Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery.

AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers any of this happened. Many of the attack vectors were based on simple things like telecom administrators failing to change default passwords on sensitive hardware entry points.

The hack, caused in part by our mindless deregulation and lax oversight of telecom monopolies, only saw a tiny fraction of the press and public attention reserved for our multi-year, mass hyperventilation about TikTok privacy and security. But on their way out the door, Biden FCC officials did try to implement some very basic cybersecurity safeguards, requiring that telecoms try to do a better job securing their networks and informing customers of breaches.

Enter the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr, which is now rescinding that entire effort because lobbyists at AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter told them to:

“The Federal Communications Commission will vote in November to repeal a ruling that requires telecom providers to secure their networks, acting on a request from the biggest lobby groups representing Internet providers.”

In a folksy Halloween blog post, Carr tries to pretend this somehow improves cybersecurity. According to Carr, ISPs pinky swore that everything is fine now, and frames obvious regulatory capture as the agency being more “agile”:

“Following extensive FCC engagement with carriers, the item announces the substantial steps that providers have taken to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses.  In doing so, we will also reverse an eleventh hour CALEA declaratory ruling reached by the prior FCC—a decision that both exceeded the agency’s authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats.  So, we’re correcting course.”

Let me be clear about something: the Biden rules were the absolute baseline for oversight of telecom, basically requiring that ISPs do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to securing their networks, while being transparent with the public about when there’s been a major hack. This stuff was the bare minimum, and the U.S. is too corrupt to even do that.

This is part of Carr’s effort to destroy whatever was left of flimsy U.S. corporate oversight of regional telecom monopolies so he can ensure he has a cushy post-government job at a telecom-funded think tank or lobbying org. To that end, he’s been taking a hatchet to the very shaky FCC oversight standards that already helped result in the worst hack in U.S. telecom history.

This is, you might recall, the same guy who spent the last few years constantly on television insisting that TikTok was the greatest cybersecurity threat facing the country, proclaiming he’d be using nonexistent authority to take aim at the company (which, as we found out later, was really about offloading TikTok to Trump’s buddies and protecting Facebook from competition it couldn’t out-innovate).

The Trump administration has also gutted government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the Salt Typhoon hack), dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and fired oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Carr is also derailing FCC plans to impose some baseline cybersecurity standards on “smart” home devices based on some completely fabricated, xenophobic claims about one of the planned vendors (again, because telecoms simply don’t want any oversight whatsoever).

It’s yet another example of how Trump policy is indistinguishable from a foreign attack. In many ways it’s worse, given that at least with Russia, Iran, and China, you’re spared the kind of phony piety and sanctimony coming from inside your own house.

We knew this was coming, but it doesn’t make it any less stupid. The road to the IRS’ Direct File program was long and hard-fought. We here at Techdirt have been talking about, and advocating for, something like the Direct File program for at least 15 years. The concept behind the program is a simple one. For a class of citizens with very simple income and tax payments, the IRS already has all the information it needs to process a tax return. In those cases, the IRS can simply mail the information it has to a taxpayer, ask them to sign off verifying the information is complete and accurate, and then process the return. The problem with this is that it cuts out the tax-prep industry that absolutely adores preying on these very same people to milk them for tax-prep services they don’t actually need.

For decades, the industry did exactly that. Even as the government partnered with private tax preparation companies like Intuit to provide federally backed “free” tax-prep websites and platforms, those same companies did everything they could to hide those free services and, in lieu of that, try to sell add-on services to those who were supposed to be able to file for free. While this eventually led to massive FTC fines for Intuit, this was the Faustian bargain that came from years and years of lobbying: The government would work with private industry for free filing programs in exchange for those same companies getting the government to line vulnerable citizens up like cattle headed to slaughter.

The IRS’ Direct File program came directly in the aftermath of the shady shit companies like Intuit did. It piloted in 2023, was a resounding success, and went live in 12 states in 2024. In April of this year, reports of Trump’s plans to end the program filtered into the news, even as the reviews by users of Direct File were overwhelmingly positive. Then, in August, IRS Commissioner Billy Long, himself a tax-prep industry player, said the program would be gone.

And, if you were holding onto any hope that this administration would keep a program in place that citizens love and ultimately reduces the overhead on the IRS, consider your hopes dashed. The IRS has begun notifying the states that had Direct File programs that the program will not be available for 2026 tax filings.

In an email sent from the IRS to 25 states, the tax agency thanked them for collaborating and noted that “no launch date has been set for the future.”

“IRS Direct File will not be available in Filing Season 2026,” says the Monday email, obtained by Nextgov/FCW and confirmed by multiple sources. It follows reports that the program was ending and Trump’s former tax chief, Billy Long, remarking over the summer that the service was “gone.”

Instead, that whole big beautiful bill we have heard so much about contained directions for the IRS to once again partner with private industry in a Free File program. The exact situation we were in that led to so much outrage at the behavior of those private companies, which in turn led to the creation of Direct File to begin with. This is simply winding the clock backwards to something people hated and calling it “progress.”

“It’s not surprising since the Trump administration sabotaged Direct File all through this year’s filing season, at the urging of tax prep monopolies like TurboTax,” Adam Ruben, the vice president of the Economic Security Project, told Nextgov/FCW. “Trump’s billionaire friends get favors while honest hardworking Americans will pay more to file their taxes.”

This isn’t something that can even be argued, honestly. It’s exactly what is happening. And, frankly, actions like this put the lie to Donald Trump’s claim to be fighting for the “little guy”. It’s all a bullshit grift, you see, with middlemen who are as wealthy as they are needlessly having Americans queued up to be conned.

This was a good program. The people who used it liked it. No serious negative consequence was experienced in its use.

And Trump did away with it so that mega-corporations like Intuit can continue skimming money from citizens in order to tell the IRS what it already knows.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• It’s Cool to Have No Followers Now (New Yorker)
• Introducing Safe for Work? — all about T&S jobs (Everything in Moderation*)
• Kids Turn Podcast Comments Into Secret Chat Rooms, Because Of Course They Do (Techdirt)
• Reddit and Kick added to child social media ban (ABC News)
• X boss explains why ‘horrific’ video viewed by Axel Rudakubana wasn’t removed (The Independent)
• Southport Inquiry (YouTube)
• How Elon Musk is Boosting The British Right (Sky News)
• arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated ‘Research’ Papers (404 Media)
• TikTok Investigated in France Over Content That Promotes Suicide (Bloomberg) 
• France Moves to Block the Shein Website Over a Sex Doll Scandal (New York Times) 
• EU leaders paper over splits on US tech reliance (Politico) 

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Safer by Thorn, a purpose-built CSAM and CSE solution. Powered by trusted data and Thorn’s issue expertise, Safer helps trust and safety teams proactively detect CSAM and child sexual exploitation messages.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

This story contains videos showing violence.

President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.

But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”

We reviewed federal prosecutions and local arrests, internal protest summaries by the Portland Police Bureau, sworn testimony from local and federal officials as well as more than 700 video clips containing hours of footage posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others. We focused on the three months before Sept. 5, when Trump made his first remarks about sending troops to Portland.

The evidence shows officers and protesters were indeed involved in incidents with varying levels of intensity on a little more than half the days. Protesters and counterprotesters exchanged blows at times. With some frequency, smoke and tear gas filled the air and shots from less-lethal police weapons could be heard.

There was no evidence of what could be termed a coordinated assault.

On most of the days or nights when officers and protesters clashed, local police and federal prosecutors ended up announcing no criminal arrests or charges — even though any number of crimes can be cited if someone commits violence against federal officers or property.

In addition, while protests continued across the summer, most of the alleged action by protesters that resulted in federal prosecution or local arrests ended two months before Trump said troops were needed in Portland.

_{While federal judges decide whether Portland protesters’ behavior constitutes a rebellion, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which they were inciting unrest and the role that federal officers played. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica}

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland, saying that his administration had not proven that the protests can be fairly characterized as a rebellion, a risk of rebellion or an ongoing lack of order that prevents government officials from carrying out their duties.

Last week, the Justice Department argued in federal court that the last of these three categories — a breakdown of public order so severe that ICE officials can’t do their jobs — is what unfolded in Portland, justifying the president’s decision to federalize Oregon’s National Guard.

The judge is expected to issue a final ruling this week, and the case is expected to continue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

If the courts go against Trump, he has another tool that could bring troops: the federal Insurrection Act, which experts say has a lower bar to being used and could involve active-duty military.

While the courts deliberate, ProPublica set out to examine the degree to which protesters were fomenting unrest and the role that federal officers themselves played.

Two policing experts who reviewed videos said federal officers at times used force inappropriately, echoing a Portland police official who testified in court that federal officers were instigating the chaos night after night.

Brian Higgins, former police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey, and a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said some of what federal officers did in the video clips was not typical.

“My question would be, ‘If you used force, why did you not follow through with an arrest?’” Higgins said.

For instance, on Sept. 1, masked officers in combat gear responded to protesters who placed a prop guillotine on the sidewalk in front of the ICE building. The officers chased away the protesters with tear gas, smoke and other less-lethal weapons, grabbed the guillotine and hauled it inside. No criminal charges were announced.

“If there was nothing else to justify the officers coming out and doing this, you’ve got to scratch your head,” Higgins said.

Justice Department attorneys said in a court filing that the presence of the mock guillotine required federal officers “to exert physical force to keep order.” Videos show a protester blowing bubbles in the moment before federal police advanced on the crowd.

The scene of protesters dispersing and officers giving chase became the centerpiece of a Fox News broadcast on Sept. 4, the night before Trump said Portland’s protests had drawn his attention.

Our review showed that the force used against demonstrators had clearer provocation in initial protests. From the start of June to July 4, Portland police arrested 28 people, while federal prosecutors said they charged 22 with criminal offenses including arson and assault.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told ProPublica in a statement that the arson and assault charges show “this isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the Left have claimed, it’s radical violence.”

