Hey, Angry Patriots!
Welcome to The Angry Files, the politics on my radar this week.
This week, I’m looking at the national debt, New York City’s AI policy, paid political propaganda, Amy Acton’s refusal to debate, Cuyahoga County’s absurdly expensive jail, one of the best campaign ads I have seen this year and the third season of Silo.
Let’s get into it.
Washington Is Losing Control of the Debt
Any member of Congress who is not talking seriously about the national debt and annual deficit is committing a dereliction of duty. Congress controls the power of the purse. Presidents propose budgets and sign legislation, but Congress decides what the federal government taxes, borrows and spends.
The national debt is the total amount the federal government owes after decades of borrowing. It has now crossed $40 trillion. The deficit is the amount the government spends beyond what it collects during a single year. The Congressional Budget Office originally projected a $1.9 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, while updated estimates have placed it closer to $2.1 trillion. Every annual deficit adds to the debt.
The bond market determines how expensive that borrowing becomes. When the federal government sells Treasury securities, investors are lending it money. As of September 4, the 10-year Treasury yield was around 4.8 percent, while the 30-year yield was approximately 5.27 percent. Inflation, Federal Reserve policy, economic growth and global demand all affect the yield rate.
The government is already spending approximately $1 trillion annually on net interest. As trillions of dollars in existing debt mature and are refinanced at higher rates, that burden grows. A one-percentage-point increase on $10 trillion of refinanced debt eventually means approximately another $100 billion in annual interest.
We are paying one credit card with another credit card!
There are only a few options for Congress:
Reduce deficit spending while growing the economy. Bring annual deficits under control while expanding the economic base that supports the debt.
Produce budget surpluses and pay down the debt. Go beyond reducing deficits by taking in more than the government spends and using those surpluses to actually lower the outstanding debt.
Inflate away the debt. Allow inflation to make yesterday’s debt easier to repay with tomorrow’s less valuable dollars. This last option quietly destroys everyone’s purchasing power.
Congress keeps treating this like a problem for the next election cycle. The bond market may eventually decide that Washington has run out of time.
Banning AI From Schools Is Only Half the Solution
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI for students from prekindergarten through eighth grade. The policy affects nearly 600,000 students.
My initial reaction is that this is both a good idea and a bad idea.
Children need to learn how to write an essay, construct an outline, solve arithmetic and algebra problems, think critically and interact with other children. They should not be able to type a homework assignment into ChatGPT and submit whatever comes back. An AI system should not replace teachers, parents, reading, handwriting, problem-solving or the uncomfortable process of figuring something out.
On that point, Mamdani is right to hit pause.
However, New York City should be asking OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies to build protected systems specifically for students.
Imagine an AI tutor that does not provide the answer.
It asks the child questions, identifies where the child became confused and walks through the problem one step at a time. It could adjust explanations to the student’s reading level, help a teacher identify patterns across a classroom and give a child extra practice at home. It would function as an extension of the teacher, not a replacement.
Nobody would object to every child having access to a responsible tutor after school. The issue is whether the technology is designed to teach or designed to complete the assignment.
South Korea is already moving toward treating AI access as public infrastructure, with plans to provide its citizens free access to premium-level domestic AI services. The United States cannot respond to this technological change by teaching wealthy children how to use AI privately while banning poorer children from encountering it in public schools.
Pause the current tools. Protect children’s privacy and cognitive development.
But build, like right now, better tools. Simply banning AI and pretending it will disappear is not an education policy.
Your Political Feed Is Being Manufactured
The Atlantic published a disturbing investigation into a political clipping operation called Elephant Clipping. A clipper takes a longer video, chops it into short pieces and posts those pieces across TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
According to The Atlantic, Elephant Clipping was run through a company in Latvia and recruited subcontractors, many apparently outside the United States, to post pro-Republican material. Participants could submit favorable conservative clips for payment through a reported $300,000 monthly campaign budget, receiving approximately $300 for every million views.
The investigation found instructions telling participants to use American proxy servers and hide their locations. The clips were posted through accounts designed to resemble ordinary Americans independently supporting Republican ideas. Some campaigns offered additional money for favorable Vivek Ramaswamy content. The identities of the ultimate funders were not disclosed. The Atlantic
This caught my attention because of the coordinated online attack against Brian Poindexter, the Democratic candidate in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District. Multiple conservative and Daily Wire-aligned accounts appeared to push essentially the same framing at roughly the same time.
I cannot prove that those specific posts came from Elephant Clipping or any paid operation. What I can say is that the timing looked more like a coordinated distribution strategy than several people independently discovering the same supposedly important story.
This happens on both sides. Democrats use influencers, consultants, friendly publications and coordinated messaging too. The larger problem is that most people scrolling through social media cannot tell whether they are seeing journalism, advertising, campaign material or an overseas contractor being paid for views.
The media environment is bought, organized and manipulated. Your feed is not a neutral reflection of what people care about. Money decides and messages appear organic.
Amy Acton Still Owes Ohioans a Debate
Amy Acton has declined to debate Vivek Ramaswamy, and I understand the campaign strategy. Her campaign says Ramaswamy and his billionaire supporters have spent more than $50 million on inaccurate and disgusting attacks against Acton and her family, including AI-generated material portraying her as having a substance-abuse problem.
I understand why she does not want to reward that conduct with a statewide stage.
I still think her decision is wrong.
Neither Acton nor Ramaswamy faced a primary that forced them to defend their ideas before their own parties. Republican leaders lined up behind Ramaswamy early, while Democratic power players helped clear the field for Acton whether anyone wants to call that an endorsement or not. Ohioans were left with two nominees who have never held legislative office and no voting records showing how either would govern.
