#HillaryBarbie, #Swelce, and the memeification of selective white feminism

 On Tuesday, the film Barbie was nominated for eight Academy Awards, the fourth-highest total of this year’s upcoming ceremony. The film, the highest-grossing of 2023 at nearly $1.5 billion, was a massive culture phenomenon and a great critical success, a refreshing bit of fresh air in an environment where most blockbuster hits are sequels and/or superhero movies. It was a sharp satire filled with humor and heart; while its theatrical opening alongside Oppenheimer as “Barbenheimer” was initially a comedic juxtaposition of the seemingly lighthearted and comic Barbie and the existential horror of Oppenheimer, each film had more of the other’s expectations than most assumed.

And although Oppenheimer is easily the favorite to take home Best Picture, Barbie too was nominated, as were two actors (Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera for Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress, respectively), screenwriters Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, costume designer Jacqueline Durran, production designers Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, and the film garnered two nominations for Best Original Song, Billie Eilish’s heart-wrenching “What Was I Made For?” and Ryan Gosling’s power ballad quasi-parody “I’m Just Ken”.

Not nominated from Barbie include Greta Gerwig for the film’s direction and Margot Robbie for her performance as the title character. Although both women have received nominations for these awards before (Gerwig for Lady Bird; Robbie for I, Tonya), their failures to do so in the 2023-24 Oscar season raised eyebrows. Many weighed in to proclaim that the two had been snubbed, though none more cringeworthy than Hillary Clinton, who punctuated an otherwise tepid statement with the instantly infamous hashtag #HillaryBarbie. But more on her in a bit.

I expected that Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, in that order of likelihood, would receive nominations, though I am fairly unqualified to explain whether they should have. Robbie, who has spent a decade crafting her reputation as one of the most charming and exciting actresses of her era, was simultaneously funny and sincere as the film’s focal point, but I also have only seen one nominee, Lily Gladstone of Killers of the Flower Moon, and I would give her performance as a woman caught between her marriage and the constant suffering of her fellow Native Americans the edge over Robbie. Regarding Gerwig and Best Director, she competed against English-language cinema’s greatest living director (Martin Scorsese) and a beloved name-brand director who is the favorite to win his first Best Director award (Christopher Nolan).

It is a largely disrespected cliche to note that the real honor of the Academy Awards is just being nominated, but there is very much truth to this. And 2023 was a strong year for pop movies. 

Margot Robbie was not assured of a nomination not because she wasn’t great, but because a lot of other women also were. By definition, to include Robbie would mean to exclude one of Annette Bening, Sandra Hüller, Carey Mulligan, Emma Stone, or especially the aforementioned Gladstone, who became the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress. With the possible exception of Stone, a bankable star who already has an Oscar to her name, Margot Robbie had less to gain from a nomination than anybody. Consider what this means for Hüller, the 45 year-old German star of two Best Picture nominees, or for Bening or Mulligan, Oscar veterans trying to win their first statues. A bad-faith argument that has been dispensed is noting that “Ken got nominated and Barbie didn’t”, which is a statement of fact but also neglects how much easier it is get a nomination for supporting actor than in a lead category. A major part of the reason Gosling campaigned for supporting actor rather than lead, despite a ton of screen time, is because it was easier to get a nomination that way. You could make a case that Ryan Gosling’s hilarious if less emotionally enriching performance as a meathead literal boy toy was in some ways better than Robbie’s, but the case would be much weaker for America Ferrera, whose role as a Mattel employee-turned-Barbie ally was not especially developed. But it’s just a lot easier to have a top five supporting performance than a top five lead one.

Meanwhile, although Greta Gerwig was omitted from the list of Best Director nominees, history was made via another woman when Justine Triet became the first French woman nominated for the award. Triet, an outspoken critic of Emmanuel Macron’s government as being insufficiently to the political left, being recognized is a victory for women in cinema, whether it is a bigger victory than a Gerwig nomination would be or not. Perhaps Gerwig was more deserving than Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, box office returns at 3.5% those of Barbie) or Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest, 0.2% of Barbie’s box office), but based on the popularity of those films, it is unlikely that the typical person critical of Gerwig’s omission would have an educated guess on the matter. As was the case with Robbie’s, the criticism of Gerwig’s omission seems far less about the awards and more about the abstractions they are perceived to represent. But for those who want to take a wider-ranging look at the landscape of filmmaking, the fact that 20% of Best Director nominees were women should be an indictment not of the Academy, which actually overrepresented women compared to how frequently they get the opportunities to direct major feature films, but of an industry that is largely unwilling to give women the chance they deserve.

There is something about losing a presidential election that seems to scar people, usually in ways less harmful than compelling your most gullible supporters that your loss was a political conspiracy. Mitt Romney escaped the public eye, resurfacing as a more-small-c-less-capital-c conservative than ever as a senator from Utah after running as a relatively centrist Massachusetts Republican. John McCain defined his personal legacy so much as a political loser than he insisted that the manufacturers of his two biggest career losses, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, speak at his funeral. Hillary Clinton, perhaps more than any other losing presidential candidate, took her loss personally, in ways diametrically opposed to her longstanding political reputation, one built on not being willing enough to show emotion (a darkly ironic twist on the common sexist trope that women are too emotional to be involved in politics). When Saturday Night Live’s all-too-loving parody of Hillary Clinton, portrayed by Kate McKinnon, looked into the camera in a sketch about a 2016 presidential debate and said, “I think I’m going to be president”, it had all of the subtlety of a Michael Bay explosion montage but it was directionally pointed at the cockiness that the Clinton camp had.

To be clear, while Hillary Clinton was flawed and not very good at playing presidential politics, she was qualified for the job in ways that Donald Trump (who was also, to put it lightly, flawed and not very good at playing presidential politics) was not. But unlike the other Clinton administration-associated person to lose a presidential bid, Al Gore, who emerged post-2000 as an advocate for action on climate change, the vast majority of Hillary Clinton’s work and public statements post-2016 have been meditations either on herself or on Donald Trump. In fairness to Clinton, the extent to which Donald Trump became the main character in American life cannot be overstated; it’s difficult to blame her for acting in a manner not dissimilar to those belonging to her political coalition. But almost by definition, this means re-living her greatest professional trauma. Whether out of her own personal ego or out of constantly seeing Donald Trump’s remedial mistakes that any American president should be too competent to make, likely some combination of the two, the belief that Hillary Clinton was done wrong by American voters only exacerbated; for those of us who voted for her but were far more enthusiastic about the “not voting for Trump” piece of that equation, the issue is that America was done wrong by American voters. I am apathetic to the personal feelings of Hillary Clinton in the same way that I am apathetic to the personal feelings of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or any of the many Democrats that I view more favorably politically—I want these people to win not as a fan of a sports team does, but as somebody who wants their governance. Barbie made a billion and a half dollars; it didn’t need awards recognition to demonstrate to the movie industry that a type of movie like Barbie can and should continue to be worth the investment. And in that way, even if by accident, Hillary Clinton’s analogy of Barbie to herself does make some level of sense.

