A conversation about MAGA media catfights and why they deserve each other, our stuck culture, Drudge as the new Philip K. Dick, AI cannibalism, what inspires us, and much more....

For the past few Decembers, Adrian Nguyen — aka “Alex Didion,” the Pride of Australia and proprietor of the film-centric Substack Lack of Taste, where this interview is being simulcast — has put me on the rack, pressing me to take stock of the year gone by. This year, we cover everything from MAGA Media’s circular firing squad, to the state of the republic (not good), to our fragmented cultural offerings being stuck in a nostalgia loop, to AI’s binge-eating us all, to what I actually find inspiring, to why you shouldn’t succumb to malaise, particularly if you have to write about it. Nguyen’s questions appear in bold, my responses follow. I’ll post our names at the start. But after the first exchange or two, will leave the rest to your common sense, since I believe in you.

Nguyen: How do you feel about the year overall?

Labash: Oh, it’s gone great. If you’re in the chaos‘n’dysfunction business. And who are we kidding? I sort of am. I warned of this before the 2024 election, even if the reality on the ground was much worse than I imagined it would be. But at least it’s allowed me to use, over and over again, one of the sweetest phrases in the English language: “I told you so.”

Nguyen: Ten months ago, you would have told me that America was OK with Trump. At least, until he proceeded with the tariffs, and now he’s no longer America’s greatest economic manager. At the moment, I am seeing conservative influencers tearing themselves apart over who will take up the mantle for Trump and his ideas after he leaves office. One of those is Tucker Carlson. I currently have a book of his magazine writings on my bookshelf called The Long Slide. Having read it, I find it difficult to reconcile his erudite prose with the nihilistic, sloppy version that has manifested this year. You were friends with him early in his career, and we had once talked about that friendship. What has changed?

Labash: Well, I don’t really like to talk about Tucker in print, which is no easy feat, since I make a living popping off in print, and he’s in the middle of every other news cycle these days. I get asked about him all the time, of course. Usually in the form of: “What the fuck happened to Tucker?” But like I said before, we were good enough friends for a long enough time (decades — after starting together at The Weekly Standard in the nineties) that I don’t fire on him in public. Mind you, I used to fire contentious emails at him plenty. And he fired back. We tussled quite a bit from about 2016 on, while staying friends. But we don’t talk anymore, and haven’t for some time. Which was never formalized. There wasn’t a dramatic final shootout. It just sort of happened. And it’s sad. Because I really liked Old Tucker, especially when he actually was Old Tucker, before becoming New Alex Jones. I pray for my old friend’s return to the guy I used to know, sometimes. Literally. He once tied me a fly out of my Bernese Mountain dog’s fur and framed it. Genuinely miss that dude.

As for what changed with Trump and his influencers? He got harder to lie about and shill for, because he has proved himself — nearly every day of his second administration — to be as incompetent and corrupt as we, his faithful critics, warned people he’d be. He’s never really been a populist. Just a narcissist. And even with the crushing amount of precedent people had to go on (refresher: he tried to overturn the will of the people when he lost an election), they still let The Demagogue-in-chief ride them like the village teeter-totter, and fell for all his screamingly obvious horseshit. Remember his promise to reduce prices on day one? He doesn’t care about their grocery prices. He eats plenty of groceries, apparently, but has he ever even been to a grocery store? And what do grocery prices have to do with his big, beautiful ballroom? Or getting handjobs from tech billionaires? Or accepting fake peace prizes from FIFA? Or making sure his grifter kids run all over the world securing even more billions from shady foreign interests for the family slush fund? Trump’s always been a con man, and they’ve always been his marks. Some of them, cynically playing the part of a mark, to rake profits out of other marks who didn’t get the irony memo.

And this is much of the reason I think the MAGAbots now spend more time clawing out each other’s eyes. There’s a lot of displaced aggression. Like when your boss humiliates you at work, but instead of telling him off or quitting, you go home and kick the dog. Or Candace Owens. Not that Candace Owens doesn’t deserve a good kicking. Sorry — I shouldn’t speak that way about the mentally ill. But, except for say Nick Fuentes, who has a lot of other problems (being a Hitler-loving incel, for starters), but who will actually call bullshit on Trump these days (even if he ignored the truth for a decade prior), they’re almost all too cowardly to criticize The King directly. So they criticize each other instead. Though I applaud that impulse, since I’m truly enjoying their circular firing squad. They all deserve each other.

