You don't have to let them take that joy away from you

Having been born after the 1980 Miracle on Ice, a men's ice hockey best-on-best championship at the highest level has occupied a somewhat unique spot on my sports fan bucket list since before the term "bucket list" existed. The women, of course, had done their part in soccer (World Cup) and hockey (Olympics) as far back as I could remember, so while those championships remain fun, their relative frequency does make them a little bit less special (a compliment to those teams). The same applied to both Olympic basketball teams, and a combination of lack of entrenched historical importance and relative team success renders the World Baseball Classic somewhat lacking in this regard. Meanwhile, while I will always enthusiastically tune in to the men's World Cup, I do so without a sincere belief that the United States will ever win, or even seriously compete for, the title.

But men's ice hockey was different. While Canada was always the dominant professional hockey country in my lifetime, it was never by such a wide margin that it felt immune to the random bounces of the sport. And while the legacy of the Miracle on Ice has always loomed in the consciousness of American hockey, the United States had ceased to be a ragtag bunch by the time I gained awareness. The United States, like the Swedes or the Fins or the (pre-banishment) Russians, were a really good hockey country that could beat Canada. They just hadn't. And then, on the back of a historically great performance by the best goaltender in the world, Connor Hellebuyck, and with Jack Hughes matching his older brother Quinn's walk-off win two games prior, they had. Cue the national anthem.

Not the Star-Spangled Banner, a song which, in the immortal words of Vince Staples, don't even slap. But rather, the song that plays every time the United States men's and women's hockey teams score a goal or win a game, Lynyrd Skynyrd's iconic "Free Bird". Specifically, it starts playing roughly halfway through the song, when it turns from a perfectly nice, lovely blues-based power ballad to one of the most raucous, exuberant hard rock instrumentals ever recorded.

"Free Bird" has been a cliché for longer than it hasn't been. Famously, mostly sarcastically, yelled out as a request during concerts. Synonymous with the 1970s epic, part of the first generation that fully dropped the "and roll" from the rock genre. The signature song of one of America's great what-if musical legends, an act that blends edge, honesty, and outright populism like few others. And, cards on the table--I think it rules. I could be cute and try to declare that the best Lynyrd Skynrd song is actually "I Know a Little" or "The Needle and the Spoon", but deep down, I know this is the one.

What's funny about "Free Bird" on a sonic level is that I don't think there's anything specifically southern about what is now by default considered the ultimate southern rock anthem, aside from the obvious fact that all rock music derives from the American South. The themes of the lyrics are every bit as western as southern. In a literal sense, it's a breakup song about independence, the kind of value that can be attributed to whatever sub-region of America is trying to claim it at any given moment. It's bluesy, and Ronnie Van Zant's southern vocal affectation does bleed through even if it's not as though he is singing with a full-blown drawl, but the most iconic part of the song is a wild guitar freakout that just as easily could have been performed by Jimi Hendrix a few years before or Eddie Van Halen a few years later.

I'm sure there are people who dislike the song "Free Bird", but I'm not sure that I've heard much, if any, criticism of it strictly as a piece of music. Rather, there is distaste for what "Free Bird", or more specifically those who performed it, represent as a whole. And admittedly, Lynyrd Skynyrd do have a somewhat complicated cultural legacy, and I mean "complicated" in a true sense rather than a "they're jerks but I don't feel like being mean" kind of centrist way. Lynyrd Skynyrd, during their 1970s heyday, were Jimmy Carter Democrats with a deep and obvious appreciation for the blues and even wrote a song like "The Ballad of Curtis Loew" expressing sincere reverence for a Black musician (I've also heard interpretations that "Gimme Three Steps" is about a white protagonist approaching a woman of color and by extension her jealous husband, though I don't think there's really enough to say this is definitively true). They also hung the Confederate flag at their concerts. They were the kinds of white southerners who would claim that such an act was defiance against condescending northerners, but even if that is the case, it's not as though James Brown or Otis Redding were hanging the stars and bars. By the time Lynyrd Skynyrd disavowed the Confederate flag, the band was essentially Gary Rossington plus a tribute act, and fully entrenched in reactionary politics. 

