Quick Takes . . . May 20, 2026May 20, 2026 LEAVING MAGA This guy voted for Trump 3 times but calls in to C-SPAN to say he’s had it — he’s leaving MAGA (3 minutes). I love that he plugs LeavingMAGA at the end. It’s catching on. This is not what they voted for. We’re gonna win. PROTECTING PEDOPHILES Nothing is more important to Trump than defying the law requiring release of the Epstein files. So nothing was more important than wreaking vengeance and retribution on Republican Thomas Massie for co-sponsoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Massie’s defeat last night was a sweet victory for adjudicated rapist and alleged pedophile Trump and for all his loyal followers. As for Epstein’s partner in crime, imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump “wishes her well” and may pardon her once all this dies down. He’s already moved her to a more comfortable cell. WINNING IN TEXAS James Talarico may be facing Ken Paxton in the general election, thanks to Trump’s endorsement. And I do mean thanks: I believe Talarico will beat Cornyn if he wins the Republican primary run-off; but Paxton is clearly the guy we’d prefer to run against. LOSING IN CRYPTO “Before You Invest in Crypto,” David Korn headlines his Our Land newsletter, “Watch This Film” — Everyone Is Lying To You For Money, a documentary by Ben McKenzie. KORN: There’s a chilling moment in the film when you ask Dan Davies, the economist and fraud expert, whether all of crypto is a scam, and he does not challenge that idea. It that your bottom-line belief? It’s just a con and eventually there will be a reckoning? McKENZIE: Crypto is only good for two things: gambling—is the price going to go up or down?—and crime. The amount of crime that crypto facilitates is staggering. There’s a crypto company, Chainanalysis, that estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto last year alone. There’s the bubble idea that the price could, over time, keep going up, as new people flock to crypto as the story continues to spread. And then crime gives it a use case, a reason to be valuable. In my congressional testimony, I described as a Ponzi scheme. What is Trump’s thing, if not a Ponzi scheme, right? His meme coin is down 96 percent. It’s all a penny stock, a pump-and-dump, a Ponzi scheme—pick your metaphor. It’s not a legitimate investment. That’s 99 percent of it. Then there’s crime on top of it. And what’s most troubling is that if crypto gets further into our regulated system, as it’s threatening to do this with the Genius Act that passed and the proposed Clarity Act, then the repercussions could be huge. Because if it does crash again—and I will remind people that crypto has crashed many times in its brief but sordid history—it could contribute to the next version of a subprime crisis. That would be incredibly ironic, given the crypto was supposedly a reaction to that crisis. → Not yet streaming — but you get the gist. TEACHING CIVICS Reacting to yesterday’s post (Teaching Civics, Not Dogma): Kris M.: “Totally agree. Civics education is absolutely vital to democratic governance. If I were in charge, every school in the country would be required to post the Preamble to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in every classroom, grades 2 -12, and provide age-appropriate lessons and discussions on government. Younger students could have it read to them, as they read along, and learn vocabulary words. Higher grade levels could have group discussions, write short papers on what the amendments mean, research the writers of the document, etc. The Preamble tells us who the government is and why it was created, and the Bill of Rights tells us what our government cannot do. The rest of the Constitution is likely more appropriate for the higher grades and high school. Equipping everyone with a knowledge of how our country was designed to function is critical to keeping this experiment going. There’s a lot of power in the words we read and say every day from childhood on. One of my favorite protest signs: ‘I didn’t pledge liberty and justice for all every day to settle for anything less.’ Maybe embedding the opening words of the Preamble in the minds of our people will create more engaged citizens: ‘We the people….in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility . . .’ ”