An unfortunate side effect of the era of “poptimism”, in short the belief that popular things ought to be valued as legitimate art and not disregarded simply because people enjoy them (true), is that critical analysis of popular things is somehow problematic. For instance, Barbie devoted a huge chunk of its run time to a Will Ferrell-led chase subplot that, despite having Literally Will Ferrell in it, turned out to be the least funny part of the film. It was too self-congratulatory about the toy’s significance as a feminist icon. Although America Ferrera’s monologue about feminism will likely be played on Oscars night and was by any reasonable assessment categorically true, it was so on-the-nose that it felt a bit distracting. And again, I liked Barbie. I liked it more than the movie that is probably going to beat it out for Best Picture. But it is not beyond reproach, and if anything, the financial security of the film should make people more comfortable to nitpick, not because popularity is a bad thing but because it’s not like one sick burn is going to turn major studios off Greta Gerwig. And nobody in modern popular culture has better embodied the poptimism pivot quite like Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift is the most popular musician on the planet and has been in the inner circle of candidates for that title continuously for over a decade-and-a-half. Reputation, her supposed comedown from massive popularity, went triple-platinum in 2017, when streaming had largely rendered the album sale as a commercially dead artform, spent four weeks at #1 in the United States, and produced four top-twenty singles including a #1 and a #4 hit. All ten of her studio albums have, to some degree or another, been enormous hits and critical darlings. I am, personally, more an enjoyer of Swift’s music than a hater of it—I think Fearless is one of the great pop albums of the 21^st century though I also would support, if not outright charges, at least a resolution at the Hague condemning “Welcome to New York”. But despite her massive popularity, Swift has managed to be a deeply personal artist for millions of people. It’s not just that her fans enjoy listening to and discussing her music—it’s that her fans view her, personally, as an important figure in their lives. There are levels to this—some of which are categorically unhealthy but many of which are mostly harmless. Let’s put it this way: I am a massive fan of Oasis. I bought all their albums well into the streaming era, I would book the first flight I could find if they were ever to reunite, and I just had to look up if the Gallagher brothers were married (Liam is not; Noel is married but separated). But there are legions of Taylor Swift fans who feel genuine and personal happiness at the relationship between Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. And that’s fine.

Considering the relative lack of headlines that Taylor Swift’s six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn generated, the sensation surrounding Swift and Kelce is astonishing—yes, the future Hall of Fame NFL player is more famous than the extremely private character actor, but Swift and Kelce’s few months of courtship have received British Royalty levels of attention. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of the two—the quiet and artsy skinny Brit along with Taylor Swift wasn’t as interesting as the guy who looks and behaves like a professional wrestler. And while celebrity gossip is usually unveiled through paparazzi photos and such, public knowledge of the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce relationship has been disseminated via the most popular television program in the country—National Football League broadcasts.

Swift’s presence at the games is, objectively, innocuous. She goes to games, sits in a private box with people who are not clamoring for her attention, watches the games, and cheers when something good for the Chiefs happens. Many have speculated that her appearances, or perhaps even the entire relationship, is a ploy for attention; I have no reason to believe that it is, and if it were, it would be rather confusing because she isn’t really doing anything. That Swift’s star power is so high that broadcasts when she is present are so transfixed on her is itself an argument against the relationship being a public work—Taylor Swift’s profile has not particularly increased because of dating Travis Kelce. Kelce’s has, but that doesn’t explain why Swift would feel motivated to help him.

Backlash to the constant camera shots of Taylor Swift was inevitable, as she has faced backlash large and small throughout her career, but that it has taken on a particular political valiance has been somewhat unusual. Swift, who was notorious in some circles for being publicly apolitical (a certain particularly bored subsection of Hillary Clinton supporter blamed Swift, who it cannot be stressed enough never said a single positive public thing about Donald Trump, for Clinton’s 2016 loss), has since taken public political stances—they began in earnest when she advocated against conservative Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn and have since extended to pro-choice, pro-LGBT, pro-Black Lives Matter liberalism. Although calling Swift an ardent leftist would seemingly be overselling it—she has notably come under fire from environmental activists for her extensive use of private jets—it would be fair to say that Swift fits within the established parameters of American liberalism. Kelce, for his part, has never really been known to be publicly political—the closest thing to political activism he has ever done was appearing in commercials for COVID-19 boosters, a political stance echoed by such socialist revolutionaries as Donald Trump.

The Kansas City Chiefs are a uniquely toxic organization in several ways. The team, named after (white) former Kansas City mayor Harold Roe Bartle, who himself was nicknamed based on a widely criticized Boy Scouts sub-section formed by Bartle, has now spent over sixty years marketing itself with Native American imagery. The name of both the team and of its home stadium, Arrowhead Stadium, have been criticized, but even more egregious examples have permeated throughout the years. And while the Chiefs have nixed some of their traditions, such as the horse Warpaint, who was worn by a man dressed in a headdress years into the twenty-first century, others have remained intact. Despite years of Native American activist organizations imploring the organization to stop using such imagery as the “war drum”, fans dressing in traditional Native American clothing, and most infamously the “Tomahawk Chop”, the team has largely escaped the severe scrutiny levied against the former Cleveland Indians and Washington (it’s such a heinous slur that I don’t even feel like typing it out—if you somehow don’t know, just search “Washington Commanders” and go from there), and while the presence of the Atlanta Braves in the 2021 World Series invited an onslaught of criticism of their use of the Tomahawk Chop, the Chiefs have somehow avoided such a large public reckoning despite appearing in four Super Bowls in five years and not exactly sliding under the public radar

One can easily make the argument that Kansas City Chiefs ownership, headed by Clark Hunt, is not materially worse than the typical NFL owner. But as a lifelong resident of the St. Louis area whose readership has primarily come from the St. Louis area, the “normal” ways in which the Hunt family has behaved perniciously are especially personal. In 1988, Lamar Hunt voted to approve the relocation of the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals to Phoenix. In 1995, he voted against the relocation of the St. Louis Rams to St. Louis. In 2016, Clark Hunt was the lone owner (on a six-owner committee) to vote against a stadium plan in Carson, California that would have saved NFL football in St. Louis, and once that fell through, voted in favor of the Rams’ relocation to Los Angeles. The Hunt family finally gave away the game for good the month the Rams moved and admitted that they planned to market the Chiefs in St. Louis. The results have been somewhat impossible to gauge—the Chiefs likely are the favorite team of a plurality of St. Louisans, but it is hardly unanimous and hardly akin to the popularity of the Rams when they were in St. Louis, or even of, say, the Green Bay Packers in Milwaukee, despite the Chiefs being treated as a de facto home team as far as NFL broadcasting has been concerned and despite the Chiefs giving their fans an absurd amount of success in the eight seasons since the Rams left St. Louis.

The previous paragraph is not intended to engender Chiefs hatred among neutral fans—it’s not as though the ownership of the York family of the San Francisco 49ers is exactly spotless—but rather to engender an understanding of why this hatred exists. The same goes for the controversies regarding Native American imagery, except for the part about it not being intended to engender Chiefs hatred—you should absolutelycondemn the Tomahawk Chop, even if allegiance to Kansas City ties you to still root for the team. As for me, I was a lifelong St. Louis Rams fan with abandonment issues, an extremely socially liberal sensibility, and a Native American wife who hates the Chiefs every bit as much as I do (for the obvious reasons) despite never having been a St. Louis Rams fan and despite Taylor Swift being her favorite musical artist of all-time—I am essentially the exact demographic destined to hate the Kansas City Chiefs. And the point here is that these reasons already existed.

In the wake of particularly stupid right-wing cranks like sports radio host Clay Travis, recent presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamay, and countless right-wing media freaks claiming preposterously that Taylor Swift is somehow a CIA plant (which might be a bit but post-Pizzagate, it is essential that we take even the dopiest sounding conspiracy theories seriously on their face), it has now become fashionable among a certain well-off white liberal milieu to openly support the Kansas City Chiefs as a means to spite the Clay Travises of the world. Having an instinct of repulsion towards this group is sensible, but it’s also worth remembering that very few, if any, of these people actually care. This group of culture warriors that gave us Bud Light protests because Anheuser-Busch (a company with plenty of actual questionable business decisions of its own) provided one special Bud Light to one transgender person got bored and have moved from one Extremely Online cultural grievance to another, and now, years after declaring that they had abandoned the NFL after Colin Kaepernick, the extremely anodyne “END RACISM” signage on end zones, or some other controversy that we have all likely forgotten, have moved on to getting angry because TV networks are showing Taylor Swift too much for their liking. 

