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TGIF: My Jeans Are Blue
Sydney Sweeney attends the 2025 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted on March 2, 2025. (Phillip Faraone/VF25/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)
Sydney fever sweeps the nation. A Democratic doozy. Trump’s tariff vindication. A begrudging NYT Gaza correction. Candace Owens gets sued. Boston bans new technology. And much, much more.
By Nellie Bowles
08.01.25 — TGIF
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I learned a new slur that I think you would all appreciate. Calm down, it’s for robots. “Clanker” is the new word for a bad machine. It’s what you call the AI agent who answers the phone, or that Optimus robot that Elon has serving coffee to our harem each morning. “Bloody clanker, this coffee is cold.”

TGIF, ya clankers.

→ Now it’s just getting sad: For a little while, as polls for Dems suffered, it felt like righteous comeuppance. How could they have let Biden stay in so long? How could they have run Kamala? Why did they become the party of closed schools and toddler masking and sidewalk disarray? But several recent new polls are so dire for Dems, I’m genuinely starting to worry and think they should come down from that high branch right now, please. A whopping 63 percent of voters have a negative view of the Democrats, according to a Wall Street Journal poll, which adds that it’s the lowest rating in 35 years. New Pew data shows the swing in party affiliation between 2020 and 2025 was pretty much across the board—every demographic, almost every issue.

It’s not good: We need two equally hated parties to better ensure eternal gridlock and no Big Ideas. We need to not be sure whether this guy is a Republican or a Democrat and really, does it even matter? We need two different, identical groups of oligarchs fighting over America so that neither ever fully wins (except me, your favorite oligarch, who is beneficent). Because right now, all Republicans are doing is winning, and the center is shifting so fast that Nick Fuentes is starting to be just a normal guy raising a few interesting points.

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Nellie Bowles
Nellie Bowles is a co-founder for The Free Press and its head of strategy. She was previously a reporter at The New York Times, where she won the Gerald Loeb Award for investigative journalism and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. She started her career at her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle.
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