I’ve been a professional internet addict since 1997, turning my info-addiction into a living for most of that time.

There have been some very fat years.

Like when I worked on behalf of Corporate America as a Director at Austin’s most powerful public affairs firm — but alas, the corner office with a 9th-floor view of Lady Bird Lake wasn’t for me.

Like when I managed four out of Vox Media’s ten most popular websites — but alas, the startup turned into a (really lame and doomed) corporation, and I’m not a big-organization guy.

There have been some very lean years.

Like when I got drummed out of Democratic politics both in Texas and then in DC and was helping build what was then SB Nation and became Vox Media for a pittance.

Like when I lost ownership of my popular UFC/MMA website, Bloody Elbow, after less than a year of owning it independently and battled a complete mental breakdown.

But I’m crawling back up, thanks to support from my family, Zach Arnold, who helped me keep my MMA Draw Substack alive, and Ian Welsh and Yves Smith (of NakedCapitalism.com), who gave me a chance to write about politics and business for their prestigious and popular sites.

Point being, I consume much more information than I can process and comment on in a longer-form format, so I’m going to start doing a weekly links roundup here at NatWilsonTurner.com.

With that preamble out of the way, let’s get to it.

From me this week

Irving Berlin Defined American Music: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 2.11

Most of y’all probably don’t know that I’ve been doing a Music History podcast called Let It Roll since 2018. We’ve racked up 500 episodes, and now I’m re-presenting them all in chronological order by topic (we’re already 23 episodes deep; better get started if you want to catch up). Today’s was a special favorite.

I originally booked this interview because I wanted to talk to James Kaplan about his incredible two-part biography of Frank Sinatra and didn’t know much about Irving Berlin, but it was Kaplan’s current book so I jumped at the chance to talk to him.

But after reading the book and talking to James about it for an hour, I became a huge admirer of Berlin and was deeply touched by his story.

A classic second-generation immigrant’s tale, Berlin’s gifts not only enriched America, they defined American music.

The dude wrote “God Bless America” and “White Christmas” for God’s sake. Plus hundreds of others, many of which remain culturally current today: “Puttin On the Ritz” “Blue Skies” etc etc etc

But his story also touched my heart: The tragic loss of his first wife on their honeymoon in Cuba (inspiring the heartbreaking “Only You”), his pursuit through song of a millionaire heiress whose WASP father who didn’t approve of Berlin but couldn’t keep his songs out of her ears (he even took her to Europe to get away but Irving’s music had already beaten them to every destination!) or his love out of her heart, their marriage and loss of their infant first son on Christmas, the tearful reunion with the Father-in-Law who had initially refused to recognize the marriage but showed up immediately when his daughter was grieving, and finally the story of the secret Christmas ritual that he and his wife practiced until her death -- never explaining to their other children that they were dressing up and going out to put a wreath on their first child’s tomb.

Gave a whole new interpretation to “White Christmas.”

Happy listening, Nate

• Short the Saudis in Combat Sports and Everywhere Else — The MMA Draw

  
  Before I was Nat Wilson Turner, I was Kid Nate, the founder of Bloody Elbow (sadly lost to me now), and I still cover combat sports, but mostly through the lens of the financing and power players who own the UFC, WWE, and are currently trying to monopolize boxing globally.
  

  The MMA Draw newsletter is more about “King of Hollywood” Ari Emanuel (brother of Rahm and Zeke), his company TKO which has monopolized MMA and pro wrestling and is trying to monopolize boxing (with Saudi backing).

  
  The regular cast of characters includes UFC frontman Dana White, disgraced former WWE owner Vince McMahon, Donald Trump, David Ellison of Paramount (Ari’s biggest money mark), Egon Durban of Silver Lake (financial brains behind Michael Dell and Ari), the Saudi enforcer turned boxing mogul Turki Alalshikh, and many more such charming individuals.
  
  Zach Arnold and I also do a podcast called The Mad Squabbles Show where we try to grapple with the reality of combat sports turning from a sleazy backwater run by small-time grifters and carnies to Ari Emanuel’s multi-billion-dollar international empire.

Worth watching

• Disgraceful Degradation — Dmitry Orlov. Orlov, one of the founders of “collapseology,” moves to YouTube and makes a major change to his famous analogy that US collapse will resemble Soviet collapse.

I feel sorry to have led people down a garden path that doesn’t lead to anything specific. People wanted to know when to throw the bags full of cans of spam and shotgun shells into the back of the pickup truck and drive for the hills. Feel free to do that anytime you like, I kept telling them. But I feel that I must do better. And now I believe that I finally can. If I think about something long and hard, sometimes a good idea does eventually pop into my head. I have no idea how that happens. It just happens. or it doesn’t. And in this case, it has finally dawned on me that there was to begin with a flaw in my comparison of the USA and the USSR. They’re not quite symmetrical after all.

There is a key difference that have that I have been neglecting to take into account. Yes, they were both 20th century military and industrial superpowers, and they both espoused opposing now defunct ideologies. and my superpower collapse soup analogy applied almost equally to both of them. But there is a rather important difference between them. The US is a colonial empire much like the British Empire and other western empires were once. These empires were based on the exploitation of their colonial possessions. They sucked resources out of them while preventing their social and economic development. Along the way, they saddled them with permanent debt servitude. They enforced their trade policies through military means. But the heavy-handed tactics of previous colonial eras are no longer necessary. Instead, there is control of mass media, cyber warfare, color revolutions, the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury with its endless sanctions. These are all means of coercing compliance. from countless from countries around the world. And what this compliance means is willingness to export products and commodities in exchange for US government debt.

This is the wealth pump which the US has been running for decades to drain wealth from around the world to export inflation and to subjugate much of the planet. This wealth pump has become less effective over time. But even if it stops working altogether, there is a fall back to an older American technique, piracy. How well it can be made to work in the 21st century remains to be seen. But it won’t fail for the lack of trying.

• Cold War 2.0 #84: Russia Secretly Helps Iran Develop Supersonic Missiles — Syriana Analysis, with Tarik Cyril Amar. Tarik Cyril Amar’s weekly appearances on Syriana Analysis are a weekly must listen to me. I love their dynamic, their accents, their humor, and they are subject matter experts I trust as much as I trust anyone about these topics (I trust no one about these topics).

• Russia’s Ukraine Endgame — Putin Has Lost Patience With Zelensky — Vladimir Brovkin and World Affairs in Context. Former Harvard Prof Dr. Vladimir Brovkin understands Russia better than most. He’s worth listening to.

• Setback for Trump: Iran intensifies US strikes as Vance denies wedding attack — Janta Ka Reporter. Great daily anti-Imperialist news roundups, and presenter Rifad Jawaid’s vicious and hilarious commentary on Trump regime buffoonery is always amusing listening — even when covering the most awful shit.

• On Sh*t… Another Private Credit Fund Just Blew Up — Eurodollar University. My go-to for coverage of private credit’s struggles.

The AI bubble and its doomers

• Did 700 AI bots actually form a civilization? — User Mag. Betteridge’s law of headlines in action. Doomerism is the other side of the coin of AI hype.

• Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit — The New York Times. Wait for the doomer swerve. He’s playing up the scary trying to save MSFT’s investment in OpenAI. This is straight bullshite.

• Dwarkesh Patel’s wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident — Gary Marcus. Marcus calls out the well-written and compelling AI doomer BS, with a classic Douglas Hofstadter line about Ray Kurzweil:

  “What I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”

• Red Alert: OpenAI is poised to cross an AI safety red line — Gary Marcus. Every time you think Scam Altman can’t make things worse, here he comes with some new outrage.

• The new Sanders-Casar Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act – and why I oppose it — Gary Marcus. I am generally politically aligned with Sanders and Casar but I do not trust them on tech issues.

• Taxpayers Must Not Be on the Hook for Bailing Out the AI Industry — Truthout. Oh but we will be.

Politics and corruption

• Michael Needham — The White House Hack Tells All — John Helmer. A great piece on one of the newest idiots in the Trump administration, possibly the least qualified Deputy National Security Advisor in US history.

• How a Brazilian Billionaire Helped Shape Trump’s Beef Import Plan — The Wall Street Journal. Joesley Batista met with Trump a day before the president announced a plan to waive tariffs on beef imports, angering farmers and ranchers.

• A Crash Course Into the 14 Names on Rep. Thomas Massie’s Epstein List — bekah day. Fine folks.

• Rahm Emanuel: ‘You Don’t Like My Ideas? Show Me Yours’ — Rolling Stone. This asshole….

• Rahm Emanuel and Brothers to Donate $550,000 to Train Palestinian Pediatric Doctors in Israel — Haaretz. Cynicism taken to new depths.

• Democrats shocked after 2 members cross aisle to help Republicans — CNN. Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez rescued a GOP procedural vote, reportedly to clear the way for Golden’s lobstermen bill. It also let Johnson proceed to messaging votes Democrats oppose, including a resolution condemning socialism.

Also worth your time

• Paid actors, AI writing: How a new kind of video business cashed in on America’s divided politics — Semafor

• US Crude Oil Production Is Showing A Lot Of Weakness — HFI Research. Not good for Team America.

• Spy-scammer shootout — Events in Ukraine. Ukraine just over-the-top insane.

  
  

After all, we’ve got a rancid dotard in Trump threatening to nuke Iran in the midst of what John Mearsheimer is calling the greatest geo-strategic disaster in US history, why bother with ol’ black-hearted Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats reckon with just how vile, stupid, and deadly the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit and the end of the republic will only escalate.

There is currently a well-funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic Party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (they got him) and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan (they’re still trying, although he’s up in the polls, they’ve already got him in knots over condemning random statements off Hasan Piker’s live stream).

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

There are some signs that’s happening because, as Bryce Green pointed out on a recent episode of American Exception:

Some leftists recently were paddled all across the Internet. They were spanked on social media just for trying to talk shit about Iranian political prisoners whom they don’t name but like so it’s the tide has turned; now you can’t even do fake left stuff without getting castigated, which is a good sign.

And I like to think part of the anger at and awareness of our godawful shitlib zionist Dem Party establishment is a result of the Biden administration having attempted to bullshit their way through four years of disaster, but instead of having a charismatic, young, generational political talent out front like Bill Clinton or Obama, they trotted out the American political equivalent of Pope Benedict, Aging Patron of Child Molesting Priests.

So let’s look at the Delaware liar’s abysmal record as US President.

I’m going to argue that the senile asshole and the people around him actually running the country were responsible for not one, not two, but three mass death events that may or may not meet the legal definition of genocide, but certainly meet the moral one.

We’ll start with COVID.

Somehow Biden’s COVID Policies Were Worse Than Trump’s

An idiot like Trump, who’s openly an anti-science ignoramus could have been expected to bungle the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic like COVID. And of course Trump’s policies were a disaster. I don’t have time or space to litigate that here.

I’m just saying that as awful as Trump was on the issue, Biden managed to be even worse — when competence and sanity were key parts of his campaign pitch.

But Biden explicitly promised a return to best practices, “follow the science” and all that.

Instead we got “take the vax” and “get back to work.”

There was never a correction of the bad science of 2020 to clearly explain to people that COVID was spread via aerosols in the air, was rarely transmissable outdoors, and could be largely contained indoors with good ventilation systems and air quality monitoring.

There was also the huge lie that the vaccine would prevent transmission. That lie fooled a lot of people because many vaccines do prevent transmission (measles, polio, mumps, etc), but not for a corona virus like COVID. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell — people know that there’s no point in making a common cold vaccine because it’s a corona virus and changes too fast. We’ve accepted the need for new flu vaccines every year for the same reason.

But no explanations were forthcoming from the ghouls in the Biden administration. Just quiet announcements that data was going to be restricted.

It was the gaslighting of the Biden era that was the hardest thing to take (as long as his policies didn’t give you COVID that is). Four years of assholes insisting “he’s not senile, he’s got a stutter,” “the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”, “the IDF is investigating” and all that crap. Was enough to drive a person insane. It certainly strained my relationships with friends and family and cost me at least one decade-long creative partnership.

The injury added to the insult was diverting money for COVID relief and prevention diverted to law enforcement and other bullshit.

The green series ends after 2022: CDC’s excess-death dataset stops at the week ending 16 September 2023 and was never resumed. The gap in the chart is the blackout, drawn to scale.

If Biden Was Out of It, Who Actually Did This?

Funny you should ask.

I happen to think it’s important to lay the blame where it belongs with murderous vermin like Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Obama’s ebola coordinator whose hiring was supposed to signal a return to competence.

Instead he pulled shit like retweeting MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle calling the OSHA vaccine rule “an ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations” which retweet was then cited by The Fifth Circuit as an endorsement when it stayed the rule, and Gorsuch pointed to it when the Supreme Court killed the mandate that January. The chief of staff’s own tweet helped sink the only workplace-safety rule the administration attempted.

Then there was COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, a management consultant and one-time Facebook board member with no public health background, wwho was somehow selected to run the response as a logistics problem for the entire vax-only stretch: the May 2021 unmasking, the Delta summer, the December 2021 rapid-test shortage, the blame-the-unvaccinated presser that December.

Criticized on the way out for rosy predictions of a COVID-free summer and for the test shortage; Public Citizen went after him on global vaccine access. He failed upward to become Biden’s chief of staff in February 2023 with God only knows how many American corpses ground under his wing-tips.

Somehow Zients’ Deputy Response Coordinator Natalie Quillian didn’t save the day, I guess her experience as Deputy Campaign Manager hadn’t really prepared her for handling a pandemic. Go figure.

And who can forget CDC Director Rochelle Walensky who wrote the May 2021 guidance telling vaccinated people to unmask at roughly 35% full vaccination, the statement that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, the December 2021 isolation cut from ten days to five under airline pressure, and the February 2022 Community Levels metric that turned the map green. A regular magician of mass murder!

And then there’s Zients’ replacement as Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, who kicked off the “personal risk assessment” era and fobbed off the government’s responsibility to lead a united national pandemic strategy off on individuals left to fend for ourselves.

Jha’s October 2022 National Strategy for Improving Indoor Air Quality is the document that proves they knew what ventilation would take but for reasons that have always baffled me, the chance to do well by doing good (ie it would have been a massive honest graft and payoff opportunity, the kind good government runs on) and funding and leading a national campaign to improve indoor ventilation in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and workplaces….instead he declared the pandemic over while hundreds of thousands died.

And let’s have a special shout-out for the The Biden-Harris transition COVID advisory board: Co-chairs David Kessler, Vivek Murthy, Marcella Nunez-Smith. Members Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm, Céline Gounder, Atul Gawande, Luciana Borio, Rick Bright, David Michaels, Julie Morita, Loyce Pace, Eric Goosby, Jill Jim, Jane Hopkins.

Special plaudits to board members David Michaels and Ezekiel Emanuel (older brother of disgraced ex-Chicago Mayor Rahm and UFC and WWE owner Ari Emanuel).

Michaels, an epidemiologist and Obama’s head of OSHA for eight years, who publicly called for an emergency OSHA standard covering inhalation hazards but was awful quiet when Biden (or someone not senile acting on his behalf) killed his own OSHA’s proposed rule.

Emanuel joined five other former transition COVID advisory board members in publishing three JAMA viewpoints calling for a “new normal” of life with COVID, explicitly rejecting elimination, just as Omicron peaked.

Dr. Emanuel boldly said, “we’re not going to defeat the coronavirus. It’s here to stay.”

The White House distanced itself from the papers — and then adopted the posture seven weeks later with the Community Levels change.

But never fear, Zeke got his back when he was very early to distance himself from the Biden administration’s disastrous COVID policy. Family trait of the Emanuels to be on both sides of every issue.

Cross-posted at IanWelsh.net.

Tons of news, let’s move fast.

The Mighty FT Confirms Ed Zitron’s Reporting

And if you know the kinds of things Ed Zitron’s been reporting about OpenAI’s finances, you know that’s really really, really bad…for Altman and OpenAI.

And maybe for the whole LLM-based US economy.

Here’s what Ed found, and FT confirmed:

OpenAI spent $34bn last year as the ChatGPT maker poured money into a race to dominate the fast-growing AI market ahead of a planned stock market listing.

Audited financial figures confirmed by people familiar with the matter show the company spent about $19bn on research and development in 2025 and nearly $6bn on sales and marketing, as well as other costs.

The spending figures, up sharply from the previous year, offer a rare glimpse into the economics underpinning the AI boom, particularly OpenAI’s lavish outlay to build models, fund data centres and recruit top researchers.

The numbers, which were first shared with the FT by independent journalist Ed Zitron, suggest OpenAI’s revenues are outstripped by rising costs. OpenAI booked about $13bn in revenue last year. By the end of 2025 it was generating $2bn in monthly revenue, up from $1bn a quarter at the end of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing businesses in history.

But heavy spending contributed to a nearly eightfold increase in the net loss attributable to OpenAI, which soared from $5bn in 2024 to around $39bn in 2025. A person familiar with the matter said the large majority of that jump reflected a non-cash accounting charge linked to the company’s previous structure rather than its underlying operations.

Before we go back to the FT’s “person familiar with the matter”, let’s also look at some numbers from the WSJ, via Gary Marcus

Read the rest at Naked Capitalism

Three awful topics jammed into one great post. My August vacation has left me behind and I need to catch up on my various beats: Trump 2.0 regime corruptions, the US 2028 Elections, and the ongoing Large Language Model AI bubble.

Wednesday, I’ll be back to talk OpenAI, circular financing, Face Hugging and how doomerism feeds into AI hype.

No time to waste. Let’s get to it.

The UAE Spooks Don’t Spook Trump, Will His Scams Spook Them?

On August 14 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave the Trump family’s crypto outfit preliminary conditional approval for a federally chartered national trust bank — the first time a sitting president’s family business has been handed a national bank charter.

Thirteen days later the Wall Street Journal reported that the largest stake in that bank’s holding company, 49 percent of it, belongs to a vehicle controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan — the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, the man the press calls the spy sheikh, and the man who runs G42, the Emirati state AI company the administration has been clearing to buy advanced American chips. A Trump family entity holds another 38 percent.

Talk about two great things that go great together. Imaginary dialogue:

Donald, Jr: “Hey you got your desperate, dying, mafioso petrostate money in my slapped together scampire!”

Tahnoun: “Hey you got your scampire in my asset portfolio which is otherwise full of oil and US treasury bonds I can’t sell!”

Both: “Hey wait, this makes arrow go up and to the right! We win again! Our enemies may be closing in but we’re too smart for them!”

Forgive me for that bad joke.

Read the rest at Naked Capitalism.

Let’s get the basics out of the way and then we’ll spend a little time in the cesspool that is South Carolina politics, including a look at the meltdown of cable TV star congressional Rep. Nancy Mace and the deep corruption of Dem. Rep. Jim Clyburn and his alliance with the state GOP.

Here’s the Wiki on the race to catch up.

Dumbass Darline Won, Really?

In the final stretch of the campaign last week Darline Graham put on a Hall of Fame bad performance, piling gaffe upon gaffe atop admissions of ignorance, all capped by a completely insane special rally appearance by POTUS Trump.

Here’s the basics from the AP:

Sen. Darline Graham — a political newcomer appointed to the seat held by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham — will win a special GOP primary runoff to replace her brother on the South Carolina ballot, the Associated Press projected Tuesday.

Graham, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump, defeated Rep. Ralph Norman, a staunch conservative and member of the hard line Freedom Caucus, who had also advanced to the runoff, following South Carolina’s special Senate primary earlier this month.

Graham will face Democratic candidate Annie Andrews in November.
…
“Now, the critics say I shouldn’t run for the Senate. They say I’m not a politician. You know what I say? Guilty as charged,” Graham said during the rally to cheers. “And by the way, President Trump had never served in an elected office before, and I think he’s done a damn good job.”

Trump, later on, effusively praised Graham, saying “she only knows how to put America first.”

We should note that even Sainted Brother Lindsey didn’t go unchallenged, having won a 6 way primary just weeks before his tragic, tragic, tragic, death.

The full post also covers the role of Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn in Graham’s victory over the GOP base (TPUSA specifically blamed cross-over voters), the epic meltdown of former cable news congressional hottie Nancy Mace and the two women vying to replace her:

Read the full post at Naked Capitalism.

Mark Carney Calls BS

It was looking like the Trump 2.0 regime and Canada were about to finalize a trade deal — something they’d been working on since Trump declared “Liberation Day” in April 2025 and declared a trade war on the entire planet.

The Canadians apparently thought a deal was nearly done and then it wasn’t, per Fox News:

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accused the United States on Saturday of making a last-minute “power play” by trying to restrict Canada’s ability to strike trade deals with other countries, offering new details about what he said caused negotiations between the two sides to collapse.

Carney said the U.S. introduced new demands in the final hours of negotiations involving Canada’s other trading relationships, its auto sector and protections for Canadian culture and the French language.

“The U.S. introduced at the last hours, in the last hour, efforts to restrict our ability to have other trade deals,” Carney told reporters.

Asked what he believed the U.S. was trying to accomplish, Carney responded, “It’s a power play. It’s a power play and, you know, [it] becomes a question of sovereignty.”

Here are Carney’s full remarks which are well worth watching because this is world-historic stuff and for all of Carney’s limitations, he has been the sole chief executive of a US ally/NATO member/5 eyes state to really stand up to Trump:

Read the rest at Naked Capitalism.

Four particularly stressed oligarchs are getting a lot of negative attention this week as Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta faces a $1.4 trillion lawsuit, Sam Altman’s OpenAI is bleeding talent and their IPO seems an ever more remote possibility, and Larry and David Ellison are in a full-on media war with 12 attorneys general over their attempted merger of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery.

Let’s start with the least likable of the bunch…just kidding, who could dislike any of these charmers?

Meta’s Legal Jeopardy Multiplies

But seriously, Mark Zuckerberg has to be one of the least sympathetic characters in American business history so let’s start with a quick celebration of his current legal troubles.

Let’s use the Gray Lady’s coverage for the basics:

Meta on Tuesday again defended itself over claims it addicted young people to social media, this time in a federal trial brought by states seeking roughly $200 billion in penalties and changes to the company’s platforms.

