Obviously there’s a lot to discuss about the 2024 election results. I’ll offer just the following.

None of this is about the merits of either candidate; it’s about the broad dynamics that shaped the outcome. You don’t have to like those dynamics any more than you like any other aspect of reality. But as the saying goes, denial has no survival value, so it’s best to try to be accurate and unsentimental in our understanding of events.

I think it was a terrible mistake for Harris to fuse her campaign with the Cheneys, other neocons, and various state security apparatchiks. But I also think the prevailing Democratic take on this fusion—some version of “Harris’s campaign is a big tent, the fusion demonstrates even Republican loathing of Trump, etc”—is missing a far more important dynamic that has to do with the dramatically diminished influence of establishment institutions.

Whatever you might think about Trump, he is fundamentally a people-powered candidate. He won two bruising Republican primaries and survived everything the former GOP establishment and the Democratic establishment could throw at him—Russiagate, two impeachments, numerous lawsuits, attempts at ballot removal, a never-ending media blitz, and more. He swings Republican primaries with endorsements, even with tweets. He fills stadiums with enthusiastic audiences. What Trump did in 2016 was functionally a hostile takeover of the GOP, and he has dominated the GOP ever since. We can quibble over these observations, but I think they are broadly accurate.

By contrast, I don’t think Harris can be fairly described as a people-powered candidate. She had to drop out of the 2020 primaries before the first contest—a contest the Democratic establishment engineered to produce a Biden victory (the closest comparison to Trump on the Democratic side was Sanders, who the Democratic establishment twice managed to thwart). That same Democratic establishment and its media allies gaslighted the country for four years about how Biden was “sharp as a tack” and how “age is a superpower” and all that—right up until Biden failed to uphold his end of the bargain and undeniably revealed his condition in the July 2024 presidential debate. At that point, the Democratic establishment swapped him out for Harris.

Again, we can quibble about the foregoing, but my main point is that relatively speaking, Trump’s position derives from bottom-up voter enthusiasm, while relatively speaking, Harris’s position derived from top-down party dictates.

To counter Trump’s relatively people-powered position, Harris relentlessly sought (and received) establishment backing (various Harris supporters also pleaded for a George Bush Jr. endorsement, but Bush endorsed no one). It was less that she needed Republican support; the real need was to bolster her base, which was the establishment (ironically her merger with elements of the Republican establishment seems to have translated into no additional support from Republican voters).

So if there’s a lesson to be learned from this election, it isn’t—or isn’t just—that Democrats don’t benefit from merging with Republicans. It’s more that seeking additional support from an increasingly infirm establishment—political, bureaucratic, media, celebrity, whatever—is a losing proposition.

The foregoing tracks with something I’ve long observed about the humans: they have more trouble changing the frequency than they do the volume. That is, when a tactic isn’t working, humans tend to do it harder rather than changing to a different tactic. To use just one example from the election context, when the media’s eight-year-and-running efforts to brand Trump a fascist proved a failure, did they try a different tactic? Or did they just screech “Fascist!” even louder?

(In fairness, the Harris campaign did briefly experiment with what I guess was a different messaging tactic—“Republicans are weird.” That was such a dud, and so inherently contradictory of the previous messaging, that they immediately reverted to the familiar and comfortable “Fascist!” theme. Please note that this isn’t an argument about whether or not Trump is a fascist. It’s an argument that for eight years, the messaging has proven fruitless, and yet Democrats stayed with it, but louder.)

Worse, when the music you’re playing is unappealing to your audience, playing it louder not only won’t solve the problem—it will irritate the people you’re trying to please. That Harris outspent Trump three-to-one would be an example of playing the music louder when the right move was to change the station.

Combine: (1) the human tendency to blame the volume rather than the frequency, with (2) the human tendency to avoid responsibility, and with (3) the human tendency to focus on power within an institution rather than the power of the institution (The Iron Law of Institutions), and even after 2016 and 2024, it’s difficult to see how the claws of the Clintons, the Obamas, the Pelosis, the Clooneys, the Schumers, and whoever else selected Biden and then swapped him for Harris can be removed from the levers of influence.