I don’t personally find the Swift cutaways especially annoying—it’s not like they are cutting away from game action (the NFL famously has no shortage of down time)—but some people do for the same reasons they get annoyed whenever Fox’s broadcast of the World Series will cut to conspicuously placed stars of an upcoming show that will last eight episodes. Yes, there are certainly misogynists among the NFL’s fan base, but do you know how I’m pretty confident that the misogyny factor isn’t all that significant? Because the NFL, for better and for worse, is a deeply, deeply capitalist organization, and every move they make is with an eye on maximizing profits, and the networks keep showing Taylor Swift. The NFL’s blackballing of Colin Kaepernick was a business decision—a gross and evil one, but a business decision nonetheless. Kaepernick was dispensable (I have long speculated that Tom Brady, or even a Black equivalent of Tom Brady, so I guess Patrick Mahomes now, would have survived the blowback he received in 2016) because whatever people were turning off their televisions in disgust was higher than the percentage tuning in for Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem. Taylor Swift is bringing people in.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I have cogent reasons for hating the Kansas City Chiefs, but that is barely material in this—if I rooted against them because I hated the color red, stewing about Taylor Swift might seem silly but it would be ultimately harmless. But the idea of expressly backing the Kansas City Chiefs, as an ostensible liberal, as solidarity with arguably the single woman on the planet who least needs solidarity at this moment, ventures into the territory of the truly absurd. It is the same uniquely white liberalism that prompted such reactions as those who were up in arms about Barbie’s lack of Oscar nominations. Posting about Barbie or Taylor Swift is, almost literally, the least one can do for the feminist cause.

I hope the San Francisco 49ers win the Super Bowl by so much that the traveling Kansas City Chiefs fans who managed to get an audible Tomahawk Chop going after the team’s road victory over the Baltimore Ravens are shamed into leaving Allegiant Stadium. But just as Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie woke up on Wednesday as extremely wealthy and respected auteurs, Taylor Swift will wake up on Super Bowl Monday as a literal billionaire. We know that Taylor Swift will root for the Kansas City Chiefs, just as we can reasonably assume that Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone, via her social media retweets, will root against the team whose name she has advocated changing. And a version of feminism that regards the opinions of a white woman but not the concerns of a non-white woman is not true feminism—it is white supremacy.

I literally can’t believe how much the Terminally Online Right didn’t get Barbie

(Some spoilers ahead)

Unlike cancel culture, cancel culture culture is an actual culture. It is a lifestyle choice. Cancel culture, to the extent that it is a real thing, is about a specific action—being outraged that, for the rare literal example of cancelation, reruns of Bill Cosby’s 1980s TV show are still airing and urging them to be canceled—and then calling off the dogs once the mission is accomplished. But cancel culture culture is about finding a new thing to be mad about. It’s about being mad that Bud Light sent a single custom order of its product to a relatively unknown social media influencer (social media influencers are not, in reality, famous), or being mad that Target sells trans-focused swimwear (online, not that such a distinction should matter, though it rebuts the critical focus of their argument), or that the new Greta Gerwig film Barbie is “too woke”. Once one goal is accomplished or fails, a new one comes up. The outrage cannot end, because doing so would force cancel culture culture warriors to acknowledge how deeply unpopular their beliefs actually are in 2023.

That Barbie is not an utterly vapid popcorn flick should not be a surprise to anybody with even a tangential knowledge of it—its writers, the aforementioned Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, have histories of typically dark senses of humor; its stars, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, are critically acclaimed actors with primarily PG-13-plus filmographies; its trailer, after all, includes Robbie as the primary of the titular Barbies asking her friends, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” It is fundamentally a comedy, but its frequent juxtaposition with Oppenheimer, framing it as the ideal antidote to the gravity of a film centering around the Manhattan Project, ignores the film’s deeper themes—indictments of consumerism, reflections on the human condition, and most controversially to some on the right, scathing critiques of the real world’s patriarchy.

The latter is what has the likes of Ben Shapiro and Piers Morgan complaining that Barbie is misandric, anti-male propaganda. And to be clear, to say that the film is anti-patriarchy is completely fair, but its feminism is hardly radical. The film’s politics are so agreeable that the film borders on apolitical—that men and women should be treated equally. It is a point that, although many would privately disagree, few would argue against publicly. Which requires a misreading of Barbie which is either intentionally obtuse (I think this is more likely) or aggressively moronic.

Barbie follows a fairly conventional three-act structure; in the first act, Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s Ken are depicted to live in Barbieland, a world in which women hold every significant position of power (Issa Rae, for instance, portrays President Barbie) and men exist essentially as eye candy for the women—Ken refers to his job simply as “beach” and is portrayed as a well-meaning dimwit, but a dimwit nonetheless. This is, I assume, the nexus of the film’s supposed anti-male propaganda, and I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Ben Shapiro watched exactly enough of the movie to reach this point and then drew his own conclusions.

But the metaphor here is almost laughably simple—I would be open to criticism that this is a structural weakness of the film—and yet the cancel culture cultural machine has seemingly missed it completely—in Barbieland, men and women have essentially flipped the social dynamic from the late 1950s/early 1960s (the era in which the doll Barbie was first introduced). This was an era in which men controlled everything of substance, had right of first refusal on all shots at home, and is portrayed in an often-idyllic way in retrospect. But like many women of that era, the Kens do not complain about their second-classic citizenship because they simply cannot perceive any other way of doing things. The men are undeniably ignorant, but to proclaim them as inherently stupid would be analogous to proclaiming women of the 1950s as inherently stupid; there may be a strand of feminism initially inclined to do so, but this can be easily used as justification for maintaining the class hierarchy. Which Barbie pretty aggressively does not do.

In the film’s second act, in the real world, Barbie is rightfully sickened by the misogyny she sees, both on a basic human behavior level (reasonable indignation of her objectification) and on a structural level (that every person in the Mattelboard room is a man). Ken, however, is charmed by a world in which men have power (though he encounters the limits of the power when he asks to perform surgery). Ironically, Ken’s contentment in this moment is an indictment of the men’s rights activist types who believe that the world of 2023 is pointedly anti-male: he sees a world that is as progressive to women as the modern, western world has ever been as a male paradise because, from the perspective of a Barbieland native, it is.

In the third act, when Barbie returns to her home, the Kens have taken control of the world via propaganda and brainwashing—this is of course villainous behavior, but it does not exactly shine well upon the Barbies, either, as they easily succumbed to the pressure of their former boy toys. The men in Barbie are far from intellectuals, but it’s not as though the women prove to be particularly smart, either. At first, this felt like a plot hole, but once the central conflict is resolved, it makes far more sense.

When the women inevitably regain control of Barbieland, Ryan Gosling’s Ken believes he has found a revelation—that his ultimate purpose in life is not to be in charge (which he admits to not enjoying) but to be with Margot Robbie’s Barbie, a premise which Barbie rejects. Both characters find themselves in positions of extreme power and subservience and both are unsatisfying to them. And in this moment, it is very specifically stated, in as plain of terms as you could imagine, that the human condition applies to both men and women and that the world is better when both are able to pursue their own happiness. The Barbies specifically acknowledge the shortcomings of their previous regime and vow to create a world in which both Barbies and Kens (and Allans) can be as happy together as possible.

The feminism of Barbie should be of a particularly agreeable variety, and yet hyper-Online conservatives have found reasons to be mad at an incredibly basic premise. For their sake, they should hope their next faux-outrage has a bit more to it.

