Politics

Mitch McConnell Will Never Be A Pokemon Master

Mitch McConnell has announced he will not be seeking reelection, so let's be sure his legacy is clearly understood

Endeavorance

24 Feb 2025 — 8 min read

The Legacy of Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell recently announced that he will not be seeking reelection at the end of his current term. He'll be stepping away from a 40-year run in the United States Senate, spending over a decade of that time as the leader of the Republicans in the Senate.

So, how did America fare under his leadership? Surely the honorable Senator from Kentucky did right by his people and the whole of the United States? Right? Surely?

Let's start at his home: Kentucky. The United States Senate has 100 members, two for each of the fifty states. The goal of the Senate is to give an equal voice to each state, contrasting the House which has varied numbers of representatives by state. McConnell has been one of the two voices in the Senate for Kentucky since getting elected in 1985.

Since his election to the Senate, Kentucky has watched as he opted to wrangle national politics while leveraging his position to enrich donors at the expense of his constituents. Kentucky ranks 43rd in economy. It ranks 46th in healthcare. Half of Kentuckians lost their income during COVID as McConnell refused to hear out aid packages before adjourning congress.

He infamously spearheaded the attacks on the ACA ("Obamacare") and pushed to end the program, which would have stripped healthcare coverage from nearly half a million of his own constituents, primarily those who need it the most. Meanwhile, he cozied up to coal barons, pushing to slash taxes on coal companies while the companies messed around and lost employee pensions.

Zooming out to the national stage, McConnell holds a massive amount of the blame for where we find ourselves today.

Nobody can deny it: Mitch McConnell has been pivotal in American history. He changed the game, so to speak. Now, unfortunately, that pivot was into the country we have today: one gripped by otherism, poverty, wealth disparity, religious zealotry, and unmasked Naziism.

In 2016, he famously blocked the Obama-era Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, citing that the next election was only a year out, and so it wouldn't be fair to seat a new SCOTUS member. This had zero basis in any law, but he did it anyway because nobody stopped him (sound familiar?)

He would of course go on to seat three Supreme Court justices under Trump, all of whom were deeply unpopular picks, and one of whom was rammed through not even a month before the election. He also packed courts across the nation with hyper-conservative judges to decrease the speed at which the government can make progress.

He's a huge reason why we have fucked up campaign finance laws as well as the Citizens United decision. He cited that "money is speech and speech is democracy," arguing that corporations were being unfairly treated compared to… the people of the country.

He also championed and ferried Trump's 2017 tax plan, lauding it as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity. The plan was almost entirely tax cuts for the rich, with no benefit to the lower class, and was proven to fail over the coming years.

I couldn't begin to fit all of the horrific things about this one man into this section. I wanted to spend some time talking about his hypocrisy around his healthcare stances given the care he received when he was younger and suffered from polio. I wanted to include a clip I remember of him directly stating that the notion of making voting day a national holiday is "socialist." But honestly, I would need to buy a few replacement keyboards if I had to type all of that out, so this'll have to do.

Mitch McConnell will not be seeking reelection. For the first time in my life, Kentucky's senator won't be actively shaping the lives of myself and hundreds of millions of my countrymen. Unfortunately, his legacy ushered in a few figures who seem intent on their own forms of self enrichment at the expense of everyone else.

Gaming / Entertainment

Pokemon Go Delete Your Data

The developer of Pokemon Go is planning to sell their gaming subdivision to a Saudi-owned mobile game developer. This should be the clearest indicator yet: this game was always a data collection ploy. They're literally selling the "game" part of the company because they got what they wanted.

GameStop CEO Has a Meltdown

The CEO of GameStop went full capital-G Gamer and posted to Twitter about how wokeness is ruining his business.

They're looking to sell off their Canadian and French branches, and so he took to Twitter and posted:

Email M&A@gamestop.com if you're interested in buying GameStop Canada or Micromania France. High taxes, Liberalism, Socialism, Progressivism, Wokeness and DEI included at no additional cost if you buy today

This is the CEO of a company that has money and employees, fyi.

