The Crayon-Eating Republic

Thomas Massie’s confession, Ken Paxton’s triumph, and the final bill for an America that forgot institutions aren't weather.

Let’s start here:

They were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race, and Donald Trump won best in class.

That is not my sentence. It belongs to Thomas Massie, Republican congressman from Kentucky, speaking to the Washington Examiner in March of 2017, two months into the first term, performing an autopsy on his own electorate. He had spent years believing that the people who sent him to Washington, the same people who had rallied to Ron Paul and to Rand Paul before him, were voting for libertarian ideas.

After some soul searching, his phrase he concluded that they had never been voting for ideas at all. Read the confession again and notice the anesthetic packed inside it. Crazy is the gentle word, the word a sitting congressman selects when he must describe his own voters and survive them. Crazy carries a residue of romance, a hint of wildness, of danger, of the stallion that will not be broken. The accurate word, the one Massie could not afford and I can, is dumbest. They were voting for the dumbest son of a bitch in the race, and the rotting orange won best in class because it is the only category he has ever legitimately dominated.

Nine years later, the same diagnosis arrived in my own car. I was driving my parents to the airport last week and I said something about the population eating crayons. My father answered that at least fifty-one percent of them are. He meant it as agreement, Massie’s theory restated at highway speed. I let it sit, because it was not quite right, and the way in which it is not quite right is the entire subject of this essay.

The number is the wrong measure. Fifty-one percent suggests a clean partition, a stupid half and a competent half, a problem you could solve by subtraction. That is not what is in front of us, and it flatters us to pretend it is. What is in front of us is not a population that became stupid. Stupidity is a floor, fixed and congenital, and floors do not move. What happened here is not a lowering of the floor but an abandonment of the work the floor was never enough to do on its own. Competence became optional. The machine of the republic ran for so long, so apparently by itself, that the people inside it forgot the machine was being run, forgot that institutions are not weather, forgot that the laws and the norms and the dull competent maintenance of a functioning state are things human beings perform on purpose, daily, or else they stop. A people does not need to be stupid to lose a country. It needs only to stop paying attention, and to mistake the silence of a system that is working for proof that no work is required. From there the sequence runs with the reliability of gravity. A population that cannot tell the competent from the confident elevates the confident. Stupidity empowers stupidity. Stupidity, empowered, destroys, because destruction is the only project that asks nothing of its workmen, while everything being destroyed was built by serious people at a cost the wreckers cannot count. That asymmetry cannot be balanced. The dumb can tear down in a season what the able assembled across generations, and the able cannot rebuild at any speed that matters while the tearing continues. Hold that paragraph. It is the spine of this essay. Everything that follows is evidence, and the evidence is everywhere.

Begin with the man this population selected, because his half of the mirror is on tape, timestamped, and fact checked into the ground. There are two kinds of false thing he says, and the national habit of conflating them has protected him for a decade. A lie is the lesser exhibit. A lie requires its teller to know the truth and choose against it, which at least certifies that the truth is in his possession. The error is the greater exhibit, the statement no motive can explain, the thing a man says not because he is deceiving you but because he does not know, and the errors arrive on a schedule, constantly.

On March 9 of this year, ten days into his war with Iran, he told a press conference that Iran also has some Tomahawks. The Tomahawk is an American cruise missile, designed in American laboratories, assembled on American lines, fired from American ships, a fact known to every defense correspondent in the room and not to the commander in chief. Six days earlier, on March 3, he had claimed the 2015 nuclear agreement gave Iran the right to have top of the line nuclear weapons, a description that inverts the document entirely, since the agreement existed for a single purpose, which was to push an Iranian weapon further from reach. On April 15, in a Fox Business interview with Maria Bartiromo, he declared that before his arrival NASA was closed, it was totally closed, in his words, of an agency that has operated without one day of interruption since 1958, and whose Artemis program, which he claims to have founded, was assembled under the presidents before him. On May 16, on his own platform, he announced that the top climate committee of the United Nations had confessed one of its scenarios was wrong, a committee that does not write the scenarios and had confessed nothing, an error available only to a man with no idea what the institution he is attacking actually does. None of these are lies. A liar tracks reality closely enough to invert it on purpose. These are the statements of a man for whom the reality was never there to invert.