In opening statements, California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey accused the social media giant, which owns Instagram and Facebook, of harming children with technology designed to be addictive like cigarettes.
…
The suit charges the company with violating federal child privacy laws and state consumer protection laws.

“Hook the users. Hold them for as long as they can. Harvest their data. Hide the truth from the public when making public statements,” Megan O’Neill, a lawyer for the states, said during her opening statement. “Meta’s business model worked especially well for kids.”

Read the rest at Naked Capitalism

LA’s Sports King Suddenly Falls From Grace

Last fall, Walter was on top of the world as his Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the third time in the 2020s after winning the National League pennant five times under Walter’s ownership.

Sean Paul Kelley waxed romantic about the team and their incredible star Shohei Ohtani, as close to the second coming of Babe Ruth as the game is ever likely to see.

And in 2024, the business press was just as effusive about the man who owned the team, via Fortune:

When Mark Walter, founder of investment firm Guggenheim Partners, bought the bankrupt Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012, many thought he’d overpaid. The $2.1 billion was almost double what anyone had ever spent for a sports team, and he had to outbid billionaire hedge funder Steve Cohen to get it.

Few would quibble with the price now. That amount has since been eclipsed nine times in deals for sports franchises, including the $2.4 billion Cohen paid for the New York Mets in 2020, while the Dodgers have gone on to become Major League Baseball’s most perennially competitive team.

The Dodgers purchase was “a forerunner in financial engineering and institutional money being put into sports team ownership,” said Marc Ganis, co-founder of consulting firm Sportscorp.

Of the deals since completed at a higher price than the Dodgers, six were led by individuals with a background in finance as sports teams have become one of the hottest investments around.

The resulting surge in values — the Dodgers are now worth $6.3 billion, according to a valuation by Sportico — helped power Walter to a personal fortune of $12.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 64-year-old’s sports portfolio includes stakes in the Premier League’s Chelsea football club, the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Sparks basketball teams, auto racing groups and the Women’s Professional Hockey League, which together total more than $3.7 billion, according to the index.

And the source of that fortune?

His biggest asset remains Guggenheim Partners, the $335 billion investment adviser that was a pioneer in raising permanent capital through insurance relationships. Walter founded the firm in 1999 along with partners including Peter Lawson-Johnston II, a descendent of mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim.

Walter, who is Guggenheim’s chief executive officer, also controls nine insurers with total adjusted capital of more than $4.7 billion at the end of 2023. His economic stake in them is worth roughly $900 million, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index.

But too much is never enough for these guys, is it?

Buying the Lakers Was One Franchise Over the Line

He bought the storied Los Angeles Lakers basketball franchise last October for a then-record $10 billion.

And the sudden sale raises a LOT of questions:

Read the rest on Naked Capitalism.

Sorry about that. The Ellison family media empire is the kind of vampire that has to be killed at the crossroads at daybreak with a silver sword, decapitated, have its mouth stuffed with garlic and its brain pulled out via the nose Egyptian-style before I’ll believe it’s dead or even mortally wounded.

Just talking metaphorically about a corporation here, no threats of violence intended in any way, shape or form in case anyone from DHS or the EU is reading this.

But let’s get down to brass tacks because the fact set has only gotten worse and worse.

Just look at the soaring costs of credit default swaps for Oracle, via Axios:

The Story Thus Far

The elderly Larry Ellison (and since Larry famously thinks he’s God, I’ll quote John Lennon speaking of the Apostles in 1980) and his “thick, ordinary” nepobaby failson David and the empire they hastily began assembling in 2025 appear to be in deep trouble on a number of fronts.

To review (for links, check the list of related posts at the end of this one):

• Larry Ellison is the CEO or Oracle and reportedly owns about 40% of its stock.

• Larry Ellison is sometimes described as the single largest private donor to the Israeli “Defense” Forces.

• August 2025: Larry financed the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount by his son David’s company Skydance in August 2025.

• September 2025: Oracle stock, and Ellison’s on-paper net worth exploded when he announced a massive investment in data centers in partnership with OpenAI. This briefly made Ellison the world’s 2nd richest human.

• October 2025: Paramount Skydance announces the acquisition of Bari Weiss’ blog The Free Press for $150 million and hired her as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

• January 2026: Oracle leads a consortium of investors in the $14 billion takeover of American TikTok which its Chinese owners were forced to spin off. Oracle’s stake is reported to be $2.2 billion.

• In February 2026, Paramount Skydance “won a bidding war” to acquire WBD (Warner Bros Discovery) for $110.9 billion after triggering a bidding war with Netflix that grossly inflated the sale price.

• At least three Gulf State sovereign wealth funds (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE) pledged a combined $24 billion to back the Paramount Skydance bid for WBD.

• Larry Ellison “irrevocably personally guaranteed” the WBD purchase with $45.7 billion to back the deal’s equity financing.

• Multiple antitrust suits have been filed on behalf of consumer, labor, and shareholder interests against the Paramount-WBD merger.

• Oracle’s stock price has plunged by more than half since its late 2025 peak and its bond yields are nearing junk bond territory.

Now let’s get to this week’s developments; they got it bad, and that ain’t good.

We’ll start with the long arm of the law that’s got the Ellisons all tangled up.

Lawsuits Freeze Deal

From the Hollywood Reporter on July 24th:

Paramount has agreed not to close its $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery until the court decides whether the deal violates antitrust laws.

The studio, in a court document filed on Friday alongside the coalition of states looking to block the merger, said it will hold off on consummating the acquisition until June 2027 or five days after the court issues a ruling on the case, whichever is earlier.

For Paramount, the delay in closing the deal may prove costly. Under the merger agreement, Warners shareholders are owed roughly $650 million per quarter or $6.9 million per day if the deal isn’t done by Sept. 30.

The truce comes a day after U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued an extension of a temporary restraining order barring Paramount from closing until Aug. 18 at the earliest.

Both sides are jockeying for an edge in preliminary injunction proceedings. Paramount had asked the court to hold a three-day evidentiary hearing next month, which the states opposed. The studio has maintained that the states’ understanding and calculation of the markets in the case are faulty.

In Friday’s filing, both sides agreed to cancel an Aug. 3 preliminary injunction hearing. They’ll file a joint statement of their respective cases regarding the scheduling of the trial by July 31.

And the legal battle is intense.

Superstar Lawyers on Both Sides, Paramount Forces New Judge

Paramount started beefing up their legal team in May per The Hollywood Reporter:

Jeffrey Kessler, a heavyweight in antitrust litigation who most recently secured a landmark win for states suing Live Nation, will defend Paramount‘s $110 billion megadeal for Warner Bros. Discovery.

The studio doesn’t expect legal challenges from the Justice Department, state prosecutors or foreign regulators, though Kessler would lead the studio’s defense if any are filed, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The addition of Kessler bolsters Paramount’s formidable legal team, led by Makan Delrahim, Trump’s former assistant attorney general for antitrust. Also representing the studio: David Gelfand, ex-deputy assistant attorney general for litigation in the antitrust division under former President Barack Obama, and lawyers at Latham & Watkins and Cravath, Swaine & Moore who have been seeking regulatory approval of the deal.

The States Attorneys General brought in some legal ringers, via Reuters on the 13th:

California said on Monday it has hired law firm Milbank to ​help with its lawsuit seeking to block Paramount’s (PSKY.O), opens new tab merger with Warner Bros (WBD.O), opens new tab, gaining access to ‌top antitrust lawyers who can go toe to toe with Paramount’s legal team.

The move also sets up a potential clash between President Donald Trump’s administration, which backed the merger, and a firm that decided to settle with Trump when he targeted ​law firms over their past clients, hiring practices and ties to Trump’s perceived enemies.
…
California’s team from ​Milbank includes Richard Parker and James Weingarten, a former U.S. government antitrust lawyer on the team that unsuccessfully tried ​to stop Microsoft’s $69 billion bid for Activision Blizzard.

Jeffrey Kessler of law firm Winston Taylor said he will be lead trial counsel defending the merger for Paramount, which has also hired former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement.

On July 15, Paramount answered by, per the LA Times:

Paramount Skydance has prevailed in its first court move to defend its Warner Bros. Discovery merger — prompting the departure of a judge who initially had been assigned the high-profile antitrust case.

Late Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín took over the case brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and 11 other Democratic state attorneys general. The states’ coalition is attempting to derail Paramount’s proposed $111-billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, alleging it violates a century-old antitrust law.

Court records show U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts, based in San Jose, had initially been assigned. Early Wednesday, Paramount filed a motion requesting that Pitts step aside, citing his previous role as a labor lawyer, including for the Writers Guild of America.

The WGA joined the legal fray Tuesday by bringing its own antitrust complaint against Paramount, alleging the proposed union of two of Hollywood’s biggest studios would lead to fewer jobs and lower pay for writers.

“A reasonable person would question Judge Pitts’ impartiality in this case based on his prior work,” Paramount’s attorneys, led by Jeffrey Kessler, wrote in their eight-page motion.

They also beefed up their legal team, per Puck’s Matt Belloni yesterday:

Cord Cutters News had more about Wilkinson:

Wilkinson previously led the successful defense of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, one of the largest technology transactions in recent history. In that matter, she guided the company through a rapid federal court proceeding against the Federal Trade Commission, ultimately prevailing and allowing the deal to proceed after a closely watched trial.

Beth Wilkinson has built a distinguished career spanning more than three decades as one of the most respected trial lawyers in the United States. Born in Saratoga Springs, New York, she graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree before earning her law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. She began her professional life as a commissioned officer in the United States Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, rising to the rank of captain and serving as an assistant to the Army’s General Counsel for intelligence and special operations. At the conclusion of her military service, she assisted as a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of Florida on the prosecution of Manuel Noriega.

Wilkinson later joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York and then moved to the Department of Justice in Washington. There she took on significant responsibilities in high-profile criminal matters, including a lead role in the prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. She remains the only two-time recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service, the Justice Department’s highest honor. After leaving government service, she became a partner at prominent national law firms before co-founding the trial boutique Wilkinson Stekloff, where she continues to handle bet-the-company civil litigation and complex antitrust disputes. Her recent victories include securing a complete defense win for the National Football League in a major class-action challenge to its media distribution practices.

Note that Wilkinson has already gotten the better of Milbank's team.

David Ellison Memos His Employees

You know family blogging is serious when Oligarch, Jr communicates with the little people. David Ellison felt compelled to write a memo to Paramount hirelings:

In the memo, sent to Paramount staffers Monday, Ellison wrote that “we remain highly confident that this transaction does not pose any legal issues, and we will complete it and bring these two companies together.”

About the decision to agree to freeze the merger ahead of the trial, Ellison said, “We believe this is the right path because the facts and the law are on our side, and a full hearing will demonstrate why the plaintiffs’ arguments should not prevail.”

He also wrote, “I know this additional uncertainty has been challenging, and I want to thank you for your continued patience, commitment and collective contributions. For now, it remains business as usual. Paramount and WBD are separate companies operating independently, and our focus remains on serving our audiences, supporting one another and executing our strategy.”

Ellison closed out the memo with a rallying message, despite the setback, writing: “Let’s go!”

That last sentence shows the underlings that their fates are in good hands with this bold and visionary captain of industry.

There’s also a Paramount press release on the case that might be worth a read to those who enjoy pouring Wormtongue’s whispers into your head.

Oracle Leads Hyperscaler Bond Collapse

Meanwhile, the corporate debt problems I covered last week have only gotten worse for Oracle and the whole hyperscaler industry.

Axios had some text too; note that Oracle is leading the race to the top (in yields that is, as in they’re the weakest player):

Bond market investors are getting slightly twitchy over the scale of borrowing and spending on data centers.
…
Recently, a bond market credit gauge associated with Oracle hit a record high, as traders tried to grok how the arrival of low-cost, open-source Chinese AI models might change the potential profitability of providing computing capacity.

Five-year credit default swaps on Oracle — a kind of insurance that investors can buy to protect them against a company defaulting on its debt — jumped to 212 basis points (or 2.12 percentage points) for every $100,000 of Oracle debt to be insured.

That means it costs about $212,000 a year to insure $10 million of Oracle bonds against default.

It’s not just Oracle.

Even tech giants considered more creditworthy have seen their CDS creep higher, suggesting a relatively small but growing concern about whether they’ve bitten off more than they can financially chew with their capex blitz.

One more chart for industry-wide context (note how much higher Oracle’s yields are than any of the other, bigger hyperscalers):

The NYT’s Jeff Sommer explained some of the context on the 17th:

What has damaged Oracle’s debt rating and disturbed its finances is the elephant stomping throughout financial markets: colossal spending on artificial intelligence.

Data centers and the other infrastructure for A.I. involve staggering sums of money. These cascades of A.I.-driven cash have enriched diverse segments of the stock market, from semiconductor makers to engineering companies to utilities to energy producers. A.I. money is bolstering the entire U.S. economy, contributing perhaps 1.1 percent to the nation’s economic growth, JPMorgan Asset Management estimates.

But where’s that money coming from?

At this point, a major source is firms like Oracle, which has gone on an immense spending spree on A.I. data centers, increasingly selling bonds to raise the money. Oracle is not alone. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are giant investors in data centers, too. (The industry jargon is “hyperscaler.) But their underlying finances are stronger than Oracle’s, and their expenditures have not landed them in the same level of trouble in the markets.

Even worse for Oracle, they are owed about $300 billion by OpenAI.

That’s right, the company whose CEO just announced the Rapture the Singularity:

Weird that bondholders are nervous about Oracle’s debt when $300 billion of it is being backstopped by a guy who’s a cross between Sam Bankman-Fried and 19th-century American millenarian, William Miller.

There’s also this confidence booster from OpenAI via ArsTechnica:

In an incident mimicking a dystopian sci-fi novel, two OpenAI models broke out of the restricted environment meant to keep them from accessing the Internet during an internal test, the AI company revealed last week. The models went on to breach Hugging Face’s network and steal confidential information and credentials. OpenAI said its agent achieved the feat by exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability. The company called the event “unprecedented,” and outsiders largely agreed.

So yea, great, by all means keep pouring money down the gullets of these psychopathic morons who are doing so much to make the world a better place.

And about that other backstop.

Iran and Ansar Allah Shut In Saudi Oil Exports

In addition to the existing Iranian (and American) blockade on the Hormuz Strait, Ansar Allah has now closed the Bab el-Mandeb strait AND, according to reports you won’t read in the MSM, blown up the biggest Saudi oil refinery, maybe the world’s biggest. Per DD Geopolitics:

This morning (Monday 27th July 2026), a surprise drone attack hit the Saudi Aramco refinery in Abqaiq, the largest oil processing & crude stabilization plant in the world…

the drone attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure were confirmed earlier today by Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesperson for the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF), who issued a statement saying (sources: Saba, Al Mayadeen, IRNA, MES and Fotros Resistance):

By the grace of Allah, a number of sensitive sites and points related to the supply and transport of crude oil from eastern Saudi Arabia to Yanbu were targeted by a number of drones in response to the Saudi enemy’s drone incursions into Yemeni airspace.

These drone attacks resulted in a 40% reduction of oil loading volumes (from ~5.16 million barrels per day (bpd) to around 3.09 million bpd) at the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea, thus aggravating the already serious situation in terms of oil export for KSA, considering the combined Iranian and US naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, not to mention the new crazy equation set by the Houthis: oil facilities in response to airspace incursion by a surveillance drone!

All this while the Saudi Aramco refinery at Jizan is still burning after more than 2 days since the Yemeni attack, with MES suggesting that “the fires are so extensive that the entire facility may be out of operation for several years”, with smoke visible from space:

But never mind facts and reality; the real war is a narrative one, and pens and keyboards and mics and cameras are being put to use with no mercy and no quarter!

Warring Op-Eds

The New York Times features a piece by Sharon Waxman who pretends to take readers beyond the superficial understanding of events they may have based on headlines in other, lesser publications, in that inimitable NYT style:

Very little about these twists and turns are as they seem. From the moment David Ellison, backed by his billionaire father, Larry, succeeded in his initially hostile bid to take over Warner this year, the unstated theme of the pushback has been politics, not antitrust concerns.

The fear in Hollywood and among Democratic leaders such as Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Raskin is that the merger would give a single company with close ties to the Trump administration huge power, including not just the movie studios Paramount and Warner Bros., not just the premium cable HBO and streamer Paramount+, but the combined news clout of CBS News and CNN.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
Both sides will tell you privately that concerns over the future of CNN and the prospect that the head of CBS News, Bari Weiss, will run both media organizations are what is driving the forces against this deal.

Notably, Waxman’s piece features exactly zero mentions of Israel, hasbara, zionism, or any of the actual political interests that drive the Ellisons.

Great work, Sharon!

Ari Emanuel Makes the Pro-Ellison Case

Meanwhile, King of Hollywood, Democratic insider, close Trump ally, and mega-zionist, Ari Emanuel took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend the deal.

The WSJ was discreet enough not to mention that David Ellison paid $7.7 billion over seven years for the rights to stream the Ultimate Fighting Championship (majority owned by Emanuel and his financial backers at Silver Lake and the UAE) almost immediately upon acquiring the company.

Nor did they mention that Ellison paid $300 million annually through 2029 to Emanuel’s clients (Ari is also Chairman of Hollywood mega agency WME), Trey Parker and Matt Stone, to renew the streaming rights to South Park around the same time.

Nor does the WSJ mention that Emanuel is the business and political rabbi who personally ushered David Ellison past every obstacle presented by former Paramount chair Shari Redstone and POTUS Donald Trump en route to getting the deal done.

But let’s at least read a little of what Ari has to say to WSJ readers in his boldly titled piece “The Paramount-Warner Merger Could Save Hollywood.“:

The lawsuit by California’s Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general to block the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance puts it all at risk. They say they are protecting competition. Their actions threaten to destroy it.

You know an antitrust case is trash when it ignores some of the fastest-growing competitors in the market. In their analysis, the state attorneys general pretend Amazon MGM, A24 and Lionsgate don’t exist and that Netflix isn’t leaning into theatrical films with its coming release of Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” (which I suspect will whet its appetite for more).
…
The case not only ignores these major competitors in the theatrical market but also pretends this market represents the entirety of the competitive playing field. This doesn’t remotely reflect reality.

Theatrical releases compete fiercely for the attention, time and money of consumers who are being lured by streamers, YouTube, videogames and everything else on a screen. You think I’m letting my client’s horror movie premiere on the same day as a MrBeast video? Or the release of the latest “Call of Duty”? Or when Netflix drops “Wednesday”? Think again.

The attorneys general don’t get to ignore the platforms that compete every day for audiences, talent, capital and content just because it makes their case harder. Believe me, as somebody who’s in those rooms, every green light, marketing budget and release date is decided against the reality of that broadly competitive environment.

And blah blah along those lines for another several hundred words that I’m sure Mr. Emanuel’s staff labored over for entire minutes while he bellowed his thoughts in their direction.

Ari took this persuasion campaign so seriously that he retweeted a video from “reality star” and failed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt speaking in support of his opinion.

Note the mega-views.

Machine transcript of excerpts (thanks Claude, you stupid clanker, you!)

Spencer Pratt: Just when you thought he couldn’t get any dumber, bonehead Bob Bonten and his hand-picked commie judge have doubled down on destroying Hollywood and blocking the Paramount merger.

Yeah, one of the biggest media mergers in history is now on hold for a while.

Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery will be delayed for many months and potentially well into 2027 due to those pending lawsuits that we’ve been covering from the state attorneys general in 12 U.S. states as well as from the Writers Guild of America.

I know some of you think Spencer’s just shilling for Paramount. I wish I had that Paramount money.

This isn’t about Paramount. This is about the industry I love. I’m a C-list reality star. Remember? Hollywood gave me everything I have and these corrupt politicians are driving it into the damn ground. You don’t believe me? The Godfather has spoken.

He’s one of Hollywood’s biggest power brokers, the longtime CEO of the entertainment empire, Endeavor, and more recently, global sports giant, TKO.

With a career spanning four decades, the straight-talking dealmaker has a reputation for getting what he wants and saying exactly what he thinks.

…

Last time I interviewed Ari, he was in a room and he got in a fight with a guy in the crowd.
…
Emmanuel has built an impressive roster of A-list clients, repping some of the most recognizable names in show business.
…
This guy is the godfather in Hollywood and he just dropped a scathing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal blasting this destructive lawfare by Bonehead Bonta.

So if you don’t want to hear it from me, hear it from the GOAT.

Unless you think this is some MAGA troll, this is Ari Emanuel.

Yes, that Emanuel.

As in, his brother was Barack Obama’s right-hand man or left-hand man. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Spratt goes on at much greater length if you can handle it.

What Does It All Mean, or Are Our Hasbara Heroes in Real Trouble?

Bloomberg quantifies the financial stakes:

Larry Ellison and his family would be on the hook for $9.8 billion if Paramount Skydance Corp.’s deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. falls apart.

Paramount, which is run by Larry’s son David Ellison, agreed to pay Warner Bros. shareholders a $7 billion termination fee if its deal to buy the entertainment giant collapses due to regulatory issues. In February, Paramount paid $2.8 billion to Netflix Inc. to get the streaming company to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.

If the Warner Bros. deal doesn’t go through, Larry Ellison and a family trust would reimburse Paramount for both the $7 billion termination fee and the $2.8 billion Netflix fee. Ellison agreed to pay Paramount that $9.8 billion total by purchasing new Class B shares of the company at $16.02 each. Paramount’s stock is trading at about $8 a share presently.

They’ve also got a cool chart; read it and weep, Larry:

Substacker Mike Brock thinks “The House of Ellison is on The Brink“:

In September, the equity market handed Ellison $101 billion in a single day for projected revenue from a contract that runs through 2032. No company in this cycle books unrealized contract revenue as earnings the way Enron did; the stock market does the booking on their behalf, pricing the projections into the shares the day the press release goes out. What the equity market booked in an afternoon, the credit market has spent this summer unwinding line by line. It marked the same contract to a different model — one that asks where the cash comes from — and the answer came back BBB-minus. In late June, Oracle logged its worst week since the dot-com bust of 2001 — an anniversary the company should recognize, having barely survived the original. The month of the downgrade, the stock fell 34 percent even as the company landed a $7 billion Pentagon contract. When credit sours, good news stops mattering.

