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Knowing something is coming doesn’t mean it gets easier to accept. Death. Taxes. Stripping your autistic child of their rights and becoming their legal guardian into adulthood.

We started this process months ago because Jordan turns 18 in April. By the time Jordan was 13, though, we knew this was something that had to be done. We tried not to think about it much. We didn’t want to. Maybe Jordan would progress to the point where we wouldn’t have to do this? We knew that wasn’t going to happen, but a parent never stops hoping.

But time does what time does and with Jordan on the brink of becoming a legal adult, we have to go to court to take guardianship of our son.

Jordan may be physically 18, but he’s mentally about 7 or 8. He’s still embarrassed around girls. He still watched shows meant for little kids.1 He struggles with abstract concepts, and by “struggles,” I mean he cannot grasp most things he cannot see or touch. Why and How are almost completely beyond him. Jordan can ask “Why?”, and he does, constantly, but unless the answer is extremely basic, “Because Mommy said so” or “Because there are no more cookies,” he will not understand you. Answering a why or a how question is something Jordan simply cannot do most of the time.

Obviously, Jordan will not be able to make informed decisions about his medical care. Or anything else. Ever. He will always be a child trapped inside a man’s body.

That means we have to take the legal steps necessary to strip away his rights as an adult so we can continue to care for him. Is it a good thing we can do this? Yes. Is it necessary? Yes? Does it still feel like a crushing loss, almost as terrible as first learning Jordan was autistic when he was just two years old?

Fuck you, autism.

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By law, Jordan is required to have a legal advocate appointed. Basically, Jordan gets his own lawyer who will ensure we are not taking advantage of him. Guardianship is not just for autistic adults. It can, and generally is, also be for senior citizens no longer of sound mind. Conniving caretakers do all sorts of shady shit in these situations. The same with kids with an inheritance, I suppose. People are gross.

Still, the idea of having a lawyer come and “protect” Jordan from us, even as a legal formality, was nerve-wracking. We didn’t know who this person was or if they had any experience with autism. Some autistic kids “look” autistic. Many do not. If you’re unfamiliar with neurodivergent people, you wouldn’t necessarily understand what you’re looking at.

She came in and explained who she was and why she was there to Jordan. Jordan nodded and said “OK” whenever prompted, and I died a little inside each time. Jordan will, in fact, answer yes or no questions and respond to “OK?” even if he has no idea what you just said. It’s mimic behavior, and you have to know Jordan to know when he understands you or not. How he responds, the tone, and the strength of his voice are what you have to listen for.

I desperately wanted to tell the lawyer that, despite his answers, Jordan didn’t understand a single thing she was saying. It was too abstract. Going to court and giving mommy and daddy guardianship? That might as well have been in Latin to Jordan. But I couldn’t say anything at all because I was worried how that would sound coming from me, the parent looking to take away my son’s legal rights.

This is not a situation I was accustomed to. I have never worried about anyone anywhere doubting our commitment to Jordan’s welfare.

Once, when Jordan was maybe six or seven, he tripped on the Fourth of July and whacked his face on a table at an outdoor fireworks display. Jordan was clumsy when he was younger. Dangerously so. We had to watch him like a hawk climbing up and down stairs, until he was about five, something three-year-olds can do with ease. Fortunately, he did not fall down a flight of stairs, but after his spill, he did have a black eye and needed stitches on his forehead.

A few days later, Jordan was in summer school (or rather, Extended School Year for special needs kids), and a teacher who did not know us was alarmed by Jordan’s injuries. She was ready to call Child Protective Services when three of the paraprofessionals who did know us stopped her. They explained who we are and that there was zero chance we had hurt Jordan. You see, we had spent so much time in the school and around Jordan and his class, we were a known quantity. Jordan’s parents? Abusive? You must be joking.

But now I had to put the fate of my family in the hands of a total stranger and hope she didn’t mistake Jordan’s non-answers for actual comprehension.

After several minutes of yes and no questions, the lawyer finally FINALLY started asking more abstract questions, and there was no longer any doubt about Jordan’s capacity (or lack thereof) to care for himself.

Then we pivoted to questions about what Jordan’s day is like and how much self-care he’s capable of. He can shower, mostly, on his own. Go to the bathroom, brush his teeth with reminders, put on his clothes, etc. All good. Make his own food? No. Cross the street safely? Not at all. Take public transportation by himself? Not if we ever wanted to see him again.

