Today is a big day at Racket, for Brad Pearce and are starting our Get Lit dive into Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons, a book suppressed by the Soviets for much of the 20th century that’s never been more relevant to the West, especially after last week’s big victory by the DSA in the New York primary. Anyone puzzled by the iron humorlessness and defiant impracticality of characters like Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, and Darializa Chevalier, to say nothing of the gushing welcome they’ve received by aging Boomers with glue-factory reservations on MSNOW, need only read this book.

Sometimes translated as The Devils or The Possessed, Demons to American readers will present as a predictive epic about wokism, told through a blistering satire of political activism that starts off as comedy and ends in the place no one described better than this author — hell. There’s more to say about this book, but first, here’s where you can find Brad and me this afternoon at 4:30 ET:

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Now for a brief cheat sheet on Demons, which is based on a real murder conspiracy but starts with an observation about family:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/25/26:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Original Text published 06/23/26:

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The days of dismissing the Democratic Socialists of America and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as lightweights are over, after Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Chevalier obliterated traditional Democrats in this week’s New York primary.

Traditional Democrats are finished. Their card is punched. They will be replaced, or more likely absorbed, by a Mamdani-led Democratic Socialist bureaucracy in short order. Though Mayor Zohran is even more overrated as an orator than Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan, he’s now proven that he possesses their same transformational political skill, as his gambit backing three shaky DSA candidates and easily winning all three hands was a masterstroke, one that did mark “a new era for the Democratic Party,” as CNN analyst Van Jones put it.

It’s not Bernie redux. Vermont’s scruffy Senator Sanders will still be trotted out as a totem, a symbol of the insufficiently ruthless old days, tolerated by the DSA’s humorless young leadership in the same way poor old Stepya Verkhovensky was by the young radicals in Dostoyevsky’s Demons. But Tuesday was not about advancing Bernie’s cause.

What happened this week is being described in many places as a big win for populist or “anti-elite” politics, but it’s the opposite. This was simulteneously a wipeout of Clintonian party hacks and Bernie’s staid F.D.R.-style big tent politics, in favor of a slickly marketed revolution with a young ethnic vibe. The Zohran movement is an obvious elite fixation, built atop the exotically batshit boutique ideas that America’s nitwit rich find thrilling, like publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” “humanity has no borders,” and my personal favorite, “the institution of the family acts as part of the carceral system.”

If the Sanders campaign was a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama, the Zohran/DSA revolution is a referendum on America itself, led by people who aren’t the least bit embarrassed to tell you they hate this place, to point of viewing our government as an extension of the Israeli state, whose people deserved 9/11. There’s a smorgasbord of statements by DSA folk along those lines, led by charming Mamdani pal Hasan Piker:

That’s the difference between the Sanders movement and this new tidal wave. Sanders loved every inch of Vermont and was desperate to implement ameliorative social reforms he sincerely believed would turn around a country and a government he revered, borders and all. His platform was designed to fit in the American system, only with government acting as a tougher negotiator for the ordinary person.

The Zohran revolution, meanwhile, is a whole-hog, fuck-it, real-thing version of Marxian socialism, instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever lived in a socialist country. Boy, is it selling with our beautiful people, who’ve never met a bad idea they didn’t love:

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In 1986 the New York Times celebrated the 100th year of the Statue of Liberty with a series of paeans to its hometown heroine-of-steel, who’d stood at the harbor and welcomed so many of the city’s immigrant families.

“Miss Liberty… represents tolerance and acceptance, a generosity of spirit, the America that lives in the words of Walt Whitman and William Saroyan, the films of Frank Capra, the music of Aaron Copland,” the paper wrote. “And when… a nation falls short of the ideals she represents, she towers in silent reproach.”

Forty years later the same Times, ahead of a new national milestone, is running a series of features called AMERICA AT 250. One of the latest is “These 8 Americans Shaped History. We Just Don’t Agree on How.”

What eight Americans would you put on a list of history-shapers?

