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Sunday Thought: The Horrifying Truth About Trump's Cage Match

14 June 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

Tonight, Trump is throwing an 80th birthday bash for himself (he says it’s in honor of the 250th birthday of the United States) with a “Freedom250” Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the South Lawn of the White House at 8 p.m. ET.

It will be a bloody gladiator fight taking place inside a 600-ton, 154-feet-tall skeletal structure called “the Claw,” painted red, white and blue. Opponents will punch, kick, wrestle, choke, and use jiu-jitsu on each other until one of them is unconscious or verbally concedes, or a referee stops the fight because one is judged too damaged to absorb any more violence.

This is a money-making operation for the UFC (which is offering special-access VIP packages for $1.5 million), for Trump buddy David Ellison’s Paramount (which will livestream it to you if you buy a subscription for $8.99 a month — see here), for Crypto.com and Ram (which are sponsoring it), and for Trump (who’s deciding which of his billionaire friends and CEO buddies will be invited ringside. Last night, Trump held a $1 million-a-person dinner at the Trump National Golf Club at Potomac, Virginia, to benefit his Super PAC, Maga Inc.).

Beyond the usual Trumpian issues of self-dealing and pay-to-play corruption, today’s fight also raises the question: What does a cage match on the White House lawn have to do with America’s 250th anniversary?

Just this: Trump and his regime are seeking to project an America that’s like the winner of a cage match.

Trump sees everything and everyone in terms of dominance or submission, and he’s hellbent on dominance. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he told his supporters on January 6, 2021, before urging them to go the Capitol.

He views America as locked in a zero-sum match with the rest of the world, and there’s no limit to our violence. Unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, he memorably said, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Trump’s entire “manosphere” is obsessed with force and violence. His secretary of “war,” Pete Hegseth, threatens “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” and “maximum violence to the enemy.” When told some fishermen survived the American bombing of their boat, Hegseth reportedly ordered his commander to “kill them all.”

Trump’s secretary of health and human services frequently posts shirtless workout videos in which he’s lifting weights alongside figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kid Rock. He claims Trump has “the highest testosterone level” ever seen in an individual over 70 years old.

Trump’s whole circle — including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and JD Vance — glorify male prowess and power. (In a Twitter exchange a few years ago, Musk said he was “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, who replied: “Send me location,” eliciting from Musk: “Vegas Octagon,” and the suggestion that podcaster Joe Rogan referee.) Musk and Vance champion pronatalism — the belief that the single greatest threat to Western civilization is collapsing birth rates — and argue that Western women must have more children.

Much of the Republican Party is likewise focusing on male virility. Texas Republican senatorial candidate Ken Paxton calls the Democratic candidate “low-T Talarico.”

Part of this comes directly from the fascist playbook, organized around a “strongman” touting male dominance. In that playbook, war and violence are thought means of strengthening society by culling the weak and extolling heroic warriors.

I suspect many Americans find Trump’s neofascist “strongman” attractive because they feel powerless in a society that’s left them behind. The cage match and similar public displays of aggression enable them to feel vicariously powerful.

Young men in particular — who make up a disproportionate share of Trump’s base — have been economically emasculated. Most lack college degrees at a time when such a degree is necessary (although hardly sufficient) for a decent job, and when some 60 percent of university undergraduates and 67 percent of graduate students are female.

In this way, cage matches darkly echo “The Full Monty,” the 1997 British comedy about unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield, England, who form a male striptease act to make quick cash.

But the cage match today on the White House lawn is no laughing matter. It’s deadly serious and deeply troubling.

When so many Americans are struggling to make ends meet, Trump’s gladiator fight suggests that the essence of the nation on its 250th birthday isn’t the democratic ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, nor is it the pull-yourself-up-from-the-bootstraps ambition that’s driven our economy, but zero-sum violence and male aggression.

What do you think?

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State AGs must stop the Paramount-Warner Bros deal, to protect CNN from Trump

14 June 2026 at 00:00

Friends,

State attorneys general are our last best hope for stopping Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison from buying Warner Bros. — and with it, CNN. They’ve already neutered and nearly destroyed CBS News. We cannot allow them to eliminate CNN’s ability to tell the American people the truth about Trump.

PLEASE sign the petition here to help block the merger, and share this video.

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The Midterms in a Nutshell, as of June 13

13 June 2026 at 23:00

Friends,

A number of you have asked me for a simple overview of where things stand in the race to control Congress, so here’s some information you may find useful. It suggests where we need to focus our energies over the next four and a half months.

1. What’s needed for control of each chamber

  • In the Senate now: 53 Republicans - 47 Democrats (or independents who caucus with Dems). Democrats need to gain a net 4 seats to take control of the Senate.

  • In the House now: 219 Republicans (or independents who caucus with GOP) - 212 Democrats. There are four vacancies (one in a largely Republican district, three in largely Democratic districts). Assuming that none of the current vacancies flip party control in special elections before November, Democrats need to gain a net 3 seats to take control of the House.

2. Vulnerable incumbent Republicans

Senate Republicans in competitive reelection races who are considered vulnerable

  • Maine: Republican Senator Susan Collins is being challenged by Democratic oysterman Graham Platner.

  • Ohio: Republican Senator Jon Husted is being challenged by former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.

  • Alaska: Republican Senator Dan Sullivan is being challenged by former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola (and potentially another candidate named Dan Sullivan).

  • Nebraska: Pete Ricketts is being challenged by independent populist Dan Osborn (who came close to defeating Nebraska’s other GOP senator in 2024).

    House Republicans in competitive reelection races who are considered vulnerable

  • Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06)

  • Eli Crane (AZ-02)

  • David Valadao (CA-22)

  • Kevin Kiley (CA-06)

    (Kiley switched his party affiliation to “independent” after California’s Proposition 50 redrew him into a bluer district, but he still caucuses and votes with the GOP majority.)

  • Jeff Hurd (CO-03)

  • Jeff Crank (CO-05)

  • Gabe Evans (CO-08)

  • Marianette Miller-Meeks (IA-01)

  • Zach Nunn (IA-03)

  • Bill Huizenga (MI-04)

  • Tom Barrett (MI-08)

  • Brad Finstad (MN-01)

  • Chuck Edwards (NC-11)

  • Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07)

    (Kean has not been seen in public or voted in the House since March 2026 due to an unspecified medical issue.)

  • Nick LaLota (NY-01)

  • Mike Lawler (NY-17)

  • Max Miller (OH-07)

  • Rob Bresnahan (PA-08)

  • Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01)

  • Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07)

  • Scott Perry (PA-10)

  • Rob Wittman (VA-01)

  • Jen Kiggans (VA-02)

  • John McGuire (VA-05)

  • Derrick Van Orden (WI-03)

    PS: Republican incumbents who lost their primaries to Trump-backed candidates (and could turn on Trump)

    • Sen. John Cornyn (TX)

    • Sen. Bill Cassidy (LA)

    • Rep. Thomas Massie (KY-04)

3. Vulnerable incumbent Democrats

Senate Democrats in competitive reelection races who are considered vulnerable

  • Georgia: Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff will face either Rep. Mike Collins or former football coach Derek Dooley after a June 16 GOP primary runoff.

    House Democrats in competitive reelection races who are considered vulnerable

  • Derek Tran (CA-45)

  • Kathy Castor (FL-14)

  • Nellie Pou (NJ-09)

  • Josh Riley (NY-19)

  • Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)

4. Competitive open seats

  • Competitive open seats for the Senate

    • Texas: Scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico for Republican John Cornyn’s seat.

    • Michigan: Republican Mike Rogers will face a to-be-decided Democratic opponent for retiring Democrat Gary Peters’s seat.

      • The frontrunners for the August Democratic primary are Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed doctor who supports Medicare for All and getting Big Money out of politics, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a so-called “moderate” Democrat who is receiving major financial support from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby.

    • North Carolina: Former RNC Chair Michael Whatley will face former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper for retiring Republican Thom Tillis’s seat.

    • Iowa: Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson will face Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek for retiring Republican Joni Ernst’s seat.

  • Competitive open seats for the House

    • AZ-01 (currently GOP-held)

    • ME-02 (currently Dem-held)

    • MI-10 (currently GOP-held)

These are the down-ballot races I’m paying attention to, but let me know if I’ve missed any (and what key midterm races you’re focused on) in the comments below.

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Pluralistic: Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (13 Jun 2026)


Today's links



A fake cover for CEO magazine. The central figure is a ZOLTAR fortune-telling animatronic, seated before various divination tools. The headline over him is FIDUCIARY DUTY. In the top right corner, there's a slug reading 'UNIVERSAL EXCUSE: A bright line test that's also *totally* unfalsifiable.' To Zoltar's left is another slug reading, 'FRIEDMAN SAID IT: I believe it. That's good enough for me.'

Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (permalink)

It's been 55 years since Milton Friedman – cursed be his name – published his NYT editorial, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," in which he invented the idea of shareholder supremacy out of whole cloth and declared it to be a universal, freestanding, inarguable truth:

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

Friedman's editorial railed against the idea of "corporate social responsibility," arguing that corporate managers should confine the exercise of their consciences to projects involving their own money and resources. At work, managers must harden their bleeding hearts and do nothing except increase the returns to their shareholders.

Friedman wasn't merely arguing that this would give rise to better companies – the crux of his argument was that by adopting this "fiduciary duty" standard, it would be easy to determine whether a company was being well-managed or run into the ground:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

Friedman argued that "being a good person" was a squishy, undefinable standard that could never be objectively measured. But "maximizing shareholder value" was a crisp, bright-line test that could be readily evaluated by any reasonable person. "Did this manager make as much money as possible for the company's owners?" feels like the kind of question we can all agree on, while, "Did this manager behave in an ethical way?" is much harder to answer.

But even a few moments' thoughts reveal the flaw in this line of reasoning. We can all agree whether a manager made money for the shareholders – but how can we know whether the manager made as much money as possible?

Think about how much "corporate social responsibility" cashes out to performative and insincere nonsense and/or cynical marketing. Target didn't stock Pride merch because they love their LGBTQ friends. They stocked it because they thought they could sell it (same goes for BP marketing its "green" gasoline). Google supports its coders' environmental/queer/antipoverty efforts because being the "don't be evil" company lets you hire in-demand workers who might otherwise go to work for Meta, and every engineer a Silicon Valley firm hires adds an average of $1m to the company's annual bottom line.

Further: it would be absurd to hold managers to the "make as much money as possible" standard in a competitive market, because in that market, there will always be a company that comes in second. If "as much money as possible" is the standard and you're Chairman of the Board of the number two company, with $10b in profit, while the number one pulled in $11b, "as much money as possible" demands that you fire the C-suite immediately, since they objectively could have done 10% better.

So the real standard isn't "make as much money as possible," it's "try to make as much money as possible." And here again, there's no objective way to evaluate managerial performance. Target made a lot of money by selling Pride merch…until they didn't. Do we fire the Target C-suite because they failed to anticipate that 2024 would mark America's transition into the chuddocene, an era in which selling Pride tchotchkes makes you cucked and soy and, you know, gay?

Whether it's "make as much money as possible" or "try to make as much money as possible*," shareholder supremacy can only be evaluated with the aid of a crystal ball…or a time machine.

Which raises a question: what made this nonsensical shareholder supremacy standard so damned attractive to corporate leaders?

Well, what if the ambiguity of shareholder supremacy was a feature and not a bug? What if the function of shareholder supremacy was to absolve the cruelest people for indulging their most sociopathic instincts? What if this "bright line test" was actually a universal excuse, an all-purpose accountability sink that could be used to justify any cruelty or cowardice? "Why didn't I fire my college buddy when I found out that he was sexually abusing his colleagues? Well, he was the best salesman on the team, and I have an obligation to my shareholders. Sorry, my hands were tied."

In other words: Don't get mad at me.

Get mad at Milton Friedman.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Microsoft gets Linux geeks evicted from convention center https://web.archive.org/web/20010619154332/http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/01/1540231

#20yrsago Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce https://web.archive.org/web/20060615203517/http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060613/ap_on_en_ot/james_joyce_lawsuit

#20yrsago Inside China’s iPod sweat-shops https://web.archive.org/web/20060616173514/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=14915

#15yrsago Terry Pratchett initiates assisted suicide process https://web.archive.org/web/20110614215922/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8571142/Sir-Terry-Pratchett-begins-process-that-could-lead-to-assisted-suicide.html

#15yrsago Lego-making machine made of Lego https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/56346-review-moulding-machine-4000001-lego-insider-tour-exclusive/

#10yrsago It’s getting harder and harder to use gag clauses to silence laid off workers in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160611202305/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/us/laid-off-americans-required-to-zip-lips-on-way-out-grow-bolder.html

#5yrsago The ACCESS Act https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/12/access-act/#interop


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.