In a contained environment, Jordan can take care of his most basic needs. Outside, he needs supervision. He cannot live on his own and will never be able to. That’s the totality of it.

It hurt so much to say that aloud. It was sticking a knife into my heart. It’s not that we haven’t had this discussion before, but this was stating it for the record. This was official. This was “real.” This was final.

Sure, if Jordan were struck by lightning tomorrow and woke up neurotypical, we could undo the guardianship. But that’s never going to fucking happen, is it? This is Jordan’s life now. He will never go to college. He will never get married. He will almost certainly never have a romantic partner (what seven-year-old goes on a date?). He will never live his life on his own terms. He will forever be the ward of someone else. For now, it will be his parents. Later, possibly his sister. Eventually, an assisted living facility.

We will have to make all of his decisions for him. Where he will live. Where he will work. What time he gets up and goes to bed. Very little will be in his control. As an eternal child, he won’t really care. But it’s still a tragedy. A life stolen by autism and I will be signing the paperwork in two weeks to make it legal and binding.

Fuck autism. Fuck autism forever.

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I’m going to do some cheerleading tonight, and let me tell you right now that I am not ashamed of it.

Bruce Springsteen announced today that he and the E Street Band will begin a “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour” in March through seventeen cities, making a total of twenty appearances. The tour follows the release of his first protest song in decades, “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote and recorded following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis last month.

The way Springsteen announced the E Street Band Tour was overtly political: “We are living through dark, disturbing and dangerous times, but do not despair — the cavalry is coming! Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band will be taking the stage this spring from Minneapolis to California to Texas to Washington, D.C. for the Land of Hope And Dreams American Tour. We will be rocking your town in celebration and in defense of America — American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution and our sacred American dream — all of which are under attack by our wannabe king and his rogue government in Washington, D.C. Everyone, regardless of where you stand or what you believe in, is welcome — so come on out and join the United Free Republic of E Street Nation for an American spring of Rock ‘n’ Rebellion! I’ll see you there!”

The tour opens in Minneapolis on March 31 and closes on May 27 in Nationals Park in Washington D.C. Springsteen has been outspoken in his opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump, describing his administration “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” on the first night of the band’s European tour last summer. He called on his European audience “to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”

Springsteen’s announcement comes on the heels of the wonderfully inclusive Super Bowl halftime show by Bad Bunny that drove the MAGA right-wing faithful to distraction and mania on February 8. It also follows the announced closure of the Kennedy Center in Washington, supposedly for “repairs and renovation,” but everyone knows the real reason was the cancellation of musical, dance, and theater performances after Trump pasted his name above that of John F. Kennedy on the center.

Springsteen has drawn a line under a fact of life in this country that has not been adequately acknowledged. The creative community in the United States, from literature, art, dance, theater, classical music, jazz, rock and roll, blues, rhythm and blues, rap, and pop is dominated if not wholly owned by people of the Left. Country is the only form of popular music that is dominated by the Right, with more than a few performers endorsing Trump during his election campaign in 2024. Every other president who has occupied the White House in recent times, including Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, were able to call upon performers from various parts of the arts community to appear at the White House, and nobody refused to appear at the Kennedy Center over the past several decades.

No prominent performers appeared at the White House in Trump’s first term in office. This time around, the people Trump was able to get to perform to celebrate his inauguration were Carrie Underwood, Kid Rock, the Village People, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Lee Greenwood, Billy Ray Cyrus, and the Liberty University Praise Choir. No prominent performer appeared at the White House last year.

During Barack Obama’s term, many prominent artists appeared at the White House, including Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Mick Jagger, who appeared in celebration of Black History Month in 2012 alongside B.B. King and Jeff Beck. Bob Dylan appeared in 2010 as part of a White House celebration of the Civil Rights Movement.

The appearances of major talents at the White House in years past has been taken for granted. Of course, performers such as Dylan and B.B. King and many, many others including famous opera singers and jazz musicians would appear at the White House! It was the people’s house, and it was an honor to be invited to entertain presidents and their guests. That came to a screeching halt in Trump’s first term, and the absence of talent from the White House has continued in his second term.