…

Where does an eighty-one-year-old get $40 billion in cash? He doesn’t have it. Forbes went through the estate: less than $10 billion in cash, only about $4.7 billion of Oracle stock sold this century, and a family trust whose asset is 1.16 billion Oracle shares. The guarantee is Oracle paper. Before the Warner bid, 346 million of his shares were already pledged as collateral for personal ventures — about 30 percent of his stake — and those pledged shares have lost roughly half their value since. Alongside the family money: $24 billion from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar, which would hold 38.5 percent of the combined company in non-voting shares. The DOJ approved the deal in June with zero conditions. The sitting president had already said out loud that he wanted CNN in the Ellisons’ hands.

The collateral chain runs in one direction. An AI circuit inflates Oracle equity. The equity backs a personal guarantee. The guarantee buys the American press, with Gulf autocracies as co-investors and the government waving from the curb. That was the play: convert circuit paper into hard, permanent assets — the third-largest news network, the second-biggest film library on earth, the cable channel the president most wanted delivered to friendly hands — before the paper deflated.

The paper is deflating first. On July 20, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the close, with a preliminary-injunction hearing set for August 3 that could stall the deal for months. Twelve states are suing. Oracle fell 34 percent in July alone while the guarantee sat exposed underneath it.

Had the deal closed in the spring, the House of Ellison would hold real assets, immune to whatever happens to a cloud backlog. Instead a judge froze the conversion mid-transaction. The guarantee is signed and irrevocable; the assets are undelivered; the collateral loses value every week the courts deliberate. He is holding the obligation without the prize, which is the exact position a man who owns forty percent of a BBB-minus company cannot afford to hold. Margin calls do not read narrative strategy.
…
Ellison’s devotion to Israel is the least hidden thing about him. He made the largest single gift in the history of Friends of the IDF; Netanyahu is a personal friend; as far back as 2015 he was privately vetting Marco Rubio for loyalty to Israel in emails with Israel’s UN ambassador. Since 2021 he has given or pledged £257 million to the Tony Blair Institute — and when the Guardian reported that institute staff had taken part in a project reimagining postwar Gaza as a “Trump Riviera,” the money trail behind the institute ran straight back to him. Weiss, the family’s pick for CBS, is known above all for her advocacy on the subject.

He is entitled to his cause. The empire has been a catastrophe for it. After thousands of film workers signed a pledge to boycott complicit institutions, Paramount stood publicly accused of maintaining a blacklist of talent who criticized Israel. His move on TikTok spawned a national campaign to take the platform back. Every property he adds attaches his politics to it, and audiences keep responding the same way: by leaving. The machine he built to protect the cause now generates evidence against it. He bought the microphone, and the room walked out.

I’ve gone on way too long, but everyone should also see Ed Zitron’s Hater’s Guide to Oracle, Part 2 and Matt Stoller’s “BOOM! Billionaires Punched in the Nose Over Paramount-Warner by State Enforcers, Unions.”

Hang tough y’all. Looks like many of us may yet live to see the Ellison hasbara empire collapse.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Related Posts:

Trump Makes an Example Out of Paramount

• Larry Ellison + Oracle + AI + Paramount + Trump = Total Info Control

• Delusion, Deception and Dipshittery: Hasbara on the 8th Front

• Tony Blair and Larry Ellison Make One HELL of a Partnership

• Pyrrhic Victory Drives Dystopian High-Tech Drive for Control

• Bari Weiss Will Run CBS News for the Ellison Hasbara Empire

• Hogs at the AI Slop Trough, Gulf States, UFC Edition

• Hasbara Ain’t Cheap, Musk, Ellison, Saudis, All Tapped

• Informational Force-Feeding Divides and Distracts

• Bari Weiss’ CBS Not an Auspicious Beginning to Total Info Control

• Oracle Debt and TikTok Transition Troubles Vex the Ellison Media Empire

• Paramount Still Reaching for WBD as CBS Misplays Colbert-Talarico Interview

• Mask-Off Moment as Paramount at Nexus of AI, Gulf State Financing, and Private Equity

• Weak Links: Oracle, OpenAI, UAE Are Hammered by Iran War

• Has the Ellison Infotainment Empire Peaked?

• Emperor Trump Brings Gladiator Games With UFC White House Event

• Oracle’s Exploding Debt and Plummeting Stock Price Threaten Paramount Media Empire?
  

When last I covered this race, the Lis Smith backed fake progressive (think Elizabeth Warren or Katie Porter) Mallory McMorrow had just dropped out, allowing centrist support to coalesce around Stevens, like fat glomming onto an ice cube dropped into a consume.

Put on your waders because family blogging is gonna be ugly today, y’all.

The Mainstream View: Can a Progressive Win in a Purple State

Let’s start with what the New York Times is selling because they remain the center of gravity in America, especially for Democratic voters.

The Times is sticking with their decades-old framing that corporate centrism ala Bill Clinton is the way to reach “purple states” like Michigan.

They conveniently forget that back in Bill’s day, Michigan was considered part of the Democratic “Blue Wall” in the upper Midwest, where the labor vote could be counted on to deliver for Democrats.

They also conveniently forget that Barack Obama ran as a progressive in 2008, and it was only after eight years of his governing as a corporate centrist that the state was narrowly lost by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general.

With that out of the way, let’s check in on the NY Times’ coverage:

Michigan’s Aug. 4 primary has become a critical front in the fight between Democrats’ progressive and moderate flanks and a pungent preview of the presidential primary to come.

(Abdul El-Sayed) is campaigning on a sharply anti-Israel platform that also calls for abolishing ICE, raising taxes on the rich and making Medicare available to all Americans.

He is an establishment-accredited epidemiologist turned anti-establishment avatar.

And at a time when a growing number of Muslims are running for and winning political office, he would be the country’s first Muslim senator.

To his most ardent supporters, Dr. El-Sayed, 41, is a charismatic amalgam of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, a next-generation answer for a party and its ossified establishment whose more standard-issue standard-bearers lost twice to Donald Trump.

To his critics, he is cocksure and condescending, a Rhodes scholar and Ivy Leaguer turned self-styled class warrior, a perpetual glory hound whose stances and statements have turned off some Black and Jewish voters.

They argue Dr. El-Sayed, if nothing else, is less electable than his more moderate primary opponent in a general election against Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressman and presumptive Republican nominee.

“El-Sayed is a radical,” said Matt Bennett, a former staffer to President Bill Clinton and co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way. Republicans agree.

Well then.

CNN is more up front with its attempt to manipulate racial politics.

Wow, That’s Quite a Headline

CNN isn’t afraid to put plenty of spin right in their headline: “Black voters may decide the nation’s biggest Democratic primary. Many are clearly against the more progressive option“.

Tell it like it is, Warner Bros Discovery!

The article leads with a folksy description of one (presumably Black, hard to confirm as Nix isn’t actually visible in the photo CNN captioned “El-Sayed speaks to Larry Nix as he pulls up to ‘Souls to the Polls’ outside Pontiac Public Library”) Larry Nix, described as a 63-year-old army veteran who’s “furious at how high the war in Iran has driven up the price of gas for his Ford Expedition, and he thinks Democratic leaders in Washington are “getting a little soft” when it comes to taking on President Donald Trump.

The piece also mentions that Stevens has come to Nix’s house during previous congressional campaigns, spoken with him, and put a sign in his yard.

All of which makes me suspect Nix is not just any random voter, but on with the show.

The article also admits that Nix had seen “the barrage of television advertisements portraying El-Sayed as disparaging toward women, highlighting his past criticism of former first lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative.

“I’m a big pro-Obama person, and you’re dogging his wife,” Nix was quoted as saying before being portrayed as telling El-Sayed he wanted to know “what the hell is going on.”

Then comes the swerve:

“El-Sayed, a former public health official, told Nix the same thing he’d told about 40 attendees at New Bethel Baptist Church minutes earlier: The ads were a distortion of previous comments he’d made about Michelle Obama, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and more, and an example of why he was running to get big money — including that of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent millions on ads opposing El-Sayed — out of politics.

“He opened my mind,” Nix said of El-Sayed. “I’m going to go home and do my research, and then I’m going to decide if he switched me over.”

More from the article:

El-Sayed may still have an uphill battle ahead of him. Dozens of interviews across the Detroit metropolitan area over the first weekend of early voting revealed the skepticism he faces among Black voters like Nix.

The Senate primary has emerged as this year’s most important test of the party’s ideological gulf — with El-Sayed and Stevens, the favorite of the Democratic establishment in Washington and in Michigan, squaring off in a race that is both critical to Democrats’ hopes of claiming a Senate majority in November, and an early preview of the battles to come in the 2028 presidential primary.

Black voters make up about one-fifth of the state’s Democratic primary electorate, and they have a history of overwhelmingly backing the more moderate candidate in similar ideological battles in Michigan. Hillary Clinton bested Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by about 40 percentage points among Black voters in the state’s 2016 presidential primary, exit polls showed, and Joe Biden racked up a similar margin in 2020 against the progressive stalwart.

Some of the skepticism El-Sayed faces is fueled by the negative advertisements like those Nix highlighted. But he’s also hampered by lingering resentment from prominent Black Democrats who view his initial support for the “uncommitted” movement in the state’s 2024 presidential primary as ultimately helping President Donald Trump win Michigan that November and who worry about his campaign’s focus on opposing US support for Israel.

Other voters said Stevens, a White woman, has been an extremely active presence in their communities since being elected to Congress in the Democratic wave of 2018. More pointed to her role working on President Barack Obama’s task force that rescued the automotive industry — the economic driver of southeastern Michigan.

About that “barrage of ads”…

$30 Million Here, $52 Million There and Soon You’re Talking About Real Money

Bari Weiss’ CBS News reported on July 20 that AIPAC was in for $30 million on Stevens.

How AIPAC-funded? This AIPAC funded:

OpenSecrets had “independent expenditures totals” in the primary at over $52 million as of July 22.

Then there’s all the (presumably) unreported spending on “influencers” who have all suddenly started saying the exact same things about Stevens and El-Sayed at the same time:

But it takes more than ads to crush progressive hopes and dreams. Gotta get those endorsements and play that race card as much as possible.

Let’s see what moves the establishment is making to capitalize on those allegedly “turned off Black and Jewish voters.”

The Endorsements Roll In

Nothing sells Black voters on a candidate than the Democratic establishment telling them how to vote, amirite?

We’ve got Governor Gretchen Whitmer:

This Governor Gretchen Whitmer, via the Detroit News:

Also, the Gretchen Whitmer seen hiding her face from the press while meeting with POTUS Trump at the White House:

And yea, about that “no-fault auto insurance” bill into law in 2019:

Under the plan, the annual Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association fee, which covers unlimited lifetime medical benefits and is at $192 now and scheduled to go up to $220 per car in July, would go down to $43 a year for people who choose lower rates of personal injury coverage. For people who choose to continue unlimited lifetime medical benefits, the fee would presumably go up because there will be fewer people paying into the system.

…

People who have been catastrophically injured in accidents have been terrified of the prospect of higher costs for services that have provided them a lifeline after serious car crashes.

“This reform will lead to injured victims not receiving needed care, and families being bankrupted trying to pay for care needed, but no longer covered,” said James Johnson of Norton Shores, whose daughter was seriously injured in a car crash 14 years ago and still needs constant care. “People will die needlessly. This purported reform is a cruel bait-and-switch, with no guarantees on rate reductions.”

This NPR post tells the story of the late Brian Woodward, pictured in the second tweet above, who stated the bill “has destroyed my life” in 2022, before dying in 2023.

David Sirota reminds readers of The Lever that “Whitmer’s dad was Blue Cross’s CEO, she appointed a Blue Cross CEO co-chair of her transition & raked in more Blue Cross cash than any Mich candidate ever — as Blue Cross denies 1 in 6 medical claims.”

So yeah, that’s enough about Governor Whitmer.

Who else is endorsing Rep. Stevens?

The Tough-on-Student-Protesters State Attorney General

This is a big get for the AIPAC-funded Stevens: a proven ally in the struggle against rampant anti-semitism, especially on campus:

Here’s a little more about Haley’s “friend” AG Dana Nessel from the Guardian in 2024:

When the University of Michigan governing board this year asked the state’s attorney general to bring charges against campus Gaza protesters, they tapped a political ally with whom some board members have extensive personal, financial or political connections, a Guardian investigation finds.

Frustrated by local prosecutors’ unwillingness to crack down on most of the students arrested at the height of the pro-Palestinian encampments last spring, the regents executed a highly unusual move in recruiting the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, because she was more likely to file charges, three people with direct knowledge of the decision tell the Guardian.

The revelations raise new questions about potential conflicts of interest. Six of eight regents contributed more than $33,000 combined to Nessel’s campaigns, her office hired a regent’s law firm to handle major state cases, the same regent co-chaired her 2018 campaign, and she has personal relationships with some regents.

Meanwhile, Nessel received significant campaign donations from pro-Israel state politicians, organizations and university donors who over the last year have vocally criticized Gaza protests, records show.

A Guardian analysis finds Nessel’s office has so far charged about 85% of the protesters who were arrested or for whom arrest warrants were requested last school year. By comparison, Washtenaw county’s office only charged 10% of arrests, while the Wayne county prosecutor Kym Worthy dropped all five Gaza protest cases forwarded to her office by Wayne State University police in Detroit, data provided by protesters’ attorneys and prosecutors shows.

But wait, there’s more. We’re talking about local grassroots activists from the Black community now.

Stevens’ Grassroots Run Deep and Also Islamophobic

Haley doesn’t seem worried though; she’s proud of the support.

This led one self-declared Michigan Islamic voter on X to ask Stevens, “Abdul defended you and made a statement condemning attacks against you. Why can’t you do the same when it comes to nasty and vile Islamophobia? Are the statements of this woman something you support? Why should Muslims in Michigan vote for you?”

I wonder if Stevens has read this Home Town Life article about the charming Angie Smith’s tenure on the Farmington School Board:

Former and veteran trustees say being on the Farmington school board the last five years was like dealing with school bullies all over again.

…

“Toxic” is the word of choice describing the board’s culture in recent years. Superintendent Bob Herrera filed a harassment complaint against a school board member shortly before his resignation, which came just 18 months after the school board hired him. The district paid Herrera a $105,000 buyout, and the district continues to pay his six-figure salary through June as his replacement is hired.
…
“I felt like I was back in high school,” former trustee Richard Mukamal said of the school board. “It was like the queen bee and the wannabes. This was like ‘Mean Girls.’”

…

Green said the “common thread” was one of her elected colleagues, current trustee Angie Smith.

Herrera said in his resignation Smith’s harassment against him created a hostile work environment. Following his resignation, the school board censured Smith, and two board members followed Herrera’s lead and resigned, as well.

“Her censure-ship was much more than what the portrayal is,” Green said. “It’s the behavior of her overall. It’s the spreading rumors, the gossip and her attacks on different staff members.”

“Angie Smith has had problems with every single person on that board,” Terry Johnson, a former board vice president who also resigned in November, said.

Smith is unapologetic for her approach. She said she’s not the bully: her former colleagues are.

“I’m very vocal and I’m very passionate about what I do and who I do it for,” she said.

I wonder who Smith is endorsing Stevens for?

But that’s just idle speculation; you’ve really got to see Stevens in action on the campaign trail interacting with a Jewish voter to see why her campaign is building up such a head of steam.

Stevens Charms on the Campaign Trail: Jewish Voter Edition

Although, oddly, Stevens isn’t willing to embrace all her constituents quite so closely:

Machine transcript:

Voter: “It’s your first Fourth! And you’re walking with the [inaudible — crowd noise].

Stevens: Well, thank you so much for your community service.

Voter: Can I ask you a question?

Stevens: Yeah.

Voter: I was wondering, with all the support of Republicans and people who are anti-choice and people who are working to disrupt our election systems that AIPAC is doing right now — I’m wondering why you’re accepting their support. I’m a Jew and my family lives here in this community. And I really think that those kinds of candidates are making the Jewish people less safe. I’m wondering why you’re accepting their—

Stevens: Well, thank you so much for coming and bringing your kiddo. It’s so nice to meet with you.

Voter: It’s nice to meet you too, but I’m just wondering — I want to make life and this country a safe place for him to grow up in. I’m wondering why you would want to accept their endorsement and $800,000 in ads this year.

Stevens: Yeah. Guys, I have received— how many endorsements have I received this election?

Apparent Stevens Staffer: A lot.

Stevens: I think I’ve got a lot of local labor.

Voter: You are a great representative and we really appreciate your support. I’m just hoping—
Stevens: Hi. Good to see you guys. Oh my gosh. Hi.

Bystander Look at a boat. Let’s ride the boat.

Talk about how to Win Friends and Influence People!

Stevens Charms on the Campaign Trail: Black Voter Edition

The video originated in this thread from local Detroit journalist Sam Robinson and is well-worth reviewing in full as it has Stevens answering questions about how she feels about her Jewish supporters who claim they will vote for Mike Rogers if El-Sayed is the nominee (she says “I’m on the Democratic team”), and her opinion on the Michiganders for Money out of Politics ballot initiative (she’s all for it).

But let’s get back to Stevens’ endorsers. She’s racking them up from members of what the Black Agenda Report’s late great Glen Ford called the Black Misleadership Class all around the country.

All the Way From South Carolina, It’s Jim Clyburn!

The man who gave us President Joe Biden has weighed in on the primary, via The Michigan Chronicle. I’m quoting at length so you can get a real feel for where the Chronicle is coming from:

Former House Majority Whip and one of the longest-serving Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives Jim Clyburn has endorsed U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s race for the U.S. Senate, adding the support of one of the nation’s most influential Democratic leaders to her growing coalition.

…

Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat whose decades of leadership in Congress and within the Congressional Black Caucus have made him one of the party’s most respected voices, said Stevens has demonstrated a record of delivering results for Michigan workers and families.

The endorsement from Clyburn adds another nationally recognized Democratic figure to the list of supporters backing Stevens’ Senate bid. Throughout his congressional career, Clyburn has been a leading voice on voting rights, civil rights, economic opportunity, and expanding political participation, while serving in senior House Democratic leadership positions and helping shape national Democratic priorities.

“I’ve been proud to have Haley by my side through some of the toughest fights against Donald Trump and fighting to lower costs for working families,” Clyburn said in a statement to Michigan Chronicle. “From taking on Big Pharma to cap the cost of prescription drugs to bringing back good-paying union manufacturing jobs to Michigan to her work as Chief of Staff on President Barack Obama’s auto rescue, helping save 200,000 Michigan auto jobs, Haley is a fighter for Michigan, and she delivers for Michigan. I’m honored to endorse her campaign for U.S. Senate.”

Stevens welcomed the endorsement, describing Clyburn as a national leader whose support carries significant meaning as she campaigns statewide.

“Jim Clyburn is a civil rights icon, a historic leader, someone who knows how to take on Donald Trump, and I could not be more honored to have his support for my campaign for U.S. Senate,” said Stevens. “This race is about winning for Michigan, protecting our manufacturing economy, lowering costs, and taking on Donald Trump’s chaos. Jim Clyburn knows what it takes to win tough fights, which is why I’m honored to have him on my team.”

Clyburn has maintained a visible presence in Detroit during 2026. In April, he appeared at Fellowship Chapel on the city’s west side for a conversation about his book, The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation. Stevens introduced Clyburn onto the stage at the event, which brought together community members to discuss the history of Black political leadership, civil rights, and civic engagement as part of his national book tour.

I gotta quote the Black Agenda Report on Clyburn’s role in the 2020 presidential primary:

On March 3, 2020, former Vice President, Joe Biden, to the euphoric pleasure of Democratic Party elites, was brought back from near political death. After terrible showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Biden was on the verge of receiving his “last rights” as a corporate politician. His Democratic Party elitist cronies were petrified that their last viable selection to derail Bernie Sanders from the Democratic Party’s nomination was on his “last legs.” These corrupt elitist Democrats were likely scrambling trying to figure out which next plan to fall back upon. However, like a loyal accessory, congressman Jim Clyburn stepped in to save the day, or at least save South Carolina for the Democrats. Clyburn passionately ushered a great many Black voters into the ballot booths, to cast their votes for a man who could not give a damn about their long term liberation and prosperity. Joe Biden has never given a damn about Black people. Black people are merely useful tools in his political chest. Given this undeniable fact, it is unfortunate that most Black voters do not see the likes of Joe Biden for whom they are—political adversaries to our community’s quest for self-determination.

“Like a loyal accessory, congressman Jim Clyburn stepped in to save the day.”

As someone who is NOT a “Democrat” (and certainly not a Republican), it is saddening to witness so many African Americans throwing their unconditional support behind the likes of Joe Biden, the man who was a primary author of the 1993/94 Crime Bill Act. Biden was also a strong supporter of the openly racist Strom Thurmond and is a rabid imperialist warmonger. The Democratic Party has done an excellent job of politically domesticating Black voters. Intellectual honest tells us that if Biden was a Republican who did those same things, then those same Black people that voted for him would be referencing those items as talking points to convince others NOT to vote for said Republican. However, since Joe Biden is a Democrat—all is good. His actions against the Black community (and humanity) are excused.

How long will Black voters continue to allow themselves to be duped, stepped on, and used like convenient rags, by the Democratic Party establishment? Again, this writer is NOT a Democrat, however, if I was, I would have to take an honest look at what this party has never done for my community. I would be compelled to say, “Hey, let’s try something else.” We have unconditionally invested in white liberals with our collective votes, only to gain nothing in return. White liberals are highly skilled at lying to the Black community—-masquerading as our friends, all the while supporting policies geared towards our demise.