Automobiles are the true robot apocalypse

In 2014, I was working in a small office in St. Charles when I mentioned to some co-workers that I was attending a St. Louis Cardinals game that night. They expressed concern about the dangers of me driving from my South County apartment to the downtown Busch Stadium, concerns which spiraled out of control when I told them I was only going to drive as far as a MetroLink park-and-ride and then take the city’s rapid transit system to the game. A few years later, I was flying to San Diego and some co-workers (same office, different co-workers) expressed concern about the dangers of air travel.

In both situations, I was unfazed by this concern and calmly noted empirical facts: respectively, that my daily commute (30 miles each way) is far more dangerous than riding MetroLink, a system with sporadic violence but which is far less frequent than injurious car accidents, and that statistically, I was more likely to be killed in a car accident on the way to the airport than killed in a plane crash. In neither case were the numbers themselves questioned on a literal level, but car accidents were treated as an inevitable cost of living. Citing car accident data would be like countering the dangers of smoking cigarettes by observing that more people die of heart disease—yes, it’s true, but it’s not like the threat of lung cancer somehow makes one invincible against the threat of a heart attack.

Yesterday, on a stretch of road so near my house that I occasionally walk my dog through it, a car barreling down the street at an estimated 100 miles per hour flew into a house, killing its driver and narrowly avoiding hitting a toddler inside the house. I do not know the context for the accident, nor do I care to speculate, nor do I care to even indict the departed other than to note that for the family merely existing inside its house, the actions of an outside force were nearly a death sentence.

In a historical context, while motor vehicle fatalities have increased somewhat over the last few years, the rates of death are nowhere near the all-time highs—modern vehicles are equipped with improved safety features and now-standard equipment like seat belts were once uncommon. But the motor vehicle fatality rate is still roughly three times higher than it is in Europe, and there is no reason to believe that it should start to decline any time soon. Vehicles have exploded in size—pickup trucks, for instance, once prioritized bed space (you know, the practical reason for one to own a pickup truck in the first place) and now seem to prioritize height, cab size, and overall vehicular mass. Despite the increased presence of convenient ride-sharing programs, impaired driving remains a major concern, including the somewhat paradoxical reality that legal marijuana (which is mostly harmless) leads to illegal impaired driving (sensory deprivation being the biggest physical drawback of marijuana). Infrastructure is literally crumbling—partially because of general austerity and partially because of the toll large vehicles take on them, roads are increasingly littered with potholes. And of course, there are the cell phones—the dangers of texting and driving, which is illegal in most states (but not Missouri!) but relatively difficult to enforce create major distractions in increasingly large vehicles on increasingly dangerous roads. And while the deaths of drivers are not increasing exponentially, the dangers for pedestrians are.

In 2021, 7,388 pedestrians were killed in road traffic accidents. In Germany (about one-fourth the population), that total was 344, and that number nearly slashed in half from 2011, whereas in the United States, the number nearly doubled. The United States has not treated this as a serious problem—in the St. Louis area, local County Council doofus Ernie Trakas has proposed a ban on people standing in the streets, an idea which not only targets the homeless but also has clearly chosen the side that cars have won in the battle against pedestrians so pedestrians must go home.

Urbanism, for me, is a little bit like religious skepticism—I broadly agree with the conclusions of those who practice it, but man can they ever be excruciatingly annoying in trying to convey their messages. Those who are the loudest about boosting public transportation often make arguments tinged in classism, willfully blind to the fact that those who have the most pressing need for cars tend to live further away from their jobs, not to mention the fact that those in rural areas, for whom public transportation is almost never an option, usually make less money than their urban or suburban counterparts. So I want to be clear about something—personal automobiles are never going away entirely, nor do I think should they. There are some major urban areas where one can easily live without a car or without even using Uber or a taxi, but for most people, this is not a realistic option. I live in an inner suburb of St. Louis, and it would take me 17 minutes to drive from my house to Busch Stadium, and it would take me over four times as long using exclusively public transportation and my own two feet. Using only non-gas-powered vehicles (walking and MetroLink), it would take me two hours and 45 minutes. And I’m not exactly in the sticks—in most counties in America, there isn’t bus service, much less light rail. Some urbanists live in delusion, strident in their belief that willpower is the only reason that every corner of the United States does not have access to New York City Subway-quality mass transit. I choose to support improvement.

Last year, I visited New York for the first and hopefully not last time, and it was a revelation just how efficient and convenient the New York City Subway was. My wife and I bought week-long passes on our first day in the city and effortlessly traversed the city. From our South Manhattan hotel, we floated wherever we wanted in the city. We headed up to the Bronx while playing with our phones almost the entire trip. We got drunk at a bar in Brooklyn and got to our beds with minimal effort. We crossed New Jersey off our states-to-visit list for a few extra bucks on an every-bit-as-convenient PATH train. And on the two occasions in which we found ourselves in an automobile—taxis to and from LaGuardia Airport (to be fair, how do you go to New York and not take a taxi; you don’t know that it definitely isn’t the Cash Cab)—I found the experience extremely stressful, and that was as a passenger with a fully qualified driver behind the steering wheel. A majority of New Yorkers do not own a car for a reason—a robust, publicly-funded transit system means that, unlike in most of the country (including St. Louis, which has a decent but limited system), driving is the less convenient option.

The residual effects of NYCS are plentiful. Just consider the last few months of weather news—extreme heat mixed with extreme, less predictable thunderstorms and terrible air quality. This is likely only to get worse as climate change continues to intensify. Meanwhile, the New York City Subway is electrically powered—far better for air quality than fossil fuels. In a country where obesity and generally unhealthy personal behavior is increasing, paradoxically while fitness industries are growing, even taking the subway incentivizes a fair amount of walking, certainly more than a world where businesses tend to have private parking lots. I ate and drank to my heart’s content and if anything lost some weight on the trip because my total step counts for the day were exploding—obviously, some of this can be attributed to general vacation browsing, but it’s safe to say that the average New Yorker walks quite a bit more on their daily commute than I do, where I walk to my car, drive to my office, and then walk from the parking lot to my desk (my only saving grace in this is that I, office worker, drive a Prius C and not a Silverado). Like I said earlier, I drank a bunch and I didn’t have to worry about driving home, and even if you aren’t a drinker and this itself doesn’t do much for you, riding a train also means you can text your friends or surf the internet while you travel, things you cannot do safely while driving an automobile. Also, consider the catharsis of not having to worry about spending money on car maintenance, car payments, or gasoline—the cost of monthly transit passes pale in comparison.

The biggest safety concern with increasingly gaudy trucks on the roads is not the trucks themselves (though they are a safety concern) but the ripple effect of drivers feeling that they need to get larger cars so that they will not be run off the road. As impractical as enormous pickup trucks are, the status quo seems to be forcing smaller cars instead into obsolescence. The political solution has largely been to widen lanes and restructure roads to accommodate larger vehicles, but the vehicles just keep getting larger. I assume there is eventually a point at which the market will no longer desire massive trucks—say, once they’re the size of a standard city bus—but I also would have assumed long ago that this point would soon be reached. The safer, more practical solution would be to decrease the number of cars on the road by making mass transit feel more comfortable. It would encourage physical fitness. It would keep existing roads intact longer. It would be environmentally friendly. And in the short-term, it would be much safer. A world in which all of the largest parking lots in a city belong not to the sports stadiums but instead to park-and-rides on the city’s edge in which visitors can then absorb themselves into the far less stress-inducing car-less lifestyle would be the ideal. And even if it seems impractical, and overnight it surely is, expecting the world to survive the further proliferation of enormous car culture is arguably every bit the fantasy of turning dozens of Americans cities into New York.

