It's Friday, April 17th, 2026 from Peachfish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Peska.

You know what's going to happen on election day? You're going to vote. They're going to count your votes,

and the candidates you vote for are going to win. Well, unless you're in the minority.

And that's how elections should work, and that's how elections will work. That's how elections

worked in Hungary, even though many people said they wouldn't work. It turns out in retrospect,

the autocrat was not quite that. I wrote an article on this, talked about it a couple of times.

It did change the subhead. The headline, What Kind of Autocrat loses an election? Original subhead

on the substack was not a good autocrat. Something like that, something glib. People, they responded. And I'll just summarize the general tone and tenor of the response. Fuck you, Pesca. So I changed the headline, not to give in to the mob, but just because I wasn't perhaps communicating enough that I am very much against Victor Orban,

I changed the subhead to read, How to Beat Trump is how hungry beat Orban, just vote him out.

But it's not that simple.

People will say, especially if they listen to a lot of podcasts that cover politics, as this one will today.

Chuck Todd's coming up.

But my point is more like, how do I order a book or how do I get delivery from Whole Foods?

Just go to Amazon, click the link.

You could say it's not that simple.

There's all this technology.

And Jeff Bezos had to get Amazon to beat his

rivals, and then there are these weirdly shaped vans in all your neighborhood, and sometimes

these rickshaw-type vehicles, and then the last mile is something. If you really get into it,

sure, it's not that simple. But for the user, which is to say the citizen in the democracy,

it is pretty simple. And this informs something that gets my goat, grinds my gears. It's the

positing of American democracy as done or over. Do you think I'm doing the thing where I exaggerate

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