“President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop,” Jackson said.

But from July 5 through Sept. 4, the violence appeared to slow significantly. Portland police announced no arrests of protesters during this time, and federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against just three. 

Only one was accused of a violent offense: felony assault for allegedly spitting in an officer’s face after an arrest for flying a drone around the building. The person pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drone offense; the assault charge did not move forward. Another person’s misdemeanor charge, alleging failure to obey an officer, was also dropped. The case against the third person, another misdemeanor allegation of failing to obey, is proceeding.

In legal filings supporting the use of troops, federal officials described a handful of additional violent incidents from July 5 through Sept. 4. They said that protesters hit an officer with a stick on July 20, threw screws on the ICE facility’s driveway on July 24, pounded fists on vehicles on Aug. 9 and 11, threw rocks and a firework over the building’s fence on Aug. 16, injured two officers in an attack on Aug. 25 and provided directions online to an officer’s home on Aug. 28. No criminal charges were announced in these cases.

During the roughly two months leading up to Trump’s Sept. 5 remarks, videos from more than 20 days or nights show federal officers firing on, grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling or using other munitions on protesters. They deployed hissing cans of tear gas, sometimes sending clouds of the chemical irritant floating toward a nearby low-income apartment building.

No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of the dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.

In most cases, videos from these events show masked federal officers using aggressive tactics that lack a clear reason.

One federal officer runs and tackles an unsuspecting protester from behind on Aug. 13, causing what the man said in a legal filing was a head injury and concussion. The person was not charged with any crime.

In a clip from Sept. 6, the day after Trump’s remarks about Portland, a federal officer walking back into the ICE building turns, walks out of his way toward a protester and pushes the man so hard he falls to the ground and rolls over backward. The officer then continues inside the building.

Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies policing, reviewed videos from the protests at ProPublica’s request and said some of the federal officers’ uses of force looked “gratuitous.”

“Going out of your way to shove someone while you’re on the way back from arresting someone serves no purpose other than intimidation,” he said, “and intimidation is not a lawful government objective.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to emails requesting comment on its officers’ tactics.

Allegations of Protester Violence Subsided Over Time 

There’s no doubt that the summertime protests were often confrontational, emotional and loud. Protesters, some dressed in black, often wore gas masks and shouted profanities at federal personnel. In June, some were also violent.

Five people faced arson charges after separate events on June 11 and 12 in which prosecutors said fires were set. One was in a trash can against the ICE building, while in another instance prosecutors said a protester used a flare to set fire to wood stacked against the front gate.

Videos from June 14 show a protester striking an officer in the head with a wooden stake that holds a protest sign. Another clip shows protesters using a stop sign as a battering ram on the front door of the ICE building.

Portland police declared a riot and made two arrests that day; federal prosecutors also said they charged three people with assault.

On June 24, a video shows someone waving a large knife at officers, being tased while running away and falling face first onto the sidewalk. Federal prosecutors filed charges against three people from that night’s protest: the person accused of wielding the knife, another accused of shining a laser pointer in an officer’s eye and one accused of hurling a gas canister back at officers, hitting one.

In addition, a Homeland Security news release from July 11 shows photos — without providing dates — of what the agency said were flyers posted in federal officers’ neighborhoods showing their names, images and addresses. The release said such information was also posted online.

Federal authorities have said protests led them to close the ICE building and work out of temporary office space from June 13 until July 7, after which the facility reopened. An analysis by Oregon Public Broadcasting found that immigration bookings continued, albeit at a slightly slower pace than average for Trump’s second term.

But violence initiated by protesters mostly subsided after July 4, based on charges or arrests announced by authorities and video reviewed by ProPublica.

The summer’s last criminal allegation of protester-on-officer violence — at least for anything other than spitting — came from a large Independence Day protest that led to federal criminal charges being filed against four people. They were individually accused of kicking an officer, throwing an incendiary device at officers, graffitiing the building and destroying fiber optic cables at the facility.

Evidence of protester violence for the rest of the summer is limited beyond the two misdemeanors and one felony charge announced by prosecutors.

In addition to the instances asserted by the government in court filings but not charged criminally, the FBI recently issued statistics that suggest dozens of people may have received citations. In the federal system, these are similar to traffic tickets and are generally issued for minor offenses. But when asked for details by ProPublica, the agency would not specify how many were issued or during what time frame.

Meanwhile, the use of force by federal officers continued.

Violence Without Violent Provocation

In most of the cases where videos captured police using crowd control tactics or other elements of force on protesters, there were neither announcements of criminal charges that followed nor allegations of protester violence made in the administration’s case for sending troops.

An official with the Federal Protective Service, which polices federal buildings, testified in court last week that federal officers use a loudspeaker to warn large groups to move. If they don’t, he said, officers physically move them.

Stoughton, the University of South Carolina law professor, said officers should use tear gas and other heavy chemical munitions sparingly when dispersing a crowd.

He added that many city police departments would be very hesitant to use these munitions “if it’s going to have this completely predictable environmental contamination on people who are utterly uninvolved with the protest.” In Portland, there’s an apartment building across the street from the ICE facility.

In addition, Stoughton said, police managing crowds ordinarily would first take time to engage people verbally, face to face, to try to get them to step aside.

“You typically don’t just want to jump right to higher levels of force,” Stoughton said, “because the point is to limit the potential for escalation.”

On two occasions shown on video, aggressive moves by officers appeared to be intended at least in part to allow them to seize protest symbols: a burned American flag that officers bagged and took indoors and the Sept. 1 display of a mock guillotine, an implement that 18th-century French revolutionaries used to decapitate royalty.

Video from the event captures someone playing a song by the Oakland hip-hop group The Coup with the chorus, “We got the guillotine, you better run.” An American flag can be seen burning at the guillotine’s base.

Stoughton said municipal police departments like those in Portland know they have to balance protesters’ First Amendment rights with public safety. “There is no more protected First Amendment interest than the ability to protest government action, to criticize the government,” he said.

A guillotine “can be purely symbolic,” he said. “That can be purely expressive.”

The Federal Protective Service incident commander that night, Will Turner, said in court that agents did not know the guillotine was a prop and thought it was real at the time. “We took it as an actual threat,” he said.

Objects like the guillotine or statements from protesters telling ICE agents to kill themselves appear to be protected speech, said Timothy Zick, a law professor at William & Mary Law School who studies public protest and the First Amendment, because they do not pose a true threat to officers.

It is “likely the sort of political hyperbole and heated rhetoric the Supreme Court has treated as protected speech,” Zick said. “The statements are likely to be considered part of a political protest.”

Notably, officers were sometimes able to clear crowds without aggressive tactics.

Footage on those occasions shows vehicles leaving the ICE compound without incident. Officers move out and onto the sidewalk, and protesters stay out of the way of the vehicles.

In one of those nonevents, as officers return to the ICE compound and the gates start to close, the thin crowd chants: “DHS — doesn’t have sex.”

A federal officer brings his hand to his mouth on the video.

He appears to blow a kiss.

What Happens Next

Trump’s order remains tied up in the courts.

Federal District Judge Karin Immergut blocked the deployment once, then again on Sunday, saying the Trump administration had “commandeered” the National Guard to quell protests that do not constitute a rebellion and had eased after a “high watermark of violence and unlawful activity” in June.

“The trial testimony produced no credible evidence of any significant damage to the ICE facility in the months before the President’s callout and no credible evidence that ICE was unable to execute immigration laws,” the judge wrote. “Protesters frequently blocked the driveway of the ICE building, but the evidence also showed that federal law enforcement officers were able to clear the driveway.”

Immergut said the deployment violated the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not given to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to states. The judge said Trump “had no lawful basis to federalize these Oregon National Guardsmen.”

Earlier in the appeals process, two appellate judges who upheld Trump’s decision said protester violence from earlier in June was a relevant concern that must be considered in the case.

A panel of judges from the 9th Circuit is expected to hear arguments from both sides next.

Last week, I wrote about how the Trump administration has replaced any sort of concept of governance with governance-by-trolling—a government optimized purely for making a huge segment of the country angry while the base cheers them on. The entire apparatus of federal power has been repurposed into a machine for generating engagement through cruelty, with no actual governing philosophy beyond “own the libs.”

The usual response from Democrats has been to offer… nothing. Safe, poll-tested blandness. That kind of vacuum is exactly what allows governance-by-trolling to thrive—at least MAGA offers some vision, however deranged.

Tuesday night, New York City voters delivered a decisive rebuke to both MAGA nihilism and the traditional Democratic technocratic blandness. Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist who was polling at literally 1% in February, won the election for mayor. And he did it by doing exactly what conventional political wisdom from the Democratic political consultants says you’re not supposed to do: he ran on an authentic vision of what he actually believes in, rather than running away from anything the consultants deemed a “political third rail.”

He didn’t shy away from his support for trans New Yorkers or immigrants. He stood side by side with them proudly throughout the campaign. He didn’t play down his own religion, background, or policy ideas, even as some of them challenged Democratic Party orthodoxy.

The contrast couldn’t be starker. On one side, you had another version of the politics of cynical spite and traditional political backroom king-making—Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, backed by at least $22 million from 28 different billionaires, running attack ads calling Mamdani a dangerous radical, questioning whether he “understood New York culture” because he was born in Uganda, and quite literally suggesting he would cheer for another 9/11. Pure governance-by-baseless concern trolling, optimized to generate fear and anger.

On the other side, you had someone who said “this is who I am, this is what I believe in, and here’s my positive vision for making your lives better.” Free buses. Universal childcare. Frozen rent for rent-stabilized apartments. City-run grocery stores in food deserts. Simple, clear policies that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from.

Guess which one won?