I choose to separate art from artist which the artist's personal transgression do not bleed into the art itself, and there's nothing political about "Free Bird". It's just a cool rock song. I have no interest in lecturing those who cannot get past the undeniably regressive elements of Lynyrd Skynyrd aside from any necessary steps to defend my own actions, which I will do because liking "Free Bird" does not cause active harm to anybody. In fact, I would argue that most of the distaste surrounding it has less to do with Lynyrd Skynyrd, who started to lean conservative in the 21st century but were never Ted Nugent-level political ideologues, and more about the kind of person who is presumed to like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Maybe some awful racists love them. Am I supposed to dislike Whitney Houston because Osama bin Laden liked her music? The final living songwriter of "Free Bird" died before I turned a year old. They exist in a different world than one in which I have ever lived.

In an America in which the idea of a shared culture is increasingly rare, arguably even delusional, the easiest way to ensure further social isolation is to conclude that anything that brings joy to one's adversaries must be bad, that culture is a zero-sum game with winners and losers. And while I rejected conservative politics before Donald Trump, this is an element that seemed to have arrived specifically with him. In the George W. Bush era, it never really occurred to me that a team would, or should, reject an invitation to the White House, partially because it never felt like an especially political event, even if of course it was by definition. But it wasn't as though George W. Bush was going to shake hands with Ben and Rasheed Wallace and then pivot to a screed about how lousy John Kerry was. Bush and Barack Obama, not to mention the presidents before them, seemed to see welcoming sports champions as a cool, somewhat superfluous perk of the job, and while some players would reject invitations, as was their right to do, most players just kind of went along with the ritual.

There is a case, one that I do not fully believe but one which absolutely can be rationalized, that the United States Gold Medal was a triumph of liberal values. The winning goal was scored by Jack Hughes, who has spoken unambiguously about his support for NHL Pride Nights. Jack and especially Quinn Hughes, the sons of a hockey playing mother who remains an active part of the women's program, have openly supported and boosted the women's team. The team's captain, Auston Matthews, is the son of a Mexican immigrant. Team USA defeated a Canadian team, led by a goalie in Jordan Binnington with a dubious history of Islamophobic social media posts, most vocally cheered on by Donald Trump's golf buddy Wayne Gretzky, and that's before we get into Hockey Canada's grotesque and very recent history of covering up for sexual assault allegations against their players. This is an extremely biased telling of what happened, but none of what I said was incorrect. But I don't blame Canadians who rooted for Canada. If I woke up tomorrow and I were suddenly a world-class hockey player, I could not play for any international team but the United States, so of course that's where I draw my fan allegiance. I would never begrudge those under similar circumstances in other countries.

That FBI director Kash Patel took a taxpayer-funded trip to Milan for the Gold Medal game is not a surprise, as it combined two of his three favorite pastimes--hockey and wasting federal money (I don't think he incorporated flexing about his girlfriend, which kept him from his personal Triple Crown). That he attended the game, while dubious from a money-wasting perspective, is not surprising or honestly all that concerning. That he proceeded, as a nearly forty-six year-old man, to go chug beers and celebrate with the team in the winning locker room is clearly undignified, but it very much fits the Trump administration playbook.

The mindset that would compel the FBI director to party with a bunch of guys mostly young enough to be his sons is related to the mindset that prompted the existence of the Turning Point USA alternative Super Bowl halftime show--a strident belief that they must be at the center of culture. It's extremely strange that Kash Patel was there not because he is a Trump appointee but because he is supposed to be a serious political figure. It would have been weird if Christopher Wray, Patel's predecessor, went into the locker room at all, much less immersed himself as a part of the event. 