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Trillionaire Testosterone | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, June 13, 2026

13 June 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

Today Heather and I take a deep dive into Elon Musk’s new status as America’s first trillionaire — worth one thousand billion dollars — and its meaning for the future of American capitalism. How much of SpaceX’s valuation is based on hype? How much on connections in the Trump regime? How much on Musk’s lobbying of major stock index funds? Answer: almost all of it.

We also look at Musk and Trump’s (and Pete Hegseth’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s and JD Vance’s) obsession with male virility — where that comes from and how it’s connected to tomorrow’s cage match on the South Lawn of the White House.

So please grab a cuppa, pull up a chair, and join in the conversation.

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Pluralistic: Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (12 Jun 2026)


Today's links



A pig in a sty. It is wearing badly applied lipstick. From behind one hairy ear pokes the Android droid.

Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (permalink)

Long before "agentic AI," we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a "user agent." Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our "agents" that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers:

https://privacybadger.org/

Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal.

But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's "dish partners"? What if your toaster refused to toast "unauthorized bread"?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made.

But once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.

That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases:

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-loses-the-adtech-monopolization

This thrice-convicted monopolist bribed Apple – more than $20b/year – to stay out of the search market:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/how-do-you-solve-problem-google-search-courts-must-enable-competition-while

They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google

Google wasn't always this way. The "don't be evil" company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any "user agent," even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server.

For years, Google thrived on the open web, and built open technologies. Android – the mobile operating system that Google bought in 2005 – was presented as an "open" alternative to existing mobile offerings, and as the mobile market collapsed into two companies – Google and Apple – Google always presented Android as the open alternative to Apple's "walled garden."

There were always ways in which Google's "open" Android wasn't exactly open. The company engaged in illegal "tying" arrangements that forced hardware vendors and carriers to lock out versions of Android that were created by Google's competitors:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_4581

In other words, even though Google offered a mobile platform that was (mostly) technically open, they used commercial and legal strategies to choke off the market oxygen for alternative Android versions that tried to capitalize on that technical openness.

But life finds a way. The existence of an open, modifiable, tinkerer-friendly mobile operating system meant Android hackers could create alternatives to Google's (de facto) walled garden, which thrived in the cracks in that garden wall. Operating systems like CalyxOS, PureOS and Graphene offered a more private, more secure Android experience, one that was largely "de-Googled," blocking Google's relentless acquisition of your private data:

https://grapheneos.org/

And Google's data-hunger is relentless. Android exfiltrates a chunk of your personal and behavioral data every five minutes. The "resting heartbeat" of Android surveillance pulses and pulses, irrespective of whether you're using your device, and the instant you unlock your screen, that heartbeat quickens, sending even more data to the company:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

All that data has proved irresistible to authoritarian governments. Donald Trump's enforcers have seized on Google data as a vital source of information about the identity of protesters and the location of migrants hunted by ICE:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promise-me-now-ice-has-my-data

So there are plenty of reasons why users would seek out these de-Googled alternatives to Android, finding them in spite of Google's illegal commercial tactics to block access to competing technologies. The worse it got, the better those alternatives looked.

Perhaps this explains Google's years-long effort to increase the technical barriers to using modified versions of Android, beefing these up to match the commercial restrictions that stand in the way of a de-Googled existence.

Back in 2023, Google floated the idea of "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI), a set of modifications to web standards that would force your computer to disclose its operating environment to the web servers it connected to, even if you objected to this disclosure:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI was a form of "remote attestation." That's when your device uses a sub-processor (sometimes called a "Technical Protection Module" or "TPM") or a walled off part of its main processor (sometimes called a "secure enclave") to produce a cryptographically signed description of your device and its configuration: which hardware, software, plug-ins and settings you're running.

When you connect to a server, it demands that your device send this "attestation" before it handles your request. If your device won't provide this data, or if the server doesn't like (or recognize) your device and its details, it can refuse to deal with you. And because the attestation is prepared by a TPM or a secure enclave that you can't modify or override, you don't get to decide which facts about your device it's allowed to see.

Practically speaking, this means that remote attestation lets a server refuse to deal with you until you turn off your ad-blocker and your tracker-blocker. It means that the server can discriminate against users who block auto-play sound and video, who block pop-ups, who put the tab in the background when it's playing a mandatory pre-roll ad.

WEI was especially disturbing in light of Google's efforts to kill ad-blockers and privacy blockers through updates to Chrome, an effort that continues to this day:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

These blockers are an important part of the dynamic between web publishers and their users. In the real world, when you get an offer, you can make a counter-offer. That's all an ad-blocker is: a way for users to respond to a server whose opening bid is, "How about you give me all your data and let me take over your computer in exchange for showing you this page?" with "How about 'Nah?'"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

We didn't get rid of pop-up ads by making them illegal, or by boycotting advertisers who used them. We got rid of pop-up ads when web users installed pop-up blockers, which made pop-up ads pointless. Take away our ability to block obnoxious digital content and you guarantee that we will be flooded with it.

These kinds of modifications aren't just used to block ads – they're also key to accessibility. People who have photosensitive epilepsy or who (like me) suffer from low-contrast vision problems use add-ons to reformat pages so that we can safely and legibly access them.

WEI's creators said they were only trying to put the web on a level playing field with apps, which routinely rat you out to the companies you connect to. Apps are a source of bottomless enshittification, not least because (unlike the web), they enjoy special, dangerous legal protections that make it very legally risky to modify them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

WEI wasn't an effort to level the playing field between apps and the web – it was a race to the bottom, an attempt to make the web as enshittogenic as the app hellscape.

Public outrage to WEI killed the project, but Google's commitment to augmenting its illegal commercial lockdown efforts with technical lockdowns never ended. Now, Google has rolled out an experimental "reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification" that uses an app, your camera, and your device's TPM or secure enclave to produce an attestation about your Android device:

https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652

This will make it much easier for the apps and other services you interact with to block your device if you run an Android alternative, or if you install a mod that overrides the actions of Google's stock Android:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacySecurityOSINT/comments/1tbdjbj/privacy_concerns_around_googles_recaptcha_mobile/

This is a terrible idea – it's every bit as bad as WEI was. In an age in which Big Tech is ever-more tied to authoritarian governments, redesigning our devices to tell strangers things we don't want them to know isn't just shortsighted, it's inexcusable.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Images from anti-DRM protest at the San Fran Apple Store https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinn/tags/drmprotest/

#15yrsago Reasons people were arrested at the Toronto G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/11/reasons-people-were-arrested-at-the-toronto-g20/

#15yrsago Paul Krugman: Rule by rentiers favors billionaires, Chinese bond-holders over jobs and homeowners https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=1

#15yrsago Ontario publicly funded Catholic school bans rainbows, appropriates student donations for LGBT cause and gives them to Catholic charity https://web.archive.org/web/20110610125236/https://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Rainbows_banned_at_Mississauga_Catholic_school-10262.aspx

#10yrsago How to be less wrong about the First Amendment https://web.archive.org/web/20160611221927/https://popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-the-first-amendment/

#10yrsago Mounties used Stingrays to secretly surveil millions of Canadians for years https://web.archive.org/web/20160610182607/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-rcmp-surveilled-thousands-of-innocent-canadians-for-a-decade

#5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly, EU edition https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/11/technological-self-determination/#dma


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  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

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Did Trump Promise "No Wars" If Elected?

12 June 2026 at 23:01

Friends,

Sometimes I provide you with information that I hope you’ll find helpful in making arguments with others. I don’t expect that what I share with you will change the minds of committed Trumpers, but the facts and the evidence may have some sway with Republicans and independents who are wavering about whom to support in the midterms.

One of the main reasons Trump was elected was his pledge to keep the United States out of wars, especially the kind of “endless” wars America has fought in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Obviously, he broke that pledge. We’re now well into the fourth month of a war he said would be four or five weeks at most.

In addition, the war he initiated in Iran was a war of choice — Iran did not attack the United States, and most specialists in foreign policy say Iran was not close to devising a nuclear weapon at that time. (It’s likely to be closer now, or at least more committed to making one.)

Yet in a lengthy interview with Kristen Welker, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which aired Sunday, Trump was once again trying to rewrite his own history, He claimed:

“I didn’t guarantee no war. So when you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months.”

In fact, Trump repeatedly and unequivocally promised during the 2024 election campaign that the U.S. would not have any wars during his second presidency.

Herewith, some examples.

In a June 2024 social media post, Trump described the election as “a choice between STRENGTH or WEAKNESS, COMPETENCE or INCOMPETENCE, peace and prosperity or war and no war.”

In one of the highest-profile speeches of his campaign — his July 2024 address to the Republican National Convention — he said, “With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don’t have wars.”

He made the promise again and even more directly during an August 2024 rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania, saying: “Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all.”

Trump reprised the same pledge in an August 2024 interview with Adin Ross, an online personality. After saying there were no wars during his first administration, he promised, “And we won’t have wars again.”

At another rally that month in the hotly contested state of North Carolina, Trump approvingly cited Viktor Orbán, then the prime minister of Hungary, as supposedly having said, “Make sure that Trump gets reelected president, and you’re not going to have any more wars.” Trump reiterated moments later, “No more wars. No more disruptions. We will have prosperity, and we will have peace.”

Trump told versions of the Orbán story at numerous other events. For example, in the swing state of Wisconsin in October 2024, he said, “Viktor Orbán said, ‘If Trump comes back, you won’t have any wars. You won’t have any wars.’ And he’s about as tough as they get, and he said it loud and clear and he said why. But you won’t have any wars.”

Finally, in his victory address in November 2024, Trump made a clear promise that he would not start a war — even when he no longer had to persuade voters to elect him. He said in that high-profile speech: “Four years, we had no wars, except we defeated ISIS. … They said, ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.”

In reality, of course, Trump has been one of the most bellicose presidents in modern American history.

His failing war in Iran and his campaign pledge not to start any wars should be held against Republicans in the House and Senate. They’re partly responsible. They have repeatedly refused to stop his wars. They have repeatedly enabled his aggression.

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Progressive Golden Boys and the Circle of Brotection. Must Be Real Nice.

Note: the way this Substack usually works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for paid subscribers only containing all the screams I restrained to make the free one either come in under the character limit or nice and civilized enough to not have to argue reality with sea lions and other internet megafauna in the comments.

This one, a follow-up to a now highly-regrettable piece supporting Graham Platner’s candidacy, was locked because I didn’t want to get screamed at by Platner’s extremely aggressive online fandom for saying anything even mildly critical of him and them. But given how it’s all shaken out in the last few days and how stupid I feel about defending him at this point, well, to put it colloquially, fuck it.

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I’m voting for Graham Platner. I am. Blue no matter who means blue no matter who.

Edit: ha ha no I’m fucking not, for reasons that will be obvious if you’re reading this after July 5, not least that he probably won’t be on the ballot at all. The whole “he didn’t assault anyone” needle-threading is well and truly out the window and we’re all just hoping he steps down before it’s too late. But the following is now even more true regarding the incredible volume of people who convinced a lot of us by spending a year willing to defend a million things, none of which any woman, person of color, LGBTQ+, or indeed, even anyone slightly less far-left than the DSA, would have survived. That vociferous defense, from last year through now, when people are still defending him and blaming the Democratic Party for a candidate they were super proud to tell everyone wasn’t like the other girls just last week, a party Platner himself said he hated and didn’t want him, is how we got here. How we got to uncertain people like me standing up and supporting him through misgivings, because Collins is monstrous. There was never any oxygen for anyone else, and never a lane to unpack the scandals because the ranks always closed faster than the news cycle.

If you don’t let your own people question a candidate, he pretty much becomes the candidate, and you’re stuck with whatever baggage he’s dragging.

It’s also MAGA behavior. And how we got there.

So this all remains true, and I’m even angrier about it, because we ALL know that unless Platner’s replacement is a white straight man, they’ll get torn apart for far less than his iceberg of bullshit (you know there’s more the GOP was holding till October) and there will somehow be a mysterious reason it’s morally indefensible to vote for them but voting for Platner would’ve been fine no matter what.

It’s the hypocrisy that kills the hope.

But my god, his supporters have been gnawing on my last goddamned political nerve for months now. And as much as I believe (Edit: WELP) in his growth as a person and potential as a candidate, I had to work pretty hard to get there because of the way this whole thing has gone down.

