❌

Normal view

Trump admin embraces fleeing Bolsonaro, losing Brazilian presidential candidate

28 October 2026 at 23:13

Brazilian Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro fled his home country and arrived in the U.S. Tuesday, described by some on the right as a political refugee. After recently losing a presidential campaign against incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro’s passports were ordered seized by the government. Instead of turning them over, Bolsonaro took off with family members, traveling through Argentina, Ecuador and finally landing in Miami, Florida. The Trump administration was quick to issue a visa to Bolsonaro and members of his family, a senior State Department official told the Washington Post.

Bolsonaro ‌thanked Argentine President Javier Milei and President Donald Trump for helping him escape. He later posted on X, declaring himself “the elected president,” before that post was deleted and replaced with a letter saying he was the rightful “leader” of Brazil.

Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, is currently under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court for alleged money laundering, corruption and tax evasion in two cases, but has yet to be charged with a crime. If Bolsonaro is charged and convicted in the investigation, he could face extradition from the U.S.. His father is currently serving a 27 year prison sentence for trying to stage a coup in 2023, but for health reasons has been serving his sentence under house arrest. The elder Bolsonaro also traveled to Florida on the eve of Lula’s inauguration in December 2022 after losing the election.


Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.


Lula won reelection by over 4 million votes on Oct. 25, defeating Bolsonaro in the second round of an election that promises to have profound implications for Latin American politics. It also gives Trump, an ally of the Bolsonaro family, less influence in South America. 

“I regret that he left Brazil, because he could have stayed here and proven that the accusations are not true,” Lula told supporters outside the presidential residence in Brasilia. “This act of leaving Brazil is shameful.”

The post Trump admin embraces fleeing Bolsonaro, losing Brazilian presidential candidate appeared first on Salon.com.

MAGA influencers use Brazil’s election to sow doubt on midterms

27 October 2026 at 11:30

For a preview of the conservative copium that could follow the Nov. 3 midterm election results, look no further than the conspiracy theories MAGA’s biggest voices are already spinning about Brazil. The immediate reaction to the country’s presidential race makes clear that MAGA is preparing to unleash a predictable wave of election denialism. 

On Sunday, the incumbent leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came back from a first-round deficit to beat Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. It was the first time since Brazil returned to democracy in 1985 that the candidate who lost the first round won the runoff, and it made Lula the first person elected to his country’s presidency four times. Before the disappointment had settled, Lula’s MAGA detractors were turning an inconvenient result into an international election fraud narrative — and warning their followers that the same supposedly sinister forces were coming for the United States. Conservative podcaster and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon made the connection explicit: Without action, he claimed on his show, it would happen “next Tuesday.”

Other influential MAGA figures immediately began manufacturing reasons to doubt the outcome in Brazil, telling Americans that a right-wing defeat cannot possibly reflect what voters wanted. Nick Shirley primed his audience’s disappointment with an exuberant before picture. The 24-year-old YouTuber traded his trademark hoodie and the Minnesota daycare centers that gained him right-wing notoriety for a spot on Bolsonaro’s campaign bus and a pre-election parade, then reported back to his followers. “I have never seen crowds and energy like this for an election,” he posted Saturday, adding that thousands of people were chanting that Lula is a thief whose place is prison. On Sunday Shirley declared that Brazil’s right-wing revolution had begun. Then Lula won by roughly 4.4 million votes and the revolution lasted about as long as the polls stayed open. The hoodie had returned on Monday, along with Shirley’s posts about corruption and election meddling.

The centerpiece of the fraud story is a two-hour extension of voting on Sunday, ordered by Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin amid bad weather and transportation problems. Zanin once served as Lula’s personal lawyer, and the American right has treated that line on his résumé as a signed confession. MAGA conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called the ruling unprecedented and said it came from a judge loyal to Lula. 

What MAGA leaves out is that both campaigns asked for more time. Lula’s side cited bus delays in cities where he was strong. Bolsonaro’s side cited flooding in regions largely loyal to him. In a race decided by millions, early data shows that fewer than 40,000 votes were cast during the added window. Still, Elon Musk told his 241 million followers that the math doesn’t add up. But it does. It just doesn’t add up to the answer he wanted.


Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.


Bolsonaro himself initially called the extension a “dirty trick” and said he would challenge the outcome. Donald Trump supplied his blessing. At Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews, where he was about to board Air Force One to hold a rally for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is in a surprisingly tight re-election bid, the president told reporters, “It looked like another rigged election, frankly.” The White House Rapid Response account promptly promoted the clip, even as the president insisted he had not taken sides. He offered no evidence because there is none. 

