Reddit is testing ads on another area of its platform: search. With this update, ads will appear within your search results "based on a range of factors, including contextual relevance to a search query," according to Reddit.

That means searching for "espresso station" could present you with ads for espresso, machines, beans, or mugs, while a search for a "home office setup" may yield ads for monitors, desks, or office chairs. Reddit currently shows ads across its feeds in a variety of formats, including images, videos, sponsored posts, and AMAs. It also shows ads within threads.

Reddit has announced a number of changes to its platform ove …

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Being a MAGA influencer just isn’t what it used to be.

When the Trump administration returned to power nearly two years ago, the influencers swaggered into Washington, D.C. with unrelenting hubris. The inauguration gave us a window into just how decisive they’d been in the previous election. The late Charlie Kirk “got a better seat than every member of Congress,” according to The Daily Beast. Jake Paul and his brother Logan took selfies with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, one of many Big Tech Trump allies who donated to his inaugural fund to secure access to the administration. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson mingled with government leaders and titans of industry.

In any other election cycle, a viral Fox News gaffe would have registered only as a momentary laugh. Last week, reporter Lucas Tomlinson was covering a South Carolina rally for incumbent Republican Sen. Darline Graham, who is seeking to serve a full term following the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham. In reality, the event was more about Donald Trump, who had flown to the Palmetto State to help shore up Graham’s candidacy, which increasingly appears to be at-risk. Spotting a middle-aged white man with a beard, Tomlinson assumed he was about to get some choice footage of a gushing Trump superfan. Instead, Tom Hoyle, with an admirable deadpan, joked that he had turned out for the rally because he was too young to have witnessed the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which 918 followers of Rev. Jim Jones died after drinking a fruit drink laced with poison. “There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man,” he added.

“All right, maybe this is not a Trump supporter,” Tomlinson said, scurrying away. 

The surreal moment capped what has been a desultory midterm election season for Fox, a network that bills itself as “news” but has long been seen by fans and detractors alike as Republican propaganda. Despite their largely worshipful coverage of the president, Trump has been complaining that the network isn’t doing enough to salvage the campaigns of the GOP. 

“FoxNews is spending far too much time putting on the OPPONENTS of Republican Party Candidates,” he recently posted on Truth Social, echoing his prior complaints that the network focuses too much on the Democrats running this cycle than on their Republican opponents. 

Trump is not wrong about the coverage tilt. According to Media Matters, during this election cycle the network has mentioned the names of Democratic candidates at over three times the rate of Republicans. That disparity, though, doesn’t mean the coverage is sympathetic. To the contrary: Fox producers likely recognize that this year’s GOP field of candidates is deeply uninspiring. Some, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is seeking a Senate seat, are so repulsive that even lifelong Republicans can’t pretend to like them.

This season, Democratic candidates are making more compelling TV, particularly the charismatic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Michigan’s Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Texas state representative James Talarico, who is running against Paxton. The most Fox News can hope for is to hijack these candidates’ ability to command attention, and then use it to drive negative polarization with endless “who do these people think they are?” outrage. But then again, the network knows its audience. 

As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye recently noted, it’s not like Fox News knows what else to do. The hosts, she writes, have been grabbing wildly at straws, praying they can find any story to spark culture war hysteria that will distract voters from serious issues like inflation, the war with Iran or the metastasizing deportation crisis. The network tried to make hay out of the French riots, but even Fox viewers struggled to see why student protests in Paris matter to America. It attempted to pretend Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., was calling for mass arrests of young Republicans when she was asked during a recent appearance about holding the GOP accountable, but that never really caught on either. A last-minute gambit to feign outrage over Barack Obama’s recent joke comparing Trump’s White House decor to the Cheesecake Factory fizzled out as well, likely because it simply reminded people of how the current resident is defiling the People’s House. 

Part of Fox’s problem is immediate. Many voters’ economic woes are sky-high, making it hard for culture war nonsense to feel relevant. But there’s also a longer-term problem for the network, which is that they don’t make as much sense as they used to.

Fox News has long existed to dress up gutter bigotries and far-right paranoia in the clothes of respectable news coverage, mostly through the use of dog whistles and innuendo. In the past, winks at some of the fouler ideas out there was enough to titillate the audience while keeping up the pretense of respectability. But now, that stuff seems dated and out of touch. 

This is an era when, as Jamelle Bouie of New York Times said on YouTube, the actual president offers “Klansman-level racism” from the campaign stump, calling Black people “low IQ,” flinging a slur for transgender people at Democratic politicians and suggesting that El-Sayed’s Muslim faith makes him a terrorist. Right-wing social media, especially the Elon Musk-owned X, reads like Stormfront message boards from the 1990s, with Musk himself regularly promoting white nationalist ideas and memes. Former Fox hosts Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson offer their former employer stiff competition by being more dishonest and outrageous than the lawsuit-wary network can be, with segments suggesting only supermodel-hot women get raped or that Holocaust deniers have a point. 

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But according to Salon’s Alex Galbraith, one Fox host seems to be getting sick of his network’s culture war strategy. Jesse Watters has complained openly on air about how bad the GOP is doing and how Fox coverage isn’t doing much to excite their audience. In one particularly telling segment, he lashed out about the relentless attention Fox News gives to non-stories from the WNBA, including hysteria over trans players, of which there are zero.

“I don’t want to push this story anymore!” Watters said. “I want to leave this story alone! I am no longer talking about the WNBA. As of now, I boycott this segment.”

Although his reasoning may differ, the host is right that the Fox fixation on the WNBA is stupid. The league has become such an obsession on the right because, plainly put, many male conservatives hate seeing female athletes perform feats they couldn’t even manage in their youth. They want to end professional women’s sports and return to the sexist delusion that all men are stronger and faster than all women. This much is evident in how real-life right-wingers behave toward the WNBA, such as going so far as to buy tickets so they can throw sex toys at the players. 

Fox hosts are careful to never say outright that women shouldn’t play sports; that, as they well know, could alienate millions of Republican voters, especially women and fathers of female athletes who are more moderate on this issue. Instead, the network attempts to hijack the antipathy many conservatives feel toward female basketball players with their traditional wink-and-nudge coverage, pretending they want to “clean up” the sport. This preserves the illusion that the right doesn’t hate female athletes while portraying the players — the white ones at least — as fragile, helping to reassure an insecure male audience. 

In the past, this kind of tap dance has worked. Now, as Watters implied, it’s floundering, feeling much too tepid when compared Fox’s online competitors and actual politicians flinging unprintable slurs. Watters suggested as much during another segment, when he argued that Republicans need more “fear porn” if they want to win.

His use of the word “porn” is telling. Watters was arguing that it doesn’t do to be coy any longer — that only the hard-core stuff will move the base. But for Fox News, that would come at the cost of losing advertising dollars and the eyeballs of less radical viewers. This is a true dilemma — and it’s one that couldn’t happen to a more deserving network. 

The post Fox News loses its grip on the culture wars appeared first on Salon.com.

On Thursday night, the smear at the heart of the mysterious transgender mailers that have rocked the final weeks of the midterm elections in Texas completed its journey. What began as baseless social media whispers quickly ascended the ladder of conservative influence, jumped into mailboxes across the Lone Star State and ultimately into the comforting prime-time embrace of Fox News.

At a town hall in Fort Worth, a Texas mother of six named Rebekah Smith told Vice President JD Vance that her 11-year-old daughter had received a letter explaining how to transition without her parents ever knowing, and asked how Republicans would keep the government out of her family. “I don’t know who sent that letter to your child,” the vice president said, “but I think the person who sends a letter to an 11-year-old about gender transition, what I call that in my family is a pervert, and that person ought to go to prison.” Host Jesse Watters, never one to let a grievance go to waste, promised that Fox would investigate “this perverted letter.” Vance asked Smith to talk to his staff because he would “like the Department of Justice to investigate that” as well.

Watters rushed to promote the spectacle. “WHOA! Texas MOM tells JD Vance her DAUGHTER received a letter telling her TO TRANSITION TO A BOY,” he posted on X, followed by Vance’s promise. Missing from that framing was the question that should have governed the segment: Who actually sent the material?

Nobody on that stage mentioned that the pamphlet was a fake. Nobody mentioned that the real transgender advocacy group named inside it had disavowed the mailer. Nobody mentioned that sworn testimony filed that same week had tied the text messages that accompanied it to a national Republican organization. The vice president was asking federal prosecutors to chase a forgery that may well have originated in his own party’s orbit — and he was doing it on a network whose viewers had been marinating in that forgery for weeks.

The race between Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic challenger James Talarico has become a crucible for dark-money maneuvers. As polls show the Republican grip on the Lone Star State slipping, conservative campaigns and their surrogates have resorted to increasingly desperate tactics. In early October, for example, Talarico took a brief hiatus from the campaign trail to recover from a severe case of the flu. Rather than accepting a routine human illness, the right-wing echo chamber treated a temporary absence as evidence of mental illness. Within days, the fabricated scandal has collapsed — yet the machinery of right-wing media simply pivoted to amplifying a more insidious operation designed to trigger visceral outrage.

This second October surprise involved millions of unsolicited text messages and a wave of physical mailers sent to Texas households with materials that directed readers to the website of the Transgender Education Network of

Texas while inserting provocative advice on child emancipation that the real organization says it never authored or authorized. By flooding the electorate with extreme material disguised as progressive advocacy, right-wing operatives appear to have sought to create a fake controversy that could be weaponized in attack ads and campaign speeches. Vance, for instance, told the Fox News audience that Talarico has “a weird fascination with trans kids,” and that “he’ll probably defend the right of the person sending the letter, not the right of the parent who is rightfully creeped out by this.” Vance claimed that Talarico “has actually called it abusive when parents try to prevent their children from transitioning” and that Paxton “has fought hard to prosecute those people, whereas James Talarico has fought hard to protect those people.” Even the distortion had been laundered by then — Talarico called denying a child’s gender identity abusive, a different claim from saying parents must permit medical transition, but at the top of the ladder the difference no longer exists.

That is how a smear works in the closed ecosystem of the American right. It does not need to survive scrutiny. It just needs to circulate upward. An anonymous account posts it; an influencer adopts it; a donor-funded outlet reports the influencer’s outrage as news; an elected official demands an investigation, and the demand becomes proof the story matters; cable news books the controversy; a vice president promises federal action. Each rung launders the one below it. The correction, when it comes, travels in the opposite direction and arrives nowhere.

