Wedsnesday ORT: WSJ Fluffs, Against The Job, Girlboss Anthems, Mary's Payday And The Year Of Envisions

All subscribers welcome

Good morning, friends. I’d like to thank the paid subscribers of ACF for supporting the “Haters/Lovers” double Open Thread with nearly nine hundred comments. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll never have a chance to read the LinkedIn comment that I made regarding Jared Rosenholtz — he apparently complained to Meta and had it nuked. No worries, we save screenshots here.

This week we will have two new features for those elite ACFers who hand over literally dozens of dollars to me every year. The first: a review of the infamous Laugo Alien pistol. The second: SHREDDIN’ FOR HARAMBE! You keep asking for it, and now it’s here. I think we will kick it off with The Commander’s one-off Goatrock semi-hollow short scale bass, and let the readers take it from there.

As MC Hammer said, let’s get it started.

If you ever doubted that the media hates America

The inimitable Edward Tomarken opened my eyes to the reality of the world thirty-five years ago when he told me, “Book reviews and criticism are not complementary of the text they consider. Rather, they are competition to it.” As a long-time reader of both the LRB and the NYRB, I couldn’t agree more. When you read a serious book review, or a critical piece, you are being force-fed a view of the work with which the author would probably not completely agree. Why does this matter? Because each reader only has so much time. Book reviews compete with actual books for your time and attention. It’s a crabs-in-the-bucket view of the world, but it’s sadly accurate.

Similarly, as the looting of Heritage America by entities as diverse as PornHub and Vivek Ramaswamy¹ continues apace, the crabs in our national bucket are starting to increase their willingness to cannibalize. Why is the media so big on Chinese cars? It’s simple: The Chinese will pay to advertise. My GOD will they pay. Every girlboss in automedia is rubbing her legs together like a cricket² imagining how much ad revenue they can get from Geely and the Gang Of Four or whatever.

It gets worse. The weaker the manufacturing sector becomes in this country, the more political power the other sectors have by default. Right now it’s still possible for the combination of the UAW, the dealers, and the OEMs to railroad some legislation through our national alimentary tract. Someday that won’t be the case, and that “juice” will flow somewhere else.

What follows is every deliberately misleading, seductive, and advertorial-esque phrase in yesterday’s miserable WSJ piece about Chinese cars:

• “the buzzy Chinese car brands currently blocked from the American market”. Everyone is buzzing about how great they are!

• “the all-electric EX2, a sleek compact” The last “sleek compact” I saw was the Dodge Omni 024, bitch.

• “Great Wall Motors boasts some beefy gas-powered sport-utility vehicles” Wait, I thought that was a bad thing?

• “the affordable sticker prices and whiz-bang Chinese technology… the sleekest Chinese cars are now attracting attention.” Remember back when LIFE magazine said this stuff about American products?

• “It’s no secret that Chinese EVs match up well against their American counterparts.” It’s a secret to anyone who owns a Chinese EV, or has owned one for more than a year.

• “Chinese BYD Song Pro plug-in hybrid… It’s a sleek four-door SUV.” The WSJ is making “sleek” sound like a Millennial neologism. All the chinese cars r so fukin sleek!

• ‘Earlier this decade, Lutz said, he had an epiphany about how advanced Beijing has become when he bought a China-made Buick Envision crossover, which GM exported to the U.S. It rocked him—the fit and finish, the absence of road noise, the “total silkiness and sweet refinement” of the vehicle, he said. “I thought, ‘Boy, if they know how to make Buicks like this in China, they obviously know how to make great cars.’”’ Remember this business about the Envision; we’ll return to it later.

Not even in Dan Neil’s fruitiest phrases have traditional European and American vehicles ever gotten a fluffjob like this in the Wall Street Journal. This is a clear and plain attempt by the media to tilt the table in favor of vehicles that are built without labor protection, environmental protection, and consumer protection — three qualities regarding which American newspapers have long waxed lyrical. China works its employees into suicide, pours mercury into village water supplies, and doesn’t back its products after they leave the showroom — but you’d never know any of that from reading the Wall Street Journal.

This is evil, and should be treated as such.