It’s this shit right here, my friends:

Look, I didn’t like Graham Platner at first, either. I’m not sure if I “like” him now. But liking someone is not actually my primary criteria as a voter. Honestly, I very rarely like candidates at all, and even less candidates I see receiving the Bernie Sanders treatment from the online commentariat—by which I mean, a candidate who receives the benefit of only being attacked from the right, while the online left suddenly declines to give them the usual ugly nicknames or distribute disingenuous readings of their histories and policies, but instead leaps into any comment section to dogpile and drown out even the mildest of criticisms. That kind of double standard, on top of the double standard Democrats already face, pisses me off and it’s hard not to notice that the candidates who get those soft gloves are always men and usually white. So I have come around the long way.

deep breath

It’s this shit right here because you and I both know good and goddamned well that if any candidate who committed the arch-crime of not getting endorsed by Saint, Demiurge, and Arbiter of Progressive Reality Bernie Fucking Sanders and therefore being anointed as the most lefty leftist this side of the special scissors, no matter what their actual policies, they could never get away with even a sliver of the shit that’s bounced off Graham Platner and straight into a 52-point victory over an incumbent governor basket.

Or, you know. A female candidate. Or a POC. Or even just a committed Democrat with years of experience in lower offices who worked their way up and forged working relationships without telling everyone to burn the party to the ground for great justice.

I mean, holy fucking shit. Can you even begin to imagine the land-speed velocity of pearls being clutched that would echo through the internet if Kamala Harris had been a Blackwater mercenary, possibly (yet somehow no one can say one way or the other) a guard at Abu Ghraib, let alone made all those brain-and-soul-dead Reddit comments, sexted a bunch of people while he and his wife were struggling to conceive, maybe-maybe-not shoved (Edit: definitely did) an ex, and had a totenkopf tattooed on her left tit?

Nuclear Bomb Explosion GIFs - Find & Share on GIPHY
Live fucking footage from the alternate dimension where she dared

We’d never get past the first one before Hasan Piker would be “just asking questions” about maybe-maybe-not burning her alive on the National Mall to appease the spirits of the gravely-offended earth. Not one explanation or excuse would be entertained for a nanosecond. But somehow now all those anti-imperialists can suddenly see past voluntarily becoming a mercenary for the most notorious private army ever and having that shit on your body. Not just see past it, but immediately body-check you into the nearest freeway divider for not being super thrilled with it.

But intern for McKinsey? You deserve nothing but pain, Pete. Such a smart guy, too bad our buddy Buttigieg didn’t realize the new rule is that if Bernie doesn’t anoint your forehead with chrism, you’re a bootlicking fascist just as bad as Trump. And you’re only allowed to disagree with the Most Perfect and Most Popular Politician Who Will Save Us All But Can’t Win a Primary Because Reasons if it’s to say “what about, instead of asking pertinent questions or having a slightly different healthcare plan, full and violently-enforced communism now?”

Now, one thing Platner and I have in common is that I, too, shitpost on Reddit. (Shut up, I’m not telling you my username.) So I’m pretty active on my local subs, and pretty much since the whole thing began, you have not been able to to squeak out “is this guy okay though, despite all this?” without getting your digital viscera loaded into a Super Soaker and turned into a Jackson Pollock knock-off on the nearest wall upon which the revolution keeps saying they’re gonna shoot people because they think that’s a cute and winning argument for normies.

For example: at one point, Janet Mills, which, god bless her but she didn’t even try, I don’t think she wanted to try, I don’t know why any of us were forced to sit through her trying to look like she was trying without actually trying, aired a couple of pretty fucking milquetoast ads with those Reddit comments in them.

OH MY GOD WHATEVER WILL WE DO, NEGATIVE ADS? IN A PRIMARY?!

Shock Shocked GIF – Shock Shocked – discover and share GIFs

But you’d have thought she called a live press conference to personally take a wet shit on an orphan’s face the way the Maine subreddits reacted to this. She should be ashamed, how dare she, this is how she supports Democrats, I’m leaving the party, she has to be destroyed, what a monster! My beautiful baby boy would never!

(Edit: and now they’re doing the same thing, absolutely LEAPING to the conclusion that the Party is going to install Mills or some other “corpo” and spitting acidic fire at the Democrats no matter what they say about the process, defending Platner’s right to refuse to step aside, and calling his accuser a liar and a plant. Blame the guy who knew he had all this in his Rucksack of Secrets? Never, not when there’s Democrats to burn to the ground!)

Nevermind that the same people hadn’t had a non-venomous word to say about a successful two-term Democratic governor who guided this state through COVID with the lowest numbers in the nation (tied with Vermont) and who stood up to Trump on the regular. Not a single kind word. But she aired an attack ad! DURING AN ELECTION! My god, drown the witch-crone at once!

I swear, however many of these people are people must never have paid attention to politics before. I know they think it shows loyalty to their candidate, but all it really ever looks like is that the left flank of the party is genuinely terrified that if there’s any competition at all, they won’t win. Which flies in the face of the conviction that America is full of secret leftists just waiting for a Bernie to vote for. It’s hardly arguing from a position of any kind of strength.

And yet. Every time.

Burn The Witches GIFs - Find & Share on GIPHY

It bothered me, seeing this Circle of Brotection form so quickly around Platner, a Circle somehow seething hate for every other Democrat. It still bothers me. After every new scandal, a flood of comments and attacks against anyone who even considers taking it seriously. I see this happen with candidates at least a few times every electoral cycle. Always the ones endorsed by Sanders. Very often men with no or very little experience in government. But always men. Except for Mamdani, almost always white and “working class,” or at least working-class-coded (rarely actually working class). And honestly I’m pretty convinced Mamdani would never have won if not for “your worst uncle” Cuomo being the only serious competition and even then, I’m not sure he’d have survived if he didn't have a squeaky-clean background to compare Cuomo’s slime to.

The Democrats, whenever they run for anything, have to run not only against conservatives all the way to the furthest-right brain-ants, but against their own left flank, who have made an industry out of convincing the country that the only viable opposition to fascism is just as bad as fascism. And no, this time I’m not going to cross myself in penance and ritualistically intone the required “the Democrats aren’t great and I don’t support them but…” because that’s the problem. Everywhere you turn there’s uncritical praise of Republicans and only occasional, heavily-asterisked, acknowledgement that Democrats and indeed liberal democracy itself aren’t entirely made up of boils upon the vast and scarlet ass of Satan.

And it doesn’t even help the left. At all. Because progressive candidates end up having to run against both their opponent and the brand annihilation of the Democratic Party that has paved their own path to Washington. What a shock they don’t win all that often! Turns out it’s really hard to score a goal when you spent the whole first half kicking yourself in the fucking face while screaming that it doesn’t matter who wins.

As I said in the first essay, I get very suspicious when the media gets together to throw a big show in the old barn. I get even more suspicious when the internet commentariat suddenly won’t allow criticism of a candidate. That’s why it took so long, and meeting him in person, for me to come around to Platner. Because he never had to deal with attacks from the left the way other candidates did, the way Mills did, the way anyone who isn’t a working class white dude who SUPER looks like a MAGA die-hard but says lefty things (but not about guns!) gets battered with the millisecond they announce.

It’s such an unbelievable advantage, this grace extended to precisely one kind of candidate.

(Edit: And now we know they didn’t even vet him. We’re most likely going to lose this seat, and the Senate, and all this time, energy, and money was wasted, because a guy in a baseball hat said socialist things and fit a casting sheet that in actual practice is no different than the Republican casting sheet. God fucking dammit. You can hate the establishment all you want, but there is a reason for most of the methodologies nerds put in place over the years.)

Instead, he got the Bernie treatment. Where any criticism or even questions are treason to the cause. Where he can axiomatically never have done anything wrong even when he has definitely done several things wrong. Where another candidate trying to win an election is pure evil. Platner got defended at every turn, for things that would easily have sunk any woman, let alone a woman of color. Would’ve sunk anyone who even inched toward the monstrous, horrible, liberally democratic “what if we just make the system work for everyone instead of detonating the entire world and dancing in the ashes and blood of whatever’s left, especially since the vast majority of people do not actually seem to want that?”

Have I mentioned how much I despise the way the word “liberal” has been demonized to the point that the only thing the far left and right agree on is a liberal is the worst thing to be, and then neither of them ever question why they’re so sure of that when no two people define it the same way, but it definitely isn’t because we all grew up hearing the news our parents watched saying liberalism was a disease and internalized it even when most of us are, in fact, fucking liberals who want safety and equality and kindness and democracy, and that’s why the right worked for 50 years to make it a swear word, and they do not draw any distinction whatsoever between progressive, liberal, and leftist, no matter how much we pretend this is all settled theory everyone understands and agrees with?

I despise it. Anyway.

It must be real fucking nice to run the way Platner got to run. Oh, I’m sure the reporting on his flaws, mistakes, and dipshittery hasn’t been nice at all. (Edit: in hindsight, it was nice, and he was probably happy the real shit hadn’t come out every time. I feel terrible for his wife, and that’s it.) But at least he didn’t have to do that while the far left teamed up with the right to sink him in favor of yet another fascist. (I cannot comprehend why the lefty media ecosystem never seems to take a step back and reflect when they see the far right is pulling the same tug-o-war rope they are.)

It’s never been proven that Hillary personally did a goddamned thing outside the absolute norm of male politicians beyond her fucking emails and yet the left hates her so profoundly most would take a lifetime of Trump if it meant getting to strike the match that burns her alive next to Harris. And not just her. Nor does it matter your progressive bonafides. AOC regularly gets dragged by her own side despite being the right’s poster child for the Evil Radical Left. Elizabeth Warren was and is absolutely loathed by the progressive wing because she…ran for President and tried to win. The only protected precious darlings are Bernie and Bernie’s chosen ones. And why not? Nice work if you can get it. When Fetterman pulls a Fetterman, or a Gabbard pulls a Gabbard, (Edit: or a Platner pulls a Platner…) there’s never any blowback on the people who promoted and defended him, who sandbagged his opponent to clear the way for him exactly the way the conspiracists say was done for Hillary and Biden, but this time it’s okay because he said socialist things in a manly mustache. It’s never even mentioned.

And again, this grace is simply never extended to a woman candidate. She must be perfect at all times, but never come off as scripted or choosing her words carefully. She must be charismatic, but not in a way that makes the boys feel insecure. She can do, and must never have done, one single thing even slightly wrong, beyond running against Bernie or a Bernie-blessed man, and will still be viciously attacked and her career/entire self racked on the wheel before being discarded. But once a golden boy, you can do or have done anything you please, including acts that go expressly against progressive ideals, and you’re, well, golden. People will not only stand up for you online, but rip anyone who isn’t sold or supports another blue candidate apart for free on your behalf.

The precise things that candidates like Harris did wrong are suddenly virtues. She stood on a stage with Liz Cheney to appeal to Republican voters? Nazi who loves Nazis! Platner will appeal to Republican voters though because he’s a rough and tumble MAGA-looking guy who likes guns and that’s amazing! They’ll like his Nazi tattoos and his boozing! And there’s just…no dissonance at all. Of course everything she did is bad and it’s her fault she lost. Of course those things are good when a man does them and if he loses it’s because of the media or liberals or rigged elections. And it’s not even questioned, or imagined in those terms, or someone might notice that “the media, liberals, and rigged elections” are the exact same scapegoats the right loves to whip. (Edit: God help Bellows or any other woman if they end up with Schrodinger’s Nomination now, because the Circle Will Be Broken and no matter who it is or how clean her record, she’ll be Somehow the Wrong Woman. Mills was unconsiderable despite having been a successful two-term statewide-elected governor and Platner having never been elected to anything. But she’s old! And so is Bernie Sanders and no one cares.)

And all this, again, helps no one, not even the left, to accomplish anything. Because now all that nastiness has alienated a ton of voters. I loved a lot of what Platner said when I saw him speak. But I hated hearing him dump on the party he is trying to lead for not supporting him hard enough. Not hoisting the totally inexperienced guy with a toilet-paper trail of scandals stuck to his shoe onto their shoulders and showering him in confetti before the primary is even over. Unforgivable! They MUST give him everything immediately! What are you doing, my guy? You need these voters behind you! You need that party to be strong!

And again, I never supported Mills to begin with! I am voting for Platner and it’s extremely necessary for this state to do so. (Edit: aaaaand it’s gone.) I just can’t abide hypocrisy.

I do genuinely think he’ll be a good Senator (OH WELL) and Collins is a jackal who has to go

I really think the assumption is that only progressives believe in their ideals enough to be alienated. The dreaded liberal is just a stupid sheep bleating blue no matter who and will vote for any D. So as long as we put a golden boy up there and brutally attack anyone else, and all the podcasters, just this once, take a brief break from telling everyone not to vote, then we’ll automatically win, because the sheep HAVE to vote for Democrats and now progressives will vote, too. Done! America is saved!

But progressives don’t vote in large numbers. The biggest progressive voices tell us not to vote in large numbers. And the spine of the party, those horrible regular people who want things to be good and stable and equal for all, can absolutely be alienated. Americans, and Democrats especially, just fucking love not voting. It doesn’t work like that at all. You have to sell a policy platform and a candidate, not just attack people for not falling in line and assume they’ll do what you want anyway because they’re NPCs in the MMORPG American politics has become.

