A Week in the Life

O n Day 1, a no-name opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times writes a piece arguing that you should probably cancel your plans for the coming weekend and cut off your foot with a hay sickle.

Initially, this essay is overlooked, until, on the morning of Day 4, it is discovered by a Twitter user whose other output makes his account un-retweetable. Within an hour, the column has become the top trending topic online, and thereby the source of most of the conversations among journalists, politicians, and the terminally plugged-in.

By midafternoon, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has critiqued the piece in a mini-documentary that is released on, and then pulled down from, YouTube. In response to Walsh’s work, a blue-check propaganda account that obtained its large following from its stint as a Taylor Swift fan-feed claims that the documentary is in violation of the Geneva Convention. This claim receives 92,000 retweets, is endorsed by Laurence Tribe and Ted Lieu, and forms the core of the next six weeks of programming on MSNBC.

Arriving first to the hot-take punch, a Vox writer who has neither read the column nor watched Walsh’s video weighs in to explain with confidence that all opposition to cutting off your feet with a hay sickle is a “social construct” that “emerged” in about 2018. At Salon, Amanda Marcotte backs this theory but complains that, while this is probably true, she can’t help but notice that the discussion about cutting off your feet with a hay sickle is being conducted “mostly by white men.” At the Atlantic, Adam Serwer repudiates the Vox piece by proposing that the most racist people on the 1957 Little Rock School Board were against cutting off your feet with a hay sickle, and inviting his readers to “think hard” about what “that tells us” about the practice’s “contemporary critics — which include Republican Senator Tim Scott.”

Serwer’s Atlantic piece is promptly read by the sort of people who produce afternoon TV. On CNN, Jim Acosta interrupts an urgent report about a terrorist attack in Canada to remind viewers that hay sickles are dangerous and to reassure them that, despite this, he is brave enough to proceed with his story. On The View, Joy Behar gives the impression that, despite her strong opinions on the matter, she doesn’t really know what a hay sickle is, while Ana Navarro tells the audience that, as a “proud Latina,” she personally likes to call sickles “sicklelôs.” Seeing this, AOC immediately begins an Instagram livestream in which she indignantly explains that opposition to cutting your foot off with a hay sickle is “the historical linchpin of the capitalist-privilege campaign against workers’ rights.” Halfway through AOC’s spot, Marjorie Taylor Greene walks past and shouts that sickles of all sorts are “Communist.” At the White House, Karine Jean-Pierre tells Philip Wegmann that the president is monitoring the situation from Delaware.

On Truth Social, Donald Trump contends that Mitch McConnell and “his Asian wife ought to cut off their feet with a hay sickle!” This prompts Breitbart to suggest that, while cutting off your foot with a hay sickle is a bad idea “in general,” Trump “has a point.” Horrified, the Bulwark runs an editorial calling for former presidents to be arrested if they even “discuss hay sickles.” At the Dispatch, David French assiduously splits the difference, proposing that if “Americans of good faith” are determined to cut their feet off with hay sickles, they must ensure that their “souls remain intact” throughout. Here at National Review, we all disagree mildly with one another. I write that I “don’t like the idea at all, of course” but that, in a free country, it’s ultimately up to an adult and his doctor whether he cuts off his foot with a hay sickle — and that, besides, “under the Constitution this is clearly a question for the states.” MBD dissents, arguing that this isn’t a question of “neutral liberalism” but of “moral integrity.” Phil Klein wants to know how much cutting your foot off with a hay sickle is going to cost the taxpayer, and if it’ll be covered under Obamacare. Dan McLaughlin writes two 20,000-word pieces: one on the legality of cutting your foot off with a hay sickle, the other on the history of hay sickles in the Austrian Empire. In the Corner, Jack Butler wonders if hay sickles were ever mentioned in a Tolkien book, and Jim Geraghty asks if cutting off their feet with a hay sickle could plausibly help the coaching staff of the New York Jets.

In response, Tom Nichols accuses National Review of being “anti-anti-hay sickle,” and reminds his readers that hay sickles are supposed to be used only by licensed professionals. In a piece that was supposed to respond to Nichols’s argument, Conor Friedersdorf instead publishes an “unedited collection of readers’ thoughts on the use of hay sickles as amputation devices.” At the New York Times, Thomas Friedman asks whether, “in a more general sense, we aren’t all hay sickles?” Nick Kristof starts a fundraising drive to send second-hand hay sickles to Nepal, and Ross Douthat observes that any society that has time to use hay sickles for anything other than cutting hay is “irredeemably decadent.” Speaking at Davos, Hillary Clinton remarks that “hay sickles are a women’s rights issue” — a comment that makes Larry Summers frown and gives Paul Krugman’s wife the idea for his next column.

In the Washington Post, Paul Waldman contends that the “astroturfed” opposition to cutting off your foot with a hay sickle has clearly “come from the Koch Brothers,” while Henry Olsen breaks down the likely electoral effects of an increase in hay-sickle-inspired casualties at a county-by-county level. At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait explains why all of National Review’s opinions are wrong — even the ones that contradict other ones — and predicts confidently that the issue will be unequivocally good for the Democrats. Writing from a diner in Western Pennsylvania, Salena Zito suggests that, actually, the public’s view of hay sickles is “complex” and could “foreshadow a surprise Trump win.” This theme is echoed indirectly by James Kirchick in his roiling Tablet essay, “My Year Living with a Hay Sickle,” which contains an extremely alarming anecdote about Richard Gere.

On Day 5, American Greatness proposes that if hay sickles are going to be used at all, they ought to be made in America. On Twitter, Bernie Sanders endorses the column, and then deletes his tweet without explanation. At Compact, Matt Schmitz provides official confirmation that cutting your foot off with a hay sickle “does not comport with the Highest Good,” in a piece that Josh Hammer paraphrases in its entirety in Newsweek. Not to be outdone, Declan Leary writes in the American Conservative that cutting your foot off with a hay sickle ought to be mandatory for non-Catholics. Electing to stay away from the matter entirely, Reason’s Peter Suderman offers cocktail recommendations to those who have decided that they’d be better off with one foot, and then argues with Sonny Bunch for an hour about whether those cocktails would look “vibrant” if they were consumed in 65mm.

On Day 7, China invades Taiwan, and everyone immediately pivots to pretending that their views on the hay-sickle question can be said to have perfectly predicted that crisis.