Yes, we have no summer jobs

In the Sunday threads we talked about my son’s plans for the future, which absolutely do not include entry-level work. Why not? The great Delicious Tacos said it better than I can:

I was sixteen and my mom made me get a job. Again. Learn the value of work. She was right, it’s a lesson I retain decades later: the value of work is less than fucking zero, a negative eating away at your soul and your life. So, thanks.

I got my first job at fourteen. I worked as a dishwasher from 6pm to 2am at a local pizza place. It paid me about eleven bucks a night after taxes. This was useful because the entry fee at my local BMX track was six bucks and it was four bucks to get a meal. But I was always dead tired and grease-sick at those races. After all, I’d slept four hours when everyone else had slept eight. My mother said it taught character. She didn’t expect my brother, who was six years younger, to be taught character. He won his first seven BMX races and rarely lost afterwards; although I was much bigger and stronger for my age than he was, I won fewer than a third of my first thirty starts. I was tired. I was tired all the time.

In quick succession after, I worked at a bike shop, a Rax, a Wendy’s, a grocery store. In the years that followed I did construction site cleanup, I sat in a call center, I reassembled busted pallets full of cat and dog food in a warehouse and wiped the heat-rotted stink of burst cans off the concrete floor. I didn’t earn $100,000 a year until I was twenty-nine years old, at which point I immediately bought three Porsches in a frenzy of economic activity that wouldn’t have shamed a newly-hatched sixteen-year cicada.

Here’s what I learned from working the dozen or so entry-level jobs I had from 1986 to 1995:

• Everyone hates their job and zones out for the whole time they are at work;

• Any idea you have, no matter how useful or intelligent, is not only unwelcome, it is a direct insult to your supervisor, who hates you and thinks you’re gay because he saw a John Milton anthology in your backpack;

• Every person you meet during your job is having the worst day of their lives and they are completely free to take it out on you;

• You will spent your entire life smelling like either a cleaning product or the filth it’s meant to erase;

• Anything you own can be stolen or damaged at any moment;

• The job pays nothing, but that’s okay, because you are worth nothing. You are only worth this job. It’s all the world really wants from you. The rest is just you dreaming, and dreams never come true.

In the years that followed, I accomplished some reasonable things. I was on newsstands across the globe. I made a fair amount of money; I can still remember a day in my late twenties when I woke up wanting a new Yamaha motorcycle and I just called clients to sell work until about seven hours later I’d made ten grand. Two days later I bought the bike for cash. I’ve been on TV, I’ve traveled the world, I’ve signed autographs for multi-millionaires, I am just one degree of separation from Sienna Miller because my tailor is also Jude Law’s tailor. But there is never a day when I fail to wonder if anything I’ve ever done is worthwhile — because I spent years cleaning toilets and sometimes I think that’s the only skill I really have.

Two years ago my son worked at the Velvet Ice Cream counter in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He took it really seriously. The girls liked him because he could carry four ice cream buckets at once and he never let them expend any real effort. It didn’t crush his spirit the way it crushed mine to scrub dishes past midnight. His mother has repeatedly suggested he go work at Subway or McDonald’s, so he can understand the real world. She doesn’t like the fact that he was flying a million-dollar Cirrus Turbo at the age of fifteen, or that he had a TTR90 at the age of eight. “He should learn how to work hard.”

My response to that is simple: I’m not going to ask a young man who can fly a plane and play Jaco Pastorius tunes and lead five hundred Civil Air Patrol cadets and audit college physics courses as a high school junior to scrub toilets at Subway. All that will teach him is that he has toilet-scrubbing potential. And when he finds himself sitting across a boardroom table from a man whose parents never even hinted to him that he should scrub a toilet, he will be at a disadvantage.

Maybe I’ll scrub a couple of toilets in the years to come, physical or metaphorical, to cover his tab. God knows I’ve done it plenty of times already. But the toilet-scrubbing tradition in our family stops with me. Therefore, there will be no summer job. End of discussion.

Where the hell is her husband, anyway?

As the #11 Substack in the “Music” category, it is incumbent upon me to occasionally discuss music. So let’s discuss it — as a societal thermometer.