Springsteen appears unafraid that his overt criticism of Trump will affect his standing with his fans and the public at large. The rest of the music community should take note. Think about what could happen during this year leading up to the midterm elections if performers joined Springsteen and the E Street Band on the road, taking a pro-democracy, anti-Trump and anti-ICE message to arenas and theaters around the country. They wouldn’t have to endorse individual candidates or even raise money for the Democratic Party. All they would have to do is go out on stage and tell audiences where they stand: Trump’s authoritarianism NO, democracy and freedom YES.

Springsteen’s stand also follows the outrageous act of censorship by CBS and the FCC of Stephen Colbert following his announcement that he would have Texas senate candidate James Talarico on his show last night.

This shit will not stand if the arts community stands up and stands together. They’re afraid of Bad Bunny. They’re afraid of Bruce Springsteen. They’re afraid of Stephen Colbert. They’re afraid of Jimmy Kimmel. They’re afraid of The View. They’re afraid of anybody who is not afraid of them.

They would be flattened with fear if other popular music acts stood up and took a stand alongside Colbert and Springsteen and Kimmel and Bad Bunny. They can try to censor individual performers, like they did with Colbert yesterday. But he put his interview with Talarico online where millions of viewers, far more than his CBS audience, saw it.

There is strength in numbers. There is strength in talent. Put both together, and we can turn these assholes and their hate inside out with their jealousy and anger. We have something they don’t – belief in what this country stands for and the willingness to stand up and sing out against Trump’s oppression.

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Since Trump’s re-ascendance to the White House, the reactionary conservative movement has become the most aggressive and unfettered it has been in my lifetime. And they are getting very, very clear on what they think an acceptable life looks like for women: Settle for any man who decides he wants you; don’t go to college; marry early; have as many babies as possible; quit your job (or don’t pursue one in the first place) to stay home full time and depend financially on your husband; shoulder the blame if you wind up married to a jerk; wind up impoverished if you divorce; and face social condemnation if you fail to follow the Trad Wife script. Contraception should be illegal or at least hard to get; same for IVF and other fertility treatments. The reactionary conservatives of the New Right are not simply pro-natalists who want lots of babies; they are people who want to impose a strictly patriarchal model of the family on all of us, which has certain kinds of women having babies, and other women punished for deviating. And that requires giving men greater rights and freedoms, while allowing women fewer.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s a plan they wrote down and published.

Last month, the Heritage Foundation published Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. Think of it as Project 2275, a detailed plan that is mostly about how America can spend the next two and a half centuries undoing the feminist progress we’ve made. And it’s not just Heritage: Some of the most prominent thinkers (“thinkers”) of the New Right are obsessed with increasing (white) birthrates, and the curtailments of women’s freedoms that would be required to get reproduction to where they want it (infinite). Many of these “thinkers” are terminally online brain-rotted misogynists, but they have heavy sway over the terminally online brain-rotted men currently running the US government (if they’re asking Claude how to invade Venezuela and capture Maduro, they’re definitely turning to Bronze Age Pervert for his thoughts about women’s rights).

The tech bro-natalist right may be in favor of things like IVF and commercial surrogacy, but the broader right is not; they believe — not wrongly — that the only way to get women having an average of three-plus babies apiece or more is to subjugate them. Or, perhaps, this is backwards: They’ve long wanted to subjugate women for the sake of it, and this new birthrate discourse has given them a new argument in favor of an old cause.

The rhetoric on the right has gotten so extreme that even Meghan McCain has spoken out about it:

…to which the conservative response was, “actually, it’s better to shame women.” Here’s Katie Miller, wife to Stephen Miller (who by the way got married at 28, when her husband was 34; not exactly a “young” marriage):

Katie Miller is right that if you focus on settling, you can probably find someone to marry at any age. Maybe that’s how she wound up married to Stephen Miller.

The fundamental problem with the conservative life script for women is that when women have choices, we don’t tend to the follow the conservative life script. For any of you reading who are under the age of, say, 45: How old were you when you met your partner, if you have a partner? (I was 30). If you’re over 45, think of the younger people you know: how old were they when they met their partner? Overwhelmingly, the Americans who marry are meeting their spouses in their late 20s and into their 30s (and beyond). The average age of first marriage for an American woman is a touch older than 28, and for men it’s 30. These couples have largely not been together since they were 16 and simply chose to wait a decade-plus to wed. It took them a while to find the right person — and to become a person who felt mature enough and themselves enough to tie themselves to another for life.