And, apologies for going back to the Black Agenda Report so often, but they can say things that I frankly can’t. One more from July 15:

With Platner in the rearview mirror the Democrat Party establishment have turned their sights to another bellwether state, Michigan. And here is where we see the new nadir of the Democrat Party establishment’s treachery and their willingness to use identity reductionism, racist and bigoted dog whistles, and Black people as pawns in their desperate attempt to sustain its power over the party even if it means losing elections as we saw in 2016. We are already seeing Clorox Feminist groups like EMILY’S list in concert with AIPAC attempting to paint Dr. El-Sayed as a “sexist” and “mysoginist”- claims that are absolutely unsubstantiated.

…

The Black Misleadership Class of the Democrat Party has been and continues to defang not just the “white left” but Black people as a whole, while also being more adjacent to, and agents of white “supremacy” ideology than Will Lawrence. That’s why it’s curious that the Coongressional “Black” Caucus (CBC) tried to take a shot at Will for his previous remarks when they are the largest recipients of blood-soaked AIPAC money than any caucus of the Democrat Party. Hakeem “AIPAC Shakur” Jeffries is so beholden to the white “supremacy” ideology of AIPAC that he has remained silent on the fact that one of his own colleagues, Representative Ro Khanna, was detained by zionist settler thugs and terrorists while recently in Palestine. We even have Jeffries on record paraphrasing renowned segregationist and white supremacists, George Wallace, as he declared, “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever.” Given the documented instances of the CBC and the likes of Jeffries pledging more fealty to the zionist ethnostate than to Black people – including Jeffries’ recent plea to his Democratic Party colleagues to reject a bill to cease sending money to Israel (introduced by Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky), the idea that they and other elements of the Democrat Party establishment would even suggest that Will is a racist or racially insensitive, when they consistently uphold white “supremacy” ideology through their votes and fealty to their AIPAC alabaster puppet masters is the equivalent of if Adolf Hitler suggested that Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes acted too brutally against Indigenous people.

The Democrat Party and the CBC have no legs to stand on when it comes to accusing others of racism or sexism. This is why it’s so melancholious to witness so many Black people and women falling for their BS. They fail to realize that the use of identity reductionism in service to the Democrat Party, as Kwame Ture once described as, “racist and capitalist to the core” only serves the race traders and race traitors of the Democrat Party more than it ever will Black and other marginalized peoples. Furthermore, they fail to comprehend that this intraparty war within the Democrat Party will not result in victors, only casualties – chief among them Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor and working class people. At the same time the interparty war lifts up two incontrovertible facts. The first is that the Democrat Party cannot be salvaged or ever taken over by social democrat/”progressive” elements…it’s corporate and zionist simply won’t allow this and would rather see its demise than its capture by the likes of Mamdani, Sanders, and DSA. The second is the contradictions of the social democrat/”progressive” wing of the party who insist on running as Democrats in the first place. How can so-called Democratic Socialists even pretend that they can rationalize running as socialists who wish to be members of a capitalist, neoliberal, imperialist, and corporate political party?

Would that it were that strongly written op-eds and snarky blog posts moved votes, but alas, money buys them.

Seems Like Money Still Buys Votes

The only independent media poll I’ve seen shows that the money seems to be working for Stevens as of July 14, per USA Today:

U.S. Senate Democratic hopeful Haley Stevens holds a nearly 7-percentage-point lead over rival Abdul El-Sayed in a new statewide poll of Democratic primary voters, with about 10% of respondents saying they remain undecided three weeks out from the Aug. 4 election.

Stevens received 48% of support compared with 41% for El-Sayed, according to the Detroit News/WDIV-TV (Channel 4) poll of 500 likely Michigan Democratic primary voters conducted last week after their first one-on-one televised debate.

About 0.2% of voters surveyed volunteered that they chose state Sen. Mallory McMorrow of Royal Oak, who dropped out of the race on July 5.

Hang tough y’all; remember “Hope is the thing with feathers” and all that, and also changing out members of a hopelessly corrupt US Congress that has abdicated its most important powers of taxation and war-making is only of so much matter.

On the other hand, it’s good to see the utterly corrupt and incompetent Imperial Establishment having to squander their money to fend off these challenges.

Related Posts:

• Faux Progressive Katie Porter Can’t Defend Against Bad Faith Attacks

• Dem Gerontocrats Try To Crush Graham Platner

• Jasmine Crockett Weaponizes ‘Dark Woke’ Cringe Against Trump

• GOP Lures Jasmine Crockett Into US Senate Primary

• CBS Misplays Colbert-Talarico Interview

• Texas Primary Results Could Flip US Senate

• State of the Art Dem Dark Money Schemes

• Israel Dominant Issue in Michigan Democratic Senate Primary

• Platner Under Siege

• The Dem Establishment Goes All-In Against Platner

• Big Money, the Maine Senate Race and US Party Competition: A Tale in Two Pictures

• The Fake Progressive Lane Closes in Michigan Senate Primary

• The Machine Gets Its Man in Maine

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Oracle Stock Ain’t What It Used to Be

And neither is the Ellison family fortune that’s built on it.

Never fear, the consensus wisdom “on the Street” is that Oracle is a great buy opportunity! Buy the dip, follow it all the way down.

Yahoo! Finance calls the stock plunge “embarrassing” for Larry Ellison (he may be only the world’s 8th richest human, but he’s just a temporarily embarrassed #2 as Steinbeck would say):

Oracle (ORCL) billionaire and well-known yachting expert Larry Ellison might spend his summer aboard his 160-foot superyacht dubbed the Musashi.

But, for lack of better terms, his stock has sunk to the ocean floor, and it’s unclear what will bring it back afloat.

Never fear, the consensus wisdom “on the Street” is that Oracle is a great buy opportunity! Buy the dip, follow it all the way down.

The divergence of opinion among investment bros on X must be shared.

The bear case:

The bull case:

This isn’t investment advice of course, but if you’re dumb enough to buy Oracle right now, you’re dumb enough to do it on the margin. Go, cat, go!

Yahoo! Finance calls the stock plunge “embarrassing” for Larry Ellison (he may be only the world’s 8th richest human, but he’s just a temporarily embarrassed #2 as Steinbeck would say):

Oracle (ORCL) billionaire and well-known yachting expert Larry Ellison might spend his summer aboard his 160-foot superyacht dubbed the Musashi.

But, for lack of better terms, his stock has sunk to the ocean floor, and it’s unclear what will bring it back afloat.

…

The crash has vaporized a good deal of Ellison’s net worth while he’s backstopping his son David Ellison’s big bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) from Paramount (PSKY).

Ellison’s net worth peaked near $388 billion in September 2025, making him the second-richest person behind his friend and Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPCX) CEO Elon Musk. By July 13, Ellison’s net worth had fallen to roughly $175 billion, a decline of approximately $213 billion in under 10 months, dropping him to No. 8 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
…
The crash has vaporized a good deal of Ellison’s net worth while he’s backstopping his son David Ellison’s big bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) from Paramount (PSKY).

Ellison’s net worth peaked near $388 billion in September 2025, making him the second-richest person behind his friend and Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPCX) CEO Elon Musk. By July 13, Ellison’s net worth had fallen to roughly $175 billion, a decline of approximately $213 billion in under 10 months, dropping him to No. 8 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Poor guy.

And the source of the trouble? Oracle’s enormous bets on OpenAI.

Why Oracle’s Debt Got Downgraded

When SP Global downgraded Oracle’s debt to ‘BBB-/A-2’ (one step above junk or BB+) from ‘BBB/A-2’ they commented:

Oracle Corp.’s rapidly expanding AI infrastructure business is increasing its overall credit risk, reflecting our more cautious view of the AI infrastructure industry, including rising capital expenditure (capex) requirements, an uncertain path to profitability, rapidly evolving industry and competitive landscape, and high customer concentration.
…
Oracle’s growing AI infrastructure business is diluting its strong business risk profile. We assigned Oracle a negative outlook in July 2025 due to the pace of its AI infrastructure buildout and the potential financial impact. We now recognize that that we underestimated the scale of the investments required to expand the AI business and its impact on our overall view of Oracle’s creditworthiness.

Despite recent contract terms requiring customer prepayments, Oracle’s strong remaining performance obligation (RPO) growth speaks to the current robust AI compute demand environment. We project Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business, which accounted for 27% of revenues in fiscal 2026, will make up almost 60% of revenues by fiscal 2028. We view this to be much riskier than its legacy enterprise software and database businesses, which have long-established track records of strong recurring revenues and sticky enterprise customer bases. This is because of the need for substantial upfront investment while returns are realized over the duration of multi-year contracts.

We’re closely watching the pace of AI industry buildout. Oracle’s AI business requires significant upfront capital investments and long-term data center leases, both of which we have continually underestimated. Rising component costs could also pressure the economics of the AI business model.

And S&P narrows down a key culprit in Oracle’s woes:

OpenAI remains a key credit risk. We estimate that OpenAI makes up roughly half of the $638 billion in RPO. OpenAI’s ability to meet its contractual obligations and raise external financing will be contingent upon AI tailwinds continuing and its models being market leaders. If OpenAI were unable to pay Oracle, we believe Oracle could be left with massive data center leases that it might be unable to exit or have to re-lease to new tenants under less-favorable terms. As a proxy for OpenAI’s future prospects, we’re tracking OpenAI’s financial commitments to data center operators and chip makers to gauge its overall financial exposure and its market share among enterprise and consumers.

Near-term cash flow will be worse than previously forecasted. Oracle guided its capex to reach $90 billion-$95 billion for fiscal 2027 (ending in May), much higher than our previous forecast of $60 billion. We attribute this mostly to rising component costs and new contract wins. We now forecast Oracle’s fiscal 2027 FOCF deficit to widen to nearly $42 billion (inclusive of working-capital benefits from customer prepayments and other timing impacts, similar to Oracle’s guidance regarding net cash outlay for capex of around $70 billion), weaker than our prior forecast of negative $24 billion.

Elon Musk could have warned Oracle CEO Larry Ellison not to trust OpenAI’s CEO, the man he calls “Scam” Altman.

In fairness, S&P believes “Oracle is firmly committed to keeping an investment-grade rating. Oracle’s focus on better aligning cash outlays with customer prepayments when pursuing new deals– as well as its $5 billion mandatory convertible preferred stock issuance in February 2026 and the planned $20 billion equity issuance in calendar-year 2026–lend credibility to its stated financial policy, which we view to be more conservative than a year ago.”

But Oracle itself is warning investors that its data center bets may not pay off.

Don’t Say Larry Didn’t Warn Us

Per Bloomberg:

Oracle has a new warning for investors: All of the spending on data centers might not pay off.

The disclosures were part of the company’s annual financial report, where Oracle detailed plans to spend big on AI infrastructure for customers like OpenAI. And it noted all of the ways that expensive bet could blow up.

Construction of data centers may end up costing more or taking longer than expected, Oracle warned. This could happen due to supply chain hiccups, government restrictions on data center development, or the failure of third parties to complete projects on schedule.

And once the sites are done, major customers might not pay their bills, or opt not to renew their contracts, Oracle said. In this case, the company could be stuck with some very expensive assets, which it “may be unable to re-lease, repurpose or assign such capacity on acceptable terms, if at all.”

Most large tech companies list data center-related risks in their financial filings. But few are as verbose as Oracle when it comes to exactly how things could go wrong.

And Oracle’s debt picture might be even worse than they’ve been reporting according to a blockbuster report from Nikkei (archived):

Hidden debt at U.S. tech giants swelled eightfold in roughly four years to an estimated $1.65 trillion as artificial intelligence investments ballooned, a Nikkei study shows, exceeding actual debt and making it tougher for investors to assess risk.

Nikkei examined recent financial statements and other materials from Google owner Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle.
…
The five companies’ hidden debt, which does not appear on balance sheets, totaled $1.65 trillion in the most recent quarter, exceeding the roughly $1.35 trillion in debt reflected on their balance sheets. The data includes some estimates.
…
Oracle is advancing a large-scale data center project called Stargate with OpenAI, using lease agreements with external operators. Its hidden debt reached $273.3 billion as of the end of May, a more-than 30-fold increase in four years.

Holy family blogging, scam man! A hundred billion here and a hundred billion there and pretty soon we’re talking real money.

And I’ve got to emphasize again that Oracle’s plan to pay all this debt back rides almost entirely on OpenAI.

A Debt Built on Sand?

Not to get all Matthew 7:26-27 on y’all but Larry Ellison betting his empire on OpenAI might be “like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

And as Ed Zitron points out:

As a reminder, the only way that OpenAI will be able to afford to pay its $300 billion cloud compute contract with Oracle will be if it continues to hit revenue projections (per The Information) that have it making $113 billion in 2028, $184 billion in 2029, and $284 billion in 2030, a year when it will magically become profitable, and no, I don’t know how that happens:

Based on my own analysis, assuming that Oracle can successfully build capacity for OpenAI to pay for (a load-bearing assumption), it would have to pay around $75 billion to rent that 7.1GW of capacity. Stargate Abilene, an 8-building, 1.2GW project that broke ground in July 2024, has (per sources familiar with the matter) only built and operationalized three buildings, despite the project having meant to be fully operational by the end of 2025 (per landowner Lancium), or energized by the middle of 2026, it isn’t really clear, and I can’t get a straight answer from anyone about whether the power even exists on site to turn any of it on.

Anyway, for Oracle to make all the rest of that money, it will have to build five more Stargate Abilenes. If you’re wondering how that’s going, Stargate Shackelford only broke ground in December 2025, Stargate Wisconsin appeared to have a single steam beam in March, , and Stargate New Mexico is still waiting for permitting to begin construction.

Based on Lancium’s presentation and discussions with sources familiar, Oracle will pull in somewhere in the region of $10 billion in annual revenue from the (assuming it’s ever done), completely-finished 824MW of critical IT infrastructure at Stargate Abilene. It is unclear how Oracle hopes to be paid even a fraction of its $300 billion compute deal, because in its current state, its annual revenue from Stargate projects currently sits in the region of a maximum $5 billion a year, or less than a tenth of its FY2026 capex.

And as the NYT’s Jeff Sommer reminds us, the Ellison hasbara media empire may nominally be managed by nepobaby failson David Ellison but it rests on a foundation of Daddy Larry’s Oracle money:

Wealth from Oracle, the giant tech company founded by Larry Ellison, is enabling Larry and his son, David, to become media moguls. Thanks to backing from Larry’s Oracle billions, David has taken control of Paramount and is now engaged in a hotly contested $111 billion bid to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, too. They are trying to build a media behemoth containing two big movie studios, multiple streaming services and the news networks CNN and CBS News, all under one enormous corporate roof.
…
Few people outside the markets have paid attention to what goes on behind the financial curtain for artificial intelligence. These big companies are able to categorize the money as an investment — a capital expenditure — and not as an expense. So under current accounting rules, the bulk of the spending has not yet counted against their gaudy earnings. That is helping to propel the stock market to new heights under rosy assumptions that A.I. will transform the world, and that the companies behind it will be making money.

With the notable exception of Oracle, which has borrowed aggressively for the last couple of years, most of these companies generated so much cash from their main businesses that, until recently, their spending on A.I. data centers barely weighed on the performance of their stock or on the solidity of their underlying finances.

But this year is turning out to be different.
…
Four of the five big, long-established data-center companies have underperformed the S&P 500 this year. Oracle has been leading the pack downward, with a fall of more than 35 percent through Friday.

And there’s a reason Oracle is at the back of the AI pack, via the Seattle Times:

The risk for Oracle is falling behind in a race it set out to conquer. Other AI hyperscalers, like Alphabet and Meta Platforms, are on an opposite course, generating more than enough cash to fund investment. That gives them “greater financial flexibility to outspend Oracle and weather industry downturns,” according to S&P.

The ratings agency said it has continually underestimated how much Oracle would need to spend upfront for AI investments. That investment has led the company to burn through more than $20 billion over the last four quarters, after capital expenditure.

“Oracle wants to hang on to that investment-grade rating, and to do that, they’re going to have to show that they are not flooding the market with more supply,” said Andrew Wells, chief investment officer at SanJac Alpha. “They’re kind of on the ropes and they have to decide: Do they disappoint the bond investors or the equity investors?”

But let’s get back to the Ellison family’s media empire and how it gets that way.

Those no-fun types at the National Legal and Policy Center tried to pour cold water on the Ellison’s Paramount + WBD party:

From where we sit, the founder’s Hollywood adventure looks less like devotion and more like a transfer of risk onto Oracle’s other owners.

Start with how the guarantee gets funded. Forbes crunched the numbers in February: Ellison holds under $10 billion in cash, about $15 billion in Tesla stock, and has sold a mere $4.7 billion of Oracle shares since the turn of the century.

His trust’s equity commitment to the Warner takeover reached $45.7 billion. The one asset large enough to bridge that gap appears to be his 1.16 billion Oracle shares, worth about $164 billion when Forbes ran its analysis.

He has form here. A September 2025 disclosure revealed 346 million Oracle shares pledged as collateral for personal business ventures outside the company — a block worth north of $100 billion at the time.

Then Oracle’s stock declined by more than half. The pledged shares lost half their value by late February, and the price has now fallen more than 50 percent from last year’s peak.

Falling collateral can trigger margin spirals. Lenders demand more stock or force sales; sales depress the price; the cycle feeds itself — with outside shareholders along for the ride.

The timing could not be worse for Oracle. The company ended May with about $130 billion in debt, negative free cash flow of $23.7 billion, and capital spending up 162 percent as it races to build data centers for OpenAI and other artificial intelligence customers.

…

June brought Oracle’s worst week on Wall Street since 2001 — a 19 percent plunge — along with word that headcount shrank 13 percent over the fiscal year. Ellison, the chief technology officer and owner of more than 40 percent of its shares, skipped the earnings call.

Two co-chief executives new to their roles and a finance chief hired weeks earlier fielded analysts’ questions instead. The man whose name is synonymous with Oracle was busy buying Warner Bros.

And what a purchase it is. The Wall Street Journal reports the combined company will stagger out of the gate under almost $80 billion in debt, about 6.5 times annual earnings — leverage that MoffettNathanson analysts labeled “staggering.”

The merged giant must service that burden from declining television networks while promising no asset sales and no cuts to content spending. If those promises break, or if streaming synergies fall short, the guarantee behind the deal traces straight back to a mountain of Oracle stock.

And about that WBD acquisition.

Legal Challenges From All Sides Slowing WBD Buy

For some reason I can’t imagine, there’s a lot of resistance to this oligarchic family of ultra-zionists buying up so much of American media.

Comics Beat sums the Ellison empire’s precarity well:

The Warner Bros. deal, though, is a risky endeavor; neither Paramount nor Warner Bros. have been hugely profitable companies in the recent past, and both are weighed down by a ton of existing debt. The prospect of making enough money to pay back the existing Paramount debt while taking on an additional $100 billion for Warner Bros. is daunting.
…
Meanwhile, there’s a “ticking clock” fee on the deal. As long as the deal remains incomplete, Warner Bros. shareholders are exposed to market volatility, so if the deal isn’t done by September, Paramount is on the hook for penalties of around $650 million per quarter, due to existing Warner Bros. shareholders.

That might be a difficult promise to deliver on when the massive, multinational companies are facing a number of lawsuits seeking to delay or halt the merger — including one led by the state of California and co-signed by the attorneys general of 11 other U.S. states. The U.K. government has also stepped in to block the merger, and Parliament is currently on summer break, meaning it will be a while before the issue is even fully taken up.

And about those lawsuits.

Four Major Lawsuits Delaying the WBD Buy

First up, a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general, led by California AG Rob Bonta, is hitting the court house claiming that the deal violates the Clayton Act by creating a media monopoly. The states argue it would heavily reduce competition in theatrical film distribution (specifically anticipated blockbusters) and basic cable licensing.

This seems the most serious and on Monday a judge issued a temporary restraining order against the merger in response to the suit.

Then there’s a suit filed by three current Paramount+ subscribers and two prospective subscribers claiming they face increased prices and reduced viewing options as a result of the transaction.

This one seems to be weak sauce and has already been denied a preliminary injunction by a judge.

The Writers Guild of America (note: I’m a former member but got booted when I got laid off by Vox Media, screw them and screw Vox, he he) has filed an anti-trust suit against the Paramount-WBD merger.

Hollywood Reporter described the fourth suit facing the Ellisons in its headline “David and Larry Ellison Sued by Paramount Investor Over Alleged Trump Side Deal:

A fourth lawsuit has been filed looking to block Paramount‘s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, this time by shareholders who accuse David Ellison and his father, Oracle scion Larry Ellison, of striking an illegal deal with President Trump for approval of the merger.

That last one is the most amusing if nothing else and reveals some of the political machinations behind the merger.

The Ellisons’ media ambitions have often been portrayed as an effort to support Trump, but despite Trump’s occasional support for their gambit, their real political play is supporting Israel, as illustrated by their promotion of no-talent zionist mouthpiece Bari Weiss to the head of CBS News.

The suit falls into the trap of missing the zionist hasbara forest for the Trump tree. A tell is it doesn’t specifically name Hollywood super-agent, UFC owner and Democratic power-player Ari Emanuel as a co-defendant despite his role as the Ellisons’ personal Trump whisperer.

I have to quote from the NY Times’ recent profile on Emanuel — which mostly focused on his likely role in his brother Rahm’s 2028 presidential race — since it confirms much of what I’ve been writing about here and at The MMA Draw (with Zach Arnold) about Ari Emanuel playing both sides of the street politically:

In June, Trump hosted the U.F.C., which is also owned by TKO Group, on the White House lawn as fighters bloodied each other’s faces in the octagon. Trump and Ari Emanuel exchanged a handshake before the fights commenced.

And then there’s the whole role of Gulf State Sovereign wealth funds in backing Paramount’s acquisition of WBD, but let’s close with the stress the workers at WBD are feeling as they don’t know who to suck up to in all the confusion.

Via Business Insider:

Employees at Paramount Skydance are wrestling with whether the planned mega-merger with Warner Bros. Discovery would put them on the chopping block or help save their jobs.

That’s our fearless independent do-right and damn-the-consequences corporate media at work alright.