But Trump's immersion into sports culture is a major part of their public relations. Kash Patel is deeply unpopular--there is a certain brand of sycophantic Trump loyalist who will refuse to critique anybody associated with the administration, but it turns out that while the administration itself may not have taken the Jeffrey Epstein investigation seriously, a lot of people who voted for Trump but do not regard doing so as their entire personality did. The United States national team in any sport is extremely popular--for every performative (mostly) leftist who believes that they are the first person to discover that the United States has done some pretty rotten things, there are many, many more people of all political persuasions that root for Team USA no matter what. For many of us, rooting for the national sports teams is the one form of jingoism that we allow ourselves, as a treat, because it's one that doesn't actually matter in any substantial way. The number of people who saw Kash Patel with a room full of people who were overwhelmingly likely some shade of confused by his presence and decided that now they supported Team USA was virtually zero, but that wasn't the point. The point was to associate Kash Patel, and to associate Trumpism, with this popular thing. Forget "if you don't like Kash Patel, it means you hate America"--it means you must hate a thing that way more people like than America.

There are probably some Team USA players whose politics I would find repulsive. There are probably some Team USA players whose politics I would find agreeable. And there are probably many, many players who had no idea who Kash Patel was and was as confused about the short middle aged guy in the middle of the celebration and any of us were. But I'm glad they won, for the same reason I'm glad the Canadian goalie with the problematic tweets won the biggest hockey game of his life for the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues. You could argue that this compartmentalization is childish; I would argue that it is every bit as childish to eschew the very idea of joy and fleeting moments of happiness because of an absurd belief that the outcome of a hockey game contested by 40 millionaires is what really matters. But that's more judgmental than I would like it to be--ultimately, I feel bad that you can't feel the joy that my simple heart feels when the drums really start to pick up right after the eight minute mark of the American goal song. Call me basic--but this bird, you cannot change.

In 2028, the Democrats need a sensible centrist. That sensible centrist is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, his stated purpose, and the main tagline of his pitch to voters, was that he would serve as a reprieve from the chaos and the alienation of the Donald Trump presidency. He ran as a moderate, especially relative to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but more than his placement on an ideological spectrum, Joe Biden ran on being a normal president who would do normal president things. This was a break from Donald Trump, but it was also a break from Barack Obama, with whom Biden obviously had much more kinship but who was a transformational political figure in a very different but similarly meaningful way as Trump.

I believe that history will view Joe Biden's term as president more positively than it is viewed today. There was a glaring hole in his resume from a progressive perspective--his response to concerns about Israeli genocide in Gaza, which ranged from apathy to antipathy--but Joe Biden did surround himself with competent bureaucrats. While inflation was a problem, most economic indicators improved, and while some of this was somewhat inevitable, the successful distribution of COVID-19 vaccines were a big part of why. After years of Donald Trump ignoring environmental issues, the Biden administration brought social responsibility back to the forefront, notably bringing the United States back into the Paris Climate Accords.

By many metrics, Joe Biden had a successful term, or at least he did not have an actively unsuccessful one. But by the standard that he himself set out--to put Donald Trump in America's regrettable past, to heal the soul of the nation, to serve as a transitional candidate to the next generation of progressive leadership--Joe Biden was a massive failure.

I am going to say something that is going to sound downright offensive at first, but I am asking you to hear me out--the conservatives who accused Kamala Harris and Kentaji Brown Jackson of being "DEI hires" as vice president and Supreme Court associate justice have a point. To be clear, this does not mean that either was unqualified for their positions: Harris had an extremely normal resume for a presidential candidate and thus for a vice presidential candidate (and eventually for a presidential candidate again), and Brown Jackson had a long legal career that eventually led to a spot on the second-highest court in the United States before then being nominated for a spot on the highest. The issue is that Joe Biden openly said that he was pursuing a woman of color for each of these positions. Both choices may have been fine-to-good, but announcing his stage directions put both women in an unenviable task of appearing chosen to fill a quota.