As previously noted in these pages, the vast majority of American pop stars are half-Asian women, and the vast majority of British pop stars are half-Black women. The leading lights among the latter are Rachel Keen d.b.a. RAYE and Olivia Dean. Their most popular songs, respectively, are “Where Is My Husband?” and “So Easy (To Fall In Love)”. Studio-produced videos below. Side note: these are both outstanding videos, scripted and produced by real talent with very little thought given to budget.

Were this a “race and culture” Substack, rather than a music Substack, we could talk quite a bit about how the women in the videos “code” white and the men “code” black, but we will save that for the people to whom it’s really important. I’d rather discuss the lyrics. Relevant excerpts for RAYE:

Baby (whoo-hoo), where the hell is my husband? (Whoo-hoo)
What is taking him so long (whoo-hoo) to find me?
Oh, baby, where the hell is my lover?
Getting down with another? (Whoo-hoo, yeah)
Tell him if you see him, baby, if you see him
Tell him, tell him he should holler

Why is this beautiful man waiting for me to get old?
Why he already testing my patience?
I only fear he’s taking time with other women that ain’t me
While I’ve been reviewing applications

He must need me (he must need me) completely (completely)
How my heart yearns for him…

I'm doing lonely acrobatics, unzipping my dress at 2 a.m.
And I'm tired of living like this…

Tell him I got brown eyes and a growing fear
That if he doesn't find me now, I'm gonna die alone…

I would like a ring, I would like a ring
I would like a diamond ring on my wedding finger
I would like a big and shiny diamond
That I could wave around and talk and talk about it
And when the day is here, forgive me, God, that I could ever doubt it…

When RAYE performed this at the iHeartMusic awards, the camera kept panning to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, who were watching and singing along while Taylor pointed to the ring on her finger. I thought it was appropriate, because Taylor Swift is to the average girlboss what Tom Sizemore’s character in “Heat” is to me: a privileged caricature of one’s own suffering.

Our society has told young women to freeze their eggs and give their youthful energy to spreadsheets and bosses rather than to children and family. It tells them that you’re more fulfilled shopping alone at Aritzia and Saks than you could ever be darning socks for your rambunctious quartet of school-aged boys. It encourages them to be an easy lay because being an easy lay keeps restaurants and DoorDash and Netflix and Bausch Health, makers of Wellbutrin XL(tm), in business.

And these women listen, and they do what they’re told, and they make the spreadsheets, and they attend the meetings, and they build the decks… only to unzip their dresses at two a.m. and ask “Where the hell is my husband?” If you’re lucky, you get the Taylor Swift ending: some high-earning simp shows up and has no more concern about your three dozen bodies and ten sextapes in the cloud than “Cars and Bids” does about a salvage title on an aluminum NSX. Then you get to have it all!

Most women will not get the Taylor Swift ending, because they are not Taylor Swift.

Next up we have Ms. Dean. She’s one-tenth the vocalist RAYE is, but that’s like saying that Billie Holiday didn’t have the range of Mariah Carey; not all talent is brash.

I could be the world to you, the missing piece
The extra sentimental kind of chemistry
Some people make it hard, with me, that isn’t the case

‘Cause I make it so easy to fall in love
So, come give me a call, and we’ll fall into us
I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life
Anyone with a heart would agree

I defy you to find a more charming pop song, but it gets oddly dark in a hurry:

I could be fresh air, might be the girl of your dreams (dream, dream, dream, dreams)
There's no need to hide if you're into me
'Cause I'm into you quite intimately
And maybe one night could turn into three
Well, I'm down to see

RAYE is demanding to know where her husband is, but Olivia would settle for a dude who is willing to fuck her three nights in a row before saying goodbye. And who can blame her? It’s a tough world out there. Young men have porn, and video games, and pornographic video games, and their group chats, and the 24/7 Polymarket Kalshi Rainbet casino in their phones.