Nguyen: Politics has transformed into entertainment, and that in turn becomes infotainment. It’s why, compared to my past self, I have not been interested in the contest of ideas and have been focused mostly on sport. (At the moment, I’m following the oldest rivalry in cricket and it’s great.) One could make the “bread and circuses” case, where most of it is a distraction. But in absurd times, a ball game makes more sense, and this feeling is still felt by the current generation.

Labash: If you’re interested in a “contest of ideas” in American politics, you might as well go back to watching cricket. Ideas haven’t had much to do with anything since, I don’t know, 2014? The only idea that animates our politics these days is are you for Trump or are you against him. (And Trump’s animating idea is to change his mind about everything every five minutes, from tariffs to elective wars.) Or in what’s left of the Republican Party, the contest is whether you are for Trump, or are really, really for Trump. When he dies, they’ll probably just have him stuffed and shuffle him around Weekend-At-Bernie’s style, until Barron is old enough to run for office. If Barron’s not too busy Zooming Andrew Tate, who we just found out is his hero. Which.....figures. We are definitely in our late Idiocracy/bad-reality-show phase. By the end of this ordeal, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mike Johnson and Candace making out in the hot tub.

Pop culture has become stuck during this decade. Most of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 have hits that are not released in 2025, nobody is reading books anymore, and box office revenue for movies released this year has been declining because streaming remains a convenient option for most people. Are you optimistic about the future, and if so, what’s the glimmer of hope that everybody like me is missing?

“Optimistic” is an awfully strong word. I wouldn’t characterize myself as that, exactly. More like a John Mellencamp fatalist, in that I think life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone. Now, more than ever, the internet has eaten everything. And AI is eating the internet. So our already overly artificial world is getting an extra layer of artifice piled on top of it. At this late date, I’m not even sure about myself. I might be AI. Better check to make sure I don’t have eleven fingers.

I hear what you’re saying about pop culture being stuck. And I largely agree. Although I think that comes with plenty of qualifiers. The monoculture is dead and gone, of course, and I don’t think it’s coming back. We have too many choices in every department to have to share the prison of each other’s taste. Which might be a good thing, since I’d rather eat a live puppy than have to listen to K-pop.

But I, for instance, read more books than ever, if you count audio books as “reading.” Always have two or three going at any given time, on top of my other reading chores. I know Peak TV is supposed to have peaked, but I still find I have more viewing options than ever — things I genuinely look forward to getting to, while I’m waiting for the next season of say, Seth Rogen’s The Studio (which is deeply funny) to roll around. I do find myself being drawn to actual movies less and less. I probably go to a movie theater twice a year, when I used to go every few weeks. And when I do catch up with the films I’ve eagerly anticipated — this year, Eddington, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, and the universally-spurted over One Battle After Another come to mind — I find myself either aggressively disappointed (Eddington and Highest 2 Lowest) or thinking that something was good, but that it was wildly overpraised. (One Battle After Another). And I’m not trying to be difficult. I generally like everything Spike Lee and Leo DiCaprio/Sean Penn do. But I do think that there’s enough mediocrity out there, that critics start grade-inflating, often without knowing it. There might be some age bias at work here, but I don’t think most theatrical releases touch even the high middle tier of the eighties and nineties, let alone the true age of the auteur in the seventies. I made one of my sons watch Barry Levinson’s Diner the other night (1982) — a film I’ve loved since I was younger than him — and it knocked him on his ass.

Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Daniel Stern, and Tim Daly in Diner Credit: Turner Entertainment

But then, I turn around and get pleasantly surprised by something I didn’t see coming. Like Rebecca Miller’s five-part docuseries Mr. Scorsese (about Martin Scorsese, which was just released on Apple TV+). Which was great from start to finish. I didn’t want it to end. I’ve written about Scorsese’s jihad against cape-and-codpiece films (which, in my book, are rot — I hate them all, or would if I ever watched them), have read Scorsese On Scorsese, and am a lifelong fan. Yet there were all sorts of things in Mr. Scorsese I either didn’t know or long ago forgot.

My point being that there’s so much culture getting produced that it’s still easy to get sucker-punched by something good if you’re not too lazy to hunt for it. A few things might not matter to everybody the way they once did. Can’t remember the last time I heard everybody talking about the same novel. (Maybe Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? Which is 25 years ago, now.) But a lot of smaller things matter to a lot more people, even if they no longer pack the same culture-wide wallop. So it’s a bit of a tradeoff.

