News

Wednesday 2026-04-01

11:00 AM

Free Speech Experts: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Panic Is As Old As Democracy Itself [Techdirt]

We’ve been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he’s been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point home with a framing that cuts straight to the absurdity of it all: this fear of new ideas “corrupting the youth” is literally as old as democracy itself.

In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial before a jury of some 500 of his fellow Athenians. The indictment accused him of impiety and added, “Socrates is…also guilty of corrupting the youth.” Despite the Athenian democracy’s commitment to free and equal speech, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Two and a half millennia later, democracies are still deeply concerned about dangerous ideas corrupting the youth. This time, the target isn’t dangerous philosophy but an increase in teen mental-health issues blamed on social media.

Mchangama and Kosseff are particularly well-positioned to make this argument (and are both former Techdirt podcast guests). Mchangama’s prior book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, traced the full arc of free speech battles across civilizations, and the two of them have a forthcoming co-authored book, The Future of Free Speech, on the global decline of free speech protections. Meanwhile Kosseff’s three previous books all cover related free speech territory: The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet, Liar in a Crowded Theater, and The United States of Anonymous. These are people who have spent their careers studying exactly these patterns — the recurring cycle of moral panic, political opportunism, and the quiet erosion of rights that tends to follow.

Their piece walks through the problems with both the evidence and the policy responses that have sprung from Haidt’s work. On the evidence:

In 2024, a review of the scientific literature by a committee at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had found that despite some “potential harms,” the review “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.” A 2026 longitudinal study in the Journal of Public Health reached a similar conclusion. 

We covered these studies at the time, noting that they were far from the only such studies to go hunting for the alleged evidence of inherent harms to children using social media — and coming up empty. It is amazing how little attention these studies get compared to Haidt’s book. So it’s good to see Mchangama and Kosseff call them out.

They also highlight what gets lost when you reduce this to a simple “social media = bad” story:

“Social media has the potential to connect friends and family. It may also be valuable to teens who otherwise feel excluded or lack offline support,” according to the National Academies of Science report. It also highlights the possible benefits of online access for “young people coping with serious illness, bereavement, and mental health problems” as well as opportunities for learning and developing interests. 

That point is especially important for vulnerable teenagers whose offline environments may be isolating or hostile. This is why comparing social media to tobacco is questionable: The scientific consensus on smoking’s harms is unanimous and no one claims smoking has benefits. Neither is true for social media.

This is consistent with what experts told TES Magazine last fall — actual researchers in the field described Haidt’s work as “fear” rather than science, said they couldn’t believe a fellow academic wrote it, and pointed out basic logical flaws in his causal claims. It’s also consistent with what I found in my own detailed review of the book when it came out two years ago, where the cherry-picked data, the ignored contrary evidence, and the policy proposals based on gut feelings rather than research were all on full display.

What makes this even worse than a standard “well-meaning but wrong” situation is a study we wrote about earlier this year showing that the social media “addiction” narrative itself may be more harmful than social media. Researchers found that very few people show signs consistent with actual addiction, but every time the media amplifies stories about social media addiction, more people claim they’re addicted. And that belief makes them feel helpless — convincing them they have a pathological condition rather than habits they could simply change.

In other words, the moral panic is doing the exact same thing it accuses social media of doing: making people anxious, helpless, and convinced they can’t control their own behavior.

The cost of being wrong here is that parents, politicians, and schools ignore the real causes of teen mental health struggles: poverty, the closure of youth services, reduced access to mental health care, and the erasure of community support systems. And the cost is that kids who genuinely rely on online communities — LGBTQ+ youth, kids with chronic illnesses, kids in hostile home environments — lose a lifeline. Mchangama and Kosseff make the same point, and now we can see the policy consequences playing out in real time.

And it goes even further. As Mchangama and Kosseff note, authoritarian governments are already using the “protect the children” framework as cover for broader censorship:

Authoritarian and illiberal states provide a grim window into how the protection of children can be weaponized to suppress dissent. In 2012, Russia enacted an internet blacklist law, with the stated intention of protecting children from harmful content. The law laid the groundwork for Russia’s heavily censored “Red Web” that now entirely prohibits many foreign social-media platforms.

The same goes in Indonesia which this month announced a ban on social media for those under 16. But Indonesia is also a country that has used the pretext of child protection to block and censor gay social networking apps and content.  

It’s a remarkable blind spot for those pushing Haidt’s arguments. They never seem to consider that these are the exact same tools authoritarian governments use to silence marginalized voices. You would think that politicians championing this book — particularly Democrats who claim to care about civil liberties and LGBTQ rights — might pause when they see Russia and Indonesia deploying identical justifications.

And yet politicians across the spectrum continue to treat Haidt’s book like scripture, despite an overwhelming expert consensus that his claims don’t hold up.

Mchangama and Kosseff close with what should be obvious, but apparently still needs to be said:

Democracies have always worried about dangerous ideas corrupting the young. Intellectuals and lawmakers should absolutely be concerned about how and when our children navigate social media. But they should also be concerned about whether, in our rush to protect our children, we are building an infrastructure of surveillance and censorship that will ultimately threaten the hard-won freedoms we want future generations to enjoy.

Speech is powerful. Ideas have consequences. But we protect such speech from legal liability for that very reason. The power of speech to change minds and influence people is exactly why those in power are so often afraid of it and looking to tamp it down. It’s also why Mchangama and Kosseff can tie the urge back all the way to Socrates.

Every generation gets its moral panic. Every time, someone insists “this time it’s different.” Every time, the evidence eventually catches up and the panic looks ridiculous in retrospect. The tragedy is how much damage gets done in the meantime — to kids who lose a real lifeline, to free expression, to privacy, and to the actual causes of teen suffering that never get addressed because everyone was too busy blaming the latest app.

The verdict from the people who actually study this stuff has been clear for a while now. Maybe it’s time for politicians to put down Haidt’s book and pick up the actual research.

08:00 AM

Techdirt Podcast Episode 448: Transaction Denied [Techdirt]

In the conversation about online speech, most of the attention tends to fall on the big social media platforms, while other intermediaries get overlooked — especially payment processors and other financial intermediaries. But that very thing is the focus of a new book coming out next week, Rainey Reitman‘s Transaction Denied. With launch events coming up on April 7th in Berkeley and April 9th in San Francisco, Rainey joins the podcast this week to talk all about the book and the vital role of financial intermediaries in online speech.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

05:00 AM

Weeks After Denouncing Government Censorship On Rogan, Zuckerberg Texted Elon Musk Offering To Take Down Content For DOGE [Techdirt]

On January 10th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan and put on quite a performance. He talked about how the Biden administration had pressured Meta to take down content. He detailed how the Biden administration had apparently pressured Meta to take down content — how officials called and screamed and cursed — and how, going forward, he was a changed man. A champion of free expression, done forever with government demands to remove content. And a whole bunch of people (especially MAGA folks) cheered all this on. Zuckerberg was a protector of free speech against government suppression!

Twenty-four days later, he texted Elon Musk — a senior government official at the time — to volunteer to remove content the government wouldn’t like. Unprompted.

As I wrote at the time, the whole Rogan interview was an exercise in misdirection. The “pressure” Zuck kept describing was the kind of thing the Supreme Court explicitly found, in the Murthy case, was standard-issue government communication — the kind of thing Justice Kagan said happens “literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.” The Court called the lower court’s findings of “censorship” clearly erroneous. And Zuck himself kept admitting, over and over, that Meta’s response to the Biden administration was to tell them no. He said so explicitly:

And basically it just got to this point where we were like, no we’re not going to. We’re not going to take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous…

In other words, the Biden administration asked, Meta said “nah,” and that was that. The Supreme Court agreed this fell well short of coercion. Indeed, the only documented instance of the Biden administration making an actual specific takedown request to a social media platform was to flag an account impersonating one of Biden’s grandchildren. That was it. That was the “massive government censorship operation.”

But Zuck milked it beautifully on the podcast, and Rogan ate it up. The narrative was established: Zuckerberg, defender of free expression, standing tall against the censorious government, vowing to never again let officials dictate what stays up and what comes down on his platforms.

That was January 10th.

On February 3rd, Zuckerberg texted Elon Musk:

Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.

So the man who spent three hours performing righteous indignation about government censorship proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.

“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”

A guy who spent three hours on the biggest podcast in the world performing righteous indignation about government censorship pressure — then, weeks later, volunteered exactly that kind of service, unprompted, to the same government. Just with a different party in power.

The Biden administration’s alleged “coercion” amounted to strongly worded emails that Meta freely ignored, and its only documented specific takedown request was for an account literally pretending to be the president’s grandchild. Zuckerberg’s response to that: three hours on the world’s biggest podcast denouncing government censorship. His response to Musk’s DOGE operation: a proactive late-night text offering to suppress information identifying the federal employees doing the dismantling.

And Zuck’s framing of “doxxing” is doing a lot of work here. The DOGE staffers whose identities were being shared on social media were federal employees exercising enormous government power — canceling grants, accessing sensitive government databases, making decisions that affected millions of Americans. The administration went to great lengths to hide who these people were, precisely because what they were doing was controversial and, in many cases, potentially illegal. Identifying who is wielding government power on your behalf has a name, and that name is accountability, not “doxxing.”

Notably, the Zuckerberg text came the day after Wired started naming DOGE bros. Which is reporting. Not doxxing. Doxxing is revealing private info, such as an address. A federal employee’s name is not private info. It’s just journalism.

Also notice how Zuckerberg bundles “doxxing or threatening” — conflating two very different things. Removing credible threats of violence is something every platform already does; it’s in every terms of service. But by packaging the identification of public servants alongside actual threats, Zuck makes the whole thing sound like a routine trust-and-safety operation rather than what it actually was: volunteering to help the government hide its own employees from public scrutiny.

Compare the two scenarios directly. The Biden administration flagged a fake account impersonating a minor family member of the president — a clear-cut case of impersonation that every platform’s rules already cover. In other cases, they simply asked Facebook to explain its policies for dealing with potential health misinformation in the middle of a pandemic. Zuckerberg’s response, per his Rogan narrative, was to tell them to pound sand, and then go on a podcast to brag about it. Meanwhile, when it came to Musk and DOGE, it looks like Zuck didn’t wait to be asked. He texted Elon Musk at 10 PM on a Monday night to let him know the teams were already mobilized. He closed with “let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help,” which is really more “eager intern” energy than “principled defender of free expression” energy.

It’s also worth noting the broader context of the relationship here. These two were, at least publicly, supposed to be rivals. Remember the whole cage match fiasco? The very public trash-talking? And yet here’s Zuck texting Musk late at night, opening with flattery (“Looks like DOGE is making progress”), offering content suppression as a gift, and then — in literally the next breath in the text exchange — Musk pivots to asking Zuck if he wants to join a bid to buy OpenAI’s intellectual property.

“Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others?” Musk asked. Zuck suggested they discuss it live. Just a couple of billionaires doing billionaire things at 10:30 PM after one of them volunteered censorship services to the other’s government operation.

We only know about any of this, by the way, because of Musk’s quixotic lawsuit against OpenAI. These texts were designated as a trial exhibit by OpenAI’s lawyers. Musk’s team is now trying to get them excluded from evidence. The motion seeking to suppress this evidence opens with one of the more entertaining paragraphs you’ll find in a legal filing:

President Trump. Burning Man. Rhino ketamine. These are all inflammatory and highly irrelevant topics that Defendants are trying to improperly make the subject of this litigation. Throughout fact discovery, Defendants have gratuitously probed these topics, and their trial evidence disclosures make clear that they intend to use the same scandalizing tactics at trial. Defendants should not be allowed to exploit Musk’s political involvement, social or recreational choices, or gratuitous details of his personal life at trial. As detailed below, Musk is the subject of daily, often-fabricated media scrutiny.

The filing goes on to argue that the Zuckerberg text exchange has “nothing to do with Musk’s claims” and amounts to an attempt to “stoke negative sentiments toward Musk because of his association with Zuckerberg.” Which is a fun way to describe a text message in which a tech CEO volunteers content moderation favors to a government official. Musk’s lawyers aren’t wrong that it’s embarrassing — just not for the reasons they think.

The hypocrisy, though, is almost beside the point. The entire Rogan performance was designed to establish a narrative: that the Biden administration engaged in some kind of unprecedented censorship campaign, and that Zuckerberg was bravely standing up to it. That narrative was then used to justify Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programs and loosen its content policies — framed as a return to “free expression” principles.

But the Zuck-Musk texts show what those “free expression” principles actually look like in practice. Zuck is more than happy to suppress speech when he supports the person in the White House. It’s only when he doesn’t like the person in the White House that he gets to pretend he’s a free speech warrior.

This has nothing to do with free expression. It’s about power. Who has it, who Zuckerberg thinks he needs to stay on the right side of, and who he thinks he can safely perform outrage against. The Biden administration was on its way out the door when Zuck did the Rogan interview, making them a perfectly safe target for his “never again” act. Musk was ascendant, running a government operation backed by a president who had directly threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison.

So the principled free speech stance lasted less than a month before Zuck was back to volunteering content suppression — this time without even being asked, for the people who actually had the power to hurt him. And that’s just the text message that surfaced in an unrelated lawsuit. The rest of the ledger isn’t public.

Some defender of free expression.

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ICE Airport Deployment Shows Officers Only ‘Need’ Masks When They’re Kidnapping People [Techdirt]

Before we get to the lie exposed here, let me just offer a correction of my own. As many, many, far too many people pointed out in my last post on ICE being sent to airports, people do actually guard airport exits. My assumption was based on my own experience on wishing to remain in airports until I had boarded my plane, so I never went looking to see if TSA agents were posting up at exits. So much for the universal experience, by which I mean I felt my experience was the universal experience.

Moving on…

Sending ICE to replace TSA agents who left the job after they stopped receiving paychecks was never going to solve the problem. In fact, it was going to introduce new ones. First and foremost, “border czar” Tom Homan said specifically that ICE wasn’t there to replace TSA agents:

“We’re simply there to help TSA do their job in areas that don’t need their specialized expertise, such as screening through the X-ray machine. Not trained in that? We won’t do that,” Homan told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

So, if they’re not trained to do TSA work (and there’s no reason to believe they are, considered they’re probably not even trained to ICE work), there’s really not much they can do to expedite the boarding process. What are they actually doing at airports? Well, it’s tough to say. A lot of photos and videos show ICE officers leaning against walls or standing around while the lines remain as long as they were before Homan sent officers to airports. (There are also photos of ICE officers doing things I assume they aren’t actually trained to do, unless they consider a 10-minute handoff by a departing TSA agent “training.”)

Homan suggested ICE officers might be able to step in to verify identification, which is absolutely the last thing you want officers with an arrest quota to be doing.

Here’s another thing ICE officers aren’t doing while hanging around airports facilitating absolutely nothing in terms of expedited security screenings: wearing masks.

President Trump claims he “asked” ICE officers to not wear masks while working in airports, which is definitely yet another thing That Never Happened.

Trump on ICE: They were wearing masks. I said, do you mind taking off your masks in the airport? And they took them off. And people said wow, these are nice guys. People are starting to say, ICE, you are nice guys.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2026-03-26T01:35:39.163Z

Here’s the direct quote of Trump’s bullshit:

They were wearing masks. I said, do you mind taking off your masks in the airport? And they took them off. And people said wow, these are nice guys. People are starting to say, ICE, you are nice guys.

A. He never said this to ICE officers. B. Nobody actually thinks simply removing a mask converts an ICE officer into a “nice guy.”

But everywhere you look, there are ICE officers operating out in the open without feeling the need to mask up:

So unmasking ICE isn’t a problem, then? Whether at the airport or on our city streets, it’s the same ICE. #unmasked

— Darlene McDonald (@darlenemcdonald.com) 2026-03-25T20:44:30.206Z

Atlanta Airport… looks like ICE wandering around aimlessly has solved everything… 🇺🇸

— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T15:41:58.888Z

Including this pair of ICE officers…

Teenage-looking ICE goons walking around LaGuardia Airport3/24/26

— Raider (@iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T00:08:32.151Z

Who apparently looked like this, prior to being sent to LaGuardia:

And that demonstrably counters the narrative pushed by Homan himself, who has constantly claimed demanding ICE officers remove their masks will immediately subject them to violence, doxxing, and whatever else can added to his clown car parade of horribles:

White House border czar Tom Homan on Sunday defended the use of masks and other facial coverings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as necessary to protect agents from a rise in assaults and violent threats reported by the Department of Homeland Security.

“I don’t like the masks, either,” Homan said in an interview Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” Still, he said, “these men and women have to protect themselves.”

Point of order: I’m sure Homan actually likes the masks. In addition, the only thing these officers are protecting themselves from is accountability. That’s why they’re fine standing around airports without masks but definitely need them when they’re jumping out of unmarked cars to kidnap people on public streets.

It was never about protecting ICE officers from the public. It was always about shielding officers from the consequences of their own, often-illegal actions. This shutdown has exposed yet another administration lie.

The other lie is this: that this was anything other than a trial balloon for adding ICE to airports permanently.

Border czar Tom Homan said Sunday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would remain at airports until TSA officers are able to resume normal operations.

“We’re going to continue an ICE presence there, and until the airports feel like they’re in 100%, you know, in a posture where they can do normal operations,” Homan said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “So if less TSA agents come back, that means we’ll keep more ICE agents there.”

ICE currently has the largest budget of any federal law enforcement agency. I’d imagine the $50,000 signing bonus, along with the guarantee that your paychecks will continue to arrive no matter how long the government is shut down, looks far more attractive to ex-TSA agents than returning to their prior positions. ICE will remain for the foreseeable future. And once the officers are there long enough, the administration will conveniently forget this was supposed to be temporary.

03:00 AM

Arti 2.2.0 released: HTTP CONNECT, RPC, and Relay development. [Tor Project blog]

Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor implementation in Rust. We're happy to announce the latest release, Arti 2.2.0.

This release adds support for using HTTP CONNECT rather than SOCKS, when connecting to the Tor network via Arti. This previously-experimental feature is now included a full build, and will then be enabled by default. The HTTP CONNECT protocol is available over the same port as SOCKS.

The RPC client library (arti-rpc-client-core) now supports non-blocking requests, and integration with application event loops. And the RPC system now supports administrative access to the Arti instance, via a new "superuser" facility.

We also fixed a low-severity security issue, TROVE-2026-005, which would somewhat weaken DoS resistance in in certain unusual embedded build configurations.

Behind the scenes we have been working on relay support, including relay channels and circuits, and directory server functionality (mirrors and authorities). As ever there are also lots of bugfixes, cleanups, and test and CI improvements.

For full details on what we've done, including API changes, and for information about many more minor and less-visible changes, please see the CHANGELOG.

For more information on using Arti, see our top-level README, and the documentation for the arti binary.

Thanks to everybody who's contributed to this release, including hjrgrn, HydroxideUnlaced, Nihal, and Tobias Stoeckmann.

Also, our deep thanks to our sponsors for funding the development of Arti!

Canada [dperkins]

This summer was a good time to visit Canada. I initially thought about going to the U.S., but what with Trump's anti-foreigner policies and the immigration police locking people up all the time, Canada had a greater appeal. Why not visit the Canadian Rockies? Never been there before. Betsy and Dex said we should go to the Bugaboos, so we did. Great.

20250807.1.Bugaboos.jpg 20250807.2.Cobalt.jpg 20250807.3.Glacier.jpg 20250807.4.Cobalt.jpg 20250808.1.Betsy-Dex.jpg 20250808.2.Bugaboos.jpg 20250820.2.Bugaboos.jpg

On the first day we drove to the Conrad Kain Trailhead and hiked up to the Conrad Kain Hut. The road was rough, but the rental SUV handled it fine, and the hike was short but steep, so we took our time... We had several ideas for the next day. In the end, we decided to hike up and over the pass to Cobalt Lake. This was a good idea, but what we had not counted upon is the fact that while there are many rocks, cairns are scarce, and the trail is mostly non-existent. But we were confident, and experience was on our side, so we climbed up the scree slopes, boulder hopped through the rock fields, walked down the glacier, and eventually found our way to Cobalt Lake. The route was sketchy and fun... On the third day, consistent with day before, we found that the Cobalt Lake Trail doesn't exist in places, but with the assistance of GPS and offline cellphone maps, we meandered out of the mountains and back to civilization... A spectacular three-day hike, provided you have the skills and strength.

The next day my parents wandered west and I drove up to Glacier National Park — the Canadian one — for several days and then headed up the Icefields Parkway to Jasper, where David joined me up. Jasper, Banff, and the Parkway connecting them are rightly famous.

20250810.1.Glacier.jpg 20250811.1.Peyto.jpg 20250811.2.Peyto.jpg 20250812.1.Parkway.jpg 20250812.2.Columbia.jpg 20250812.3.Stutfield.jpg 20250814.1.Robson.jpg 20250814.2.Kinney.jpg 20250814.3.Doug-David.jpg 20250817.1.Sentinel.jpg 20250817.2.Sentinel.jpg 20250817.3.Sentinel.jpg 20250818.1.Banff.jpg 20250819.1.Alberta.jpg 20250820.1.Alberta.jpg

The hiking and camping were excellent. The mountains were majestic, the glaciers were gigantic, the waterfalls were wonderful. In the words of Stompin' Tom Connors, In Canada, where adventure ever falls — in Canada, we get to see them all.

Rehearsing possibility [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism.

Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about?

Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.

      

Pluralistic: State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms (31 Mar 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links


A Democratic mule, kicking out. It has kicked an ICE agent into the air. Another group of ICE agents sullenly await their turn. The background is a ballot drop-off box.

State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms (permalink)

Donald Trump has announced his intention to steal the midterms with a voter suppression law that would ban the mail-in voting that he himself uses (which he claims is not fit for purpose).

This voter suppression campaign is Trump's number one policy priority, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act that would accomplish this is behind the shutdown and aviation chaos that has hamstrung the country for weeks:

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/save-act-voting-rights-congress/

SAVE requires voters to show up at the polls in possession of ID like birth certificates and passports, and it will fill our polling places with armed, masked ICE agents – you know, the guys who just randomly kidnap and murder people for having accents, speaking a language other than English, or being visibly brown.

During Trump's aviation crisis, Trump heard about "Linda," a woman who called into a far right talk-radio program to suggest that ICE be deployed to American airports to backstop the TSA agents who'd stopped showing up for work on the very reasonable grounds that they hadn't been paid in a month:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-may-have-got-his-ice-airport-idea-from-linda-from-arizona/

Trump loved the idea and the next thing you knew, ICE was at the airports, hanging around like a bad smell and being totally useless. It turns out that the TSA is a trained workforce, unlike ICE, who receive precisely 47 days of training as a kind of MAGA Kabbalah (Trump is the 47th president):

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-agents-frustrate-airport-employees-as-shutdown-drags-on/

ICE's uselessness at the country's airports was beyond farcical, though, as ever, The Onion found and nailed the farce in "How ICE is assisting TSA":

https://theonion.com/how-ice-is-assisting-tsa/

Overseeing the removal of shoes, belts, and abuelas

Confiscating, then brandishing dangerous items

Assuming all milling-around duties

Culling weaker travelers when lines get too long

Commiserating about failing the police academy

Drinking any shampoo that exceeds the carry-on volume limit

Simplifying the customs interview to one question about skull size

But having ICE in the airports does serve one purpose. As Steve Bannon gloated on his podcast, ICE in the airports is a way to soften people up for ICE in the polling stations. He called it a "test run" for the midterms:

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/steve-bannon-calls-ice-agents-at-airports-part-of-a-test-run-for-the-midterm-elections

Writing for Jacobin, Eric Blanc points out that Democrats don't have to sit by passively while Trump – who repeatedly promised that if you voted for him in 2024, "you won't have to vote anymore" – steals an election:

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/ice-trump-election-theft-laws/

That's because America has a federal system of government, and the administration of its elections is firmly, constitutionally, unarguably in the hands of the states, and the states have large collections of highly trained, highly armed officials who can enforce their laws.

On March 13, the New Mexico state legislature passed a law banning armed federal officials from showing their fascist asses anywhere within 50 feet of a polling place or ballot drop-box:

https://www.koat.com/article/new-mexico-prohibits-armed-agents-voting-sites/70729595

Other blue states like "California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington" are contemplating similar laws.

It's a start, but as Blanc says, what the fuck are the other blue statehouses waiting for? This is a white-hot, hair-on-fire emergency. There isn't a moment to spare. This should be on the agenda for every union, at every demonstration, at every DSA and Democratic Club meeting. As Blanc says, if we wait until November to find out what Trump is going to do, it'll be too late. The time to act is now.

This is – as Blanc says – a "concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, and immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today." And that organizing would "onboard and develop scores of new leaders in this fight nationwide."

I know where we can start. Unions across America have called for a general strike on May Day (May 1), under the banner "No work, no school, no shopping." As we rally on May Day, let defending our right to vote be at the top of our agenda. Mark your calendars:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ref=paydayreport.com&mid=1_b8qBUINLYWeLiwpFSfUO2SmX2w6TWA&ll=37.724800549268%2C-96.94920235000001&z=4

(Image: Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0; Jami430, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

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 Gobler Toys https://web.archive.org/web/20010331150924/http://www.goblertoys.com/pages/goblertoys.html

#20yrsago Power-strip with hidden GSM hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20060412201921/https://www.spy-labs.com/infinity.htm

#20yrsago I Hate DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060406063345/https://www.ihatedrm.com/cs2/

#20yrsago GOP hopeful’s photo of “peaceful Baghdad” was really Istanbul https://web.archive.org/web/20060405225546/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002274257

#20yrsago Disney using freeware Disney-inspired font in its signs https://flickr.com/photos/mrg/sets/49427/

#20yrsago Yahoo could stay in China and stop sending its users to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20060411085309/http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2006/03/yahoo_abominati.html

#20yrsago AMC CEO: why we won’t show DVD simul-release movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060426042457/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/start.html?pg=15

#15yrsago Canadian ISPs admit that their pricing is structured to discourage Internet use https://web.archive.org/web/20110401033318/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5711/125/

#15yrsago Science fiction growth-chart takes your kid from Tribble to Vader https://web.archive.org/web/20110331134518/http://geeky-dad.tumblr.com/post/3869493918/my-daughter-is-turning-one-soon-and-i-decided-we

#15yrsago Open access legal scholarship is 50% more likely to be cited than material published in proprietary journals https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1777090

#15yrsago Senior London cops lie to peaceful protestors, stage mass arrest https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/mar/28/cuts-protest-uk-uncut-fortnum

#10yrsago Cuba’s free med schools are the meritocratic institutions that America’s private system can’t match https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medical-school-cuba/

#10yrsago As criminal justice reform looms, private prison companies get into immigration detention, halfway houses, electronic monitoring, mental health https://web.archive.org/web/20160331101534/https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/private-prisons-fight-back/66970

#10yrsago Surveillance has reversed the net’s capacity for social change https://web.archive.org/web/20160429233747/https://m.jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/25/1077699016630255.full.pdf?ijkey=1jxrYu4cQPtA6&keytype=ref&siteid=spjmq

#10yrsago Top Trump strategist quits, writes an open letter warning America about him https://web.archive.org/web/20160330035435/http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector

#10yrsago Doctors who get pharma money prescribe brand-name drugs instead of generics https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-who-take-company-cash-tend-to-prescribe-more-brand-name-drugs

#10yrsago GOP’s anti-abortion strategy could establish precedent for massive, corrupt regulation https://web.archive.org/web/20160329045614/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/fans-of-economic-liberty-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-regulate-abortion/475566/

#10yrsago Turkish government tells German ambassador to ban video satirizing president Erdoğan https://web.archive.org/web/20260316070423/https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/tuerkei-verlangt-offenbar-das-extra-3-video-zu-loeschen-a-1084490.html

#5yrsago Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#statistical-inference

#5yrsago Big Salmon's aquaturf https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#aquaturf

#5yrsago Noble Lies https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#masks-and-trade

#5yrsago Monopoly so fragile https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail

#1yrago #RedForEd rides again in LA https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab

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, 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. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

How the Extreme Becomes Mainstream [The Status Kuo]

I’m writing for The Big Picture substack today about something we all may have seen but not fully processed.

Last week at CPAC, the main staging ground for MAGA extremism, the Deputy U.S. Attorney General, Todd Blanche, asked the crowd why anyone would object to sending ICE agents to polling places. That’s actually illegal under a federal law with roots dating back to Reconstruction. And Blanche isn’t a podcaster or some random online provocateur. He’s the second-highest law enforcement officer in the country.

Every year, horrible statements like this come out of CPAC, and observers debate whether it’s all just red meat for the base we should simply ignore. But as I explain today, we need to take it quite seriously. There’s a disturbing but telling track record of how extremism at CPAC becomes mainstream GOP policy not long after.

My piece will land in your inboxes later this afternoon if you’re a subscriber to The Big Picture (which is separate from my writings here at The Status Kuo). If you’re not yet signed up, you can do so using the button below at no additional cost. But as always we do deeply appreciate our voluntary paid supporters!

Sign Me Up For The Big Picture!

I’ll be back tomorrow morning with my regular piece in these highly irregular times.

Jay

12:00 AM

David Ellison Pretends He Won’t Fire Half Of Reeling Hollywood If Pointless Warner Bros Merger Is Approved [Techdirt]

We’ve repeatedly noted how the Ellison family’s acquisition of Warner Brothers (after their recent acquisitions of CBS and a part of TikTok) would be very bad for a long list of reasons. The gargantuan debt load will result in unprecedented layoffs and price hikes. And the Saudi funding, and Larry’s anti-democratic interests, raise no limit of propaganda and foreign influence concerns.

It’s also worth noting that absolutely nobody in charge of this new Paramount appears to be competent.

But because our federal government is currently too corrupt to function, there’s zero real hope this merger gets blocked on the federal level. That leaves a fleeting coalition of states, who’ll likely have to band together to file a long-shot lawsuit to try and scuttle the deal.

To get out ahead of such a lawsuit, Larry Ellison’s nepobaby son David, freshly gifted not one but two giant Hollywood studios, has been making the rounds in California insisting to everyone that the merger will be great for Hollywood and for jobs. This was what he said in a response to California lawmakers about the precarious nature of the deal:

“I firmly believe that uniting Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery presents a unique opportunity to build a true champion for the creative community, one that can and will bring more stories to life, support filmmakers and talent with real scale, and compete effectively on the global stage as an independent media leader,” Ellison said in response to a question about the merger’s impact on California and Hollywood specifically. “That is the true legacy of Hollywood, and my promise to you is to build a stronger Hollywood, by keeping both of these legacy studios operating separately, thereby preserving and potentially increasing jobs.”

None of that, to be very clear, will be happening. And outside of some (more) tax incentives thrown at the already rich, neither California Sen. Adam Schiff nor Rep. Laura Friedman (who peppered the Ellisons with some light performative questioning), can or will do anything meaningful to thwart the consolidation or hold the new, bigger company accountable for false pre-merger promises.

Any real hope rests with a handful of state AGs, and their road will be a very rocky one now that the federal government has rubber stamped the deal.

Hollywood is already rocked and reeling from COVID, previous pointless consolidation, and massive migration of production overseas. You’ve got numerous high level technically skilled production folks resorting to driving Ubers amidst historic layoffs.

Enter Warner Brothers, a company that’s been acquired four times in the last two decades, with each acquisition being more pointless and devastating than the one that preceded it. With this merger having just unprecedented levels of debt at a very precarious time for traditional TV:

“Look, there is incredible IP sitting inside of Warner Bros. Now, the flip side is, you paid a lot for it. You also leveraged up to seven times. Seven times debt to EBITDA leverage; that’s a lot of debt that you’ve got to work off over the course of the next five years. Plus, you got a lot of linear TV, and like we were just talking about earlier on the podcast, nobody’s watching linear TV. And so you spent a lot of money to get assets that are in secular decline.”

That debt does not get paid off by Larry Ellison or the Saudis, or by a massive boon in badly-automated AI batman slop.

It gets paid off by brutal layoffs, corner cutting, production cuts, and consumer price hikes. That’s not up for debate. There’s also zero indication that the kind of folks leading CBS and Paramount are any more competent than the kind of folks we saw at AT&T who loudly and repeatedly demonstrated they had no idea what they were doing.

The accumulated debt from the CBS and Warner Brothers mergers, combined with Larry Ellison’s precarious footing atop the AI bubble, combined with a potential economic collapse at the hands of our bumbling kakistocracy, together form a super unstable cocktail that could result in this merger being one of the more disastrous “business” exercises conceived by modern man.

Every single time Warner Brothers changes hands the press and public are peppered with claims that this will unleash vast new innovation and jobs, and every single time that winds up being a lie. Anybody claiming this time will magically be different is either lying or not particularly bright.

Tuesday 2026-03-31

06:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 梅 [Kanji of the Day]

梅

✍10

小4

plum

バイ

うめ

青梅   (あおうめ)   —   unripe plum
梅干し   (うめぼし)   —   umeboshi
梅雨   (つゆ)   —   rainy season (in Japan, usu. from early June to mid-July)
紅梅   (こうばい)   —   red-blossomed plum tree
梅林   (ばいりん)   —   ume grove
白梅   (しらうめ)   —   white plum blossoms
梅酒   (うめしゅ)   —   ume liqueur
梅干   (うめぼし)   —   umeboshi
梅肉   (ばいにく)   —   shredded dried plum
梅雨明け   (つゆあけ)   —   end of the rainy season

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 慈 [Kanji of the Day]

慈

✍13

中学

mercy

ジ

いつく.しむ

慈恵   (じけい)   —   mercy and love
慈善   (じぜん)   —   charity
慈悲   (じひ)   —   mercy
慈愛   (じあい)   —   affection (esp. parental)
慈しみ   (いつくしみ)   —   affection
慈善事業   (じぜんじぎょう)   —   philanthropic work
無慈悲   (むじひ)   —   merciless
慈善団体   (じぜんだんたい)   —   charitable organization
慈しむ   (いつくしむ)   —   to love (someone weaker than oneself)
慈眼   (じがん)   —   merciful eye (of a Buddha or a bodhisattva watching humanity)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

05:00 PM

Game Pirates Beat Denuvo with Hypervisor Bypasses — Irdeto Promises Countermeasure [TorrentFreak]

denuvo logoFor as long as protected computer games have existed, people have tried to break or bypass these digital locks with patches, loaders, and keygens.

With gaming as a multi-billion-dollar industry today, protecting games is more important than ever. Especially during the early release window when most sales are generated.

In the past decade, Denuvo has been the prime anti-piracy solution. The Irdeto-owned protection software managed to delay pirate releases seriously. Despite being a nuisance to many legitimate customers, gaming companies were pleased to pay for this first line of defense.

That is, until everything suddenly appeared to change a few weeks ago with the pirate leak of ‘Resident Evil Requiem,’ mere hours after its official release.

Hypervisor Bypasses Break Denuvo on Day Zero

The early leak was not a one-off. A wave of hypervisor-based Denuvo bypasses came out recently, including day-zero releases of major titles, including Crimson Desert and Life is Strange: Reunion. Meanwhile, long-protected titles like Assassin’s Creed Shadows also fell to the new method.

The speed and scale of the breaches, which also bypass other DRM software, are unprecedented. Where some reputable game crackers previously feared that Denuvo would effectively end game piracy, the tables have completely turned now.

Hypervisor leaks

hypervisor

Traditionally, crackers were required to reverse engineer Denuvo’s DRM paths to patch the game, which is a labor-intensive process that could take months.

Hypervisor bypasses take a fundamentally different approach. They don’t interfere with the game directly, but they operate beneath the operating system’s standard security visibility level, in what security researchers call Ring -1.

At this fundamental level, with key security features disabled, the hypervisor bypasses can intercept Denuvo’s CPU instructions and feed back false data to make the game believe that the tampering protection is still in place.

Because these bypasses are much easier to develop, these new ‘cracks’ come out faster than ever. Where pirates previously had to wait for weeks, they can now play pirated games within hours. That’s unprecedented.

Security Concerns

The hypervisor bypasses are a breakthrough, but they are not without concern. Right off the bat, critics warned that for them to work, pirates essentially have to turn off a key protection layer on their computer.

The bypasses are also plagued by hardware-specific problems and limitations that make them far from a simple patch. AMD systems are currently more stable, while Intel users face significant performance and stability issues, leading to other dangerous “tweaks”.

This cracking approach is still relatively young, and new developments surface nearly daily, with the game piracy forum Steam Underground (CS.RIN.RU) being a central hub.

The forum does not only facilitate pirate releases; it also offers detailed educational resources on potential security issues, warning that there are serious risks involved.

“[E]ven if you trust the authors of the hypervisor driver and even compile it yourself from source, a serious vulnerability in its code could instantly provide maximum and undetectable access to your system,” forum administrator RessourectoR writes.

One of the many warnings

hypervisor

The question remains, of course, whether the average game pirate will read these warnings at all.

Denuvo’s Response

The scale of the bypasses has not gone unnoticed. While pirates try to navigate the security issues, Denuvo is working on an update that will counter the new hypervisor ‘cracks’.

Denuvo’s parent company, Irdeto, informs TorrentFreak that they are actively working on a countermeasure to address the Denuvo bypasses.

“We’re already working on updated security versions for games impacted by hypervisor bypasses. For players, performance will not be compromised by these strengthened security measures,” says Daniel Butschek, Irdeto’s head of communications.

Further details on these countermeasures will come out in due course. Some have speculated that to counter hypervisor cracks Denuvo would also has to operate in Ring -1, under the Windows kernel, but that is not the case.

“Addressing hypervisor-based workarounds will not require Denuvo to move into Ring -1 or deeper kernel level, and that is not the direction we’re pursuing,” Butschek says.

Denuvo

denuvo

Since people in the pirate ecosystem already warn about security issues, it is no surprise that Irdeto also highlights these concerns.

“Hypervisor‑based bypasses rely on installing a custom, self-signed hypervisor that operates below the Windows kernel, giving it far broader control than a normal driver,” Butschek notes, warning that this makes systems more vulnerable.

“To run, users must disable major Windows security protections such as Virtualization‑Based Security (VBS), Hypervisor‑Enforced Code Integrity (HVCI) and driver signature enforcement, which are designed to prevent kernel‑level malware, rootkits, and ransomware.”

FitGirl Embraces Hypervisor Bypasses

Initially, popular game repacker FitGirl was also rather cautious due to the widespread security concerns.

“You won’t see any HV-cracks repacks from me until you won’t need to actually disable security features,” FitGirl wrote in an early post, adding that no game is worth the potential irrecoverable damage it can do to one’s computer.

However, as bypass development by KiriGiri and the broader MKDEV team continued, the security situation improved. When the requirement to disable Secure Boot or use the EfiGuard tool was eliminated, FitGirl shifted their position, while recognizing the drawbacks.

FitGirl began publishing hypervisor repacks shortly after, tagging each one visibly with a HYPERVISOR label and committing to replace them with traditional cracks if and when those become available.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, FitGirl further pointed to the ongoing technical improvements, while remaining cautious.

“The team behind those cracks is now working on maturing both the VBS.cmd part and the cracks themselves,” they told us. “So I think that most of the issues coming from Intel or older CPU will be resolved shortly.”

“Caution is still needed with hypervisor bypasses. Mostly for what you download and run. But that is true for any download; it is not hypervisor-specific,” FitGirl adds.

Strict Rules

FitGirl notes that people should never run anything on their computer until they’ve verified that it’s from a trusted source. This raises the question of whether one can trust semi-anonymous pirate sources, but for now no major incidents have been reported linked to hypervisor bypasses.

What stands out is the high level of community rules and moderation. CS.RIN.RU has always been very strict, and with these hypervisor bypasses, forum administrator RessourectoR maintains oversight through detailed release requirements and best practices.

Release requirements

best practices

According to FitGirl, these strict rules are reassuring. However, trust can always be broken in the future, and that’s also a risk here.

“Trust can be broken, yes, but we’re not there yet. And hope we won’t, considering how strict rules for publishing those cracks on CS.RIN.RU now are,” FitGirl tells us.

The Cat-and Mouse Game Continues

While Irdeto has several options to respond, the exact countermeasures remain a question for now. Denuvo could check if third-party hypervisors are running by checking CPUIDs or measuring CPU latency, for example.

FitGirl suggested that Irdeto can also respond by shifting to daily license ticket checks, but that would be a nuisance to legitimate players while it may also be bypassed. Alternatively, the company might ask Microsoft for help by restricting Driver Signature Enforcement (DSE) mode, but that doesn’t seem viable either.

One thing is for certain: Denuvo will try to tackle the problem as best as they can, continuing the seemingly endless cat-and-mouse game. While Irdeto knows that it can’t defeat piracy, it would like to go back to the situation where games remained crack-free for weeks.

For now, however, the hypervisor bypasses have made Day-0 pirate releases a reality. For those who are willing to take the risk.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

03:00 PM

Pluralistic: Market participation is exhausting (30 Mar 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

  • Market participation is exhausting: No one wants to be the sucker at the table.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: EMI DRM v Brazil; "The Information"; Genome patenter v copyright troll (let them fight); Green investing isn't; Trump loves Big Tech; Kleptones' "24 Hours"; Lasermonks; Ransomware hospital; News co-ops; AI "art" sucks; Swisscom wifi is $838/24h; Millennials don't exist; Why Microsoft's chatbot turned Nazi; NYC's best dumpster-dived food; RIP Diana Wynne Jones; What really happened at the student protests in Trafalgar Square; Church-owned insurer has secret pedo priest files; Names that break databases; Reality-based communities; Hugo for websites; Cop cabs; Fake pediatrician group; Bring Your Own Bigwheeel; "How To Talk About Videogames."
  • Upcoming appearances: Montreal, London, NYC, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • 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.


An early 20th C painting advertising a magic show, it features a mustachioed, tuxedoed conjurer beating the Devil at poker with four aces in his hand, as a giggling demon on his shoulder whispers advice in his ear and the Devil looks chagrined. The image has been altered: the Devil now has Trump hair and orange skin. The demon perched on the magician's shoulder has the face of Adam Smith.

Market participation is exhausting (permalink)

We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).

Luckily, I'm married to a woman with incredible spacial sense. My wife Alice can sit at one end of a basketball court and look at the scoreboard at the other end and say, "It's 1" off-center to the right and 1° off true clockwise." She'll be right. She's also a crack shot and an extremely proficient gamer (she was the first woman to play e-sports internationally, on the English Quake team).

I'm good at stuff she's not good at. I don't mind wading through personal admin and bookkeeping processes, while she finds these excruciating (and interestingly, it's reversed when it comes to work-related admin, which I find torturous and which she excels at). I love listening to audiobooks, which she can't focus on at all. She loves instrumental music, which I broadly find tedious; while I find it much easier to work while listening to music with great lyrics.

This is great. As a couple, we make up for one another's deficits and complement one another's strengths. Obviously, this is also true as a species: we all like doing different stuff in different ways, and that's good, because there is a lot of stuff to do, and it's pretty damned heterogenous. A complex, dynamic world demands a complex, dynamic response.

This is a bedrock of cybernetics, the study of systems control. The "law of requisite complexity" states, "in order to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

Cyberneticians and systems designers understand that their job is partly to design a set of controls that are as complex as the system they modulate, and partly to simplify that system to make it possible to control. Think of how you can make a database search run faster by confining it to one field in records from the past year, or how you can hold down the shift key to constrain a rectangular selection tool so it draws perfect squares.

This happens cognitively, too. Pretty much anyone can track their expenses from a work trip, but the company bookkeeper needs to have a certain "head for figures" that lets them do this all day long, for everyone's expenses, so we limit the kinds of bookkeeping we ask normies to do, and reserve the heavy lifting for specialists.

As a freelancer, I hire a bunch of people who have cognitive strengths that I lack. My accountant isn't just a person who knows more about tax law than I do – he's also someone who can manage the reconciliation of all my bookkeeping spreadsheets better than I ever could, and without the psychic trauma I experience when I try to do this on my own.

Likewise, my publisher employs copyeditors and proofreaders who find the typos that my brain just doesn't see, and when they send me back my marked-up manuscripts for review, I ask my mom to give them a pass, because she finds the typos they miss.

Sitting between me and my publishers are my agents (I have several of these, one for English-language literary deals, another for foreign rights, another for media, and yet another for speaking engagements). I love these folks, partly because the better they are at their jobs, the easier it is for me to pay my mortgage, but especially because they really enjoy doing things I hate doing: a) asking for money, and; b) haggling.

For me, haggling is (at best) embarrassing. At worst, it's humiliating. It's always exhausting. But for my agents, it's invigorating. Many's the time I've gotten on a video call with my agents after they've concluded a successful deal and they're glowing. Call it what you will: cognitive diversity, emotional diversity, neurodiversity…my agents and I have it, and it's good for all of us.

And here's the thing that makes these world-class hagglers great: they can switch it off. They're competitive as hell, they love to bargain hard, but they understand that they're playing an iterated game, and if they crush the publishers' representatives they're up against, then they'll ruin my good name.

More: when the bargaining's done and we're having a nice chat about everyday things, or getting together for dinner, they're not on. They're just normal, not wrestling over every detail. Bargaining is what they do, it's not who they are.

That doesn't just make them bearable as human beings, it also makes them better at their jobs. There's an old pal with whom I've done some creative work, and at one point I needed to pay them for their part in a project. They asked me to route the payment through their manager, and this manager assumed I was just another production hiring my buddy, and let loose with his full power at me over this payment, haggling for paperwork that would make Creative Commons releases impossible, as well as other (normal but not appropriate in this case) conditions. I emailed my pal, who emailed their manager to stand down and treat this as a friendly negotiation, whereupon Mr Hyde became Dr Jekyll and we wrapped things up in about ten minutes.

These haggler types do very well in our society, which is organized around the idea of efficient markets, where everyone is always bargaining to the last breath in order to "maximize their utility."

This ideology isn't just an observation ("society is a market"), it's also a demand ("society should be a market"). People who find aggressive haggling invigorating have taken over the operations of our civilization, and they are determined to convert everything to a marketplace, from waiting on hold for the IRS to looking for a parking place:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

The people running this game are so invigorated by haggling that they can't not haggle. They make putting a price on everything into a virtue. They want to be able to sell their kidneys. More importantly, they want to buy your kidneys.

In Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People, there's a memorable incident in which Sheryl Sandberg is shocked to the roots of her hair when she is told that she can't go to Mexico and buy a kidney if her child gets sick. Her child isn't even sick! She's just offended that this hypothetical situation wouldn't be resolved by bargaining:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like "revealed preferences," the idea that if you say you're dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a "revealed preference" for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a "revealed preference" for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Trump is the apotheosis of this. The true "art of the deal" is just cheating. That's why he stiffed his workers, stiffed his suppliers, stiffed his backers and stiffed his base. If you can cheat and get away with it, it's not even cheating: "that makes you smart":

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

"Caveat emptor" makes sense at a yard-sale or an estate auction – but it's no way to operate a government or conduct your daily life. It's exhausting:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

Running the world on "caveat emptor" isn't just a transfer from workers to the wealthy, it's a transfer from people who are exhausted by bargaining to people who are invigorated by it. It's a way of transforming just one of the many differences in how humans think into the single most important success criterion, the major determinant of your life's chances. It's a way for the invigorated to utterly dominate the exhausted. It's the elevation of "stop hitting yourself" into political ideology.

The antidote to this is something Dan Davies calls "The Club Med theory." He argues that while mostly we sneer at inclusive holiday resorts as a way to go on vacation without having to engage with another country's culture and people, that the original value of these resorts (still present today) is the way they let you go on vacation without participating in markets:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-club-med-theory

Club Med was founded by an Olympian named Gérard Blitz whose insight was that "what people seek from a holiday is not luxury or material comfort, but happiness." For Blitz, the value of an inclusive resort wasn't the open bar and the buffet, "it’s the relief from participation in the everyday economy."

As Davies points out, class differences (between guests, at least) are erased at inclusive resorts. The richest person at the resort eats and drinks the same food, goes on the same excursions, and participates in the same activities as the poorest person at the resort (yes, this is less true of today's inclusive resorts, which are full of "up-charges," representing the triumph of people who are invigorated by bargaining over people who are exhausted by it).

For Davies, the beauty of an inclusive resort is that it removes the "cognitive demands" of a market economy, which are inherently stressful: "Every transaction is a decision, and decisions cost energy."

Davies proposes that "this is quite difficult for people to understand if they have an economics degree." Why would the resort restaurants improve their food quality if they're not competing for your business? Why would servers hustle to make you happy if they're not competing for tips?

But this is not what happens. Resort-goers love the bartenders at the swim-up bar, and they are frustrated to the point of fury with the people selling necklaces, sunglasses and massages on the beach. These sellers "live or die by their ability to persuade people to part with money in exchange for goods and services." It's exhausting to be them, and it's exhausting to be approached by them.

Davies says that the best strategy to get someone to part with their money isn't necessarily to provide good service. As he learned in his stockbroker days, you can also "pester them mercilessly until they pay you to go away." In an unregulated market, you don't get a single vendor who comes around and offers you sunglasses once a day. The equilibrium of that market is to be woken from your nap or interrupted from your book every five minutes by someone who's hustling to make the rent. The economy doesn't "price in the externality" of your plummeting satisfaction with your holiday.

Davies isn't the first person to observe this. As he points out, in 1963, Galbraith wrote:

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt.

I read Davies's short post last week and it stuck with me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it – and the more I thought that there was something missing from it: the idea that there are some people who hate a life without bargaining. These people are invigorated by bargaining and exhausted by "total physical and mental inertia." They need to be hustling.

The people who turn up their noses at an inclusive resort aren't just people who want to have the "authentic experience" of a distant land – some of them are people who want to spend all day hustling and being hustled. People who need that energy.

Those people have a place in the world. I don't want those people trying to sell me a timeshare or trying to rope me into their MLM, but I'd love to have them negotiating on behalf of my union:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

But even then, I'd want them to be like my agents, capable of stepping back from constant bargaining and to cease their remorseless seeking of advantage. I wouldn't want them to be Sandbergian would-be buyers of kidneys, full of self-serving tales of revealed preferences, caveat emptor and "that makes me smart."

As with anything, the dose makes the poison. I know lots of hustlers who are fun as hell to hang around, whom I'd trust with my life or at least my password. A lot of libertarians fit this mold: people who are truly committed to voluntarism and intrinsic generosity.

But libertarianism, like any movement, is a coalition, and within that coalition is a large group of people – people who are invigorated by bargaining – who are committed to dominating others by exhausting them. For them, bargaining isn't a cognitive demand, it's a cognitive invigorator. To the extent that they understand this, they think it's just a sign that they are born to rule. Caveat emptor. Revealed preferences. That makes me smart.

What's more, for people on the losing side of this trade, losing the bargain means being poorer, and being poorer means more cognitive demands – rationing out your pennies and eeling through the impossibly narrow gaps between payday and the day the bills are due. This produces a winner-take-all dynamic in which the losers of the bargaining game have less energy and wherewithal to bargain the next time around.

This is beautifully unpacked in (what else) a science fiction novel, Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, a young adult novel about the teen daughter of a libertarian cult leader who is growing up on a seastead:

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

Kritzer's novel beautifully plays out the "stop hitting yourself" justifications that eventually allow her libertarians to enslave others – after all, in a truly voluntaristic society, why wouldn't you have the freedom to sell yourself into slavery? And if you claim later that you're unhappy with this arrangement, tough shit – you've got a "revealed preference" for being a slave.

Caveat emptor. If you're the kind of person who gets charged up by bargaining, then you were born to rule.

If bargaining means cheating, well, "that makes you smart."

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 DIY circumcision revision (CW gross) https://web.archive.org/web/20010618005738/https://www.subgenius.com/subg-digest/v5/0206.html

#25yrsago Gen X guide to Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20010302143848/http://www.omnigroup.com/~cirocco/dizney/index.html

#25yrsago Hugo for best website https://web.archive.org/web/20010404222727/http://www.conjose.org/wsfs/wsfs_web.html

#20yrsago America’s worst WiFi hotels https://web.archive.org/web/20060404214142/http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2006/3/27/21911/4235/hotels/Worst_WiFi_Hotels_2006

#20yrsago Help Peter Beagle sue the film-house that made “The Last Unicorn” https://web.archive.org/web/20060116061435/http://www.conlanpress.com/youcanhelp/

#20yrsago EMI releases Brazilian DRM CDs that totally hose their customers https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/24/emi-releases-brazilian-drm-cds-that-totally-hose-their-customers/

#20yrsago Video reveals Belarus electoral fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20060506233026/http://www.media-ocean.de/2006/03/26/does-youtube-video-proove-election-fraud-in-belarus/

#20yrsago Kleptones new mashup double-CD free to download: “24 Hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20060810172451/http://www.kleptones.com/pages/downloads_24h.html

#20yrsago Steve Jobs, 2002: “You need the right to manage music on all devices” https://web.archive.org/web/20060509144710/http://www.songbirdnest.com/nivi/blog/jobs_france

#20yrsago Monks in Wisconsin refill printer cartridges https://web.archive.org/web/20060324043723/http://lasermonks.com/

#20yrsago DRM is Killing Music https://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=2686

#20yrsago Swisscom WiFi at London conference centre costs $838.73/24h https://web.archive.org/web/20060329090917/https://benhammersley.com/FCE47259-78BA-4B5E-ABF2-F39B93520C85/Blog/C9043A4D-F791-4B7F-A8A7-3484779B4748.html

#20yrsago Most expensive Google ad keywords listed https://web.archive.org/web/20060325094245/http://www.cwire.org/2006/03/23/updated-highest-paying-adsense-keywords/

#20yrsago LA Times slams Marvel for trying to steal “superhero” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-mar-26-ed-superhero26-story.html

#15yrsago Microsoft switches off privacy for Hotmail users in war-torn and repressive states https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/microsoft-shuts-https-hotmail-over-dozen-countries

#15yrsago Wisconsin GOP uses sunshine laws to harass prof who speculated about links with pressure group https://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/

#15yrsago Koch-pranking Beast editor runs for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110326042435/http://www.murphycanhascongress.com/

#15yrsago Did Limewire shutdown really cause P2P music infringement to drop 30%? https://web.archive.org/web/20110428175101/http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/03/24/cnet_and_others_get_it_wrong_miss_the_actual_story.php

#15yrsago Man who wants to patent genome gets legal threat for embedding James Joyce quote in artificial lifeform https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/03/14/craig-venters-genetic-typo/

#15yrsago James Gleick’s tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history of information theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/24/james-gleicks-tour-de-force-the-information-a-natural-history-of-information-theory/

#15yrsago NYT paywall sub is $100 more expensive than WSJ, Economist and Daily combined https://theunderstatement.com/post/4019228737/digital-subscription-prices-visualized-aka-the

#15yrsago RIP, Diana Wynne Jones https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/27/diana-wynne-jones-obituary

#15yrsago Front-line report from Trafalgar Square paints a radically different picture https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/trafalgar-square-police-young

#15yrsago Deathless: Cat Valente’s beautiful fantasy of Stalinist Russia and the Siege of Leningrad https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/28/deathless-cat-valentes-beautiful-fantasy-of-stalinist-russia-and-the-siege-of-leningrad/

#10yrsago Cop Cabs: The NYPD has at least three fake taxis on NYC’s streets https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/mar/28/nypd-taxicabs/

#10yrsago Peer-reviewed online expert system will help you if you’ve been poisoned https://www.webpoisoncontrol.org/

#10yrsago The “American College of Pediatricians” is a hate group with fewer than 200 members https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/28/speaking-of-bad-science-never-trust-the-american-college-of-pediatricians

#10yrsago Ransomware gets a lot faster by encrypting the master file table instead of the filesystem https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/petya-ransomware-skips-the-files-and-encrypts-your-hard-drive-instead/

#10yrsago Security-conscious darkweb crime marketplaces institute world-leading authentication practices https://web.archive.org/web/20160331091155/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/some-dark-web-markets-have-better-user-security-than-gmail-instagram

#10yrsago Saudi embassy hired mafiosi to smuggle Turkish PM Erdoğan’s son out of Italy ahead of money laundering charges https://web.archive.org/web/20160311095055/https://awdnews.com/top-news/rome’s-police-spokesman-saudi-embassy-helped-erdoğan’s-son-to-escape-the-police-custody-using-a-forged-saudi-passport-and-disguised-as-an-arab-diplomat

#10yrsago Photos from Bring Your Own Bigwheel 16 https://www.jwz.org/photos/2016-03-27-bigwheel/

#10yrsago How to Talk About Videogames: a book that is serious (but never dull) about games https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/28/how-to-talk-about-videogames-a-book-that-is-serious-but-never-dull-about-games/

#10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

#10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

#10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

#10yrsago Ransomware hackers steal a hospital. Again. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/03/hospital-declares-internet-state-of-emergency-after-ransomware-infection/

#10yrsago STUCK: Public transit’s moment arrives just as public spending disappears https://web.archive.org/web/20160327040633/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-immobile-masses-why-traffic-is-awful-and-public-transit-is-worse

#10yrsago East Harlem’s secret museum of gorgeous junk rescued from NYC’s trash https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fascinating-photos-from-the-secret-trash-collection-in-a-new-york-sanitation-garage

#10yrsago Heatmaps of the human body in varying emotional states https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321664111

#10yrsago Man exonerated after video shows unprovoked police beating, cops insist all is well https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/video-clears-texas-man-of-assaulting-cop-did-police-commit-perjury/

#10yrsago What you think about Millennials says a lot about you, nothing about them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

#10yrsago Jerks were able to turn Microsoft’s chatbot into a Nazi because it was a really crappy bot https://web.archive.org/web/20160325221619/http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot

#10yrsago When the antibiotics run out, maybe we can use GMO maggots to stave off infection https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12896-016-0263-z

#10yrsago King Arthur’s grave was a hoax invented by cash-strapped 12th C monks https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/medieval-monks-used-king-arthurs-grave-as-an-attraction-to-raise-money/

#10yrsago Eating from the trash of New York’s finest grocers and restaurants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJmCUSb-ZVo

#10yrsago Catholic Church-owned insurer has secret files on paedophile priests https://www.theage.com.au/national/secret-archive-of-paedophile-crime-kept-by-catholic-churchs-insurers-20160317-gnlc6k.html

#10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

#10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

#10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

#5yrsago Dirty NYPD cops can't lose https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

#5yrsago Dreaming and overfitting https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#dreamtime

#5yrsago Good news about news co-ops https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#good-news

#5yrsago Zuckerpunch https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#played-for-zuckers

#5yrsago Green investing is a fraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/24/greenwashing/#bargaining

#

1yrago Trump loves Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america

#1yrago Why I don't like AI art https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

#1yrago The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/26/not-me-us/#the-people-no

#1yrago Reality-Based Communities https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/27/use-your-mentality/#face-up-to-reality

#1yrago Big Tech and "captive audience venues" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 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. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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02:00 PM

It Appears RFK Jr. Is Having Trouble Finding Anyone To Take The CDC Director Job [Techdirt]

All the way back in August of 2025, RFK Jr. made the extraordinary decision to fire his own CDC Director, Susan Monarez, after only a few weeks on the job. Kennedy claimed at the time that he fired Monarez because she told him affirmatively that she wasn’t trustworthy. That was obviously laughable and Monarez herself disputed that, saying she was instead fired for not agreeing to rubber stamp everything that came out of Kennedy’s remade version of ACIP and for daring to talk to members of Congress about the goings on at CDC. One of those stories is much more believable than the other.

Regardless, she was fired and replaced as Director of CDC by… nobody. Nobody Senate-confirmed into a permanent role, at least. And it turns out there is a time limit for how long the role could remain vacant, which Kennedy and the Trump administration have now blown past.

According to federal law, there’s a 210-day limit on a Senate-confirmed position being filled by someone in an acting capacity. The clock started when anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Susan Monarez from her Senate-confirmed role as CDC director in late August—allegedly after she refused to rubber-stamp changes to CDC vaccine recommendations. Until yesterday, Jay Bhattacharya, who heads the National Institutes of Health, had stepped in to also be the acting director of the CDC. But he can no longer hold the position officially.

It’s not that Kennedy doesn’t want a CDC Director. It just appears he’s having trouble finding one that wants to take the job and is willing to be his sycophant. I’ll remind you all that the country currently has a measles outbreak problem on its hands and having the role of CDC Director vacant at such a time is mountains of stupid. The CDC itself isn’t publicly commenting on why the role has been so difficult to fill, but it’s fairly obvious to this writer.

Who could possibly see all of the chaos at CDC, the strong-arming of staff there to bend to Kennedy’s wishes, the quick exits and resignations of top talent, and say, “Sure, sign me up to manage that.”?

So far, Kennedy seems to be struggling with the search. According to reporting from The Washington Post, sources close to the matter said the goal was to name a nominee before the deadline Wednesday, but Kennedy was unable to do so. Sources said around half a dozen people were being seriously considered for the role.

A spokesperson said only that Kennedy and Chris Klomp, the operational leader of HHS and a close advisor to Kennedy, “are working with the White House on the CDC director search by evaluating candidates that can further the Trump administration’s objective of restoring the CDC to its original mission of fighting infectious disease.”

Good luck and Godspeed. The last nomination of Kennedy’s hasn’t been going all that well, with his Surgeon General pick languishing in limbo over her lack of qualifications for the position combined with a disastrous performance in confirmation hearings.

One of the chief duties of a Secretary-level administrator in government is to fill lower roles with good people. If Kennedy can’t even do that, then what’s the point of keeping him in place?

08:00 AM

Pete Hegseth’s War On Truth [Techdirt]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Martha Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship to become the only woman journalist to land on Normandy Beach on D-Day. She carried stretchers before writing her harrowing account of the invasion.

The New Yorker’s famously epicurean writer A.J. Liebling subsisted on military rations and came under fire during World War II to describe what it was like for the soldiers and sailors at war.

Syndicated columnist Ernie Pyle died, in a helmet and Army fatigues, among some of the troops whose names and hometowns he carefully included in his dispatches. “At this spot, the 77th Infantry lost a buddy,” read the makeshift sign posted at the place where a Japanese machine gun bullet felled him.

Those reporters told stories of war in all its gore and its glory, its exhilaration and its ennui. Others have laid bare the anxiety and doubts.

Veteran Vietnam correspondent Neil Sheehan broke the story of the Pentagon Papers, which showed how government officials deceived the public about the Vietnam war. Sheehan won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “A Bright Shining Lie,” which chronicled the war’s impact on idealists who once believed in it, through the story of his relationship with an inside source.

Well before bombs started dropping on Iran and President Donald Trump began to tease the notion of a ground invasion, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, began putting obstacles in the way of the reporters with the most experience covering the nation’s military. While Hegseth’s moves haven’t stopped the reporters from doing their jobs, it has made it harder for them to keep the public informed.

As someone who worked as a Washington correspondent for decades, I worry that these obstacles could limit the number of reporters who have the experience with – and trust of – key sources to do the kind of in-depth, nuanced journalism that a war, with its price in lives and resources, deserves.

Corralling the watchdogs

Generally, war correspondents need the cooperation of the military they are covering to get to the front. For the U.S. press, that requires relationships and credibility at the Pentagon.

Early in 2025, Hegseth ordered major news organizations to give up their desks in the Pentagon press room to MAGA favorites. NPR’s desk went to Breitbart News. Roaming the hallways, where reporters sometimes found sources who would deviate from the company line, became verboten.

Eventually, the area in the Pentagon where reporters were allowed was circumscribed to a single corridor outside the press room – even though the public affairs officers who worked most closely with reporters were in an office on the other side of the 6½-million-square-foot building.

Then Hegseth conditioned the issuance of press credentials on reporters, effectively giving military brass the right to censor or sanitize their reports.

As a result, almost the entire Pentagon press corps, which included outlets ranging from The Associated Press to The New York Times to Fox News and USNI News, which covers the Navy, moved out of the building in October 2025. Some have been invited back for the press briefings Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have begun to give on progress of the battle in Iran.

But after the first of these briefings, the Pentagon abruptly banned photographers from attending, reportedly because Hegseth’s staff found some of their images of him to be unflattering.

Secretary on defense

Gone are the off-camera “background” briefings where Department of Defense brass could give trusted reporters greater context and nuance for battlefield decisions. Gone are the impromptu hallway meetings where reporters have, with luck or persistence, picked up information that deviates from an administration’s agreed-upon script.

Also not in evidence, at least not so far: the deployment of the kind of journalistic embed program that the Pentagon used during the Iraq war to give the American people an up-close look at troops in the conflict zone.

How might that affect what you, the public, gets to know? It was a combination of an anonymous tip and insider access that led the legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the devastating story of My Lai, the American soldiers’ massacre of civilians during the Vietnam War.

At the made-for-TV briefings he does hold, Hegseth devotes most of the session to questions from outlets such as the Epoch Times, The Daily Caller and LindellTV – owned by Mike Lindell, the head of the well-known pillow company.

At one recent briefing, one of the favored new cadre tossed Hegseth a shameless softball. Referring to American troops in the Middle East, the questioner asked: “What is your prayer for them?”

Yet as hostilities drag on, even some among Hegseth’s chosen press corps have begun to ask irksome questions about the war. The normally Trump-friendly Daily Caller ran a less-than-flattering piece about the president berating a reporter for asking about troop deployments.

On March 4, 2026, Hegseth accused journalists of focusing on war casualties to make “the president look bad.” On March 13, Hegseth castigated as “more fake news” CNN’s report that the Trump administration had underestimated the impact of the war on shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Hegseth concluded, adding fuel to the speculation that a Trump supporter who won a bidding war for CNN’s corporate parent is going to turn the network into a more administration-friendly outlet.

Soon after, Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr threatened network broadcast licenses over coverage critical of the administration’s conduct of the war. Echoing Carr’s threats the next day: the president himself.

‘Be a Marine’

The Trump administration is not alone in its disdain for a free press: Israel has long been notorious for restricting press access from areas where it is conducting military operations.

Leaders of the theocratic Iranian regime are even worse; the country is cited by press freedom advocate Reporters Without Borders as “one of the world’s most repressive countries in terms of press freedom.”

But the United States has historically distinguished itself by making freedom its calling card, even – or perhaps especially – in wartime.

“The news may be good, or bad. We shall tell you the truth,” Voice of America, a U.S. government-launched radio network, promised – in German – in its very first broadcast to Nazi Germany in 1942.

Now, however, the Trump administration, is busy trying to undermine the editorial independence of Voice of America, which broadcasts news to countries that don’t have a free press.

Pentagon reporters are continuing to find ways to get around the propaganda. NPR’s Tom Bowman told me that he takes inspiration from a pep talk he overheard a military source deliver to another reporter crestfallen over the lack of access.

“Quit whining and be a Marine,” the official said. “Go over, under or around the obstacle. Find a way to do it.”

Most reporters and their organizations are doing just that, finding sources outside the administration, like the ones in Congress who told The Hill how much money the war is costing taxpayers per day. And they’re continuing to get information from sources on the inside, like the ones who told The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s military advisers warned him that Iran might block the Gulf of Hormuz, but that he opted for war anyway.

So far, neither Hegseth’s obstacle course nor threats from the White House and the FCC have stopped the press from reporting stories or asking questions that the administration would rather not see or hear.

But restrictions on press freedom have a corrosive effect. We already have seen how Trump, using lawsuits and licensing threats, has used his power to make corporate media owners think twice about pursuing news he doesn’t like.

Seasoned Pentagon reporters will still find ways to get to sources they already have. But Hegseth’s tactic of blocking press access to the military keeps reporters from developing new sources and keeps new reporters from building the relationships they need to become seasoned Pentagon reporters.

Americans have long been able to understand the triumphs and tribulations of American troops at war, and to make intelligent decisions about whether they approve of a war’s cost, because a free press has been able to tell the story – good or bad. That tradition is now at risk.

Kathy Kiely is Professor and Lee Hills Chair of Free Press Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia

06:00 AM

Trump’s DOJ Hands $1.2 Million Payout To His Former National Security Advisor, Mike Flynn [Techdirt]

As if we needed any more evidence showing just how deep and thoroughly corrupted the Trump administration is. It’s an endless cycle of self-serving actions, pushed forward by bigots, grifters, and loyalists who sold off what was left of their souls and spines when Trump took office.

It’s an endless cycle of perverse self-involvement performed by people who openly loath America and Americans, but tout themselves as the only real patriots left. It’s an ouroboros, except the snake is sucking itself off, rather than symbolizing the live/die/repeat process that is supposed to iterate its way towards enlightenment.

I mean, look at this bullshit:

The Justice Department has reached an agreement with President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn to pay him roughly $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the former general claiming he was politically targeted for prosecution during Trump’s first administration, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News. 

Pay special attention to the phrase “reached an agreement.” That shouldn’t be there, much like everything else surrounding that phrase. Here’s Julian Sanchez, breaking down the perversity of this “agreement” succinctly:

Just to be very clear: The Trump DOJ is stealing $1.2 million of your money to gift one of Trump’s cronies, who pled guilty to the crimes he was charged with, and whose suit against the government had already been tossed by a judge.

— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T22:03:23.675Z

Here’s what Sanchez said, for those of you who can’t see the embed or access the Bluesky post:

Just to be very clear: The Trump DOJ is stealing $1.2 million of your money to gift one of Trump’s cronies, who pled guilty to the crimes he was charged with, and whose suit against the government had already been tossed by a judge.

It’s not just the lifting of $1.2 million from the public’s wallet. It’s not just Trump deciding to reward a loyalist. It’s also that there should be no settlement at all. You don’t “settle” lawsuits that are no longer viable.

Flynn’s malicious prosecution lawsuit was tossed by a judge in 2024 after Biden’s DOJ responded to it. And it’s pretty difficult to both plead guilty to charges and claim the prosecution was malicious. It would be one thing if a jury rung Flynn up while his defense team maintained his innocence. But that’s not what happened here.

And that’s not the only thing that doesn’t add up… at least to anything else but patented Trump administration corruption.

Flynn previously pleaded guilty to charges brought by former special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to FBI agents during a January 2017 interview in the White House about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. 

The Trump Justice Department under former Attorney General William Barr then moved to drop the case in 2020… 

This prosecution was already short-circuited by Bill Barr while Trump was still in office the first time. And then Trump pardoned Flynn on his way out the door following an election loss both Trump and Flynn continue to claim wasn’t a loss.

But that’s apparently not enough for Flynn. He also wanted up to $50 million for allegedly being maliciously prosecuted. He’s only getting a fraction of that but it’s far more than he deserves. Unless this is just Trump buying a bit more loyalty from a guy who’s just as determined to prove any election that doesn’t favor Trump or MAGA legislators is “stolen.”

According to information gathered by the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, Flynn was among a number of advisers who urged Trump to seize voting machines after the 2020 election and said in media appearances that Trump should use the military to “basically rerun” elections in states that he had lost. 

Here’s what Flynn is doing now:

According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. 

So, this is all very gross and ugly and being done right out there in the open by people who don’t care how this looks. When most politicians would at least balk at the appearance of impropriety, this administration absolutely revels in it. Yeah, $1.2 million isn’t even a rounding error in this deficit, but it still matters. The administration is repeating itself: if you lie, cheat, steal, or actually fucking raid the US Capitol building for Trump, you’re gonna be just fine.

04:00 AM

FBI Director Kash Patel’s Personal Email Account Apparently Breached By Iranian Hackers [Techdirt]

Call me a sicko, but I’m almost always happy when a top-level government official’s communications get hacked. That’s because — in almost every case — either the official seems to be a bit shady, or holds a high-level position in an agency involved in some shady stuff. I mean, it’s not like hackers are targeting the head of HUD or the transportation secretary. They’re targeting people like Kash Patel, who’s currently mismanaging the FBI.

Sure, the reason these people are targeted is because their information is more useful to hackers and foreign adversaries. But there are plenty of hackers not tied to foreign entities that go after the same people with the goal of forcing the sort of transparency and accountability these people and the agencies they lead persistently resist.

(And I have no love for hackers targeting entire government agencies just to harvest sensitive info to engage in identity fraud or hold the data for ransom. Government agencies serve the public. Most top-level government officials — especially in this administration — are only serving themselves.)

So, it gives me no pleasure a certain amount of pleasure to report that Kash Patel has been hacked. Reuters was the first to report on the breach:

Iran-linked hackers have broken into ​FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet, the hackers and the ‌bureau said on Friday.

On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel “will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims.” The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle ​of rum.

A picture is worth a thousand words. And I don’t mean to malign the messenger, but perhaps some better words might have been chosen to describe the photos seen by Reuters reporters. “Selfie with a bottle of rum” maybe doesn’t quite capture the entire essence of this photo, but it’s far less unwieldy than “making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.”

That bit of mild criticism aside, the report is a bit of a blockbuster. First, the FBI has already confirmed this hack by Handala, which seems counter to its usual insistence on pretending things didn’t happen and/or insulting the press for reporting on it.

Second, while it probably contains some juicy stuff from Patel’s Gmail account, it doesn’t contain the stuff we really want to see: his communications since being elevated to FBI director.

Alongside the photographs of Patel, the hackers published a sample of more than 300 emails, which appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.

The FBI’s statement is correct in the fact that this breach seems to contain nothing more than “historical” communications. But the second part of the statement — that this “involves no government information” — cannot possibly be true.

This is from TechCrunch’s report on breach, following the journalists’ attempts to verify the contents of communications shared by Handala:

We used a tool to verify several emails in the leaked cache of files that were sent by Patel from his Gmail account. These emails contained cryptographic signatures that matched the messages, which strongly suggests that the emails we checked are authentic. In some cases, Patel appears to have sent emails from his former Justice Department email address in 2014 to his Gmail account. TechCrunch found that the emails sent from Patel’s DOJ account also appeared to be authentic.

Sure looks like “government information” to me. And it’s especially notable because Patel decided OpSec is for other people by routing DOJ email to his personal inbox. If he had just done the sort of stuff he would logically be expected to do as (in running order) a federal prosecutor and the goddamn deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, none of that would have ended up exposed by the Handala hack.

All of this makes it very difficult to believe the FBI’s assertion. Either it has already managed to look through everything accessed by the hackers (maybe?) or it’s just taking it’s boss’s word for it (probably). Either way, not a great look. But if we’ve learned anything from the multiple OpSec failures that have defined Trump’s second term, nothing will happen to Patel for violating internal rules governing official US email account security. No one will learn anything from this directly. But if there’s anything Iran can use against us slid between the cigar-sniffing and rum selfies, we — as a nation — might learn a few things indirectly.

Daily Deal: StackSkills Premium Annual Pass [Techdirt]

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The White House App’s Propaganda Is The Least Alarming Thing About It [Techdirt]

Call me crazy, but I don’t think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person’s GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are.

The White House released a new app last week for iOS and Android, promising “unparalleled access to the Trump Administration.” A security researcher, who goes by Thereallo, pulled the APKs and decompiled them — extracting the actual compiled code and examining what’s really going on under the hood. The propaganda stuff — cherry-picked news, a one-tap button to report your neighbors to ICE, a text that auto-populates “Greatest President Ever!” — which Engadget covered, is embarrassing enough. The code underneath is something else entirely.

Let’s start with the most alarming behavior. Every time you open a link in the app’s built-in browser, the app silently injects JavaScript and CSS into the page. Here’s what it does:

It hides:

  • Cookie banners
  • GDPR consent dialogs
  • OneTrust popups
  • Privacy banners
  • Login walls
  • Signup walls
  • Upsell prompts
  • Paywall elements
  • CMP (Consent Management Platform) boxes

It forces body { overflow: auto !important } to re-enable scrolling on pages where consent dialogs lock the scroll. Then it sets up a MutationObserver to continuously nuke any consent elements that get dynamically added.

An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.

Yiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.

And, yes, I can already hear a certain subset of readers thinking: “Sounds great, actually. Cookie banners are annoying.” And sure, there are good reasons why millions of people use browser extensions like uBlock Origin to do exactly this kind of thing. In fact, if you don’t use tools like that, you probably should. Those consent dialogs are frequently implemented as obnoxious dark patterns, and stripping them out is a perfectly reasonable personal choice.

But the key word there is choice. When you install an ad blocker or a consent-banner nuker, you’re making an informed decision about your own browsing experience. When the White House app does it silently, on every page load, without telling you — that’s the government making that decision for you in a deceptive and technically concerning way. And those consent dialogs exist in the first place because of legal requirements, in many cases requirements that governments themselves have enacted and enforce. There’s something almost comically stupid about the executive branch of the United States shipping code that silently destroys the legal compliance infrastructure of every website you visit through its app.

Then there’s the location tracking. The researcher found that OneSignal’s full GPS tracking pipeline is compiled into the app:

Latitude, longitude, accuracy, timestamp, whether the app was in the foreground or background, and whether it was fine (GPS) or coarse (network). All of it gets written into OneSignal’s PropertiesModel, which syncs to their backend.

The White House app. Tracking your location. Synced to a commercial third-party server. For press releases.

Oh and:

There’s also a background service that keeps capturing location even when the app isn’t active.

To be clear — and the researcher is careful to be precise about this — there are several gates before this tracking activates. The user has to grant location permissions, and a flag called _isShared has to be set to true in the code. Whether the JavaScript bundle currently flips that flag is something that can’t be determined from the decompiled native code alone. What can be determined is that, as the researcher puts it:

the entire pipeline including permission strings, interval constants, fused location requests, capture logic, background scheduling, and the sync to OneSignal’s API, all of them are fully compiled in and one setLocationShared(true) call away from activating. The withNoLocation Expo plugin clearly did not strip any of this.

So at best, the people who built this app tried to disable location tracking and failed. At worst, they have it set up to actually use. The plumbing is all there, fully functional, waiting to be turned on. And this is detailed, accurate GPS data, collected every four and a half minutes when you’re using the app and every nine and a half minutes when you’re not, synced to OneSignal’s commercial servers. For a government app. That’s supposed to show you press releases.

While it’s true that the continued lack of a federal privacy law probably means this is all technically legal, it’s still a wild thing for an app from the federal government to do.

And it gets better. Or worse, depending on your perspective. The app embeds YouTube videos by loading player HTML from… a random person’s GitHub Pages account:

The app embeds YouTube videos using the react-native-youtube-iframe library. This library loads its player HTML from:

https://lonelycpp.github.io/react-native-youtube-iframe/iframe_v2.html

That’s a personal GitHub Pages site. If the lonelycpp GitHub account gets compromised, whoever controls it can serve arbitrary HTML and JavaScript to every user of this app, executing inside the WebView context.

This is a government app loading code from a random person’s GitHub Pages.

Cool, cool. Totally normal dependency for critical government infrastructure.

It also loads JavaScript from Elfsight, a commercial SaaS widget company, with no sandboxing. It sends email addresses to Mailchimp. It hosts images on Uploadcare. It has a hardcoded Truth Social embed pulling from static CDN URLs. None of this is government-controlled infrastructure. The list goes on and on and on.

There’s way more in the full breakdown by Thereallo — this is just the highlights. The app is a toxic waste dump of code you should not trust.

Each of these findings individually might have a charitable explanation. Libraries ship with unused code all the time. Lots of apps use third-party services. Dev artifacts occasionally slip through. But stack them all together — the silent consent stripping, the fully compiled location tracking pipeline, the random GitHub dependency, the commercial third-party data flows, the dev artifacts in production, the zero certificate pinning — and the picture is software built by people who either don’t know or don’t care about the standards government software is supposed to meet.

Which brings us to the part that makes all of this even more inexcusable. The United States government used to have people whose entire job was to prevent exactly this kind of thing.

The U.S. Digital Service was created after the Healthcare.gov disaster during the Obama administration, specifically to bring real software engineering talent into the federal government. For over a decade, across three administrations — including Trump’s first term — USDS and its sibling organization 18F recruited experienced engineers, designers, and product managers from the private sector to build government technology that actually worked. These were people who would have caught a full GPS tracking pipeline sitting one function call from activation in what is supposed to be a press release reader, and who would never have loaded executable code from a random person’s GitHub account.

DOGE fired them. Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” gutted USDS and 18F — the organizations that were actually doing what DOGE claimed to be doing — and replaced their expertise with… whatever this is. An app built by an outfit called “forty-five-press” according to the Expo config, running on WordPress, with “Greatest President Ever!” hardcoded in the source, loading code from some random person’s GitHub Pages, and shipping the developer’s home IP address to the public.

This is what you get when you fire the people who know what they’re doing and replace them with loyalists: a government app that strips privacy consent dialogs, has a GPS tracking pipeline ready to flip on, depends on infrastructure the government doesn’t control, and ships with the digital equivalent of leaving your house keys taped to the front door. But hey, at least it makes it easy to report your neighbors to ICE.

02:00 AM

Redundancy and resilience [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder.

Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises.

If quality is a problem, look at the system, not the people.

      

A Perfect Texas Storm [The Status Kuo]

Three political winds are a-blowin’ in the Lone Star State. Any one of them alone might knock the election needle to the Democrats’ side. But all three together? It’s now quite a bit more likely that 2026 will be the year a Democrat finally wins state-wide in Texas.

Now, a caveat: We’ve gotten our hopes up before, only to be let down hard. I know from personal experience how deeply entrenched the GOP is in Texas. Team Takei once raised big bucks to try to flip the state blue in 2020, all to no avail.

And to our collective heartbreak and horror, the state has only trended redder, as Latinos drifted away from, and not toward, the Democratic Party.

So what is it about this year that gives me hope that this time around will be different? A series of self-owns by the GOP and Trump has created quite the potent brew and a unique opportunity for an economic populist like Talarico.

Today, let’s track these three political storms and how they might come together in November.

Subscribe now

Please let it be THAT guy

With no Republican candidate for U.S. Senate receiving a majority in Texas’s March primary, the top two voter-getters, Cornyn and Paxton, are now in a fierce, damaging and costly runoff battle for the GOP nomination. To the dismay of Senate Republicans, incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is trailing enfant terrible, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, in the polls.

A runoff election is set for May 26, one day after Memorial Day weekend.

While the MAGA base cheers the fact that Paxton is now in the lead, since many consider Cornyn a RINO for bucking Trump on a few notable occasions, Paxton is simply too far to the right for many Texas voters. This from the state that gave us Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott.

Indeed, Paxton is so extreme that even his own party tried to impeach him and remove him from office. He boasts a list of scandals, investigations and criminal indictments that rivals Trump himself, which may explain his popularity among MAGA stalwarts. What could be more anti-establishment, after all, than a multiply-indicted, corrupt serial philanderer?

Cornyn and his GOP establishment supporters have spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat Paxton by running ads about how deplorable Paxton is. Here’s a taste:

This has given Democrat James Talarico room to consolidate his support, while the two Republicans tear each other apart.

Trump said he’d endorse but hasn’t

Donald Trump’s endorsement was supposed to settle the question early and in Cornyn’s favor, but it hasn’t come.

After the primary, where no Republican won an outright majority, Trump hinted that he’d soon back one candidate and demand the other drop out. That endorsement, which was pushed on Trump by GOP leaders, was supposed to go to Cornyn.

But the MAGA faithful pushed hard for Paxton, and then Paxton pulled an impressive political maneuver: He declared he would drop out of the race if the Senate would pass the SAVE Act, which is Trump’s highest political priority. This put Cornyn in a box and, in a sad “pick me” moment, he came out with a statement in support of eliminating the Senate filibuster to pass it.

Paxton had proven his MAGA bona fides once again to Trump. And by this point, Trump started to believe Talarico was so “liberal” that either candidate could beat him. So Trump declined to weigh in early on the Texas Senate runoff and ultimately failed to issue an endorsement before the deadline to drop out.

Early polling had shown Talarico would handily beat Paxton but trailed Cornyn. Now polling shows that Talarico would beat both candidates by roughly the same 1-2 point margin.

Independent voters will have an outsized say in this election, meaning their opinion of the candidates’ characters will play a big factor. On this front, Talarico maintains an advantage. As Max Burns noted recently in an OpEd for The Hill,

Talarico boasts a favorability of plus-6, compared to minus-24 for Paxton and minus-28 for Cornyn. Historically, voters are far less likely to turn out on Election Day for candidates they dislike. Call it the nasty guy tax.

With anti-Trump midterm winds at the Democrats’ back, the two GOP candidates attacking each other, Trump sitting out the race so far and a yawning gap in favorability numbers, Talarico is well-positioned for the general election in November.

Adios, GOP

Support for the GOP among Latinos is collapsing across the country. But it’s particularly visible in places like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas as the economy worsens, inflation spikes and brutal ICE enforcement actions continue against immigrant communities.

That erosion of support has been rapid. In fact, it has come on so suddenly and strongly that it has erased all the gains Republicans made since 2020 with Hispanic voters in Texas.

A special election held in January for Texas state House District 9, which encompasses Fort Worth, portended problems for the GOP with Latino voters. Trump had won that district by a whopping 17 points in 2024, thanks in large measure to Latino voters who swung his way. But in the January special election, his endorsed GOP candidate fell easily to the Democrat, Taylor Rehmet, who flipped the district by 14 points—a nearly 31-point swing toward the Democrats.

A closer analysis showed that Rehmet captured a stunning 79 percent of the Hispanic vote in District 9, a huge shift from Harris’s 53 percent in 2024. This overperformance shows up clearly in the district maps, per The Texas Tribune.

More recent election numbers in the state should also have Republicans sweating. In the March primary, most of the energy among Latino voters came from their participation in the Democratic rather than the Republican primary. As Multistate.us noted,

The March 2026 Texas primary saw record turnout exceeding 4.4 million voters, with Latino voter participation up 37% in majority-Latino regions and approximately three quarters voting in the Democratic primary.

If Latino voters are not only motivated but switching back to the Dems in large numbers, that represents the lift that could put Talarico over either of the two Republicans in the race.

Granted, there’s a political eternity between now and November. But many of the things currently driving key voting blocs away from the Republicans—the weakness in jobs, the rising costs of nearly everything, and the White House’s continued brutal mass deportation campaign—are only likely to worsen over the next seven months.

And that’s very bad news for the GOP and its electoral hopes, even in former red strongholds like Texas.

Monday 2026-03-30

10:00 PM

Dems Urge Probe Of Saudi, Chinese Money Backing The Ellisons’ Warner Bros Acquisition [Techdirt]

Republicans spent three years suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok, but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $25 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. They’re also suddenly quiet about Larry buying up huge sections of the media environment (TikTok, CNN, CBS, HBO, Warner, Paramount), despite previously pretending to care about media consolidation.

There’s an opportunity for Democrats to highlight the hypocrisy here, provided they’re competent enough to message their concerns in a way that resonates with the press, public, and social media (not historically the party’s strong suit).

In a letter to the FCC, seven Democrats urged the agency to launch an investigation into Saudi and Chinese backing of the deal in the hopes of bringing some additional press attention to journalist-murdering autocracies being tightly intertwined with U.S. media and journalism:

“The national security concerns are specific and serious. Tencent’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is well-documented. Chinese law also requires domestic technology companies to cooperate with state intelligence services on demand. A Tencent stake in the parent company of CBS News and CNN, no matter how “passive” on paper, creates concrete avenues for potential foreign influence over the editorial independence of American broadcast journalism and content.”

Brendan Carr’s FCC will, of course, ignore the request. Brendan Carr spent years on cable TV hyperventilating about China’s distant proxy relationship with TikTok, but has since gone curiously silent despite China’s Tencent involvement in the deal.

Paramount is trying to avoid triggering CFIUS scrutiny of foreign influence by insisting that the three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds (Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) “have agreed to forgo any governance rights — including board representation — associated with their non-voting equity investments.”

We’ve noted how the U.S. right wing is trying to mirror Victor Orban’s assault on media in Hungary, which involved autocrat-friendly oligarchs buying up all the media companies while the government strangles independent truth-telling journalism just out of frame. Over long enough of a timeline, this trajectory routinely leads to first the arrest — and eventually murder — of journalists critical of party power.

Republicans are making obvious, steady progress in that goal so far, and will keep pushing until they run into opposition that consists of more than just feckless Democrat “concerns.” Democrats should be highlighting, at every opportunity, not just the potential soft power foreign influence over the deal, but the right wing’s unsubtle goal of widespread information warfare and control.

Even free of autocratic issues, the Warner Brothers Paramount deal is just generally terrible; the massive debt load is expected to trigger unprecedented layoffs across a Hollywood production industry that’s already reeling. The best chance for blocking the deal outright currently sits with a coalition of state attorneys general, though even they likely face a steep uphill climb without some significant political, press, and public support.

06:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 額 [Kanji of the Day]

額

✍18

小5

forehead, tablet, plaque, framed picture, sum, amount, volume

ガク

ひたい

金額   (きんがく)   —   amount of money
総額   (そうがく)   —   sum total
月額   (げつがく)   —   monthly amount (sum)
全額   (ぜんがく)   —   total
高額   (こうがく)   —   large sum (of money)
減額   (げんがく)   —   reduction
巨額   (きょがく)   —   huge sum (esp. of money)
多額   (たがく)   —   large (amount of money)
半額   (はんがく)   —   half the amount (of money)
増額   (ぞうがく)   —   increase (in an amount of money)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

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