I watch Platner’s campaign and I know if it were Gemma Platner she’d already be buried and forgotten when she wasn’t being exhumed to stomp on her again. We’ve already seen this country would literally rather die in flames than support a woman for President. And yes, Platner is running against a woman, but conservative women never have this problem. Because conservative women don’t want anything in the hierarchies of identity and power to change, they want to enforce those hierarchies, so they’re not scary like the women who want to kick the legs out from under those hierarchies. And the right comes together to vote for whoever will preserve their little food pyramid where white men are on top and everyone else is consumable.

And that’s where I get kicked out of the progressive clubhouse, because no one wants to hear it pointed out that preserving hierarchies of power based on identity is literally fascist shit and should have no place among us. It’s just a coincidence the only candidates we like are white men who look like they’d punch you in the face for being gay, don’t you know. They’re not like that, but they look like they are, which is cool and awesome, and women are lame and boring and only like dumb stuff like experience, co-operation, and progress.

None of these reactions are particularly Platner’s fault. (Edit: eh, at this point who knows, he certainly felt he was entitled to run in a crucially important race and let his people run wild annihilating any other possibility and seething at the party for wanting one. And hasn’t said a word about it, or the current seething because they won’t install Platner’s handpicked replacement just because he says so even though his endorsement is pretty much a gravestone for anyone else at this point. He risked the future of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and this country knowing what he’d done and certainly being entirely aware of having never so much as volunteered to run a school bake sale.)

Except it is his fault, in that he did all this heinous shit we were asked to look past. (but everyone else is fair game) And because I suspect Gemma Platner would’ve long ago dropped out due to absolutely no quarter given even for the tattoo, let alone anything since. But then, Gemma probably wouldn’t have gotten that tattoo or thought she could run before covering it up if she did. The Circle of Brotection provides insulation against that kind of pressure, which is, of course, its purpose. Much like Fox News, loathe as anyone is to make the comparison. I am, and will, vote for him, because Collins is so much worse, and I do believe he wants what I want in government and will work toward it. (Edit: Obviously not now. And I’ll never not be angry about having stood up for him, however reluctantly, and for the look of hope in my kid’s eyes when we went to his rally. You asshole. How could you do this to your fellow Mainers, knowing what hangs in the balance?)

I just can’t quite let it go. (Edit: and I won’t!) Because I am a progressive. And that means I deeply believe that benefits extended to one group belong equally to all of us, and when it is withheld from all but a chosen few, I really struggle to find much blue in the clubhouse wallpaper pattern.

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They don't want you to know the REAL reason Social Security is in trouble

12 June 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

The trustees of the Social Security fund said Tuesday that the fund will be depleted by late 2032, a year earlier than the trustees’ projection last year of 2033. If nothing is done, benefits will automatically be cut six years from now.

The common understanding is that Social Security’s shortfall is due to the huge postwar baby boom, now retiring, and to America’s increasing life expectancy. The usual recommended fix is to reduce Social Security benefits or raise the age of eligibility. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, warned Monday, “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed.” He said Republicans will introduce a plan to do that. Brace yourselves.

I used to be a Social Security trustee, and I call bullsh*t.

The baby boom can’t be blamed for Social Security’s shortfall. The Greenspan Commission, which in 1983 recommended the reforms that Congress then made — raising Social Security payroll taxes and also raising the eligibility age for collecting Social Security benefits — knew all about the baby boom and figured it into its calculations. (Early boomers like me can now start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 have to wait until they’re 67 to collect full benefits.)

Americans’ increasing life expectancy isn’t at fault, either. While wealthier Americans are living longer, that’s not the case for lower-income Americans. The Urban Institute estimates that life expectancy in the top 20 percent of income-earners is 91 years for people born in the 1990s, four years more than people born in the 1950s. Yet the life expectancy in the lowest 20 percent of income-earners is fewer than 80 years.

So what’s the real cause of the Social Security shortfall? What did Greenspan’s commission fail to predict? Widening inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain cap. This year, that cap is $184,500. Earnings at or below this amount are taxed at 12.4 percent. The cap rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the cap was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of total income in America. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Greenspan commission assumed that, as the cap rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 83 percent of total income in America. It went from 90 percent to 83 percent because a steadily larger portion of the nation’s total income has gone to the top.

In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today, the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

This year, someone earning $1 million in wages stopped paying any Social Security payroll tax at the beginning of March. Jeff Bezos probably stopped a few minutes past midnight on January 1. Elon Musk, a few seconds after midnight on January 1. (In point of fact, Bezos, Musk, and other robber barons of this Second Gilded Age get all the cash they need by borrowing against their fortunes, rather than bother with pesky wages, so they probably pay a pittance in Social Security taxes.)

Logically, then, to get back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax has to be raised.

If all income in excess of $400,000 were subject to the Social Security payroll tax, Social Security’s solvency would be guaranteed forever. We could also expand Social Security benefits.

So there’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical and necessary response is simply to raise the cap, Mike Johnson and other Republican shills for the oligarchs to the contrary notwithstanding.

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Additional background:

Social Security is America’s most effective anti-poverty program. Last year, it lifted 23.5 million Americans out of poverty, including 16.5 million seniors. Before its creation, about half of our nation’s seniors were living in poverty. Today their poverty rate is just 10.3 percent. Without Social Security, nearly 4 in 10 seniors would have had incomes below the official poverty line.

Hollowing out of private pensions makes Social Security all the more important. One in 5 Americans 50 and older have zero retirement savings. Meanwhile, the average Social Security benefit at the start of last year was $1,975 a month ($23,700 annually).

Social Security is also the federal government’s biggest children’s benefit program through its disability and survivors’ benefits. In 2024, 1.7 million children received Social Security benefits, and the vast majority are eligible to receive survivors’ benefits if a parent were to pass away. Additionally, millions more children are part of a household where all or part of the household income comes from Social Security. Social Security is estimated to lift close to 1 million children out of poverty each year.

Other fixes that have been introduced in Congress:

1. The Social Security Expansion Act

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have introduced this plan for several Congresses. (It is cosponsored by Budget Committee Members Merkley, Whitehouse, Van Hollen, and Padilla.)

The bill imposes Social Security taxes on wages above $250,000 and applies the same 12.4 percent rate to capital gains and business income. That would boost benefits for almost all retirees by $200 per month, using a more generous measure of inflation to calculate the cost-of-living increase, and setting a minimum benefit at 125 percent of poverty. When estimated in 2023, it achieved 75-year Social Security solvency solely by increasing taxes on incomes above $250,000.

2. Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act

Sen. Whitehouse and Rep. Boyle introduced this bill starting in the last Congress. Budget Committee Member Van Hollen is a co-sponsor. It adopts the tax increases of the Sanders bill, adjusted to start at $400,000. The bill has no benefit increases, so it significantly overshoots solvency, and there would be extra revenue. The bill achieves 75-year solvency for both Social Security and the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund.

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Warning: Trump's Rolling Coup Is Already Underway

11 June 2026 at 23:01

Friends,

I received the following from Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri in the United States House from 1977 to 2005 and served as House Democratic Leader from 1989 to 2003, and Tim Wirth, who served in the U.S. House and Senate from Colorado from 1975 to 1993 and as the first U.S. Secretary of State for Global Affairs.

I have worked with both and know them quite well. Neither is an alarmist, but they did want me to help spread this alarm. Hence, I’m sharing with you what they wrote to me. (Research is from Keep Our Republic, a civic education non-profit focused on fair elections.)

***

Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these, and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture.

Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration but few have taken a step back and connect the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision or a single day.

On September 25, 2025, President [Trump] signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence’).

Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American”, “ anti-capitalist”, “ anti-Christian” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”

No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway. It tasked the FBI, the IRS and the Treasury Department with tracking the funding sources and supporters of organizations suspected of directly or indirectly facilitating political unrest, with no reference to the First Amendment.

Soon thereafter, the FBI organized a Joint Mission Center, drawing hundreds of personnel from ten federal agencies to identify and prosecute the targets of NPSM-7. The Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, subsequently testified [that there was] a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that thousands of U.S. citizens and non-governmental organizations are now on a secret watch list tied to the Joint Mission Center.

Concurrently the Justice Department has opened grand-jury investigations and indictments aimed at officials of previous administrations including former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey.

The President’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly described political opposition as a “fifth column,” and Trump himself amplified this by declaring “Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all… But first, Barack Obama.”

On May 6, 2026, the administration’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that names “violent left-wing extremists,” “anti-fascists,” and certain religious minorities as principal threats to the United States.

Bondi provided a Department of Justice operational order that included a five year plan for retroactive mining of data files and plea interrogations along with the requirement that financial donors be named. The Joint Mission Center uses its $12.5 billion dollar budget to do the targeting. The President’s lead lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel have preauthorized the use of domestic force.

Meanwhile the administration has appropriated $45 billion for construction of new ICE detention facilities, a 265 percent increase over previous years and more than four times the entire budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Tom Homan, the President’s “border czar” has overseen the proposal for the acquisition of over 100,000 detention beds above the current capacity of 70,000, with contracts for permanent mega-centers whose scale far exceeds anything an immigration processing operation would require. These are undoubtedly prisons for political prisoners, even as 1974 federal law prohibit the detention of American citizens without an act of Congress.

In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, U.S. forces have killed more than 200 people across nearly sixty strikes on small boats designated as “narcoterrorists” without indictment, trial or judicial review. The commander of U.S. Northern Command has said publicly he would “definitely” execute lawful orders to apply this same authority on American soil.

The White House has declined to rule out using lethal force against U.S. citizens designated as members of domestic terrorist organizations, while Trump has fired most of the Department of Defense officials responsible for overseeing the legality of military operations.

Trump is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents, to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter roles and ballots.

[The U.S. Senate recently passed a $70 billion supplemental funding bill for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The legislation is on track for an upcoming U.S. House vote. The funds aim to finance these agencies through 2029.]

[Another piece of the puzzle: Over the last year, the Justice Department has sought voter roll data from most states; sued those that have declined to comply; opened a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., a state Trump narrowly lost that year; and demanded ballots from the 2024 race from Wayne County, Mich.]

Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter roles, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents. These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” which is currently underway.

Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.

Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial — we are not deploying the military domestically, we are not declaring an emergency over elections, we are not coming for citizens.

Congress, paralyzed and outnumbered, has not mounted a serious institutional response. Some press has reported stories about the pieces but not on the whole dangerous picture.

The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature. That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.

So what is to be done?

Congress must reassert its Article I authority over emergency powers, military deployment on U.S. soil, and the Office of Legal Council’s power to rewrite statute by memo.

Governors and state attorneys general must adopt the protective measures that civil liberties lawyers have already drafted to shield citizens, non-profits and election workers from NPSM-7.

Newsrooms must report the rolling coup architecture as a single big picture story, because that is what it is.

And each of us — in pulpits, in classrooms, in podcasts, in union halls, at work and around kitchen tables — must call this by its name out loud, while there is still time and there is still room.

***

Unless we begin to act with resolve, fortitude and clear-eyed commitment to our democracy, a future election will be lost and our democracy will likely be destroyed by a Presidential declaration of a national emergency and the subsequent implementation of the emergency measures, not authorized by law but drafted and implemented without any Congressional oversight.

We took the same oath of office that every member of the military and every federal officer takes — to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The obligation in that oath does not end when one leaves office. We believe that an awake America can stop what a drowsy one will not, but time is short and the challenge is urgent.

— former House Leader Richard Gephardt and former Senator Timothy Wirth

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The Democratic Urge to Lose

Note: the way this Substack works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for paid subscribers only containing all the screams I restrained to make the free one either come in under the character limit or nice and civilized enough to not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments. And sometimes, because I’m still mad but it’s not helpful to yell publicly as it’s not actually the candidate I intend to vote for’s fault that his campaign is the beneficiary of some seriously grotesque hypocrisy I’m still struggling to swallow.

The follow-up to this essay is here: On Progressive Golden Boys and the Circle of Brotection

I really don’t get us sometimes.

We here on the vast “not Nazi” side of the political divide seem to be happy to scream passionately about fascism 24/7 online, but faced with actually doing anything about it, down to and including the barest meager minimum of maybe voting for our own party, we seem to genuinely love losing more than we love our own rights.

"well now I am not doing it" Pingu : MemeTemplatesOfficial
There’s always a reason, and it’s always that our fundamental rights are less important than something else, oh and also the person who will protect our rights is kind of meh so fuck it, better die slaves

So yeah, this is about Graham Platner.

Oh, the internet certainly does have a lot of Big Feelings about Mr. Platner. All the more so over the last couple of weeks, headed into a primary it’s been nearly impossible for him to lose since like March. And everyone from the collective hive-shriek of Facebook randos to the established media still pretending to be liberal and trustworthy, will be more than happy to tell you all about every single thing they’ve heard thirdhand from their cousin’s favorite influencer’s contact in an opposing candidate’s and/or party’s campaign if you so much as say the guy’s name three times into an empty oyster plate. Or make a pretty goddamned innocuous post about going to hear him speak with your kid because he literally came to speak on the street where I live last month.