How trading for Kurt Thomas jump-started the most fascinating rebuild in sports

 Like pretty much any city that has lost its Big Four sports team in, conservatively, the last fifty years, Seattle did not deserve to lose the Seattle SuperSonics. But while several relocated teams went to cities which seemed apathetic to their presence, the same cannot be said for Oklahoma City. Despite its relative lack of size—of the current NBA markets, only Memphis is smaller by primary statistical area—Oklahoma City enthusiastically supported the displaced New Orleans Hornets in the 2005-06 season and carried forward that devotion into the era of the Thunder. In a just world, both Seattle and Oklahoma City would have NBA teams. I understand why Seattleites would root against the Thunder; I do not, for the life of me, understand why otherwise neutral fans hold the sins of Howard Schultz against this lovely one-sport city.

That said, while Seattle didn’t deserve what happened to them, you can easily argue Oklahoma City didn’t deserve the windfall that came to them. A year before they moved to Oklahoma City, the Sonics drafted future inner-circle Hall of Famer Kevin Durant. In 2008, shortly before the Thunder came into existence, the then-technically-still-Sonics drafted future maybe-not-inner-but-certainly-still-in Hall of Famer Russell Westbrook. But sandwiched between those two selections came a lesser-known acquisition that paid dividends, and continues to pay dividends, for the Oklahoma City Thunder—the acquisition of Kurt Thomas.

Kurt Thomas, who last played in an NBA game ten years ago yesterday, never wore an Oklahoma City Thunder jersey. In fact, he only played in 42 total games for the Seattle SuperSonics. But what he was on July 20, 2007 was overpaid. God bless him and anyone who can reach this stage in life, of course, but his employer, the Phoenix Suns, didn’t want to pay him, and they were willing to give up actual assets to avoid doing so. Although the Suns did receive a 2009 second-round draft pick in sending Thomas to the Sonics, the real meat of the trade was the two first round picks they were gifting Seattle to take Thomas off their hands.

Of note, the Phoenix Suns were a good team at this point, which means two things—one, trying to clear out cap space in order to improve in the short term was defensible, and two, they expected the first round picks to be relatively late. They were right—the 2008 first-rounder that the eventual Thunder received was #24 and the 2010 first-round pick was #26. The #26 pick was used on Quincy Pondexter, who more or less had the expected NBA career of a 26^th overall pick—48 career starts, a decent off-the-bench scorer, the 24^thbest player of the draft by Value Over Replacement Player—though he was parlayed by the Thunder into a trade for moderately useless center Cole Aldrich and an aging Morris Peterson who played four total games for Oklahoma City, before he ever played an NBA game.

The #24 pick in 2008, however, was of tremendous value for the Thunder—Serge Ibaka. Today, Ibaka is a deep bench player for the Milwaukee Bucks, but he went on to start 413 games for the Thunder between 2010 and 2016. Although a secondary or perhaps even tertiary scorer, Ibaka was a terrific defensive player, twice leading the NBA in blocks and being named NBA All-Defensive first team in 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14. By VORP, he was the 10^th best player in a fairly deep 2008 draft; Basketball Reference gives him a 0.2% chance of making the Hall of Fame, which is 0.2% higher than it gives to Kurt Thomas.

Once Ibaka arrived, the Thunder took off, improving from 23-59 to 50-32. Over the next seven seasons, the Thunder had a winning record in each. In 2015-16, the 55-27 Thunder took the 73-9 Golden State Warriors to the brink of elimination, taking a 3-1 Western Conference Finals lead before the Warriors rattled off a three-game winning streak. Of course, that the Warriors would blow a 3-1 series lead of their own in the next round also had a material impact on the future of the Thunder, as well.

The biggest domino to fall for the 2016-17 Thunder came on July 4, 2016, when Kevin Durant, by far the greatest player in Oklahoma City Thunder history to that point, signed with the Golden State Warriors—plenty could be written about what unfolded over the next three seasons for them, but very little of that concerns the Thunder. But in the lead-up to Durant’s decision, the Thunder shopped Serge Ibaka, who was growing unsatisfied with his secondary role on the team. What they received, for a player who was a year away from free agency, could be described as a haul—the package was headlined by Victor Oladipo, the second overall pick from three years prior who had been something of a disappointment as far as #2 overall picks go but had established himself as a serviceable NBA shooting guard. The Thunder also received Ersan İlyasova, who spent just three games in OKC before he was flipped with a first-round pick for Jerami Grant. The Thunder also acquired the rights to #11 overall draft pick Domantas Sabonis, who spent one season in Oklahoma City before he emerged as a three-time All-Star and the 2022-23 NBA rebounding champion with the Sacramento Kings. But before you start to think of Sabonis as the one that got away for the Thunder, I ask that you table that thought for now.

Despite the nominal rebuilding taking place, 2016-17 Russell Westbrook was simply a maniac—he became the second player in NBA history to average a triple-double over the course of a season, and he didn’t do so cheaply—he scored the most points, tallied the second most assists, and even pulled down the eighth most rebounds in the NBA that season. But even with their star player going out of his mind on his way to an MVP season, the Thunder finished sixth in the Western Conference and bowed out to the Houston Rockets in the first round of the postseason. As much fun as it was to watch Russ be a one-man show, it wasn’t going to produce title-winning basketball. So the Thunder made a blockbuster.

In one of the most shocking trades in recent NBA history, the Oklahoma City Thunder acquired Paul George, a three-time third-team All-NBA player, and didn’t have to flip a single draft pick in the process. On July 6, 2017, the Thunder sent two-thirds of their Serge Ibaka return, Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis, to the Indiana Pacers straight-up for Paul George. At the time, even with George a pending free agent following the season, it seemed like robbery for the Thunder, but to the credit of Oladipo and Sabonis, they both became All-Stars in Indiana—the Pacers did not lose this trade. 

But it paid off for the Thunder—Paul George averaged 21.9 points per game in 2017-18 and earned another third-team All-NBA. But it wasn’t until after the season concluded that the Paul George OKC experiment really paid off. George reached free agency, but ultimately he re-signed with the Thunder. And in 2018-19, Paul George reached a whole new level. He averaged a career-high 28.0 PPG, a career-high 8.2 rebounds per game, and led the NBA in steals per game with 2.2. George finished third in MVP voting and cracked his first first-team all-NBA squad. The Thunder won 49 games, but for the third consecutive season, they lost in the first round of the playoffs.

And this is the part of the story where Oklahoma City Thunder Sam Presti has the greatest month in the history of sports executives.

The Thunder found themselves in a common place among modern pro sports teams—they were undeniably a good team, but they probably weren’t a great team, or at least a team capable of winning a title. Unlike in baseball or hockey, where teams regularly sneak deep into the postseason with rosters barely good enough to make the playoffs at all, the best team (or at least a team with a credible argument of being the best team) usually wins the NBA title. The Thunder had two choices—try to find a difference maker who could elevate the Thunder from good to great or start over. Their decision was made for them by a man who has never been employed by the Oklahoma City Thunder—Kawhi Leonard. In 2019, Leonard won his second NBA Finals MVP award; having helped to rejuvenate the San Antonio Spurs at the beginning of his career, he was the missing piece in the first ever title run for the Toronto Raptors. And now he was a free agent, and an extraordinarily coveted one at that.

Kawhi Leonard had his eyes set not on the Oklahoma City Thunder, but the Los Angeles Clippers—the southern California native was largely boxed out from the Lakers, who already employed LeBron James, but the opportunity to win a first title for LA’s secondary NBA team was very much on the table. But despite a very fun Clippers run in 2018-19, where a team led by Danilo Gallinari and Montrezl Harrell somehow won 48 games and took two road games in the postseason against the Kevin Durant-led Warriors, there wasn’t an obvious second banana for Kawhi. So he sought out Paul George.