The solution here should have been simple--Biden should have said that he was going to consider a wide range of candidates from a wide variety of backgrounds, choose the best person available, and then chosen Kamala Harris and Kentaji Brown Jackson. But Joe Biden's lack of communication instincts became his great political weakness. Even when he did things well, he could not explain himself. The most famous example of this, of course, was his 2024 debate with Donald Trump which for all intents and purposes forced the informal referendum that forced him to step aside from the 2024 Democratic nomination.

Donald Trump has always had a remarkable ability to be simultaneously a massive liar and somebody who is able to communicate an aura of sincerity to his supporters. Joe Biden was the inverse of this, and it is arguably the primary reason that Donald Trump, who ran an objectively terrible campaign (he constantly brought conversations back to complaining about the 2020 election, the single least popular thing about him), is president today. Donald Trump lies about his accomplishments--by the end of 2026, I assume he will be claiming that he has ended several million wars--but when he does accomplish something, you will hear about it. Joe Biden didn't put his name on stimulus checks to Americans, Donald Trump did, and more Americans remember the Trump checks than the Biden ones.

There are some things that Donald Trump does very well as a political communicator. He has demonstrated a sense of humor (I would note that the same thing could be said about vice president-era Joe Biden). He knows how to excite his supporters while giving speeches. These are not inherently bad qualities--being able to excite one's supporters would come across much more pleasantly if the things his supporters wanted to hear weren't usually racism or misogyny against his political opponents. There will periodically be calls for a "Trump of the left", and some cannot look past how Trump makes them feel personally to understand that "Trump of the left" doesn't mean "be more racist". It doesn't mean finding a billionaire and/or celebrity. It doesn't, despite Gavin Newsom's best efforts, mean doing an SNL-like impression of Trump's bits.

I tend to find myself defending Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign. I do believe that she was put in a nearly impossible situation--elevated to the top of the ticket by absolute political necessity--and that had Joe Biden remained in the race, not only would he also have lost but that his performance would have been so poor that it would have caused Democrats to fare worse in congressional and other down-ballot races. But the core flaw of her campaign was an inability to articulate a vision for the future. Partly she was hamstrung by her position in the Biden administration--her infamous inability to answer what she would have done differently than Joe Biden on The View was a reflection of a small-c conservatism within the Democratic Party. Donald Trump offered specific promises--they were mostly lies, but there was an ambition there that excites people. In a better world, the skills that make one a good president and the skills that make one a good public communicator would seen as unrelated, but that is not the reality of the present.

A little over a year into Donald Trump's second term as president, he is unpopular on every issue. Some of these were inevitable--even at the peaks of his 2024 popularity, voters hated where he stood on abortion and on re-litigation of the 2020 election, for instance. But immigration enforcement was supposed to be one of his strengths, and it almost immediately became a massive liability. And it is an indictment of the Democratic political machine that they were unable to make immigration a winning issue for them before it was too late. Republicans accused Democrats of wanting open borders, and because Democrats did not push their own message, this was what defined them. Now, I'd rather have totally open borders than the current policy of guns-blazing raids of peaceful immigrant populations, but I understand why this would not be ideal politically either. So how about "Illegal immigration should be handled as a civil matter rather than a criminal one, and the Stephen Miller strategy of creating quotas for how many people to deport treats what should be a boring technical matter as a loud, dumb game"?

The most impressive political candidate of the Democratic Party in 2025 was now-New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Constitutionally ineligible to serve as president, as he was not born in the United States. But just because Mamdani cannot become president doesn't mean that his political strengths have not been explored as a potential roadmap for the party as a whole. Some have turned his political messages into a reductive version of it--Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse Mamdani for mayor even after Mamdani won his party's nomination, has essentially learned the lesson to just say "affordability" repeatedly, as though saying it three times in a row will cause prices to go down. But this was a sensible political strategy specifically because of what job Mamdani was pursuing--mayor of the most notoriously expensive city in the country.