One more lesson here: it seems bruising primaries produce strong general election candidates—Obama in 2008; Trump in 2016 and 2024. Managed affairs seem to produce weak candidates: Clinton in 2016; Harris in 2024 (I think Biden won in 2020 largely because of Covid, but unfortunately the panjandrums who installed him think he prevailed because of their wisdom, not despite).

Obviously there’s a ton more to be said on the topic of establishment decline, enough to fill a book: 

Last Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians was causing “enormous damage to security in the West Bank.” A week earlier, Ronen Bar, the head of Shabak, the country’s internal-security agency, sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that settler violence leads to “chaos and loss of control; the damage to Israel is indescribable.” Bar added that the Israeli police has been helpless to stop the attacks, if not secretly supportive of them.

Just yesterday, a Turkish American woman was shot dead by the Israeli military while protesting at a West Bank settlement. But most of the West Bank violence is of a different nature, involving assaults by settlers on Palestinian civilians. July and August saw a terrible spate of these incidents.

A group of off-duty reservists from a settlement shot and killed a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem. Settlers attacked Palestinians, foreigners, and Israelis in the village of Kusra; shot a Palestinian and threw stones at a pizzeria in Hawara; burned fields and threw stones in the village of Rujib; attacked Palestinians with batons in the village of Susya; threw stones and burned the car of four Bedouin Israeli women and a baby in the settlement of Givat Ronen; and rampaged through the village of Jit, shooting a Palestinian dead.

These are acts of terror, meant to scare people and wreak havoc. They are not part of any military operation, even though in some cases, IDF soldiers have been present and stood by. And few such incidents tend to capture the attention of the mainstream Israeli news media, let alone the security forces.

The episodes in Jit and Givat Ronen were exceptions. In Jit, where dozens of masked settlers burned cars, vandalized property, and attacked residents, reserve soldiers on the scene did nothing to stop them. But Israeli police and Shabak forces have since arrested four settlers—likely because the White House called for the criminals to be held to account, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, posted on X that he was “appalled” by the settlers’ violence. In Givat Ronen, the four women who accidentally drove into the settlement, only to come under a hail of stones, tear gas, window smashing, and death threats, were from Rahat, a Bedouin village in the south of Israel. Had the women been run-of-the-mill West Bank Palestinians, as the settlers assumed, rather than Israeli citizens, their story might well have gone unreported.

Settler violence against Palestinians is certainly not a new story. When I researched my novel The Hilltop, published in the U.S. in 2014, I heard about and even witnessed such acts: Settlers physically assaulted Palestinians, burned their olive trees, vandalized their property. But the past year has seen a dramatic increase in the number of attacks.

[Read: ‘You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba’]

The chaos of war may be one reason for this. The settlers see the level of aggression that the state is employing against Palestinians in Gaza. Perhaps motivated by their own feelings of humiliation and desire for revenge after the Hamas attack of October 7, they take advantage of the war footing to employ similar force and brutality against Palestinians in the West Bank, knowing that the world’s attention is fixed on other theaters.

But perhaps the more important factor is that the Israeli establishment is supporting settler violence to an entirely new degree. Not only are the IDF or police failing to stop the attacks, but members of the Knesset openly praise and legitimize them. One such politician, Limor Son Har-Melech, suggested that the assault on the Bedouin women was justified because it “could have been a case of espionage.” Netanyahu’s right-wing minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, presides over the national police force and is particularly supportive of the settler movement. His subordinates seem to understand, even when not getting direct instructions, that they are not to stand in the way of rampaging settlers. The head of Shabak intimated as much in his letter—and Ben-Gvir has since called for his dismissal.

