NBN so clearly remembers waking up Nov. 4, 2016 with a new-found sense that we’re saps. Not simply because our country had just elected a president completely opposed to all our hopes and dreams for humanity. Rather, it was the discovery that so many don’t share those hopes and dreams including, as it would turn out, close friends and family. As we saw it, 62 million Americans somehow believed that what’s best for them is best for this country and the rest of the world can go hang. It was a wake-up call.

Readers, before you say: “What a sap,” consider for a second when NBN came of age. Grave moral lessons from the Great Depression and WWII were the timber from which our hopes and dreams were hewn. Sure, America’s done stupid, bad, even inhuman things. But then there is the United Nations, The Marshall Plan, USAID, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air and Waters acts. The Statue of Freekin’ Liberty. The ends always justified the means in America, right?

Nov. 4, 2016, marked open season on all that. The means became the end in the United States. Atlas shrugged, bigly. Rather than fight the good fight and “resist” this sudden, seismic shift in national priorities, NBN spent the next four years trying to figure it out. Tools for said investigation were two friends who helped put the past POTUS in power and tried again this last November. Two very different friends. We’ll call them the Bubba Bros.

There is no way the Bubba Bros would last five minutes in each other’s company. Yet here they are, four years later still wholeheartedly endorsing the unrelenting, indiscriminate deconstruction of our administrative state. They love this country but hate its government. (Who doesn’t, right?) Nonetheless, this impossible communion of such antithetical actors is a warning shot across the bow of those who, however reluctantly, believe our government can still be an agent for good. You know, saps. Understanding what binds the Bubba Bros, all 74 million of them, in Our Latest Post.