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:

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?

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?!

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.

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 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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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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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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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.

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!

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!

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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Today's links

• The world has moved on: Notes from the enshittocene.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Jpod"; Barlow v Glickman; Cyclist v bike lanes; Judge v copyright trolls; "The Uncertain Places"; Thatcher v Palin; NY v Time Warner; Banks v negative interest rates; Keeping the new web decentralized; "Prisoners' Inventions."
• Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, 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.

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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.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Apple wants Europe to blink https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/947051/apple-europe-dma-siri-ai

• Tech Influence Watch https://influence.citationneeded.news/

• Graham Platner and Stock Market Democrats https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-graham-platner

• Nominate a Site for Tiny Awards 2026 https://tinyawards.net/nominations/?2026

• Rudy Rucker Paintings https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings/

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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)

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: The Sovereignty Debate (IAB Canada's State of the Nation), Jun 23
  https://iabcanada.com/state-of-the-nation-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, and Everything (Luke Savage)
  https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the

• Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus)
  https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035

• Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP)
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

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

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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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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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ISSN: 3066-764X

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.

Share

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.

Share

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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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.

Leave a comment

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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!

Share

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.

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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.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The mayor of Shelbyville, Indiana, says only people who live in ‘shitty houses’ oppose data center https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/944984/shelbyville-indiana-mayor-shitty-houses-data-center

• Last Idea Factory https://starlogic.itch.io/last-idea-factory

• ‘Her silence was more powerful than words’: how I interviewed a Facebook whistleblower who wasn’t allowed to speak https://www.thenerve.news/p/carole-cadwalladr-sarah-wynn-williams-tim-wu-hay-festival-careless-people-gagging

• She won a religious exemption from using AI at work. The Pope's remarks could fuel similar appeals. https://www.businessinsider.com/worker-got-religious-exemption-using-ai-at-work-2026-6

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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/

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, and Everything
  https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the

• Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus)
  https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035

• Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP)
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

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

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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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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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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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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

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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Friends,

Friday’s jobs report — showing that America added 172,000 jobs in May — stimulated a lot of celebratory bullsh*t.

Trump said, “It’s raining jobs!” White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett claimed the job market is "hitting on all cylinders.” The mainstream media called it a “blowout jobs report,” “stronger-than-expected jobs data,” the labor market’s “best three-month stretch in more than two years.”

What all this acclaim left out was that wages are falling relative to prices.

Average hourly earnings for private-sector production and non-supervisory workers — that is, for most employees — rose by only 8 cents (or 0.2 percent) in May. That’s the weakest pace of wage growth since 2021.

Meanwhile, prices are rising quickly — by around 3.8 percent annually. Hence, real wages — that is, their actual purchasing power — are dropping. The paychecks of most American workers aren’t covering rising costs. They’re getting poorer.

It’s no cause for celebration that the American economy is adding a lot of jobs that are paying less. Hell, if paychecks keep shrinking relative to prices, there’s no telling how many jobs can be added. June’s job report could top May’s 172,000 new jobs.

There’s no limit to the number of terrible jobs an economy can create. If inflation-adjusted pay keeps dropping, we could see many hundreds of thousands of crappy new jobs per month. But most Americans would be getting poorer and poorer.

Bottom line: Don’t fall for any breezy, celebratory focus on the number of new jobs. Always ask: What about real (inflation-adjusted) wages?

When real, inflation-adjusted wages are dropping, we’ve got a real problem — regardless of how many jobs are being created.

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Friends,

Scott Pelley, the famed CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent who was fired last week by Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, gave an interview to The New York Times about what occurred. I reproduce it below because it’s an important indictment of Bari Weiss; of Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News; and of David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance, the parent corporation of CBS. It shows very clearly that, in effect, Trump fired Pelley because Trump doesn’t want Americans to get the truth about what he’s doing — just as Trump fired Stephen Colbert from the same network because Colbert was telling Americans the truth about Trump, through satire. The question I want to leave you with (and will take up in a later post) is: What are we going to do about this?

Here are Pelley’s words:

“No one saw the Black Thursday massacre coming. This is our entire senior staff. Tanya Simon, our boss, she’s the first woman ever to be executive producer of “60 Minutes.” And she concluded this season with a growth in our audience of nine percent, which is unheard-of in broadcast television, and a growth of our online presence of 190 percent. Last season, we had 2.5 billion views. That’s a third of humanity! So we’re riding high.

The night before, Tanya and I were at the Emmy Awards, and we won two Emmys. Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired. At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Bilton. I’m sure he must be a wonderful man, but no one had ever heard of him. He has zero experience in television news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like “60 Minutes.”

Explain to me exactly how you felt. Shock, dismay, impossible to believe, searching desperately for an explanation, knowing that an explanation would be forthcoming and then not seeing that. No executive at CBS News, our editor in chief, Bari Weiss, coming over to explain, to talk with us, to sit with us. That’s a family at “60 Minutes.” My colleagues and I have worked together 10, 20, 30 years. We travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together. My former boss and former producer Bill Owens saved my life in a firefight in Iraq. So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.

CBS leadership says that they tried to get in touch with you to talk about all of those changes before Bilton’s first day and you didn’t speak to them. Why not? I’m almost 69 years old, and if I’ve learned one thing in life, it is not to reflexively react when you feel that way. I thought, I’m going to give it a day. I’m too emotionally wrought up. I am going to say the wrong thing. I am not going to hear what they have to say. This isn’t the moment. So we got through the weekend, and I learned that Nick Bilton was going to speak to the “60 Minutes” staff that next Monday morning. My wife and I had a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies planned, and I wasn’t going to be able to be at the meeting and she and I talked about it, realized that this was an existential moment for “60 Minutes” and canceled the vacation so I could be there. That was the first time that I had an opportunity to meet Nick Bilton.

At that meeting, you spoke up very forcefully. You asked him why he’d taken the job “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” Why did you decide to have that first interaction with your new boss in public and not behind closed doors? It was behind closed doors. I was with my family in a closed room. None of this was meant to be public. Imagine I’m walking into this room with these people who have devoted their lives to “60 Minutes.” They have not received any kind of explanation. They are waiting for Bari Weiss to walk in the room in the hope that she’s going to explain why this tragedy has occurred and why it was so necessary. I’m waiting to see who comes in and it’s Nick Bilton and one of Bari’s deputies. No Bari. People are a little shocked by this. As we’re standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me. He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people. The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better. And also, if I can give you a little bit of context.

Please. What happened a couple of days before the meeting was so critical. Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved. He said in his email that it was “strange” that “60 Minutes” is only on the air at 7 o’clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we’ve been on the air 24-7 globally, online, for well over a decade. It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn’t know anything about us, didn’t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader.

Why did you feel that you were the person that needed to get the answers at that meeting? First of all, our entire senior staff had been wiped out. They’re not there. I looked around the room. I’m the only correspondent there, which surprised me very much. I learned that my colleagues were out shooting stories, as they should be in the month of June, but I’m the only correspondent. And I looked at my friends and colleagues in the room and realized I was the senior person. So when I saw Nick Bilton’s email and then saw him reading to my brokenhearted people off his phone, I felt that somebody had to stand up not just for the broadcast but for the people. There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant. [Tears up] Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the FDNY down the street. It is a life-threatening job in many instances. And to have people running CBS News, who don’t know that, have never felt that, and don’t understand it, is a tragedy.

You know, Bari Weiss came into a job with a mandate to evolve and modernize CBS News, to reinvent legacy media. In that meeting, you said Weiss was “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” language that you’ve used here. Can you explain what you mean? It was the wholesale nature of it. Senior staff wiped out after a triumphal year. One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited — I’m paraphrasing here — to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents. And when I saw that, I thought, “They’re going to fire all of us, eventually.” So that’s why I use these admittedly, for a journalist, hyperbolic terms. They capture the scale of what happened.

You then have a meeting with CBS leadership after this very contentious interaction [with Bilton]. Did you go in expecting to be fired? Oh gosh, furthest thing from my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me. The president of CBS News, Tom Cibrowski, sent me a note and said, can you come by and talk to us? And I said, absolutely. I scheduled about an hour on my calendar for the meeting. I didn’t know who was going to be there.

It really didn’t occur to you that you could be fired after so many of your colleagues had been let go, and after you’d had this very contentious interaction with your new boss? Some reporter I turned out to be. I just didn’t connect the dots. I mean, was this meeting [with Bilton] contentious? Yes, but “60 Minutes” is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.

There was a screening once with Mike Wallace, and Mike and the executive producer and founder of “60 Minutes,” Don Hewitt, got into a big argument about a script. Wallace jumps up in the middle of the screening, throws his script up in the air and yells at Don, “Well then you write the effing thing!” One of those pieces of paper comes down and slices an associate producer across the face. He’s bleeding now. He’s got a paper cut on his face. That was about a story. The meeting that I was in was about whether “60 Minutes” was going to even survive.

So, you walk in and what was the energy of the room? Hostile, dismissive. Before I can take my seat, Tom Cibrowski said, this is a firing offense. So I sit down, like, OK, let’s talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn’t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great.

So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn’t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don’t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes. Cibrowski tells me, you’ll have our answer in a few minutes. I went over to my office, and much to my surprise, all of my guys on my team were still there. They wanted to know what happened in the meeting. What was that all about? Did they explain why our people were fired? And I sat down in my office, it has a big plate glass window that looks out on the newsroom, and there were a whole bunch of people standing out there. I didn’t think anything of it. I’m waiting to find out what my fate is. I explained to my team, “I think I just got fired, but they haven’t told me that.” And then I look up and all those people are still out there, and then it hits me. This is a vigil. Four hours go by, and I go outside and said, “I’m leaving.” I packed up and left just so those people would go home. And not long after that, the email came through and said that I’d been fired.

I want to take a step back because this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The saga at CBS News began when David Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS as part of his purchase of Paramount. There was a lot of turmoil around that sale. The longtime previous owner of Paramount and CBS, Shari Redstone, told my New York Times colleague that she sold the company to Ellison in part because, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, she wanted to devote herself to causes around Israel. I’m sure there were other reasons as well. Did you ever speak to Ms. Redstone about the sale, and how did you feel about it? I didn’t speak to Shari Redstone about the sale. I felt the sale was very necessary. The company was in financial trouble. It wasn’t clear what our path forward was going to be. Mr. Ellison came in with a lot of money, a young man of vision, and I thought this was going to be very good for all of us.

The very last thing that the previous ownership did was pay a multi-million-dollar bribe to the president to settle this frivolous, ridiculous lawsuit. And very shortly after that, somehow the Trump administration approved the sale. That lawsuit against “60 Minutes” had caused a great deal of concern. Paying the bribe broke our hearts. No lawyer thought that was necessary, but they did it to get the sale through. At that point, my colleagues and I thought, great, that’s behind us. We have bright new leadership with financial resources. We’re in better shape than we were before. That was the theory.

Ellison then hires Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Weiss is a former opinion writer at The New York Times who left to start her own publication after claiming bias in the Times Opinion section. I never worked with her, for the record. The Free Press, which she launched, is generally pro-Israel and bills itself as pushing against what it sees as the mainstream media. What did you make of her appointment? I was not familiar with her name, so I did some research and discovered those things that you just outlined. What concerned me was that she had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News. Those were red flags to me, but I thought, David Ellison thinks she’s the right person for the job. We are absolutely going to welcome her, listen to her, and give her the benefit of the doubt.

When Bari comes in, she has a meeting with senior “60 Minutes” staffers, and in that meeting she asked, “Why does the country think you’re biased?” I wasn’t there, but that is what I’ve been told by my colleagues, and they were shocked.

What was the feeling about that opening salvo? “Uh-oh.” She didn’t offer any kind of a metric. Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about? We felt that she was making statements that she couldn’t back up and was coming into the news division with hardened preconceived notions that didn’t seem to be thought through.

You’ve now accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story? That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.

So, the story goes through screenings. It’s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.

Did you do as she asked? I asked my producers, “Did we leave anything out that’s important? Did we make a mistake here? I don’t think so, but go back and look.” And then I sat down with a video editor, and I went over the video of the Renee Good killing over and over again, and realized that the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it. And it’s late. Our deadline was noon. It’s now almost 5 o’clock. That’s dangerous as hell. So I decided that I wouldn’t do those things. I wasn’t going to get in a debate about it. I wasn’t going to call Bari Weiss about it. I was just going to refuse to make those changes.

Did you change any language in the broadcast? Anything? Not that I recall based on her notes, but as you probably are aware, when you’re doing a story, especially on deadline, a lot of things happen, there’s a lot of input, and you’re just scrambling to save everybody’s skin because you’re going to have a crash, which is what happened.

Next day I didn’t hear anything. Nobody called, nobody said anything. It occurred to me that maybe Bari Weiss didn’t see the broadcast and didn’t realize that those changes hadn’t been made. But that’s how that happened. There was 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.

Could she not have been trying to be fair to the administration at a moment of very high tension? She could have been trying to be fair to the administration, except I felt that the story was abundantly fair to administration and to the ICE officers and to border patrol officers who were caught in that moment.

Is it possible to see this as the system working? She had notes, you felt they didn’t make sense to take, the piece ran, and there was no retaliation. Well, it was the interference that’s a problem, especially in a story that’s been approved by the top editors. And the bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence. The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air. The entire hour of “60 Minutes”! It was the night of the Grammys. “60 Minutes” was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn’t have a broadcast. I pledged to myself that no matter what Bari Weiss wanted to do in a story, I would never break the deadline again because we put the entire network in jeopardy.

Why did you think she was asking for these things? I need to be a little bit careful here because I don’t want to be hyperbolic. My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough.

Cecilia Vega, who was recently fired, also alleged interference after she was let go. Sharyn Alfonsi as well, and you are now doing the same. CBS has denied any bias or interference, saying in a recent statement that changes and disputes were “the normal back and forth between editor and correspondent that happens in every newsroom.” A more generous interpretation of Weiss’s tenure might be that her missteps have been due to a lack of experience. Could inexperience be the real problem? I think inexperience is the larger part of the problem. The most difficult thing for the staff is trying to make up for all of these missteps in terms of our production and the technical aspects of television. It’s been enormously stressful.

.Another high-profile “60 Minutes” host, Anderson Cooper, declined to renew his contract this year. And at the end of his final show, he went on air and said, “I hope ‘60 Minutes’ remains ‘60 Minutes.’” That was seen as a swipe at Bari Weiss. Did you talk to Anderson about why he did not renew his contact and his reasons for leaving? I did not.

How did you receive that news? Correspondents don’t resign from “60 Minutes.” It’s the greatest job in the world. There is nothing else to aspire to. So, if a person of Anderson Cooper’s stature decides that he has to leave the broadcast, that’s an indication that he has found his role there untenable.

It’s been reported that Bari Weiss was upset that Anderson Cooper’s comments had aired in that way. That’s my understanding.

Do you think that was part of the reason executive producer Tanya Simon was let go? Yes. My understanding from people directly involved in that interaction is that Bari Weiss was quite livid that Anderson Cooper was allowed to say those things and that she, Bari, was not consulted beforehand, which in our normal course of business would not have been done anyway. I believe that was part of the reason Tanya was let go. But she wasn’t let go for cause. She was let go to create a space for the new person, Nick Bilton, to come in.

Tanya was completely blindsided by this. She was told that she was coming into a meeting to discuss the past season and the next season. She walks in; she sits down. And Tom starts the meeting with, the nature of this meeting has changed. We’re letting you go. And told her she was fired and had to get out of her office by 5 o’clock.

Can I give you a little bit of background? The Simon family is legendary at CBS News. Her father was a famous Vietnam correspondent and then Bob Simon covered every single war, everywhere in the world throughout his entire career. I was with him in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1990. We would stand on the roof of the hotel and watch the missiles come in. He taught me how to be a war correspondent. And then Tanya Simon comes in. She’s at the broadcast 30 years. There is no respect for that. Get out of the office by five o’clock? What company in the world treats their precious people that way? [Tears up] Tanya Simon spent her whole childhood waiting for the call that her father was dead, never knowing if she would ever see him again. Her whole childhood. Get out by 5 o’clock. Make of that what you will.

I can hear how much this has hurt you. Yes, it’s like your spouse being murdered. I don’t care about me. It’s not about me. I am not emotional about this because I have lost this job. I’ve done it for a long time. I’ve had the greatest experiences. But the people I leave behind, treated in this way? That breaks my heart, and it’s going to take me a long time to get over it.

One of the arguments that Bari Weiss has made about “60 Minutes” and CBS News is that they need to be brought into the modern era. Nick Bilton also said in that staff meeting with you that “broadcast is an ice cube that is melting.” Do you think they have a point, even if “60 Minutes” is reaching a huge audience now? Does its metabolism, the kinds of correspondents that it has have to change to reach a younger audience that interacts with media in a completely different way? Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous. It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is. At CBS News, yeah, join the fight. We started our first “60 Minutes” online show, “60 Minutes Overtime,” in 2010. I shoot TikTok verticals, or I used to shoot TikTok verticals on every assignment. We’re there. We’re everywhere.

Nick Bilton sent a very conciliatory note to the staff this past week. At last.

He promised editorial independence. He praised some of your longtime colleagues, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, Jon Wertheim. And while we’ve been talking, those three released a statement that they are staying at “60 Minutes.” How does that make you feel? Same reason I was staying. I haven’t talked to them. I assume it’s the same reason. And we have had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of the broadcast. If we leave, we can’t help. There have been other times — when Anderson left, when others were fired — that we could have stormed into a meeting and quit, but those very distinguished correspondents and myself did have conversations about this and decided that we were better working on the inside, and that we could influence things for the better. And we did. And it was my intention to stay and do exactly that.

Do you think they can trust those assurances? No. I would venture to say that trust is broken.

Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed? Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, “There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.” I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, “Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.”

President Trump reacted to your being fired. Did he?

He went on a podcast and called you a stiff. I’m surprised that the president of the United States would bother to notice, but please tell me. I’m not aware of this.

He said you were part of this gang of “stupid, crooked people that don’t care about your country.” Stupid? I can take that. Stiff? Yeah, probably. Don’t care about the country? I’ve never worn the uniform. But I’ve been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kuwait. I’ve been shot at, spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert. I’m not aware that the president of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country. Please correct me if I’m wrong. You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the president used about me might be applicable, not that one. [Tears up] There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. That is why I am a journalist.

***

“There was 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. … she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the President. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough.” — Scott Pelley about Bari Weiss, whom Trump buddy David Ellison made head of CBS News.

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Friends,

Please submit your caption in the Comments section and, as before, please use the Comments section only for captions.

Winners will be announced next Sunday. For consideration, please post your caption by Monday at 9 pm PT, 12 midnight ET.

Leave a comment

Last week’s winner:

“You tried to ‘Trump’ the law and THE LAW WON!”

(Congratulations, Daniel Black Coal.)

Runners-up:

“Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”

(Congratulations, Timbo.)

“YOU did it to yourself!”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“You can bet your last $1.776 billion I can.”

(Congratulations, Carol Schachner.)

“I’m following the law. Try it sometime.”

(Congratulations, Jean Knowlton.)

“Look on the bright side, orange is your color.”

(Congratulations, Seniors Taking Action.)

“I CAN and I DID.”

(Congratulations, Karla Von Huben.)

“No Kings isn’t just a catchy slogan, pal!”

(Congratulations, Mark Robokoff.)

“You’re fired!”

(Congratulations, Karen Cook-ronan.)

“Guilty until proven guiltier!”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“I hold you in contempt of all that is good, moral, ethical and true!”

(Congratulations, bRad Weller.)

“Handcuffs will hide the bruises on your hands.”

(Congratulations, Ruth Fader.)

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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “The Age of Vapor,” about the role science fiction imaginaires plays in fueling high-tech investment bubbles.

It’s one thing to make everything about imaginary technology when you’re writing SF. The point of those imaginative exercises is to illumi­nate: To provoke reflection on our present moment, to inspire or warn about the future.

But spinning narratives about imaginary technology as investment advice is a very different matter. The point here is to obscure: to con­vince investors that a company with a 90% market share will somehow continue to grow, to stave off the day when Stein’s Law (“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop”) asserts itself.

MP3

Friends,

I detest him and everything he does or says. Ditto his despicable aides and Cabinet members, his unprincipled sycophants and suck-ups.

But it’s possible that someday we’ll look back on this horrendous era and say we needed Trump. We needed to see how horrible it could get before America was able to revive its ideals.

Please hear me out.

Even before Trump, we were barreling down the wrong road. Inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity were worsening. Legalized bribery was soaring in the form of mounting campaign contributions from big corporations and the wealthy. Workers were getting shafted. On Wall Street and in C-suites, fealty to the rule of law was giving way to “greed is good” selfishness. Giant corporations were monopolizing ever more of the economy. America was losing its moral authority in the world (think Abu Ghraib and the torture memo).