Paul George was likewise a SoCal kid, but unlike the free agent Leonard, he was very much under an NBA contract. It was a very open secret that George sought a trade to the Clippers, and that Leonard signing there was contingent upon a deal getting done, and Sam Presti knew it. Because of the NBA’s maximum salary, even paying the max to Kawhi Leonard would be a relative bargain, so the Clippers could reasonably afford to overspend conventional wisdom to land Paul George, since the two transactions were linked, but for the Thunder, the Kawhi Leonard signing didn’t matter—this was a chance for a pure victory for the Thunder. And did they ever secure it. The Thunder acquired so much that I feel like I need to switch to bullet points to properly articulate it. Keep in mind that the Thunder only traded Paul George here; no other pieces went to LA. And George has played well in LA—in four seasons, he has made two All-Star Games, notched a third-team All-NBA in 2020-21, but the Clippers still have never made the NBA Finals and, perhaps more damningly, remain a clear #2 to the Lakers in Los Angeles, even though they have unquestionably been a more consistently strong team over the last decade. Much like the Brooklyn Nets, the Clippers have been built to win now and finally emerge from the shadow of the more popular if less successful other NBA team in their city; Leonard and George, guys who thrived in less prestigious NBA markets, trying to become true superstars in Los Angeles was the perfectly logical extension of this. Anyway, the assets the Thunder collected:

·        Danilo Gallinari, the Clippers’ best player in 2018-19 by VORP. He spent one successful individual year in Oklahoma City (more on that season later) before being traded for a 2025 second-round pick to the Atlanta Hawks; even if the Hawks implode by then, the second-round pick shouldn’t be a huge deal.

·        Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the 11^th overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft, started 73 games as a Clippers rookie and made second-team All-Rookie, but started to really take off in Oklahoma City. 2022-23 was his best season yet—his 31.4 points per game were fourth in the NBA, as were his 1.6 steals per game. The guard has become one of the most well-rounded players in the league and has an outside chance of making first-team All-NBA (though I think second team is more likely), and he is undisputedly the best player on the current Thunder team. Oh, and he’s also still just 24 years old.

·        A 2021 first-round draft pick via the Miami Heat, a pick traded so many times before it arrived in Oklahoma City that Danny Granger was involved in one of the trades. Simple enough—the Thunder selected Tre Mann, who is presently a backup point guard for the Thunder.

·        The Clippers’ 2022 first-round pick, which as it turns out was a lottery pick thanks to the Clippers missing the playoffs. With the #12 pick, the Thunder selected Jalen Williams, who started 62 games and averaged 14.1 points per game as a rookie. By both VORP and Win Shares, he was the second-best rookie in 2022-23. He turns 22 in two days.

·        A 2023 first-round pick swap, which allows the Thunder the superior pick between that of them or the Clippers. The Clippers made the non-play-in playoffs, so even in the unlikely event this swap gets used, it won’t be a lottery pick. Oh well, worth a shot!

·        A 2024 first-round pick from the Clippers. The Clippers have been largely competent, but Kawhi Leonard and Paul George aren’t getting any younger and they’ve traded away anything resembling a future piece in order to accommodate their star duo. The odds are this winds up being a mid-first round pick, but it’s hardly assured.

·        A 2025 first-round pick swap with the Clippers. For reasons I will detail later, I think there’s a very real chance the Thunder use this one.

·        A 2025 lottery-protected first-round pick from the Miami Heat which converts to an unprotected 2026 first-round pick if unused in 2025. This only becomes a truly spicy pick if the Heat miss the playoffs in both 2025 and 2026, and they aren’t really an organization inclined to do this too often, but even if the Thunder wind up with a mid-first, a useful piece can be grabbed.

·        A 2026 first-round pick from the Clippers. George and Leonard will be in their mid-thirties by this point.

The future assets here were obviously tantalizing for the Thunder in the future; it made sense the day the trade was made. But it also, even with Gallinari and Gilgeous-Alexander coming back, made the Thunder worse in 2019-20. Although, unlike with Durant, they got a healthy return, the Thunder found themselves in a similar situation—Russell Westbrook surrounded by question marks. But this time, Sam Presti was proactive, and six days after the Paul George trade, the Thunder sent Russell Westbrook to the Houston Rockets.

The trade made sense at the time, even if it was far less of an obvious call than the Paul George trade (either of them, really). In exchange for Westbrook, the Thunder received a 2021 top-four protected pick-swap, a top-four protected first-round pick in 2024, a 2025 top twenty protected pick swap, and a top-four protected first-round pick in 2026. But a huge part of the allure for Houston was also salary relief, as they also sent Chris Paul to Oklahoma City. Paul, though a future Hall of Famer and arguably a top-five point guard of all-time, appeared to be on one of the NBA’s worst contracts in 2019.

Ultimately, the Thunder didn’t get anything from the 2021 pick swap—the Rockets landed in the top four—and it’s impossible to know what the future holds for the later picks. But what I do know is that Chris Paul, in 2019-20, turned his career around. He became a considerably more efficient shooter and was named All-NBA (second team) for the first time in four years. In the postseason, ironically, the Thunder faced Russell Westbrook and nearly humiliated their former star, who was fine in Houston but not nearly as good as Chris Paul had become. Suddenly, Chris Paul had become not only not a trade liability, but a legitimate asset. And in the off-season, the Thunder flipped Paul to the Phoenix Suns.

You could make a case that this trade didn’t work out for OKC, and you could certainly make a case they didn’t get as much as they could have had they waited another year. The key piece for the Thunder was a first-round pick that was later used on Peyton Watson, who was traded for a 2027 first-round pick. But you can’t really argue that, broadly, the Chris Paul experiment was not a resounding success for the Thunder—not only did the Thunder acquire a ton of future pieces, but they improved in the short term as well.

Unlike the losses of Ibaka, Durant, George, and Westbrook, the Thunder could not withstand the loss of Chris Paul, a player they almost certainly never wanted in the first place. The 2020-21 Thunder finished 22-50, though on the bright side, if you’re going to be absolutely awful, it’s hard to pick a much better season than during one without fans. They didn’t hit the lottery, in a manner of speaking, only drafting at #6, but they selected Josh Giddey, an Australian wing who averaged 16.6 points, 7.9 rebounds, and 6.2 assists a night in his sophomore 2022-23 campaign—by VORP, he ranks fourth in the 2021 draft class so far. In 2022, however, their lottery luck turned around and the Thunder picked second; although Chet Holmgren missed the entire 2022-23 season, the Thunder still managed to get a legitimate Rookie of the Year campaign via Jalen Williams and, despite constant and largely unfair commentary about their supposedly egregious tanking (I would never claim they didn’t tank a little bit, merely that their recent rebuild was entirely normal by NBA standards, far less insidious than the Trust The Process-era Philadelphia 76ers, for instance), will play postseason basketball tonight.

The three best players on the 2022-23 Oklahoma City Thunder by any advanced metric (or non-advanced metric, really) were Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Josh Giddey, and Jalen Williams. Two of these players were acquired directly via the Paul George trade, and the third was acquired in the immediate aftermath of the rebuild that said trade precipitated. The Thunder probably aren’t going to win the 2022-23 NBA title, but they will have a fresh Chet Holmgren to add to a young core and should surely be a real player in the Western Conference as soon as next year. And it’s all thanks to the Kurt Thomas trade.