I should also recommend John Campea’s YouTube coverage of the Paramount-WBD merger for those with the time and inclination for video news:

Key quotes (lightly edited machine transcript):

John Campea: The other thing you got to keep in mind here is that it is not necessarily $360 billion right out of the pockets of Larry and David Ellison.

They own about 44% of Oracle and most of their value is not in cash. It’s in the shares they own in Oracle. So this does represent a significant hit to their personal wealth and their personal value in the three digit billions kind of range.

So, why does that matter so much? Well, because at some point here, and I remember one of my business guys, his name’s Scott, did bring up a point about four or five months ago, when he said to me, “There is a path here where it just starts costing them so much to do this deal, it may be cheaper for them to get out.”

Here’s the thing. If Paramount pulls out anyway, if Paramount pulls out, they for whatever reason, doesn’t matter if they just decide to get out of the deal, doesn’t matter if the government or the lawsuits stop the deal, doesn’t matter. If for whatever reason under the sun Paramount has to get out of the deal, they have to pay WBD, get this, a $7 billion breakup (fee).

If the deal is not closed, which we’ve talked about in the last few days, by September 30th, Paramount has to pay WBD shareholders $650 million per quarter.

We said that roughly worked out to six something million dollars a day. That’s a lot of 4K discs, bro. So this this is getting extremely hard.

This caper has it all: big money, geopolitical stakes, propaganda wars, infotainment, nepotism, oligarchy and even time pressure! Stay tuned and I’ll do my best to keep it covered for y’all.

And remember, if it’s corporate media you can’t truss it.

Read the rest at Naked Capitalism.

Related Posts on the Ellisons, Oracle, Paramount WBD:

• Trump Makes an Example Out of Paramount

• Larry Ellison + Oracle + AI + Paramount + Trump = Total Info Control

• Delusion, Deception and Dipshittery: Hasbara on the 8th Front

• Bari Weiss Will Run CBS News for the Ellison Hasbara Empire

• Hogs at the AI Slop Trough, Gulf States, UFC Edition

• Hasbara Ain’t Cheap, Musk, Ellison, Saudis, All Tapped

• Informational Force-Feeding Divides and Distracts

• What Are They Thinking? Son, Altman, Ellison Edition

• Bari Weiss’ CBS Not an Auspicious Beginning to Total Info Control

• Oracle Debt and TikTok Transition Troubles Vex the Ellison Media Empire

• Paramount Still Reaching for WBD as CBS Misplays Colbert-Talarico Interview

• Mask-Off Moment as Paramount at Nexus of AI, Gulf State Financing, and Private Equity

• Weak Links Oracle, OpenAI, UAE Are Hammered by Iran War

• OpenAI, Sora, Iran, the Ellison Empire, and Maybe a Recognition Event?

• Has the Ellison Infotainment Empire Peaked?

• Emperor Trump Brings Gladiator Games With UFC White House Event

And the endgame seems to be global Gaza-fication.

A Texas Congressional Candidate Shouts the Alarm

Peace activist and US Army Ranger vet Gregory Stoker is warning of “The Palestine Lab”:

Transcript:

“Whatever they do to Palestinians, they are willing to do to you.”

Former U.S. Special Ops Officer and congressional candidate Greg Stoker is sounding the alarm on a chilling reality that the establishment desperately wants you to ignore.

Ever heard of “The Palestine Laboratory”? It’s a term used by defense contractors to describe how the Israeli occupation uses Gaza and the West Bank as a testing ground for cyber-dystopian tech:

Advanced spyware & AI drones
Facial recognition & smart shooting systems
Predictive policing algorithms

But here’s the catch: once these terrifying tools are “battle-tested” on occupied Palestinians, they are packaged, exported, and sold directly to local police departments right near you.

Why should you care?
Because the elite have zero intention of fixing the housing crisis, the student debt crisis, or the soaring cost of living. Instead, their blueprint is to militarize the police and use national security databases (like Palantir) to control us when we inevitably protest.

Share this to wake people up before the “laboratory” comes to your front door.

This term wasn’t new to me. I remembered it from a few years back.

Antony Loewenstein Wrote a Whole Book About It

I caught author Antony Loewenstein on Amy Goodman in 2023 talking about his book “The Palestine LaboratoryHow Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World.”

Some key quotes:

Antony Loewenstein: The occupation of Palestine by Israel is now the longest occupation in modern times, 56 years and counting. During those years what Israel has done very successfully from its perspective is find various tools and technologies to maintain and control Palestinians and what they’ve done during that time is increasingly export those tools and technologies but also those methods those so-called counter-insurgency methods so what I look at in the book both being on the ground in Palestine for many years and also classified documents and various interviews across the world is that you find in over 130 countries across the globe in the last decades Israel has sold forms of anything from spyware so-called smart walls, facial recognition tools, a range of tools of occupation and repression that have initially been tested in Palestine on Palestinians.

The occupation of Palestine is not staying there. It’s not a conflict that remains geographically based just in Palestine it’s become so-called Global Palestine.

Amy Goodman:How would you describe “politicide” — a term you use?

Loewenstein: Politicide I think was a term that was coined by Baruch Kimmeling, the late amazing academic and he was talking really about the concept of a desire within many in the Israeli elite to find ways to destroy Palestinians that’s not necessarily just through killing them but also through extinguishing their political identity their political self-determination.
…
The European Union in the last years after 2015 when they were, in their view, overwhelmed by particularly Muslim refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Libya.

(The EU) didn’t want to ever repeat that and they put in place almost the Fortress type Europe which has occurred in the last years which is a range of tools and technologies to keep people out — mostly Muslim and brown and black bodies of course — and part of that Arsenal is using Israeli drones. They’re unarmed but they are flying over the Mediterranean 24/7 and they’re used mostly by Frontex which is the sort of EU border security arm and they’re the eyes in the sky essentially.

So they are sending back all these images 24/7 to Warsaw which is where Frontex is based and the EU has made a decision, of course they don’t admit this, but this is the reality of letting people drown. This is the new policy there are very very few rescue boats. The EU barely rescues anyone. There are some NGOs that are trying to do so, and I deeply admire what they’re doing…

So the Israeli drone becomes a key arsenal and part of this infrastructure of essentially allowing people to drown and to me it really goes to the heart of why Israeli drones are used by the EU because they were battle tested in Palestine over Gaza in the last 15 years and you see this almost Israeli border industrial complex exported across the U.S-Mexico border, for example.

There are massive amounts of Israeli surveillance towers made by Elbit, which is Israel’s lean defense company, dotted across the border. It’s a key part of the U.S Arsenal across this border with Mexico and why was that company chosen by the US?

Because of course it was tested first in Palestine. So to me the real concern in the 21st century as the climate crisis worsens, as resource wars are worsening, as refugee numbers have never been high since World War II, many Western nations are sadly making a choice to not welcome people in, but in fact to build higher walls and more surveillance and Israeli surveillance and technology and repression is part of that arsenal that many nations are now a buying because it’s been used, in their view, successfully on Palestinians in Palestine.

It’s not just Palestine where this tech is being tested.

Donbas = Gaza 2.0?

DD Geopolitics warned us in 2025 in their piece by Sarah B. titled “Gaza to Donbass: How Israel and Ukraine Built a Transnational War Machine.”

Some quotes:

From Bandera to Ben-Gurion, echoes of ethno-nationalist revival resonate in the modern trajectories of Ukraine and Israel, two states forged through war, hardened by siege mentalities, and fueled by historical narratives of existential struggle. But these similarities are no accident of parallel development. They reflect a deepening alignment shaped by shared adversaries like Russia and Iran, backed and brokered by the same Western patrons.

In 2022, an officer of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, toured Israel after surviving the siege of Mariupol. By 2025, Israeli drones were flying missions over Rafah, while American-made PSRL-1 rocket launchers, initially supplied to Ukraine, were spotted in conflict zones across the Middle East. Some experts suggest these may have reached Gaza through black-market channels, though a direct transfer remains unproven. What is undeniable, however, is the convergence of military technologies, intelligence doctrines, and battlefield logistics spanning both theaters.

In April 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, himself a stalwart ally to the Zionist cause, declared that he envisioned Ukraine becoming “a big Israel.” In doing so, he abandoned the pretense of liberal reform and embraced a future defined by permanent militarization, domestic surveillance, and an ideologically mobilized citizenry. Ukraine, he suggested, would survive not by joining Europe’s post-national dream, only by imitating the ethos of a heavily securitized Middle Eastern state.

Zelenskyy’s statement didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It followed decades of quietly intensifying Ukrainian–Israeli ties, in historical memory, military cooperation, tech integration, and shared narratives of victimhood. But it also exposed a deeper and more disturbing fusion. When the president of a country still reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust and its own fascist collaborators calls for the building of a “Big Israel,” he is not just invoking a model of defense, he is invoking a model of justified violence, permanent siege, and a long tradition of selective memory, one that both Ukraine and Israel have wielded to reconcile uncomfortable historical alliances of culpability.

And while we’re talking about Ukraine and laboratories…

Ukraine: Where Alex Karp Gets Even More Practice Mass Murdering People

Lena Petrova has a new piece called “Ukraine: The Laboratory of the Western Military-Industrial Complex and AI Weapons.”

It includes this photo of fab folks:

Caption: “According to the Ukrainian President’s Office, the meeting held at Ukraine House in Washington, DC, was attended by BAE Systems President Tom Arseneault, Day & Zimmermann Chair and CEO Harold Yoh, Boeing President Theodore Colbert, CEO of Sierra Nevada Corporation Fatih Ozmen, Northrop Grumman Vice President Stephen O’Bryan, RTX Vice President Jeff Shockey, Lockheed Martin Vice President Raymond Piselli, General Dynamics Vice President Mark Roualet, D&M Holding CEO Daniel Powers, AeroVironment Vice President Charles Dean.”

And from the article:

Ukraine has become the largest real-world testing ground for Western military technology since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of AI in this case is notable because nowhere else can Western states test the newest, most advanced military technology against their only and bitter adversary – Russia.
…

Perhaps no company symbolizes this grotesque transformation more than Palantir. According to a report, Palantir’s Karp was the first Western CEO to visit Zelensky.
…

Volodymyr Zelensky’s relationship with Palantir has evolved from an emergency wartime partnership into one of the most significant collaborations between a national government (an illegitimate one, in this particular case) and a foreign military technology company. Palantir CEO Alex Karp first visited Kyiv in 2022, and the company subsequently expanded its presence in Ukraine, providing software for intelligence analysis, battlefield awareness, logistics, demining operations, and targeting support.

Unsurprisingly, the precise financial value of Ukraine’s agreements with Palantir remains largely undisclosed. Unlike traditional weapons contracts, many of Palantir’s services involve software licenses, cloud infrastructure, and data analytics platforms.

By 2026, the partnership had expanded considerably. Zelensky met personally with Alex Karp to deepen cooperation in artificial intelligence and battlefield analytics. The joint Brave1 Dataroom initiative provides developers with access to real-world combat data to train AI models, with more than 100 companies reportedly developing over 80 AI systems for detecting and intercepting aerial threats.

Although no publicly verified contract value has been released, Palantir itself reached a market capitalization of roughly $330 billion in 2026, underscoring the growing financial importance of military AI companies operating in Ukraine, Palestine, and against Iran.

Recent reporting indicates that Palantir’s AI systems have helped Ukraine analyze aerial attacks, process intelligence, and support planning for deep-strike operations. As I mentioned above, the company has also worked with Ukrainian institutions on the Brave1 Dataroom initiative, which provides battlefield data for training artificial intelligence models.

And naturally Palantir gives me an easy segue to ICE, the leading edge of the Gaza-fication of the USA.

Public/Private ICE/Palantir Info Partnership

Or all your Medicaid data belong to Alex Karp, Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, via NPR:

After Medicaid officials improperly shared data about millions of people in January with immigration officials, ICE then shared that data with the data analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings. Palantir operates an app called ELITE that is used by ICE agents to show the addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.

That revelation was made public in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration last year over its data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE.

…
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is asking the judge to expand his order to allow ICE to receive data on a broader category of noncitizens – to potentially include all immigrants who are not legal permanent residents, citizens or have another form of permanent status.

“ICE’s inability to identify Medicaid records in its possession undercuts any claim that the agency should be entitled to more access to that data,” the Democratic attorneys generals wrote in their motion filed late Thursday.

Their motion continued, “Each successive revelation of a violation of the Order makes it more difficult for Plaintiff States to have confidence in Defendants’ ability to maintain and secure this data in compliance with the Order, and more difficult for Plaintiff States to communicate assurances to Medicaid providers, enrollees (and their counsel), and the public at large about the privacy and confidentiality of their healthcare data.”

Palantir provided the following statement to NPR: “Our customers control their own data and manage access to that data. When Palantir employees are granted access to a customer’s dataset, it is solely to help integrate and analyze that data — which is what our software does — not to store it or use it for our own purposes. Palantir can confirm that the dataset in question was purged pursuant to government instruction.”

And speaking of ICE and the worst people on Earth, here’s one (allegedly) murderous agent who recalls the infamous Dirlewanger Brigade.

Is Stephen Miller Scouring the Prisons for These Guys?

So the (alleged) murderer in the ICE shooting in Maine gets the ring-a-ding-dong-this-guys-a-dick endorsement from his ex.

NPR has more deets:

Ashley Brouillette told NPR her ex-husband, David Brouillette, was the officer who fatally shot Joan Durán Guerrero four times during an attempted traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday. She said she found out he was the officer responsible when he called her on Wednesday, asking her to vouch for his character.

“He asked me to basically talk good in his character, not to talk bad about him. And if I couldn’t not talk bad about him, then just not to talk at all to anybody,” she told NPR. “And I told him that I was not going to lie for him. He asked me not to talk about the abuse in our marriage. And I told him again I was not going to lie for him.”

Oh wait, he’s got another ex who vouches for his (lack of) character:

And now that we’re talking about ICE, let’s look at the root causes of the infection.

ICE and the People Who Love and Fund Them

I came across this doozy of a piece in Politico this weekend:

Some quotes:

At the far end of a dock on the banks of the Potomac, past protesters yelling SHAME! and holding signs like DEPORT HATE NOT PEOPLE, up a ramp, across a gangway and up a flight of stairs, about 200 of the most hard-line, anti-immigration people in Washington boarded a boat Thursday afternoon. It was, they believed, time to party.

The organizers of the event wanted to call it the U.S.S. Deportation, but no such boat was available, so they had to settle for renting out the Potomac Spirit — a massive, three-story yacht with open bars on every level that would attract lines throughout the evening. “Ahoy! This is the captain speaking,” piped a cheery voice, not emanating from an actual captain, but rather a video of a former DHS staffer in a captain’s hat. “Where are we going on this boat? Hopefully, to a political and policy destination of two commas in the deportation numbers.”

The boozy gala attracted conservatives who have served in Congress, the Justice Department and ICE — all of whom share a goal of deporting an unprecedented 1 million-plus people a year. Former GOP Reps. Steve King and Tom Tancredo reminisced about their time as rabble-rousers in the House, like when King literally built a border wall on the House floor to demonstrate the government could, too. Scott Mechkowski, the former deputy ICE field director in New York, held court on the rooftop deck, trading battle stories about his two-and-a-half decades leading deportation operations. Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general, mingled with an entourage, some of them wearing multicolored leis and flipping through printed-out policy playbooks from the Mass Deportation Coalition, as the group calls itself.

“To influence D.C., you need to speak the language of professional D.C.,” said Mike Howell, the brains behind the event. “One of the modes of language in D.C. is convening with some pomp and circumstance — and what better way to do that than on a boat, touring the sights and smells of Washington, D.C.?”

And in case you think they’re kidding around, never forget, “How ICE grew to be the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency.”

Oh and the FBI has been ordered to cease investigating ICE-involved incidents, per the NYT:

Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the F.B.I. would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed on the decision.

If enacted, such a change would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers.
…
F.B.I. managers around the country received a written notice informing them of the change on Thursday, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal communications. The same day, some ICE agents around the country were notified by their F.B.I. counterparts.

The guidance shared with them said that the bureau would stop investigating claims of assaults against Department of Homeland Security agents, the people said. Even though such investigations are intended to determine whether the officers were in fact attacked, they can provide a crucial means of gathering evidence implicating the agents themselves.

Sourcing is anonymous, which is meh, but I have no reason to doubt the report.

And while we’re talking about awful people and the AI-powered Gaza-fication of America, we gotta bring Flock into this.

Go Flock Yourself CEO Guy

I haven’t covered the ongoing grassroots rebellion against Flock cameras in a bit, so let’s check in on their CEO who’s making himself quite the popular fellow.

Via Forbes:

For the last two years, Will Freeman has been advocating against Flock Safety, an $8.3 billion surveillance company that tracks vehicles with a network of over 80,000 cameras. His organization, DeFlock, crowdsourced a map that shows where the company’s cameras are located, and helps local grassroots movements organize against Flock deployments.

In an interview with Forbes last year, Flock CEO Garrett Langley described DeFlock as a “terroristic organization.” But now, as Flock faces an increasingly vitriolic public backlash, Langley says he regrets that label.

“My comments were a mistake and I apologize,” he says. “There are groups today that have real valid criticisms of the business, and I think what’s changed for us is, as we’ve listened to them and heard them out, what we’re trying to do is find this balance. We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy.”

You and me both buddy, you and me both.

So yea, what a world and the people who help it get this way.

Hang tough, y’all.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Note: I’m traveling so this post was written early Monday and might be a bit out of date.

Let’s start with the big picture view of the DHS — the villain of the first half of today’s post.

Even Under New Management ICE Keeps Killing

DHS and ICE might be under new management with the removal of “ICE Barbie” Kristi Noem by former MMA fighter turned US Senator from Oklahoma Markwayne Mullin, but their bloody handiwork continues.

Yea, it’s great that Noem’s personal gigalo (seriously watch Noem filibuster when asked directly if she’d had sex with Lewandowski at a Congressional hearing) senior aide and unofficial DHS uber-consultant Corey Lewandowski is not only out, but under investigation for improperly awarding contracts at an agency where he was never officially employed (although that didn’t stop him from personally firing the head of FEMA).

And it’s nice that Nazi larping Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino lost his job.

And I guess it’s even bueno that the grim sex farce that was Noem’s marriage is being put out of its misery, but is it really a good thing that Per Politico, Mullin has delivered on his promise of a “more discreet” Department of Homeland Security:

While the Department of Homeland Security continues to deport large numbers of unauthorized immigrants, it is making fewer arrests in public, holding back from deploying fresh waves of immigration agents to hotspots and has scrapped a plan to expand mega-warehouse detention facilities.

It’s all with the aim of fulfilling the president’s pledge for large-scale deportations — without attracting the kind of public attention that ignited widespread protests.

“It’s by design,” said one person familiar with strategic discussions within DHS, who like others was granted anonymity to speak freely about the conversations inside its agencies. “Just like Mullin and [acting ICE chief David] Venturella want — quieter and smarter operations. Finally.”

And how are those “quieter and smarter” operations working out for people in Houston, Texas?

The ICE-ing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

The temperatures are a lot hotter in Houston in July than they were last winter in Minneapolis, but ICE is just as deadly.

Incompetent, but deadly — the NYT reports that they weren’t even investigating Araujo but stumbled across the van he was driving in the course of another investigation.

Like an agent from the famous FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit — except they’re reporting facts instead of making up nonsense, Migrant Insider pointed out all the tell-tale trademarks of this particular serial killer:

ICE says Araujo tried to flee a traffic stop, rammed an agency vehicle and attempted to run over an officer — the same justification the agency has offered in at least three other fatal or near-fatal shootings by immigration agents since Trump’s second-term deportation push began. In every one of those cases, video or the paper trail eventually cut against the government’s version. As of Tuesday night, no video of the Araujo shooting has been made public. That absence is the story.

…ICE calls the shooting self-defense, says Araujo used his vehicle as a weapon, and folds the operation into Operation Take Back America, the Trump administration’s mass-enforcement push that filed 259 immigration cases in the Southern District of Texas in a single week this May.

What’s missing?

Everything that would let anyone outside ICE check its story. Click2Houston reports no dash-cam or body-cam footage has surfaced. No independent witness has been quoted. Three other people at the scene were detained; ICE hasn’t said who they are or what they saw. The FBI’s Houston field office is investigating Araujo for a potential “assault on a federal law enforcement officer” — investigating the dead man, in other words — while DHS’s own inspector general reviews the shooting itself, as it must whenever a federal officer kills someone.
…
This is not the first time ICE has reached for “he tried to run me over.”

• In March 2025, an ICE agent on South Padre Island killed 23-year-old U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez. DHS said Martinez drove at an agent. The shooting wasn’t disclosed publicly until watchdogs forced the records into daylight.

• In January, agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, a VA nurse. DHS said Good tried to run over agents and that the holstered, restrained Pretti still posed a threat. Video showed neither — Pretti was already subdued when Border Patrol agents shot him ten times.

They also point out that local officials are claiming impotence:

“Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia’s office confirmed it has no jurisdiction over federal agents and referred questions to the Sheriff’s Office and ICE — the same jurisdictional dead end that has swallowed accountability in every prior case on this list.”

While I’ve yet to hear of any local organizing comparable to what was done in Chicago or Minneapolis when ICE “invaded” their cities last year, Texans are protesting the killing of one of their own, via TPR.org:

The protest, organized Wednesday evening by civil rights group FIEL Houston and the Houston branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, brought hundreds of Houstonians to the 6800 block of Canal Street where, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot on Tuesday morning.

Local Democratic officials (keep in mind Texas is a red state, but its cities are blue) are putting out the proverbial “strongly worded statements” in droves.

The GOP officials are even more pathetic, remaining completely silent in the face of this deadly intrusion of the federal government into Texas.

And some local Latin leaders are grappling with Houston’s chronic lack of mobilized citizenry, via Straight Arrow News:

More than 1,000 people attended a protest and vigil Wednesday evening on Canal Street, an under-construction stretch of road in Houston’s historic East End where Salgado Araujo was shot the day before. Protestors walked several blocks of the neighborhood; elected officials shouted into megaphones demanding accountability and change; mourners lit candles.

That size crowd is a significant turnout — especially for Houston. But it stayed firmly within the bounds of a somber, highly organized gathering. The deluge seen elsewhere never appeared. It rarely does.

“Houston does not respond like a lot of the other liberal cities, especially like Minneapolis did,” David Contreras said. Contreras has lived in both Houston and Minneapolis, though Houston is his hometown. It’s where he made a name for himself as a local historian, eventually earning the role of national historian for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and where he now serves as chairman of the Harris County Hispanic Cultural Heritage Commission.

“And I really don’t know why,” Contreras told Straight Arrow. “We don’t get that response from the Latino community, and have not in the past.”

Some of the low headcount can be explained by the chilling effect ICE’s presence has had on communities of color, particularly in the East End. Earlier this year, LULAC canceled its annual Cinco de Mayo parade due to “growing concerns surrounding ICE enforcement activity,” according to the press release the organization published at the time.

“We canceled it because of fear of arrest, especially in the youth, and deportations,” Contreras told Straight Arrow.

“There’s a visceral fear in immigrant communities of what’s going on,” said Joe Higgs, lead organizer at the Gulf Coast Leadership Council, a community organizing group in Houston. “And so they’re not going to go out and protest. The question is: Is it agitational enough to others?”

Even in the nation’s most diverse metropolitan area, where 44.2% of city residents are Latino, translating one community’s fears into broader civic outrage has long been a high hurdle to clear. And the city has, for decades, struggled to generate large-scale turnouts for movements that see larger crowds in smaller cities.

As awful and frustrating as the above story is, it’s just one of several instances of the Trump regime and aligned businesses running right over Texans who don’t seem to know what’s hitting us.

ICE Pulls Back on Pull Overs, NOT

And I don’t mean sweaters. Looks like Markwayne Mullin is putting ICE’s rampage on the downlow, per FOX:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are being instructed to end “most” vehicle stops nationwide in a major policy shift, effective immediately.

According to multiple federal sources, ICE agents will cease making traffic stops, which have played a significant role in the agency’s operations until now. A federal source told Fox News that ICE will continue conducting vehicle stops only for those considered to be the most egregious targets with serious or violent criminal histories.

This comes after two people were killed in ICE officer-involved shootings in Maine and Texas in the last week.

But that was yesterday; today, POTUS Trump says nah:

I’d make a joke about “chilling effect” on immigration enforcement Trump rug pulls, but until ICE is frozen to death, there’s nothing funny about this.

Now, let’s look at the case of Big Bend National Park, one of the nation’s most beautiful and beloved natural wonders, and the lesser known but almost as spectacular Big Bend Ranch State Park.

Barricading Big Bend

We’ll start with some quotes from this March Texas Monthly piece which captures the chaos and incompetence accompanying the Trump regime’s inevitably bad intentions:

When news broke last month that the federal government was actively seeking leases for border-wall construction in the Big Bend region, an opposition movement quickly coalesced around protecting Big Bend National Park. The effort united folks across the political spectrum and drew bipartisan support from local officials, including a coalition of county sheriffs, and even some state lawmakers, all aimed at stopping a wall from cutting through the cherished natural resource.

Upriver, meanwhile, beyond the park’s boundaries and on private land in a string of tiny desert communities, residents were grappling with haphazard outreach from CBP, wondering if their properties were about to become casualties of border politics.

The notices were puzzling and inconsistent. One resident received a letter, while their next-door neighbor, located along the same length of river, did not. Some folks got calls from CBP representatives telling them to expect letters that never arrived. Others received notices about land that wasn’t theirs.

This video from Big Bend Sentinel tells the story well:

Another Texas Monthly piece chronicles just how farcical the pretenses “justifying” the Trump regime’s actions in the region are:

…this year’s declaration of emergency, an annual requirement for our participation in Operation Lone Star. There is no emergency and everyone knows it, but it’s a game we all must play as poor counties, so the lights can stay on at the jail and the sheriff can make a salary that isn’t an outright joke. There is no discussion and the measure passes 5–0. Whereas, the health, safety, and welfare of the residents of Presidio County, Texas are under imminent threat of disaster from the unprecedented levels of illegal migration, human trafficking and drug smuggling coming across the U.S. border from Mexico . . .

There isn’t a single person in the room who believes these words to be true. Maybe they were in 2022, when the resolution was first passed, but since then, Border Patrol apprehensions are down 79 percent across the southwest border, logging some of the lowest numbers in the agency’s history. The Big Bend—which sees, on average, anywhere from 1 and 3 percent of the agency’s total encounters year after year—remains as slow as ever.

Following the government’s logic about these plummeting numbers requires Olympic-level mental gymnastics. There is so much money—the most money ever set aside for the DHS in history—and then there isn’t enough. There are so many people crossing the border and then there aren’t; no one has crossed the border in eight months, according to the president. No one crossed the border in eight months, but everyone who has is the Worst of the Worst.

And then there’s the horrifying scope of the money being spent squandered to ruin some of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth, also via Texas Monthly:

In June, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, awarded a staggering $2.6 billion contract—the largest upfront award for physical border infrastructure ever—to build a four- to six-foot-tall steel “vehicle barrier” and pave new patrol roads for a 156-mile stretch from Sanderson to Lake Amistad. Fisher Sand & Gravel Co., a North Dakota–based contractor with ties to the Trump administration, won the bid.

The new proposal will still tear up Skiles’s land, destroying important archaeological sites and polluting what is one of the last wild places in Texas. And if anything, the latest plans may constitute an even more pointless waste of taxpayer money than a thirty-foot wall. Skiles Ranch, like almost the entirety of the Lower Canyons stretch of the Rio Grande below the national park, is characterized by a deep river gorge, with natural canyon walls typically soaring from one hundred to three hundred feet. It’s remote, harsh, and seldom trafficked by migrants.

A border wall might, in theory, keep some of the small number who do cross there from entering Texas. But a vehicle barrier makes no sense for the simple reason that vehicles do not and cannot cross an impassable river gorge. As of now, smugglers have not figured out how to drive cars or trucks down vertical cliffs, across a river (or giant Lake Amistad), up vertical cliffs, and subsequently onto private property that’s surveilled and patrolled by Border Patrol, enclosed within fences, and watched over by heavily armed private landowners. Why would they? There are far easier and better places to traffic drugs and people.

The Texas Observer has more:

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott told a reporter in May that because of the Big Bend’s “granite cliffs” over “90 feet tall”—likely referring to the thousand-foot tall limestone canyons that line the river—a physical fence would not be erected in the park. That same month, CBP awarded a $1.7 billion contract to Southwest Valley Constructors, a subsidiary of Kiewit, for “border wall” in and around Big Bend National Park. The agency then clarified to press that this actually referred to smaller vehicle barriers, roads, and tech.

Meanwhile, the state park was originally slated for a steel bollard wall from the park entrance through Closed Canyon, one of the park’s most popular attractions, but former Big Bend Sector Chief Lloyd Easterling promised Presidio County commissioners in March that no wall would be built in the state park. A few days later, Easterling suddenly and unexpectedly announced his retirement. The agency then said that Easterling’s retirement had nothing to do with the wall, and also that—just kidding!—at least two miles of wall would be built in the state park.

In addition to the Kiewit contract, four other border barrier contracts have been awarded for the Big Bend region, going to Fisher Sand & Gravel of North Dakota and Barnard Construction of Montana. Together, the companies will build 175 miles of traditional steel border wall through Hudspeth and Presidio Counties.
…

As a river guide who’s logged thousands of miles running the Rio Grande, the most polite word I can think of to describe the agency’s vehicle barrier plans is “baffling.” Much of the 17 miles presently marked on the map for vehicle barriers is in Mariscal Canyon, which forms the distinctive bend in the Rio Grande the region is named for. It’s around 80 miles from my house as the crow flies, but it takes around 6-8 hours to get there. There are no roads in Mexico leading anywhere near Mariscal Canyon, and the road that leads into the canyon on the American side is so bad that every time I’ve been out there I’ve brought a shovel for the express purpose of building the road myself.

Markwayne Mullin’s DHS may be unbelievably stupid but they also unbelievably well-funded and damn dangerous.

Related Posts:

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• Posse Comitatus and Trump’s Post-Constitutional Order

• Will Trump Work Himself Into a Shoot Versus Illinois Governor?

• Ken Paxton Takes His Anti-Antifa Fight Undercover

• ICE Barbie on the Bleeding Edge of Trump Era Conflict & Corruption

• ICE, Antifa, and the Ever Expanding Definition of Terrorism

• Democrats Tangle Themselves on ICE and Israel

• Minnesota on ICE, Part One

• Democrats React to Minnesota on ICE

• Stephen Miller vs ICE Barbie & Corey Is a Distraction

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

A Bold Proposal From Scam Altman

Regular readers might recall that not long ago, OpenAI and Amazon were involved in encouraging the Trump admin to crack down on rival Anthropic in a fairly nasty family blogging.

The Financial Times had the details on July 1 (archived):

OpenAI has discussed giving a 5 per cent stake to the US government as the $852bn AI start-up seeks to clear political obstacles by securing financial buy-in from the Trump administration.
…
The proposed arrangement would involve other US AI companies handing over a similar stake, although it is not clear if the other labs would be willing to do so.

Giving the government an ownership stake could help secure good relations with the administration and would mark an attempt to address political blowback by sharing the wealth generated by AI with the public.
…
OpenAI and its chief rival Anthropic have recently both had the release of their cutting-edge models held up by US scrutiny, while some Republicans and advisers to President Donald Trump favour much tighter regulation of the sector.
…
Altman and other OpenAI executives have suggested that each of America’s leading AI developers allot 5 per cent of their equity to a vehicle like the Alaska Permanent Fund, a sovereign fund that invests the state’s oil wealth into stocks and pays dividends to the state government and residents.
These companies might include Anthropic as well as Google, Meta and others, although it is not clear any of these groups would agree with OpenAI’s proposal.

You’ve got to hand it to Sam Altman; he’s got great comic timing.

Even Axios was a bit skeptical:

Investors tell Axios that the idea of giving a stake reads like a PR stunt aimed at making it seem as if the public could benefit from the AI boom just as the technology threatens their jobs.

Yes, but: The government’s 9.9% stake in Intel, taken last August, appears to have paid off.

Its shares are up nearly 400% since then, although it has also come amid a broad rally for chip stocks.

The Intel stake was acquired under the CHIPS Act. A deal with the AI labs would likely require an act of Congress.

It’s also unclear what a government stake would accomplish, other than giving the AI labs a closer relationship to what is currently one of their biggest hurdles: the government.

An investor in Anthropic and OpenAI tells Axios that the proposal reads more like a “political move” to gain favor with the administration than something that would actually create a shared benefit for the American public.

What they’re saying: A government stake would be a “troubling milestone” that hurts competition between the labs, ” David Sherman, AI and financial inclusion strategist at io.net, a decentralized cloud network, said via email.

It “gives one AI company a government stamp of approval whilst millions of developers, researchers and businesses are locked out by skyrocketing token prices and endless GPU queues,” he added, referencing the challenge in accessing AI at current costs or chips at current supply levels.

And why would the lames at Axios be skeptical about the leader in the “we’re building God” industry?

Apple Slaps OpenAI With a Suit

Could it be because the ever unfocused Sam Altman has talked mad trash about taking on Apple and launching an OpenAI phone?

Maybe it’s because in pursuit of that obviously dumb idea Altman’s been poaching Apple talent, per the FT (archived):

Apple claimed that the ChatGPT maker has used former and current Apple employees to steal hardware designs as the start-up prepares to launch its own AI-focused devices. It alleged that this was part of a pattern of misconduct normalised by OpenAI’s top leadership.

“Significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products,” Apple said.
…
The lawsuit marks a breakdown in the relationship between Apple and OpenAI as each encroaches on the other’s territory: Apple, with the launch of its new ChatGPT-like Siri in June, and OpenAI with its plan to take on the iPhone.

OpenAI signalled its plan to compete with Apple in the consumer device space when it acquired io, the studio led by Apple’s former design chief Jony Ive, for $6.4bn in May last year.

OpenAI has since aggressively poached employees from Apple, part of a broader trend of AI talent leaving the company.
While OpenAI in 2024 became Apple’s first big partner in the AI space, integrating ChatGPT into Siri, Apple has since partnered with Google for its newest features.

Competing with Apple might be Altman’s dumbest idea since Sora, or selling ads, or doing pr0n.

Somehow all this flailing around isn’t leading to the infinite pots of gold at the end of the AGI/ASI rainbow, no matter how many times Altman claims OpenAI is about to immanentize the eschaton.

OpenAI Blinked on Their IPO

Well it seems that OpenAI was supposed to dropping a $1 trillion IPO but then they didn’t.

Barchart’s Rob Isbitts titled his take “Why OpenAI’s Delayed IPO Filing May Have Just Been the Death Knell for AI Stocks in 2026” via Yahoo Finance:

…go back a few weeks to June 8, 2026. That’s when OpenAI announced it had confidentially filed its S-1 paperwork with the SEC. The hype machine was working overtime, with bankers floating an unprecedented public valuation target of up to $1 trillion.

But before we could even get to the next calendar month, the news has completely flipped. According to reports on June 25, OpenAI’s financial advisors are now blinking, actively urging the company to push its heavily anticipated IPO all the way back to 2027.
…
OpenAI’s private funding rounds have been an exercise in exponential asset inflation, jumping to an $850 billion-plus valuation in March 2026. Bankers presented CEO Sam Altman with a clear choice: lower the valuation expectations to get the listing cleared sooner, or delay the IPO until 2027 to protect the $1 trillion target. Altman reportedly declared that any reduction in that trillion-dollar figure was an absolute non-starter.

The underlying financial disclosures reveal a staggering operational situation: OpenAI posted an astronomical net loss of $38.5 billion for 2025 on $13.07 billion in revenue. Even with monthly revenue pacing at a resilient $2 billion earlier this year, the company is still projected to burn through roughly $14 billion in losses for 2026.

When you combine that cash burn with a massive $600 billion data center and infrastructure commitment stretching out to 2030, the hurdle for public investors becomes completely impossible to meet in a high-interest-rate environment. Public market allocators are no longer willing to subsidize massive losses just for the promise of top-line generative AI growth.

And when Scam Altman gets a mote in his eye, the money mark who has sunk $30 billion into OpenAI and pledged another $30 billion gets a face full of pepper spray.

So Softbank Got Maced

When the NYT reported that OpenAI would be delaying its IPO until 2027, Softbank’s share price dropped 12% in one day and dropped almost 20% by July 7, although it’s recovered some since.

Somehow Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son didn’t turn things around with his brilliant presentation at the company’s 46th annual meeting:

OpenAI has the potential to dwarf Softbank’s infamous $6.2 billion loss on WeWork, but heck, Mark Zuckerberg squandered 10x of that on the Metaverse, so I’m sure Masayoshi Son feels pressure to keep up. Heck, Son’s probably still kicking himself for missing out on Theranos.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Masayoshi Son, he might have AI psychosis if his claims to spend 2 to 3 hours daily interacting with ChatGPT are true.

The C-Suite AI Psychosis Pandemic

Can’t prevent this one from spreading by masking up and working from home, per TechCrunch:

Tech executives, especially CEOs, are collectively suffering from delusions of AI grandeur. And at least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie.

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X.

CEOs “play with AI,” develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie’s examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work.

But these top-level executives aren’t the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren’t responsible for training AI models on a company’s idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.

In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs.

I’m not qualified to tell AI psychosis from ketamine poisoning and I’m certainly not going to tell a CEO when microdosing has become macrodosing so let’s get back to brass tacks.

Because not everyone is a sunny-side-up type who really believes that Sam Altman is building Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI) like Son and credulous NPR readers.

And I can’t leave Masayoshi Son behind without at least mentioning another of his brilliant ideas: Roze.

AI Psychosis Diagnosis: Positive

The pink paper revealed what is possibly Softbank’s most dazzlingly brilliant plan in April (archive):

SoftBank is planning to create and list an AI and robotics company called Roze in the US that will be involved in building data centres as Masayoshi Son pushes to realise his massive AI ambitions.

Roze could be listed as early as this year, and executives at SoftBank are eyeing a valuation that could reach $100bn, according to people familiar with the matter.
…
Despite Son’s optimism, some inside SoftBank are sceptical about the valuation and the proposed timeline for an IPO, in part due to the geopolitical and economic uncertainties following US President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran.
…
The valuation target could shift and is considered ambitious by some SoftBank executives since it relies on rapidly expanding its data centre businesses.
ABB Robotics, which SoftBank agreed to buy last year, could play a critical role once the deal closes, alongside some existing group assets, including land and infrastructure, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
SoftBank is working fast on building its own data centres, including a large-scale project in Ohio, and people familiar with the matter say Son has big ambitions in the sector.

The oft quoted, albeit semi-anonymous, X.com tech analyst/slop slinger, Ricardo rips this scheme to pieces:

Tasty quotes:

There’s no prototype, no data center, and not even a single cable has been laid.

But Masayoshi Son wants this thing public by the end of 2026 at a $100 billion valuation.

Only a handful of companies in history have ever debuted at that level, and every single one of them had billions in actual revenue when they went public. Roze has zero.

And here’s the thing…

SoftBank isn’t building Roze from scratch. They’re Frankensteining it from acquisitions they already own.

ABB Robotics, bought for $5.4 billion last year, gets folded in. Land assets, energy investments, infrastructure holdings, all bundled into ONE shiny new entity designed specifically to go public.

They’re repackaging assets they already own under a new name with an AI story slapped on top and trying to sell it to retail investors at a 20X markup.

And the timing tells you EXACTLY why this is happening:

SoftBank committed over $30 billion to OpenAI this year alone. Took out a $10 billion loan backed by their OpenAI stake just weeks ago.

Their balance sheet is so stretched that their own insiders are raising concerns about funding.

So Roze is a fundraising mechanism disguised as a company. The IPO exists to bring in outside capital so SoftBank can keep feeding its other AI bets without collapsing under its own weight.

SoftBank has literally run this EXACT play before. Every single time it ended in disaster.

2018: They pour $2 billion into Katerra, a construction tech startup promising to “transform” building. Same pitch as Roze, just swap “AI data centers” for “apartments.”

Katerra burned every dollar, exaggerated revenue to investors, and filed for bankruptcy. 8,000 employees lost jobs with no severance.

Son called it one of his biggest “regrets.”

A Masayoshi Son “regret” is unfortunately not quite as rare as a unicorn, even at a Silicon Valley ayahuasca party.

But speaking of cryptozoology…

Mommy Do AI Bears Really Exist? Will They Eat Our Portfolio?

Unsurprisingly, professional generative AI bear Ed Zitron was unsympathetic, titling his reply “Let AI Burn“:

Every single time you hear somebody discuss “bailout” or “too big to fail” or “sovereign wealth funds,” know that this is the industry, on some level, attempting to create the air that it cannot die, when in fact every one of these companies is just as weak and brittle as any other startup.

I also think that the media — and the world at large — is too ready to accept the prospect of a bailout after watching those who drove the world into a ditch in 2008 escape blame, and I must be clear: the AI industry is very different to the financial industry. It is inessential to the economy, and its relevance is only as large as the hype campaign that sits behind it.

This is an industry of losers that has inflated only because of the joint manufactured consent of Silicon Valley, the mainstream media, and an enshittified stock market that rewards grifting and circular financing. OpenAI had $5.7 billion and Anthropic a little under $5 billion in the first quarter of this year — and those revenues mostly came from companies that were burning AI tokens at a horrendous rate because they’d just been forced to pay the actual cost of AI — and now everybody’s pulling back on that spend.

Generative AI will not bring us AGI, nor does it do much of what we associate with artificial intelligence. It is not autonomous. It is not “intelligent.” It does not have thoughts, or “knowledge,” and no matter how many layers of harnesses and scripts you put on top of it, it is still (per OpenAI) mathematically certain to hallucinate. I estimate that at least 70% of the entire AI industry’s revenues are made up of OpenAI and Anthropic’s compute spend, and as both companies are horrendously unprofitable, this means that the AI industry is, for the most part, venture capitalists funnelling money to hyperscalers so that they can funnel that money to NVIDIA or data center capex.

Everyone knows Ed’s just a hater, surely the geniuses at the all-slop AI Chronicle will weigh in a convincing rebuttal, after all, they’re the best bots in the biz:

That’s enough about AI, let’s wrap with a quick look at the 30 companies the Trump 2.0 regime has taken stakes in on behalf of the US government.

Does OpenAI Fit the Presidential/Public Portfolio?

The always helpful Council on Foreign Relations has launched a “U.S. Government Deal Tracker” to “show how the government is experimenting with new tools and financing structures to advance a range of strategic sectors, including critical minerals, energy, global logistics, manufacturing, telecommunications, and other technologies.”

Washington’s latest and boldest experiment in industrial policy is a renewed willingness to take equity stakes. Since January 2025, the U.S. government has announced investments worth $26.7 billion across thirty deals involving direct ownership, broadening a toolkit that has traditionally focused on grants, loans, and tax incentives. The Department of Commerce leads the way with seventeen announced deals, including taking a 10 percent stake in Intel. The Development Finance Corporation, the United States’ development bank, has pledged six equity transactions in critical minerals, energy, and infrastructure. The Department of Defense has disclosed seven deals, and the Department of Energy has participated in two.

CFR’s U.S. Government Deal Tracker is designed to shed light on the growing number of public investments into private companies. Drawing on open sources, the tracker presents information on deals announced since January 2025 that entail equity and quasi-equity stakes. It records key details for each deal, including the terms agreed to, the agencies and authorities involved, the participation of the private sector and foreign partners, and milestones for monitoring progress.

There’s some cool pie charts and bullshit too:

CSIS was months ahead of CFR in looking at the Trump Regime’s novel public investment strategy, some key notes:

…the Trump administration is acquiring a strategic portfolio of investments in companies directly related to national security, spanning minerals, nuclear energy, and semiconductors, among other sectors. These equity positions aim to support key U.S. firms and thus reduce U.S. dependence on China, help reshore critical manufacturing and provide reputational and financial support for innovative domestic firms. At the same time, equity held by the government when not sufficiently constrained can also pose risks, potentially including the politicization of corporate decisionmaking.

“Politicization of corporate decisionmaking?”

You don’t say.

That’s exactly what the CFR’s Sebastian Mallaby warned about on a recent episode of Prof G Markets, he also shares some thoughts about the massive distress Sam Altman’s bad decision-making and lack of focus has put OpenAI in and what angle Scam might be working with this “5% for the public” con:

Relevant quotes (edited AI transcript):

Sebastian Mallaby: When you have a very high valuation, a down round is super painful.

(OpenAI was) valued in the last round at $852 billion dollars and in the secondary market they’re trading for a lot less than that.

If they were to just say ‘okay we accept we’re really worth $600 billion,’ the hit to everybody’s equity options inside open AI would be horrible and they would lose people and the hit to investors who had believed in open AI would be bad and they would get pissed off and the whole momentum machine that Sam Altman has built would really go through a convulsion.

Now, it might be what you have to do to make this thing sustainable because but but my point is once you ratchet all the way up to this very high valuation, it’s difficult to climb down.

That is why I think he says ‘why doesn’t the government have 5%.?’

Because a strategy to get out of this box that he’s in is for Altman to give 5% to the government and then the government will say ‘Right you know OpenAI is too important to fail now because we own 5% or 10% or something’ and they’ll do what they did with Intel which they took a 10% stake in last year.

Next thing you know Commerce Secretary (Howard) Lutnik is like calling other tech companies in The Valley saying ‘You’re going to do a deal with Intel.’ ‘You’re going to bring Intel in as a partner on your next project.’ Blah blah blah and so you’ve got the US government, a Trumpy US government, strong-armming other companies into giving business once they’re in your corner.

So that I think that is what Sam Altman’s strategy is here is to kind of recruit the investment banker to whom you can’t say no — the US government — which seems like he’s basically just trying to take some sort of workaround shortcut around capitalism.

Well, who doesn’t enjoy a good workaround? It certainly makes a hard screw job a lot more pleasant for everyone.

So far the verdict is that the Trump regime’s investment in Intel is paying off, so we should all be on the lookout for Milo Minderbinder to come around and pass out all of our shares any day now.

Related Posts

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• The Tangled OpenAI and Microsoft Alliance Frayed Under Pressure

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Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

“…the timing of the politically fatal accusation against Graham Platner stinks. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the successful campaign to force Platner to give up his Senate bid was not about his character but his politics.” Yves Smith

After Graham Platner was forced from the Maine US Senate race -- not because of the allegations printed in Politico, but rather because the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and Maine Democratic Party announced they were withdrawing their financial and technical support from the campaign -- centrists have launched a campaign to purge the party of Platner’s voters, donors and key consultants.

Before we start…

I’ve already covered the machinery that forced Platner out of the race so this post will look at forces that are contending to capitalize on his campaign’s failure to punish political enemies or just boost their own clout.

I also covered the role of parasocial relationships, aka “stan culture,” in this situation in the previous piece. In short, I’m against cults of personality whether they’re built around putative progressives, fake-ass centrists, or reactionary fascists.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the current round of the Democratic Establishment vs. Progressive Populists. Go team!

If He’s So Innocent Why Is He Dropping Out?

From Platner’s video statement announcing the end of his campaign:

The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.

We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function.

Larger organizations. The national level party. The bigger donor networks. They have all committed to spending no money in this race if I’m in it.

They would rather see Susan Collins win than have me be the next senator from Maine.

In short, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), headed up by New York’s dynamic duo of genocide enthusiast Chuck Schumer and the astoundingly corrupt Kirsten Gillibrand (who also played a leading role in the defenestration of Al Franken), announced it “will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.”

Given that both Schumer and Gillibrand were Cuomo dead-enders in last year’s New York City Mayoral election — despite Cuomo having resigned from the Governor’s office after facing “credible accusations” from over a dozen women that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice confirmed — neither of them is a credible advocate against sexual violence and exploitation.

And as Ian Welsh pointed out a very long month ago in his prescient piece “Establishment Attacks On Platner Are Classic Woke Attacks On The Populist Left”, it was pretty gross that Cuomo was forced out of office for being a sex pest but no one seemed to care about the 12,000+ of New Yorkers who died directly as a result of his corrupt COVID policy decisions.

But let’s get to the fight for power.

The Big Dem Money Pulled Out Early

Fox News tells us that there was a sudden and massive withdrawal of ad support for the Platner campaign before the fatal Politico story dropped:

Two Democratic-aligned political groups shifted millions of dollars in planned Maine Senate ad reservations days before a rape allegation against former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner became public, handing Republicans a new line of attack over whether party leaders had already lost confidence in his campaign.

WinSenate removed more than $6.2 million in Maine Senate ad reservations, including $5.9 million in broadcast reservations from July 7 through Aug. 31 and $330,000 in cable reservations that had been set to begin June 30, AdImpact, a leading ad-tracking and analytics firm that monitors political advertising, reported July 2. AdImpact also said a separate $240,000 in digital spending shifted from Majority Forward.

The ad shift came roughly one week before one of Platner’s ex-girlfriends accused him of rape, though Majority Forward denied the shift was due to recent campaign turmoil.

Very fishy, no?

Reminder: The GOP Incumbent Is A Disney Villain

From the archived piece:

Collins is not showing up to the fight empty-pocketed. According to federal campaign filings for the 2025-2026 election cycle, updated through June 7, at least 111 billionaires and their spouses from across the country gave just shy of $10 million to help her keep the seat.

These donations include direct campaign contributions–which are capped at $7,000 per cycle–as well as contributions to other PACs supporting her bid. Among these, Pine Tree Results, the main pro-Collins super PAC, has raised over $16 million and has already spent nearly $4 million opposing Platner.

But the Democratic establishment has other priorities than winning a Senate majority. There’s a populist uprising to nip in the bud!

Open Secrets points out what a deep deep hole the loss of Platner puts any Democrat challenging Collins in:

Platner’s withdrawal … exposed a deeper problem – a financial crater left behind in a pivotal race Democrats view as central to their hopes of regaining control of the chamber.

Before his populist campaign unraveled, the 41-year-old combat veteran and oysterman raised $16.3 million through May 20 and held nearly $2.2 million in cash on hand, according to filings his campaign submitted to the Federal Election Commission before the June 9 primary. While that cash total falls well short of the $10 million banked by Republican incumbent Susan Collins – who in 2020 kept her seat even though Democratic challenger Sarah Gideon outraised her by more than $45 million – it nevertheless dwarfs every potential Platner successor.

Send the Hordes Home In Their Hundred Thousands, 600 Insiders Will Choose

So here’s how the Maine Democratic Party intends to decide who the party’s official nominee for US Senate will be — this after overruling the wishes of a record 156,000 who voted for Platner in the June 9 primary — per the WaPo:

Since Platner suspended his campaign, a half-dozen Maine Democrats have announced they would run to replace him. On Thursday, the Maine Democratic Party said those candidates would need to submit a declaration of intent to run at a nominating convention, including a 300-word statement outlining their campaign vision and at least 500 signatures from registered Democratic voters in Maine.

Hours after Platner’s withdrawal, the Maine party announced it would hold a nominating convention July 25 with 601 voting delegates — 101 who are members of the Democratic State Committee and 500 who will be appointed at nominating meetings in each of the state’s 16 counties. The voting will be conducted in rounds, with the five highest vote-getters advancing to the second round and the candidate with the fewest votes eliminated in subsequent rounds until one remains. Only registered Democrats will be allowed to participate, the party said, citing Maine law.

“We are proud that this is one of the most open and inclusive processes that any state party has ever undertaken to replace a Senate nominee,” said Charlie Dingman, chair of the Maine Democratic Party.

Yea right.

There are many ways to organize far more representative caucuses which could engage far more than 0.002% of the 216,000 Mainers who voted in the June 9 primary — over 156,000 for Platner.

Call me crazy, but I really think an actually-democratic Democratic Party would have some kind of mechanism to remove a nominee through a vote of the electorate, but trial by social media followed by judgment by arbitrary elites is the system we’ve got instead, I guess.

Do the Mainers Even Buy This?

Morning Joe claims that Maine voters are not happy:

Joe Scarborough: I will say this, and this is just a word of warning to Democrats in Washington, D.C. Graham Platner was losing support with independents, no doubt about it. But I will tell you, me and [Mika?] have heard nothing — let me underline that, nothing but support from Maine Democrats on the ground for Platner.

Platner campaign signs are still up. They think that this is Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and the Washington establishment coming to get him.

They all have the same story. They started hearing 10 days ago that people were coming up to Maine and they were desperate to try to get Platner off the ballot because they thought Susan Collins had too much on him and would destroy him.

I will tell you, without revealing any names, that we have been bombarded by phone calls and text messages from people who want Graham Platner off the ballot, who are high up in Maine politics. And we’ve been getting that for the last two weeks.

So why do I say this? Because there’s a conspiracy? No, not at all.

Go back to what I said at the beginning — a warning to Washington Democrats. You do need to listen to Graham Platner, because whether it’s true or not just as Caddy said about her son who has been working on this campaign, rank-and-file Democrats who have been supporting Platner from the very beginning think that this was cooked up in Washington, D.C. with a lot of money behind it to find anything that could be found to get Graham Platner off the ballot.

And I will say, we know nothing about that. We just — [Mika] and I have been scratching our heads for the last couple of weeks going, why are we getting all these calls about Graham Platner needing to be off the ballot?

It’s almost like the last thing the Democratic establishment wants to do is engage an unruly, unusual coalition of real people.

At least that’s my inference based on this representative tirade from Dem “strategist” Karen Finney on CNN’s The Source:

Karen Finney: I think the the Democratic primary voters owe the rest of the Mainers an apology. Democrat primary voters knew Graham Platner was awful the whole time. They knew that he said society should be disrupted if you didn’t agree with him. They knew that women had credibly accused him of physical abuse. They knew that, in fact, Graham Platner said that he had a very flexible moral compass. The badness is why Democrat primary voters picked him, and they’re the ones that foisted this problem on us. Don’t just blame Graham Platner. Blame, blame Maine Democrats.

It’s hard to imagine why her MSNBC show Disrupt With Karen Finney was cancelled after less than a year.

With the Dem establishment having excluded the vast majority of voters, the right-wing decided to go full witch hunt.

Going After the Donors?

The right-wing Leadership Institute’s website Campus Reform immediately tried to relive the good old days of the Fall 2023 witch hunt on pro-Palestinian activists.

Progressives should remember that they’re always in the gunsights of the right and that the centrist Democrats do NOT have their back.

Regardless, this attack is weaker than pressing criminal charges on people who mocked the martyred Charlie Kirk.

Let’s look at another story that isn’t as scary as it seemed from a glance at the headlines.

Next, Let’s Kill All the Consultants

(I’m alluding to Shakespeare, not claiming anyone is advocating actual violence)

As annoying as that kind of contempt for the will of the voters is and as scary as GOP witch hunts are, the forces of reaction weren’t done yet, or maybe this one was just Left factionalism, the ol’ circular firing squad.

Turns out some members of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) — the organization behind much of Zohran Mamdani and company’s success in New York City — have signed a letter calling for Platner and Mamdani consultant to no longer be hired by DSA affiliated candidates.

Here’s from The Intercept:

“We, the undersigned, call on DSA candidates and elected officials to no longer contract or work with Morris Katz or Fight Agency, his political consulting firm,” the letter reads.

Katz is not a member of DSA.

The letter also noted consultants at the agency like Rebecca Katz, who is not related to Morris, were also behind the campaign of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and said they continued to advise him even after he made a hard-right turn after entering the Senate.

Two sources with knowledge of the letter confirmed its authenticity.

“Morris Katz is one of the chief parties responsible for the catastrophic campaign of scandal-ridden Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner,” the letter says. “Billed as a top adviser to the campaign, Katz helped recruit Platner and supercharged his candidacy with slick video production, friendly media placements, and political connections.”

The only reason people are attacking Morris Katz is that he’s incredibly effective.

An as Ryan Grim pointed out, this is a trumped-up nothing burger: “This is not a DSA letter. There may be some DSA members writing one, but there are 120,000 DSA members doing lots of different things.”

But let’s follow that pivot at the end of the letter to Michigan.

The Attempted Pivot to Michigan

Former George W. Bush speechwriter, David “Axis of Evil” Frum chimed in with a strong pro-genocide statement:

Naturally, as a “Never Trumper”, the Dem establishment loves Frum — despite, or maybe because they have literally zero electoral appeal — and he feels free to pontificate as if he had the moral high ground.

Establishment apparatchick Neera Tanden agrees:

I’ll let David Sirota have the last word on this exchange:

156,000 Mainers Can’t Be Wrong, and Now They’re Pissed Off

Nathan Barnard has a story with a bit more substance for DropSite News:

The 15,000 member volunteer network behind Graham Platner is now using its considerable leverage to push whoever replaces him as the Democratic Senate nominee to be aligned with the same policy platform that drove the largest primary turnout in Maine state history.

Drop Site has obtained a draft letter addressed “to the Maine Democratic Party and prospective candidates” notifying them of their policy demands.

“The volunteer infrastructure that this movement built - the organizers, door-knockers, the small-dollar donors, the hosts, the people who make phone calls and staff tables between now and November - does not transfer automatically to whoever the Party selects,” the letter states. “That infrastructure exists because people believe in a specific platform. It will only continue to exist and only continue to be deployed for a nominee who publicly and explicitly adopts these core commitments as their own.”

…
The tension between organizers and Maine Democratic party officials has grown as they determine a process to replace Platner. A former Platner staffer told Drop Site “all field and data” staff were moved onto MDP payroll before the rape allegations broke for “accounting purposes,” creating an awkward situation for the Platner organizers—who, like the volunteers, are unhappy with the MDP’s manuevers.

On July 8, Platner campaign organizing director Spencer Toth resigned from the MDP over its lack of engagement with volunteers and organizers in determining the replacement process. Drop Site obtained his resignation letter.

“Together, organizers and volunteers built something much bigger than one candidate. They built the largest grassroots operation in Maine’s history, a people powered movement rooted in working class politics and the belief that ordinary Mainers deserve a real voice in the future of the Democratic party,” Toth’s resignation letter says. “But yesterday, the Maine Democratic Party said the people who built this movement will “have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for US Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like.”
…
“That work matters. It cannot be treated as disposable. The people who knocked thousands of doors, organized their communities, and built local teams across the state deserve transparency, respect, and a meaningful voice in what comes next.”

Toth concludes there is “no path forward to defeating Susan Collins without honoring and engaging the grassroots movement” the Platner campaign built across Maine. The future of the race should not be decided without the people who made the movement possible, Toth says.

“You deserve to have your voice heard and it is incumbent on each of you now to hold the Democratic Party accountable.”

Volunteers for Platner have broadly supported the nomination of Troy Jackson in place of Platner. On Friday morning, the Maine AFL-CIO also endorsed Jackson.

“We can pass Medicare for all, we can take on corporate power and the politicians in their pocket,” Jackson said in his Senate announcement video. “I’ve won in deep red Trump country and progressive cities like Portland and Bangor.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. My instinct is that the decision to destroy Platner’s campaign based solely on allegations with no due process has likely cost the Democrats the chance to defeat Susan Collins, but where there’s life there’s hope.

What Was This Really All About?

And I’ll end with Thomas Neuberger’s point about what the Democratic establishment really wants: to prevent change:

Someone wanted him gone, and they found a way. Someone who? And why? What will the outcome be?

Let’s take these one at a time. Someone who?

The perp, I think, is the Democratic establishment — the party in Maine, the Senate bigs in DC, the vast machine that composes the DNC, its well-paid consultant class and wide-ranging servicing groups like print and televised media. The pile-on, when the accusations were more smoke than fire, began early, were clearly political, and deployed in defense of Janet Mills, the establishment’s preferred choice. Platner’s anti-genocide, anti-AIPAC stance didn’t help with that group, and is likely a cause on its own of his strong opposition.

And chief among all the perps is Sen. Chuck Schumer, who clearly places seating compliant Democratics above beating Republicans.

…

That answers the why. Control of the party comes before winning elections. And support for Israeli genocide is clearly a must, certainly for Schumer and other top Dems of his type. In case he hadn’t heard, total Israel-related contributions to Schumer total $1,727,974. That money buys something, happily given or not.

What’s Next?

The battle is shaping up now. As I write, I’m watching Rebecca Traister on MSNOW say Platner was always disliked by establishment Maine and national Democrats, largely because he brought people real hope for change. Yes, that’s what she said: real hope for real change. In my view, only the genuinely anti-establishment can do that.

…

Watch how the Party decides, and whom they nominate. Will Maine get a Harris-like coronation? A loyalist, solid pretender, or someone more real?

Then watch how Maine voters respond, especially those inspired by Platner’s rebellious stance. You’ll learn a lot.

The fight to return the Democratic Party to its historic role as a representative for the working classes will be long and brutal, and it may be too little too late in the context of the fascist Trump regime, but it’s a long way from over.

Related Posts:

• Dem Gerontocrats Try To Crush Graham Platner

• Platner Under Siege

• The Dem Establishment Goes All-In Against Platner

• The Machine Gets Its Man In Maine

Thursday’s New York Times brings back their old RussiaGate spirit with a front-page banner headline about “foreign interference” and data center opposition.

Here’s a key quote:

…a push by foreign adversaries to seize on what polls have shown is deep ambivalence — verging at times on hostility — about the spread of the data centers needed to power A.I. in the United States and elsewhere.

China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into “a domestic fracture point,” according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year.

These campaigns, whose impact on public opinion remains to be seen, have raised alarms in Washington, where A.I. is seen as a top issue heading into this year’s midterm elections.

The foreign efforts appear intended to stoke the debate over data centers that has united political figures across the political spectrum — from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a progressive, to Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to President Trump.

“Foreign actors aren’t manufacturing American debates over the future of A.I., they are exploiting them,” said Jessica Brandt, a former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who tracked foreign influence efforts during the Biden administration.

The goal, she added, is to “deepen our divisions in order to dent our appeal and weaken us from within.”

Interesting sources: some company called Alethea and a former Biden admin DNI spook.

We’ll come back to them later, but first I’m curious as to why the NYT is only now covering this story when OpenAI put out a press release saying basically the same thing on June 10 except focused solely on China.

After all, OpenAI’s report was convincing enough to sway such luminaries as Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), Republican Leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and prominent tech investor Kevin O’Leary, per WIRED.

And what did the man Elon Musk calls “Scam” Altman’s company have to say that swayed such shrewd and critical thinkers?

In this report, we describe two clusters of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China that we banned after they used our models in support of apparent covert influence operations that promoted narratives in an attempt to manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and wider tech policies.

The first cluster generated social media comments and images claiming that data center buildouts for AI were increasing electricity prices for average families. We named this cluster the “Data Center Bandwagon” campaign.

The second cluster generated comments and images criticizing US tariffs as attempts to dominate technological competition and specified in their prompts that the content should not include China’s leader Xi Jinping in the output and instead include only President Trump. This cluster was connected to a network of likely inauthentic social media accounts that were also likely targeting OpenAI by claiming ChatGPT user data had been compromised. These allegations were entirely false. We named this second cluster the “Tech and Tariffs” campaign.

The targeting of OpenAI and US data center buildouts is significant not because the operation appears to have shifted public opinion, but because it shows PRC-origin influence operators testing narratives against AI infrastructure – a foundation of US technological leadership, economic growth and the broader democratic AI ecosystem.

Although as Ben Nimmo, principal investigator of intelligence and investigations at OpenAI, said, per Politico:

“Neither campaign appears to have gained much authentic engagement,” Nimmo said during a Wednesday press briefing. “They’re important for what they reveal about the intentions of influence operators from China, and the narratives they’re testing and seeking to amplify, but not for the impact.”

And you’ve got to trust Ben Nimmo, despite keeping his LinkedIn resume refreshingly brief — as if he emerged fully formed at OpenAI like Venus on the halfshell, he’s actually left quite the trail, like a snail slicing itself open on an Occam’s razor of foreign disinformation.

Nimmo was named one of TIME’s “Democracy Defenders” in 2024. I can’t resist quoting from Ben’s TIME bio :

When Ben Nimmo first began tracking online influence operations targeting elections in 2014, he had to scroll for hours on Twitter, studying how networks of fake accounts tried to hijack partisan narratives.

A decade later, AI is changing the game—not just for foreign threat actors, but for those working to counter them. “So much of the conversation is around how the bad guys might use AI,” says Nimmo, who now works as the principal threat intelligence investigator at OpenAI (a TIME licensing and technology partner). “My all-time favorite misquote from Harry Potter is: We can use magic too.”

…

In May, OpenAI announced it had removed five covert influence operations, detected by Nimmo’s team, based in Russia, China, Iran, and Israel. All were trying to use the company’s AI tools to manipulate public opinion.

A big lesson from 2016, when Russia mounted a vast operation to meddle in the U.S. presidential election, was that influence operations were “a bit like mold in the bathroom,” says Nimmo. “They thrive in the dark, and they thrive when nobody is looking to wipe them up.”

He was also lionized in the New York Times in 2020, dig the heroism:

Of course the dude was involved with “investigating” RussiaGate. I also find it interesting that he references 2014. What else happened in 2014? Oh yea, the Maidan Coup in Ukraine.

Coincidentally, Nimmo was a press officer for NATO in 2014. Can you say “unprovoked”?

From there it was onward and upward for Ben, who founded the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) in 2015, where he developed his oft-cited “Four D’s of Disinformation: Dismiss, Distort, Distract, and Dismay.” We’re dealing with a regular William of Ockham here.

I wouldn’t want to rush past Ben’s time as Graphika’s first head of investigations (2019-2021) or as global lead of threat intelligence at Meta (2021-2024). Meta — doesn’t get more reputable than that, amirite?