Minutes after Trump signaled that he would not intervene, Bolsonaro effectively conceded and backed off his call to annul the election results. He said he would instead sue Lula for abusing the power of incumbency. “I wasn’t the one who lost; the system won,” Bolsonaro said, vowing to turn the overwhelming conservative legislature into a fortress against what he called barbarism.

The personal and political networks linking the MAGA movement to Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative apparatus run deep, and they have been cultivated over years.

The personal and political networks linking the MAGA movement to Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative apparatus run deep, and they have been cultivated over years. Prominent figures within the American right, including Bannon and senior MAGA advisers like Jason Miller, have long maintained intimate ties with the Bolsonaro family. Organizations like the Conservative Political Action Conference have repeatedly expanded their presence into South America, hosting regional summits that fuse American-style culture war rhetoric with local right-wing nationalism. Mar-a-Lago has also served as a gathering ground for the Bolsanaros. When Jair Bolsonaro faced legal consequences and potential imprisonment in Brazil following his own post-election maneuvering, his political allies in the U.S. took the development as a personal warning, treating the legal accountability of a foreign leader as a direct threat to their own domestic political project.

Bannon’s “War Room” podcast has become a hub for election denialism. Right-wing pundits and administration officials alike have used the show to argue for a national emergency declaration covering the midterms. Bannon spent Monday demanding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio cut off diplomatic relations with Brazil and shut down trade entirely. The goal of his rant was clear: to convince MAGA that democratic institutions across the globe have been captured by hostile forces, rendering standard electoral participation obsolete unless it is backed by relentless resistance. Alex Jones declared that Brazil must be liberated. The disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn asked whether Brazil was turning into a banana republic. Kari Lake, who is hardly a neutral authority on losing gracefully after claiming fraud in her own losing bids for Arizona governor and the U.S. Senate in 2022 and 2024, said Brazil’s elections reminded her of Arizona’s. 

Running underneath the fraud talk is a conservative creation myth. MAGA lore holds that the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development dismantled the left’s machinery in Latin America, and its triumphalists claim the left has not won a single election in the region since. But much of the region has been governed from the right for decades, and its longest-lived left-wing governments expelled USAID years ago precisely because they regarded it as a hostile American instrument, not a benefactor.

The immediate deluge of claims alleging manipulation and shadowy state intervention is more than standard right-wing culture wars. They are a calculated effort to prime American audiences for the idea that any electoral outcome unfavorable to Trump’s MAGA coalition is inherently fraudulent. The narratives depend on a selective performance of democracy in which visible enthusiasm for a preferred candidate counts as evidence of popular legitimacy, all while the actual votes can be dismissed as fraudulent whenever they produce an unwelcome result. Crowds become proof that a candidate must win. A defeat becomes proof that the system is rigged. No outcome can disprove the theory.  

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., recently told CNN that Americans have to assume Republicans will try to come up with any diabolical scheme to prevent Nov. 3 from being a free and fair election. After watching Brazil, you could argue the scheme is no longer diabolical so much as announced.

The post MAGA influencers use Brazil’s election to sow doubt on midterms appeared first on Salon.com.

Things Get Messy in Georgia After Election Board Director Writes Letter to Todd Blanche

5 October 2026 at 14:20

Georgia Election Board Employee Allegedly Goes Rogue, Requests Federal Intervention

Last week, a letter surfaced from the Georgia Election Board, signed by board executive director James Mills, requesting that the federal government intervene in his state’s election. Addressed to attorney general Todd Blanche and cc-ing Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, the letter asked that the agencies get involved with and oversee numerous aspects of Georgia’s 2026 election.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office denounced the letter. “People who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the eleventh hour,” a Raffensperger spokesperson told MS NOW.

Then, over the weekend, the story got weirder: Members of the state election board alleged that Mills never was authorized by the board to send the letter, and was essentially using his position to freelance ahead of the election.

“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” the chair of the board, John Fervier, told reporter Jessica Huseman, who broke that aspect of the story for Votebeat.

The five-member Georgia Election Board, readers may remember, was restructured in 2023 to provide Republicans with a significant majority. President Trump has praised various members of that majority, who have entertained conspiracy theories about the way in which the state conducts its elections. A year before the DOJ launched its own investigation of the 2020 election in Fulton County, the Georgia Election Board ordered one.

