Pattern? I See No Pattern! September 13, 2025 Upgrade Your Activism: The Evidence-Based Path from Protest to Power Governments change behavior when the cost of maintaining the status quo exceeds the cost of reform. Street protests alone rarely impose sufficient costs or remove pillars of support. Protests can serve other vital functions like building community, shifting discourse, and demonstrating solidarity. But if your goal is systemic change, then read on. Thankfully, we know what does work. I’ve been listening to Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue (at 1.25 speed) and can tell you that — after a few only moderately interesting childhood chapters — it really does live up to its subtitle. I mean, holy cow! The role she played in World War II? Back when we were all fighting the dictator who, unprovoked, had invaded his neighbors. (Today, of course, it’s unclear who’s side we’re on.) Highly recommended. The other book you know I’ve been recommending — recently brought back to mind when the appeals court upheld her $83 million judgment, is E. Jean Carroll’s Not My Type. The Harriman biography works fine reading with your eyes; but E. Jean has such fun job reading Not My Type, I’d suggest your ears (at 1.3X speed). Trump supporters would not be able to listen to her story without admitting that he has just lied and lied and lied and lied. So they won’t read it. Trump supporters know he has a deep respect for women. Especially young ones. Yes, avoiding STDs was his ‘personal Vietnam’ but that was before he took the vows of marriage. Trump supporters also know he beat Biden in a landslide. What his own election security czar called “the most secure election in history” was in fact rigged, as anyone who watched Rudy Giuliani at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, between the sex shop and the crematorium, would know. For his service to Trump, Rudy will shortly be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, joining the ranks of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Helen Keller, Bob Hope, Edward R. Murrow, Joe DiMaggio, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pope John XXIII. What Tyler Robinson did was murder; unAmerican, undemocratic, unDemocratic, unacceptable — and counter-productive. That said, this woman’s 60 seconds, I think, is worth considering. Missouri Representative Bob Onder has a different take (15 seconds): Everything has changed. If we didn’t know it already, there is no longer any middle ground. Some on the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people, but their ideology is pure evil. They hate the good the truth and the beautiful and embrace the evil the false and the ugly. And they literally will kill those with whom they disagree just as their predecessor leftists Marx and Stalin and Lenin and Pol Pot and Fidel Castro did. We must know that. Really? That’s the ideology of, well, me and my friends? Of the aforementioned John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Of Barack Obama and Taylor Swift, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney? Mitt Romney, Bernie Sanders . . . and of most Americans, the majority of whom disapprove of most of Trump’s decrees? Have a great Sunday.