See, there’s a huge difference between me and the vast and teeming majority of people flapping their face-holes about Platner online at the moment, the moment being less than a week before the primary.

I fucking live and vote in goddamned Maine.

Funny how there’s suddenly so much national interest in this little state most people can’t be bothered to remember exists beyond “lobster” “Stephen King” and “wait, there’s another Portland?” Sure seems odd to me that, like beautiful maritime magic, everybody seems so loudly confident about knowing our business and what’s best for us. And no, it’s not just because of Susan “Concerned” Collins. I’ve lived here a couple of decades now, and at no point, no matter who was running against her, could the politically-aware nation at large tell you the name of her opponent, let alone pick their faces out of a line-up. Most of them still couldn’t.

I had to take that post down, at least from thrice-cursed Facebook, because all manner of strangers just couldn’t wait to barf up whatever they think they know about a candidate for an election they have no stake in like the corpse of Jon Voight in Anaconda, and also what a terrible parent I am for taking my child to a talk where virtually every child on the island was present, and also demand I personally answer for every single rumor, despite, once again, none of these people knowing anything whatsoever about Maine.

And now he’s won the primary, which, if you live here, was never seriously in question. Sure, Governor Mills was on the ballot, but she suspended her campaign months ago, and even if she hadn’t, Platner was 38 points ahead of her when she bounced, because no one was into her as a candidate, least of all Mills herself, who never actually seemed to want to run. She just wasn’t that into us, and it showed. I saw all of one Governor Mills campaign sign and my first thought was: wow, where did they even get one of those? And sure, there were another candidates, but you don’t know who they were and neither did pretty much anyone. Platner has had so much energy behind him for so long now there was no serious advertising for the others (but plenty of negative ads against Platner paid for by that scamp, “no specific candidate”). Much like Mills’ baffling campaign, they didn’t even really seem like they wanted to be here except to spend the campaign funds—and occasionally, try to torpedo the only opposition to Collins that has gotten anyone in this state genuinely excited and hopeful.

Do I think he’s a beautiful leftist cinnamon roll of a messiah who must be protected and elevated at all costs? Absolutely not. Are there things that bother me about both him and his supporters? Definitely. Do I think any of that fucking matters right now? Not even a little bit.

Am I going to vote for him? Of fucking course I am what are we even doing here?

Well, I’ll tell you what we’re doing here. The same thing we do every single time a Democratic candidate gets any traction or momentum at all. Passively watch the media tuck a napkin into its bib and eat that D alive with a massive bowl of hot buttery hypocrisy to dunk them in before shrugging helplessly and losing again. What else could we possibly do? Not demand youth and experience and a perfect personal life from the cradle on and massively overclocked charisma and perfectly pure policy stances that satisfy the whole tent from blue dog to radical leftist from every single candidate for every single office or else fascism can just take us all? Don’t be stupid, if we did that, we might win!

Grossed Out GIF - Thats Disgusting Ew Gross - Discover & Share GIFs
Meanwhile, let’s hear some trenchant analysis on the moral fiber of Democrats from our guest, Actual Asmodeus, Lord of the Pit and Arch-Fiend of Hell (R)

Every article about him winning the primary I’ve seen has made references to Platner’s “scandals.”

Platner’s scandals. The President of the United States and his entire party are exposed pedophiles, rapists, corrupt corporate puppets when they aren’t puppetmasters, bought and paid for by foreign interests, abusers, war profiteers, screaming idiots, and cheerfully co-operating with big tech to destroy the planet on a quest to fully replace every human being they possibly can with a chatbot, and they aren’t shy about showing how gleeful the idea makes them to any camera they can find.

But sure, Platner’s got scandals. That must be included in every headline so no one makes the mistake of not realizing Democrats Bad. While Republicans can just cruise on by with some of their baby-devouring lunch still dripping off their chin—no comments, sir, and no follow-up questions!

Uh…congratulations, I guess?

You should always be suspicious when the media agrees on something. When they all use the same words. When they all get oh-so-Collinsingly concerned about this one Democrat people like and how much we shouldn’t like them. Especially because this trick is only ever rolled out against Democrats and the left, while the right gets the benefit of a thousand angles all competing to see which one gets them into the least trouble.

So let’s go through it.

Yep, he made a bunch of shitty Reddit comments. You know I don’t like a single one of those moronic statements.

Yep, he has a deeply questionable and fucking stupid tattoo he absolutely should’ve been smart enough to get covered long before he ran for Senate. Right about the time he was deleting his social media comments.

And yep, it appears he was maybe a shitty boyfriend in his 20s and sexted people he wasn’t married to while a private citizen. Now, I held back this essay once I heard something new was going to come out, in case it was assault or minors or something indefensible. But this isn’t Swalwell. They weren’t minors, no one is even suggesting it went beyond texting, the information came directly from his wife (leaked by an aide working for another candidate in the party) who has obviously forgiven him and also this isn’t Love Island, that’s between them, we’re not electing a Husband for the State of Maine, so I don’t fucking care.

Protect our goddamned rights. Stand up for us. Pull us back from the brink. That is what I care about. Democrats have jettisoned their own (sometimes correctly, sometimes Howard Dean yelled too enthusiastically) over and over while Republicans happily vote for a parade of fucking Backrooms monsters and this is where it’s gotten us.

Is it fascism or isn’t it? Because if it’s fascism, well, people are mostly trash most of the time and none of this is more important than NOT DOING FASCISM WITH THE WORLD’S LARGEST NUCLEAR ARSENAL. I don’t know what kind of tattoos Susan Collins has (though I do know what Pete Hegseth has on his chest and the media never refers to it in headlines) but her actions show she’s a fascist. She has enabled them joyously every step of the way. She played an enormous role in taking away my bodily autonomy.

Oh and fun fact: she’s married to a guy she started adulterously fucking while his previous wife was dying of cancer. Shall we write even a single article about it? No? Because that’s a bit worse than sexting. Still no? Ah yes, I see the media is very genuine and serious about this whole situation.

Honestly, if we’re going to say a stupid edgelord tattoo, shitty Reddit comments, not being a good boyfriend thirty seconds out of the military, and sexting adults other than his wife are disqualifying, we might as well just pass a law now barring Millennial men from holding any kind of office. And no, some salacious story about jerking off in a port-a-potty you only know about from his own comments on Reddit where everyone exaggerates, doesn’t turn the dial on that. Oh no, he jerked off privately in a closed space where no one knew or saw? No man has ever done such a thing in the history of the world, better surrender to fascism!

You can’t demand younger outsider candidates and also insist none of them have been a recent dipshit—being an occasional dipshit is largely part and parcel of being younger and an outsider. The only result will be that only rich personality-free kids groomed for government from birth by helicopter parents with their eyes on the prize will ever get elected as Democrats, while the Republicans will continue electing their Garbage Pail Kids Rogues’ Gallery because everyone normal fucks up plenty on their way to not being young anymore.

And I would be very careful about sending the message that people cannot change or grow or come to the left from outside it, because we do actually need to get kind of a lot of folks out of these horrifying pipelines, and that will involve convincing them that not only can they change and grow, but that there is a viable life waiting on the other side of their mistakes. Platner might be a pretty superb beacon for leading that exodus, precisely because of all this.

Not to mention riding the “dipshit to decency” pipeline has been Platner’s brand from jump and it’s why he’s been successful. Mainers knew, it’s been on label the whole time. Everyone loves a conversion story. Nobody here heard “working class ex-military white guy fisherman” and didn’t assume he was rough around the edges at a minimum. For the most part, it’s why a lot of people around here like him. This is not a state that falls along easy party lines. Our political motto might as well be “why don’t you go fuck yourself, bub, and leave us alone?” It’s also why a lot of red-leaning independents like him, and that’s why the media is in a panic that Collins might go, and Trump, of all fucking tentacled creatures of the underdark, is out there calling him a thug. Which won’t help at all, it just fixes the whole “Democrats aren’t tough” thing, but what Trump understands about human nature would barely make a splash in his golden toilet.

Graham Platner is the only opponent Collins has faced with genuine grassroots enthusiasm behind him, whose name the voting population here in Maine now knows very well, and let’s be honest, he’s a straight white dude and we’ve seen how much that matters over and over. Shouldn’t, but does. We do not get to play politics in a magical gummy bear dreamland full of philosophers. We have to play the field as it lies.

I’m not defending these things. Of course I don’t love any of it. (Still baffled as to why Collins’ past is a no-go zone, though!) But are we facing the existential threat of fascism or aren’t we? There really is no taking the Senate back without this seat and, call me quirky and unreasonable, but I would like to keep some rights. And not die in a nuclear fireball just yet. We do not have the luxury of waiting for perfect candidates. We never did. I have been furious at voters for not being able to look past whatever flaws Kamala, Biden, and Hilary had and pull the lever for the smallest hope of things getting better instead of the certainty that they wouldn’t. I can’t not do the same in my own home state.

And when I went to hear him speak a few weeks before the primary, he did actually address these things. I went with quite a bit of suspicion, because I did not like him at first. But a major Senate candidate came to the tiny island in the ocean where I live. A thing Susan Collins has certainly never done, nor Mills.

You know who organized that? The island school nurse and her husband, who is also an oyster farmer and knows Platner personally. In fact, I know a lot of people who know Platner personally. Maine is that kind of place. There are more alligators in the state of Florida than people in the state of Maine. Platner opened his speech asking if anyone knew his mom and about a dozen people cheered because they did. We know each other here. I can talk to more than one person who’s known this guy for years without leaving a mile radius of my house. And the people who know him are the ones I listen to.

Did I like everything he said? Nope. I will never like it when a candidate bashes the party they’re running to lead to the voters aligned with that party. I am allergic to insincere promises, I despise canned meme statements like “get money out of politics” as though that’s remotely possible while resources remain finite and people remain human, and these days idealism just depresses the hell out of me. But I liked his policies (because they’re pretty much just Democratic policies, I don’t know why we have to do this “not like other girls” dance all the time to avoid siding with ourselves) and he’s a good and relatable speaker that gets people excited which I promise you Sara Gideon did not.

Who’s Sara Gideon? That’s the fucking point. She was the last challenger, and while she was ahead in the polls briefly, no one was ride or die for her the way many are for Platner, and she was never enough of a threat for the Republican-thralled media to wallpaper the country with scare-quotes about her.

And he talked about all this stuff very openly. The first questions were about the Reddit comments etc. And he talked about getting sucked into the pipelines that so many young people are drowning in these days, and finding his way out again. About having to answer for yourself. He seemed, to me, to take accountability rather than blaming someone else or shrugging it off. One of my major issues with him is that I don’t think he’s handled these oppo leaks very deftly, and he’d better figure it out quickly, because Susan Collins won’t be as out to lunch as Janet Mills. Most of this should’ve been and could’ve been dealt with before he ever filed to run, and I’m nervous about someone who doesn’t know that. But in person, he is actually very good at facing it down and at least seeming to take real lessons from it.

And pretty inspiring, if my dead soul were capable of being politically inspired anymore. He’s the only Congressional candidate I’ve ever heard acknowledge that the junior senator from Maine can’t actually do any of these things alone, and won’t make a huge difference except in Senate majority numbers unless there’s a movement, people, and other candidates standing with him. What can I say, pragmatism gets me going.

But no, I don’t think the guy campaigning on the idea that our time is being stolen from us by the conservative agenda and everyone deserves more time, more ease, healthcare, safety, opportunities, peace, equality, and the possibility of even hoping for reform is some kind of secret Nazi sex-fiend. That’s not how they talk. I’m pretty sure the proud and outspoken Nazi sex-fiends are Nazi sex-fiends, though. Because they tell us they are. And then steal our money to build a ballroom to have their Nazi sex-fiend parties in while telling us that’s exactly what they’re doing. Scandals are meaningless now. The President is one of the worst people ever to walk the Bad People Planet. The media agrees Graham Platner is somehow equivalent, which I and all of us should’ve learned long ago probably means he’s a pretty good person because the only thing the media ever cooperates to do is lie.

And I don’t think he’s another Fetterman, though that would still get Collins out and help secure the Senate my god do we even want to win? Fetterman never talked as empathically and warmly about equality even before the catastrophic head injury.

Look, I didn’t like Graham Platner at first, either. I’m not sure if I “like” him now. But liking someone is not actually my primary criteria as a voter. Honestly, I very rarely like candidates at all, and even less candidates I see receiving the Bernie Sanders treatment from the online commentariat—by which I mean, a candidate who receives the benefit of only being attacked from the right, while the online left suddenly declines to give them the usual ugly nicknames or distribute disingenuous readings of their histories and policies, but instead leaps into any comment section to dogpile and drown out even the mildest of criticisms. That kind of double standard, on top of the double standard Democrats already face, pisses me off and it’s hard not to notice that the candidates who get those soft gloves are always men and usually white. So I have come around the long way. (And yes, the follow-up essay for paid subscribers starts right here, you know me so well.)