That said, I’m reading a delightful new memoir by the director Cameron Crowe (of Almost Famous fame), called The Uncool. It focuses on his stint as a rock’n’roll journalist for Rolling Stone and others during his teenage years. And it doesn’t get much cooler than taking off for ten days at a time to go hang out with the Allman Brothers or Led Zeppelin in their prime. And I was thinking about what the equivalent of that would be with a Cameron Crowe of today. And there’s just no matching it. Either the music got smaller, or we did. Which might explain why so much of our culture is reverting to nostalgia acts.

So I look back at this year and there were plenty of movies and TV shows I enjoyed. I’ve watched The Studio twice, and I am more appreciative of Eddington than you are and as appreciative of One Battle After Another as you are. Those movies felt like they spoke about how absurd our political moment has gotten. Eddington, which I’ve been meaning to discuss at some point, is about how doomscrolling and phony online activism has heightened our anxieties, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. One Battle After Another, which I think is Paul Thomas Anderson’s worst movie, sympathizes a lot with the ideas of the revolutionaries. And in the new age of political violence, it seems like there wasn’t ever a vibe shift that many pundits predicted following Trump’s reelection. I think things will still be the same. But thank God for Eddington for evidently bucking that orthodoxy.

I feel like I should like Eddington more than I did. Plenty of people I respect felt the same as you about it. Though I don’t think I was just having an off-night. Watched it with my family, and my wife quit out of boredom about a third of the way through, one of my sons fell asleep, and the other was as frustrated as I was with it being meandering, slow, and dull-witted, with lots of convoluted subplots and cardboard characters. All while Joaquin Phoenix (who I usually love) was gratingly mumbly, killing off early the only character who actually interested me. (I won’t say who, in case anyone still cares enough to get angry over spoilers.) But to be honest with you, I’m not qualified to mount a sustained argument against it, because though I only saw it a month ago, I’ve already forgotten almost everything about it.

I suspect I would’ve liked it more if it actually was the film it was described to me as: a real examination of our COVID-era madness and division. When a crisis that should’ve brought us all together instead revealed just how deep our fissures are, as plenty on both sides of the issue went out of their minds. But this is why dystopian novelists are now being rendered obsolete. Because the madness of our everyday headlines in the Trump era often surpasses whatever their dark imaginations can conjure. A buddy of mine likes to say, “Who needs to read Philip K. Dick when you can just read Drudge for all the real-life dystopia?”

As for whether there was a vibe shift into revolutionary or government-inflicted type violence, I got out of the predictions business a long time ago, since it often now feels like the craziest thing that can happen, will. But believe it or not, even though it feels like the second Trump administration has already dragged on for twenty years, it’s only been one. And we have three more to go. (Possibly longer, if he refuses to relinquish power.) So every day is still anything-can-happen day. I do concede that it feels like some air has been let out of his tires lately, with even isolated swaths of his base expressing disillusionment and resentment. (Which is a good thing.) And I’m glad that liberals and moderates, by and large, prefer nonviolent No King’s Day protests to armed revolution. But just as our entertainment culture has fractured, so has our oppression culture. And not all of us are experiencing it the same way. I might snow myself into thinking things are business-as-usual (I don’t — see my last year’s worth of writing, where I strive to be diligently clear-eyed about Trump’s abuses and norm-shattering). But if you’re a brown person here legally, and are afraid to go to your construction job because you’re worried masked ICE goons might pile out of a van, offer no ID or warrant, and round you up and take you to some dog-kennel detention center without letting you notify your family or attorney, and it could be weeks or months before things get straightened out, well then, you might think you’re living in a very different America than you were 12 months ago. And you’d be right.

On a personal note, I think I’m done with 2025. It’s another year of a clown decade where most of our culture and politics are a bad joke. But more importantly, you reached out to me on why my Substack is drying up after many years, and it’s because I am living a very quiet life doing a rigid and boring desk job that has nevertheless left me financially and emotionally stable. It’s quite calm, in contrast to the chaotic and cutthroat art of content and commentary, which is something I can do and have tried to turn into a regular job numerous times, but have missed every opportunity when it comes. I would like to go back to writing regularly on my newsletter, but after my writing is constantly breaking my balance with my other life, it was inevitable for me to feel that Lack of Taste was less a sea of original thought and more of a dumping ground of backburner and pitiable work that only a few people read.

