To avow a political stance and therefore take responsibility for the exercise of power shows more honor than, for example, the dirtbag left ever has, who resentfully carp and sneer in their permanent exile. If Anna and Dasha had tried to appear aloof and above it all after Trump won, if they'd pled the case that they only supported him for the aesthetic, it would have been disreputable. They're not political pundits, though; they tend not to weigh policies on the merits or to think through their effects "dialectically," as their old comrades would say, or even to do what I do, which is to attempt an exhaustive and exhausting examination of my own divided loyalties and conflicting desires. They're just loyalists, which doesn't make for a good podcast, exacerbated by the paradoxically ultra-democratic un-democratic nature of new-right politics, where the Caesar figure is supposed to channel the will of his constituents directly, thus obviating any need on their part to question or cavil. (I could criticize the memecoins, but it's possible—probable!—we will all be shilling memecoins within five years.) Our heroines are also mismatched as types on this score: Anna is a true ideologue and moralist, Dasha an artist and ironist. Committed to truth and therefore able to lie, Anna said she hid her conservatism before, was only pretending to be a leftist, but now proclaims it openly; Dasha, on the other hand, is a chameleon poet, incapable of truth on that level, committed only to the higher or lower truth that is the emotional reality of time and place. She recently returned from the Caribbean saying "praise Jah," whereas Anna might have come back from the same trip with a distanced and acerbic political analysis. In that respect, Dasha is closer to the non-ideologue Trump, hence she said she voted for him but would not have voted for a generic Republican, whereas Anna said she would have voted for any Republican. Anna also recently conceded that truly winning against the left would be a disappointment because one would have to go back (I quote from memory) to "writing poems" and "going to parties," presumably non-ideological parties, since they do go to ideological ones, and non-ideological poems, too, since she could write political poetry if she pleased. (What's the MAGA version, I wonder, of "Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying"? MAGA's resident poet laureate, Joseph Massey, tends to write apolitical religion-and-nature lyrics in the Imagist style, not any kind of right-wing Brechtian satire or invective—Brecht, who was himself inspired by the right, by Kipling. But I digress.) Despite this admission, their podcast, to retain vitality, should return to its cultural roots and deal with the politics inter alia. Why did they review the dire Nosferatu, for example, other than as an excuse for their customary discourse on sex and gender, and not the much more Red-Scare-coded Anora and The Brutalist, films about which I am sure they would have had surprising and expert things to say?