American Dumpster Fire: Tales from a Moron Caught in the Crossfire of the Culture Wars

Since no one in publishing wants my story, I'm writing it here.

When I got sober in Los Angeles in 2013, my sponsor told me that I wouldn’t recognize myself the longer I stayed clean. If she had told me that eleven years later I would be a Texas suburban mom—I never would have quit drinking.

Santa Monica. Summer of 2013. A few months before I got sober.

Jokes aside, 2015 to 2025 has been an insane decade—for the world—and for me personally. Globally, the shifts have been tectonic. It is bookended with Trump’s descent down the escalator—as a joke to some, a savior to others—and his recent star-studded inauguration. Smack dab in the middle is a global pandemic.

I just happened to be standing in the center of the Venn diagram where comedy, sex, and running my mouth on Twitter (now X) intersected. I was at Playboy during #metoo. I was doing stand-up comedy when comedians took an outsized role in pushing back against the fun police. I was on Twitter the whole time, a social media platform that propelled me from slinging french fries in a café to hilariously being hailed as some kind of “voice of reason” on the frontlines of the virtual civil war.

How did this happen? How did a “verified nobody” manage to tweet my way into the center of the culture wars?

For years, I was just another average American liberal with a Twitter account, struggling as a freelance writer and stand-up comedian while waiting tables to pay the rent. I spent decades of my life with my head down, working hard, living paycheck to paycheck, drinking too much, a blissfully ignorant “libtard.” Although I was raised a New England Democrat and could spout the party lines verbatim, I really didn’t care all that much about politics.

Until, of course, I simply couldn’t avoid them. The culture war had taken over and I was caught in the crossfire. But this didn’t just happen to me. It happened to millions of other Americans who had managed thus far to avoid partaking in politics. Eventually, the culture war will come to you.

Not only did I go from drunk to sober. I went from single to married. From childless to mother. From California to Texas. And to my great surprise—from voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to voting for Donald J. Trump in 2024.

Although these changes in my life might seem remarkable, they’re not. Millions of Americans have voted with their feet. Millions of Americans, particularly mothers, have been what we might call “red-pilled” in wave after wave after wave.

Culturally we went from #metoo to #MAGA. From the Women’s March to a bill banning men in Women’s sports. From pussy hats to red baseball caps. From DEI to meritocracy. From censorship to free speech? (We’ll see how this one plays out—I’m not convinced anyone really cares about free speech so much as they care about power.)

Trump’s first inauguration was an embarrassment and most people, other than the brave few, were ashamed to be associated with him. This time around his inauguration was attended by society’s elite movers and shakers. Many of the most powerful men on the planet all gathered to kiss the ring(s). (They were sucking up to Elon, too.) He has the support of some of the biggest names in tech and entertainment. Gen Z men love him. So do professional athletes who will do his weird little dance to celebrate a victory. Trump, at last, is popular.

As the kids these day say, the vibes have definitively shifted. Now the great realignment is underway.

I have spent years and thousands of hours podcasting trying to figure one thing out:

Why did I ever quit drinking? Just kidding. (Kind of.)

What is happening?

What happened to the left wing party that I knew and loved? What happened to the right wing “moral majority”? Since when did “radicals” and “punks” align with Big Tech, Big Corporations, mandatory vaccines, and side with the government? How did the Right become “cool”?

Part memoir, part social commentary, AMERICAN DUMPSTER FIRE will follow me as I navigate the tumultuous years prior to Trump that began with #MeToo and ended with, well, wherever we end up.

This is my story. But it’s not just my story. It’s the story of so many Americans who—thanks to the perfect storm of a reality show president and social media—almost overnight went from moron majority to accidental pundits commenting on an extended national dumpster fire.

I’ve been trying to sell some version of a book for years. When I first pitched it around 2018 as THE CENTER MUST HOLD, I was told there is no market for it. “The center doesn’t actually exist.”

When I tried to pitch it again as THE ACCIDENTAL PUNDIT, I was told it skewed “a little too much toward memoir and should instead aim a little bit wider, toward sociological observation of the exhaustion phenomenon we see throughout the country.” In other words they wanted me to tone down the funny and be more journalistic. Which honestly sounded awful. No one wants that from me. People aren’t coming to me for sober analysis. They’re coming to me because I’m often the frustrated voice of the Moron Majority™️.

When I tried to pitch it again recently as AMERICAN DUMPSTER FIRE, I was basically told I need to be offering some kind of solution, like “AND THAT’S WHY IT’S IMPERATIVE YOU MUST VOTE FOR TRUMP!”

Again, no one wants that from me. No one in my audience is looking to me as some authority and they’re certainly not voting how I tell them to vote. As I’ve said many, many times—I don’t care how you vote.

After Trump won and all the trends I have been writing about and commenting on for the past decade played out—I was told, hilariously, now it’s too late for a book like this. I disagree.

But also, it doesn’t matter. I write because I have no choice. I write to process my life and the world around me and in the rush and stress of the past decade, I’ve had little time to sit down and process anything. Over the past decade, I was humbly required to investigate my priors over and over again. In order to move forward, I need to investigate what new priors I’ve adopted during this wild transition.

Since the internet made me, it seems right to give birth to this book online, too. Many of you have been with me since the beginning, watching me “grow up” in public. Getting so much wrong, occasionally stumbling into getting things right. Because my audience is incredibly engaged (and much smarter than me), I want to hear from you. I value your opinion. Therefore, large portions of this book will be behind the paywall so I can filter out the trolls and workshop my thinking with people who come from vastly different backgrounds and have also found themselves lost in the wasteland of the center, found in a new party, or alienated from it all.

So this isn’t the book the market wants— but it’s the book I need to write. I think it was Gandhi who said, “Write the book you wish to see in this world.”

Become a supporter and get a sneak peek at the Table of Contents and to hear stories of what it was like to do my first media hit on The Ben Shapiro Election Special, why I found myself crying in a tub in D.C., and so much more.

I’m excited about this.