There are also the collapses no staff can launder, because they occur inside the span of a single thought. He has spent a year insisting that his executive order cut prescription drug prices by impossible magnitudes. At a televised Cabinet meeting last October, he ran the figure up the scale, promising reductions of 400, 500, 600, 700, 800 percent, marveling that nobody had ever heard of such a thing before, which is true, nobody has, because a price that falls one hundred percent costs nothing and cannot fall further. His number does not describe a discount. It describes a pharmacy that pays you to leave. By a Cabinet meeting this May he was running the same figure back down the scale, 80, 90, 70, 60, 50, the way a man recites numbers when numbers are only sounds to him. That same week he boasted of the most contested waterway on earth, we have total control of the Strait of Hormuz, as you know, with our blockade, and then, minutes later, at the same event, pleaded, we want it open, we want it free, we don’t want tolls, while Iran was at that very hour charging ships a fee to pass. A man does not beg for the opening of a strait he controls. A mind capable of holding two facts at once would have caught the seam between those sentences. His did not, because the seam requires two facts, and he only has the capability to hold one.

The governing proceeds at the same altitude as the speech. On April 2 of last year he stood in the Rose Garden and imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly every trading partner the United States possesses, an event he marketed as Liberation Day. The duties took effect at midnight on April 9. Roughly thirteen hours later he suspended most of them by social media post, a reversal so sudden that Jamieson Greer, his own trade representative, learned of it while seated before a House committee defending the policy that had just ceased to exist. The night before the collapse he assured a Republican dinner, I know what the hell I’m doing. On the morning of it he posted BE COOL, and then THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY, hours before folding because the bond market moved against him, a retreat he explained by observing that people were getting a little bit yippy. We are perpetually invited to read all this as strategy, as chess played at some dimension the commentariat cannot perceive. It is not chess. It is the absence of a plan, narrated aloud, in real time, by a very stupid man discovering his own policy at the same moment the country does.

Strip away the office, the cruelty, the spectacle, and what remains is the explanation the entire professional class refuses because it feels too small to be permitted. He says these things because he does not know better. He is not playing the fool to bait his enemies into underestimating him. There is no hidden register, no private sharpness behind the public fog. The malapropisms are the mind. There is no one behind the curtain, and there never was.

Now turn from the selected to the selectors, and ask the only question that has ever mattered, the question that comes in three sizes. Not why a man this limited says things this absurd, because that answers itself. Why does a country hand a man whose only demonstrable talent is confidence the entire apparatus of its power, twice. Why does a country watching stupidity of this caliber govern continue to empower a party of this caliber of incompetence, election after election, and how can a country shown stupidity this naked, this documented, this timestamped, still hold its elections at a coin flip’s edge. The answer to all three is the same. He gets away with it because he is speaking to people who no longer hear stupidity as stupidity.

To an ear that has lost the instrument for telling competence from its counterfeit, the confident error sounds like candor, the contradiction sounds like a man too real to be managed, the failure to finish a coherent thought reads as authenticity, as proof he is reading from no one’s script. Crayon eating, performed without a flicker of shame, does not register as crayon eating. It registers as brilliance. Now hold the two halves of this mirror against each other and admit they show one face. He cannot tell what is true from what is false. America cannot tell who is competent from who is merely confident. It is the same faculty, dark on both sides of the podium. Which means he is not fooling anyone, because fooling requires a gap between the fooler and the fooled, and no gap exists. He is not their con man. He is their portrait, painted at national scale and hung in the highest office the species has to offer.

You can watch the same darkness running far outside politics, in what this country has agreed to call its intellectual life. The most listened-to voice in America belongs to Joe Rogan, whose program draws roughly eleven million listeners an episode, a reach no anchor, no newspaper, no professor approaches. Consider what those millions are receiving. A man thinking out loud for three hours at a sitting, wondering at questions a single google search would resolve, granting a shitty comedian’s hunch and a physicist’s career identical weight, because assigning them different weights would require knowing something. His audience calls him interesting. Interrogate the word and it confesses. They mean unhurried. They mean confident. They mean unembarrassed. The program supplies the sensation of inquiry with the inquiry extracted, the posture of curiosity without an hour of curiosity’s labor, and an audience the size of a nation cannot tell the posture from the practice. So the verdict I can no longer postpone. When a population can no longer distinguish competence from its counterfeit, when the only credential it audits is stupid confidence, it has abdicated the one discriminating act self-government demands of the people who hold it. A people that cannot perform that act no longer deserves what it has. Not because anyone is coming to confiscate it. Because a thing built by people who could tell the difference cannot be kept by people who no longer can. They do not lose it. They set it down.