Korra Has Some Explaining To Do

We recently got word that we're getting a new main entry in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. Taking place after the events of The Legend of Korra, the new show, titled "Avatar: Seven Havens," has a twist: the Avatar is now considered the destroyer of humanity, rather than it's savior:

Avatar: Seven Havens is set in a world shattered by a devastating cataclysm. A young Earthbender discovers she's the new Avatar after Korra–but in this dangerous era, that title marks her as humanity's destroyer, not its savior. Hunted by both human and spirit enemies, she and her long-lost twin must uncover their mysterious origins and save the Seven Havens before civilization's last strongholds collapse.

Additionally, we're getting a new book in the line of Avatar novels, this one following one of the most niche imaginable characters: the girl that Zuko goes on a date with in the infamous Tales of Ba Sing Se episode.

Yes, really.

She was too good for him

Sounds kinda rad: they're telling a story from the point of view of some random commoner in this otherwise massive and fantastic world. Color me hyped.

Tech

One Backdoor Closes, Another Opens

Thats… I mean look, it's a weird headline we can agree on that.

Apple has stated they will "never build a backdoor" into their security systems in response to the UK's demands to give them access to Apple's "Enhanced Data Privacy" feature for iCloud.

I discussed this in last week's newsletter, but as a recap: Apple offers the option to enable end-to-end encryption for iCloud data. This level of security makes it nearly impossible for governments or other nefarious actors to get ahold of your data. The UK directly asked Apple to give them a backdoor into the encrypted data.

Apple refused, but unfortunately in doing so, they also plan to disable the feature in the UK entirely to avoid further legal battles. So ultimately, the UK government got what they wanted regardless.

It's Literally A Cult

Well, it's several, actually. But one of them is being exposed in a pretty spectacular way.

I've often noted that the depths of Silicon Valley are "literally a cult," between the Elon Musks who believe they must repopulate the world with their "genius DNA" and the Peter Thiels wanting to inject themselves with the blood of the young, there's actually multiple cult-like things going on.

A lot of it stems from the long, storied history of eugenics in Silicon Valley. It's why you see so many tech bros talking about "IQ," whose roots are solidly in eugenics.

Sometimes, they are more formal than "basically" a cult, such as the "Zizians," an extension of "rationalists" who are essentially a group with a religious-level devotion to using logic and math to explain reality and "optimize" humanity out of its problems. You've probably heard of "Effective Altruism" or maybe "Longtermism" or "Technooptimism" or whatever. They've all flavors of the same general basis that all of these ideologies stem from: tech bros insulated in a world where they're given untold sums of money and told they're the smartest people ever. They believe they are the ones who will deliver us from our inherent faults as a species, and where does that get us?

Musk in the White House, a murderous cult whose leader was recently arrested, and myriad unbelievably rich white dudes moving in relative silence, funding projects in attempts to extend their lives due to the lingering threat of death—the thing they'll never be able to escape which they share with the rest of us.

I say this as someone who has spent years of my life embedded on teams with these people: they need help. They genuinely become so detached from reality, as their jobs, social status, and general existence are almost entirely set in the intangible space of computers.

In my experience, there's two types of folks working in tech: those with the ultimate goal of fucking off to the middle of nowhere and becoming a farmer, and those who believe they are one startup away from becoming King of Earth.

AI-Powered Electronic Waste

It's the end of the line for the Humane AI Pin as the company has announced it will be shutting down its services soon, making every existing AI Pin a brick. HP will be buying up the Humane company itself.

The pin was universally dragged by reviewers for good reason. They noted it didn't really do anything of value, was slow, expensive, awkward to use, and hardly worked even when you tried to do the things it was "good at." Humane had billed the device as the next step after smartphones, and released the device as a standalone product which required its own subscription plan to operate completely separately from your existing phone or computer.

But now? It's a $700 brick. Or, it will be in a few days.