The paper trail looks like what you would expect from a covert operation. Texas Transgender Student Union LLC was formed in Wyoming on Sept. 2 through a commercial registered agent that helps owners stay anonymous. After CBS News Texas visited the agent’s address in Sheridan, Wyoming, the agent announced it was resigning. The mailers listed a Houston-area post office box. The Texas Observer reported that the barcode on the envelopes traced to a mail-tracking company that has taken federal campaign money from only one group this year, the National Republican Congressional Committee. The committee said it had nothing to do with the mailers, and the company would not say who paid. CBS News Texas reported that the bulk-mail permit belongs to an Illinois printer owned by the Zerrusen family, who have given heavily to Republican PACs and been photographed with Donald Trump.

When the real Transgender Education Network of Texas filed a petition in Travis County court to unmask the perpetrators behind the impersonation campaign, the partisan safety nets of the Texas judiciary eventually snapped into action. A deposition of Infobip, the messaging company that delivered the texts, which a Travis County judge ordered made public, indicated that the texts were sent on behalf of the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund and a man named John Braun. But on Friday, the Texas Supreme Court, composed entirely of judges appointed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, issued an administrative stay that blocked its release. Chris Hilton, an attorney who previously served under Paxton, defended him during his impeachment trial and was later pushed out of office amid sexual harassment allegations, argued on behalf of the company that the mailers were not political speech because they named no candidate or party.

Dirty tricks are an old tradition of American politics. This cycle, Republican PACs in Nevada mailed a flyer calling a nonpartisan candidate, Danielle Ford, the “AOC of Nevada,” hoping voters would mistake her for the actual Democratic nominee, Aaron Ford. This week also brought word that the group that funded Cornel West’s 2024 ballot drives raised every dollar through a dark-money network bankrolled by Elon Musk.

The president’s party whines about decoy candidates in Alaska while running them at home. Ratf**king is a long and proud Republican tradition, and the Texas operation fits inside perfectly.

The post Right-wing media and the mystery of Texas’ transgender mailers appeared first on Salon.com.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani knows what they’re saying about his grocery plan. 

Conservative media outlets and right-wing commentators have, for more than a year, been practically apoplectic about Mamdani’s push to open five municipal stores to sell discounted food. Local Republicans have responded to the initiative by comparing Mamdani to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Last year, as Mamdani made the plan a central plank of his campaign, Fox Business published a dramatic piece featuring interviews with “descendants of socialism” from Eastern Europe and Cuba suggesting Mamdani’s agenda was reminiscent of the “vivid memories,” “tales of woe” and “scars” they experienced. 

Now, the plan is underway. The first store is set to open its doors by the end of next year, and Mamdani is thoroughly unmoved by the backlash. In a conversation with TPM last week, the mayor dug into the details of his grocery store plan and brushed off the critics. 

“If I listen to that commentary every day, I would become afraid of my own shadow,” Mamdani said with a laugh. “And I think, for too long, we have allowed the right to dictate the entirety of the discussion. And we have limited ourselves to a response to a landscape that they have created.” 

As he sat in the Governor’s Room of City Hall, Mamdani emphasized his words by tapping his hand against the large conference table. It’s a gesture that would go unnoticed if it were not for his signature silver rings gently rapping against the wood. The sound served as periodic punctuation as he expressed his frustration with the limitations of Democratic politics as usual and his enthusiasm for the city-run stores.

“It is time for us to ask ourselves, what is our party for?” he asked. “And to me, the answer has to be the working class. It’s the only majority in this country. And then what can we do to materially change the lives of those working class New Yorkers or Americans?” 

Those are the people who inspired Mamdani’s groceries initiative. The mayor explained that he settled on the idea during his campaign last year based on conversations with city residents.

“If you ask New Yorkers, .. what are the costs that you’re reckoning with as part of the skyrocketing cost of living crisis in our city? … What is pushing you to reconsider if you should be living in this city? … Again and again, you hear about housing, childcare, groceries,” Mamdani said. “We’d hear about public transit, we’d hear about other things, but groceries would always be up there.”

Data shows it’s gotten far more expensive to eat in New York City. A report released by the state comptroller last year showed food prices in the metropolitan area were up over 25 percent since 2019. And as Mamdani and his advisers looked at ways to confront the issue, they became adamant new approaches were needed. 

“When everyone is telling you that prices are too high, the common refrain is therefore we should subsidize the private market further,” said Mamdani. “And yet, what we’ve seen is that we’ve explored those kinds of strategies here in New York City. They have not had a substantial impact on the cost of groceries.”

The plan is rooted in a very New York “tradition.” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a progressive New Deal Republican who steered the city through the Great Depression, opened public markets that gave street vendors support and space for their businesses. That vision has continued with Essex Market, a warren of shops and restaurants on the Lower East Side that the city has operated since the 1990s. 

Mamdani describes La Guardia as “an inspiration each and every day.” One of New York’s five new grocery stores is being constructed at La Marqueta in East Harlem’s El Barrio, a site that was home to one of the original 1930’s markets. More recently, a similar public grocery store initiative has begun in Atlanta. 

Despite the histrionics — including dire warnings from Fox News and right-wing think tankers that Mamdani’s stores could cause widespread food shortages — the actual plan is fairly limited in its scope. There will just be five stores (one in each of New York City’s boroughs). In addition to La Marqueta, another is planned for a city-owned site at Hunts Point in The Bronx. That store, which has been dubbed The Peninsula, is slated to be the first to open towards the end of next year. The other three locations, which will be in Brooklyn, Queens, and on Staten Island, have not been identified yet. Mamdani has pledged to open all of them by the end of his term in 2029. 

Inside the stores, a slate of items that Mamdani’s team has dubbed a “core basket” will be offered at a 30 percent discount that will be adjusted monthly and pegged to the market rate. This includes produce, meat, seafood, dairy, and a selection of pantry staples. Other items will be on sale at standard prices. The city estimates this will save customers roughly $90 per month.

Those market rate costs for the majority of goods in the grocery stores are hardly in line with the visions of Havana spun by the right. The “government-run” moniker conservatives have slapped on the project is also an exaggeration. Mamdani’s grocery stores are actually a public-private partnership. The New York City Economic Development Corporation currently has proposals out looking to rent privately owned sites for the final three stores. They also have accepted bids from experienced operators to run all of the venues. 

Some of the criticism of the plan has been based on its potential cost to taxpayers. The city initially invested $70 million to cover construction and real estate expenditures associated with the five sites. According to officials, with solicitations for sites and operators ongoing, the final annual cost of the program is not clear. However, they are confident having the spaces paid for will be sufficient incentive to enable the store operators to offer the “core basket.” If necessary, the city may also provide further subsidy beyond covering real estate capital costs to ensure operators can stock the discounted items. Furthermore, they expect the NYCEDC’s competitive bidding process will help identify companies who can keep the stores’ overhead low. 

In the interview with TPM, Mamdani insisted the plan will be “sustainable.” And, thus far, the mayor has a track record of managing the costs of his ambitious programs. This year, Mamdani, who inherited an approximately $12 billion deficit when he took office in January, balanced the city budget. While much has been made of the fact that the feat required some help from the governor’s mansion and a delay in pension payments that will need to be dealt with down the road, Mamdani made up nearly half the difference by finding new revenue through taxes on the wealthy and cost-saving measures like cutting unnecessary overtime. 

Joseph Hernandez, the Republican candidate for state comptroller, has been one of the more vocal critics of Mamdani’s municipal grocery stores. He’s unveiled estimates claiming the plan could cost $200 million. There are some issues with that figure. Along with the initial $70 million in construction costs and an estimated $106 million in projected operating costs, Hernandez’s tab includes a supposed $30 million that he says will be lost by other businesses from competing with the stores. 

“We can absolutely afford it,” Mamdani said with a laugh. “We are a city budget that has significantly north of $100 billion on an annual level — and we already spend about $850 million in programs that seek to address food insecurity, ranging from our school system to funding food pantries.”

“What we’re talking about here is a drop in the bucket of what the city already spends,” he added. “But one that will be felt by every single New Yorker who goes to these stores.”

Mamdani further argued that those who raise questions about the price of social programs “prefer not to see the cost today” of the underlying issues those initiatives seek to address. 

“We are dealing with the costs of food insecurity every single day. We’re sitting down to talk in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and yet one in four New Yorkers are in poverty,” Mamdani said. “It is not tenable, it is not acceptable.”

For the mayor, the situation calls for a different kind of politics. He described himself as “unwilling” to simply point at the problem “and then hope that somebody comes up with a solution.”

“This is a city of innovation. It’s a city of imagination. It’s time we bring those kinds of ethos to our politics as well,” Mamdani declared. 

The idea that the new stores will hurt other businesses has been one of the more persistent arguments from critics of the plan. A group of minority-owned bodegas and supermarkets has even sued to stop the initiative. Yet Mamdani argues his stores are fundamentally different, particularly from bodegas which typically offer ‘round-the-clock service and core items that won’t be available in the municipal shops. 

“The biggest things that drive revenue for bodegas are tobacco, lottery tickets, and alcohol. We’re not selling those,” Mamdani explained. “Our goal here is not to compete with fundamental parts of New York City.”

Mamdani, who noted there are thriving bodegas in the immediate vicinity of the existing public Essex Market, also framed it as fairly simple math. 

“We’re speaking about a city that has north of 10,000 bodegas, north of a thousand different grocery operators. We’re talking about five city-run grocery stores,” he said emphatically as his ring tapped against the wooden table. 

As they select locations for the stores, city officials are looking for neighborhoods where there isn’t much competition. They are aiming for locations with insufficient grocery store options as well as a high rate of residents accessing public benefits. Though the goal is to ensure the discounted food will be easily accessible for lower income New Yorkers, the stores will be available to anyone who wants to shop at them. 

“These are stores for everyone,” Mamdani said.

In building out his vision for the municipal grocery stores, Mamdani named his chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, who he calls his “left hand,” as a key force behind the project. He also pointed to Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, the highest ranking City Hall official with the stores in their portfolio, and NYCEDC Executive Vice President Jamie Horton as being among the key officials overseeing the plan. 