This is a good thing, if what you care about is happiness and human flourishing. It is a bad thing if all you care about is women doing their maximal reproductive and wifely duties. And the only real way to force women to do their maximal reproductive and wifely duties is to, well, force them.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the forces of the New Right want to use the full force of the state to impose a national patriarchy. I read through the Heritage Foundation’s plan to save America by saving marriage. Here is the plan, in Heritage’s own words, with a little translation from me. They are explicit: Have fewer women go to college; push women to marry and start having babies when they’re very young; ban same-sex marriage; ban IVF; limit contraception access; strip basic rights even to physical safety from children; penalize single mothers; and impose conservative Christianity as a national religion.

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On Curtailing Women’s Rights:

• “the state and federal governments should recognize the natural differences between men and women. They should also preserve this distinction between the sexes in law against attempts to replace it with tendentious and subjective concepts, such as ‘gender identity.’”

  • What that means: The law should discriminate against women. Heritage leaders have said this repeatedly. They recently hired Scott Yenor, who says professional women are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” and that “the heroic feminine prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who make it possible.” He advocates for the end of anti-discrimination laws and says it should be possible for companies to legally “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage.” And “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”

• “Instead of celebrating the nuanced expressions of femininity, the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s commanded a crusade that promoted sexual, financial, and familial ‘freedom’ for women. Women were encouraged to “liberate” themselves from a patriarchal culture that insisted they stay at home and raise a family.”

  • What that means: Sexual, financial, and familial “freedom” for women is bad. Liberation from a patriarchal culture is bad.

• “Fertility rates tend to be higher in less-developed countries, but as nations industrialize, several factors conspire to reduce birth rates. These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home, the delayed financial independence of young adults, and the government’s role in old-age Social Security.”

  • What that means: The Heritage Foundation is looking to limit birth control, higher education for women, work for women, and Social Security.

• “Today’s adults may favor autonomy and personal development over raising children more than earlier generations did. Thus, greater opportunity cost rather than greater actual cost may be a better explanation.”

  • What that means: I actually think they’re right on this, but what they aren’t explicitly saying is that there are greater opportunity costs for women today than there were in past years. Men have always been able to have children, rely on women to raise them, and still pursue fulfilling work, hobbies, friendship, and travel. Women, on the other hand, once gained significant social status by having children, and now see the other things they love — work, hobbies, friendship, travel, autonomy, and so on — threatened if they reproduce. The Heritage plan is not to make it easier for women to be fully-formed human beings and mothers. The plan is to make it harder for women to be fully-formed human beings so that motherhood will be their own path to personal fulfillment.

• “Often, dating app users who are marriage minded suffer from what sociologist Brad Wilcox describes as the ‘soulmate myth,’ which he defines as ‘the idea that marriage is primarily about feeling an intensely emotional connection with the one that makes you happy and fulfilled.’ This contrasts with the historic understanding of marriage as being centered on a shared life of duty and virtue. The same idea can be captured in three words that are emblematic of the dating scene today—fear of ‘settling.’”

  • What that means: It is frivolous to try to find someone with whom you feel you have a unique and profound connection. Instead, you should marry out of a sense of duty. You should settle. Or at least women should.

On Curtailing Contraception and Banning IVF:

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Rachel Maddow has a bit of wisdom that comes in handy a whole lot when it comes to Republicans: Watch what they do, not what they say. Republicans are liars, thieves, fascists, human garbage in every way you can think of. They are also very good at reading the tea leaves when it comes to their political future. After all, the most important thing to an elected Republican is holding onto power, especially their own.

This is why I’ve been making a lot of noise about Republicans and the filibuster since early last year. The fact that they will not get rid of it means they are not convinced Donald Trump and his fascist regime will survive past 2028.

Fast forward to now. Republicans need the SAVE Act. It’s a national voter suppression law, and the only thing that can stop them from being annihilated in the midterms and 2028. I’m pretty sure they called it the SAVE Act because they designed it to save them from Trump.

But there’s a problem:

Some Republicans want to kill the filibuster, but most of them are flat-out refusing, just like I said they would. Why? For exactly the reasons I’ve been saying. Without the filibuster, Republicans risk being wiped out by a Democratic majority passing bills ending gerrymandering, voter suppression, overturning Citizens United, making Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states, etc. etc.

Just as importantly, some of them are smart enough to see handing control over state elections to the federal government as pure suicide, something else I’ve been saying. The SAVE Act sounds great, in theory. It would allow the regime to control elections, meaning they would be able to rig them at will. But that is a one-way street. Once state Republicans hand over control, they cannot just snap their fingers and get it back.