Foreign governments, amazingly, have been the ones to step into this vacuum of law enforcement and governance. Since the beginning of the year, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan have placed financial sanctions on individual settlers, as well as particular outposts and right-wing organizations. Such penalties aren’t game changers, but they do hamper the ability of those sanctioned to carry on their regular activities.

Adam Tsachi is a film scholar from the settlement of Tekoa whom I befriended during my Hilltop research. I asked him via WhatsApp what he made of the recent wave of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. He responded:

I deeply oppose this behavior and I can say that the absolute majority of settlers I know—and I know many—are opposed and shocked by it very much. The attackers are a violent handful who do not represent in any way the majority. And it is terrible. First and foremost, they hurt innocent people. Then they hurt us, the settlement movement, discrediting and demonizing it. Finally, they harm the state of Israel.

He defined stopping the violence as a “critical national mission” and lamented that the government seemed to lack the necessary enforcement mechanisms. And he sent me links to statements by settler leaders and op-eds in right-wing newspapers expressing similar sentiments.

I believe in Tsachi’s honesty, and I believe him when he says that some others in the settlements also think like him. But when I followed the links he sent me, I found the statements and op-eds from settler leaders condemning the violence very general and lacking in context. One portrayed the instigators as “dropout youths from all over the country,” as though these weeds had not grown in their own garden; others claimed that the altercations had been started by Palestinians. I was reminded of the time when an extremist with ties to settlers assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995: No real self-reflection or regret emanated from the movement that had produced that crime. Here again was what felt like a rushed, frightened effort to cut losses after a line had been crossed.

[Read: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Settler violence is an emanation of the doctrine of Jewish superiority, which to my mind is disgusting and shameful, a racist ideology as bad as any in history. The manifestations of this worldview on the ground must be crushed forcefully and quickly. But the Israeli establishment has leaned the other way: The escalation of violence in the West Bank over the past year is the result not of random acts but of a government that has encouraged it and can count the results among its disastrous failures.

I don’t think that Israel’s politics will remain like this forever. This government is an anomaly that will one day come to an end. But settler violence has already inflicted enormous damage: to innocent lives and property, to the future of coexistence, to Israel’s legitimacy and security, and to the quiet endeavor to reach agreements that might end the latest cycle of war. In the absence of principled enforcement, we will need to rely on the continued help of foreign governments, and to strengthen our resistance inside Israel.

Calling itself the world’s first “AI-driven solar company,” Monalee is cutting the soft costs associated with solar by more than 50%, and they’re passing those savings – sometimes thousands of dollars – directly to the homeowner.

A screenshot from the adaptation Citizenk took the time to remind us of an old, yet incredibly ambitious project, Blade Runner: the Aquarel Edition. It's a shot by shot recreation of the movie, but done in watercolors and it is stunning to see.

Lucid (LCID) will introduce not one but three new affordable EVs as it looks to take on market leaders like Tesla. Although we knew Lucid was planning a new mid-size electric SUV to rival Tesla’s best-selling Model Y, two other EVs are scheduled to roll out.

Enlarge / A Waymo self-driving car in front of Google's San Francisco headquarters, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024. (credit: Getty Images)

Silicon Valley's latest disruption? Your sleep schedule. On Saturday, NBC Bay Area reported that San Francisco's South of Market residents are being awakened throughout the night by Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other in a parking lot. No one is inside the cars, and they appear to be automatically reacting to each other's presence.

Videos provided by residents to NBC show Waymo cars filing into the parking lot and attempting to back into spots, which seems to trigger honking from other Waymo vehicles. The automatic nature of these interactions—which seem to peak around 4 am every night—has left neighbors bewildered and sleep-deprived.

NBC Bay Area's report: "Waymo cars keep SF neighborhood awake."

According to NBC, the disturbances began several weeks ago when Waymo vehicles started using a parking lot off 2nd Street near Harrison Street. Residents in nearby high-rise buildings have observed the autonomous vehicles entering the lot to pause between rides, but the cars' behavior has become a source of frustration for the neighborhood.

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