Court suddenly become very well acquainted with the real world when it comes to helping Republicans win elections.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

In 2021, Krafton, a South Korean games publisher, bought the independent games developer Unknown Worlds for $500 million. Unknown Worlds was known for making Subnautica, a popular underwater survival game in which you basically crash-land on a water world and have to figure out how to survive and rebuild your ship while exploring the spooky ocean depths.

It’s a good game, though hardly worth $500 million. But the purchase was made in 2021, and the thing about 2021 is that the entire video game industry was just coming off a Covid boom. People were locked inside, playing more games than ever before, and games were making more money than ever before. Even though the industry was obviously in a bubble, companies went a little nuts and spent like the inflated pandemic numbers would last forever.

They did not.

In any event, when buying Unknown Worlds, Krafton included a little carrot for the founders of the company and their core staff: It promised them a $250 million bonus if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets within five years. Unknown Worlds got to work on Subnautica 2.

Fast-forward to 2025, by which point it’s clear that Krafton made a terrible deal. Again, Subnautica was a good game, but it wasn’t going to be worth the $500 million purchase price. That said, Subanutica 2 was probably going to hit the revenue targets needed to trigger most or all of the $250 million bonus.

That’s when Krafton CEO Changhan Kim went to ChatGPT and asked how he could get out of his deal. No, I’m not making that up. When Krafton’s own lawyers told him that there was no way out of the contract, my man asked AI how to breach it.

ChatGPT gave him an answer. Remember, AI is like that desperate kid in high school who just wants to be liked. ChatGPT told him to fire the founders and delay the release of Subnautica 2 to avoid having to pay the bonus. Which Kim then did.

ChatGPT’s legal advice, however, was dead wrong. The makers of Subnautica 2 sued, and, after a trial during which all this ChatGPT stuff had to be disclosed, a judge ordered the founders reinstated and the game released. The judge also extended the timeline for the revenue targets through June 2026 (to account for Kim’s shenanigans) and ordered Krafton to pay a bonus amounting to $3.12 for every $1.00 in revenue, up to the $250 million cap.

Subnautica 2 was released on May 14 for $30 on Steam. The game sold over 4 million copies in under a week. That far outpaces more expensive games you may have heard of, like the recently released Resident Evil 9. Subnautica 2 will almost certainly hit all revenue targets and force Krafton to pay out the full $250 million bonus, which the founders have indicated will be shared with the staff that helped make the game. And the judge still hasn’t ruled on what damages the Unknown Worlds founders are entitled to.

The lesson, as always: Don’t take legal advice from ChatGPT. Well, don’t take legal advice from ChatGPT unless you’re a greedy CEO looking to screw over your partners. If you’re that guy, by all means, feel free to fail in whichever way seems best to you.

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