Keep your doubts to yourself: At a Turning Point USA rally for Donald Trump this week, former Fox News anchor — and now independent media mogul — Tucker Carlson waxed poetic:

“If you let people get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous … and you don’t do anything about it … you’re going to get more of it,” he it startedanalogizing the Trump-America relationship to that of a father and his misbehaving children.

“There has to be a time when dad comes home,” he continued. “Yes, that’s right. Daddy comes home and he’s angry. Daddy’s angry. He’s not vindictive. He loves his children, no matter how disobedient they are. He loves them because they’re his children.”

“Go to your room right now and think about what you have done! And when dad gets home, you know what he says? “You were a bad girl. You were a mean little girl and you’ve become a strong slap now. And no, I won’t hurt you. No, I’m not going to lie to you “You get spanked for being a bad girl and that’s the way it should be.”

This strange and perverse soliloquy on the right reminded me of this terrible graphic – not the first of its kind and representative of an entire genre – on the left:

Come on, we all know there’s only one VP candidate you’d be excited to see at family reunion — and he’s the one who will actually protect IVF, abortion access, or LGBTQ+ rights.

Voters know who is fighting for them and who is just screwing them over. pic.twitter.com/viWahTwtIk

— Planned Parenthood Action (@PPact) October 1, 2024

America is not a naughty little girl, JD Vance is not a creepy uncle, Tim Walz is not an adorable Carhartt father, Kamala is not parent (or a “river“), and Donald Trump is not daddy, the disciplinarian. America is still the freest, richest, most prosperous place on Earth, not because of the politicians who try to convince us they are parental figures, but in spite of them.

There are a bunch of narratives that have come out of this election cycle — widening educational polarization, second/third/fourth-generation Latinos moving right, the weirdness of both Georgia and Arizona getting just a little bluer – but an under-discussed narrative. it’s the degree to which the younger generation (and apparently Tucker Carlson too!) are grafting family roles and relationships onto politicians and their supporters. It started as a silly little meme – Generation Z calling people parent as a kind of term of approval, in the same way they reformed the nibits meaning—but it says something about the level at which we operate: we misunderstand politics as deeply personal (which raises the temperature); interpret authority as something to be approved of or submitted to, not controlled; think in terms of simplified memes, not fundamental principles.

Speaking of children: “I have a young child and in the last three years my family has spent over $120,000 on child care… How can families like ours, or those with fewer resources and more children, afford the rising costs of raising children today ?” asked one man at a NewsNation town hall with Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance.

“Sometimes these issues are a little more difficult for working moms than for working dads,” Vance offered — acknowledging gender differences that are sometimes a bit of a trigger for progressives — before launching into his real answer: “I think we have to to give young women and young men more options to build the kind of childcare that works for them.”

“Some people would like to stay at home, maybe for a few years, maybe they would like to stay at home for a few months and then go back into the workforce, maybe they would like to go right back into the workforce. the childcare regime we have in this country is basically trying to force a one-size-fits-all model across the country.”

He talked about Community Development Block Grants and how they fund only one type of child care. He talked about how sometimes there are grandparents, aunts/uncles, members of a church community who want to take care of children, but it’s very difficult for those people to actually get any kind of federal incentives to make it financially possible. “The federal government is actually making it harder for anyone other than people who are currently providing child care to get into that job.” (Watch here.)

Vance is, of course, no libertarian. At one point, he advocated forcing large companies to accept such childcare arrangements by mandating paid leave provisions. And government involvement in any this is something many libertarians would find fault with. But his fundamental point is a fair one: the federal government currently subsidizes certain types of behavior but not others. What if we made a concerted effort to adjust that, to allow for more choices?

“strange“The Ohioan has its flaws, but this town hall was an example of where elections should be focused: on real policy tradeoffs that affect real people’s lives and what the role of government is. it is precisely in facilitating people to live their full potential.

Meanwhile in Texas: As the race draws to a close, Kamala Harris decided this weekend to avoid another state visit. choosing instead, old red Texas (my homeland).

Accompanied by native Texans Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, Harris appears to be trying to emphasize abortion rights in a place with strict bans and a kind of gin-up interest and virality amid much of the campaign’s monotony and predictability. She will sit down with the podcaster/talk-therapy-normie-whisperer/Target mom Brené Brown. He’ll probably wear a cowboy hat.

Funnily enough, Donald Trump will fly to the Lone Star State to record an interview Joe Rogan today. It’s kind of a funny, absurd, late-game coincidence that both presidential candidates are bashing Texas, versus a state that’s actually in play. (Unless… it could be in the game? Probably not, but that would be wild.)

Scenes from New York: Not. Let’s think about Texas for a moment. Just take a moment to think about kolaches and Luckenbach and gun rights and watering holes and margaritas and Tex-Mex. It’s my newsletter and we’re going to spend a moment appreciating Texas if I say so, dammit. what do they have you made to respect texas today?

QUICK KICKS

• “Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. achieved early production yields at the first plant in Arizona that outperform similar plants at home, a significant breakthrough for a US expansion project initially plagued by delays and labor disputes.” rEPORTS Bloomberg. “The share of chips manufactured at TSMC’s Phoenix facility that are usable is about 4 percentage points higher than comparable facilities in Taiwan, Rick Cassidypresident of TSMC’s American division, told listeners at a webinar Wednesday, according to a person who attended. Success rate, or yield, is a critical metric in the semiconductor industry because it determines whether companies will be able to cover the enormous costs of a chip factory.” TL;DR, this has big implications for US competitiveness with China, Taiwan’s strategic value, etc.
• “UK citizens arrested, prosecuted and convicted for praying silently outside abortion clinics”, rEPORTS Madeleine Kearns for Free Press. “Even holding pro-life meetings in your own home can be a crime.” The full piece is well worth reading.
• “Asking journalists in a newsroom who they’re voting for (always with the acceptable answer option of ‘none of your damn business’) is a way of telling both external audiences and internal management some useful information about the organizational inclination,” write Reasonto Matt Welch in “Show Us Your Votes, Cowards!”

• You would have to be very desperate to want to come to Canada of all places. But in all seriousness, this looks bad for would-be migrants (and… possibly America’s border influx?). Also, what does “let our economy catch up” even mean?

We will significantly reduce the number of immigrants coming to Canada over the next two years. This is temporary – to stop population growth and let our economy catch up.

We need to make the system work right for all Canadians.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) October 24, 2024

• Speaking of immigration, this may be my favorite theory floating around on X right now:

The fact that JD Vance, in all likelihood, cooks Indian food better and more often than Kamala Harris is a testament to how well integration is happening in this country, belying his pessimism about immigration.

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) October 25, 2024