But in the end, if this is it and there isn’t something absolutely massive still to come out, I think he might be the only person who even has a prayer of prying this state out of the cold, unfeeling claws of Susan Collins, at least for the moment. And that’s probably why we’re being primed to hate him and draw a straight line between the monstrous crimes of blood and gold Trump and his regime commit every second of every day and a bunch of rumors that amount to just kind of what you’d assume an ex-Marine oyster fisherman in Maine did before getting his life together.

Or shall we just lose to fascism because it’s the only thing we know how to succeed at anymore?

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Pluralistic: The world has moved on (11 Jun 2026)


Today's links



A blasted wasteland with a mushroom cloud rising over it. In the foreground are swarms of drowning people climbing over each other to escape into the limbs of a dead tree, and a crowd of agonized skeletons. All sourced from Dore engravings illustrating the Old Testament.

The world has moved on (permalink)

Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."

I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.

I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times

That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed:

https://customercaremc.com/2025-national-customer-rage-study/

We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.

So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.

The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/04/us-consumer-rage-prices-economy

I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken

Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on."

At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.

Spoiler alert!

Still with me? OK, then.

In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.

It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.

And then the world moved on.

For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.

The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface – from our world and theirs – creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.

When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life – hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say – with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the fucking end-times.

For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?

Well, yes – and no.

Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.

When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.

And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company – not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company – get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.

I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – "conservative"? What binds all these views together?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.

That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.

If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.

For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. "Taxes are for the little people":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we "distort the market," which is literally going against nature:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, and the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover – because the rules that protect everyday investors are "for the little people." Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/spacex-blocked-from-early-us-benchmark-index-entry-as-sp-reaffirms-existing-rules.html

The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower – antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the "autocrats of trade." The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were "for the little people," that breaking those rules "made them smart."

They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means, "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap

Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria

In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.

When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.

AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now require ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.

What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to

It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):

https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/

This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600

This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog

This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.

So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.

What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:

https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff

Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:

https://utaw.tech/

Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.

Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Coupland’s JPod: the Anti-Microserfs https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/09/couplands-jpod-the-anti-microserfs/

#20yrsago Anti-iTunes DRM demonstrations across the USA tomorrow https://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/98

#20yrsago EFF co-founder Barlow debates MPAA prez Glickman http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5064170.stm

#20yrsago Warehouse where old Disney World rides go to die https://limegreen-loris-912771.hostingersite.com/lost-horizons-another-look-back-at-a-future-world-favorite/

#15yrsago IMF considered harmful https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-it-s-not-just-dominique-strausskahn-the-imf-itself-should-be-on-trial-2292270.html

#15yrsago AT&T lobbies Wisconsin GOP to nuke Wisconsin’s best-of-breed co-op ISP for educational institutions https://communitynetworks.org/content/does-att-really-own-wisconsin-legislature-battle-over-wiscnet-continues

#15yrsago Developmentally disabled man harrassed by TSA at Detroit airport https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141422/http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/taryn_asher/dad-special-needs-son-harassed-by-tsa-at-detroit-metropolitan-airport-20110608-wpms

#15yrsago Miami cops intimidate citizen journalist who recorded shoot-em-up, smash camera https://web.archive.org/web/20110615035017/https://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/02/v-fullstory/2248396/witnesses-said-they-were-forced.html

#15yrsago NYC cyclist vs. bike lanes – kamikaze law-abiding https://web.archive.org/web/20110612100758/https://consumerist.com/2011/06/test.html

#15yrsago Judge to copyright trolls: you are “inexcusable” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/judge-furious-at-inexcusable-p2p-lawyering-cancels-subpoenas/

#15yrsago Wah wah crybaby extortionists wah wah https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-defame-torrentfreak-in-court-110609/

#15yrsago Lisa Goldstein’s The Uncertain Places: Grimm fairytale in California vibrates with believable unreality https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/09/lisa-goldsteins-the-uncertain-places-grimm-fairytale-in-california-vibrates-with-believable-unreality/

#15yrsago American right upset at report that Thatcher won’t meet Palin https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/09/margaret-thatcher-sarah-palin-meeting

#15yrsago Lobbynomics: Canadian Chamber of Commerce manufactures fake $30 billion counterfeiting loss https://web.archive.org/web/20110611045202/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5841/125/

#10yrsago USA Swimming bans rapist Brock Turner for life https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/usa-swimming-bans-convicted-rapist-brock-turner-for-life-114108/

#10yrsago Human advice for exercising while depressed https://web.archive.org/web/20160505140324/https://theestablishment.co/2016/05/05/depression-busting-exercise-tips-for-people-too-depressed-to-exercise/

#10yrsago Every industry thinks it’s special, but only finance gets treated that way https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/John-Kay-BIS-speech.pdf

#10yrsago Spain’s Podemos Party publishes its manifesto in Ikea Catalog form https://estaticos.elperiodico.com/resources/pdf/9/4/1465389843149.pdf

#10yrsago Reminder: Neal Stephenson predicted Donald Trump in 1994 https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/10/reminder-neal-stephenson-predicted-donald-trump-in-1994/

#10yrsago Donald Trump, deadbeat https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

#10yrsago UK startup offers landlords continuous, deep surveillance of tenants’ social media https://web.archive.org/web/20160610150904/https://gawker.com/new-startup-that-sends-dossiers-on-your-private-social-1781576586

#10yrsago UK Parliament votes in Snoopers Charter, now it goes to the House of Lords https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/08/uk-parliament-ignores-concerns-moves-snoopers-charter-forward/

#10yrsago Hard times for judge who sued dry-cleaner for $65M over missing pants https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/06/pants-chapter-28.html

#10yrsago New York Attorney General to Time Warner: your Internet is “abysmal” and “troubling” https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/time-warner-cable-internet-speeds-are-abysmal-ny-ag-claims/

#10yrsago Banks confront negative interest rates with plans to store titanic bundles of money on-site https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/banks-rebel-against-negative-interest-rates.html

#10yrsago Watchdogs 2: hacker kids led by a guy named Marcus fight the DHS in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ipUwUcHASI

#10yrsago Internet greybeards and upstarts gather to redecentralize the Internet https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html

#10yrsago How we will keep the Decentralized Web decentralized: my talk from the Decentralized Web Summit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE

#5yrsago Prisoners' Inventions https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

#5yrsago Urban broadband deserts https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

#5yrsago A denialism taxonomy https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#denialism


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


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Musk's Galactic Ripoff

11 June 2026 at 10:01

Friends,

Elon Musk’s SpaceX goes on the market tomorrow. Rather than provide a range and then price the deal based on demand, as is customary in Initial Public Offerings, Musk has set a take-it-or-leave-it price of $135 per share.

He anticipates that the resulting corporation will be valued at $1.77 trillion. That’s an extraordinary amount for a company that generated $18.7 billion in revenue last year and recorded an operating loss of $4.2 billion.

In other words, Musk is offering SpaceX stock at roughly 100 times the company’s total revenue in 2025. This is ballsy, to say the least, given SpaceX’s consistent negative profitability and its failure to meet prior goals. But it’s a great deal for Musk. He comes out of it with nearly a trillion dollars.

Granted, it’s difficult to predict the value of activities that don’t yet exist, such as SpaceX’s stated mission to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” Interstellar space travel and interplanetary habitation are inherently speculative endeavors. But before tomorrow’s giant IPO, capitalism had never before put a price tag on something nearly as speculative and as large.

Let’s be clear. SpaceX’s IPO is basically nothing more than a show of faith in Musk. After all, much of SpaceX’s value comes out of a deal Musk negotiated between SpaceX’s and his Artificial Intelligence startup, xAI. Musk essentially made that deal with himself, setting the relative valuations by himself, closing the deal by himself, and unilaterally deciding the value of his own transaction. A magic trick, out of thin air!

The closer you look at the SpaceX IPO, the more it looks like Musk’s ill-fated DOGE. It also bears a striking resemblance to Trump’s takeover of the U.S. government. All of it is arbitrary, based on the will of one man with a giant ego and an insatiable thirst for money and power. It’s built on self-dealing. There’s no accountability. No checks. No balances.

Musk will have total control. Shareholders won’t have any voice whatsoever. Each share held by Musk will have 10 times the voting power of a share offered to the public. SpaceX’s board of directors will engage in a pantomime. They’ll have no meaningful authority. As the editorial board of the Financial Times put it, “traditional governance checks are almost entirely absent…. [Musk] will have a virtually unchallenged grip on voting rights and the board.”

None of this would be particular cause for concern if investors could decide for themselves whether the downside risks and potential upside gains from buying SpaceX stock were worth the price. That’s called a “market.” Caveat emptor.

But many of us, if not most of us, with any savings parked in major stock indices (yours truly included) won’t have any choice. We’re going to end up investing in SpaceX whether we want to or not. That’s because the major indices have been rigged.

Normally, major stock indices have a waiting period before they plow their investors’ money into a newly formed company, in order to test whether that company is worth it. But SpaceX has lobbied index funds to change the rules.

On May 1, for example, the Nasdaq 100 implemented a new “fast entry” rule that will include companies among the top 40 most highly valued companies — which will almost certainly include SpaceX.

Presto! A big chunk of Americans’ retirement savings and pensions (as well as university endowments) will automatically be tied to SpaceX’s market value. At the same time, all that automatic infusion of investment will artificially jack up the value of SpaceX, at least in the short term.

But here’s the real kicker. SpaceX insiders — such as Musk and, reportedly, senior Trump officials — will be able to sell their shares sooner than is usually the case with an IPO, because that’s the way the IPO has been organized. Which means they can enjoy the stocks’ upward tide as the major indices force millions of investors to buy it, and then they can exit SpaceX before the tide goes out.

If this sounds to you like a Ponzi scheme, it does to me, too. Even worse, it’s a Ponzi scheme that’s been rigged by Musk, with the acquiescence of Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission, to require that I and probably you put some of our savings into SpaceX.

Speaking of the SEC, Senator Elizabeth Warren has raised many of these concerns with Paul Atkins, Trump’s SEC chair. She’s even asked him to delay the IPO to determine whether index funds are adequately protecting investors — warning of “a disastrous scenario where retirees’ and families’ investment accounts take a hit if SpaceX’s valuation falters, with little recourse for any corporate misconduct, while the wealthiest man on earth becomes even wealthier due to a lack of oversight.”

But SpaceX’s takeoff is happening tomorrow, regardless. It’s likely to make Musk a trillionaire but also to shaft a lot of innocent people, perhaps without their even noticing. It will be a huge redistribution from most of us to Elon and his buddies.

I don’t want to sound cynical, but this is the sort of thing that brings out the cynicism in me. It’s the story of American capitalism in this Second Gilded Age.

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It's Worse Than Ever

11 June 2026 at 01:02

Friends.

Either he knows he’s lying — in order to further undermine confidence in our elections and as a prelude to attacking the outcome of the midterms — in which case he needs to be impeached and convicted.

Or he doesn’t know he’s lying — he really believes that our election system is “crooked” and that the major media are “crooked” — in which case he’s seriously and dangerously mentally ill, and the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked to get him out of office.

Take your pick. Either way, he has to be removed from office. And soon.

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JD's Strategy

10 June 2026 at 21:01

J.D. Vance giving an address in front of a microphone

Friends,

I’ve been watching JD Vance as carefully as anyone can track a snake in the grass, which is to say, with some difficulty. He has seemed uncomfortable with Trump’s grandiose foreign ambitions, especially Trump’s failed war in Iran, but I’ve seen no evidence that JD has spoken out against any of it even inside Trump’s ego-echo chamber.

JD hasn’t carved out a regressive policy specialty for himself, as have some other of Trump’s despicable underlings such as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Harmeet Dhillon.

Nor has JD become much of a spokesperson for Trump. He rarely appears on television or even on social media. Nor has he been visible on Capitol Hill. He hasn’t cinched any deal in Congress.

JD seems to appear when and where a vice president is supposed to, but then disappears again into the daily effluence of Trump.

But there’s one particular area where JD seems to stand out (I was tempted to write “excel,” but it’s impossible to excel at something as execrable as JD’s specialty.) He is the regime’s strangest bigot.

Among all the bigots in the Trump regime — and there are many — JD’s bigotry stands out for a particular lunacy, combining magic realism with a unique ultra-wackiness.

We saw glimmers of this during the 2024 campaign when JD, then a U.S. senator from Ohio, insisted that the pets of upright Americans residing in Springfield, Ohio, were being “abducted and eaten” by Haitian immigrants “who shouldn’t be in this country.”