Remember, Trump and his group of bootlicking fascists are really bad at their jobs. They are wildly unpopular and becoming moreso every day. Stephen Miller may have dreams of ICE being his iron fist, subjugating the peasant rabble, but how’s that working out in Minneapolis? A mid-sized city known for…being pleasant? I dunno…did anyone outside of the Midwest actually know anything about Minneapolis before it kicked Miller and his Gestapo in the teeth?

If ICE can’t conquer Minneapolis, and they couldn’t conquer Los Angeles or Chicago or any of the other cities they’ve invaded so far, they’re not going to be much of an occupying force, now or ever.

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But still, the SAVE Act, right? Total control over state elections! Sure, that’s awesome. But only if the government stays in Republican hands. That’s where the Republican certainty that Trump is not the tyrant to end the American experiment comes into play. Like I’ve explained before, the SAVE Act + Democratic President = Doom for the GOP.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s Mitch McConnell, soon-to-be-dead Republican Senator from Kentucky:

McConnell argued passing the legislation could amount to "laying the groundwork for a leftwing election takeover" if Democrats retake the White House and Congress, as it would "make it easier ... to use more sweeping mandates to carry out a complete federal takeover of American elections" in the future. The measure also overrides states' authority to conduct their own elections, he argued.

When McConnell says “a leftwing takeover,” what he means is “red states will no longer be able to cheat in their elections.” Democrats running red-state elections would put an end to all of the “legal” shenanigans Republicans use to suppress the vote. An actual free and fair election would mean devastating losses for Republicans. And that’s before we even consider an end to gerrymandering and Citizens United.

So Republicans are resisting ending the filibuster because they’re afraid of what Democrats will do with that kind of power. They’re also resisting their own election law because they’re afraid of what Democrats will do with that kind of power.

If you’re a would-be tyrant and your own party is convinced, absolutely convinced, you will not be in power in a few short years, you are a failure. Your “loyal” supporters are keeping an eye on the exit and already plotting what comes next. What comes after you, the dictator-for-life.

Republicans are afraid. They’re afraid of us, the public they thought they had crushed under the heel of their jackboots. This November, let’s show them what fear really means as we crush them under a blue wave so vast, all of Trump’s schemes will mean nothing. Then the real work begins. Accountability. Consequences. Exposure. Dismantling the corruption and fascism until the only thing left standing by 2028 is a smoking husk where once stood the mighty Fourth Reich.

Trump is going down. Republicans know it, and they’re trying to avoid his coming destruction.

Good luck with that, fellas. Be seeing you at Nuremberg II, Electric Chair Boogaloo.

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There are only 258 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Have you had a look at the pantload Trump has nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations? His name is Jeremy Carl, a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, a parking garage for right-wing fools and outright racists who are between jobs in the federal government. Carl is a Holocaust denier and author of The Un-Protected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. That would be pretty much all you need to know about this asshole. He’s one of those screaming racists the MAGA right has dressed up in a suit on given a haircut and put forth to represent what they figure is racism cleaned up enough for government work. He’s frequently referred to as a white nationalist, as if exchanging “supremacist” for “nationalist” is going to make him more palatable.

Carl wouldn’t even be worth mentioning in polite company if the job to which they want him confirmed hadn’t become an unexpectedly hot potato after this year’s Munich Security Conference, a Cold War relic that was begun in 1963, when the USSR was threatening Europe on a daily basis with so-called “theater nuclear weapons” that could wipe out the entirety of Europe in about a nanosecond. Every year, a whole bunch of the world’s national security professionals get together in Munich to discuss how best to protect the West from everybody East of Poland and the Baltics, which for those without an atlas handy, would be Russia and China.

The Munich Security Conference became a thing in 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine, giving the national security professionals something real to talk about for the first time in quite a while. Everybody in Europe and Canada and the U.S. pulled together to support Ukraine, and things stayed pretty stable until Trump took office in 2025 and sent Vice President Bible Thumper to Munich to scold everyone and tell them a new sheriff was in town, and he wanted five percent of European nations’ GDP contributed to NATO, and by the way, all you guys we’ve been best friends with since 1941 have gotten the whole democracy thing all wrong. We didn’t mean it when we said we were opposing totalitarianism and wanted to “tear down that wall” after all. What we really meant was, you’ve got to stop letting in all those brown and black and Muslim people and clean up the whole “free speech” thing we used to talk about. What we mean now is, Europe is for white people and free speech is for the following people…kind of like Viktor Orban is doing in Hungary. And oh, by the way, Trump’s buddy Vlad isn’t such a bad guy, because he’s been attacked and vilified and discriminated against just like Trump.