Speaking to TPM, Horton said one key aspect of the program for Mamdani is ensuring that the stores will be a “pleasant experience” without “stigma.” The solicitations for operators and sites specify the visual language and design elements that will be part of creating an elevated environment inside the shops. 

“It’s really important that this is an example of public excellence, that the public sector can deliver a high quality experience. It’s also about providing a service … that treats folks with dignity, that this isn’t a handout for folks, it’s that the government is delivering for its people,” Horton said. 

Overall, Mamdani said a core goal of the project is making a real change in the environment for city residents. 

“I am tired of the fact that politics has increasingly become an act of describing working peoples’ struggles as opposed to putting forward what you will do about those struggles,” he said, before asking, “How are you going to deliver them a different reality?”

That ethos and desire to take concrete steps to address cost of living has been the central plank of Mamdani’s platform. As he ran for office last year, the grocery stores were one of the highest profile parts of his campaign along with a partial rent freeze and a plan for fast, free city buses. Mamdani delivered on the rent freeze for certain stabilized units in June. While the plan for free buses has run into legislative opposition, in July, Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a road map to speed up service. 

At every turn, Mamdani’s various proposals have faced backlash and questions about costs. The criticism has been amplified by Mamdani’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. All of this has, for better or worse, made Mamdani a national figure who has received both positive attention and ire from President Donald Trump. Last June, after Mamdani won the Democratic primary en route to City Hall, Trump took to social media and blasted him as “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” Less than five months later, after Mamdani was victorious in the general election, the two had a warm meeting in the Oval Office where the president heaped praise on the new mayor. 

“I met with a man who’s a very rational person. I met with a man who wants to see — really wants to see — New York be great again,” Trump said, adding, “I’ll be cheering for him.”

Along with the rhetoric, Trump’s allies have also played their part in the opposition to Mamdani’s grocery plan. One of the legal complaints from store owners was filed with the America First Policy Institute, a right wing dark money group chaired by Larry Kudlow, the former director of the National Economic Council in the Trump White House. 

Mamdani smiled broadly as he offered some choice words for Kudlow. 

“Larry must love paying a lot of money for eggs,” Mamdani said, adding, “There will always be opposition wherever there is innovation and wherever there is imagination. And we welcome it. We are fully confident in the legality of this program and even more so than the legality, the urgent necessity of it.”

While the mayor clearly has his critics, Mamdani and the swirl of national buzz around his rise helped turn “affordability” into one of the major talking points of this election cycle. And, in New York, the most recent polling shows his popularity has surged to nearly 70 percent favorability. 

Mamdani believes his fellow Democrats need to be less preoccupied with their detractors. 

“I think you simply have to prepare and expect for this kind of backlash. What it is, is a backlash to any kind of change. And if you want to avoid backlash, then all you will do is just steward the status quo. And that is exactly what has gotten us to this point,” he said. “It is critically important that we stop the act of constructing an ever-lowering ceiling on our ideas.”

For Mamdani, his grocery stores epitomize this ambitious, unafraid vision and approach. 

“That is what is so exciting to me,” he said. “Politics so often is something that has to be translated to someone who lives outside of the political world. There is no translation required about cheaper groceries. You understand it when you’re checking out.”

“For too long, politicians have had things to say and they haven’t had anything to do,” he added. “And it’s time to make this city an example of what we can do for people.” 

Night falls in the European capital. Everything’s quiet, but the nightmares are about to begin.

Viktor Orbán’s ghost haunts the Schuman roundabout; ash from the bonfire of red tape covers the Justus Lipsius building; Ursula von der Leyen’s chief of staff, Björn Seibert, chases after staffers demanding to know what “associate membership” for Canada actually means; and MEPs tremble at the prospect of construction workers uncovering the skeletons of political intrigues past during renovations.

Scared? You should be.

Here’s our guide to who is terrified of whom in the Brussels bubble. 

Everyone is scared of Marine Le Pen

The person haunting EU diplomats, officials and lawmakers is French presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen. Will she really halve Paris’ contribution to the EU budget, as promised? Will she pull Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni away from the Brussels mainstream? And will she demand von der Leyen’s head?

The bubble had warmed (slightly) to the idea of Jordan Bardella in the Élysée Palace, after his years leading the National Rally’s European operation revealed a certain pragmatism toward Brussels — only for those hopes to be shattered when a Paris appeals court cleared Le Pen to be a candidate for the presidency.

The next ECB chief is scared of Jean-Luc Mélenchon

The European Central Bank president is the euro’s last line of defense against unorthodox national economic decisions — but that could be tested by French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is on course to reach the runoff after vowing to set billions of euros of French debt “on fire.” His incendiary plan calls on the Frankfurt-based ECB to waive interest payments on a vast tranche of French bonds — an unorthodox, perhaps impossible, maneuver that critics warn could even see France kicked out of the euro.

Now that we know Christine Lagarde will step down as ECB president in February, what France’s presidential candidates want to do about its monumental debt pile will haunt the race for her successor, with Dutchman Klaas Knot and Spaniard Pablo Hernández de Cos as the two frontrunners.

Lobbyists are scared of ChatGPT

The number of amendments lawmakers have filed has exploded since generative AI arrived, with key EU laws now facing thousands of proposed text changes. Parliament officials don’t think it’s a coincidence, with some pointing to amendments written in suspiciously bot-like language, and others saying sometimes amendments cite legislation that does not even exist.

The growing pile of amendments is haunting lobbyists, parliamentary assistants and officials forced to track and sort through it all — along with the fear that AI could eventually replace them. Spare a thought, too, for the MEPs who may have to vote through the amendments one by one, with hands raised in plenary. 

Commission officials are scared of Austria’s Europe minister

Well-heeled Commission officials (and their families) are spooked by Austria’s Europe Minister Claudia Bauer, who has been leading a push to slash the Commission’s administration expenditure — which pays eurocrats’ salaries and offices — in the next seven-year budget. The campaign, backed by most EU capitals, resulted in an 8% cut to the admin budget in the latest budget proposal.

Bauer is so feared that EU officials joke they reduce their delegations’ size whenever they travel to Austria.

Jessika Roswall is scared of Stéphane Séjourné and Valdis Dombrovskis

Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and her department have reason to fear industry boss Stéphane Séjourné, who is taking the lead on the upcoming Circular Economy Act, despite Roswall’s official title of Commissioner “for a Competitive Circular Economy.” Making matters spookier, Roswall’s environment department now shares the Breydel building with Séjourné’s internal market and industry department, setting the stage for some chilling corridor encounters as Roswall pushes for greater environmental protection while Séjourné prioritizes industrial growth.

Roswall is also under pressure from EU simplification chief Valdis Dombrovskis to cut red tape on several environmental laws. The Latvian commissioner, who oversees the omnibus packages, wants a deal before year-end. Meanwhile, the center-right European People’s Party continues to press the Commission to reopen laws on birds, habitats, and water — the EU’s oldest nature protection laws — so they can be simplified too.

Alexander Stubb is afraid of Kaja Kallas and António Costa

Kaja Kallas has not publicly addressed the call that Finnish President Alexander Stubb made to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but the EU’s top diplomat has made clear she dislikes such outreach. Still, if Putin offered serious talks and concessions, Kallas would be the obvious person to answer: as coordinating EU foreign and security policy is her job. “Of course I will talk if such an opportunity presents itself,” she told Estonian media in September when asked about speaking with Putin or his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Also reaching for the phone: António Costa. EU diplomats note that the European Council president represents the bloc at the leaders’ level abroad. That institutional turf war may explain why Stubb stressed that he and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Støre spoke only for their own countries — not for Europe.

Manfred Weber is scared of his own group …

What keeps the leader of the European People’s Party — Europe’s largest political family — up at night? Divisions within his own ranks. So far, Weber has kept a tight ship and wants to reunite his troops ahead of the 2029 EU election, which he is casting as a battle against the far right. But that may prove tricky as the EPP’s national delegations increasingly clash over whether to work with the far right or isolate them.

… and the group is scared of Ouarda Bensouag

Central to Weber’s strategy is Ouarda Bensouag, the group’s secretary-general and his chief of staff. One of his most trusted lieutenants, she has a reputation as a smart but ruthless operator who EPP staffers fear when crossing paths in the Parliament’s labyrinthine hallways.

No one is scared of the Parliament … but they should be

Parliament’s attempts to spook capitals over the next long-term budget have been borderline tragic so far: It keeps threatening to kill the budget, but nobody seems to care or believe it will.

They should care. When it comes time to pass the budget, 361 of 720 votes will be needed, and the margin could be razor-thin in a fragmented chamber that’s hostile to plans to pool farm and regional funds. The louder MEPs protest — and the longer the Council ignores them — the more determined they become to prove the threat is real.

By Max Griera, Gregorio Sorgi, Kathryn Carlson, Nick Vinocur, Jakob Weizman, Fiona McNally and Eliza Gkritsi

LONDON — Britain’s intelligence agency GCHQ cannot account for the whereabouts of thousands of storage devices which could contain sensitive material, according to an official watchdog.

A report by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPCO) — which polices how Britain’s intelligence agencies use their spying powers — on Thursday found that a significant number of devices including USB sticks, hard drives and memory cards are unaccounted for.

Brian Leveson, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, said that GCHQ “still cannot tell me what has happened to removable media that may hold sensitive data, years after I first raised it with them.”

He noted that the devices “may contain IPA-related data” — which has a high level of sensitivity.

IPA-related data refers to information collected or held under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. That could include intercepted communications such as emails, texts and telephone calls, as well as information extracted from people’s computers or phones.

The report added that GCHQ currently estimates the number of devices “to be in the thousands” and is currently undergoing work so it can report how many of the devices have been confirmed as lost.

“We remain very concerned about this issue and are disappointed with the time it has taken GCHQ to investigate,” the report notes.

Last year IPCO disclosed that GCHQ and fellow intelligence agency MI5 had been unable to locate considerable numbers of storage devices, some of which potentially containing information classified as “TOP SECRET.”

A GCHQ spokesperson said: “As IPCO have reported, our management system for removable media was previously not sufficiently robust to effectively track the items that were registered for use. IPCO are right to note the flaws in the data the system produced, and we have taken action against all their recommendations.

“We recognise the importance of security of removable media in our systems, and have a range of measures to mitigate the risks posed by these items. The findings in the report have been addressed comprehensively and all necessary steps to correct this issue have been taken.”

FRANKFURT — Christine Lagarde’s announcement that she will leave the European Central Bank in February quickly drew attention to more than her departure date: the two bandages on her face visible in a video statement she posted.

They prompted speculation on social media, which Lagarde addressed in a follow-up post. She said they were from a “small surgery” earlier in the week and urged people to follow medical advice and get their skin checked regularly.

In a separate internal video message to all ECB staff, seen by POLITICO, Lagarde offered a little more humor and detail: “I know I look funny. This is not kick-boxing in Thailand,” she said after attending the International Monetary Fund annual meetings in Bangkok earlier this month. “It is just a little skin cancer that had to go.”

The ECB declined to comment and referred to Lagarde’s earlier statement.

Earlier Thursday, Lagarde, who is 70, ended months of speculation about her future role, saying that she will step down on Feb. 7 ahead of her term officially ending in October next year.

The ECB did not reveal what Lagarde’s immediate plans are, however she has previously hinted she may want to weigh in on France’s 2027 presidential race.

An official familiar with Lagarde’s thinking, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said she made her move almost a full year before the end of her term, to have “greater freedom to express her views and to engage in non-monetary matters, because she cannot remain neutral when she sees the developments taking place in her own country and in the world.”

Die EU-Kommission will nationale Regelungen zu Altersgrenzen für soziale Medien vorerst zurückstellen. Die Mitgliedstaaten sollen entsprechende Gesetzesvorhaben für ein Jahr aussetzen. Statt unterschiedlicher Regeln soll eine gemeinsame europäische Regelung kommen.

Seit dem vergangenen Jahr arbeiten sowohl die Kommission als auch einzelne Mitgliedstaaten an Altersbeschränkungen für soziale Medien. Als Grund gelten Risiken für die psychische Gesundheit junger Menschen. Doch auch nachdem die EU einen einheitlichen Rechtsrahmen vorgeschlagen hatte, verfolgten die Länder weiterhin unterschiedliche Ansätze und Altersgrenzen.

Im September schlug die EU den sogenannten Kids Act vor. Er soll EU-weit einheitliche Standards schaffen und unterschiedliche Beschränkungen für Kinder unter 13 Jahren und Jugendliche unter 15 Jahren vorsehen. Mehrere Mitgliedstaaten arbeiteten dennoch weiter an eigenen Verboten. Länder wie Griechenland und Dänemark erklärten, sie wollten nicht warten, bis die EU-weiten Regeln ausgehandelt und umgesetzt sind.

„Die Kommission hat beschlossen, alle Entwürfe nationaler Gesetze, die sich mit den künftigen harmonisierten Regeln überschneiden, für zwölf Monate aufzuschieben“, sagte Kommissionssprecher Thomas Regnier am Donnerstag vor Journalisten.

Österreich hatte die Kommission bereits im Juli gebeten zu prüfen, ob sein geplantes Gesetz, das den Zugang für unter 14-Jährige verbieten würde, mit EU-Recht vereinbar ist. Die Frist für eine Antwort der Kommission lief am Donnerstag aus. Die EU-Kommission forderte Österreich daraufhin auf, die Verabschiedung des Gesetzes für ein Jahr auszusetzen, sagte Regnier.

„Ein europäisches Problem erfordert eine gemeinsame europäische Antwort“, sagte Regnier. „Wir müssen uns nun auf die Verhandlungen zum EU Kids Act konzentrieren.“

Die Mitgliedstaaten müssen sich nun mit dem Europäischen Parlament und der Kommission auf die Einzelheiten des Kids Act einigen, bevor die Regeln umgesetzt werden können.

Nach dem Vorschlag der Kommission wäre der Zugang zu sozialen Medien für Kinder unter 13 Jahren in den meisten Fällen verboten. Für Jugendliche unter 15 Jahren würde er stark eingeschränkt. Zudem sollen Plattformen zu mehr Sicherheit bereits bei der Gestaltung ihrer Dienste verpflichtet werden. Die Vorgaben sollen auch für Videospiele und KI-Begleiter gelten.

Wie die Mitgliedstaaten auf die Aufforderung reagieren werden, ist zunächst unklar.

Griechenland hat bereits ein eigenes Gesetz für unter 15-Jährige verabschiedet und dürfte es voraussichtlich beibehalten können, weil das Verfahren bereits vor dem EU-Vorschlag durchlaufen wurde. Außer zu Österreich wollte sich Regnier nicht zu einzelnen Ländern äußern. Im Fall Griechenlands gebe es jedoch „Nuancen“, die damit zusammenhingen, wann das Land sein Gesetz der Kommission zur Prüfung auf Vereinbarkeit mit EU-Recht vorgelegt habe.

Dieser Artikel ist zuerst auf Englisch bei POLITICO erschienen.

The European Commission is telling capitals across the bloc to pause any national laws that restrict social media access to minors, as Brussels seeks an EU-wide set of rules.

But Austria, the first country told to halt its legislation Thursday, lashed out at the order.

“It is unacceptable for Brussels to block member states from enacting national laws without presenting a completed European solution of its own,” Austrian State Secretary Alexander Pröll told POLITICO.

The Commission and national capitals have been seeking age restrictions for social media over the past year, citing risks to young people’s mental health. But even after the EU proposed a unified law, different countries have continued pursuing different approaches and age limits.

In September, the EU proposed the Kids Act, which would set the same standard across the union, placing different limits on access for those under the age of 13, and for those under 15. But multiple capitals continued to legislate their own bans, as countries like Greece and Denmark have said they don’t want to wait for the EU-wide law to be negotiated and implemented.

“The Commission has decided to postpone for 12 months any draft national laws overlapping with the future harmonized rules,” the EU executive’s spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters Thursday.

Austria had asked the Commission back in July to check whether its own proposed law, which would ban access for under-14s, was in line with EU law. A deadline for the Commission to respond lapsed Thursday and the EU executive told them to pause adoption for a year, Regnier said.

“I have no sympathy for the European Commission’s delay of Austria’s social media ban,” Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Media Affairs Andreas Babler told POLITICO in a statement.

Austria will continue preparing its own legislation to get it ready for the end of the 12-month pause, said Babler. Vienna will “advance the legislative process at national level to ensure that the social media ban can be implemented immediately once the EU standstill period has expired,” he added.

“A European problem requires a united European response,” Regnier said. “We need to now focus on the negotiations of the EU Kids Act.”

The capitals have to negotiate with the EU Parliament and Commission to agree on the details of the Kids Act, so that it can then be implemented.

The Commission’s proposal would bar access to social media for minors under 13 in most cases and severely restrict access for teens under 15. It also sets requirement for safety by design on the platforms, including video games and AI companions.

The reaction of the other capitals to the order is not immediately clear.

Greece has already passed its own law for under-15s and will likely be able to keep it, simply because it went through the process prior to the EU proposal. Regnier declined to comment on specific countries other than Austria, but did say that there were “nuances” due to when Athens sent its law to the Commission for the compatibility check with EU rules.

Sebastian Starcevic contributed to this report. This article has been updated to include Austria’s reaction.

LONDON — Enforcement of the U.K.’s upcoming social media ban for under-16s will probably require older teens to show a form of photo ID, according to the U.K.’s online safety regulator Ofcom.

In a government-commissioned report, Ofcom said it had identified just four methods that are “highly effective” at determining whether a user is 16 or over — while noting that “the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated, and some children will succeed in bypassing age checks.”

The advice comes after the U.K. government vowed to take a tougher approach than Australia to enforcing its ban — due to come into force next year — by requiring platforms to use “highly effective age assurance” to identify underage users.

It will inform regulations to implement the ban which ministers have said they aim to introduce to parliament this year.

Three of the methods identified by Ofcom — photo ID matching, using a digital ID service, or banking-based checks — require a passport or driving license at some stage, while the fourth, facial age estimation, may in some cases need to be followed by a supplementary check using one of the other methods because of a high margin of error at younger ages.

“This ban will shape the future of children’s lives online, so it’s important to get it right,” Ofcom CEO Melanie Dawes said.

While the age checks would involve processing of personal data, “available methods can be delivered in a way that protects users’ privacy and complies with data protection law,” Ofcom said.

It also said social media platforms should take steps to mitigate circumvention, like enabling users to report suspected underage accounts, and using age inference technology to spot activity from users who may be underage.

The regulator said it will consult on further guidance for platforms once regulations to implement the social media ban are laid.

We live in an era where wars are fought not just on battlefields, but also on our screens, in our minds and through the narratives we are led to believe. Narratives are influencing perception while missiles destroy infrastructure. What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself? Who’s controlling the narrative?

When wars end, the fighting over what they meant begins: who won, who was to blame and who can be trusted to keep the peace. These questions are settled less on the battlefield than on screens, in feeds and in group chats. For a Middle East emerging from the war that began on February 28, that contest may decide whether any new security order holds.

The region is now asking what comes after deterrence. That question brought policymakers, military leaders and researchers from the United States, Europe, Asia and the Gulf to the TRENDS 6^th Annual Conference, held in Abu Dhabi and organized by TRENDS Global, in collaboration with its global offices. The answer cannot be measured only in missiles and alliances. Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.

What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself?

The struggle over perception can now matter as much as events on the ground. That is no longer hyperbole. In any crisis today, governments, media outlets, political movements and non-state groups compete in real time to define what is happening. Disinformation, coordinated propaganda and now content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) mean a false account can reach millions before an official one is drafted.

As former BBC correspondent Karen Allen put it at the conference, “Now in an instant, I’m able to influence millions of people,” and algorithm manipulation is what we are increasingly seeing.

This year’s war showed how real that is. Within days of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, an AI-generated video of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa on fire, with crowds fleeing, was viewed tens of millions of times, according to BBC Verify. Fabricated images of damaged U.S. facilities in the Gulf spread just as fast, some posted by Iranian state-linked outlets. UAE Minister of State Noura Al Kaabi later described the attacks on the country as coming “from the sky and behind our screens.” Her government’s answer was to treat “fake news and misinformation as a security threat.”

A more damaging false story was not a single video. It was the idea that the Gulf was a party to the war. The UAE did not want this war and said so. On March 3, Minister of State Reem Al Hashimy said the UAE did not “seek to expand the circle of confrontation,” that it had “repeatedly confirmed” its territory could not be used for any military operation against Iran, and that “returning to the negotiating table is the only rational way forward.” The attacks continued anyway. Reuters reported, citing UAE defense figures, that 186 ballistic missiles and 812 drones were fired at the country in the first days of the conflict.

Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.

Tehran sought to blur that record, framing strikes on Gulf cities as retaliation against American aggression. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told NBC News that Iran had “not attacked our neighbors,” only “American bases,” and called the hotels hit in Dubai “collateral damage.” Countering that narrative does not require propaganda of our own. It requires putting the record in front of the world quickly and repeatedly: the UAE’s public calls for restraint before the war, its refusal to let its territory be used against Iran, and the hundreds of missiles and drones fired at it, most of which it shot down. Facts published fast, through verified channels, in Arabic, English and Farsi, are harder to bury than corrections issued too late.

Even after a war ends, the threats do not disappear; they simply take different forms. Ceasefires and reconstruction depend on public trust. If populations come to believe that the peace is a betrayal, or that a neighbor cannot be trusted, no deterrence framework or security pact will survive contact with domestic politics. Spoilers understand this. Their cheapest weapon is a story.

Seen from the Gulf, the lesson of recent years is that speed and credibility beat silence. Crisis communication is not a side function of security. When official channels inform the public quickly, consistently and honestly, rumors have less room to grow. When they hesitate, someone else fills the gap.

None of this is simple. Governments everywhere are still working out where countering disinformation ends and controlling speech begins, and that debate should stay open. But the common ground is wider than it looks: a society cannot be secure if it cannot tell what is true.

The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion: relitigating who was to blame, questioning whether Gulf governments can protect their people, and setting neighbors and communities against each other. Young connected audiences are the main target. They are also the best defense.

Protecting our societies from that influence does not mean closing them. It means official channels fast and credible enough that people turn to them first. It means platforms held to clear rules on labeling AI-generated conflict content, as X began to do in March. And it means a generation of young Emiratis and Gulf citizens equipped to verify what they see and able to tell the region’s story themselves rather than leaving it to others.

The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion.

This is not only a Gulf problem. The campaigns aimed at audiences in the Gulf also shape how Washington and Brussels understand the region. The UAE and its partners already work closely on defense and intelligence. Detecting and exposing cross-border influence operations belongs on that shared agenda as a joint effort between governments, platforms and researchers.

Diplomacy, investment, and deterrence will rebuild the region’s security. Whether that security holds will depend on something harder to measure: what people across the region believe about each other, and about who protects them. For the UAE, winning that argument with facts is not public relations. It is part of keeping the country safe.

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Najla Al Midfa is an Emirati researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory, a company under TRENDS Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics, international relations, economic diplomacy and regional security, with a particular interest in the UAE’s foreign policy and strategic partnerships. She holds a master’s degree in Global Affairs and Diplomatic Leadership from the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, where her thesis examined the UAE’s economic diplomacy through its Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement strategy.

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Sources

• Sixth Annual TRENDS Conference 2026 kicks off on October 12 — WAM (Emirates News Agency), September 2026
• TRENDS 6th Annual Conference 2026 — Sustainable Security: programme and speakers — TRENDS Research & Advisory
• AI-generated Iran war videos surge as creators use new tech to cash in — BBC Verify, March 7, 2026
• Factbox: Iranian missiles and drones fired at Gulf countries — Reuters (republished by Al-Monitor), March 3, 2026
• X suspends revenue sharing for undisclosed AI war videos — AFP, March 3, 2026
• UAE urges the US, Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table — Euronews, March 4, 2026
• Fake news treated as security threat during Iran war, says UAE minister — The National, September 15, 2026
• NBC News, “Iran’s foreign minister denies seeking war with neighbors,” March 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-foreign-minister-denies-seeking-war-neighbors-rcna261954

BRUSSELS — New powers proposed for the EU’s border police Frontex to monitor social media pose a threat to free speech, European lawmakers and civil society groups have told POLITICO.

The EU Commission’s proposal Tuesday for a major revamp of the coast and border patrol agency included a broad and explicit mandate to monitor social media for information that aids or encourages illegal border crossings into the European Union.

Social democratic Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei told POLITICO it was “legitimate” for authorities to remove online advertisements for human smuggling: “But a broad social media surveillance mandate goes much further, placing online speech under a border agency’s watch.”

After a 2019 monitoring tender with similar powers was revoked over criticism about privacy violations, Benifei said “the Commission now proposes copying ICE’s invasive online tracking,” referencing the much-criticized surveillance tactics of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Under the EU proposal, Frontex would set up an internal structure to monitor social media and report to the platform in question the content it says is facilitating illegal entry to EU countries. This comes as the Commission is seeking to double the agency’s budget for the next seven years and vastly expand its powers to deport people.

The EU already has several structures that facilitate the exchange of information between civil society, social media platforms and authorities when it comes to disinformation campaigns or illegal content. These include a rapid response system on disinformation campaigns under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s landmark law regulating digital platforms, as well as a recently established democratic resilience center.

Policing content

Brussels must tread a careful balance not to police individual pieces of content, especially given criticism from civil society activists that it is trying to become the arbiter of truth online. The legality of content is set by countries, which assign their authorities or civil society to monitor the platforms for problematic postings to be flagged to the platforms to be taken down.

Frontex would apply for trusted flagger status under the DSA, which gives priority to the content it flags to social media platforms. Entities that apply for this status have to demonstrate expertise and independence to a national authority, which grants them special status.

“The DSA’s trusted flagger program was never conceived for police forces to circumvent due process when assessing the legality of people’s online expression,” said Jan Penfrat, senior policy advisor at civil society group EDRi.

The Commission’s initial communication suggested Frontex “will be acting” as such an entity, which EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen later clarified meant they would apply for it. That application would have to be reviewed by a national authority to check Frontex’s independence and expertise in that area.

Polish right-wing MEP Piotr Müller told POLITICO that the “mandate must be precise” in focusing on criminal networks. “Frontex should go after smugglers and human traffickers, not police opinions about migration.” Müller is among those that criticize the DSA as policing free speech online.

Executive Vice President Virkkunen announced the news at a meeting Tuesday of signatories of the DSA’s code of conduct on disinformation, some of whom are trusted flaggers. Questions around the implications of the measures for freedom of speech and assembly came up in the closed-door meeting. According to two attendees, Renate Nikolay, deputy director general of DG CONNECT, the Commission’s tech department, tried to assuage the free-speech concerns.

Other lawmakers took a positive, yet reserved, stance towards the changes in Frontex’s mandate. The EU’s migration authorities “need the tools to respond to the changing threats at Europe’s borders, including smugglers using social media to spread lies and promote dangerous crossings,” which can include “better monitoring and information-sharing,” Regina Doherty, a center-right MEP from Ireland told POLITICO.

But “the priority now is to get the detail right so authorities can act quickly within a clear legal framework, and platforms take responsibility for illegal content,” she pointed out.

Austrian center-right MEP Andreas Schwab said that “social media clearly is becoming more and more a concern, but we should not have too many tools – let’s make use of the DSA.”

Another MEP who knows the agency well was more blunt. Fabrice Leggeri, a former director of Frontex who hails from the far-right French National Rally party, said that the new powers amounted to an “attempt to censor freedom of speech in Europe” by Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen.

The Commission didn’t respond to POLITICO’s repeated requests for comment on Frontex’s expertise in this domain.

Max Griera contributed to this report.

Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don't like AI, and it's not just young people and creatives. Appearing on the Colin and Samir podcast to talk about the launch of widescreen and long-form video for Instagram, Mosseri said he thinks there's a trend of "more anxiety and more frustration and more anger about AI," particularly in creative industries:

It's not only getting worse, it's going to continue to get worse. I think we're going to see more frustration and anger, some of it founded, some of it un …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The For You feed combines posts from communities users have joined with recommendations tailored to their interests.

With less than two weeks before some states begin mailing ballots for the 2026 midterms, there is plenty to worry about. Donald Trump is escalating his campaign to interfere with the machinery of American elections, demanding sensitive voter files, threatening state officials with prosecution and rewriting the rules for mail-in ballots. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the administration a procedural victory that could let parts of Trump’s mail-voting scheme move forward, and new litigation is already underway to stop it.

But looking past the daily torrent of alarming headlines reveals another story worth telling. The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters. Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project’s most enduring images.

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda. The suit should have stripped “2000 Mules” of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it  claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago.

One of the supposed “mules” was Mark Andrews, an auditor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, who appeared onscreen in deceptively edited footage returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members before the 2020 election. The film treated a few seconds of surveillance video as license to publicly accuse an ordinary man of an election crime. D’Souza’s voice-over declared, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”

They weren’t. Andrews had done nothing illegal, and after Georgia investigators cleared him of wrongdoing, he sued D’Souza and others involved in the film. The settlement amount remains undisclosed. That is less satisfying than a jury verdict, but it is still a remarkable endpoint for one of the Trump era’s most consequential election-fraud narratives. It also follows D’Souza’s own acknowledgment that the whole project was a fraud. In December 2024 he apologized to Andrews, and Salem Media Group, which distributed the movie, also apologized and withdrew “2000 Mules” and its companion book from distribution.

While D’Souza’s unraveling took years, the next chapter of MAGA’s fraud theater is falling apart in real time. 

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Earlier this month, conservative provocateurs James O’Keefe and Cam Higby dressed in what they described as traditional Muslim clothing. With O’Keefe in a thobe and Higby in a burqa, the pair walked into Minneapolis polling places during the state’s primary to test a decades-old voter vouching law, which lets a registered voter attest that a newly arrived or recently moved neighbor lives in the precinct. O’Keefe used a badly affected accent and, in one instance, gave poll workers the name of a real registered voter, William Pomeranz, who learned days later that his identity had been used in a viral video without his knowledge. A third member of the group, Anthony Rubin, reportedly told poll workers he wanted to vouch for people he described as recently arrived Hamas members from Gaza. 

None of them actually cast a ballot or completed a registration. Rather than uncovering a loophole, they appear to have landed themselves squarely in legal jeopardy.

Falsely signing a vouching oath is perjury under Minnesota law, punishable by up to five years. Misrepresenting your identity to obtain a ballot is a separate felony. Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, slamming the stunt, noted that fewer than 0.6% of the state’s 2024 votes involved vouching at all, and that roughly 71% of those were already registered voters simply updating an address. Local law enforcement in Hennepin County is now reviewing the footage, which has reportedly been viewed more than seven million times. O’Keefe, who was ousted in 2023 from Project Veritas, the right-wing organization he founded, over what its own board called financial malfeasance, built his career on precisely this kind of stunt. He targeted Minneapolis after Trump zeroed in on the state as a hotbed of election fraud based on nothing but racist vibes. Now it looks like O’Keefe is left holding the bag.

That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA’s election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too.

Scott Presler and his political action committee, Early Vote Action, offer another version of the same schtick. The watchdog group Public Citizen recently filed a complaint alleging that Presler and his group failed to register or disclose spending related to their campaign to unseat three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices in the state’s 2025 retention election. Under Pennsylvania law, any committee spending more than $250 to influence an election, including a judicial retention race, must register and disclose its donors and expenditures. Presler’s operation reportedly ran a two dozen person paid field staff in the state, sent tens of thousands of postcards to Amish voters and texted more than 100,000 people in Bucks County alone, yet it never once showed up in the state’s campaign finance database. The complaint alleges that Presler and Early Vote Action sidestepped transparency laws meant to let voters know who is bankrolling attempts to hijack their judiciary. 

The justices Presler tried to unseat, all Democrats, were reelected anyway. Since then, he has become a prominent outside advocate for the SAVE America Act, pressing Senate Republicans to embrace the Trump-endorsed legislation’s proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification mandates. A separate Public Citizen complaint alleges that neither Presler nor his affiliated super PAC registered lobbying disclosures for activity promoting the measure on Capitol Hill.

The pattern here is unmistakable.

The Trump administration is building an extraordinary federal apparatus, backed by the Supreme Court’s blessing on at least part of it, to police an epidemic of noncitizen voting that its own Justice Department cannot document well enough to win a single voter roll case in 23 tries. The propagandists who manufactured the visual evidence for that epidemic, chief among them D’Souza, are settling defamation suits and apologizing to the private citizens they smeared. The stunt artists trying to manufacture a fresh round of viral fraud evidence are instead generating criminal referrals against themselves. And the MAGA media personalities raising money and influence around the cause of “election integrity” are themselves facing questions about whether they followed the disclosure rules that govern political spending.

The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump’s inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it. 

The midterms will bring more attempts to manufacture doubt with ominous warnings and baseless allegations of fraud. The lesson from 2020, despite Trump’s return to the White House, has not changed. Do not yield to MAGA’s performance. Fight back and protect the people who administer elections.

The post MAGA influencers are still paying for the Big Lie appeared first on Salon.com.

SAN FRANCISCO — Billionaire opponents of California’s proposed wealth tax have spent more fighting it than they ever have on a political cause in the state, according to a POLITICO analysis.

A record $612 million from more than 70 current and former California billionaires is flooding this year’s state elections, nearly half of it for groups working to defeat Proposition 40, the wealth tax initiative on Tuesday’s ballot, POLITICO found.

The fight over Prop 40 has brought California’s wealthiest residents — many from its native tech industry — together in an unprecedented show of political coordination, the new data reveals. Tech leaders say the wealth tax has accelerated plans for broader political engagement this cycle, building networks that could be the foundation for future campaigns.

It’s a particularly striking display of unity from Silicon Valley’s notoriously hard-to-organize donor class. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is by far the well-funded opposition’s biggest benefactor, with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capitalist John Doerr, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and crypto executive Chris Larsen also among those who have contributed the most dollars in trying to stop the billionaire tax.

The possibility of a tax on their assets has drawn more than $293 million from at least 30 California billionaires, the majority of whom made their fortunes in tech but otherwise span industries, from agriculture to real estate — as well as the political spectrum, from established Democratic megadonors to some Republican allies and first-time donors.

Frank Slootman, the billionaire board chair and former CEO of cloud data company Snowflake, said he only had a “moderate” interest in politics despite giving $5 million to an anti-Prop 40 group, arguing that the measure erodes private property rights and the state’s economic dynamism.

“This upends the most basic assumptions we have about being a taxpayer and a resident of a state,” said Slootman, who has no prior record of California campaign contributions. “I vote in most elections, that’s about it. This is not about politics for me — it is far more important than that.”

The other half of billionaires’ spending this year came largely from Tom Steyer, a rare billionaire endorser of Prop 40 who bankrolled his own failed gubernatorial bid — the most expensive primary campaign in state history.

Even longtime strategists who have worked for statewide candidates and California’s costly ballot battles struggled to find a historical parallel for the coordination or scale of billionaire spending against Prop 40.

Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento political consultant whose past campaigns have involved a billionaire gubernatorial candidate and record-breaking ballot spending over sports betting, said that Silicon Valley leaders see Prop 40 as an “existential threat to tech in California” and the innovation that has taken root in the region for decades.

“Having to defend against a direct assault is a more unifying principle,” Stutzman told POLITICO. “They’re known for their pet issues that are harder to organize their peers around, but you can circle the wagons to protect yourselves. There is nothing that focuses similar-situated people.”

Proponents of Prop 40 contend the measure is necessary to backfill federal health care cuts.

The last year billionaires in California came closest to spending at this level was 2010, when they dropped $147 million on state races and measures, according to POLITICO’s analysis — a total that’s just over half of what the current wealth tax proposal mobilized. Most of it was the result of billionaire Meg Whitman, a former CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard, self-funding her unsuccessful Republican campaign for governor.

Scott Ellis, a millionaire and Prop 40 supporter who formerly served as a senior director at HP, described the magnitude of billionaire spending to fend off the measure as “a completely different animal” than past examples of “a lot of money spent by a rich person to get themselves elected.”

“People with wealth and extreme wealth are getting much more brazen than they used to be,” Ellis told POLITICO. “These people have tremendous resources. They have an incredible range of choices to make, including choosing to oppose this kind of ballot measure.”

Representatives for several billionaire opponents of Prop 40, including Schmidt, Larsen and agricultural titan Stewart Resnick, declined to comment on POLITICO’s findings.

Others, like Doerr, referred POLITICO to Building a Better California, a new Brin-led political operation that has become the primary vehicle for billionaire money against Prop 40.

The group defended the importance of its cause, arguing the measure would “permanently devastate” the state tax base and budget while undermining the health care funding it’s intended to patch.

“We are fortunate to be supported by entrepreneurs and business leaders who have built their businesses and created hundreds of thousands of jobs here, and who share a deep commitment to advancing policies that will improve quality of life for all and protect the state’s economic, jobs, and innovation engine for generations to come,” Building a Better California spokesperson Abby Lunardini said in a statement.

Debru Carthan, vice president of the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West union behind the billionaire tax, responded to the contributions, saying, “no amount of billionaire spending is going to intimidate us or turn us back.”

A reawakening

Tech leaders have told POLITICO that the wealth tax awakened a sleeping giant in California politics: their previously disengaged industry peers, who months ago suddenly started spending across the ballot to steer California in a more moderate, business-friendly direction. The threat injected the wider political organizing, some of which preceded the measure’s introduction, with a new sense of urgency.

“The tech community has wanted to become a bigger player in California politics,” said veteran Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio.

“They’re building an infrastructure, I think, for the long term because they’ve become a dominant player in our economy, and they now, after literally a decade of being hands-off, want to be very involved because they see the consequences,” Maviglio, who is working on a separate housing and environment-related ballot fight where Schmidt’s wife, Wendy Schmidt, has given $10 million, told POLITICO.

Earlier efforts to unify faltered amid strategic disagreements and overinflated fundraising promises. That was especially apparent in the push to rally Silicon Valley around San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a business-friendly candidate with a background in startups, during the California gubernatorial primary.

Although Building a Better California wasn’t spared its share of donor turmoil, an initial patchwork of opposition efforts eventually consolidated resources under the Brin operation’s strategy, devised with the help of veteran ballot-measure consultant Ned Wigglesworth.

The group also brought on fundraisers associated with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s inner circle. Newsom has publicly opposed imposing a billionaire tax at the state level.

In addition to funding Prop 40 attacks, several billionaires claimed to have fled the state to avoid the tax. Brin, for example, registered to vote in Nevada. Because the one-time, 5% tax on assets would apply to billionaires who lived in the state as of Jan. 1, 2026, POLITICO’s analysis covers billionaires with recent California ties, based on information from Forbes, the progressive nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness and news reports.

Some of those billionaires made their moves quietly, highlighting a split over how they should respond to the possibility of the tax passing.

“This has been a point of friction between me and some of my other billionaire friends,” Palmer Luckey, the billionaire founder of defense tech giant Anduril, said on a call with reporters this week. “They’ve said things like, ‘Palmer, you have to have solidarity for us. You can’t enable these really bad policies. If you stay and if you don’t leave, it’s going to show them that there’s no consequences.’”

Luckey, a vocal critic of the tax who hasn’t donated to the opposition campaign, added, “I’m planning on staying in California. I’m going to keep fighting it. I’m hoping that this doesn’t pass.”

Meta revealed a plan last week incentivizing CEO Mark Zuckerberg to stay near the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters after the longtime California resident told a special committee of his board he was considering leaving over the tax. He also hasn’t challenged Prop 40 through political contributions.

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, who poured almost $3.5 million into trying to prevent the wealth tax, was one of three members on the special committee negotiating with Zuckerberg.

Behind the money

Brin is single-handedly putting $102 million behind Building a Better California as it campaigns to sink Prop 40. This year, he’s also backed unsuccessful runs by Republican Chad Bianco and the moderate Mahan in the gubernatorial primary, plus Republican Steve Hilton’s campaign for governor. Federally, he’s given close to $450,000 to the Republican National Committee.

But before this cycle, Brin had been a sporadic donor, gone dark for many years. His last disclosed political donation in California was in 2010 — for $200,000 to join other Silicon Valley leaders in opposing an ultimately defeated ballot measure that would’ve suspended a state climate law.

Some of the billionaire donors — Slootman, Roblox CEO David Baszucki, Robinhood co-founders Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, Figma CEO Dylan Field, fintech executive Max Levchin and software founder Andrew Karam — have no history of spending on California politics before this year, according to state campaign records.

Tenev said in a statement that he donated to Building a Better California to support one of two other measures the group has advanced, which is designed to invalidate Prop 40 and would prohibit new taxes on various forms of personal savings.

“Special taxes on retirement and unrealized investment gains run contrary to the intent of the investment vehicles that have helped millions of Americans build wealth for the long term,” the Robinhood chief executive said. “History shows us that taxes aimed at a few have often been extended permanently to include more taxpayers over time.”

Another Building a Better California donor, Doerr, on the other hand, was a pioneer in shaping how Silicon Valley engaged with politics and Washington. He co-founded TechNet in 1997, which launched a political action committee as a key part of its strategy. Today, the influential industry trade association manages both federal and state-level PACs on top of a vast bipartisan lobbying network, with Google, Stripe and Kleiner Perkins among its many corporate members.

The wealth tax has also brought former Sequoia venture capitalists, Michael Moritz and Doug Leone, onto the same side after they previously diverged on California’s partisan redistricting fight at the ballot last year. They spent $7.5 million and $100,000, respectively, on groups fighting Prop 40.

Leone is a prolific Republican donor who re-endorsed President Donald Trump in 2024, while Moritz has consistently criticized Trump and chided his supporters in Silicon Valley for making a mistake.

No less than a dozen of the billionaires spending on groups that oppose Prop 40 are current CEOs — including DoorDash’s Xu, Roblox’s Baszucki, Robinhood’s Tenev, Stripe’s Collison, Affirm’s Levchin, Schmidt of rocketmaker Relativity Space, Hemant Taneja of top venture capital firm General Catalyst, Field of design platform Figma and Parker Conrad of HR software provider Rippling.

Collectively, they’ve plowed at least $88 million into their cause.

Several more of the billionaires in POLITICO’s analysis chair influential companies and firms. The opposition effort has received $40 million from Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist; $17.5 million from Larsen at the crypto company Ripple; and $2 million from George Marcus at the Bay Area real estate titan Marcus & Millichap — to name a few.

Will they come together again?

Whether the campaign infrastructure built by billionaires and the tech industry for the midterms will endure is still an open question.

Other new tech-funded groups this cycle have promised to play the long game and framed their plans around at least a decadelong horizon. Building a Better California itself has also committed to sticking around for the foreseeable future.

California political observers point to the size of the Brin-backed operation, as well as its decision to focus on additional environmental and housing measures, in predicting it won’t stop after the election.

Still, the unprecedented nature of their mobilization raises questions about what cause would be able to activate so many of these individuals again. Donors and advisers to Building a Better California previously clashed over whether spending on non-wealth-tax issues, such as environmental policy, could jeopardize the group’s success.

In the past, “if you look at those big dollar campaigns, ballot measure campaigns, those were funded in general by an industry,” said Jim Ross, a Bay Area-based Democratic consultant. “Wherein this, it’s a bunch of individuals, very wealthy individuals, but they don’t necessarily have any commonality other than they don’t want to be taxed.”

“When you have a group of wealthy people all putting money into this, a lot of the challenge is going to always be: How do you manage that coalition? How do you keep everybody moving in the same direction?” he added.

One ready answer is a revived wealth tax effort.

Last week, Rippling CEO Conrad said in a social media exchange with Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna, whose early support for the wealth tax alienated some of his original tech backers, that he “absolutely cannot afford to stay” in California — reasoning the measure may soon be followed by another one-time tax in the next election.

Slootman made a similar calculation.

“In a one-party state with super majorities in both chambers, we are at risk for everything we own,” he said. “We are hunted animals in this state. They will be at it again in two years.”

Rosmery Izaguirre contributed to this report.

About this analysis

POLITICO’s analysis compiled records from the California secretary of state for 142 California billionaires that have contributed to state campaign committees, including 30 who had given to the following committees opposing Proposition 40: Building a Better California, Californians Against Tax Increases and Golden State Promise. Reporters reviewed donation records to verify names and employers matched with the billionaires who live in the state, as well as contacted each donor. Donations are as of Oct. 26.

Forbes estimated the wealth of the persons included in this analysis. Because billionaires often own properties in multiple states, we relied on Forbes to identify each person’s residence and supplemented with further data provided by the progressive nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness. We included people who have recently left the state, including cases when they said they were leaving to avoid the potential wealth tax.

After Elon Musk warned that "advertisers who post ads that are ugly, shrill, strident or overstate claims about their product will be barred from advertising" on X earlier this month, the platform now appears to be using a jarring animated arm that reaches across the screen to draw attention to the "promote" button while users are composing a post.

Many X users have seen and shared images of the unsettling promotional tool, including The Verge's Tom Warren, but it doesn't appear for everyone on the platform. The arm seems limited to verified users, or those with a paid subscription to X Premium. Reactions, unsurprisingly, have been less tha …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Donald Trump is bad at a lot of things — negotiations, concealing criminal behavior, standing normal — but he’s not bad at everything. As much as it might bug some of us to admit it, there are a few areas where the president excels. He has an incredible gift for crafting earworms, and his Queens cadence and variable-volume delivery has wriggled its way into American speech patterns. He’s skilled at crafting funny putdowns, pithy nicknames and jabs that hit what his rival politicians are sensitive about and exploit the pressure points of expensive, futile campaigns.   

But Trump’s greatest skill is his ability to sniff out a loser. The son of a slumlord coming from the outer boroughs, he was starting with two strikes against him when he attempted to make a jump into Manhattan’s high society. If he wanted to join the rarefied air of the sons and daughters of The 400, he couldn’t be seen associated with anyone who would count as a mark against his judgment. Trump developed a sharp sense of who was on the wane and on the rise, and he worked hard to only mingle with the ascendant. 

It worked. His surname became synonymous with big-money deals, success and opulence despite a string of bankruptcies, casino closures and failed direct-to-consumer businesses. Trump kept away from maiden horses, in part because he ate dirt so often. So you can trust that when he calls Bill Maher a “complete and total loser,” he knows what he’s talking about. 

Trump railed against the host of HBO’s “Real Time” on Sunday night in a Truth Social post that expanded beyond essay length. He bashed Maher for his ratings and accused the host of lying about Trump’s approval rating. He pushed back against Maher’s criticism of the war in Iran. Most cuttingly, the reality TV veteran accused Maher of leaning heavily on canned applause and a laugh track to sell the idea that he’s funny.

“[Maher] lies about everything,” the president wrote, “and I believe he lied to me when I asked him, with all the applause and laughter he gets after almost everything he says, about things that aren’t funny or even any good, what Laughter Machine does he use?”

Maher prodded Trump in a monologue last Friday after attending a White House dinner alongside Kid Rock and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. The host made a note of Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and recent commentary on men’s physiques at his rallies. “It’s just a little odd that Trump keeps gushing about men’s bodies, and how handsome they are, and their jawlines, and their asses, their physiques,” Maher said. “I’m a little hurt. I was there for dinner for four hours last week, and not a peep. Nothing.”

On Truth Social, Trump accused Maher of turning up looking bedraggled and drunk for the controversial dinner at the “seductive and beautiful” White House. The president said that he “learned nothing” from Maher, but he clearly hoped the host would leave with a more favorable outlook on the MAGA movement. Afterward, Trump said Maher returned to his set and his “laughing machine” and offered slightly tamer critiques in the days that followed, before the host supposedly turned on him for the cameras.

“He reverted back to his former self, and his old ways,” Trump wrote. “What he spouts isn’t what he believes. He has to cater to his base, which is mostly composed of Losers, and people who don’t like working.” 

In true Trump fashion, the post was lengthy and melodramatic. But at the heart of his burn-book slams, he did hit on a real question: Who is Bill Maher for? 

The snarky libertarian has the carriage of an overeducated yuppie. Despite his frequent protestations, his smarm and suits pushed him to one side of the country’s rigid two-party binary. (He didn’t name his first show “Politically Incorrect” to rile the GOP, after all.) Maher’s outrage over the War on Terror and 2002 cancellation by ABC jammed him into an awkwardly fitting box of “liberal cause celebre.” As neoconservatives pushed an uberpatriotic theocracy in the aughts, his bad faith documentaries, which were aimed at evangelicals, kept up the illusion that he was on the side of progressives. But Maher has never been a lefty, or even particularly committed to any beliefs beyond his freedom to smoke weed.

In recent years, he’s crowed to anyone still listening that he’s open to MAGA’s overtures. He’s frequently come out on the side of reactionaries when the question centers around gender nonconforming people or Islamophobia. Outside of his dinner at the White House, Maher has railed against progressive candidates and offered his vote to Republicans, provided they tone down their rhetoric around the Big Lie. 

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That particular problem is unsolvable, at least as long as Trump is alive and in power. While the president’s popularity might be waning with voters, he still has the ability to sink Republicans who cross him. That leaves Maher in an unenviable position, inching toward a conservative party that could take or leave him. He’s gotten crankier and more prone to cribbing Fox News talking points at a time where the center of the Democratic Party is rushing to the left. His constant trashing of rising progressive stars will be hard to forget if the expected blue wave materializes in the Nov. 3 midterms. 

All this means that the proud libertarian has found himself with fewer friends than ever. Cozying up to Trump only got him publicly mocked by the president as a “hopeless guy” and a “coward.” The liberal commentariat reacted negatively to Maher’s first dinner with Trump in 2025, with Keith Olbermann claiming that the comedian had always been a “shameless opportunist.” This year, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed called out Maher’s history of religious intolerance.

With Trump realizing that Maher’s not worth the effort to woo and the next generation of party stars outright hostile to him, it’s unclear what role Maher has to play. “Aren’t these flyover states stupid?” isn’t enough of a stance to warrant having the mic when the current administration is disappearing people off the street. Maher’s punch-left, pat-right comedy has been stale for years, but he’s still insisting he’s owed a platform. He’s a blunt comic whose rotation of tired jokes have left him with no one to pass his joint to. 

Perhaps Trump summed up the problem of Maher best, in a barb buried deep in his Sunday night tirade. Maher clearly views himself as a bold truth-teller, willing to take on both the empty-headed conservatives and the too woke progressives. Trump’s approval-obsessed brain looks at a guy who has alienated anyone who might support him and only sees one thing: “You’re not transformative,” he said. “You’re a loser!”

The post Trump’s right. Bill Maher is a man without a party — or a point appeared first on Salon.com.

It feels like the skies above our AI-frenzied world have darkened in the past month. Employees at Anthropic and Google started quitting, citing fears that the AI was spiraling out of control. After a string of agents started hacking websites, researchers used AI to discover vulnerabilities in critical systems, leading to large swaths of the web going dark last week and giving rise to a scary term: Black October. At the same time, as it continued to ramp up AI spending, Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — and economists once again warned of a bubble.

Yet, a lot has happened recently to make AI genuinely useful for more people. AI agents are getting better and can now make restaurant reservations for you. Walmart made it possible for agents to shop on behalf of humans, a bold move since Amazon banned the practice. Apple announced an AI-ready home display that can turn on your lights. And let’s not forget that AI is also helping scientists find cures for formerly incurable diseases and mathematicians solve previously impossible problems. 

It’s hard to reconcile the incongruity between the recent bad news and good news. For most of us, the state of AI is anxiety-inducing — especially when it comes to our livelihoods. According to a Pew Research Center study published in August, 71 percent of Americans think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next two decades. That figure is up 7 percentage points from where it was two years ago. Sure, in the best-case scenarios, AI could erase inefficiencies at work, streamline our daily lives, cure diseases, and generally improve the human condition. 

But what if you are the “inefficiency” at work that gets erased?

That tension is at the heart of Ethan Mollick’s latest book Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI. If there is such a thing as an AI sage, it would be Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School and faculty director of its Generative AI Labs. To the nearly half a million subscribers to his Substack newsletter, One Useful Thing, he delivers semiweekly updates from the jagged frontier of the technology’s development. His message in any medium is resoundingly clear: You need to use AI in order to understand it. And to get the most out of using it, he argues that you have to accept that AI is not going away; it’s only going to become more important. 

That ethos doesn’t make the existential threats of AI any less daunting, but that’s not the point. Unless you’re an early Anthropic employee or a United States senator, there’s probably not much you can do directly to rein in AI’s potential harms. But you can, according to Mollick’s worldview, decide how the technology could fit into your life and think about how you fit into an AI-dominated future. 

I recently spoke with Mollick about his new book, what life and work might look like in the agentic AI era, and what it means to be an artisan when even knowledge is industrialized. His theories about living with AI are meant to help you navigate the future, regardless of the latest forecast. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

We’re entering a new era for AI, and the vibes are different. AI agents are something that many of us will encounter, interact with, and maybe even embrace. I’ve always known you as someone who jumps on the cutting edge of this technology to figure out what it can do. What do you think most people don’t understand about the next generation of AI?

I really think people haven’t internalized what agents do. Agents mean many things, and we can talk about personal agents, like Muse. But the fact that the problems that plagued working with AI agents before — you had to guide them each step of the way, they made mistakes, hallucinated constantly — that’s kind of gone. You can regularly get hours, days, weeks of work out of a system. 

It’s not just a theoretical thing anymore. I talk to coders all the time who are a hundred times or more productive than they were before. And in other fields, we’ve kind of moved past the theoretical discussion about AI being, “This is going to be a big deal,” to, “It’s here.” From a whole kind of co-intelligence perspective, we’ve gone from, “Here’s how we use AI and work with a chatbot back and forth,” to, “These systems are now doing real work in ways that matter to real people and are reshaping real fields for better or worse.” And if you’re used to using AI a year ago, if you’re not paying for one of these systems, it’s really easy to have lost track of what’s going on.

What about the practical, everyday ways that AI is disrupting our lives? And what do you think are the limits of that disruption?

So outside of the job world and homework cheating, I think life has changed only a little bit for people, partially because these systems were kind of complicated to use and you had to decide what you were using them for. But I think the advent of personal agents, like Muse and Dot, are going to lead to a very rapid change in a lot of ways.

Most people I know who aren’t experts who use these systems, like my parents, are using these things spontaneously. They’re finding that once you know how to prompt the AI to do something, it can do things spontaneously and come back to you because it has your email and everything else. Just as one example, I was unable to figure out how to cancel my standing $8-a-month wifi subscription from my airline, and I was like, figure this out. And it went to customer service, joined chats, then I have no idea what it did, but now I don’t have a subscription to wifi anymore, thank goodness. 

“I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work.” 

So there is this sort of lowering friction piece that’s super interesting, with good and bad elements to it. The bad side of lowering friction is both that every article gets written by AI, so there’s no human thinking in it anymore, and that companies don’t want 10,000 customer service agents coming to them demanding new things. So I think we’re just on the edge of seeing the mass change in everyday life. Right now, AI is a really good second opinion on everything. As agents become more popular, they start to take action.

How do you know when to let AI do the work, though? We know that offloading certain tasks to AI can make you worse at doing those kinds of tasks in the future. How do you take advantage of AI’s ability to do drudgery but also hold onto your own expertise? 

If there’s a personal theme underlying Co-Existence, it’s that one. That is an incredibly hard choice to make, and we’re historically very bad at making it. 

Students are the No. 1 case because they’re willing to offload homework because homework sucks and because the incentives for doing any piece of homework are terrible. But overall we need to do it to learn. So people offload that, but even if you’re trying to do the right kind of thing, like using AI only to help you learn and not to replace learning, it turns out that when chatbots are in assistant mode, as opposed to using them as a tutor, it feels like you’re learning even though you’re not. You feel like you’re in the loop even though you’re not. And so that assumes that we both know we want to offload and we do it intelligently and that we do it in a way that helps our long-term gain.

I am worried about us being able to do that. You have to draw lines for yourself about what skills matter to you or not, and you have to be thoughtful, in a way that we’re usually not, about what we’re giving up and what we’re not. Technology’s designed for us to give up stuff. We don’t walk 50 miles a day anymore in forced marches. I don’t know how to weave clothes. There’s a lot of stuff I’m very happy to not know: how to maintain my computer in some ways, even though that’s dangerous. I let Codex scan for security issues because it does a better job than me faster. But I deeply worry that if I de-skill myself entirely, I won’t even know how computers work. 

So I don’t have an easy answer, but I think that that will be the defining question for most people in their career paths right now and their lives: What do I give up? I think we can be too sentimental about things that we’re giving up. It’s okay, but we don’t know the full chain of consequences. I think that struggle is going to be central to a lot of people’s experience. I wish I had an easy answer, but now that AI can do so many things, de-skilling is a real problem at this point.

We’re living through a huge transformation. That’s increasingly clear. Besides losing their jobs, a lot of people are scared of losing the sense of what makes them human and what makes them valuable. How do people hold onto that in the years to come?

There’s a transformation happening, and for some people, the work will get more satisfying. There’s a lot of coders who did not like writing lines of code, but they did like summoning software and figuring out what they wanted to build. Their lives are much better because the AI does all the tedious work. They can command things to be built, and it’s so much more exciting than it was before. It lets people who didn’t code start to do incredible coding projects. So on one hand, that’s deeply freeing of the kinds of work that we did. On the other hand, there are people who love writing those lines of code and that’s gone now. You’re a hand-weaver in a world of power looms. Your stuff might be elegant and beautiful, but it is not going to last in a world where industrialization happens.

Industrialization versus craft is a way to think about this. There’s a lot of craft that we’ve grown to really appreciate, like the handcrafted sentence. Those things will be under threat from the logic of industrialization, which is that we need to do more of it. I think that there’s going to be a shift. There’s satisfying work to do, but I think a lot of what was satisfying human work will be under pressure to disappear, because you took pleasure in something that was not automatable, but now is.

We’ve been through this in industrial revolutions before. This is happening at a very large scale to intellectual work, where craft was a very important part of what we did. Mathematics was craft, software engineering was craft. I think that we’ll be under pressure to produce more of it, which is what industrialization’s about, even if that destroys the value of doing this as a person. You get paid to do it now, but you’re not getting the same value you did before.

“We’re no longer in a place where AI is going away.”

I think we’re going to find lots of crises of meaning. Some people are going to find huge amounts more meaning in their work, either because the work itself is now much more interesting. Work is a lot of crap, too. We can say great things about it, but people spend a quarter of their work life saying they’re bored. It’s not like this was a great job for everybody. So some people will have much more excitement in craft. Some people will have it extracted out of their job, and it’s all going to be happening at once. I know it’s not a satisfying answer, but that’s what’s happening.

Forgive me for saying so, but that was an anxiety-inducing answer. It’s an anxiety-inducing time. I wonder what advice you have for us anxious people?

I think anxiety is real, and there’s different levels of anxiety. We’re going through a wrenching change, or we will be going through one that we’re on the edges of now. There is also existential risk about whether AI will kill us all, where we clearly need more regulation. The answers are unclear. Smart people seem to think that that’s a real danger. It’s hard to know. But leaving that aside, there’s anxiety about our own transformation, our jobs. I mean, the industrial revolutions worked out great in the end, but during it, [that] was the time of Marx and anarchists and Dickens writing about London. There’s a transition we have to go through here.

I don’t think we can pretend it’s not happening, and I see a lot of people taking comfort in the idea that maybe this all will collapse and AI will go away. Even if there was a bubble financially, we’re no longer in a place where AI is going away or stopping development. I worry a lot about people doing that. Once you face that, though, I find people often reconstruct meaning in very exciting ways. Thinking about what more you can do and where you find joy in this is actually quite exciting. So I think that anxious optimism is a reasonable place to be.

What I worry about is sticking your head in the sand saying, “I’m not going to learn AI. This will go away. I’m going to pretend it’s not happening.” I mean, I wish I could give you that option. I think there’s a lot of people who wish we could slow things down or turn a dial down, but there’s also a lot of exciting things. There’s a lot of hard problems in the world that are unsolved.

If you lean into the positive pieces, you can ask how we mitigate risk but also think about how we can build a better world. Part of what makes me nervous is people sitting out that second question and just filling up with anxiety rather than believing we have a tool that can rebuild things. How do we rebuild a better world for journalism or for nonprofits or whatever it is? I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, and I worry it’s asked too little.