The St. Louis Blues are saying the quiet part out loud, for some reason

 On Super Bowl Sunday, a day on which non-NFL sports leagues go out of their way to avoid scheduling around the biggest television event of the year, nobody would reasonably expect teams in other sports to say anything at all. The St. Louis Cardinals, for instance, tweeted happy birthday to assistant hitting coach Brandon Allen, noted that Hall of Famer Chick Hafey was born on that date in 1903, and stopped posting on social media for the day—a completely reasonable thing for a sports team that was not playing nor making transactions to do. For instance, the Chicago Blackhawks didn’t tweet at all. The Pittsburgh Penguins, a team which plays in a state with a team in the Super Bowl, tweeted a late-night game story for their Saturday night, West Coast game and then posted a link to a fan event—the kind of bland social media fodder one might expect. It probably wasn’t the highest traffic day for a hockey team, but benignly continuing about their business was the expectation of the day.

The St. Louis Blues, however, were not silent on social media on Sunday. But while they made a handful of tweets about the previous night’s game, during which they secured their first victory in 23 days after blowing a three-game lead to a team that got kicked out of their home arena days after trading one of the best half-dozen players in franchise history because they have playoff odds currently lower than the odds of them securing the #1 overall draft pick, the true attention-grabber came when they wished good luck in the Super Bowl to, and later congratulated on their victory, a team which plays its home games 241 miles away from their arena.

Although the Kansas City Chiefs are not the closest NFL team located to the Dome at America’s Center, the former home of the St. Louis Rams (that title belongs to the Indianapolis Colts, though the margin is so narrow that it could be reasonably deemed immaterial), that they became a popular choice for spurned NFL fans in St. Louis is hardly surprising—they were a reasonably nearby team, and although the St. Louis Rams and Kansas City Chiefs were ostensibly rivals, competing on six occasions during the NFL regular season for the Missouri Governor’s Cup (the Chiefs won all six meetings), the blood was never so bad that most St. Louisans took particular glee in the shortcomings of Kansas City’s NFL team.

But the arguments for St. Louisans to root against Kansas City with increased or newfound fervor were ample. In 2015, Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt was the lone vote on the NFL’s committee on Los Angeles opportunities to support the relocation of the Rams to Los Angeles, as opposed to the Chargers and Raiders, and in 2016, Hunt voted for the relocation of the Rams; before the dust had even settled, the Chiefs were already marketing themselves in St. Louis, the NFL’s equivalent to if Lee Harvey Oswald had made a move on Jacqueline Kennedy. There was a family history of this—in 1988, Clark’s father Lamar happily voted for the relocation of the St. Louis Cardinals to Phoenix. Although the Chiefs have succeeded wildly since 2016, winning the AFC West each season and amassing two Super Bowl titles plus another appearance, led in large part by Patrick Mahomes, one of the sport’s most exciting players, the culture of the Chiefs—shielding star wide receiver Tyreek Hill after multiple credible domestic violence accusations (not to mention drafting him less than four years after Jovan Belcher’s violent murder-suicide) and their repeated insistence on using Native American imagery and racist chants (the Super Bowl broadcast showed a crowd of Chiefs fans in Munich doing the Tomahawk Chop—consider, for a moment, that the franchise has managed to export racism to Munich) during an era in which both Washington’s NFL team and Cleveland’s MLB team were successfully pressured to change their nicknames, has made rooting for Kansas City a non-option for those who harbor similarly negative feelings about the Atlanta Braves, whose use of the Tomahawk Chop has received even more aggressive criticism, presumably because of the city’s proximity to the Mason-Dixon line.

Ultimately, it is not unreasonable for St. Louis sports fans to not harbor a great resentment against Clark Hunt for his votes. After all, the final vote for the Rams’ relocation was 30-2, which considering one of the 30 “yes” votes includes the franchise with over 500,000 owners (the Green Bay Packers) means there are too many grudges to potentially hold at once, and even one of the “no” votes, from the then-Oakland Raiders, was simply made so that Mark Davis could rip out of the hearts of his own fans, so hardly a sympathetic gesture (I tend to gravitate towards rooting for the Cincinnati Bengals because of Mike Brown’s far less egregious “no” vote, but it is not as though the penny-pinching failson who has shown a greater proclivity for donating money to faceless Republican politicians than to his own football team is exactly innocent). But aside from Stan Kroenke, the real estate baron and part-time NFL team owner whose franchise value increased overnight when the Rams relocated (there’s a reason Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno insisted on branding his baseball team with “Los Angeles” rather than their actual home city of Anaheim), nobody profited more from the pain and suffering of St. Louis than Clark Hunt.

Third on the list of Rams relocation profiteers, however, might be the St. Louis Blues. From nearly the moment the NFL approved the removal of St. Louis’s NFL team, the Blues have marketed themselves as an alternative to the Rams. At the first St. Louis Blues home game following the relocation vote, the Blues held a ceremonial puck drop featuring St. Louis Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III and Blues owner Tom Stillman, each wearing jackets representing the other team, which received widespread media acclaim, particularly after the fans erupted into the now-familiar chant of “Kroenke sucks”. In February 2016, the Blues offered ticket and merchandise promotions to former St. Louis Rams season ticket holders. In March 2016, the Blues parlayed this jolt of attention into clinching a bid to host the 2017 NHL Winter Classic, a lucrative outdoor hockey game with over double the ticketed capacity of a typical game and with much higher ticket prices. Throughout the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs, which saw the Blues make their deepest postseason run—to Game Six of the Western Conference Finals—in three decades, the Blues stood as the anti-Rams in ways that the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team never could. The Cardinals are ubiquitous, an international brand with clusters of fans well beyond the Greater St. Louis area; the Blues, like the Rams before them, did not have a large national or international following, but they belonged to St. Louis.

But in a more literal sense, the St. Louis Blues belong to Tom Stillman. And while Tom Stillman has demonstrated himself to be a far more palatable owner from a fan perspective than Stan Kroenke, or than most, the Blues are ultimately subject to his whims and the whims of SLB Acquisition Holdings LLC. The St. Louis Blues came to life because Chicago Black Hawks owner James D. Norris owned St. Louis Arena and wanted to earn more income from his place in the NHL by virtue of having an expansion team play there. The St. Louis Blues nearly collapsed under the weight of Ralston-Purina’s ownership, with the local company so angry that they were not permitted to relocate the franchise to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan that they refused to send representatives to the 1983 NHL Entry Draft as some sort of ill-fated protest. And three years after the Rams left St. Louis, the St. Louis Blues took $70 million in public subsidies in order to renovate Enterprise Center, a project which may indeed serve some sort of intangible good for the area but which primarily exists to make the rich richer.

To be clear, I’m not offering any suggestions of a conspiracy. While Tom Stillman and company may have secretly been excited for the marketing opportunities that came with the Rams exodus, they were not the ones who turned it into reality (while Chiefs ownership can at least be reasonably considered an accessory to the crime). But the Blues undeniably benefited. In the year following the Rams’ departure, their value increased by 45%, and it has more than doubled in the years since, outpacing increases across the National Hockey League.

Certainly, when the St. Louis Blues Twitter account posted support and congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs, it was not done at the direct behest of ownership, nor was it when the Blues tweeted such messages to the Chiefs in 2020 and 2021. But the relationship is not reciprocated even by the Chiefs themselves, who have tagged the Blues on Twitter three total times, twice via replies (thus avoiding annoying their own fans who do not also follow the Blues, which is most, because St. Louis and Kansas City are more than three and a half hours apart) and once when they posted a link showing Blues goalie Jordan Binnington wearing a Patrick Mahomes jersey, which hardly removes the feelings of Blues subservience. When the Blues tweeted positively towards the Chiefs yesterday, the response was largely negative not because it matters if some individual social media manager cares who wins the Super Bowl but because it represents St. Louis buying into the Hunt family’s despicable strategy of segmenting heartbroken sports fans. Clark Hunt decided that St. Louis was ripe for the picking; the strategy has been plenty successful, though the Blues would suggest the strategy was far more successful than it actually was and that St. Louis is firmly, unanimously Chiefs Territory. Instead, St. Louis is a city where there are more fans of the Chiefs than of any other individual team but where there is hardly unanimity.