Fervier, the chair who accused Mills of freelancing, is a Republican but has frequently clashed with his three Republican colleagues on the board and instead voted with its sole Democrat. He’s also clashed — sometimes very publicly — with Mills, who was hired by the board but is not on the board.

Another Republican member of the board also expressed displeasure with Mills to Votebeat’s Huseman, saying that, though this letter may have been inspired by a resolution the board voted on that urged Raffensperger’s office to begin software updates for voting machines and empowered Mills to seek federal help around those updates, Mills’ requests to the DOJ and DHS went far beyond that. That member, Salleigh Grubbs, also said board members were not given a chance to review Mills’ letter.

“In private enterprise, if I told an employee I wanted to see something before it goes and he did this, we’d be having a very different conversation,” Grubbs said. “I thought we were all on the same team.”

This mess is kind of funny, but also very serious. More broadly, this is the kind of thing we should expect heading into the midterms — an official, and perhaps not even an important official, acting on their own to encourage the Trump administration to get involved in an election and take sweeping action. The DOJ and DHS have not yet responded in any public way to Mills, but the administration has valorized similar figures who have gone rogue, such as former Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters. Requests like Mills’ give the DOJ material to spin into whatever narrative it wants.

Bolsonaro’s Son Is on the Cusp of Becoming Brazil’s President

Senator and right-wing presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro speaks to supporters during a rally at Mackenzie Esporte Clube in Belo Horizonte, Brazil on August 17, 2026. (Photo by Gledston Tavares / AFP via Getty Images)

Flavio Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, came in first place in the country’s presidential election Sunday with 47% of the vote, beating President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had 45%. Because neither candidate cleared 50%, the race will now go to a runoff on Oct. 25.

  • Jair Bolsonaro, of course, was at the center of a Jan. 6-like auto-coup attempt after Lula beat him in 2022. The younger Bolsonaro has framed his campaign around revenge for his father and his associates, who were handed jail sentences.
  • The right has been ascendant in Latin America, with reactionary candidates winning several elections in a row. Many explicitly align themselves with Donald Trump.
  • Runoff systems, such as the one in Brazil, have sometimes blunted the rise of far-right factions. I’ll be watching to see if that happens here.
  • Brazil is often compared to America in that it more successfully addressed a very similar auto-coup, prosecuting the former president behind it. Should Flavio Bolsonaro win election, that contrast will become less clear cut.

Pluralistic: Good politics (22 Jun 2026)


Today's links

  • Good politics: Just make people's lives better.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: WWII online; Xbox security blunders; Homeless bloggers; Thermal printer racing game; Robbing a bank to get healthcare in jail; Crumb v Trump; "The Blues Brothers"; Bagelheads; Pickpocket training mannequin; Windmill joke; Singularity skepticism; GPU Dieselgate; Peleton bricks treadmills; Juul's junk science.
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.



A group portrait of a working class family picnicking and enjoying themselves, dating from about 1930. They look like they're really enjoying themselves.

Good politics (permalink)

Some people love to admire a beautiful football play; me, I can't get enough of politicians doing good politics – and like those World Cup fans, I am doubly pleased when it's my team making the play.

I definitely have a team in Brazilian politics: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Workers' Party. Lula's done so many amazing things in his career, and these often intersect with my own special interests. Like, he made Gilberto Gil his minister of culture, and his people built the telecentros, free software-based internet dojos for the poorest kids in the country, living in favelas:

https://www.informationweek.com/software-services/brazil-turns-away-from-microsoft

Lula was royally ratfucked – framed by a corrupt justice minister who secretly conspired with the country's oligarchs – and imprisoned, and the conspirators installed Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist war criminal whose covid bungling led to mass death:

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

When Bolsonaro lost his next election – to a triumphant Lula – he attempted a coup, for which he was arrested and handed a long prison sentence, despite Trump and Microsoft trying to intimidate the Brazilian judge into letting him walk:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/22/bolsonaro-prosecution-us-sanctions-00575122

Now, Lula is fighting to keep Bolsonaro's nepobaby failson, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, from wrestling back control over the country for his fascist party; and that's where the good politics come in.

Lula's party has just scored a massive, national political victory by tabling legislation to establish a five-day workweek. While Brazil's professional/managerial class enjoy a two-day weekend, the working poor of the nation are prisoners of the escala 6×1 system, which sees them working six days per week. It's a hangover from the era of Brazil's fascist dictatorship, which (nominally) ended in 1988, but whose legacy still haunts the Brazilian people.