That didn’t go over very well in Europe. So, this year, Trump sent “Little Marco” Rubio, his house Velvet Glove to Munich to make nice. The problem Little Marco had was that Trump’s White House had recently released its National Security Strategy which said pretty much nothing bad about Vlad and Russia and lots of bad shit about Europe, which was accused of having become “unrecognizable” because of the “civilizational erasure” of its immigration policies. That would be, in case you don’t have a copy of Mein Kampf handy, European nations are letting too many people who are not white and Christian through their borders.

The right wing in this country has a convenient shorthand for this attitude called “the great replacement theory,” which holds that there is some kind of conspiracy by someone to “replace” white people with Black and Brown and Other people, which they fear would make the United States “unrecognizable” by about 2040, or so the demographic estimates say.

So, the solution to all of these “civilizational” problems is to appoint a screaming Holocaust denying, great replacement theorizing, White People defending lunatic to the position in the State Department that is charged with seeing to international organizations and meetings like the Munich Security Conference. Jeremy Carl had some problems last week at his Senate hearing, however. Asked by Senator Chris Murphy what he meant when he referred to the “erasure of white culture,” in his book and his writings for the Claremont Institute, Carl stammered out a string of blather. What is different about “white culture,” Murphy wanted to know. Carl explained that the “white church is very different from the black church in terms of its tone and style on average.” Uh-oh. What could be next? “Food ways could be different,” Carl explained.

You could almost see Senator Murphy wondering if he was going to “go there” and mention the Super Bowl show that had riled up the Right so badly only a few days before. Carl did not disappoint: “Music could be different. You look at the Super Bowl halftime show that was not in English.”

A look of astonishment on his face, Murphy asked, “So our ability to access white churches, or white food, or white music is being erased?” Suddenly, it was as if Carl had been waiting for a pitch he could hit out of the park: “I’m concerned with the majority common American culture, that we had for some time, that particularly through mass immigration, has become balkanized, and again, I’m not running away from my comment, and I’m not apologizing for it.”

Apparently not satisfied that he had made himself clear to Senator Murphy, Carl took to Xitter after his testimony to explain himself: “The ‘White culture’ that I was referring to was simply the culture of the overwhelming majority of Americans who lived here prior to the passing of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, which radically transformed American demographics. It incorporated everything from the sports we played (football, baseball etc.) to the foods we ate (Hamburgers, pizza etc.) to the music we listened to and the TV shows we watched.”

Yeah, that’s the problem all right. You just can’t find a good burger or pizza or Perry Como song or “Leave It to Beaver” show on TV anymore, can you?

This guy is the person Trump wants to represent the United States on world stages such as the DAVOS and Munich Security conferences. We won’t even get into the idiocy of his mention of pizza that was here before the evil Hart-Cellar Act came along and substituted Thai food or something even weirder. And of course we won’t get into the fondly-recalled Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the precursor to the evil Hart-Cellar that was designed to specifically limit immigration from Southern Europe, like say, Italy, with all those pizzas that would come in and “replace” burgers.

In fact, this is one of those places where I just want to give up trying to make sense of these fools. Rubio babbled on in his speech at the Munich Security Conference about our “shared” culture by mentioning the Rolling Stones, as if citing a British rock and roll group whose first two albums were devoted entirely to covers of Black blues, and whose music remains rooted in what we might call “Black culture” rather than “White culture” made any more sense than Jeremy Carl and his babble.

What are these people thinking? Nothing, is all I can figure. I guess what they’re doing is reacting in a quite natural way to their own instincts, which are racist to the core. This is the government that is now running things in Washington D.C. and is in charge of our national defense and what remains of our standing in the world. It’s the government that just murdered two American citizens while trying to rid this country of people who they believe do not represent “White culture.” It’s the government that wants to appoint a Holocaust denier racist loon to a high position in the Department of State.

It’s the government of Donald Trump.

