I've seen things down in the tunnels. I've seen a possum run a three-card monte game on a subway grate. I've seen a man try to pay rent with a Chuck E. Cheese token and argue it was legal tender. But I had never seen a former Labor Secretary look at a reusable rocket and decide it would run better if it were managed like the DMV.

Here's the case file.

On his Saturday "Coffee Klatch" show, dated October 24, Robert Reich, who ran the Labor Department under Bill Clinton, told Democrats it was time to "defund Musk." The episode's title was "Defund Musk and Impeach Trump," which at least saves you the trouble of watching it.

Then he went further. According to a clip posted by Collin Rugg, Reich said Democrats "ought to" be "laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink & SpaceX," adding, "It should be a public corporation."

Let that settle in your coffee. The man wants the government to own the company that lands rockets on their own tail, a trick the government spent decades paying other people to attempt.

In the episode notes, Reich called Elon Musk and Donald Trump "the two most vile people in the United States (in the world?)." The parentheses are doing a lot of work. It's the sound of a man who started a sentence about America and then remembered the rest of the planet exists.

Musk did not take it as a compliment. He replied on X: "Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich."

So now we have a professor proposing to seize a rocket company and a rocket man proposing to seize the professor. Down here we call that a Sunday.

Let's walk through how the plan would work, because somebody has to.

Step one, Democrats win Congress. Step two, they hold a hearing about who owns the rockets. Step three, the rockets are renamed the Department of Upward Mobility, and every launch requires a 40-page environmental review, a public comment period, and a form you can only pick up in person between 10 and 11:45 on alternate Tuesdays.

I asked a tunnel source, a retired transit worker named Gus who has seen what public ownership does to an escalator, for comment.

"The escalator at my old station has been 'temporarily out of service' since the Bush administration," Gus told me. "The first Bush. You want them running a satellite network? Your Wi-Fi will come back online in 2041 with a press release."

Gus is not real, but his escalator absolutely is. Every city has one.

Here's the part Reich skipped. Public corporations already exist. They deliver your mail on a schedule best described as seasonal, and they run the trains that taught a whole generation the word "delay." Nobody looked at that track record and said, "Yes, now give them orbit."

The man spent his career explaining how the economy should work. He just never mentioned that his version comes with a hold line.

I've seen things down in the tunnels. Now I've seen a plan to put Starlink on the same waiting list as the escalator.

The Demorat is satire. Tunnel Tucker is a fictional character, and so is Gus. Quotes from real people are taken from their public statements and posts; everything else is made up for laughs.

The real story that inspired this