On June 12, 2019, the Kansas City Royals offered the lone tweet they have ever issued about the St. Louis Blues, congratulating them on their Stanley Cup victory, and most of the replies are from Kansas City fans annoyed that their favorite team is celebrating the victory of a different city. And they were right to do so—if Kansas Citians want to root for the Blues, that’s their prerogative (and unlike with regards to St. Louis and the NFL, the Blues are by far the closest NHL team to Kansas City), but the Blues are not a Kansas City team. They aren’t a Missouri team. They are a St. Louis team.

After Jackson County voters approved a tax increase to pay for $850 million in stadium renovation in 2006, the Chiefs signed a lease which will keep the team at Arrowhead Stadium (you know, the stadium named after Native American imagery since they are named the Chiefs, a reference to the city’s former white mayor) through 2031. But Kansas City’s sports teams have dangled relocation, if not out of the metropolitan area than at least to different stadiums, religiously. Persistent rumors have been that the Royals may seek a new downtown stadium (Kansas City’s shared Truman Sports Complex is located in the city’s outskirts) and that the Chiefs, like many NFL teams (Giants/Jets, Rams/Chargers, Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots, Commanders, Dolphins, Cardinals, Raiders, Bills), may seek to build a stadium in the suburbs, where ample parking revenue can be more easily found. These proposals have included ones to move the Chiefs to the Kansas side of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, a move which, if the Chiefs cared whatsoever about their status as Missouri’s Team, would be deadly. But it isn’t, because despite what the St. Louis Blues embarrassingly seem to believe, the Kansas City Chiefs are not, and barring relocation will never be, St. Louis’s NFL team.

The silent majority won

 In the Missouri House congressional district in which I live, a man named Kenneth Abram was the Republican nominee. The sixty-two-year-old Boeing manager was a newcomer to politics and ran on a platform consisting largely of the platitudes around which his party has largely crafted itself in the modern era. He referred to himself as simultaneously pro-business and pro-labor without expressing a distinct opinion on, say, labor unions, for instance. When the Call Newspapers, a small news network covering issues pertaining to South St. Louis County, surveyed Abram, he gave quick and pointed answers which lacked any semblance of nuance. His opponent, Democrat Bridget Walsh Moore, gave thoughtful answers throughout; even on matters where the two fundamentally had the same stance (like a merger between St. Louis County and City), she explained that her opposition was steeped in a lack of cohesive plan that she had seen put forward rather than any sort of dogmatic opposition as a matter of principle.

If you drove through the 93^rd district at any point in the last couple months, you would be inundated with Kenneth Abram signs. There were occasional Bridget Walsh Moore signs, but Abram’s far outpaced Walsh Moore’s. And when the votes were tallied on Tuesday, the voices of Lemay and Affton were loud and clear—Moore won by 9.2%.

We are coming up on over half a century of it being considered a given that the Republican Party represents the so-called “silent majority”, the Richard Nixon-era belief that while liberals will protest in the streets or on college campuses, mainstream Americans go to work, go to church, and don’t necessarily obsess or derive their identities from their political views but when they do vote, they tend to do so conservatively. Perhaps there was a point in time when the silent majority was based on reality, but that point has long since vanished, and in 2022, the exact opposite has proven to be true.

I live in a blue district in a blue county in a blue metropolitan area—granted, it is one which resides in a red state, but in every presidential election in my lifetime, the county in which I live has voted for the Democratic Party. The platonic ideal of a St. Louis County presidential candidate may not be a Bernie Sanders nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style socialist, but it quite demonstrably is not a brash, Donald Trump-style Republican. And yet, there aren’t any houses in my neighborhood with pro-Joe Biden flags hanging, or anti-Joe Biden bumper stickers. But when it comes time to actually vote, the loudest voices are coming from those in the minority.

I have never put a political bumper sticker on my car nor put a political sign in my yard, and my reasons are simultaneously pragmatic and paranoid—I’m not trying to get attacked. Do I believe police officers (who lean to the right politically) are going to specifically target people with “I’m With Her” bumper stickers? With almost no exceptions, no, but subliminal biases do exist, and can I honestly say that, if I were a traffic cop, I wouldn’t take some extra level of glee in issuing a ticket to somebody with a 2020 election denying bumper sticker? Anyway, I’ve made the decision to avoid the potential conflict of interest altogether.

Despite Joe Biden being broadly unpopular across the country, it appears that the Democratic Party did shockingly well in a midterm election cycle that for years has been assumed to be a disaster for the party. While the United States Senate is still not yet determined, it looks increasingly likely that Democrats will maintain (potentially without the “with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote” caveat) control of the Senate, and while Republicans remain favored to take control of the House of Representatives, it will hardly be the “red wave” that was repeatedly predicted. In Midwestern swing states which voted for Trump in one of his two presidential bids, things went quite well for the Democratic Party—lieutenant governor John Fetterman flipped a Pennsylvania Senate seat blue, Wisconsin reelected its Republican senator Ron Johnson but also reelected Democratic governor Tony Evers and avoided a worst-case scenario in which the state’s Democrats were gerrymandered into absolute irrelevance, and Michigan’s legislature flipped blue for the first time in decades. 

Ultimately, for as unpopular as Joe Biden is, the opposition party proved to be even less popular. This was the case in St. Louis County, when not-especially-popular County Executive Sam Page was re-elected over Republican challenger Mark Mantovani, whose yard signs overwhelmed the county. I don’t know that I saw a single pro-Sam Page yard sign in the months leading up to the election. But he had his voters, and that bore out on Election Day, even if the overwhelming majority of his voters did not actively campaign on his behalf.

The juxtaposition of the 2020 presidential candidates is perhaps the most instructive example, and certainly the most famous example, I can give of how Democrats became the true silent majority. Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in any other presidential election in history, and this was despite a distinct, somehow almost aggressive lack of personality cult surrounding him. Sure, there were cutesy Onion articles about him, but unlike Hillary Clinton or especially unlike Barack Obama, a self-stylized Joe Biden superfan wasn’t really a thing—he won the nomination largely by being broadly acceptable by the majority of the party’s voters, even if he barely cracked 50% of the votes despite the primaries being largely ceremonial for the second half of it. 

That Biden, an old white guy, was not historic like Clinton or dynamic (and historic) like Obama, couldn’t conjure passion, however, did not materially impact his ability to swing voters. As much press as Barack Obama’s campaign rallies received, the overwhelming majority of his voters never attended one. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic had allowed for rallies, Biden’s certainly would have been quite underwhelming compared to what Obama produced. Meanwhile, Donald Trump became his own political identity, despite never received as high of a percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney or John Kerry. I have met many, many Joe Biden voters—I have never met, and God willing never will meet, a person who identifies themselves primarily through their support of him. If you drive through any Midwestern state (this is the case in Missouri, but it is also absolutely the case in Illinois, a state which twice denied Trump electoral votes, too), you will see barns on the sides of highways painted to represent support of Donald Trump.

The impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision which unpopularly overturned Roe v. Wade, has been repeatedly cited as a thing which helped Democrats to close the gap in 2022, but abortion is hardly the only issue on which Democrats are in the majority. Most Americans support gun reform. Most Americans support funding public education and increasing taxes on the wealthy. But they do so not through big, dumb, inevitably futile gestures like painting the side of a barn or turning the back of their cars into moving billboards, but by voting and by supporting those who share their beliefs. Unlike the midterms under Barack Obama, during which Democrats got absolutely smoked, the first (and perhaps only) midterm under Joe Biden went fairly well because the party, rather than running on the public face of a charismatic leader, ran as a party guided by popular policy. And it worked.