Lula's 40-hour workweek is incredibly popular. So popular that Bolsonaro's party whipped its members to vote for it, because they fear that to do otherwise would hand an even bigger majority to Lula, who might go on to give workers a four-day work-week:

https://prospect.org/2026/06/22/lula-sees-boosts-as-he-pushes-to-reduce-brazilian-workweek/

It turns out that weekends are popular and promising the electorate access to a weekend is good politics. What's more, denying weekends to the electorate is shitty, awful politics, which is why Bolsonaro's fascists were forced to vote in favor of a policy they hate, even though all credit for that policy will still go to Lula and the Worker' Party. The bill passed 461-19.

Contrast Lula's muscular, deliverism-based politics that seeks to improve the lives of working people in tangible, immediate ways with the catastrophic series of blunders that Keir Starmer's Labour has delivered. Despite having won a majority so large it would have made Saddam Hussein blush (not because Labour was popular, but because the outgoing Conservatives were universally loathed), Starmer has refused to lift a finger to improve Britons' lives. Instead, he's abetted genocide, criminalized protest, proposed ending jury trials, imposed austerity, handed the NHS over to Palantir and all the remaining potable water and electrical capacity in the country over to America's most unprofitable AI giants.

Starmer's insistence that we can't have nice things is bad politics, because (and it's weird that this has to be said) a government that makes people's lives worse is less popular than a government that makes people's lives better:

https://www.whatwelo.st/p/everyone-hates-tech-but-nobody-knows

Now, the right is incapable of making working people's lives better, because broad improvements to the vast majority necessarily come at the expense of the tiny minority of morbidly wealthy hoarders whom the right serves. In order to get millions of turkeys to vote for Christmas, the right substitutes spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities to distract their voters from the quiet acts of everyday cruelty they subject those voters to:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

This isn't good politics. The sadistic torture of your base's enemies will never please them so well nor so durably as making immediate, significant improvements in their lives will.

That's why the corporate Dems who say that the party should campaign against renewables and in favor of fossil fuel companies aren't merely climate criminals, they're also bad at politics:

https://prospect.org/2026/06/22/affordability-climate-envioronment-policy-gas-oil-prices-iran-war-trump/

Cleantech is fucking great. Since I put in solar, a heat pump and an induction top, my energy bills have fallen to less than $80 per month, even in Los Angeles, even at the height of summer. My EV – a 7-year old Kia Niro – costs pennies to run, because I charge it off my roof. Not only that, it's fast, maneuverable, silent, and incredibly reliable. It handles like that Mustang a rental agency once upgraded me to. I mean, I'd rather have a subway, but if I have to drive, this is so much better than any ICE car I've ever owned.

Sure, our solar was a giant pain in the ass to get installed and working, but that's because the same corporate Dems who say climate is a political loser also said the best way to roll out solar nationwide was to set up an elaborate system of financialized tax-credits. That meant that every solar installer I talked to was more interested in swindling me by putting solar on my roof that they would own than they were in selling me a system I owned outright. Financializing America's rooftop solar conjured up a vast army of scammers and hustlers who screwed the majority of people they sold solar to, and my installers, Solaredge, were no exception:

https://www.propublica.org/article/missouri-pace-loans

Everything about living in the cleantech future is better. I can boil a gallon of water in under a minute on my stovetop! And it's only gonna get better: not only is cleantech improving every year, but fossil fuel is getting shittier every year, thanks to Trump's lunatic war of choice in Iran, the cost of using fossil fuels will only go up from here:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Look, as a workaholic whose unhealthy anxiety coping mechanism is to work even harder, I might not make the best use of an extra day off:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/14/compartment/#flow

But as Pete Seeger sang in 1941, your time is all you have, and every hour you give to your boss is an hour you can never get back:

You'll get shorter hours
Better working conditions
Vacations with pay
Take your kids to the seashore

https://genius.com/Pete-seeger-talking-union-lyrics

It's something Lula understands, which is why he's winning. Good politics are a delight to watch, especially when it's your team doing them. But man, it can be pretty demoralizing to watch your team fumble play after play after play.