This is the problem facing young women now: we’ve raised a generation of timid young male screen addicts who won’t cross the street to get laid. Even the most “alpha” of them would rather be in the gym building muscle than getting on top of a chick. Faced with this complete lack of interest, the girls are now doing what Nissan and Kia dealers have been doing for twenty years: they’re advertising easy terms and marketing to the lower demographics. You don’t have to worry about anything! I’m into you! Quite intimately! This is a sure thing!

Then we have a rather hilarious bridge where Olivia and her chorus just sing the word “ME!” over and over again. This is narcissism to an extent that would bewilder Perry Farrell. The last word in the song is also a long hold of a single note: “Meeeeeeeee.”

We talk a lot about male loneliness; this weekend we discussed the fellow who thought ChatGPT would be the best therapist with which to discuss his relationship, probably because he has no real friends outside Rocket League or Call of Duty. But female loneliness is just as strong. I refer you to the greatest quote of all time regarding relationships:

The desire of the man is for the woman

but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man

Our young men have discovered that they can do without the former. OnlyFans, online video games, gambling — those are more than adequate substitutes. But that leaves women out in the cold, begging for the attention of men who are distant, feeble, or both. Where the hell is your husband? Lady, he’s on Rainbet.

In less demand than Olivia Dean, apparently

Erik Starkman is better at headshotting the mooks at General Motors than your humble author could ever be. In his latest post, he draws some damning conclusions:

GM’s board of directors, chaired by CEO Mary Barra, excluded the adverse impact of President Trump’s tariffs when determining her record $29.9 million 2025 compensation, saying the move was intended to incentivize Barra to manage the fallout. Indications suggest Barra’s management of that fallout isn’t as strong as the board apparently believes.

GM Authority reports that Buick Envisions are piling up on dealer lots, with inventory far exceeding demand. There are currently 16,873 Envision units either in stock or in transit across the U.S.

At the current sales pace, that supply would take roughly 330 days to clear—close to a full year of inventory.

The Envision is built in China. It is subject to tariffs and does not qualify for certain U.S. financing incentives available to domestically produced vehicles. In addition, consumers increasingly want hybrids, and the Envision is a gas-powered vehicle.

GM has responded by raising prices. The Envision’s MSRP has increased by $4,500 over the past 15 months, along with a $600 increase in destination charges. GM is an industry leader in using destination charges, which are nonnegotiable, to mask price increases.

These unsold Envisions will be included in earnings. Under standard industry accounting, vehicles are recognized as sales when they are shipped to dealers, not when they are sold to customers. The cost of holding that inventory falls on dealers, who pay floorplan interest each month on vehicles that are not moving.

Let’s talk about how wild it is to retain Mary Barra at all, much less PAY HER THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS TO OVERSEE THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA’S GREATEST INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE!!! This is like writing a check for a million bucks to the cow that kicked over a lantern and started the Chicago Fire. She has earned more than

$300 million

during her tenure. Mark Reuss has earned ninety million bucks during the same timeframe. Imagine paying nearly half a billion dollars to two people who, arguably, have never made a correct decision in their entire lives. These very fine leaders have sodomized the Buick dealers of America with a year’s worth of Chinese junk and counted it as income!

It shouldn’t be legal to sell the Envision here at all. It certainly isn’t moral to do so. It’s immoral to take taxpayer money and use it to build the Chinese capacity that you then use to turn around and close North American plants. Not since GM deliberately made a crappy fighter plane so they could retain factory capacity to bushwhack Ford in 1946 have they so transparently acted in their own interests against those of the country.

Sixteen thousand Envisions on the lots. At a price $4500 above what they used to not fetch. It’s like a comedy skit. Hey, bubba, want a trash Chinese SUV? No? What if… we charged $4500 more?

The best and most ironic part: the Wall Street Journal is, apparently, wrong. The American buyer is not drooling to buy Chinese products, because they have Chinese products right in front of them that they won’t buy. Well, that’s not quite right. The American buyer isn’t Envision-resistant because the Envision is Chinese; they’re resistant because it’s a Buick.

When better Chinese cars are built… Buick won’t build them.

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow!

1. on second thought, I could have come up with two much more diverse entities than a company that produces filth and a dude who likely consumes a ton of it, couldn’t I?

2. with apologies to the late Eazy-E: