Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...

Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...

[Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in an ongoing series exploring how the MAGA movement has rebranded old systems of exclusion using the tools of modern technology. What once relied on firehoses and poll taxes now operates by algorithm, targeting dissent, shaping access, and codifying control under the guise of efficiency. It’s not digital populism. It’s autocratic convenience — stripped of checks, staffed by engineers, and answerable only to the whims of those who designed it.] Introdu...

[Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in an ongoing series exploring how the MAGA movement has rebranded old systems of exclusion using the tools of modern technology. What once relied on firehoses and poll taxes now operates by algorithm, targeting dissent, shaping access, and codifying control under the guise of efficiency. It’s not digital populism. It’s autocratic convenience — stripped of checks, staffed by engineers, and answerable only to the whims of those who designed it.] Introdu...

Let us begin with the obvious: “woke” has lost all meaning—except as a political sneeze MAGA injects into every argument, no tissue required. Want to ban books? Say it’s to fight “wokeness.” Want to gut higher education? Call it “woke indoctrination.” Can’t define the term without sounding like a QVC conspiracy theorist with a flag pin? Doesn’t matter. Just repeat the word, louder, until it rhymes with liberty. In Trump’s America, “anti-woke” has become the peanut butter to fascism’s jelly: c...

Let us begin with the obvious: “woke” has lost all meaning—except as a political sneeze MAGA injects into every argument, no tissue required. Want to ban books? Say it’s to fight “wokeness.” Want to gut higher education? Call it “woke indoctrination.” Can’t define the term without sounding like a QVC conspiracy theorist with a flag pin? Doesn’t matter. Just repeat the word, louder, until it rhymes with liberty. In Trump’s America, “anti-woke” has become the peanut butter to fascism’s jelly: c...

In the grand forensic tradition of whodunits, Nate Cohn’s recent newsletter in The New York Times attempts to answer the question: Who killed the Democrats in 2024? And like any good sleight of hand, he pulls the reader away from the crime scene just as the murder weapon is being polished in the next room. Spoiler: it was the media with a heavy assist from Mr. Cohn himself. Cohn’s June 26 post-election piece — “The Tilt: Final Word on 2024 Turnout” — arrives as the Gray Lady’s version of a co...

In the grand forensic tradition of whodunits, Nate Cohn’s recent newsletter in The New York Times attempts to answer the question: Who killed the Democrats in 2024? And like any good sleight of hand, he pulls the reader away from the crime scene just as the murder weapon is being polished in the next room. Spoiler: it was the media with a heavy assist from Mr. Cohn himself. Cohn’s June 26 post-election piece — “The Tilt: Final Word on 2024 Turnout” — arrives as the Gray Lady’s version of a co...

The Curtain Rises: Vacuity as Performance “This vacuousness is the choreography of illiberal power.” It sounds like the kind of phrase that belongs in a graduate seminar — abstract, a little haughty. But it is not an abstraction. It is a diagnosis. We live in a country where the dance of emptiness is no longer background noise but the show itself. Trumpism didn’t invent the performance of hollowness. It perfected it. The rally chant with no policy, the executive order with no enforcement, the...

The Curtain Rises: Vacuity as Performance “This vacuousness is the choreography of illiberal power.” It sounds like the kind of phrase that belongs in a graduate seminar — abstract, a little haughty. But it is not an abstraction. It is a diagnosis. We live in a country where the dance of emptiness is no longer background noise but the show itself. Trumpism didn’t invent the performance of hollowness. It perfected it. The rally chant with no policy, the executive order with no enforcement, the...

After nearly three hundred essays and dozens of podcast episodes, I’ve reached a simple conclusion: I’m done writing on a schedule, and I’m done writing for platforms that confuse noise with vitality. When I began this experiment, I thought the work would matter in the way words used to — that reason and wit might still pierce the fog. I believed there was an audience hungry for insight instead of outrage, context instead of clickbait. I believed satire could still reach the public nerve. May...

After nearly three hundred essays and dozens of podcast episodes, I’ve reached a simple conclusion: I’m done writing on a schedule, and I’m done writing for platforms that confuse noise with vitality. When I began this experiment, I thought the work would matter in the way words used to — that reason and wit might still pierce the fog. I believed there was an audience hungry for insight instead of outrage, context instead of clickbait. I believed satire could still reach the public nerve. May...