Hey look at this (permalink)



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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago WWII Online https://web.archive.org/web/20010625120559/https://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/reviews/0,10867,2778704,00.html

#20yrsago Microsoft’s myriad Xbox security mistakes https://web.archive.org/web/20060703000421/http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System

#20yrsago Kentucky government censors political watchdog site https://web.archive.org/web/20060628055926/http://www.bluegrassreport.org/bluegrass_politics/2006/06/bluegrassreport.html

#20yrsago Life among the homeless bloggers https://web.archive.org/web/20060702205047/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71153-0.html

#20yrsago Disney, 1939: No woman animators allowed https://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/disney-1939-girls-are-not-considered.html

#15yrsago Sick man robs bank for $1, demands jail and healthcare https://web.archive.org/web/20110628144748/https://www.gastongazette.com/news/bank-58397-richard-hailed.html/

#15yrsago Car-racing game on a thermal printer https://www.undef.ch/project/receipt-racer

#15yrsago Toronto police swear off kettling https://web.archive.org/web/20110625131204/http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1012959–exclusive-toronto-police-swear-off-g20-kettling-tactic?bn=1

#15yrsago LEAKED: UK copyright lobby holds closed-door meetings with gov’t to discuss national Web-censorship regime https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/rights-holders-propose-voluntary-website-blocking-scheme/

#15yrsago Georgia’s anti-immigrant law leaves millions in crops rotting in the fields https://web.archive.org/web/20110620213900/https://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/06/17/gas-farm-labor-crisis-playing-out-as-planned/

#15yrsago Bagelheads: toroidal saline forehead injections https://web.archive.org/web/20110619033443/https://vicestyle.com/en/news/today/post/japanese-bagelheads

#15yrsago Spitalfields Nippers: East London street-urchins of 1912 https://spitalfieldslife.com/2011/04/02/spitalfields-nippers/

#15yrsago Danish police proposal: Ban anonymous Internet use https://www-computerworld-dk.translate.goog/art/117279/forslag-du-maa-ikke-laengere-gaa-anonymt-paa-nettet?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

#15yrsago Bell-mannequin for training pickpockets https://web.archive.org/web/20110626045035/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/06/23/amateur-pick-pockets-study-in-crime-college/

#15yrsago Skeptical take on Singularity http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html

#15yrsago Windmill joke https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/4p8qkb/two_windmills_are_standing_in_a_field_and_one/

#10yrsago Electronics repair shops overbill for labor when the customer has insurance https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/computer-repair-shops-screw-over-customers-if-theyve-got-insurance/

#10yrsago Being a Craigslist scammer is hard work https://web.archive.org/web/20160622140008/https://www.infoworld.com/article/3086304/cyber-crime/interview-with-a-craigslist-scammer.html

#10yrsago Dieselgate for GPUs: review-units ship at higher clockspeeds than retail ones https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/6/21/11986836/msi-asus-overclocked-graphics-cards-review

#10yrsago Phones without headphone jacks are phones with DRM for audio https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/6/21/11991302/iphone-no-headphone-jack-user-hostile-stupid

#10yrsago Donald Trump sources $6M worth of campaign expenditures from companies he and his family own https://web.archive.org/web/20160621142100/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/9f7412236962464f9f2c0a8d2696ba25/trumps-campaign-cycles-6-million-trump-companies

#10yrsago Samantha Bee puts the NRA before a firing squad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M4qHzd3xfM

#10yrsago Improv Everywhere: asking random New Yorkers to give a commencement speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drvcLC3DuHo

#10yrsago R. Crumb v. D. Trump, 1989 https://dangerousminds.net/comments/robert_crumb_and_friends_flush_donald_trump_down_the_toilet_1989/

#10yrsago Cleveland: “First Amendment zones” will fence protesters far away from RNC https://www.wired.com/2016/06/cleveland-will-create-city-within-city-keep-rnc-civil/

#10yrsago Space botanists are beneficiaries of Canada’s legal weed boom https://web.archive.org/web/20160624043929/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-space-technology-will-produce-the-best-weed-marijuana-cannabis-pot

#10yrsago Debullshitifying the EU referendum (radio comedy edition) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03yylpn

#10yrsago Judenstaat: an alternate history in which a Jewish state is created in east Germany in 1948 https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/21/judenstaat-an-alternate-history-in-which-a-jewish-state-is-created-in-east-germany-in-1948/

#10yrsago Gun control is a great idea, terrorist watchlists are bullshit https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/2016_06_20_aclu_vote_recommendation_on_feinstein_and_cornyn_amendments_to_h.r._2578.pdf

#5yrsago New Yorkers just missing the subway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWh385F5lms#5yrsago
#5yrsago Peloton bricks its treadmills https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

#5yrsago Juul's junk science https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#smokescreen

#5yrsago Improving the ACCESS Act https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#improve-access

#1yrago Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison/#the-new-oldsmobiles-are-in-early-this-year


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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



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

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


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

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

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


How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

❌