The Friday Brief, 20, 2026

Brain Rot, Marco and Castro, and War With Iran

Inside

The Brain-Rot Pandemic
Little Marco Hearts Castro
The Fed and Trump: Let Them Fight
Trump’s Temu U.N.
Intercepting Cancer Way, Way Early
The Trump Crime Syndicate
Wag The Mullah
Scenes From The Home Front

The Brain-Rot Pandemic

(h/t to Kate Salkowitz for the idea for this piece.)

Let’s be honest with each other for a minute and look at the landscape of American politics in this, the year of our Lord 2026. We aren’t just fighting over marginal tax rates or parts per billion of carbon in the atmosphere, or whether we should build a bridge to nowhere anymore.

We are locked in a cage match with ghosts, hallucinations, imaginary demons, and a very specific, very aggressive form of collective psychosis.

The era of the sane political disagreement is in the rearview mirror, and it’s currently being devoured by a pack of feral conspiracy theories that have moved from the damp, mildewy basements of 4chan directly into the West Wing and the halls of Congress.

We’ve moved past the “fringe.” There is no fringe anymore. The fringe is the fabric.

If you’d told me ten years ago that a significant portion of the GOP, the party I spent decades building, for better or (mostly) worse, would believe that the world is run by a child-abusing cabal of subterranean lizard people who operate out of a pizza parlor, I would have told you to lay off the peyote. If you’d told me that once Donald Trump’s name appeared in the case, that 90% of them would declare their own deeply held previous beliefs as a hoax, I would have taken the peyote.