Robert Graboyes

3 weeks ago | persuasion.community | Robert Graboyes

Long ago, I was state chair of the Virginia Democratic Party’s youth auxiliary, party chairman in my hometown, and a national convention delegate. By around 2000, economics and other issues had led me rightward, though not implacably so. These days, my votes go often to Republicans, sometimes to no one, and occasionally to Democrats. Here are my dozen suggestions for howDemocrats might persuade my hand (and the hands of similarly-minded Americans) to gravitate toward the “D” on the 2028 ballot.

1 month ago | graboyes.substack.com | Robert Graboyes

Paid subscriptions ($50/year or $5/month) really help, but we love free subscribers, too. Substack (Bastiat’s Window in particular) is loaded with intelligent, talkative, thoughtful commenters. My recent tariff pieces (“Tired of Winning, Apparently” and “Real-World Trade-Deficit Math-Magic,”) and one older one (“The Gulf of Trump”) elicited tens of thousands of page views, hundreds of comments, and dozens of emails.

1 month ago | graboyes.substack.com | Robert Graboyes

Paid subscriptions ($50/year or $5/month) really help, but we love free subscribers, too. In 2016, Donald Trump promised, “We’re gonna win so much that you may get tired of winning.” His advisors must have reached that point, as evidenced by the bizarre, incoherent “Liberation Day” tariff policy they helped craft.

2 months ago | discoursemagazine.com | Robert Graboyes

On March 23, genomics pioneer 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and to be sure, the bankruptcy offers an opportunity to indulge our darkest fears about the digital world and to contemplate how individuals and institutions might handle private data going forward. Once valued at more than $6 billion, 23andMe saw 99% of its market capitalization evaporate after medical applications failed to pan out and hackers in 2023 absconded with the data of 7 million clients.

2 months ago | graboyes.substack.com | Robert Graboyes

Paid subscriptions ($50/year or $5/month) really help, but we love free subscribers, too. Portions of this essay were adapted from my “Digital Life — No Room to Hide,” published in 2017 by InsideSources. Privacy, it turns out, may have been a vanishingly brief phenomenon in human history.