One of Mamdani's earliest notable endorsements came from New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Like Mamdani, the representative typically known by her three initials has been noted for her youthful enthusiasm. Like Mamdani, AOC has cultivated a wing of those who are utterly terrified of them. But these wings have come from a group of voters that are roughly as likely to vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as they are to vote for Bernie Sanders, or Kamala Harris, or Joe Manchin. In the contemporary political climate, there is not going to be a single unified candidate that all Americans can agree is fundamentally decent--the guy who inspired "Let's go Brandon" chants was supposed to be that guy. If not him, than whom?

But what AOC can do that Joe Biden famously could not do, or would not do, is articulate why she believes what she believes. This week alone, she has spoken with moral clarity about issues ranging from AI deepfake pornography to medical costs. She has not only weighed in the presence of ICE in Minneapolis and the cost of living in America, but has effortlessly tied the two topics together, observing in a social media-friendly short video that there is a direct connection between funding of brazen ICE overreach and the defunding of health care subsidies for working class-to-impoverished Americans. She does not make a decision between arguing against immigration enforcement efforts on moral grounds and arguing against it on financial grounds--she explains in a few seconds why these are both part of the same rotten system.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a lightning rod since before she even entered Congress, having launched to fame via unseating a not-exactly-conservative Democratic incumbent in 2018. She almost immediately became a frequently cited bogeyman by Republican politicians. But despite seeming like a far-left outlier from a deep-blue district when she was first elected, she has played the game of Democratic politics while still being unapologetically true to her own politics. She was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in 2020 (I would argue that, as a woman of color, she helped bridge the gap between Bernie's overwhelmingly white and male, largely just anti-Hillary Clinton 2016 coalition and his far more positive and demographically diverse 2020 one) who became a valuable Joe Biden surrogate once the primaries were over. In a party dominated by an obsession with dying linear forms of infotainment like Meet the Press appearances, AOC has regularly hosted Twitch streams where she would, say, play Madden with Tim Walz while still advocating for her worldview. For as exhausting as the "Should Kamala Harris have gone on Joe Rogan?" news cycles of late 2024 were, it's a valid question, along with whether she would have been good at it. I personally think she would have done just fine. But I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do well, because she's been doing well.

By 2028, AOC will have been in Congress for nearly a decade, even if, at 39, she would be the youngest elected president ever--we would go from only having one president who was (barely) younger than my parents to having one younger than I am. She would have critics, sure, but she would also be able to capture the excitement that her and my generation felt as teenagers with the rise of Barack Obama.

The idea that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too far left to be a viable presidential candidate will be discussed--I would argue that this is not a disqualifier to run for president but rather the sort of thing that will sort itself out during the primaries. Maybe she is. But polling repeatedly shows that the Democratic Party is repeatedly to the right of the American public as a whole, and way to the right of its base. AOC is not a stubborn ideologue who will not settle for anything less than the abolition of ICE, but rather a practical but sincere political communicator who understands that speaking with moral clarity rather than immediately trying to compromise one's principles for some artificial sense of moderation is how to achieve genuine progress. Would President Ocasio-Cortez abolish ICE? She might try, but she probably wouldn't pull it off. But by treating this as not only a possibility but as something worthy of consideration on its merits, she could impact real, substantial change. No matter what you call it.

When Renee Good was killed in Minneapolis seventeen long days ago, I knew that my congresswoman, Ann Wagner, was going to avoid commenting on the matter, as the Republican representative in the closest thing Missouri has to a purple district who understands that her best way to survive in both primaries and general elections is to make absolutely no noise. I knew that my senators, if they weighed in, were going to say something asinine. Even Wesley Bell, the nearby Democratic representative who has been subject to many justifiable critiques but whose politics are certainly much more closely aligned with mine than just about any other politician in the state, was never going to communicate in a way that felt like it conveyed my own sentiments. The only elected official whose statements I cared about were from the representative in a New York district that I've only barely set foot in before. And I know I'm not alone. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like all congresspeople, represents between 700,000 and 750,000 constituents, but unlike every other member of the body, AOC represents the beliefs and hopes of many, many millions. She should be the next Democratic nominee for president.