506 - Influencer Poison, Trump’s Lifeguard & The Migrant Summer

Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the last month of summer, if summer means anything to you. When you’re broke, it’s heat, car seats, and perhaps Burger King’s disastrous bacon sundae. Now it’s rage bait: four-hundred-dollar Japanese melons, nineteen-dollar strawberries, pricey mediocre food. I tried the melon. It was a melon. Melons stink.

There’s understandable disgust with conspicuous consumption, especially in the Hamptons, where people advertise absurd purchases like they’re begging the public to remove their heads. I live there because it’s pretty, near family and the city, not because I worship it. At lovely liberal dinners in gigantic homes, somebody’s kid discovers finance is an insider club. Yes, darling, fascinating.

What’s making people furious is influencer disease. Take a quick picture and say a restaurant rocks; fine. But don’t turn scallops into a production set, shove phones at workers, invade kitchens, or broadcast strangers who never consented. Maybe the guy beside you is having a discreet affair and you’re reviewing risotto. Have the tiniest bit of decency.

Privacy will be the next actual luxury: no-phone clubs, no-filming restaurants, places where people pay not to be captured by an army trying to become influencers. A lawyer gets filmed kissing someone in a park, then faces consequences at work despite doing nothing illegal there. People will wall themselves off from cameras and surveillance.

The tech loop is perfect: tech gives people devices to behave monstrously in public, drives everyone home, then sells them technology for staying home. I’m for getting out, meeting people, disagreeing, being part of the world. But I understand the recluse now. Everything is marketed, overpriced, and sold as something you must line up for because you saw it online.

This footage shows a sixteen-year-old lifeguard at Sea Bright Beach in Santa Cruz trying to pull a roughly ten-year-old boy through heavy surf. A witness says conditions changed incredibly quickly as the guard held on and other swimmers moved to assist.

So the witness’s instinct was: take out the phone while two kids might die. Fine, perhaps we only know this rescue happened because he recorded it, but that’s the American division of labor now. One person risks everything, one films, and I explain it days later. The kid did his lifeguard job, admirable, but calm down with turning every competent employee into a White House ceremony.

Sheldon and I knew Lindsey Graham for many years. Around 1990, we helped fund an AIPAC educational trip for freshman Republican congressmen to Israel. I met Lindsey there, and as a physician I notice eyes; to me, his looked clear and sincere. Sheldon spoke with him virtually every day about Israel.

That’s why Miriam Adelson is compelling as a supervillain. I oppose what she wants and the influence-buying arrangement she describes, obviously, but she seems to enjoy the enterprise. She’d be more entertaining at dinner than a Columbia gender-studies professor because she has infectious enthusiasm for her project. Lindsey was, in this telling, a durable acquisition.

Then there’s footage from Spain’s North African enclave, with migrants arriving from Morocco by land and sea. I don’t know enough about this event to claim it was orchestrated, including the Israel theory. But migration will dominate European politics for our adult lives. Western intervention, climate disruption, collapsing states—there are real reasons people leave. There are also practical limits nobody discusses honestly.

You cannot have thousands entering countries with established cultures, weak economies, evaporating middle classes, and tell worried residents they’re forbidden an opinion. Colonial powers did monstrous things, but conquest, slavery, and barbarism are not uniquely Western inventions. Pretending every concern is evil produces surveillance, violence, and chaos, not a humane society.

I’m not saying every migrant is the same, or that I know the secret hand behind every boat. This arrangement will not hold. Countries are not merely economic zones. Even moving Texans into tiny New York apartments would create a clash of expectations. Pretending differences don’t exist is insane.

My fantasy is a fully paid, safely staged production: boats arriving at a Hamptons dinner while rich friends lecture about racism. Actors, craft services, stunt coordinators, everybody fine—then “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.” Let oceanfront principles get nervous for one minute. Enjoy the week, everyone.