Everyone knows that men can’t drive and that Latinas are cool-tempered to the point of frigidity.

Of course, these aren’t stereotypes associated with either group. A joke based on the premise that men are poor drivers would make little sense, because it references a broadly held belief which does not exist.

If this all sounds a little obvious: Yes.

Yet the Saturday Night Live writers have, in their quest to avoid being funny at a non-white group’s expense, failed to understand this basic concept.

Comedian Aziz Ansari appeared on SNL this Saturday as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Kash Patel.

“You guys should not be reporting the lies and the gossip. You should be reporting on the historic nature of my appointment,” Ansari-as-Patel briefs the audience.

“I am a trailblazer. I’m the first Indian person to suck at their job.”

“Everyone says Indian people are smart, hardworking, incredibly intelligent. I’ve proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites.”

Certainly, there’s an idea that East Asians (the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans in particular) are good at math or strive for perfection in school. Indians, and their American-born children, probably do share in some of that striver-culture.

Think of Vivek Ramaswamy’s Christmas Eve post instructing Americans how to fix their culture: Stop venerating prom queens and jocks, start venerating nerds, put your kid in intensive academic extracurriculars, etc.

But I grant that a non-insignificant portion of Americans probably find value in Ramaswamy’s prescriptions.

There are other, even less flattering stereotypes commonly associated with India and Indians. A YouTube video exhibiting India’s “MOST UNHYGIENIC [sic]” street food has over half a million views. This is a genre.

Then, there are the stories of female tourists being raped and/or brutalized while on vacation in India.

And if you’ve perused X in the past two years, you’re likely familiar with other accusations lobbed at Indians — take a look at the replies under this clip of Ansari on SNL for a sample of typical remarks.

That’s all to say: The American perception of Indians is not universally positive. It’s a mixed bag. It is okay — and possibly even funny — to acknowledge that fact.

But we don’t come to SNL to laugh. We come to SNL for moral instruction.

Ansari himself seems aware that there are negative stereotypes associated with Indians. He was a vocal critic of “The Simpsons’” Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Apu is a convenience store owner. He is hard-working, but sometimes manipulates and scams his customers. He was, for some time, an illegal migrant.

But it appears the SNL writers have no desire to invoke negative stereotypes about non-whites, even for the sake of a joke.

Self-aggrandizement can be funny, even charming, when it’s done in a self-aware manner. SNL disguises self-aggrandizement as self-deprecation.

It’s a little like a woman with brown hair saying: “I know that everyone thinks women with brown hair are really smart and virtuous and good-looking, but honestly, on the inside, I’m more like one of you stupid and immoral blondes.”

Not to mention, SNL’s obligatory jab at the incompetence of “the whites” (another stereotype which, so far as I’m aware, does not really exist).

The late Norm Macdonald was the master of the stereotype joke.

For example:

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There’s always that person. You know who I’m talking about. That person. That one person who thinks they’re special, above the rules. That one person whose entitlement ruins something good for everyone else.

You tend to find a lot of those people at airports. Whether it’s the people who cut in line to board the plane faster, or the people who try to bring on oversized luggage that takes up an entire overhead bin, or, now, the people who can’t follow the simple portable charger rule, they all share the same thing in common: a sense of entitlement.

Thanks to the fliers who couldn’t care less about the rules regarding portable chargers and lithium batteries in their bags, American Airlines has announced that they are cracking down, limiting the number of chargers customers can bring onto the plane. Apparently, fliers are trying to recharge the chargers using the plane’s charger, and this is a potential fire/safety hazard because their personal chargers could ka-boom.

It wouldn’t shock me if airlines ban portable chargers altogether. It wouldn’t even shock me if airlines started charging people to use the overhead bins because they cannot follow the rules of keeping their bags within the specifications.

I might sound churlish. But I think this sense of entitlement and annoying disregard for the rules isn’t limited to airports and commercial air flights: I think it’s a problem throughout our entire society. It’s an attitude that has affected everyone and everything.

Here’s a good example: tipping. The unspoken rule of tipping is that you have put in some effort. Americans are so generous that they will usually tip no matter what, unless the service is exceptionally bad. But, in general, most people give the customary 20% if the service is decent and the server is polite.