We couldn’t have remained on that road. Even if we didn’t know it then, most of us understand that now. Trump has opened our eyes to the consequences of extreme greed, corruption, cruelty, and utter disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law. His brazenness and shamelessness have awakened us to much that we took for granted.

He and his regime are still dangerous as hell, of course. But the American public is catching on. His polls are in the cellar; they continue to fall.

It’s as if the nation has been through basic training in democracy, a stress test in civics, a crash course in the importance of having a decent and good government.

Before Trump, how many Americans understood the importance of “checks and balances” among the three branches of government, as envisioned by the Founders?

Now nearly everyone knows, because we’ve seen what happens when the head of the executive branch usurps the power of Congress and defies the federal courts.

How many of us really knew what “due process” meant when it came to giving people accused by the government an opportunity to defend themselves?

By now most of us have seen videos of people dragged out of their homes in the dead of night by masked agents of the U.S. government and thrown into detention camps without so much as a hearing. And we’ve seen government agents murder American citizens in cold blood on the streets of our cities.

Did we understand the meaning of corruption, bribes, self-dealing, and pay-to-play before Trump extorted corporations and billionaires to contribute millions to his campaign, his PAC, his inauguration, his ballroom, and his 250th birthday party? Now, we surely do.

Did we really know the importance of professional civil servants before Trump fired tens of thousands of them and substituted brainless loyalists? Before he got rid of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because it published truthful jobs data he didn’t like?

Did we understand the importance of expertise before Trump turned his back on career diplomats at the State Department, doctors and epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control, and experienced lawyers at the Justice Department and replaced them with loyalist hacks?

Or the meaning of “equal justice under the law” before Trump turned the Justice Department into his own private law firm to prosecute political enemies and pardon supporters?

Did we comprehend the true meaning of freedom of speech and expression before Trump attacked our universities for allowing demonstrations he disliked? Before he got CBS to fire Stephen Colbert for satirizing him and muzzle “60 Minutes” for criticizing him?

Did we know the dangers of oligarchy before Trump authorized Elon Musk to destroy entire federal agencies? Before Trump suck-up Jeff Bezos prohibited the editorial board of The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris? Before Trump turned over to Larry and David Ellison much of how Americans learn what’s going on — CBS’s broadcast network, its news division, and over 28 local television stations, as well as CNN, TikTok, Comedy Central, Discovery, HBO and HBO Max, and Warner Bros. Studios?

Did we understand the importance of the federal government keeping us safe and healthy before Trump eviscerated health and safety regulations? Before he decimated the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, and much of the Department of Health and Human Services? Before he authorized a crackpot with no medical background who opposes vaccines to run the world’s largest and most powerful health agency?

Did we understand why the Federal Reserve needs to be independent of politics? Did we know why the Federal Trade Commission needs to crack down against monopolies? Did we appreciate why the National Labor Relations Board must protect workers’ rights to form unions?

I venture to say, in answer to all of these questions: No, we did not know.

Now, most of us do.

It’s a terrible time. I share your sadness, anger, and fear. But prior to this daymare, too many of us had fallen asleep at the wheel. We had let America barrel down a road that was compromising too many of the ideals we hold in common.

Maybe we needed this horrific wakeup call in order to get back on the road we should have been on. We needed to see how fragile the institutions of self-government are in order to know why we must strengthen them. We needed to be reminded of what America is all about — what it should be about — in order to revive it — and reclaim it, for and by the people.

We will use what we’ve learned. We will fight for a stronger democracy. We’ll demand equal justice and the rule of law. We’ll commit ourselves to the common good. And we will assign Trump and his regime to the dustbin of history.

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Friends,

Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day — the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. It’s referred to as “D-Day” after the military term for a day when a secret combat attack or operation is planned.

It was the largest seaborne invasion in history. It began the Western Allied effort to liberate western Europe from Nazi Germany.

Over 2,500 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen were killed during the initial amphibious assaults and airborne operations. All told, there were 4,414 confirmed Allied deaths on the first day of the invasion, which also included troops from the United Kingdom and Canada.

At the time of the invasion, my father was 30 years old, in a tank battalion readying to go to Europe. My mother was 25, working in a factory producing gas masks for the war. Some of their friends participated in the invasion. A few were paratroopers. Others were pilots. Others were soldiers.