Despite being informed by city officials that Haitian immigrants were not in fact eating pets, Vance doubled down. He was sure Haitians were eating people’s pets. The publicity surrounding JD’s bizarre claims led to threats against Springfield’s Haitian community.

Not to let a disgusting lie about a minority group go unexploited, Trump amplified Vance’s pet-eating claim during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

Finally confronted by irrefutable evidence that Haitian immigrants were not eating pets in Springfield, Vance admitted publicly that he was speaking, shall we say, metaphorically: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

Hello?

Now, JD is back.

“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit,” JD declared on X last week. Nowak would still be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

If you’ve followed this sad story, you know that an 18-year-old British student named Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed in the British city of Southampton in December by Vickrum Digwa, who falsely claimed Nowak had racially abused him and that Digwa had acted in self-defense. After the truth came out, Digwa was jailed for life on June 1, with a minimum term of 21 years.

That, in turn, prompted JD’s jeremiad against “mass invasion of migrants.”

But inconveniently for JD, Digwa was born and raised in Britain. Which puts JD’s blaming Nowak’s death on a “mass invasion of migrants” roughly on par with his claims about the eating habits of Haitian-Americans in Springfield.

This hasn’t stopped JD, of course, who’s using the Nowak murder to bolster his narrative of Britain as a “once powerful nation” whose elites are now welcoming “migrants” who “despise the West.”

JD has become a mouthpiece inside the Trump regime for assailing what JD repeatedly terms the “decline of Western civilization,” especially in Europe. It’s part of the Trump regime’s increasingly shrill critique of Europe. Trump’s most recent National Security Strategy promises to push “Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

In a sense, then, JD has stepped into the bigoted shoes of Viktor Orbán; Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing populist Reform UK party; and other resurgent European white Christian nationalists.

But there’s something more to this. JD wants to be the leader of the world’s anti-democracy movement.

Recall that JD would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on JD’s election — a major portion of all the funds that went into JD’s Senate race.

Thiel knew what he was buying. Before running for the Senate, JD had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick JD for his vice president.

Thiel was such a strong sponsor of JD because Thiel saw in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the U.S. away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

That’s the point. Thiel and JD — along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement — believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the U.S. is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the U.S. establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

Yarvin — who’s something of a thinker behind this movement — has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as JD offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” — as did Andrew Jackson — that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

The next step, apparently, is to foment so much division and bigotry inside the U.S. and within every other major Western nation that people come to view those on the other side of the political divide as the source of everything that’s wrong with their lives. That way, they won’t look upward to see Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the other billionaire robber barons, plutocrats, and oligarchs of this second Gilded Age grabbing most of the wealth and power for themselves.

And average people will trade in democracy for strongman autocracy.

Behind JD’s bloopers about Haitian-Americans and British “migrants” is a deadly serious plan to unite the far-rights of America and Europe and rid much of the world of democracy. If JD ever becomes president, he’s intent on finishing the job.

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The Senate Should NOT Confirm This Person

10 June 2026 at 10:01
Todd Blanche

Friends,

Let me get right to the point. The Senate should not confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.

Blanche, who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still believes that Trump — rather than the United States — is his client.

At the very least, the Senate should insist, as a condition of confirming Blanche, that the May 19 deal Blanche devised to immunize Trump and his family from all future prosecutions — which Blanche alone signed — be nullified.

The purpose of that immunity deal — which resulted from Trump’s own bizarre lawsuit against the IRS — should by now be clear. It’s to prevent any future government inquiry into the corrupt dealings of Trump and his family.

The breadth of the so-called “settlement” agreement between Trump and, well, Trump is staggering. Take a look at it, here.

Boiled down to its bare essentials, the deal “forever” protects Trump and his family from “all claims” or “causes of action” or “requests for any relief” including “examinations” that “could have been asserted by the United States against Trump, his children, “or affiliated individuals” or “parties” which arise out of “any matters” or of “Lawfare and/or Weaponization” or of any matters that “could be pending” before the United States or its agencies and departments.

Put another way, the U.S. government is prohibited from looking into any of the corrupt sh*t Trump or his family have gotten into.

And there’s a lot of corrupt sh*t.

Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. Since being in office for a second time, he’s so far increased his wealth by an estimated $4 billion, and his sons’ and daughters’ wealth by billions more. Some examples:

  • Trump and his family have created multiple crypto businesses — World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP meme coin — that have received favorable deregulatory treatment and reportedly generated at least $2.3 billion in income for Trump and his family since he won the presidency.

  • Six days after a company backed by Eric and Donald Jr. took a 20 percent stake in an American mining group, the group’s parent company received $1.6 billion in federal financing. That’s because the president of Kazakhstan granted the company the right to mine the world’s largest known undeveloped deposit of tungsten, an element used in semiconductors, lightbulbs, and warheads.

  • In late 2025, Don Jr.’s firm 1789 Capital acquired an equity stake in critical minerals company Vulcan Elements. Shortly after, the White House and the Pentagon awarded Vulcan a $620 million federal loan without competitive procurement or independent technical review.

  • After Eric and Don Jr. backed the drone manufacturer Powerus, the U.S. Air Force awarded the company a lucrative contract.

  • Eric and Don Jr. have conducted numerous undisclosed meetings with foreign government officials (including representatives from Hungary, the UK, Vietnam, and Qatar) while simultaneously negotiating global real estate deals for the Trump Organization.

  • Don Jr. serves as a strategic advisor or investor in prediction market firms Kalshi and Polymarket, which have received favorable, deregulatory treatment from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

  • Don Jr. is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which will benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.

  • Presumably, someone has made a fortune trading stocks and bonds on the basis of insider knowledge of decisions that Trump would announce — about tariffs, his war in Iran, and other news that moved stock and bond markets. The trades occurred just before the announcements.

  • In May, Trump disclosed that his trust was actively trading individual stocks, an unprecedented practice for a sitting U.S. president in the modern era.

  • Trump has pardoned some of the most brazen financial criminals in American history, and one can only wonder what he received in return. They include Philip Esformes, convicted in what Trump’s own Department of Justice described as the “largest health care fraud scheme ever charged”; Joseph Schwartz, convicted for a $38 million fraud scheme; and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted for multimillion-dollar bank fraud. He’s granted clemency to Lawrence Duran after a $205 million fraud conviction. He commuted Jason Galanis’s sentence and pardoned Devon Archer, both tied to tens of millions in fraud.

If the “settlement” remains in force, we will never know the details of any of these transactions, because the “settlement” — devised and signed by Todd Blanche — will result in the largest cover-up of presidential wrongdoing and illegality in American history.

Without it, Trump and his family could be required to disgorge their ill-gotten gains.

For his role in this scam, Blanche should not be confirmed as attorney general. At the very least, his confirmation should be conditioned on this so-called “settlement” being deemed null and void.

If you’re with me on this, please contact your senator’s office and tell them to vote NO on confirming Blanche. (At the very least, NO to the immunity deal Blanche gave Trump and his family.)

The Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Elected officials prioritize their own voters, so please share your name and your city/town so the staff knows you live in their state.

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Inequality Isn't Just Unfair. It's Dangerous!

9 June 2026 at 23:00

Friends,

Here’s this week’s video. Please have a look, and please share!

You’ve heard me talk about this, but I wanted to present it in a way that would be absolutely clear.

The wealth of the richest Americans has exploded. I’m not even talking about the top 1 percent. I’m talking about the richest 0.1 percent — the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

In the 1990s, most Americans’ wealth grew at about the same pace. But after 2010, the top 0.1 percent pulled ahead of the rest of the 1 percent, and everyone else.

2010. Remember that year, because I want to come back to it.

After 2018, in part because of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich that went into effect at the start of that year, America’s richest 0.1 percent are now worth more than the entire GDP of China.

What do they do with all this money? Well, when they’re not just shooting rockets into space or building hideous trucks, they’re spending it on politics.

Billionaire political spending in presidential elections is exploding.

After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, it took off.

In the last presidential election, just 300 billionaire families spent roughly $3 billion. Those families gave an average of $10 million each — roughly 100,000 times what an average donor gave.

And the super-rich are getting a big return on their “investment.” They’re getting more tax cuts, more deregulation, and a government that lets them get away with busting unions, exploiting workers, and monopolizing their markets while poisoning the environment.

All so they can get even richer and accumulate even more power. So they can get even richer and accumulate even more power. And so on.

But this vicious cycle is unsustainable, both politically and economically.

When so much of our economy is in relatively few hands, we will inevitably get to the point where consumers cannot buy all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing. This puts the entire economy at risk.

It’s also politically unstable because it’s inherently divisive — pitting losers against winners and laying the groundwork for an authoritarian state — where no one’s future is secure, including the super-rich.

So we ALL have a stake in stopping this vicious cycle.

To do this, we need to raise taxes on the rich — not to punish them but to ensure that the system works for everyone. This means raising their income taxes and taxing their wealth.

And we need public financing for federal elections — matching public dollars to small-dollar donations in order to balance the power of super-rich and corporate donors. Many states and cities are already doing this — and it works.

Finally, we’ve got to undo Citizens United. One way to do that is for states to follow what Montana hopes to do and what Hawaii has already done: take away the power of corporations to make political contributions in the first place.

Look, it’s time to get big money out of politics — for all our sakes.

Please share!

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Pluralistic: Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix" (09 Jun 2026)


Today's links

  • Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix": When forced birth cultists become forced obstetrics militants.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: DD-WRT; iTunes DRM is illegal; Fingertip magnet; Sony passwords v Gawker passwords; RIAA recants on 3 strikes; Parachute wedding dress; Roald Dahl (jerk); "Level Up"; The rent's too damned high; RIAA v "Search by artist"; "Robopocalypse"; You are not a wallet; The man who created the religious right; NY x voting; NY x antitrust; Media companies fund Heritage Minister's campaign; Richard Dreyfuss x iTunes EULA; 3-way street; RIAA lawyer becomes Solicitor General; Brock Allen's wrist-slap; Ad-tech interop; Apple's manorial security; Billionaires aren't taxed, "Rabbits."
  • Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.



The tordotcom cover for Naomi Kritzer's 'Obstetrix.'

Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix" (permalink)

Naomi Kritzer's Obstetrix is a new, tense thriller in the mode of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Alderman's The Power; it's a beautifully turned, claustrophobic horror novel about an obstetrician who's been kidnapped by a Christian cult obsessed with fertility:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250423375/obstetrix/

Kritzer is a master of building scenarios that require her characters to express and resolve a wide variety of complex and contradictory emotions. Her breakout novel, Catfishing on CatNet is a charming and deceptively goofy story about an AI trained on the impeccable vibes in a really solid groupchat becoming sentient and demanding…cat pictures. This is the setup for a warm (but intense) novel of internet-mediated friendship and IRL mutual aid:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/naomi-kritzers-catfishing-on-the-catnet-an-ai-caper-about-the-true-nature-of-online-friendship/

Then there's her incredibly prescient 2015 story "So Much Cooking," about people in lockdown during a pandemic. For obvious reasons, it enjoyed an revival in 2020, with Kritzer penning an excellent essay reflecting on what it means to have thought through the implications of a disaster that is now upon us:

https://reactormag.com/didnt-i-write-this-story-already-when-your-fictional-pandemic-becomes-reality/

In 2023, Kritzer published one of the most memorable YA novels I've read, Liberty's Daughter, which is set on a libertarian seastead and told from the point of view of the daughter of the cult's founder:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

Liberty's Daughter is basically what you'd get if you rewrote a Heinlein YA novel from the perspective of one of the kids, who had to live with a Heinlein-type dad (Heinlein was childless and had some of the most batshit child-rearing ideas, which he managed to make sound bizarrely plausible). There's a lot of sf that is "in dialogue" with Heinlein (including some of mine), but no one nailed RAH like Kritzer.

Then there's Obstetrix; it's got one of those admirably propulsive setups. Doctor Elizabeth Gwynn is an obstetrician who performed an abortion to save her patient's life, only to be dragged into the culture wars by North Dakota's crusading attorney general, who charged her with felony murder and offered to let her plead out if she would admit that she was wrong to do it, as an example to other OBs who might be tempted. Now, Dr Liz lives in Minneapolis, where her savings are running out and no one wants to hire an obstetrician who's done time.

Then, Dr Liz gets a cold-call from a midwifing service that wants to hire her as an on-call doc. It's a weird offer from out of the blue, but Dr Liz can't afford to pass up a chance at steady work. She finds herself in a residence that the midwives work out of, and the nice woman there offers her a cup of tea. That's when the world fades to black, as the drugs in the tea take hold.

Liz sporadically regains consciousness in a van during a multi-day drive, and already she is thinking about her escape – even as she is becoming increasingly aware of how truly terrible her situation is. When she finally arrives at the cult's remote compound, frozen and isolated, she learns that she has been kidnapped because the fertility-obsessed cult needs an OB, especially since the daughter of the cult's founder, the "pastor," is carrying a high-risk pregnancy.