Stay with the asymmetry, because it is the beam every other observation hangs from. Building and destroying are not symmetrical activities. They never have been. To build the thing the rotting orange is dismantling took specialists, decades, coordination among people who would never meet, capital, patience, and an agreement to be bound by rules that constrained the builders themselves. To dismantle it takes one resentment and an afternoon. A man with no skill can burn a library. He cannot write the books. This is why incompetence at the levers is not a paradox to be puzzled over. It is the expected result. Competence is required to build and to keep. Incompetence is fully sufficient to destroy, and in a culture that has learned to confuse demolition with strength, the destroyer is not a malfunction of the selection process. He is its product.

The selection has been running for ten years. Understand what that means before you reach for the comfort that this ends when he does. For a decade the party that elevated him has filtered its own ranks, rewarding loyalty over judgment, grievance over capacity, the willingness to repeat the false thing over the ability to do the hard one. Every primary, every purge, every official who chose the man over the oath, and every official who chose the oath and was driven out for it, all of it is a filter, and a filter run that long does not leave you with a temporary problem attached to one face. It leaves you with a bench. Watch the filter work in present tense. This spring in Texas, Chip Roy, a congressman holding a perfect score from the movement’s own scorekeepers, lost his primary for state attorney general, undone not by insufficient conservatism but by insufficient submission, by his occasional breaks with the president and his 2024 apostasy for a rival. Ideology did not save him. Nothing survives this filter except obedience. You do not reverse ten years of breeding for a single trait by removing the one animal everyone happened to be watching.

If you want to inspect what the filter leaves behind, you do not need a forecast. You need Texas, this month. In late May, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, a man impeached by his own party’s legislators in 2023 and acquitted by them, won the Republican Senate runoff over John Cornyn, a four-term incumbent, because the president preferred him.

Within hours of victory he introduced himself to the general electorate with a list of names for his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, a former middle school teacher and seminarian. Low-T Talarico. Tofu Talarico. Six-Gender Jimmy. He pronounced the man too low-T for Texas. The pile-on assembled itself within days. Congressman Wesley Hunt, fresh from losing that same primary, greeted the news that Talarico has a girlfriend by posting, what’s his name. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the second most powerful aide in the executive branch, announced that Democrats had nominated their first transgender Senate candidate, a statement about a man who is not transgender. Jesse Watters, on national television, called him a gay vegan, then conceded in the next breath that Talarico is neither gay nor vegan, and the concession cost the insult nothing, because the insult was never a claim about the world. It contains no information at all. Now stack the entries and mark what is missing from every single one, which is a sentence, any sentence, about governing.

This is the bench. This is the party’s best in class for 2026, contesting a seat in the United States Senate at the level of a third grade recess, and it is the strategy that just retired a four-term senator. The coda closes the loop with a click. Massie, the man who named the selection rule nine years ago, lost his own primary this May to a challenger carrying the endorsement of the very man he had described, someone dumber than he. The filter does not exempt the people who can see it. It just keeps filtering.

So the man is the portrait, the party is the bench, and the population is the painter. Which brings me to the part of this essay I mean as an invitation rather than a verdict. I want solutions. I am asking for them sincerely, the comments are open, and I read every one, but the proposals that arrive most often arrive already broken, so before you write, walk the graveyard with me, because knowing why the obvious answers fail is the beginning of seriousness.

The boycott, the general strike, the great withholding of wallets. It founders on biology before it ever reaches economics. People must purchase things to survive, food, fuel, medicine, the roof, and survival spending is the bulk of what most households spend at all. If you believe this country could go years without buying, try going one quarter, because the quarter is the minimum unit in which the economy admits to pain, the unit in which earnings are reported, guidance is issued, and boards panic. Nobody makes it a quarter. Most cannot make it a week, and a week accomplishes nothing anyway, because a week of withheld spending is not a message, it is a blip inside the economy’s natural ebb and flow, demand deferred rather than destroyed. The register simply rings louder the following Monday, the quarter closes flat, the strikers declare victory, and the only lesson the system learns is that it has nothing to fear.

Stop paying your taxes, the bolder version. You go to prison. That is the end of the analysis, and anyone who tells you otherwise is auditioning for a cell. This government can no longer pass a budget on schedule or run a war on a single set of facts, but the one muscle it has never allowed to atrophy is collection. It will misplace a continent’s worth of policy and still find your wages by Friday. There is exactly one legal way to stop funding the enterprise, and I will come back to it, because it happens to be mine, and because its price tag is the entire point.