As a small boy, I remember trying to talk with my father and my mother about D-Day. I wanted stories. The little I’d heard about it made it seem romantic and exciting. But they were reluctant to talk about it. They answered my questions in short sentences. Their voices were hurried. It was as if I was trying to open a door they’d rather keep closed. They had lost friends, relatives. D-Day, and the war it helped end, had left deep scars.

Eventually they and their generation were called America’s “greatest generation” for their valor and sacrifice. They had fought fascism and won.

Now, 82 years later, we have homegrown fascism. An entire political party seems to have given up on democracy. They’re supporting an egomaniacal “strong man” who cares only about enlarging his own (and his family’s) wealth and power.

His regime is marked by a degree of corruption, cruelty, and criminality never before witnessed in America’s national government.

The firing of so many top brass by Trump and his “war” secretary, Pete Hegseth, can be seen as a way to guarantee the loyalty of other officers to Trump rather than to America. Trump’s proposal to increase the U.S. military budget by nearly 50 percent can be understood as a bribe to officers. He wants them to side with him, if and when he tries to stay in power indefinitely.

He has already tried to turn much of America into a police state.

Public support for him is waning, and the federal courts have fought back. But it is startling and saddening how far Trump and his regime have gotten.

What happened to the bravery and dedication of the greatest generation? What became of the sacrifices my parents and their peers made so that this nation could be free?

How and why did so many Americans succumb to neofascism?

I think it has to do with the anger so many Americans have felt that they and their children haven’t been able to get ahead, no matter how hard they work. Trump and other neofascists have channeled that anger toward immigrants, gay people, transgender people, Muslims, and Black people.

Democrats and progressives should be channeling that anger toward the real culprits — a wealthy elite that’s used their money to gain political power and rig the economy to their benefit and against everyone else.

Another reason so many have succumbed to Trumpian neofascism is the passage of time. Eighty-two years is long enough for a nation to forget, especially a nation whose collective memory is short to begin with. Very few living Americans remember the terror and heroism of our fight against Nazi fascism. The greatest generation has mostly died off.

But we must not forget. Fascism is being born again, in America and in Europe. This time it’s masquerading as white Christian nationalism, but it’s as dangerous as ever.

The best way to remember and honor the men and women who risked everything for us is to fight neofascism — fight for a stronger democracy, fight for the rule of law and social justice, fight against bigotry.

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Today's links

• Criticizing the everything machine: It slices, it dices, it even makes paperclips!
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Parliament v DRM; Colbert's commencement; Counterfeiting x luxury goods; Joule thief; Lean-back media.
• 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.

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Criticizing the everything machine (permalink)

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):

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

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"

I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?

"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."

In 13 minutes.

You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:

https://bsky.app/profile/petermiles.eurosky.social/post/3mnffjqczjs2t

Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"

In 800 words:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."

Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.

What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.

AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?

This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.

Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.

Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.

My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then offering me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Shortly after writing the book, I turned it into a lecture:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• What happens when your phone is confiscated at the airport https://www.theverge.com/report/944076/cbp-airport-phone-searches-seizure-minneapolis-activists

• A Billionaire Explains Why American Business Now Feels like the Mafia https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-billionaire-explains-why-american

• These Republican Lawmakers Challenged Abortion Bans. Then They Faced Backlash. https://www.propublica.org/article/republicans-face-backlash-after-challenging-abortion-bans

• Debbie Downer https://prospect.org/2026/06/05/debbie-downer-wasserman-schultz-florida-house-races/

• Mechanical Pencil https://mechanical-pencil.com/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK Parliament report damns DRM, calls for limits https://web.archive.org/web/20060615115510/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2006/06/05/launch-of-the-apig-report-on-drm/

#20yrsago Colbert’s Knox College commencement speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111228135413/http://departments.knox.edu/newsarchive/news_events/2006/x12547.html

#15yrsago Counterfeiting can be good for luxury goods sales https://web.archive.org/web/20110602061646/http://www.slate.com/id/2294927/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Joule Thief and get all the power you’ve paid for https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Joule-Thief/

#15yrsago School suspends student for refusing to remove personal animation from YouTube, threatens other students for petitioning on his behalf https://web.archive.org/web/20110603041200/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/student-cites-freedom-of-speech-after-suspension-for-online-videos/article2043954/

#5yrsago Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/05/lean-back/#lean-forward

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus)
  https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035

• Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP)
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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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

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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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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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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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