Even if you don’t agree with his policies or political leanings, you have to be able to see that he offered quite the contrast to traditional politics these days. Even publications staffed with Never Trumper former Republicans, like the Bulwark, pointed out that Mamdani’s “socialist” policies are well within the confines of modern liberal democracy, while Donald Trump’s are not. For all the baseless fear that Mamdani will “seize the means of production,” Donald Trump is literally doing it.

Leadership Means Leading, Not Following the Polls

As Anil Dash wrote in his excellent piece “Turn the Volume Up,” one of the defining features of Mamdani’s campaign was that it started with principle:

You have to start with the principle. You must have a politics that believes in something. You can’t win unless you know what you’re fighting for. Something specific, that people can see and believe. Something that people will know when it’s been achieved. It can’t just be a vague platitude, and it can’t just be “root for our team” or “the other guy is bad”. Zohran and his team understood this profoundly well, and made a campaign focused on substance — grounded in humanist principles, and tied to extremely clear, understandable and specific policy deliverables.

This is exactly what the Trump administration—and Cuomo’s campaign—completely lack. They don’t believe in anything except their own power and the validation that comes from making their opponents angry. There’s no vision beyond “give us power” and “watch the other side cry.”

Every week, we see another crop of Democratic political consultants pushing out their big plan to win elections. And almost all of them involve the same basic strategy: ditch what they claim are “unpopular” wedge issues. Embrace “popularism”—just supporting the policies we know poll well, and avoiding anything else. Don’t talk about trans rights. Downplay your support for progressive economic policies. Take a harsh stance against immigration. Don’t talk about diversity. Find the safest, most poll-tested positions possible and stick to those.

Indeed, last week, before this election, we saw the launch of yet another of these (there have to have been at least a dozen similar things this year, it’s hard to keep track of them all) called “Deciding to Win.” It had a bunch of big-name political consultant types (David Plouffe! Matt Stoller! Nate Silver! James Carville!) sign onto it. Yet it urged the same fucking thing this group of strivers always says: “play down anything that is seen as a culture war, political third rail.” What that usually means is “throw marginalized groups like trans people and immigrants under the bus.”

It’s running scared. Not running to lead.

Mamdani did the opposite. He was a strong, vocal supporter of trans rights, immigrants, and Palestine from day one, and it didn’t hurt him one bit. The consultants from the sidelines seemed to be screaming about how he had to minimize his Muslim faith and his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. Instead, he leaned into both.

And rather than hurt him, this authenticity became a core part of his appeal. Even voters who disagreed with specific policies responded to someone offering a genuine vision over consultant-approved talking points.

Leadership is about leading people by convincing them of your vision. Not just feeding them what the polls say will work. If you want people to follow you, it means you need to be worth following. You need to present a vision of a world they can believe in, that they want to help achieve. That’s leadership. Campaigning just on focus groups and polls gives you a median campaign, with nothing that excites people. It gives them nothing to believe in.

Worse, the popularism approach cedes all the framing to your opponents. They’re going to call you a radical communist Marxist socialist anyway—just ask Kamala Harris, who got labeled all of those things despite mostly running a campaign so cautious it could have been designed by the most risk-averse consultant imaginable. She started with energy and authenticity, then let the consultant class convince her to pivot away from anything even remotely appealing, to emphasize traditional Republican talking points on guns and immigration, and to downplay support for trans rights, Palestine, and other “divisive” issues.

And she lost.

Meanwhile, Mamdani got called all the same things—communist, radical, dangerous extremist who doesn’t understand America—and he just… floated above it. He didn’t waste time trying to prove he wasn’t those things. He just kept talking about free buses and childcare and what he actually believed in. He showed people what he stood for rather than spending all his energy explaining what he wasn’t. And he made it clear that he believed in his vision not because he thought it would get him elected, but because he thought it was actually the best platform to actually help New Yorkers.

As Dash notes, this required a kind of courage that’s become rare in Democratic politics:

If you run from who you are, you have already lost.

Coming on stage for a political victory to Ja Rule’s New York (I had bet that there would be some Jadakiss involvement in whatever walk-on music he picked), and walking off to Dhoom Machale, while saying with his full chest that he’s a Muslim, a New Yorker, and a young Democratic Socialist — these are the moves of a person who knows that those who are motivated by hate will never back down if you try to hide or be evasive about who you are. A coward dies a thousand deaths, and a politician who hides their identity loses a thousand elections before a single vote is cast. We see Vivek Ramaswamy tap-dancing around his faith every day, and the white supremacists that he’s cozied up to will never let him win. But fourteen years ago, the racist and hateful media falsely called President Obama’s private birthday party a “hip-hop BBQ”. And as I said years later, you should just have the damn hip-hop BBQ — they’re going to accuse you of it anyway. Lean into who you are, own it, and let the haters stay mad.

This gets at something fundamental about how to actually beat back today’s fascism and the politics of spite. You don’t do it by accepting their framing and trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. You do it by offering a compelling alternative vision that people actually want to vote for.

The Cowardice Is Coming From Within

That kind of courage is rare in Democratic politics for a reason. Unfortunately, the consultant and donor class’s grip on Democratic politics remains so strong that even the party’s own leaders couldn’t bring themselves to support their most dynamic candidate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—both representing New York—refused to endorse Mamdani at all. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, only gave his endorsement in the final days before the election and then claimed he didn’t think Mamdani was the future of the Democratic party.

Think about what that says. You have a candidate who is energizing voters, bringing new people into the process, winning a massive grassroots campaign against a billionaire-backed opponent—and the Democratic leadership is too scared to publicly support him until it’s basically over, if at all.

Why? Because they’re terrified that Trump will call them communists too? Or that the billionaire donors who supported Cuomo won’t keep supporting them? They’ve internalized the consultant wisdom that says you can’t be seen anywhere near a Democratic Socialist, that you have to keep your distance from anyone who actually believes in progressive policies, that the safest play is always to hedge your bets and play it safe.

They’re Going to Call You a Communist Anyway

The Democratic consultant class never seems to understand one simple thing: Republicans are going to call any Democratic politician an extreme leftist radical communist no matter what they actually believe or say—or how they actually lead. They called Joe Biden a socialist. They called Kamala Harris a Marxist. It’s just blatant baseline name-calling that gets deployed against literally anyone with a (D) after their name.

So if they’re going to call you that anyway, you might as well actually stand for something and give people a reason to vote for you rather than just trying to prove you’re not what Fox News and MechaHitler1488 on X says you are.

Mamdani understood this intuitively. When they called him a communist, he didn’t waste time explaining why Democratic Socialism is actually different from communism or how his policies are really quite moderate. He just kept talking about concrete things that would make New Yorkers’ lives better. He worked to front-run and mock the typical GOP tried-and-tested criticisms. Literally a day before the election, he posted a video about Vito Marcantonio, a popular NYC politician in the 1940s who was regularly called a communist, who delivered for New Yorkers.

Traditional political consultants would have told him to hide from and denounce anyone who was investigated by the FBI for his “leftist” views. But Mamdani reminded people that these kinds of scare tactics and nonsense are often used against legitimately popular politicians who deliver for their constituents.

The consultants told Harris to run away from trans rights and progressive economics. She largely did, and lost. The same consultants would have told Mamdani to do the same thing. He ignored them completely and won by a massive margin.

When Both The Message And The Messenger Are Authentic

Cuomo had everything the consultants say you need: name recognition, political dynasty, massive funding, endorsements from establishment figures like Bill Clinton. And he had the benefit of running against a young, relatively unknown candidate who by all traditional metrics should have been easy to defeat.

But Cuomo didn’t have a message beyond “I should be in charge” and “the other guy is scary.” That’s not a vision. That’s just entitlement wrapped in fear-mongering. And when you don’t believe in anything yourself, you can’t make anyone else believe in you.

Mamdani, by contrast, is an exceptionally skilled communicator who understood how to meet people where they are. His campaign’s mastery of social media—from TikTok to Instagram to YouTube—wasn’t just about being “very online.” It was about authentically connecting with voters in the spaces they actually occupy, rather than demanding they come to him. He also showed it daily, all over New York City. Over and over again, the clips you saw of him showed him walking the streets in all five boroughs, happily talking to people all over.

Mamdani kept reinforcing a clear, simple, positive message that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from. As Dash explained:

They have to be able to talk about us without us.

This is one of the refrains that comes up most when I’m talking to people about communications, in almost any context from organizing to business to building a community. A message has to be simple enough, memorable enough, and clear enough that even someone who’s just heard it for the first time first time can repeat it — in high fidelity — to the next person they talk to. The Mamdani campaign nailed this from the start, focusing not just on “affordability” in the abstract, but specific promises around free buses, universal childcare, and frozen rent in particular. The proof of how effective and pervasive those messages have been is that detractors can recite them, verbatim, from memory.

That’s a message. That’s something people can understand and repeat. “Free buses, universal childcare, frozen rent.” You don’t need a focus group to tell you whether people want their rent frozen or free bus rides.

Compare that to the typical consultant-approved Democratic campaign message, which usually amounts to “we’re going to fight for working families by implementing sensible, pragmatic solutions that move us forward, not backward.” What does that even mean? How do you repeat that to your neighbor? How do you know when it’s been achieved?

Hope Beats Hate

There’s one more element to Mamdani’s success that’s worth highlighting: joy. As we’ve written about before, Mamdani’s citywide scavenger hunt wasn’t just a campaign stunt—it was a demonstration of what politics could be when it’s about creating something positive rather than just attacking opponents.

Thousands of New Yorkers came out not because they were angry at Cuomo, but because Mamdani offered them something joyful to participate in. He showed them a vision of NYC where politics isn’t just about endless grievance and combat, but about building community and celebrating what makes the city great.

Indeed, this vision even meant that he won by a huge margin among young men, a group that many consultants have written off as permanently MAGA fans of Joe Rogan-style podcasts. Mamdani got people excited across the board in nearly every age group and demographic.