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On question about how artificial intelligence will affect jobs and productivity, the honest answer is that the actual empirical evidence is pretty thin. In part, this is because the new AI tools have arrived so recently, and are evolving so quickly, that don’t yet have much experience with their effects–or much data to separate the effects of AI from other changes in the economy. Eric Fruits and Kristian Stout offer an overview of what the emerging evidence has to say in “AI, Productivity, and Labor Markets: A Review of the Empirical Evidence” (International Center for Law & Economics Issue Brief, February 5, 2026). For those just getting up to speed on the subject, one especially useful part of the article is that the reference list is annotated–that is, there’s a brief discussion of what angle is taken by each of the references, with weblinks as possible.

The authors emphasize that most of the predictions about effects of AI are essentially driven by underlying assumptions: what share of tasks in in what share of jobs might be affected by AI; to what extent will AI complement workers and shift the tasks that they do in a given day, or replace them; how quickly will AI diffuse across varying sectors of the economy; how quickly will complementary investments be made to support the effects of AI (in everything from electric power generation to education to robotics); if AI requires large-scale organizational redesign, how long does that take; will AI expand overall output or make the distribution of income more unequal; and so on and so on. Choose your assumptions, and you can choose your outcome. As the authors point out, for example, its also possible to have effects that start in one direction and then swerve to another direction: for example, it’s straightforward to build a “J-curve” theory in which the adjustment to a new technology first has a negative effect during a transition period as firms face the cost of making adjustments, but then later has a very positive effect.

However, some themes are begining to emerge from actual research on the use of AI in different settings, like call centers, accountants, law students doing complex legal tasks, software developers, professional translators, randomized experiments with groups given certain tasks to perform, and others. Here are some themes that emerge:

First, such studies consistently show substantial gains in specific areas of both quantity and quality of output.

Second, the gains can be highly variable, even on tasks that may appear similar. For example, a given AI tool might be enormously helpful and reliable for certain tasks or up to a certain level of complexity–but then become highly unreliable beyond that point. Those using the tool may see that it works well in lots of cases, and then start trying to use it everywhere–even where it doesn’t work well. Thus, several of the studies emphasize the need for “verification protocols” to double-check quality of output and to provide feedback to users.

Third, another theme across these studies is “skill compression,” as the authors note: “Across settings, micro-level evidence points to skill compression. AI tools disproportionately boost output among lower-performing workers, narrowing performance gaps within job categories. This pattern recurs across productivity studies and carries distributional implications: AI can reduce inequality within occupations, even as it reshapes demand for certain entry-level roles.” In other words, access to AI tools may have the biggest benefit for the productivity of workers with less experience or skill, and smaller benefits for workers who already have greater skills. (This pattern may also help to explain some evidence that the number of jobs in sectors exposed to AI for young workers may have fallen: when AI boosts productivity of these younger workers, firms end up hiring fewer of them.)

Fourth, the studies of AI and jobs do not involve a random selection of jobs. Instead, the studies tend to focus on jobs where it seems intuitively plausible that the gains might be substantial. Thus, it would be clearly incorrect to extrapolate the patterns from individual studies across the economy as a whole.

Fifth, the new AI tools seem to be leading to a surge of new companies. Moreover, these companies are often smaller in terms of employment than average start-ups in the past. authors write: “AI substitutes for managerial, operational, and technical tasks that previously required additional hires or cofounders. By lowering the minimum viable team size, AI reduces entry costs, increases the number of entrants, and strengthens downstream competition.” The emerging pattern here may be large and concentrated “upstream” companies doing the foundational research on AI and owning the actual computing power, w while the new startups may be smaller competitive “downstream” users of this technology. Of course, the share of these start-ups that eventually succeed and grow it not yet clear.

Sixth, the growth of the new AI companies depend on other factors in the economy: availability of finance, a non-hostile and non-fragmented regulatory environment, a supply of science and engineering workers, capacity for training new workers, capacity for computing power and supporting infrastructure (like electricity and telecommunications).

I think we don’t yet have a clear sense of what these AI tools will actually be in the medium term of, say, 5-10 years. (See above discussion of how assumptions will determine predictions.) But I strongly suspect that no high-income country, if it wants to remain a high-income country, is going to be able to a to sidestep and avoid the new AI technologies. It’s worth remembering that in the long-run, the average standard of living in a society rises when the average productivity per worker rises. In turn, greater productivity pretty much always requires change, sometimes disruptive change.

The post Some Evidence on AI, Productivity, and Labor Markets first appeared on Conversable Economist.