Now we may not get a debate either.
The Ohio Democratic Party condemned Mike DeWine for refusing to debate Nan Whaley in 2022. It called debates “the equivalent of a job interview” and said candidates should not avoid scrutiny, fact-checking or difficult questions because they are leading in the polls.
That principle cannot change because the Democrat is now the candidate who sees more political risk than reward.
This is part of a larger retreat from public access.
The Cuyahoga County Democratic Party discouraged judicial candidates from participating in Judge4Yourself.
Some Republicans refuse editorial-board interviews with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
Candidates (Mike Dovilla) skip League of Women Voters forums.
Former Senator Sherrod Brown and his opponent Senator Jon Husted seemingly will not debate.
Members of Congress replace actual town halls with telephone events where questions can be screened in advance.
The public increasingly receives only campaign advertisements, curated events and consultant-approved communication.
I agree that the traditional debate format is broken. It rewards interruptions, lies and made-for-TikTok insults. Change the format. Control the microphones. Give candidates the topics beforehand. Crowdsource questions from Ohioans and fact-check claims in real time.
But do not eliminate the debate. Acton does not owe Ramaswamy a performance opportunity. She owes Ohioans the chance to compare both candidates under the same conditions.
Stop Spending Money on This Damn Jail
Cuyahoga County’s proposed Central Services Campus has become one of the most expensive correctional projects I could find anywhere in the developed world.
The current estimate is approximately $889 million for 1,886 beds, or roughly $471,000 per bed. That is about what it costs to build a very nice three- or four-bedroom suburban house for every person the jail is designed to hold.
Where the fuck is the money going?
Franklin County’s completed corrections center cost approximately $280,000 per rated bed. It includes medical care, mental-health treatment, behavioral programming, addiction services, direct supervision and reentry support. Cuyahoga is proposing many of the same modern features at a cost approximately 68 percent higher per bed.
Recent facilities in the United Kingdom, France and Japan have also been built for substantially less per bed. These are not cages without medical treatment, ventilation or rehabilitation services. They are modern facilities in wealthy countries.
Cuyahoga’s HVAC estimate alone is approximately $85.8 million for 872,000 square feet, or around $98 per square foot. That is nearly twice the reported per-square-foot mechanical cost of the Coyote Ridge correctional facility and Somerset County Jail. It even exceeds the per-square-foot cost of a broader hospital mechanical package that included HVAC, plumbing and medical gas.
Yet too many Democrats would rather turn a blind eye than hold their own people accountable. They excuse bad decisions, accept mediocre governance and demand so little from the people around them because they refuse to hold themselves or their political allies to any meaningful standard.
Bullshit.
Cancel it if necessary. Pay a cancellation penalty.
I would rather lose millions stopping a financially indefensible project than obligate taxpayers to more than a billion dollars because political insiders are afraid to admit they lost control.
Brian Poindexter Made One of the Best Ads of 2026
Brian Poindexter released one of the best campaign advertisements I have seen in a long time.
The advertisement features his daughters making fun of him, from the enormous phone clipped to his belt to the little generational idiosyncrasies that start appearing when a man reaches his mid-40s and becomes fully comfortable being a goofy dad.
The ad was obviously planned and scripted, but it did not feel artificial. That is what made it work.
His daughters appeared comfortable, funny and proud of their father. Brian was willing to be the joke. The entire family seemed to understand the plot without a consultant instructing them to be a “normal” family for the camera.
That is incredibly difficult to manufacture.
Political advertising usually fails when candidates attempt to sand away everything unusual about themselves. Consultants take a real person, remove the quirks, replace normal language with approved phrases and produce another video of someone walking through a factory while pretending to listen to a worker.
Everybody Wants to Be Zohran Mamdani
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass recently released one of the cringiest political videos I have seen in a while.
Poindexter went in the opposite direction. He let voters see the oversized phone, the awkwardness and the dad humor. He made his personality part of the message.
The result also creates an unavoidable contrast with incumbent Congressman Max Miller. Miller is going through an extremely public divorce and custody battle ex-wife. She has made serious allegations against him, which Miller denies, and the legal battle has generated thousands of pages of court docs and media coverage.
Poindexter did not need to mention any of that. He showed a warm, relaxed relationship with his daughters, and voters will recognize the contrast themselves.
The best political advertisements do not tell us that a candidate is authentic. They allow us to see enough of the candidate to decide for ourselves.
Brian’s ad did that.
Silo Was Disappointing, and I’m Still Watching
Finally, the third season of Apple TV’s Silo has ended.
Silo feels like someone put Snowpiercer, The Platform, Cube and the underground city of Zion from The Matrix into a blender. It is a dystopian mystery built around class, information control, rebellion, surveillance and the question of who gets to decide what people are allowed to know.
For two seasons, it has been a good show to watch for 45 minutes at the end of the night. It is entertaining enough to keep me interested and mysterious enough to make me return for the next episode.
Season three, however, was a chore.
The story moved SOOOOOOO slow. The writing became tedious, the political parallels were painfully on the nose, and several supposedly dramatic developments were predictable. Political allegory works when it deepens a story. Here, the show sometimes appeared to stop telling its own story and started playing into Elon Musk haters.
What made the experience stranger was reading reviews that barely discussed those obvious parallels. When a show is this politically on the nose and so little of the published conversation acknowledges it, I start questioning how organic that conversation really is.
The absence of the most obvious criticism (Elon parallel) made the online discussion feel carefully managed.
I watched every episode and I will watch season fourth and final (thankfully) season.
Apparently, my disappointment has limits.
Let me know what was on your radar this week.