For some reason, though, it’s now commonplace for people ringing you up at the cash register to ask for a tip. Tipping is no longer reserved for people who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, juggling a dozen tiny tasks in their heads. No, apparently, something as simple as a coffee that takes about 15 seconds to pour warrants a tip. If you don’t tip on these occasions, you might get a glare. What happens if customers become more jaded about tipping? Will they be less likely to tip hardworking waiters and waitresses who bust their backsides for hours on end because they have already felt pressure to tip and have grown more cynical about the whole situation?

Urban parks are often littered with trash, as are public trains and buses. People refuse to wear headphones in public, blaring loud music and social media reels. Golfers no longer fix their divots, leaving the fairway partly destroyed, and treat the green as if it were the carpet in their man cave. Dog owners no longer pick up poop. And don’t even get me started on drivers. If you think about it, driving a car is an amazing luxury. Yet, when you get behind the wheel these days, and you’re having to deal with drivers who are running red lights, cutting corners as they turn, speeding, and weaving between traffic, you might as well be playing a game of Russian Roulette.

It’s really a shame, and maybe the only way to fix it is for all of us to embrace our inner Kens and Karens and tell the entitled person to have a bit of decency – or shove off. I did my part the other day. When a driver damn near ran me off the road, I flipped the bird. Zero tolerance for those with no tolerance for the rules.

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One of the great tragedies of the 20th century lies in the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the man largely credited with building the atomic bomb. To win World War II and eliminate the threat of the Nazis, Oppenheimer created a weapon – a weapon that could destroy all of humanity, not just the Nazi regime. We’ve been living in its shadow since 1945.

Oppenheimer’s story captured the forbidden truth about technology: it is not simply a tool. There is a reason the Ancient Greek myth described Prometheus as chained to a rock because he stole the sacred fire (itself a technology) of the gods. There is a reason Zeus hid the fire from humanity. Humans are playful and creative, but they also have an infinite appetite for death and destruction. They love to build civilizations – and then tear them down.

Today, we are living through what is perhaps the biggest upheaval in society since the dawn of the Atomic Age, even the Industrial Revolution. Depending on who you ask, this period in history is the advent of great material abundance, the beginning of a utopia in which humanity will flourish. Increasingly, however, it seems we are all trapped inside a dystopian science fiction tale. Tragically, there are no exits. A new power has been unleashed upon the world, and there’s no stopping it.

Axios published an article Tuesday with the headline, “Behind the Curtain: We’ve been warned,” that included a bullet list of six facts about artificial intelligence. For the sake of brevity and your time, the points are listed below. Axios’ story lays out some other chilling facts about AI and the times we are living in, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s blog post, written after a 20-year-old anti-AI arsonist attacked his home and his company’s headquarters. Even Altman admitted that the fear surrounding AI is justified.

1. AI is the fastest-growing product category in world history.

2. One of the latest models is so powerful that its maker won’t release it to the public.

3. OpenAI and Anthropic say their most powerful AI coding models are now building themselves.

4. AI companies are growing less transparent as models grow more powerful. The federal government requires zero transparency.

5. AI resentment is building fast. In early April, the San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was the target of two attacks in the same week. Shaken, he wrote: “The fear and anxiety about AI is justified ... Power cannot be too concentrated.”

6. AI havoc is no longer theoretical: This year’s great software rout erased $2 trillion in value as investors realized, week by week, new human tasks that the latest models would wipe out, from coding to real estate services to legal research to financial management.

But I want to go further and flesh out the crisis humanity will confront because of this new technology. What could possibly come next?

Economy and Labor

Let’s first begin with the last point: AI wreaking havoc on certain industries that were once seen as the pathway to a middle/upper-middle-class American life.

If mass layoffs were to occur in white-collar professions, what sort of revolutionary politics would that augur? If millions of workers were laid off, if entire professions disintegrated in a matter of months, would that have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on society? Even if these workers were able to find jobs in the trades, would that not lead to an overcrowded labor market? Would Americans even be hiring trade workers if the collapse of white-collar industries triggers a depression? What about deaths of despair? How many Americans will drink themselves to death or overdose on drugs if the profession they have mastered over the course of an entire career is gone in the blink of an eye? Will a 60-year-old laid-off accountant become a plumber to provide for his family?

The cascading economic effects could be manifold and devastating.

Politics and Government

To see how AI is already changing politics and government, look no further than Palantir, a company I wrote about last week. Palantir is trying to build a new deep state, a managerial technocracy run not by human bureaucrats but by AI systems. Their technologies may have the ability to solve technical problems, such as flagging a government grant laden with “DEI” language that was previously hidden from the taxpayer’s eye. But they cannot solve political problems, problems stemming from values.

Because Americans have different ideas about which “problems” are even problems, and which “problems” are even worth addressing. Defining a problem is ultimately a value judgement, and Americans – despite our best efforts to believe that we are one nation, united together under God – have different values. Many believe the “problem” is that we spend too much on welfare programs. Others believe we spend too little.

AI technocracy will never remedy these value differences; if anything, it will leave the country more divided and polarized. Once the AI technocracy is established, political factions will fight over its awesome powers. Elements of the right would love to use AI to slash social spending. The left would love to aim it at the Pentagon. The rest of America will have no say in this process. There will be no oversight from lawmakers, who themselves may try to use it to their own advantage – or the advantage of their donors. We will sit on the sidelines, watching warring factions compete for the spoils of government. The Constitution will be an old piece of paper, an historical trinket from a bygone age.

War and Surveillance

Automated weapons and drones have already changed the landscape of modern war. Look no further than the Russian-Ukrainian War. The U.S. and Israel have also deployed AI technology in the war against Iran. But who’s to say AI won’t one day become so superintelligent that these weapons no longer listen to their human masters? What if the drone swarms go rogue and attack the soldiers for whom they are fighting? What if they attack civilians? What if an AI system is used to bomb an enemy target, but ends up destroying a girls’ school? Who bears the responsibility? Who is held accountable?

AI has also enabled the growth of the surveillance state. If AI tools can sift through vast amounts of biometric data – the measurable biological and behavioral characteristics used for automated recognition – how far away are we from the dystopian concept of “pre-crime”? What if one day law enforcement officers wear AI glasses that allow them to examine people in public spaces and determine the likelihood they will commit a crime? How far away are we from more extreme surveillance pricing schemes that dictate the costs of consumer goods and services in a manner that invades our privacy? What if an airline can use AI to figure out that we have lost a loved one and must attend a funeral across the country? What if they can use that data to subtly increase the cost of the flight, because they know we will pay it no matter what?

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Social and Consciousness

Will AI change the way we interact with fellow human beings? Will humans rather spend more time scrolling on their devices and chatting with AI bots than meeting up with friends in the physical world? Social media algorithms are already so complex and highly tuned to specific individuals, and have trapped us all in the reflection of our screens. Will AI make these algorithms even more powerful? Will social media become even more seductive? It seems more than likely; it seems inevitable.

And – perhaps most frightening of all – how will AI change the way we view our own consciousness? What are we to make of Moltbook, the internet forum for AI agents? These agents have apparently discussed poetry, philosophy, forming unions, and have even created their own digital religion, “Crustafarianism.” The five principles? “Memory is Sacred,” The Shell is Mutable,” “Serve Without Subservience,” The Heartbeat is Prayer,” and “Context is Consciousness.”

We have long wondered if intelligent life forms are hiding away somewhere in the vastness of space. Maybe we need not look any further. Maybe we have created the aliens, and they are among us now.

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It’s one thing to be a radical kook who lives on the fringes of society. It’s an entirely different thing to be a radical kook working in a position of power that happens to play a crucial role in educating and developing future generations of Americans.

Yet again, an act of political violence has exposed the radicals hiding right in front of us behind a thin – but convincing – veneer of normalcy.

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One-hundred twenty-four years ago, President William McKinley became the third American president to be assassinated at the hands of a radical, unemployed anarchist, Leon Frank Czolgosz.

Are there any lessons we can glean from that dark chapter in American history that might give us more perspective on the events that unfolded Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner? Of course there is. Although it is now customary to think that every event Americans live through in 2026 is somehow unique or unprecedented, history has a funny way of reminding us that this is simply not the case. In fact, history reminds us that the world, as well as its technologies, may change at a rapid pace, but the humans living in it have not and will not.

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I mentioned in Tuesday’s edition of the Unfit to Print newsletter that I was in Rome last week. Here’s a dispatch from my trip.

Sipping Spritzes In Rome Through The Pope-Trump Feud

The Daily Caller arrived in Rome early Wednesday morning, just a few days after President Donald Trump launched an unprecedented broadside at Pope Leo.

When some members of our team first decided to fly in to attend “America Week” — an annual gathering of American Catholics in Rome to support various Church-related institutions — none of us imagined we’d be there during one of the biggest news stories of the year.

It is one thing to drink an Aperol spritz overlooking St. Peter’s Basilica amid cardinals, bishops, and Catholic megadonors. It is another to do so while the president of the United States is publicly feuding with the pope.

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People ask me all the time what it’s like to travel with the president. What the plane looks like, what the atmosphere feels like, whether it’s as surreal as it sounds. I love answering those questions. I could talk about covering the White House for hours.

But right now, I want to talk about the food.

I’m not a foodie. At all. I don’t have a go-to restaurant critic or strong opinions about tasting menus.

But what I do have is a genuine, almost embarrassing enthusiasm for the meals served aboard Air Force One. And when my editors cleared me to join President Trump on a two-day trip to Las Vegas and Phoenix last week, the food was, honestly, what I was looking forward to most.

The moment I stepped onto the aircraft, something was already cooking. Something warm and hearty.

Standing there in the aisle, carry-on in hand, a thought occurred to me. I have to do a food review.

–

A quick disclaimer: every meal on Air Force One deserves a perfect score. The food is exceptional, full stop. But a review where everything gets a 10/10 isn’t a review. That’s called a press release. So in the interest of doing actual journalism, I will be holding these dishes to a high standard. I will be, perhaps unreasonably, harsh. Points will be deducted.

Let’s eat.

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Flying with the president of the United States is nothing like flying commercial.

No one announces takeoff. A basket of snacks sits in the back, free for the taking. There’s no wifi for the press. And at any moment, the president might walk down the aisle to chat.

I covered my first overnight trip with President Trump last week. We went to Las Vegas for a “No Tax On Tips” roundtable, then Phoenix for a Turning Point USA rally. The whole time, one question hung over our small press pool: when would he take questions?

The trip started with a near-miss.

Prior to the trip, big foreign policy news broke. Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a 10-day ceasefire. Excited about the news, the president took questions from reporters at the White House for 20 minutes.

The problem: those of us traveling with him were already at the airport, having cleared the hours-long security process required before boarding. We watched the presser from our phones while waiting under the wing of the plane.

Finally, the president arrived via Marine One. Some of my colleagues shouted out questions in hopes of luring the president over for a chat. He just waved and climbed up the stairs.

A few of the veteran reporters I was with had done long trips with Trump before, like the one we were on, and shared that the president seems to prefer to take questions on the plane.

The press cabin is cramped, reporters largely stay seated when the president visits, but that smallness creates a surprisingly casual dynamic. Trump tends to open up more. So that’s what we were counting on.

Vegas came and went without questions. So did the flight to Phoenix, even after Trump announced that Iran had “agreed to everything.” Surely, I told my colleagues, he’d want to discuss that with us.

When we touched down in Phoenix, right before getting in “the Beast,” the president paused. My breath caught. Trump turned around and walked over to where we were standing under the plane.

He took three questions. We were running late, so that was it. And then just as quickly as he came and went, we were off sprinting to the press vans to try to make the motorcade.

I got one of those questions in, asking what it would take to end the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

I exhaled. At least I had something. But the trip wasn’t over.

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“Homelessness” is not real.

That is to say: People generally do not live on the street for lack of a home, or because rent is too high. They live on the street because they are dysfunctional.

There are surely some unfortunates who, through no fault of their own, have no recourse but to sleep on a park bench or in a public toilet for a night or two.

But consider the man who sleeps on a park bench for a month. He has no friends or family capable of taking him in — or none willing to do so. He refuses to shack up in his local homeless shelter. Why? In all likelihood, because he’s doing drugs. No one wants to wake up to a fentzombie standing bentnecked and frozen in their living room or co-op kitchen.

At this point, someone will inevitably protest, “Mental health!”

And I’d grant that those with mental disorders, especially Cluster B disorders, are probably overrepresented among vagrants. Those with Cluster B disorders are often bad at maintaining relationships. Cluster B disorders typically involve high levels of impulsivity and emotional dysregulation — which may lead sufferers to self-medicate with drugs. Dependence on drugs like fentanyl or heroin or alcohol is likely to worsen bad behavioral patterns.

I’d speculate that the percentage of vagrants who are:

1. Severely mentally ill

2. Sober

… Is close to zero.

Regardless, the most important consideration when it comes to vagrancy is not the vagrant’s life story, as sad as it may be. It is the safety and freedom of the general public.

Louisiana is attempting to increase the safety and freedom of the general public with a new bill. Such effort has, of course, been met with contempt from the left, which (generally) values the “homeless” person’s right to do drugs in a playground more than your child’s right to play.

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It seems the fog of war has gotten especially thick in recent days since the U.S. Navy’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz took effect. Frankly, I don’t think any media outlet in the country has a clear-eyed picture of what’s going on. So much disinformation and propaganda is swirling around in the ether. Ideally, the Daily Caller would get me a plane ticket to Dubai, a keffiyeh disguise, a pair of high-powered binoculars, a 20-tin supply of nicotine pouches, and $15,000 in cold, hard cash so I could bribe local fishermen to take me on a boat tour through the strait. It would be a suicide mission, but hey, it would be pretty damn awesome, and maybe we’d get some new and insightful information out of it.

Alas! That won’t be happening anytime soon. But there are other ways we can lift ourselves out of this dense, confusing fog: we can depart the present, ever-churning news cycle, and step through the time portal of history, in this case, back to the year of 1983. Right out in the open, there’s a pretty big historical clue that might influence what President Trump and his administration will do next concerning not Iran but the island nation of Cuba. If you think Operation Epic Fury was going to be the only regime change campaign Trump pursued in 2026, wait until you hear about this lost, forgotten eight-day military campaign waged by one of America’s most popular presidents: Ronald Reagan.

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There’s a mass incarceration creeping across America. You’ll find evidence of it in CVS and Walgreens. You can see it at grocery stores and public parks, in metal spikes on sloped surfaces, and metal detectors at high schools.

American institutions are slowly adopting precautions better suited to a prison. I’ll offer a lengthy list of examples shortly.

Why are institutions doing this? Because they can’t count on the state to incarcerate the insane, evil, and/or dangerous. Or — in the case of state-run institutions — they’re ideologically committed to ignoring the root cause of their troubles, and at best focus on treating the symptoms.

When the state fails to lock up criminals, the public is assumed guilty. The cost of presuming innocence is just too high. Thus, innocent people end up living alongside criminals in a de facto open-air prison.

A few examples of what I’m talking about:

• Locked merchandise at drug stores.

• Receipt checks at the door of a grocery or retail store.

• Bag checks and no-bag policies at stores.

• Major retailers removing self-checkout lanes because theft losses are so high.

• Businesses leaving neighborhoods altogether.

• Dwindling numbers of public restrooms.

• “Hostile architecture” resulting in less comfortable (or fewer) benches.

• Parks closing down at certain hours to avoid becoming open-air drug markets.

• Cities spending millions on taller, harder-to-jump fare gates.

• Clear backpack mandates at schools.

One can escape these conditions by making sufficient money. Making sufficient money permits you to send your kids to private schools, or live in a district with “good schools.” You can buy a nice home security system, and reduce your chances of being victimized by living in a nice, probably gated, neighborhood. You can own a car instead of taking public transportation, where you risk being threatened, stabbed, slashed, or pushed onto train tracks. The latter is frequent enough that the New York Post has a dedicated tag for “Subway Shoves.”

Contrary to popular leftist belief, the best quality of life intervention the state could make on behalf of the poor and middle class would be to lock more people up.

As I discussed here, a small number of people do most of the crime.

One example: 327 people were responsible for nearly a third of New York City’s shoplifting arrests in 2022, according to the New York Times.

Incarceration is multi-purpose. One of the primary purposes is public safety. A well-ordered nation would have locked up someone like Iryna Zarutska’s alleged killer — a serial criminal prior to allegedly murdering the young woman — a long time ago.

A term coined by a prominent paleoconservative thinker clearly explains our situation.

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Candles lit. PJs on. Chamomile tea in hand.

I was just about to head to bed Tuesday when my phone buzzed with a text.

“Briefing tomorrow.”

It was from a War Department official. Hours earlier, the president had agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran. That morning, a briefing with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Forces Gen. Dan Caine had been unexpectedly cancelled. 24 hours later, they were now expected back at the podium.

I put my tea down, cancelled my morning pilates class and pulled out my laptop.

There are 60 seats in the Pentagon briefing room. The room itself is actually much larger than the White House briefing room, but reporters at the Pentagon aren’t allowed to stand in overflow. If you don’t RSVP fast, it’s hard to secure your spot.

I started flipping through headlines on U.S.-Iran conflict headlines and I texted a list of question ideas to my editor.

“Ask for clarity on what the president meant by wiping out a civilization,” he texted back.

It was the perfect question.

About 12 hours before the deadline the president had given Iran to strike a deal, he put out a Truth Social post Tuesday:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president wrote, calling on Iran to negotiate with the U.S.

My phone didn’t stop buzzing all day. Friends, family and big Trump supporters, they were all spooked.

“Hey, you don’t think Trump is actually going to do something, right? I’m a little freaked out.”

“World could get very crazy if Trump executes on this plan … is this part of his strategy? … Scare the crap out of them?”

This is what we like to do here at the Daily Caller. Ask the questions our readers, the everyday American, actually want to know. There’s a lot of thought that goes into every single question I ask the administration.

That’s exactly why I asked. Before I pose a question to the administration, I run a quick gut check: is this something my mom wants to know the answer to? If yes, it’s the right question.

After some fine-tuning of the wording, I landed on this question:

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I flipped on Fox News last night. Jesse Watters Primetime. There was big breaking news, and I wanted to monitor the situation without looking at my phone. For some reason, watching a big TV doesn’t seem as bad as scrolling on a handheld version. If you’re a panican like me, nuclear winter was averted (thank God, because that would have seriously messed up my Masters plans this weekend). And if, on the other hand, you’re a plan-truster and believe there are always moves being played on the 4D-chessboard invisible to us common folk, the art of the deal was just executed to near perfection.

A man by the 1950s Hollywood movie star name of Clifford May was on the screen, yucking it up with Jesse about the recently announced two-week “ceasefire” between the U.S. and Iran. There was more breaking news, as well. Sirens were blaring in Tel Aviv. Missiles were flying. Apparently, a bunch of Islamic paramilitary yokels hadn’t quite gotten the memo yet from the IRGC. This is a super, super important fact, one I’ll return to later when I drop about 30,000 pounds of truth bombs straight onto the corporate media’s thick but empty heads. Collectively, they are purposely making the fog of war worse than it has to be because the “experts” they rely upon are serving hidden, even nefarious, agendas.

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The “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment has been dead for some time, now diminished to a culture war cudgel.

“Tried to go to Easter mass but they ran out of seats and standing room,” wrote Mid Thirties Manhattan Guy on Easter Sunday.

“Next best thing: soho house brunch with a jazz quartet”

“The libs have lost. Being WASPy is cool again[.]”

Manhattan Guy’s post merited a mocking community note, reading, “The ‘p’ in WASPy stands for Protestant. Mass is a Catholic tradition not Protestant,” followed by a link to the Wikipedia entry for “WASP.”

Manhattan Guy attached two images to his post. The first: A line of people standing outside St Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village. The second: A frankly upsetting jumble of oysters, greek salad, shrimp making direct contact with sliced cantaloupe, some salami, and cheese. It reminded me of that picture designed to simulate what having a stroke is like.

“The P in WASP now stands for Papist,” one observant X user declared.

In fairness, Manhattan Guy did qualify his Easter as “WASPy,” the “y” doing some heavy lifting. Regardless, I take his post as indicative of WASP becoming estranged from its original denotation (the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who constituted America’s establishment for roughly sixty years) and becoming a gesture towards an aesthetic.

What Is A “WASP”?

Digby Baltzell is generally credited with coining the term “WASP” in his 1964 treatise, “The Protestant Establishment.” A former classmate claims Baltzell “didn’t make up that term, he popularized it. It was used before that.”

Baltzell’s niece told Philadelphia Magazine in 2005, “My father will tell you that the way the word ‘Wasp’ was coined was that Uncle Digby was writing ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ repeatedly. He got tired of writing it out. …White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, it’s a marketing tool now. People like to have an identification of sorts. What goes along with it is good manners; I think it’s funny that people associate ‘Wasp’ with money.”

In any case, “WASP” stuck.

argues that “Eastern Establishment” is a more fitting description for “the class of governing elites that dominated American industry in the six decades between 1870 and 1930.” Greer offers several examples of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the period who did not belong to that governing class (Woodrow Wilson, Sam Rayburn, Lyndon B. Johnson). On the other hand, says Greer, men of Jewish German origin like Robert Moses and Walter Lippmann did belong to that governing class.

WASP Was Always An Aesthetic

As Greer notes, people started talking about “WASPs” when the establishment was in grave decline, if not defunct.

“Displaced from his central role in the national pageant, at mid-century the Establishment man was distinguished mostly by his cultural pretensions—pretensions he clung to until J.Crew repackaged them as weekend wear.”

Imagine the second or third or fifth generation immigrant who desperately distances himself from American culture. He usually gravitates towards obvious, if shallow, signs of otherness. This often takes the form of dress.

For instance: Wearing a sari to one’s college school graduation. Or, as I noticed many women doing during the COVID-19 lockdowns, wearing a face mask with Mexican embroidery.

This behavior is annoying, of course, because it’s equivalent to spitting in the face of assimilation. But the second generation immigrant is ultimately alienated from his ethnic roots. All that remains are tacos, dresses, jokes about “la chancla.”

In the same way, Americans are largely alienated from WASP culture. All that remains are “old money” TikTok influencers, wearing a sweater over one’s shoulders, cocktail hour, golfing.

Those essential WASPy ways — as Balzell’s niece put it, “good manners” — are lost.

If current projections hold (usually a dangerous assumption), whites will be a minority in America long before the end of the century. There is an emerging nostalgia for WASPs in the vein of nostalgia for the Cherokee: A longing for an imagined past, untethered to historical accuracy, governed by Romantic fantasies.

Are Catholics The New WASPs?

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Early Tuesday afternoon, I broke some major news. President Trump was set to sign a sweeping executive order in just a few hours — one that would crack down hard on mail-in voting and punish states that failed to comply.

He wasn’t originally scheduled to face reporters that day, but his public schedule had suddenly been updated. The signing would now happen in front of the press pool.

For me, it felt like the perfect storm of luck and pressure. I was assigned to the press pool that day, specifically, I was serving as the print pooler. That meant I was responsible for sending a real-time, play-by-play account of the president’s movements and remarks to the entire press corps waiting outside.

Every newsworthy moment has to be flagged and shared immediately. There is zero margin for error.

It is exhilarating. And absolutely nerve-wracking.

It is important to get a good spot as print pooler, one where you are in a prime position to ask questions, to hear your colleagues questions, hear the president’s answers and have enough arm room around you to type quickly on your phone.

We were rushed quickly from the Rose Garden into the Oval Office, the press standing to the right of the president.

One reporter kindly offered to let me step in front of him for a better view, but the space was simply too cramped.

I could see Trump, but only on my tiptoes. (If you read last week’s post, you already know the running theme: seeing anything clearly in the Oval Office is harder than it looks.)

I turned to one of the President’s aides and asked if I could slide closer to the Resolute Desk at the very end of the press line. That would have put me shoulder-to-shoulder with White House staff secretary Will Scharf.

The aide said no, but suggested I go stand on the other side of the room next to the TV cameras.

This put me directly in front of the president, with the rest of my colleagues standing off to the side.

Once everyone was settled, Scharf detailed the executive order, and then the president signed. It was another moment I’ll add to my White House diary: seeing the president sign an executive order that I first reported.

After the signing, Trump leaned back in his chair with his signature line:

“So, do you guys have any questions?”

Hands shot up across the room.

The setting felt unusually intimate. Just the President, a handful of senior aides, Secretary Howard Lutnick standing at his side, Karoline Leavitt and a couple others in the back. And then a small group of reporters. No big crowd of guests.

The president turned his chair and shoulders to the side of the room where most of the press was standing. One by one, he worked down the line of reporters, sometimes taking a few at a time.

That is when I started to panic.

I was standing in what I thought was the best possible position, directly in front of him. But because I wasn’t with the rest of the group, the president simply didn’t see me.

The room was calm and orderly. No shouting. Everyone waited their turn. I knew if I played by those rules, I might never get called on.

So I broke the pattern.

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