So I’ll leave you with this. Have you ever felt this malaise, and how do I keep moving forward from succumbing to such malaise?

Well, jeez, man. No pressure or anything, asking me to turn your frown upside down. I guess I’d start by saying I can see a lot worse outcomes than being financially and emotionally stable. I’ve known plenty of writers/journos who are financially unstable nutcases. And I don’t think wanking off for a living in print or on a screen is more noble work than digging ditches or assembling Big Macs or being a corporate drone. Though it’s saved me from having to get a real job my entire adult life, thank God. Especially since I’m not qualified for much else, keep odd hours, and really suck at taking orders.

If you love to write, I’d say do it anyway, regardless of the outcome or audience size. (And by the way, if you don’t, it doesn’t make you a moral failure not to write. The world, by my lights, has enough writing to last it for a good while.) But it can be its own reward. Even if it’s more rewarding to get rewarded, theoretically. And I say theoretically, because there are a ton of people who will gain more fame and money than you’ll ever know, who end up in rehab or who have to pay princely sums to their shrink every week to stay emotionally solvent. Or worse, they end up barking mad like Candace Owens, prattling on about her transvestigations or about who really killed Charlie Kirk. (Is Erika Kirk off the suspect list? I’m behind.)

I’ve often said to my wife that I actually tend to be a better person on the page than off of it. Because it causes you to bear down on your best self, and allows you to edit out your worst one. But more importantly, writing forces you to clarify thoughts and to find order in the chaos. Or to possibly refine the chaos that constantly swirls about us, making it funny or sad or beautiful, or maybe even just giving voice to it while raging against it, helping readers who feel it too, but maybe haven’t quite articulated to themselves just how or why it’s eating them alive. A lot of the writers we like, we tend to like for a common reason: because they make us feel like we’re in good company in what can be a lonely, forbidding world.

So do I ever feel this malaise, you ask? About five or ten times a day, give or take. But we don’t always get to choose the color palette we’re handed. Sometimes, there are more dark colors than light ones. That’s okay, though. Use those colors to go paint your picture.

Actually, here’s a final question. What are some things that have inspired you this year?

When you ask me that, my mind naturally goes to books or songs or poems or to Taco Bell’s new Avocado Ranch Crispy Chicken Burrito, which you really ought to try if they have those in Australia. But I’ll tell you what actually inspired me this year: my father-in-law, Vic Peruzzi.

We saw him off in October, at age 90. I wrote a huge piece about it on my site. But here’s a story I didn’t tell, that left a real impression. Vic was an active, robust guy his entire life. Even well into his mid-eighties, my kids and I would go out with him to clear brush on his property. He used to own his own construction company, so he’d be working his big Bobcat with his shirt off in 95-degree-heat — refusing to take a sip of water — then would jump off of it and join us when we hit a snag, grabbing another chainsaw to help us buck some fallen oak. He’s like 85, when he’s doing this. But by the end, he was suffering from interstitial lung disease, and esophageal dysphagia, and just plain old age. He was a shell of himself.

In the last months, he was on oxygen and having trouble even getting to the bathroom. And so his daughters, who were basically his caretakers, had to station a piss bottle next to the recliner where he was parked all day. He was having trouble, however, even getting directed into the bottle to get it done. So he needed help with that awkward task. But Vic was also always an irreverent, hilarious sonofabitch. So rather than sit in defeated, passive silence, he announced loudly to the room, “Hey, if anyone’s gonna be touching me, you need to wash your hands first! I don’t want you getting it dirty!”

I laughed until I cried upon hearing it. It was A Moment. He took his defeat and humiliation and physical indignity, and made everyone else feel less uncomfortable about it. There went a dude who knew how to paint a beautiful picture out of the darkness that had enveloped him. May we all do the same.

Slack Tide by Matt Labash is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Bonus Track/Clip: Since I namechecked Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical Almost Famous upstairs, here is its most famous scene: the Elton John/”Tiny Dancer” bus singalong when the rock’n’roll circus was leaving town and the wheels were coming off. Though the studio was pushing Crowe to shoot faster, this scene took two entire days to capture, with Crowe calling it “the soul of the movie.”