Vote them out, the answer with the most adherents and the least content. Read it slowly and hear what it actually promises, a restoration of the status quo, and the status quo is literally what produced this. There is no return to normal, because normal is not the safe place the word imagines. Normal is the ground this grew in. Normal was the arrangement under which the least serious people in the country accumulated power for a decade while the serious assured one another that the system would hold, that it always had, that the adults were still somewhere in the building. An election changes the occupant, not the electorate. The selectors walk out of the booth carrying the same dead instrument they carried in, and the bench, as Texas just demonstrated, is stocked with the next selection. To vote your way back to normal is to plant the same seed in the same ground and stand amazed at the same harvest.

Now line the failures up and notice what they share. Every remedy that could actually wound this thing charges its full price up front, in time, in comfort, in sacrifice, and sacrifice is the one currency this population no longer carries, because the same comfort that let the faculty atrophy is the comfort no one will surrender to restore it. The disease guards its own gates. Which returns me to the one legal exit from that second grave. You cannot refuse to fund this government from inside it, but you can stop being inside it. I made that argument in these pages long ago, and my wife and I made it personal on election night, the moment they called Florida. Withdraw what your labor funds. Take your taxes and your talent out of the machine’s fuel line, lawfully, completely, by leaving. I will not relitigate the case here except to report its price honestly, a home, a country, the daily nearness of the people you love, which is exactly why I can count on one hand the readers who have followed it. I am not asking you to. I am telling you what the only working remedy I have found actually costs, so you understand, precisely, why the crayon eaters are winning. They are not winning because they are strong. They are winning because destruction is free and repair is priced in sacrifice, and we are no longer a people who are willing to pay.

What the price bought me, the only part of it I can hand to you, is distance, a second set of eyes that are not American. Ask a person in the country we are moving to, a farmer, an agent who sells houses, a man who has never read a political essay in his life, to explain what happened to America, and he or she will do it in a sentence. They will tell you the place got comfortable. They will tell you it stopped appreciating what it had. They will tell you it is losing its standing now, and losing it fast, and they will say all of it without heat, the way you would describe a neighbor who let a good farm go to ruin. They can see it because they are not standing inside it, and because they were never granted the luxury of assuming a country runs itself. Come home, then, and talk to your countrymen, and count how many of them cannot assemble the most basic account of their own situation. That gap is not an insult, but it is reality.

This is where it all converges. A patient who cannot describe his symptoms cannot consent to treatment, and a country that cannot name its own condition will reach, every time, for the explanation that asks the least of it. He is the explanation that asks the least. Remove him and the arithmetic that elevated him is untouched, the bench is untouched, the conditions are untouched, the millions who looked at the most documented incompetence in modern political life and called it strength are untouched and still voting. People keep calling this moment a crossroads. A crossroads implies the option of turning. What the evidence describes is a grade, and everything on it is rolling one direction, and the brakes were a maintenance item nobody performed. If you are holding a remedy that bills its cost to someone other than yourself, it is not a remedy, it is a lullaby. If you are holding a real one, my comments are open, and I will stress it until it breaks, because that is the only respect a real proposal deserves. The honest reading of the evidence does not hand me a sentence about how this ends well, so I will not write one. I can tell you only what the foreign farmer already knows, what the distance teaches, what fifty-one percent was always too small a number to hold. It was never going to be enough to remove the man. The man was never the thing that broke.

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If You Are Still Here...

This essay didn’t offer a soft landing, and it wasn’t designed to. Looking directly at the structural decay of a republic without reaching for a comforting delusion is exhausting work. Thank you for spending your most valuable asset, your attention, here. In a culture that trades in cognitive shortcuts and cheap optimism, choosing to look at the unvarnished ledger is a rare and necessary act.

How to Carry This Forward

The thesis of this piece is that we are losing the republic because too many people mistook the silence of a working system for proof that no work was required. If this analysis gave you a sharper, colder lens to view the coming months, do not let it sit quietly in your inbox.

• Share the Warning: Pass this essay along to someone who is still waiting for a return to “normal” to rescue them. Drop it into the feeds of those who still confuse the confident with the competent.

• Plant the Marker: Restack this post, quote your favorite line, or share the link on your platforms. Let it stand as a definitive record of what we could see clearly before the grade got steeper.

• Audit the Remedies: As I noted, the comments are open and I read every single one. If you have a real strategy, one that bills its full price to you and not a fantasy, bring it to the table. Let’s stress-test it together.

Join the Conversation: Click below to share The Crayon-Eating Republic with your network and join the discussion in the comments section.