From Elvis to Muhammad Ali to Michael Jackson to Barack Obama, the most famous people on earth for the last seventy-plus years have almost all been Americans, but being known isn’t everything. If the question is who shaped world history, one could make cases for Edison, Ford, Whitney, Salk, Disney, Deere, Gates, Jobs, Rockefeller, Colt, or the Wright Brothers; you might think of shadow villains like Dulles or Lansdale, or activists like Samuel Gompers, Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony, or Martin Luther King, Jr. It would be hard to write a modern history book without sections on Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, and both Roosevelts.

Which eight did the Times choose? Let’s dig in:

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It doesn’t mean what you might think, but “How a State is Ruined Because of Women” is one of the chapters in Book III of “Discourses on Livy,” Niccolo Machiavelli’s masterpiece on governance and stability. Brad Pearce and I will start wrapping up the great book today at 4:30 pm ET, at the links below:

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There’s an abundance of interesting material and brilliant writing in this last section from Machiavelli’s sweeping book, including a sagacious chapter titled “That the Faults of Peoples Begin With Their Princes” and counterintuitive passages like “the most useful thing in a free society is a way to keep the citizens poor.” Mostly there’s wisdom and warning in Book III, which looks at the ways even great societies fall, which they must, as “it is impossible to organize an everlasting Republic.” Please tune in if you can, and if you haven’t done so, pick up a copy of our next book, the hilarious and horrifying Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/16/26:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

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Text published 06/12/26:

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Once upon a time Northeast liberals just didn’t know why people liked NASCAR or the WWE. Now they’ve moved all the way from, “I don’t know it and I don’t get it, but whatever,” to “That shit I’ve never watched and don’t understand must be somewhere between porn and lynching!” Here’s Substack’s own Cox Richardson comparing the UFC bash to “the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century”:

You have to be mad as a March hare to equate the UFC with lynching, but that’s where we are, I guess.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, whom I once debated in Toronto when she was teamed up with Malcolm Gladwell, has a new piece up about the UFC bash Donald Trump just threw on the White House lawn. Amid an obligatory Idiocracy reference and true observations about the ignominious end (we hope) to Trump’s Iran misadventure, Michelle dropped this whopper of a passage in a piece titled, “A Garish Spectacle of American Decline”:

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Those who strive to create a great empire can can choose one of two paths, according to Niccolo Machiavelli. “This may be done in two ways; either through love or through force.”

We’re getting into a better groove now on “Get Lit,” the show in which Brad Pearce and I talk about great and sometimes-forgotten books. Today at 4:30 ET we’ll be talking about Book II of Machivelli’s “Discourses on Livy,” which is written in smooth prose and addresses issues still relevant to current politicians. There’s a lesson or two in here that captures what Machiavelli or the Romans would have thought about war with Iran, for instance, or our general policy of “Democracy Promotion.” Lots to get to, and we hope you’ll join us. Tune in at 4:30 pm ET below:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/09/26:

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From the New York Times:

After all, Americans like to think of ourselves as a country that believes deeply and universally in equality for all. We tend to say, yes, the ideal that “all men are created equal” was radical when it was first set out in the Declaration of Independence, but that over time it has steadily become a given…

But throughout our history there have been voices that have contended that despite the abiding tension between political democracy and the forces of capitalism, we should learn to view inequality as something that is natural and even good.

I knew from the first sentence about “figures in and around Silicon Valley” that “‘All Men Are Created Equal’? Not Everyone Agrees” would be a jeremiad against conservative billionaires who think it’s okay to be billionaires. Then I realized Columbia University professor Dr. Kim Phillips-Fein was trying something more ambitious, railing against the observation that LeBron James was born with a better shot at the NBA than the rest of us. Her first idea is to make verbalizing this obvious truth villainous, citing as a guilty party John Adams, who said that “to teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties” is a “fraud.”

The second idea in the Phillips-Fein column is even funnier. She lays out the basics of the American social contract, namely that we agree to tolerate inequality of outcomes provided we have equal opportunity, then not only denounces that too as villainous, but acts like she’s the first person to put it into words.

I burst out laughing at this passage:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/07/26:

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