Player Haters

“America first does not mean America alone,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on April 23, seeking to reassure the market three weeks after the president declared Liberation Day and tariffed the world. Spooked by turbulence in the bond market—or eager to discard the pretense that this wasn’t primarily about a Sino-American decoupling—the White House had already announced a ninety-day pause exempting all countries besides the Middle Kingdom from the new import levies. Despite Bessent’s remarks, the administration’s attack on all the factories under heaven has been met with international opprobrium and plunging domestic confidence in our chief dealmaker; the United States’ position in the twenty-first-century global order has arguably been more threatened by its upheaval of the supply chain than, for example, the approximately 4.5 million left dead in the war on terror, to say nothing of what this country now abets in Gaza.

“Player Haters” surveys the state of competition in Fortress America, where the only flourishing industries are sports betting and YouTube. The latter’s vloggers have embraced the country’s masculinist turn: fewer suicide forest pranks and tiny-mic’d street interviews, more beating the shit out of each other. Sean Nam demonstrates how influencers took over the dying sport of boxing, selling sloppy bouts to an uneducated audience while decrepit and corrupt regulatory bodies played blind and profited big. Elsewhere in violence, mixed-martial-arts moguls TKO Group Holdings, Inc. have diversified, now proffering Professional Bull Riders, a multimillion-dollar novelty league that sells highlight reels of bovine-on-man accidents and the Western frontier as not a place but a vibe, per Grayson Scott, easily accessible everywhere given this nation’s omnipresent fears of invasion. Country-fried LARPing continues in Lena Redford’s exhibit of cowboy mounted shooting, while Tristan deBrauwere’s photos of CarJitsu—i.e., jiujitsu in a car—depict another breed of vehicle-based brutality. No one has choked out a Formula 1 driver at 230 miles per hour, but perhaps one of the citizens of Las Vegas might chance it, aggrieved, as David Hill shows, by the city’s many capitulations to the racing league.

Other athletes watch as once quintessentially American pastimes experience a downturn. Dennis M. Hogan contemplates whether college sports are too dependent on exploitation to survive paying players. Dave Denison wonders how long the change-resistant sport of bowling can endure the vulture capitalists buying up alleys around the country. Petra Browne details the challenges faced by female bodybuilders long after their 1980s heyday, competitors reliant now on muscle-worshipping groupies to bankroll their costs—inclusive of the steroids necessary to compete at the highest levels. Andrew Schenker considers the complicated questions faced by halls of fame, like whether a separate wing should exist for the dopers and cheaters.

On its current course, the United States could use some juice of its own. Domestic production will have to be bolstered and industrial inputs found. Meg Bernhard reports from Arizona’s copper mines, necessary for the cutting-edge technologies we’re supposedly about to furnish ourselves, alongside the billions of dollars of pharmaceuticals we’ll no longer import from abroad. But will putting a “Made in the USA” sticker on every bottle of Advil compel the middlemen of medicine, described by Jess McAllen, to take pity on our wallets? It’s doubtful. The tariffs, as currently conceived, are already a regressive tax, and America First seems to only ever mean immiserating the poor until they’re penniless and alone.