This stands in stark contrast to the politics of spite that defines MAGA. As I wrote last week, Trump’s entire governing strategy is optimized around one question: how mad can we make the other side? There’s no vision beyond that. No positive agenda. Just endless trolling and performative cruelty designed to generate engagement from the base.

Mamdani proved you can beat that by offering something better. Not by trying to out-troll the trolls or by running away from who you are to avoid their attacks, but by presenting an authentic, positive vision that gives people something to vote for rather than just against.

The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling captured this at Mamdani’s victory party:

Hope over tyranny, hope over big money and small ideas, hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible, Mamdani said. We won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.

The Path Forward

Mamdani’s victory doesn’t solve all of the Democratic Party’s problems. One mayoral election in New York City isn’t a national political revolution. But it does offer a clear roadmap for how to actually beat back the politics of spite and fascism. Especially given that across the country, in almost every election where Democrats were on the ballot, they won handily. They took the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, with Virginia’s being against an actively transphobic Republican campaign. They even won elections in surprising places like Georgia and Mississippi.

Running campaigns where you show what you’re for, instead of cowering in the face of attacks, can work. People want a positive vision of the future. They don’t like the constant attacks. But they also want authenticity and a vision for the future.

The roadmap is sitting right there: Don’t accept your opponents’ nonsense culture war framing. Don’t waste time trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. Don’t let consultants talk you into abandoning the issues and constituencies that need you most. And definitely don’t try to out-troll the trolls.

Articulate a clear, positive vision of what you actually believe in. Be authentic about who you are. Give people concrete reasons to vote for you, not just against the other side. Be joyful about the opportunities of the future for everyone. Trust that voters are smart enough to see the difference between someone who believes in something and someone who’s just performing for engagement metrics.

The politics of nihilism and spite, whether it’s Trump posting videos of himself dumping shit on citizens or Cuomo running racist attack ads, is ultimately hollow. It has no vision, no substance, nothing to offer beyond the temporary satisfaction of making your opponents angry, scared or both.

Mamdani proved that the politics of belief—of actually standing for something, of offering people hope and a positive vision—can win decisively. The Democratic Party establishment probably won’t learn that lesson. They’re too invested in the consultant and billionaire donor class that keeps feeding them the same failed playbook.

But candidates don’t need the party establishment’s permission. And voters don’t need to wait for the consultants to catch up. Mamdani won because he ignored the people telling him to play it safe and instead trusted voters to respond to something real. That option is available to anyone willing to take it. The blueprint is right there, proven and tested. All it takes is the courage to actually believe in something beyond politics.

Tuesday, Republicans got crushed in elections across New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. Not close races. Not razor-thin margins. Massive defeats in states they’d convinced themselves were winnable after Trump’s 2024 victory.

Bret Baier—on Fox News, to Fox & Friends—had to explain to his audience how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the results, but “the spreads are surprising.” Young women “overwhelmingly” supported Democrats based on the economy and “those ICE images.” Based on how they “feel about the economy” versus “how Wall Street’s doing.”

Trump posted cryptically: “AND SO IT BEGINS.”

He’s right. Something has begun. Just not what he thinks.

The simulation is collapsing.

Not literal Matrix-style unreality. Something more precise and insidious: the manufactured consensus that authoritarianism was inevitable, that resistance was futile, that most people had become—or would become—what the sociopaths are.

After November 2024, they built an entire world out of lies. Silicon Valley CEOs who’d backed Harris immediately bent the knee. Zuckerberg congratulating Trump. Bezos killing the Post endorsement then offering “extraordinary” praise. Tim Cook presenting gold-plated tribute in the Oval Office like some feudal vassal paying homage to his lord.

My friends transformed into MAGA supporters. Not before the election—after. Weather vanes turning with the wind. People who calculated that MAGA had won the culture war and wanted to be on the winning side. They didn’t believe—they capitulated.

The triumphalists declared it complete. Musk proclaimed it “inevitable.” Bannon celebrated “full-spectrum dominance.” Andreessen announced “morning in America”—liberation from the terrible oppression of having to pretend to care about other people at dinner parties. The wealthy sociopath’s dream made manifest: a world where cruelty doesn’t even require justification anymore, where kindness itself becomes the performance and contempt becomes authenticity.

They expected universal capitulation. They thought everyone would become what they are. They were wrong.

The protests started smaller than 2016, and the triumphalists crowed about liberal demoralization. See? They said. Resistance is dead. Accommodation is wisdom. But they weren’t watching the actual trajectory. From February to April, protests grew over sixteen-fold. Tesla’s market value dropped precipitously, aided by sustained consumer boycotts. Artists refused cooperation. Museums defended autonomy. Universities resisted federal interference.

But the simulation held. The platforms they controlled kept amplifying the narrative: resistance is failing, Trump is consolidating, the fight is over. Every algorithm calibrated to make resistance seem isolated and futile, every feed curated to make you feel alone in your outrage.

Until Tuesday.

When the votes came in, Fox News had to explain to its own audience that Republicans lost. Badly. Not in spite of Trump’s power, but because of what Trump’s power is doing to people. The manufactured consensus that authoritarianism was inevitable met reality, and reality said: No.

Manufactured consensus only works until lived experience contradicts it. Tuesday, lived experience voted. That’s what collapsed the simulation.

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Look at what they’ve been building, what they’ve been selling, what they’ve been trying to make you believe.

The technocratic liberals built their simulation of competent management. “The data shows everything is fine. Trust the analysis. Wait for Republicans to overreach.” They treat democracy as an optimization problem, citizens as data points. They look at aggregate metrics—GDP growth, stock market performance—and conclude everything is working while people experience catastrophic precarity. When you say “I’m struggling,” they respond “actually the data shows recovery is strong” as if your lived experience is a statistical error requiring correction. This isn’t bad communication. This is the technocratic frame revealing itself as fundamentally broken.

The neo-reactionaries built intellectual infrastructure for natural hierarchy. Peter Thiel writing that democracy and freedom are incompatible. Curtis Yarvin publishing blueprints for monarchy. JD Vance—now Vice President—citing Andrew Jackson’s defiance of judicial review as a model, talking about going “extra-constitutional.” They’re not hiding this. They’re publishing it. They’re proud of it. They think they’re the brave truth-tellers who see through democratic delusion to the natural order of dominance.

The sociopaths convinced themselves their framework was correct. Shaun Maguire donating to Clinton in 2016 because he was “scared out of my mind about Trump,” then donating $300,000 to Trump in 2024 after his felony conviction—not because Trump changed but because Maguire decided principles were the obstacle. When Erika Kirk offered forgiveness at her husband’s memorial, Trump mocked it and the crowd erupted in delighted laughter. They were celebrating the rejection of grace itself.

After November 2024, they thought they’d proven their framework. That winning without kindness proved kindness is weakness. That seizing power without morality proved morality is performance. They built an entire simulation around that proof.

And the fascist executive deployed federal power not to govern but to dominate. ICE at the Super Bowl to intimidate Latino cultural celebration. Warrantless mass detentions in Chicago—federal agents detaining American citizens without individualized probable cause, children zip-tied together, people sorted by race. American cities described as “military training grounds.” Stephen Miller calling judicial review “insurrection.”

Their simulation said performance of dominance equals actual consolidation. That threats produce submission. That fear guarantees compliance.

Every simulation met the same reality Tuesday: it’s collapsing. Every lie met the truth. Every manufactured consensus met actual human choice. And the people who built their entire world out of those lies are about to learn what happens when reality vetoes the simulation.

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This is what should terrify them: they own Twitter, they influence Facebook, they’re capturing traditional media. They have unprecedented control over information flows. They thought this meant they controlled outcomes.

They were wrong.

Simulation only works when reality doesn’t contradict it too obviously. You can manufacture consensus that resistance is failing when resistance is invisible. You can create the appearance of overwhelming support when people can’t see evidence otherwise.

But you cannot simulate away your own groceries costing more. You cannot simulate away federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions in your city. You cannot simulate away ICE deployed to cultural events you attend. You cannot simulate away economic precarity while billionaires build 90,000-square-foot ballrooms funded by oligarchs etching their names into the people’s house. You cannot simulate away your electricity bill going up to fund AI systems you didn’t ask for.

Reality has veto power over simulation. Eventually. Always. No matter how many platforms you own, no matter how sophisticated your algorithms, no matter how much you’ve invested in manufacturing consensus.

The oligarchs thought owning platforms meant controlling reality. They’re learning the difference. Platforms control information flow. Reality controls lived experience. And when the gap between simulated consensus and lived experience becomes too large, the simulation collapses.

This is why their project was always fragile. Not because they’re weak—they’re not. But because simulations require maintenance against reality, and reality keeps happening regardless of what oligarchs want.

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While Republicans got crushed Tuesday, something else emerged that should make every tech oligarch nervous. Eighty percent of consumers worry about data centers driving up their electricity bills, according to recent surveys.

This isn’t abstract environmental concern. This is “my power bill is going up to fund Altman’s AGI fantasy” rage waiting to happen.

Data centers now consume roughly four percent of U.S. electricity—estimates suggest this could reach six to twelve percent by 2028, according to projections from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And Sam Altman admits he doesn’t even know how much power AI will need. As he concedes, AI’s future power needs are unknowable. Yet locked-in contracts risk raising household bills today to fund bets that might never pay off. “If a very cheap form of energy comes online soon at mass scale, then a lot of people are going to be extremely burned with existing contracts they’ve signed.”

Read that again. They’re gambling with the electrical grid. They’re driving up your power bills. They’re making massive infrastructure investments. And they admit they don’t know if any of it will work. This is speculative extraction made concrete. Your electricity bill subsidizing oligarchic bets on computational supremacy.

And most people are “more concerned than excited” about AI, according to Pew surveys. Employers are wielding it to cut headcount rather than augment productivity.

Add this to federal agents terrorizing communities. Add this to grocery bills rising while Wall Street celebrates. Add this to housing costs making home ownership impossible. Add this to economic precarity while oligarchs build ballrooms with your tribute.