All that is in the first few pages, which leaves plenty of room for an expertly spun second act in which we get Kritzer's trademark interpersonal work, where carefully chosen and smartly wrought small details flesh out a picture of the complex dynamics of life inside a "high-demand" cult, from the way that members are manipulated into policing each other's compliance to the internal processes that keep members cowed even when they're unobserved by others. It's a brilliant work of sociological speculation and the engine that drives it is a series of maneuvers and gambits whereby Dr Liz hopes to make her way to safety.

I won't spoil the end, except to say that it is exciting, satisfying, and has a sweet denouement that does real justice to the whole book. All told, this is a read-in-one-sitting thriller that does as much to illuminate the workings and dynamics of patriarchy and religion as any gender studies class. It's peak Kritzer (so far), and that's saying something.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago HOWTO turn a $60 Linksys router into a $600 super-router https://web.archive.org/web/20060610003137/http://assets.lifehacker.com/software/router/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router-178132.php

#20yrsago Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: 1811 slang dictionary https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5402

#20yrsago Ex-RIAA head Hilary Rosen rethinks lawsuits and DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060609030533/https://www.p2pnet.net/story/8979

#20yrsago Norwegian ombudsman says Apple’s iTunes DRM is illegal https://web.archive.org/web/20060611194556/http://forbrukerportalen.no/Artikler/2006/1149587055.44

#20yrsago Implanting a magnet in your fingertip adds a sixth sense https://web.archive.org/web/20060613072724/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71087-0.html?tw=rss.index

#20yrsago Recording industry: Search-by-artist is “too interactive” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5055744.stm

#20yrsago US branch of “Pirate Party” launches https://web.archive.org/web/20060613041144/http://www.pirate-party.us/

#20yrsago Pranksters give fake McDonald’s anti-global-warming presentation https://web.archive.org/web/20060614011522/http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9621

#20yrsago Can. Heritage Minister’s election was funded by entertainment co’s https://web.archive.org/web/20060612224646/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1289/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago High-def DRM licenses cost $15k https://web.archive.org/web/20060612202129/https://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32273

#15yrsago Richard Dreyfuss reads the iTunes EULA https://web.archive.org/web/20110611012317/http://www.cnet.com/8301-30976_1-20068778-10348864.html

#15yrsago Top universities a ‘breeding ground’ for Tories, warn Islamic groups https://newsthump.com/2011/06/07/top-universities-a-breeding-ground-for-tories-warn-islamic-groups/

#15yrsago 3-Way Street: visualization of the uneasy dance of pedestrians, bikes and cars at a busy intersection https://web.archive.org/web/20110610123449/http://blog.ronconcocacola.com/2011/06/02/nyc-goes-three-ways.aspx

#15yrsago Copyright extremist RIAA lawyer confirmed as America’s Solicitor General https://web.archive.org/web/20110610134934/http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/senate-confirms-verrilli/

#15yrsago Scot-free millionaire playboy’s lawyer was judge’s depute campaign treasurer https://web.archive.org/web/20110610123824/http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-06-06/news/fl-levin-sentence-mayocol-b060711-20110606_1_house-arrest-dui-manslaughter-case-kenneth-watkinson

#15yrsago Bubble-in forms betray individual, traceable “handwriting” https://web.archive.org/web/20110609164727/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/wclarkso/new-research-result-bubble-forms-not-so-anonymous

#15yrsago Inbox Influence: plugin reveals corporate money behind the emails in your inbox https://web.archive.org/web/20110816105954/https://inbox.influenceexplorer.com/

#15yrsago Macedonia erupts after young man beaten to death by special police in public square https://web.archive.org/web/20110610132108/http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/default.aspx?VestID=139049

#15yrsago Robopocalypse: rigorous, terrifying novel about a robotic campaign to exterminate humanity https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/07/robopocalypse-rigorous-terrifying-novel-about-a-robotic-campaign-to-exterminate-humanity/

#15yrsago Using clickfraud on Google ads to amass shares of Google https://gwei.org/index.php

#15yrsago Comparative analysis of leaked Sony and Gawker passwords https://www.troyhunt.com/brief-sony-password-analysis/

#15yrsago China’s Politburo warns Google not to be “political” https://web.archive.org/web/20110610165205/http://www.transparencyrevolution.com/2011/06/china-warns-google-not-to-be-evil/

#15yrsago Guerrilla camper re-opens shuttered Michigan public campsite https://web.archive.org/web/20110609184456/http://www.miningjournal.net/page/content.detail/id/563100/Campground-closed-in-2009-illegally-reopened.html?nav=5006

#15yrsago Record industry lobby says it no longer supports 3-strikes copyright termination laws https://torrentfreak.com/recording-industry-steps-back-from-piracy-disconnections-110606/

#15yrsago Death threats for Aussie climate scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/06/australia-climate-scientists-death-threats

#15yrsago Wedding-dress made from life-saving parachute https://www.si.edu/collections/snapshot/parachute-wedding-dress

#15yrsago Level Up: Gene Yang’s comic about destiny, games, and filial piety https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/06/level-up-gene-yangs-comic-about-destiny-games-and-filial-piety/

#15yrago Roald Dahl: Jerk https://web.archive.org/web/20110602195454/http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/6/1/in-which-we-consider-the-macabre-unpleasantness-of-roald-dah.html

#15yrsago Rotting Gulliver’s Travels themepark in Japan https://web.archive.org/web/20110609235431/http://www.sleepycity.net/posts/40/Gullivers_Kingdom__Sea_of_Trees

#15yrsago Ticketed for being childless and eating doughnuts in a playground https://gothamist.com/food/two-women-ticketed-for-eating-doughnuts-in-a-brooklyn-playground

#15yrsago Internet Archive becomes archive of physical books, too https://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/

#10yrsago Swedish traditional costume made from Ikea bags https://ikeahackers.net/2016/06/swedish-folk-costume-5-ikea-bags.html

#10yrsago NSA dumps docs about its Snowden response, reveals that Snowden repeatedly raised alarms about spying https://web.archive.org/web/20160604213547/https://news.vice.com/article/edward-snowden-leaks-tried-to-tell-nsa-about-surveillance-concerns-exclusive

#10yrsago John Oliver buys and forgives $15M in medical debt, illustrates horrors of America’s debt-collectors https://web.archive.org/web/20160606234823/https://consumerist.com/2016/06/06/john-oliver-buys-15m-in-medical-debt-then-forgives-it/

#10yrsago David Byrne wants you to register to vote, and wants everyone else to, too https://web.archive.org/web/20160609060810/http://davidbyrne.com/were-better-than-this-vote

#10yrsago You are not a wallet: complaining considered helpful https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/07/its-your-duty-to-complain-thats-how-companies-improve

#10yrsago Web Sheriff’s legal scare strategy: throw everything at the wall, hope something sticks https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-breaking-basically-every-possible-law-pointing-out-that-abusing-dmca-takedowns/

#10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda declares war on bots https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/opinion/stop-the-bots-from-killing-broadway.html

#10yrsago Uber loves competition, when it’s the one doing the competing https://www.boston.com/news/technology/2016/06/05/uber-app-urbanhail-startup-ride-prices/

#10yrsago MI5 warning: we’re gathering more than we can analyse, and will miss terrorist attacks https://theintercept.com/document/2016/06/07/preston-study/

#10yrsago Samantha Bee interviews Frank Schaeffer, who helped create the religious right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhLY0JqXP-s

#10yrsago Why defense attorneys aren’t cheering Brock Allan Turner’s wrist-slap https://web.archive.org/web/20160611024154/http://mimesislaw.com/fault-lines/brock-turner-the-sort-of-defendant-who-is-spared-severe-impact/10288

#10yrsago Password hashing demystified https://www.wired.com/2016/06/hacker-lexicon-password-hashing/

#5yrsago Google and France agree on ad-tech interop https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#monkeys-paw

#5yrsago Billionaires don't pay tax https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#eat-the-rich

#5yrsago Apple's manorial security https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

#5yrsago Rabbits: PK Dick meets Qanon https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#rabbits

#5yrsago Competition tames ISPs https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#muni-fiber-now

#5yrsago New York to revolutionize voting https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#sb309a

#5yrsago New York to revolutionize antitrust https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#sb933

#5yrsago The Rent’s Too Damned High https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)



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Latest books (permalink)



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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


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Office Hours: What Did Trump's "Meet the Press" Interview Reveal?

9 June 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

Yesterday I asked a group of eight specialists who have closely watched Trump over the years — two clinical psychologists, a psychiatrist, two medical doctors, and three political advisers — about their reactions to Trump’s interview that aired on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.”

Here’s the part of the interview I asked them to focus on. For those of you who missed it, please click on the arrow to see it.

Today’s Office Hours discussion will focus on what, if anything, this interview reveals about Trump at this point in his second term.

The views expressed by my panel of medical and political experts were thoughtful and nuanced. For the sake of discussion, I’ve grouped them into the following categories:

Read more

Experience, Knowledge, and Talent Need Not Apply

8 June 2026 at 22:53

Friends,

Bari Weiss was hired by CBS to be editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025, when Paramount Skydance acquired CBS.

Weiss had no television-news experience. She was a New York Times Opinion staffer and founder of The Free Press.

In May, Weiss made Nick Bilton the new executive producer of “60 Minutes.” He has no television experience. He has no management experience, either.

I remember when CBS News was the most admired news organization in America — home to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. They spoke truth to power. Cronkite had the guts to challenge Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Murrow had the guts to expose Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunt.

Now, CBS News is a disgraced shell of a news organization that last week fired famed “60 Minutes” senior correspondent Scott Pelley after gutting most of the rest of its team.

Pelley says Weiss repeatedly interfered in stories “60 Minutes” sought to run. When, for example, the show did a piece on the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Weiss wanted to make “the protesters look more violent” and to describe Good “as driving toward the officer,” when videos show her driving away from him.

Pelley concluded that Weiss was trying to put “a thumb on the scale for the President’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News. … a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the President.”

Why was Weiss doing this? Presumably because her boss, David Ellison, wants to suck up to Trump, and hired Weiss to help him — and she hired Bilton to aid her in doing so. And she fired other staff because they wouldn’t.

Trump, meanwhile, has chosen Bill Pulte to be acting director of national intelligence. Pulte has no background in national security. He was head of Trump’s federal housing agency. His entire professional experience before that was at companies tied to his family’s wealth.

Trump chose Pulte not because he knows anything about intelligence but because of his eagerness to advance Trump’s political revenge campaign. He used his housing office to attack Trump’s enemies, leveling accusations of mortgage fraud against people Trump considers political enemies — Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Lisa Cook, a Fed governor Trump has sought to fire.

Trump has also chosen Todd Blanche to be attorney general. Blanche’s qualifications? As acting attorney general, Blanche oversaw the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI director James B. Comey over a photo he posted on Instagram in May 2025 of seashells on a beach that spelled out “86 47,” which the department characterized as a threat to the president.

It was the second attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to prosecute Comey, against whom Trump has vowed retribution for Comey’s alleged disloyalty to Trump during Trump’s first administration — when Comey said Trump pressured him to drop the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, publicly refuted Trump’s allegations that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump, and publicly challenged Trump’s narrative regarding the Russia probe.

Before becoming Pam Bondi’s attack dog at the Justice Department, Blanche was one of Trump’s personal lawyers.

Speaking of no relevant experience, I can’t resist pointing out that Lindsey Halligan, whom Trump appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had been a White House aide with no experience as a federal prosecutor before she was appointed. Halligan was tasked by Trump with prosecuting James Comey and Letitia James, after her predecessors as U.S. attorney — Erik Siebert and Todd Gilbert — refused to do it. The ploy didn’t work. The federal courts threw out both indictments.

I could go on — Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — but you get the point. Under Trump, experience, knowledge, and talent are irrelevant. The only criterion for getting a top job is blind loyalty to Trump.

But now this poison has also leached into the private sector, in vital places such as CBS and CBS News — places where people used to be hired for their experience, knowledge, and talent. Now they’re hired for their willingness to sacrifice their integrity to suck up to Trump.

This is how dictators poison the organizations a free society depends on. Trump is destroying CBS News by putting suck-ups David Ellison and Bari Weiss in charge, just as he’s destroying the Department of Justice and the Office of National Intelligence by putting suck-ups Todd Blanche and Bill Pulte in charge.

Sadly, a dictator will always be able to find people whose blind ambition exceeds their integrity.

But you and I don’t have to accept any of this.

We can boycott CBS News and its sponsors.

And we can do everything within our power to get out the vote in the midterm elections whose mail-in ballots start in four months and put responsible people in charge of Congress who have the courage to stand up to the dictator.

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