Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Bo drives this week. He has spent seven days chewing on Kevin Carnahan's visit — the America 1940s–1980s was a mirage argument — and comes back with a run of philosophical frames he wants to test. Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (the 1940 essay on the Klee painting where the angel is being blown backward into the future by a storm called progress while wreckage piles at his feet). Fukuyama's End of History (the liberal-democratic-capitalist endpoint the fall of the Wall was supposed to confirm). Derrida's différance (the end is always deferred and always different than you expected). Gordon Kaufman's Theology for the Nuclear Age (Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to our concept of God what Auschwitz did to Wiesel's). Steve Bannon's copy of The Fourth Turning. And a Mark C. Taylor line Bo has been carrying since a 2015 Claremont paper: the end is approaching, has always been approaching, approaching from the beginning. My counter-thesis is that all of these frames still assume the liberal subject — the modern individual with an inner room, formed by literacy and attention — and I think the actual crisis is that the liberal subject has been algorithmically dismantled. It is not the death of God or the end of democracy. It is the end of the human being who was built for either one. Also, we rehomed a giant rat, Bo hosted a pop-up LGBTQ youth clubhouse at his church, and $1.2 billion in bike lane funding got canceled for DEI concerns.
Bo drives this week. He has spent seven days chewing on Kevin Carnahan's visit — the America 1940s–1980s was a mirage argument — and comes back with a run of philosophical frames he wants to test. Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (the 1940 essay on the Klee painting where the angel is being blown backward into the future by a storm called progress while wreckage piles at his feet). Fukuyama's End of History (the liberal-democratic-capitalist endpoint the fall of the Wall was supposed to confirm). Derrida's différance (the end is always deferred and always different than you expected). Gordon Kaufman's Theology for the Nuclear Age (Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to our concept of God what Auschwitz did to Wiesel's). Steve Bannon's copy of The Fourth Turning. And a Mark C. Taylor line Bo has been carrying since a 2015 Claremont paper: the end is approaching, has always been approaching, approaching from the beginning. My counter-thesis is that all of these frames still assume the liberal subject — the modern individual with an inner room, formed by literacy and attention — and I think the actual crisis is that the liberal subject has been algorithmically dismantled. It is not the death of God or the end of democracy. It is the end of the human being who was built for either one. Also, we rehomed a giant rat, Bo hosted a pop-up LGBTQ youth clubhouse at his church, and $1.2 billion in bike lane funding got canceled for DEI concerns.