Popular rage at extraction is becoming politically operational. Young women voting against Republicans based on “those ICE images” and economic concerns that include energy prices. The material reality of what oligarchic rule actually means—not abstract threats to democracy but concrete increases to your power bill so Sam Altman can pursue projects he admits might not work.

The simulation required people to believe AI was serving them. Tuesday suggested they’re starting to see it’s extracting from them instead.

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Tuesday night I watched CNN analysts pearl-clutch over Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech in New York. Not divisive enough, apparently—or too divisive, depending on which pundit. They were horrified he gave Trump “the middle finger.” They wanted conciliatory messaging. They wanted him to reach across the aisle. They wanted him to moderate his tone.

Never mind that Trump and his officials have threatened to strip Mamdani of his citizenship. Never mind that Shaun Maguire called him a liar advancing an “Islamist agenda.” Never mind that Stephen Miller has called judicial review “insurrection” and that ICE has conducted warrantless mass detentions of people who look like Mamdani.

The analysts wanted conciliation. They wanted prose, not poetry. They wanted him to understand that Muslims who win elections are supposed to apologize for winning.

Here’s what Mamdani said instead:

“This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”

And then he explained exactly what he meant. Not threats. Not violence. Policy.

“We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.”

This is what they cannot tolerate. Not rudeness. Not divisiveness. Not lack of decorum. Fighting back through democratic power used to break the concentrations that produced Trump in the first place.

The CNN analysts want him to play by rules that no longer exist. To extend courtesy to people threatening to strip his citizenship. To moderate his ambitions so he doesn’t offend sensibilities of people who think Muslims shouldn’t hold power at all. To accept that the price of access to power is agreeing not to actually use it.

But Mamdani didn’t run to access power. He ran to wield it. “To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: This city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.” Not can be yours if you’re properly deferential. Not might be yours if you moderate your expectations. Is yours. Right now. Through democratic choice exercised despite every dollar spent to prevent it.

“No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”

That’s the line that broke their brains. Not because it’s divisive but because it names what they need unnamed. That you can traffic in Islamophobia and lose. That Muslim immigrants can not only vote but win. That working people can not only organize but govern. That the simulation claiming oligarchic rule is inevitable just collapsed in the city that produced Trump himself.

“After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

This is what they mean when they say he’s divisive. He’s dividing power from those who’ve hoarded it. He’s dividing dignity from those who’ve denied it to others. He’s dividing the future from the past where people like him were supposed to accept subordinate status gratefully.

The analysts wanted prose. Mamdani gave them poetry and a governing agenda. They wanted moderation. He gave them rent freezes, free buses, universal child care. They wanted conciliation with people threatening his citizenship. He said: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”

The simulation required that Muslims who win elections apologize for it. That democratic socialists moderate their ambitions. That young brown men with accents know their place. That anyone threatening to actually use democratic power to break oligarchic concentrations understands the unspoken rules limiting how far you’re allowed to go.

Mamdani gave them four words instead: Turn the volume up.

This is what the collapse of the simulation looks like. Not just winning. Winning without apologizing. Winning and immediately announcing you’re going to use the power you just won. Winning and naming exactly whose power you’re going to challenge and why. Winning and refusing to pretend that the people who tried to destroy you deserve your deference now that you’ve beaten them.

The CNN analysts are terrified because they can see what comes next. If you can win in New York while being openly Muslim, openly socialist, openly aligned with working people against oligarchs—if you can win while promising to actually fight concentrated power rather than manage it—if you can win without apologizing for any of it and then immediately announce you’re turning the volume up—then the rules they’ve spent their careers defending don’t exist anymore. Then the simulation they’ve helped maintain just collapsed. Then everything they told you was impossible is happening right in front of them.

The conciliatory message they demanded? Here it is:

“Together, we’re going to freeze the rent. Together, we’re going to make buses fast and free. Together, we’re going to deliver universal child care.”

That’s the conciliation. With the people who elected him. With the working people who’ve been told power doesn’t belong in their hands.

There is no conciliation with oligarchs who funded tens of millions in attack ads. No reaching across the aisle to people who suggested he practices religious deception. No moderation of ambitions to make comfortable people feel less threatened. No apology for winning.

“The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate. I am young. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”

This is what they cannot tolerate. Not the policies—those can be negotiated, compromised away. The refusal to apologize. The insistence that power won democratically should be used rather than hoarded politely. The clarity that you don’t defeat oligarchy through conciliatory gestures but through dismantling the conditions that produced it.

Mamdani looked at those rules and said: Turn the volume up.

That’s what Tuesday proved. That’s what happens when the simulation collapses and someone refuses to help rebuild it.

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The doomers who declared the fight over after November 2024, who treated every authoritarian move as proof of inevitable consolidation—they were unknowingly maintaining the simulation. Not through malice but through genuine despair that itself became accommodation.

When you declare “it’s 1933, consolidation is complete, resistance is futile,” you validate the authoritarian narrative. You discourage mobilization. You make the simulation self-fulfilling. You become part of the machinery of manufactured consensus, another voice telling people that fighting back is pointless.

The doomers measured the wrong thing. They saw oligarchs bending the knee and concluded everyone would bend. They saw establishment accommodation and decided resistance was dead. They saw platform control consolidating and assumed manufactured consensus would hold.

What they missed: protests growing over sixteen-fold from February to April. Tesla’s market capitalization dropping amid boycotts and other market pressures. Cultural institutions defending autonomy. Universities collectively resisting. And now, massive electoral defeats that prove the simulation was always false.

The simulation of inevitable authoritarian victory required people to believe it was inevitable. Despair maintained the simulation. Fear became the enforcement mechanism. And everyone who surrendered to that despair, everyone who counseled acceptance—they were doing the oligarchs’ work for them.

Tuesday shattered that. Tuesday proved that sustained organizing works even when every doomer said it wouldn’t. Tuesday showed that most people haven’t become sociopaths even when every cynic said they would.

The doomers were wrong. Not about the threats being real—those are real. But about resistance being futile. About accommodation being wisdom. About the fight being over.

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Tuesday validates something that should reshape how we think about politics. Defend the framework—courts, rights, process—and fight the concentrations—monopoly, captured platforms, extractive grids. That combination wins.

Not “liberal” as progressive cultural positions. Liberal as the framework that makes democratic self-governance possible: constitutional constraints, rule of law, democratic process, free expression. The institutional space where people can reason together when no one has privileged access to truth.

Not “populism” as demagoguery. Populism as fighting concentrated interests—using democratic power to break economic concentrations, returning agency to citizens, delivering material wins that make people’s lives tangibly better.

Young women voting based on “those ICE images” and economic concerns aren’t making separate calculations. They’re recognizing that federal agents terrorizing communities and economic structures serving oligarchs while abandoning workers are the same problem: concentrated power—governmental and economic—dominating everyone else.

This is what voters responded to. Not careful positioning between technocratic management and authoritarian force. Rejection of both. Rejection of the entire framework that says ordinary people need to be managed by experts or dominated by strongmen.

They’re saying: We don’t want experts telling us the economy is good when we’re struggling. We don’t want federal agents terrorizing our communities. We don’t want oligarchs rigging the system. We don’t want our power bills going up to fund speculative AI projects. We want leaders who will fight concentrated power—governmental and economic—using democratic means.

That’s not the simulation either side was selling. That’s reality breaking through. That’s the actual democratic impulse that both technocracy and authoritarianism claim is impossible, proving them both wrong simultaneously.

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Putin is paralyzed by the conservative corrosion that comes from staying in power too long. He sees the opportunity to accept Trump’s advances, partly reintegrate with the West, use that to undermine Western democracies from within. He can’t take it. Too rigid. Too defensive. The dictator who restored Russia to imperial glory can’t make the strategic move that would consolidate it because the psychology that gained him power has destroyed his capacity to use it strategically.

Trump is performing dominance rather than building institutions. Humiliating Musk publicly. Threatening Vance. Conducting arbitrary displays of power that prevent the stable hierarchies authoritarianism requires to consolidate. When millions of Americans took to the streets in “No Kings” protests, Trump posted AI memes depicting himself as king and declared they were “not representative of the people of our country.” Seven million Americans. Not representative. This is narcissistic performance mistaking mockery for power.

Musk discovered that wealth buys subordination, not partnership. The richest man on the planet reduced to rage-tweeting after Trump demonstrated he’s subject, not equal. Every other billionaire watching that humiliation and calculating: that could be me. The system I’m funding to crush others will eventually crush me too.

Tuesday added decisive evidence. They can’t maintain simulations when reality contradicts them too obviously. The triumphalists expected universal capitulation. They got massive electoral defeats. The simulation of inevitable victory met reality: it was never inevitable.

And authoritarian psychology can’t process this. They can’t accept being wrong. They can’t admit the simulation was false. They can’t recognize that most people aren’t sociopaths and won’t become sociopaths.

So they’ll escalate. Authoritarians escalate when performance fails. That isn’t consolidation; it’s a tell.

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The simulation is collapsing. They will try to restore it through force. When authoritarians discover that performance doesn’t produce submission—when oligarchs learn that owning platforms doesn’t control outcomes—when sociopaths realize most people won’t become what they are—they escalate.

More aggressive use of federal power. ICE raids will intensify. Warrantless detentions will expand. The threats to use military force against American cities will move closer to implementation. Stephen Miller calling judicial review “insurrection” will become operational policy—openly defying courts, testing how far they can go.

More sophisticated platform manipulation. The oligarchs will study what went wrong. They’ll refine the algorithms. They’ll deploy AI more aggressively. They’ll try to rebuild the simulation using every tool they control.

More explicit threats. Trump mocking protesters with AI sewage memes was performance. What comes next will be more direct. Threatening investigations of opposition. Using federal agencies against political enemies. Making the costs of resistance tangible and personal.

More oligarchic capture. Tuesday showed controlling platforms isn’t enough when people’s lived experience contradicts the simulation. So they’ll try to control more. More media. More institutions. More economic leverage. The protection racket will become explicit: capitulate or face consequences.

More desperate attempts to fragment resistance. They’ll sow division within opposition coalitions. They’ll amplify conflict between progressive and moderate Democrats. They’ll fund primary challenges against anyone who doesn’t accommodate.

This is the pattern when simulations collapse. The people invested don’t accept reality—they try to force reality to conform through escalating coercion. They double down. They raise the stakes. They try to rebuild the simulation through fear since consensus failed.

The threat is genuine. The escalation is real. The danger is existential. They have enormous resources. Real power. Actual tools of coercion.

But here’s what makes them fragile: every escalation that doesn’t produce submission reveals their weakness. Every threat that doesn’t generate compliance shows they’re not as strong as claimed. Every display of force that produces more resistance proves the simulation was always false. They’re trapped in a death spiral where force reveals fragility reveals more force, and Tuesday started that spiral in a way they can’t stop because they can’t accept that they were wrong.

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The simulation is collapsing. That’s when this gets most dangerous. They will escalate. This will get worse before it gets better. The threat is real. The stakes are existential.

But Tuesday proved the simulation was false. They’re not as strong as they claimed. Resistance is not futile. Most people haven’t become what they are.

Hold both truths. The danger is real and resistance can work. The escalation is coming and it emerges from fragility, not strength.

Keep organizing. Build alternatives. Live well so you can last. When they escalate, name it as weakness—not fate.

Sustain the organizing that’s working. This trajectory matters because it proves sustained organizing produces outcomes even when oligarchs control platforms and authoritarians control government. Don’t let the coming escalation fragment what’s working. They want resistance to collapse into reactive outrage. Maintain the discipline. Keep building power through participation.

Build resilience for the long fight because this is years, not months. You cannot sustain resistance through constant crisis response. You need grounding in what makes life worth defending—relationships, beauty, work that matters, dignity maintained under pressure. Living well is not retreat from resistance. It’s the foundation making resistance sustainable. The person who protests and organizes and fights and then comes home and loves their children well—that person can sustain this for years. The person who lets fear fragment them burns out. They want you fragmented. They want you exhausted. Living well is resistance because maintaining your humanity is refusal.

Expose the escalation as evidence of fragility. When they lash out, name it clearly: They’re escalating not because they’re winning but because Tuesday proved they’re losing. Every aggressive move, every threat—these aren’t signs of consolidation, they’re signs of fragility. Make that visible. Help people see that escalation emerges from weakness.

Make the connections explicit because your power bill going up, federal agents in your city, groceries costing more, housing unaffordable, oligarchs building ballrooms—these aren’t separate problems. They’re the same problem. Concentrated power extracting from everyone else while claiming it serves the common good. Tuesday proved voters are starting to connect these dots. Keep making the pattern visible.

Build alternatives to oligarchic infrastructure because they control the platforms but platforms aren’t reality. People are organizing in physical space. Building networks that don’t depend on billionaires’ servers. Creating economic alternatives through boycotts and mutual aid. Defending institutional autonomy. Accelerate this. Every network built outside oligarchic control is infrastructure for sustained resistance they can’t shut down.

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The simulation is collapsing. Reality is reasserting itself. And we get to choose whether to recognize that or surrender to the reconstruction of the lie.

The doomers will say Tuesday changes nothing. That one election doesn’t matter. That they’ll escalate and win anyway. They’ll maintain the simulation through pessimism the way oligarchs try to maintain it through platform control—by making you believe fighting back is pointless.

The optimists will say Tuesday proves everything is fine. That institutions are holding. That normal politics will contain threats. They’ll treat Tuesday as return to normalcy rather than breakthrough requiring sustained intensification.

Both are wrong because both refuse to see what Tuesday actually proves. The simulation of inevitable authoritarianism was false. The manufactured consensus that resistance was futile was false. Reality vetoed the simulation. Not completely. Not everywhere. Not permanently. But decisively enough to prove the simulation was always fragile, that reality always had veto power, that we always had more agency than they wanted us to believe.

But the simulation was never reality. It was manufactured consensus maintained through platform control, elite accommodation, and cultivated despair. And manufacturing consensus is easier than manufacturing reality, which means they will try to rebuild it through force.

Whether that works depends on whether enough people recognize what Tuesday proved—the simulation was always fragile, reality always had veto power, we always had more agency than they wanted us to believe.

They need you to doubt what you saw Tuesday. They need you to question whether it matters. They need you to accept that they’ll just escalate until resistance becomes impossible. They need you to believe the simulation even after reality contradicted it because if you keep believing, you make their victory inevitable through your own surrender.

That’s the choice. See what Tuesday proved or accept the lie they’ll try to rebuild.

Two plus two equals four.

There are simple truths that withstand every simulation, every manipulation, every sophisticated argument for why you should doubt what you know.

Federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions violates the Fourth Amendment. Using ICE as cultural enforcement is authoritarian. Treating American cities as “military training grounds” is fascist rhetoric. Young women voting based on “those ICE images” are recognizing reality. Your electricity bill going up to fund speculative AI projects serves oligarchic extraction. Massive Republican defeats after Trump’s 2024 victory prove the simulation was false.

Most people still recognize these truths even when oligarchs control platforms and authoritarians control government. Tuesday proved it. The simulation collapsed when it met reality because these truths are weight-bearing. They hold. They cannot be spun away or optimized out of existence or threatened into nonexistence.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And no amount of platform control, no sophistication of manipulation, no escalation of threats can make these truths less true or make people stop recognizing them.

Tuesday proved the simulation was false. Today we choose whether to fight from that truth or surrender to the reconstruction of the lie. There is no neutrality. Your choice—made through action or inaction, through organizing or accommodating—determines whether the simulation gets rebuilt or whether reality continues to assert its veto.

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The simulation is collapsing. That’s the wire starting to fray. The manufactured consensus that authoritarianism was inevitable—that’s what’s breaking down. The triumphalist narrative that resistance was futile—that’s what Tuesday shattered.

But fraying isn’t breaking. They will try to repair the simulation through force. They will escalate to make reality match what they claimed was inevitable. They will lash out because Tuesday proved they’re not as strong as they claimed.

Whether the wire holds depends on whether we keep walking it. Consciously. Understanding what we’re doing and why. Together. This isn’t individual heroism, this is sustained collective action. With discipline. Not reactive outrage but organized power-building that compounds. With resilience. Maintaining what makes resistance sustainable. With clarity. Recognizing escalation as evidence of fragility, not strength.

The wire is holding. But only because people are choosing to walk it despite every force conspiring to make them fall. The wire holds through conscious choice to keep walking it together even when everything tells you to stop.

May love carry us home.

Not as sentiment but as practice. Not as naivety but as recognition that the only force strong enough to sustain resistance across the years this will require is love for what we’re defending. Not weakness but the disciplined refusal to become what we’re fighting.

Because the sociopaths are shocked that most people aren’t sociopaths. The simulation is collapsing because reality kept asserting itself. Tuesday proved that sustained organizing works. But the sociopaths will try to prove their simulation was correct through escalated force. They will make the costs of resistance tangible and personal. They will try to make you become what they are through fear.

Love is what prevents that transformation. Not love as feeling but love as commitment. To children who deserve a world where democracy works. To communities that deserve safety without terrorization. To dignity that belongs to everyone. To truth that matters even when platforms lie. To justice that requires fighting concentrated power. To beauty that persists. To each other—sustaining solidarity when everything conspires to fragment it.

That love is what makes resistance sustainable when fear would make it collapse. That love is what kept people organizing while the doomers counseled surrender. That love is what produced Tuesday’s results. That love is what will sustain the fight when the escalation comes and the threats become personal.

---

Jefferson warned that humans accommodate tyranny. For a while it was sufferable. Federal agents in Chicago. Children zip-tied. ICE at the Super Bowl. American cities as “military training grounds.” Economic precarity while oligarchs build ballrooms. Power bills rising to fund AI speculation. Each violation normalized. Each evil deemed bearable.

Tuesday, voters said: no further. Not everywhere. Not uniformly. But in enough places, in decisive margins, to prove that the sufferable has become insufferable for enough people to start changing outcomes.

The ground approaches only if we let it. And Tuesday proved we don’t have to let it. They will escalate. They will lash out. They will try to make you afraid. But Tuesday proved what’s been evident all along: most people haven’t become sociopaths. And when reality contradicts simulation decisively enough, reality wins.

The simulation is collapsing. Hold the center. Walk the wire. Build the alternatives. Sustain the organizing. Maintain your humanity. Choose love over fear. Choose clarity over despair. Choose sustained resistance over accommodation masquerading as wisdom.

The wire still holds. Not because the forces trying to break it are weak but because enough people have chosen to walk it together. Not because victory is guaranteed but because the alternative—surrender to oligarchic rule by people who admit they’re gambling with your power bills to fund projects they admit might not work—is unthinkable.

Two plus two equals four. The simulation is collapsing. And we get to choose whether reality continues to veto manufactured consensus or whether fear rebuilds what truth tore down.

Choose reality. Choose resistance. Choose each other.

The circus continues. And this time, we’re changing the show.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

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Nothing survives a purge. Especially not the truth.

The DOJ secured a conviction for Washington state resident Taylor Taranto. According to the DOJ’s May 21, 2025 press release, Taranto had committed several federal crimes, including carrying two guns without a license and engaging in “false information and hoaxes.”

Here are the details:

On June 28, 2023, near National Harbor, Maryland, Taranto broadcast a livestream of himself as he sat behind the wheel of his van. He stated that he had been “working on a detonator” and indicated to his audience that he would drive a car bomb into the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His target was a neutron reactor housed at the NIST campus. He then drove over the Wilson Bridge to Alexandria, Virginia, where he parked his van in the middle of the street and ran away from it, demonstrating to his audience how he would create the appearance of an emergency.

The FBI’s Washington Field Office and the Joint Terrorism Task Force mobilized immediately to find Taranto, alerting regional law enforcement agencies of the potential bomb threat. The following day, the FBI discovered Taranto’s location when he broadcast another livestream that showed him driving around D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood. Law enforcement officers arrested Taranto at Kalorama and discovered that the bomb threat was a hoax. When law enforcement officers searched his vehicle, they found two firearms, multiple magazines, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Those are the facts. But they’re not all of the facts.

First, “driving around DC’s Kalorama neighborhood” may be factually correct, but the DOJ deliberately refuses to state who Taranto was targeting.

A federal judge has sentenced a man to time served for making a hoax threat near the D.C. residence of former President Barack Obama two years ago, prompting a massive law enforcement response that included a bomb squad and sniffer dogs.

Second, it ignores who Taylor Taranto is, much like the presiding judge was forced to do thanks to previous actions by Donald Trump:

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols noted that Taranto had no criminal history — partly because the Justice Department had previously moved to dismiss several charges related to Taranto’s participation in the siege on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But just because Trump gave Taranto (along with pretty much every other participant in the 2021 raid on the Capitol building) clemency doesn’t mean he didn’t do the things he did on that date. You have to be convicted to obtain a pardon. And you have to be accused of criminal acts to secure clemency.

The Trump DOJ would rather no one remember Taranto for who he was on January 6, 2021. It wants everyone to pretend Taranto was just some guy driving around DC who had never previously supported Trump so hard he felt compelled to commit federal crimes two years before he committed these federal crimes.

The sentencing memo originally submitted by the DOJ in this case contained mentions of Taranto’s history as an insurrectionist.

On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building. After the riot, Taranto returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.

The DOJ has clawed back this memo and replaced it with one that excises this and any other reference to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol building. In doing so, it severs Taranto from his support for Trump and Trump’s election conspiracy theories. Its official press release does the same thing, removing anything that might suggest former president Obama was the target of Taranto’s malicious acts.

Not only is the administration actively removing the truth from court records, it’s removing the people who put these facts in their sentencing menu. First, the government came for the words. Then it came for the people who said them.

Two federal prosecutors were informed Wednesday that they will be put on leave after filing a legal brief that described the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as being carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” sources familiar with their removals told ABC News. 

The two prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, were locked out of their government devices and informed Wednesday morning they will be placed on leave, just hours after they filed a sentencing memorandum in the case of Taylor Taranto, the sources said.  

The prosecutors also made the mistake of suggesting Trump had aided Taranto’s vengeful search for Barack Obama.

The sentencing memo Valdivia and White filed also noted that Taranto appeared to zero in on a home belonging to former President Barack Obama after Trump published “the purported address” of Obama’s home on Truth Social. Taranto re-posted that address and ranted on video and on Telegram about “tunnels” he could use to reach the homes of Obama and others.

And so it keeps on going. The Trump administration continues to shed talent, replacing it with insurance lawyers and other sycophants who don’t possess the minute amount of legal acumen needed to indict a ham sandwich.

The prosecutors ousted by this latest shitty little purge are AUSAs Carlos Valdiva and Samuel White. The judge presiding over Taranto’s case praised them both as they were replaced by other prosecutors who, if they’re smart, are already seeking other employment. Anyone not completely subservient will recognize they can’t possibly serve both justice and the Trump administration. And this administration demands nothing but blind loyalty, so even just trying to do your job competently has the chance of placing your head on the chopping block.

While it’s one thing for an administration to oust anyone it feels stands in the way of its desires, it’s quite another to ask a court to swap out public records for something with a bit less truth in it. But that’s how this administration rolls. Anything that might reflect poorly on it must be removed from the permanent record. The original memo will live on at other sites. But as far as the federal record is concerned, Taylor Taranto never raided the Capitol or rolled up with a bunch of guns and ammo near Barack Obama’s house. He’s just some random guy who did threatening stuff for no particular reason. The Ministry of Truth, of course, will always have his back.

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child for this phenomenon.

It’s a silly, hollow game. With streaming growth saturated and executives all out of original ideas, the only way to goose quarterly earnings and generate new tax breaks is “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation. Such consolidation creates the illusion that these are savvy deal makers creating innovative new things, but as we’ve seen repeatedly this sort of media consolidation is mindlessly corrosive.

Right on schedule, Larry and David Ellison’s $8 billion acquisition of CBS is following this well-tread path.

The massive debt incurred from this and other deals (like the $7.7 billion bid for exclusive MMA rights, and the $150 million acquisition of Bari Weiss’ weird troll blog) is already resulting in a wave of layoffs as the company tries to cut costs, which (surely entirely coincidentally appear to be disproportionately impacting women and minorities):

“Eight on-air correspondents and hosts were given their pink slips – and all of them are women, with half of them people of color. According to three sources with knowledge of the situation, a male correspondent was initially included on the layoff list but was removed after he appealed directly to the new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, leading to another female correspondent being added to the list at the last minute.“

Nice. Classy. We’ve noted how Bari Weiss, a “contrarian” right wing opinion troll who has failed upward into her new job at CBS News (despite no serious experience in actual journalism), was hired by Ellison to ensure that CBS is nicer to far right wingers like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu (the softening of the latter’s ongoing war crimes being clearly important to Larry and Bari alike).

While Weiss is busy firing black and female employees and journalists, she’s apparently under the impression that she’s important enough to warrant a $10,000 a day security detail:

“Page Six hears that as staffers watch their colleagues pack up their desks, they’re also learning that the security detail for new CBSNews boss Bari Weiss costs the company five figures every day. Insiders tell us that eight bodyguards surround the Free Press founder at all times, and she’s shuttled around in a caravan of SUVs, much like the president and vice president.”

Weiss is busy eyeballing new CBS news hosts to replace the ones she already fired, and most of them (unsurprisingly) appear to be coming over from Fox News. Folks like Weiss will vehemently deny this (possibly even to herself), but the Ellisons’ goal here is to demolish whatever was left of CBS’ already pretty flimsy journalism, and turn the outlet into yet another right wing propaganda mill (see: Sinclair, Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, OANN) financed by profits from the infotainment arm (again, much like Fox).

That’s the plan, anyway. There’s no indication that this weird assortment of fail-upward brunchlords, nepobabies, and authoritarian apologists will actually succeed. The media market for billionaire ass kissing is pretty saturated (see: WAPO), U.S. media is an unforgiving and ever-changing mess being endlessly disrupted by new media and piracy, and we all saw what happened when AT&T tried to buy their way to modern media domination (spoiler: they fled screaming toward the exits after setting billions on fire).

It’s far more likely this effort stumbles around drunkenly for a few years, before the entire mess is offloaded to some clumsy new suitor in a few years allowing the pointless cycle to begin anew.

Well, this is actually pretty fascinating. We’ve been discussing the somewhat bizzare patent lawsuit Nintendo is waging against PocketPair in Japan for some time now. PocketPair is the company behind the hit game Palworld, which has obviously drawn inspiration from the Pokémon franchise, without doing any direct copying. Powering this attack were several held or applied-for patents in Japan that cover some pretty general gameplay elements, most, if not all, of which have plenty of prior art in previous games and/or game mods. Most recently, two things happened on opposite sides of the ocean. In September, the USPTO approved a couple of new, but related patents in a manner that had at least one patent attorney calling it an “embarrassing failure.” Separately, in Japan, a patent that Nintendo applied for, which sits in between two approved patents that are being wielded in the Palworld lawsuit, was rejected for being unoriginal and for which prior art exists. Given how interrelated that patent is with the other approved patents, the same logic would apply to the approved patents, bringing into question whether all of these patents should just be invalidated.

Back on the USPTO side, one of the patents that was approved without proper due diligence was patent #12,403,397 and covers the summoning a “sub character” that will either fight at your command or fight autonomously based on input from the player. Again, prior art abounds in this sort of thing, which is the “embarrassing failure” mentioned earlier.

Well, in what is apparently the first time in a decade, USPTO Director John Squires personally ordered a re-examination of this patent.

John A Squires has personally ordered a re-examination of the patent, citing previous patents which might make it invalid. Specifically, Squires has focused on the patent’s claim to having a sub-character fight alongside you with the option to make them fight either automatically or via manual control. In his order, Squires said he had “determined that substantial new questions of patentability have arisen” based on the publications of two previous patents, named as Yabe and Taura.

The Yabe patent was granted in 2002 to Konami, and refers to a sub-character fighting alongside the player either automatically or manually, while the Taura patent was granted in 2020 to Nintendo itself, and also refers to a sub-character who battles alongside the player.

Yes, one of the previous patents that might invalidate this one is held by Nintendo itself. And I would argue that these gameplay mechanic patents are still far too generic and obvious to those in the industry to be patentable at all. That isn’t Squires’ argument, however. Instead, the original examiner did some true tilting at windmills to pretend like prior art didn’t exist because of minute specifics in this new patent and so never considered the Yabe and Taura patents.

While this doesn’t directly relate to the patent suit in Japan, it’s hard not to see this in the context of the patent rejection in Japan, never mind how the rest of this weird lawsuit is going, and not see that this is a house of cards that is collapsing in on Nintendo.

And, most importantly, I still can’t see how any of this is worth it for Nintendo. Bad publicity, legal costs, time, energy, effort, and for what? Palworld is still a hit and the Pokémon franchise is still strong. What are we doing here?

We’ve long established that modern “smart” devices aren’t always all that smart.

Whether it’s “smart” door locks that are easily hacked to gain entry, “smart” refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials, or “smart” vehicles that sell data to insurance companies without your permission, the act of modernizing something with internet access and a CPU isn’t always a step forward.

The latest case in point: one owner of the $300 iLife A11 smart vacuum realized that the device wasn’t just cleaning his home, it was creating a map of his entire living space, and then openly broadcasting it to its parent company via the internet:

“I’m a bit paranoid — the good kind of paranoid,” he wrote. “So, I decided to monitor its network traffic, as I would with any so-called smart device.” Within minutes, he discovered a “steady stream” of data being sent to servers “halfway across the world.”

“My robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, transmitting logs and telemetry that I had never consented to share,” Narayanan wrote. “That’s when I made my first mistake: I decided to stop it.”

When he prevented the device from sending data back to the corporate mothership, the device refused to boot up. After several efforts to get it “repaired,” the device fell out of warranty and he was left with a $300 paperweight. At that point, he dug a bit more deeply into the device, and found it was using Google Cartographer to create 3D maps of his home that were being transmitted back to its parent company.

Like most data collection of this type (in a country with no modern privacy laws or functioning privacy regulators), the vacuum maker wasn’t informing customers of this data collection and transmission. Digging through the vacuum’s code, he says he found specific instructions to stop the vacuum from working if the data collection ceased:

“In addition, Narayanan says he uncovered a suspicious line of code broadcasted from the company to the vacuum, timestamped to the exact moment it stopped working. “Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

This is just a vacuum. The same thing is happening with far more important devices, like your phone and vehicle. And again, we live in a country with a President (and corrupt court system) who is making it impossible to hold companies accountable for any of it.

Either by blocking regulatory oversight “legally” (see attempts to fine AT&T for location data collection), or by basically lobotomizing agencies like the FTC and FCC. U.S. privacy enforcement was already a sad joke; now it’s basically nonexistent. Surely that won’t be a problem longer term, right?

We’ve always been wary of putting cops in schools. Putting cops in schools just means administrative issues (i.e., student discipline) get the law enforcement treatment, which turns misbehavior into criminal acts and generates exactly the sort of school cop overreactions you’d expect.

Adding AI-assisted tech was never going to improve anything. Administrators were certainly told by salespeople that things like “gun detection AI” would not only increase safety, but reduce the number of personnel needed to keep guns out of schools.

Evolv has taken most of the heat in recent years for providing under-performing gun detection tech to schools and, with the outgoing NYC mayor’s blessing, city subways. In the first case, public records showed Evolv’s tech tended to flag a lot of harmless, normal things that students take to school (3-ring binders, laptops) as guns, suggesting the tech was really just an over-engineered metal detector.

In the latter case, Evolv explicitly told the city of New York that its tech would under-perform if installed in subways. After all, it had already under-performed in a Bronx hospital, where it had racked up an 85% false positive rate. Any place with a lot of electricity, electronics, and lots of people moving around constantly apparently overwhelmed the tech. But since Mayor Eric Adams was spending other people’s money, Evolv’s tech was placed in subways… where it immediately engaged in the expected under-performance.

Omnilert is the other big player in the school gun detection AI market. Its track record isn’t a whole lot better. Earlier this year, its tech failed to detect the gun carried by the student who killed one student and injured another before turning the undetected gun on himself.

Omnilert is back in the news, and it’s brought a cops along for the ride.

Armed police handcuffed and searched a student at a high school in Baltimore County, Maryland, this week after an AI-driven security system flagged the teen’s empty bag of chips as a possible firearm.

[…]

“They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me,” Kenwood student Taki Allen told CNN affiliate WBAL, describing what happened Monday evening when police arrived at the school while he was waiting with friends for a ride home after football practice.

Yep, that’s what they’re paying for in Baltimore County, Maryland: the sort of incident that not only makes readers desperate to search out the perfect “Takis” take on the AI blunder, but prompts dozens more to simply ask:

The absurdity and inadvertent hilarity can really only be appreciated by those who weren’t held at gunpoint by a whole bunch of police officers.

“The first thing I was wondering was, was I about to die? Because they had a gun pointed at me,” Allen told WBAL, saying about “eight cop cars” pulled up to the school.

Here’s how the Baltimore County PD phrased its response to the incident, which leaves out all the stuff about a swarm of cops and guns being pointed at someone who was holding nothing more dangerous than a handful of saturated fat.

The department told WBAL officers responded to “a report of a suspicious person with a weapon” but determined the person was unarmed after a search.

I know it’s unreasonable to expect a detailed play-by-play from police spokespeople, but this makes it sound like a couple of officers calmly approached someone, did a quick frisk, and went back to calmly patrolling the neighborhood. And while I understand the alternative to a swift, potentially violent response to a suspected threat near a school is pretty much just asking for another Uvalde, there needs to be some sort of backstop between AI thinking it saw a gun and cops showing up and waving around the only actual guns on the premises.

Omnilert has apologized, but its apology contains a statement that drastically redefines a commonly used term:

Omnilert, the company that operates the AI gun detection system, expressed regret over the incident and emphasized that its system is designed to identify a possible threat and elevate it to human review.

[…]

“While the object was later determined not to be a firearm, the process functioned as intended: to prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification,” the company added.

Calling the cops is not the same thing as “human review.” “Human review” is the missing step. And it’s a crucial one. It’s the thing that could possibly prevent someone from being killed by police officers who’ve been told the person they’re looking for is armed when they clearly are not.

Now that the thing directly adjacent to the “Worst Possible Outcome” (the killing of an unarmed minor by police officers) has happened, the district is promising to do a bit more of the “human verification” Omnilert claims is already happening. It will also apparently be asking Omnilert why this happened. And I imagine Omnilert will simply tap the canned statement it made — the corporate version of thoughts and prayers — and suggest it’s the school’s fault that it trusted the AI’s alert, even though “you can trust the robot” is likely makes up a significant portion of Ominlert’s sales pitch.

Oh. Wait. That’s exactly what the Omnilert sales pitch says:

Our expertise in AI has roots in the U.S. Department of Defense and DARPA related to real-time target recognition and threat classification. That military focus on high reliability and precision carried through to the development of our AI threat detection that goes beyond identifying guns to finding active shooter threats.

We employ a data-centric AI methodology that prioritizes high-quality training data. While traditional methods focus on data volume, sourcing millions of gun images, we take a quality-over-quantity approach. Our training data is hand-curated with rich annotations that improve accuracy and increase reliability.

Until the school either kicks this tech to the curb or forces Omnilert to do better, students would be wise to follow the announcements posted on the bulletin board and only purchase Doritoguns from vending machines during their lunch period or other pre-approved break period.

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The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censorial and the most dismissive of the First Amendment in modern history. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again we see the Trump administration engaging in blatant and obvious speech suppression.

So it’s no surprise that Republicans all across the country are now responding to any criticism or any reporting on their illegal activities as something they can threaten to suppress. ProPublica recently had an eye-opening deep dive into North Carolina’s Supreme Court chief justice, Paul Newby, who seems to view his job not as ensuring justice is served, but in bending every aspect of the North Carolina judicial system to favor and help Republicans.

It’s a long article, but you get the gist of it here:

Few beyond North Carolina’s borders grasp the outsize role Newby, 70, has played in transforming the state’s top court from a relatively harmonious judicial backwater to a front-line partisan battleground since his election in 2004.

Under North Carolina’s constitution, Supreme Court justices are charged with upholding the independence and impartiality of the courts, applying laws fairly and ensuring all citizens get treated equally.

Yet for years, his critics charge, Newby has worked to erode barriers to politicization.

He pushed to make judicial elections in North Carolina — once a national leader in minimizing political influence on judges — explicitly partisan and to get rid of public financing, leaving candidates more dependent on dark money. Since Newby’s allies in the legislature shepherded through laws enacting those changes, judicial campaigns have become vicious, high-dollar gunfights that have produced an increasingly polarized court dominated by hard-right conservatives. 

As chief justice, he and courts under him have consistently backed initiatives by Republican lawmakers to strip power away from North Carolina’s governor, thwarting the will of voters who have chosen Democrats to lead the state since 2016. He’s also used his extensive executive authority to transform the court system according to his political views, such as by doing away with diversity initiatives. Under his leadership, some liberal and LGBTQ+ employees have been replaced with conservatives. A devout Christian and church leader, he speaks openly about how his faith has shaped his jurisprudence and administration of the courts.

As is happening all too often in American politics, what we’re seeing is the politicization of just about everything. That’s a shame for many reasons—namely that politics is supposed to be just about making the case for getting elected, but after that you should govern (and handle judicial matters) in an unbiased manner.

But the really striking thing in the piece is how the Republican Party tried to threaten ProPublica to drop the story by pulling a “if you don’t, we’ll tell Daddy Trump to punish you.”

When ProPublica emailed questions to Newby’s daughter, the North Carolina Republican Party’s communications director, Matt Mercer, responded, writing that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against “NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any comments whatsoever.” 

“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump Administration and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter,” Mercer said in his email. “I would strongly suggest dropping this story.” 

It’s the Brendan Carr shakedown all over again. Just non-stop, thuggish, mafioso-style bullying. “If you don’t shut up, we’ll find a way to punish you.”

It remains truly astounding that Trump and the MAGA folks spent years claiming to be the party of free speech, when basically every few days yet another one of these stories pops up. Directly calling out that if ProPublica continues to report on a very powerful, extremely politically-motivated judge, they’re going to call up Daddy Trump and have him punish you?

Pure censorial thuggishness.

But it also reveals something crucial: the MAGA GOP knows that this kind of journalism works. When ProPublica exposes how North Carolina’s chief justice has systematically corrupted the state’s courts to favor Republicans, that exposure is genuinely dangerous to their project. The threat itself is the tell—they wouldn’t bother threatening reporters if this kind of reporting didn’t matter.

And that’s the real story here. Not that they’re hypocrites about free speech (we knew that), but that their entire governance model now depends on preventing the public from learning what they’re actually doing. They have no actual policy positions that can survive scrutiny, and what they’re doing is so ridiculously unpopular that their only remaining move is threatening anyone who documents it.

Which means: keep documenting it.