I should also point out that WIRED pretty well demolished OpenAI’s claims with Molly Taft’s June 12 piece “China Didn’t Make Americans Hate Data Centers.”

Local opposition to data centers in the US has skyrocketed in recent months. A poll released last week from climate outlet Heatmap shows that more than half of Americans support a moratorium on data center development. Separate polling released in early June from UK-based policy research agency Public First shows that support for data centers in the US was the lowest of 15 countries surveyed.

They also quoted some experts, including someone from Graphika (which makes me wonder if Ben didn’t place an angry call to a former colleague or two):

• Dina Sadek, an analyst at Graphika: ““Our ongoing research indicates that domestic US actors are leading the online anti-data-center conversation”

• Kyle Chan, Fellow at the Brookings Institution: ““If you’re looking for prominent people from China who can speak about [AI], they are going to be the very people who would be in contact with and providing advice to the Chinese government—especially in academia, where there’s a lot of back and forth between academic experts and advising the government on policymaking. The framing of it can certainly sound ominous, but almost by definition, you would want people who matter in the Chinese AI debate to be there.”

• Graham Webster, research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University: “You see US media covering these types of data center discourses,” he says. “It’s totally normal for the English-language Chinese media to pick up storylines that are in the US media. It’s just how wire services work…(Chinese coverage of data center opposition in the US is) part of a broader pattern of Chinese state media and connected actors amplifying legitimate social grievances in the US to make the US look bad. I’d be cautious in estimating the impact of these efforts before seeing more evidence…”

Hell even what’s left of TIME magazine managed to debunk this crap in a piece authored by Rebecca Lissner, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations of all places (they’ll come up again later:

Popular opposition to data centers is likely the canary in the coal mine. Propelled by concerns about data centers driving up the price of electricity and water, and creating pollution, community resistance against data center construction is growing across the country.
…
I heard immediate, tangible complaints about the impact of AI on their communities: electricity bills climbing skyward and the incessant hum of data centers disrupting once-quiet neighborhoods.

Rather than a boon to the local economy, data centers were seen as a drain on local resources—operations that benefit from generous incentives, drive up utility costs for communities, and generate few permanent jobs in return. Tech industry insiders were bullish on the need for rapid AI innovation. Nearly everyone else sounded a note of deep pessimism.

So if the crack OpenAI team’s report wasn’t persuasive enough to merit coverage from the Gray Lady, what can we learn about former Biden administration official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Jessica Brandt and the team at Alethea?

After all they did provide news that “fit to print” by the “paper of record.”

Let’s start with Jessica Brandt. From the article screenshotted above:

Jessica Brandt’s career has come full circle. Her first job after college was at the Council on Foreign Relations, and she is currently the senior fellow for technology and national security. In between, she held positions at the Brookings Institution and the German Marshall Fund, before becoming the first director of the Foreign Malign Influence Center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
…

And what a “welcome back from summer vacation, kids” essay it is:

CFR: What did you want to be when you were little?

Brandt: I don’t think I had a clear idea early on, but I knew I wanted to do something that combined my interest in government, history, politics, and travel.

CFR:When do you feel like your interest in foreign policy really developed?

Brandt: As a young person, I dragged my family around to history museums and historical sites. So that was an interest very early on. Over time, I developed an interest in politics, and then the broader world.

I definitely had a chapter as a young person where I wanted to be a marine biologist or a voiceover artist in an animated film. But what felt like a handful of different interests in politics and government and travel eventually came together in a career in foreign policy.

CFR: I was surprised, and delightfully so, that you actually started your career at CFR when you finished college. You joined CFR’s National Program and Outreach team. How did that happen? Were you drawn to the organization, or was it just sort of luck of the draw as you were applying?

Brandt:When I had a chance to come to the Council, I jumped on it. I worked on the National Program and Outreach team when we were launching a spate of programs doing outreach to non-traditional foreign policy constituencies. I got to talk to religious leaders, state and local officials—which continues to be a constituency I care a great deal about—academics, and others. I loved that work, connecting non-traditional audiences with the foreign policy research that the Council does.

CFR: That’s so cool. After a few years, you went to get your master’s in public policy from Harvard, and then after that, you joined Brookings. What drew you to the think tank world, rather than maybe going straight into government or private sector?

Brandt:It’s a good question. I think the kind of policy work that researchers at a think tank do is the careful work of examining trade-offs, proposing options and ideas, and finding ways to balance competing equities for the greater good. I was drawn to that opportunity.

Brandt:Before grad school, I had the opportunity to live and work abroad. In my twenties, I worked for a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization. Though I now work on a very different set of issues, the experience I had there left me with an appreciation for what civil society organizations can accomplish, and also with the conviction that there are some things that only governments can do—difficult decisions that only governments can take. That’s what led me to the master’s program and left me very interested in eventually working for the government.

CFR: I noticed that in that first stint at Brookings, you were also special advisor to their president.

Brandt:Yes, I had an opportunity to work for Strobe Talbott, who I greatly admired. I learned so much working for him as he led Brookings. Strobe was a journalist for twenty-one years, the editor of Time magazine, and got his start as a journalist. I think he always had a journalist’s fascination with people and with stories and connected with human beings in that way. I learned a great deal from the way he brought a journalist’s mind and a journalist’s approach to foreign policy problems. I also learned a lot about how organizations work. I’m so grateful to have had that opportunity.

Isn’t that cute, I’m sure Strobe Talbott, known as the house “Russia Hand” in the Clinton administration really enjoyed mentoring her and sharing his learning and wisdom. It takes a long time to expand NATO all the way to Russia’s borders but ol’ Strobe got the project off to a strong start.

There’s no evidence that he had the kind of relationships with his interns that made his boss’s second term so notorious and he was certainly no chick magnet like the late great Ron Brown, but a mentor’s a mentor and an intern’s an intern and there’s no better teacher of Russophobia than ol’ Strobe.

Now on to the crack team at Alethea. It’s Girlboss country, but don’t worry, there’s an experienced daddy in the background, too.

According to their web site, Alethea was founded in 2019 by Lisa Kaplan whose origin story according to her Linked In profile is that in 2018 “Kaplan served as the Digital Director on the Angus King for US Senate campaign, where she developed and implemented a proactive and defensive digital strategy to identify, understand, and respond to disinformation campaigns by analyzing social media and other relevant data to determine reach and impact on voters. She is among the first who can share first hand experience from the front lines.”

Lisa is also a 2013 graduate of Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College in Maine. Go Mules!

So we’re dealing with an incredibly credible expert.

Don’t believe me? Check out her 2021 video on “How to Protect Yourself from Disinformation” (409 views in 5 years for the incredibly popular Girl Security channel which has 115 subscribers).

Her four key insights for avoiding disinformation are brilliant and insightful:

1. Look at the author

2. Look at the date

3. Get to know your own algorithm

4. Think before you share

So yea, obviously any study released by a a person who’s bringing genius level insights like this is worthy of front-page coverage on the NYT. Go Mules!

But Alethea is more than just a one-woman show, Senior Advisor Brian Besanceney has quite the LinkedIn resume, featuring several years in “Public Service”:

Notably he was running DHS public affairs during Hurricane Katrina. Heckuva job, Brian!

Followed by several years in the “private sector”:

Wow, Disney, Wal-Mart and Boeing. That’s heavy duty.

And our boy Brian was Comms Director for Boeing from 2022-2024? AKA the dead whistleblower years, the cabin door blew off years.

Surprisingly he didn’t last out the year, although his work was recognized by the influential MEK Group:

Essentially building an ongoing case study on how not to handle crisis communications, Boeing first issued tepid and faceless statements in 2019 and didn’t fare much better in 2024. Various sources reported widely that Boeing didn’t seem to know what to do, flattening confidence in an industry that lives on trust and confidence.

Experts noted that the dry statements seemed to be written jointly by a lawyer and an engineer. No empathy. No assurances, No proactive statements promising action and building confidence. No credible compassion. No video of the Boeing CEO striding aboard a 737 Max to confidently demonstrate its airworthiness firsthand.

No wonder Brian moved on before the year was done.

I hope this odyssey through the resume of some our top Disinformation Experts nonsense purveyors and propagandists served to delight and distract, if not warn and alert.

Cross-posted at IanWelsh.net

UPDATED: July 8 5pm EDT: Drop Site has the text Platner’s accuser sent him that Politico left out of their story. That’s at the bottom of the post.

UPDATED 2: JULY 8 8:30 PM EDT: The Hill reports Platner has dropped out of the race. There goes any leverage his campaign had to influence the choice of the nominee.

UPDATED 3: The Maine Democratic Party has decided that a nominating convention of 600 people will decide on the nominee. Contrast with the 156,000 who voted for Platner in the primary.

The Usual Caveats Apply

As always, I’m covering this in the hopes of providing a one-stop window into a race that has national (and thus international) implications and what it tells us about the American electorate and the forces attempting to sway it.

This is not an endorsement of any candidate, regardless of my (obvious) personal sympathies, or even of the American electoral system, which is impossibly corrupt and has led to the bought-and-paid-for US Congress being functionally impotent.

Americans won’t vote our way out of the polycrisis, so don’t get your hopes up.

The Dangers of Parasocial Relationships With Politicians

The Platner story perfectly illustrates many of the problems with representative democracy in the 21st century: cults of personality, trial by social media, media manipulation by monied players (both for and against Platner).

Let’s start with “stan culture” — a problem I believe is inherent in modern American politics.

The Discourse Blog podcast reps the anti-Platner from the left perspective perfectly (lightly edited machine transcript) with warnings against “stanning” but as far as I can see no suggested solutions:

Jack Mirkinson: This shows you what happens when you decide to become part of a politician’s stan army rather than treating them like someone who’s asking for very significant power
over your life and and acting accordingly.

A lot of people got themselves into a big hole with Graham Platner where they had spent so much time lauding him as the best thing since sliced bread; where they were reveling in the fact that the party establishment — which
as we all know is very rightfully hated by everybody — was unable to defeat him.

When you do that like too uncritically things can calcify in very problematic and crazy ways.

Aleks Chan: Graham Platner looks and behaves (how what) you think a Republican would and then as part of that is he is a traditionally masculine white guy who espouses democratic and progressive politics and so when you when you don’t have many
of those; you have sort of clean-cut Mckenzie types you find people like (Ken Klippenstein) and his ilk salivating at the opportunity to be like ‘look traditional masculinity can be progressive.’

That’s also part of ‘well we’re done with like being woke, we know where that got us, nobody wants that anymore. If you are (opposing) someone like Graham Platner then you are trying to sort of resurrect the ‘hashtag resistance’ ‘vote blue no matter who’ pussy hat blah blah blah.

They also raise the valid concerns about Platner’s history as a combat military veteran in America’s colonial GWOT and later as a mercenary for Blackwater.

Admittedly these are (likely valid) concerns I am personally guilty of overlooking in my coverage of Platner.

Yasmin Nair raised many of these concerns at Current Affairs in October 2025 when his nazi Totenkopf tattoo was first revealed:

Platner seems less a homophobe and more of an asshole who can’t keep his stories straight. He has tried to brush off his homophobic and other problematic posts by claiming they were from some distant past when he was just a wee and silly lad, but many of these were in fact from 2021: when he was 37. Four years ago.

The posts don’t confirm that he is a raging homophobe, but they do indicate that he is an immature, juvenile straight man—in other words, a very typical straight man, the kind who never grow up and away from their high school bullying days when they called every kid they didn’t like a faggot. And they don’t grow up because they never have to.

Platner is beloved amongst a certain lefty crowd, led by the likes of Sanders. Given the state of the world, literally, literally anything could happen between now and June 2026, when he may be up against Collins, so who knows.

Have to give credit for Nair for pointing this out at the time, although she presented no political alternative to Janet Mills.

There’s another important aspect about why this scandal is bringing Platner down and the specter of whatever war crimes he may have been involved with in West Asia did not: racist Americans don’t care about deaths of brown people “over there”, to wit:

I’d also like to highlight the once-bitten-twice-shy words of Bhavik Lathia on The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali when asked “Why did you recommened Graham Platner and tell me he was a good candidate who was going to win?”:

I met Graham last September or October. We were both speakers at a conference put on to do an audit and an autopsy of what happened in 2024 and why we lost.

The thing that Graham and I connected on frankly was his experience in the military and how that radicalized him
into pro-peace, anti-war politics.

What he did and saw while he was deployed, the stories he shared with me deeply resonated with me. I believed that he cared about taking on the military industrial complex and
I was (Kamala Harris’) battleground mobilization director.

It was a big job. I had staff across the over 80 staff across every single battleground state and state And my firm analysis is two big reasons why we lost the 2024 election is because we failed to put enough distance between our Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign and the Biden record on Gaza and inflation maybe not in that order, maybe inflation was the number one, but Gaza played a significant role.

I grew up in mid-Michigan. I have done tons of work in Michigan, Wisconsin across swing states I was hearing from all of my organizers and staff and contacts on the ground that Gaza and the Biden administration record on Gaza was killing us with voters.

And so after the election, when I saw a candidate like Graham strongly speaking about the genocide in Gaza, and before knowing what I learned yesterday that there is a credible sexual assault allegation against him, and then the way that I saw main voters responding to him…

There was a strong economic populist who was just speaking in clear language. I decided to throw my support you know support behind him and um yeah that’s kind of that’s kind of where I landed. I think we need to continue to seek out outsiders, shake up the system economic populist candidates.

We can’t like let this experience scare us from that. Now we need to be very clear that just like arming a genocide is a red line in our party, that sexual assault — credible allegations of sexual assault are also a red line.

So to all the men, progressive men moderate men, whatever (if you’re) contemplating running, unless you’ve done the work to make amends for and atone for any abuse that you have done in your life, don’t raise your hand to run for office.

This is not the moment for it. We need strong progressives
that are going to inspire the people.

One of the things I know everyone’s feeling right now is heartbreak. I felt it when I read The Politico piece yesterday. I just felt a deep sense of sadness and grief.

There was this moment with Graham that the narrative was supposed to be redemption: imperfect people can find themselves in this moment, redeem themselves and represent just regular people in the halls of power.

And because I’ll just say it’s Graham’s lack of foresight maybe arrogance… I don’t know now, but there’s a lot of people who are just feeling really disappointed.

The whole video is worth watching if you have the time. Adam Green also explains that there is time for Platner to drop out and for Maine Democrats to hold a statewide caucus and allow voters to select a new nominee in a democratic fashion.

It’s important to remind people who supported Platner that they are not responsible for what he may or may not have done. Responding to his message is not the same as giving a blank check or excusing any personal behavior.

We’ll come back to Ken Klippenstein and others who make a case that Platner represents the overwhelming will of the Maine Democratic party primary electorate, but first I want to remind readers of the money and talent behind Platner. Campaigns like his don’t “just happen.”

The Monied Leftists Who Groomed Graham

I blogged about some of this last fall, citing a key piece from the New Yorker:

It was three days before a video titled “Platner for U.S. Senate” would drop, catapulting this local oyster farmer, harbormaster, and former marine onto the national stage.

The video was produced by Morris Katz, a top political strategist for New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani.
…
The campaign rollout, which was orchestrated by Platner’s senior adviser, Joe Calvello (John Fetterman’s former director of communications), raised half a million dollars in its first four days; volunteer sign-ups for the campaign averaged three hundred a day. “No one was expecting this,” Calvello told me. The Times, ABC, NBC, and Fox News covered the launch, focussing on Platner as a political novice who represented a new approach for the Party.

The Rupert-Murdoch-owned New York Post had a near slanderous and salacious piece titled Meet the champagne socialist duo who groomed rich kid Graham Platner into a ‘working-class’ candidate — since they were just caught lying about Morris Katz advising Platner to stay in the race, take with lots of salt, nonetheless I’m including factual claims that I presume to be true:

The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. …
That under-the-radar team are a couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancée, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.

The pair had originally met while working for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2020 and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for Senate in Nebraska, and Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a member of the Keystone State congressional delegation since 2023 and part of the DSA “Squad,” alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

The point being, that Platner didn’t organically rise up from the Maine oyster beds, he was recruited and groomed by some of the most effective DSA operatives in the country.

Nothing wrong with that, but let’s not be naive about how this game is played.

Now let’s look into the specific charges that seem to have crippled Platner’s campaign.

The Times’ Opening Salvo

The MSM has been coming at Platner hard since it became clear he would win the nomination.

First the NY Times dropped “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior” on June 4.

The Times detailed their sourcing:

This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including six women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner. The Times spoke with friends or acquaintances of several of the women, reviewed contemporaneous text and social media messages and saw some of Ms. Fifield’s diary entries. Mr. Platner declined to be interviewed for this article.

The worst allegations in that story came from Lyndsey Fifield. Long time New York Post readers might remember Fifield from a previous sexual assault accusation kerfluffle:

Inez Stepman and Lindsey Fifield are two millennial women who co-founded the group Ladies for Kavanaugh to show their support for the nominee when they felt that view was being left out of the public discourse. Their day jobs are in conservative politics, Stepman at Independent Women’s Forum and Fifield at the Heritage Foundation. (Their pro-Kavanaugh group was formed on their own time.)

Fifeld and her pro-Kavanaugh friends had stayed quiet during the original hearings while liberal women raged in the streets and on social media. “But in the wake of the baseless, 11th-hour accusations orchestrated to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, we couldn’t stay silent anymore,” Fifield said.

Supreme Court denies NFL’s bid to keep former Dolphins coach Brian Flores’ discrimination lawsuit from heading to court
Stepman told me, “Our husbands, brothers, fathers and sons deserve fairness, too.”

The Times June 4 story also quoted Jenny Racicot who said “she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

While that story did not force Platner out of the race, it had a dramatic effect on his polling.

Before:

These polling numbers have allowed journalists and pollsters like G. Elliott Morris to proclaim “Graham Platner is a bad dude — and data shows he’s a bad candidate, too.”

But to Morris’ credit, he isn’t trying to push for a centrist to be the new nominee:

(Platner) tapped a genuine populist, anti-establishment current that is currently animating a lot of American politics. Democrats might pick former state Senate President Troy Jackson — a fifth-generation logger with deep working-class roots — and, if he polls well, Democrats flip from underdogs to win the Senate to slight favorites.

But back to the MSM campaign against Platner.

Politico Goes for the Kill Shot

Politico’s Monday piece got quite a bit more from Jenny Racicot — including an accusation of full-on sexual assualt while Platner was allegedly “black out drunk” — than the Times had gotten.

Politico detailed their sourcing:

The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.

Adam Wren, co-author of the Politico piece went on MS Now’s Morning Joe where (per DropSite) “Mika Brzezinski pressed him on what evidence pushed the outlet to publish rape allegations against Graham Platner, asking what made the story more than a “he said, she said” case and what evidence directly tied Platner to the alleged crime.”

Key exchange:

Mika Brzezinski: So my question to you, given the very high standards political has before they write something like this and publish it, what aspects of this story brought it to the level of publishable?

Adam Wren: Yeah, you’re correct here, Mika. There is no police report in this case. We spent a lot of time talking to Jenny asking her for corroborating evidence.

She shared that she had confided into a number of people, including her therapist, in almost real time and we reviewed e-mail exchanges between she and her therapist, referring to what she called the sexual assault and her therapist sort of acknowledging that this had happened to her.

We talked to people who she confided in, in the months after this happened.

We asked her why she didn’t file a police report and she described sort of the insular nature of (the part of Maine) she shares with Graham Platner and she debated sort of how to handle this.

We found ultimately the number of coloborating pieces of evidence. I want to take a look at this to support her story in a way that we could report it.

Brzezinski: What are some of those corroborating pieces of evidence. So you’ve got conversations with her therapist and people who she confided in. Any conversations with Graham Platner at the time of it where she said, because apparently as part of this she said she even confirmed to him that this was not consent. Do you have that?

What do you have that actually connects …Graham Platner to raping this victim?

Wren: She reached out to him the day after via Instagram and essentially told him that she didn’t want to hear from again. She told him that morning as well.

We looked at messages that she had sent to others in the months after this happened through social media.

Brzezinski: But were you able to see those?

Wren: She tried to recover those dms. We did not, we were not able to review those dms, but she described them to us.

We also, long before he was a political candidate we saw, her essentially explain to others that he was in her words ‘consensually careless.’

Brzezinski: Were you able to see the interactions between Graham platner and this alleged victim? Did you actually physically see them? Did she produce them for you?

Wren: She attempted to uncover them, but was unable to.

At one time that would have been considered a very thin reed upon which to overturn the will of 150,000 primary voters — a record breaking total that has not been matched since record-keeping began in 1918.

Platner Paused His Campaign and His Supporters Fled

Platner quickly released a video denying the allegations but also pausing his campaign.

After that it was all over.

Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and the DSCC were among the first to announce they would not support Platner.

I’m sure it hurt worse when Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Ro Khanna, and Ruben Gallego withdrew their endorsements.

The Sierra Club and veterans groups like Veterans for Responsible Leadership (VFRL) were just the cherry on top.

Of course the real kick in the nads came when VFRL called forAIPAC-owned Congressional Rep. Jared Golden to take Platner’s place.

This Jared Golden: “The House just failed to pass a resolution to end Trump’s war with Iran by one vote. The count was 213-214. Just one Democrat, Jared Golden, voted to let Trump keep waging the war.”

There was also some mysterious influencing going on.

Who’s Influencing This Influencer?

Cheyenne Hunt, he social media influencer who claimed the clout for the fall of California Congressman and Gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell was quick to notch her belt:

Matt Stoller described Hunt thusly: “This person runs a dark money political group and is offering to pay accusers of Platner. Who are her funders?”

This post has more on Hunt’s group Reckoning Action:

Key quotes:

Reckoning Action, the group that connected Jenny Racicot to Politico, is a 501(c)(4) — a Delaware nonprofit that discloses none of its donors. Its executive director, Cheyenne Hunt, was instrumental in ending Eric Swalwell’s career.

It was launched May 20 on Capitol Hill alongside the Democratic Women’s Caucus, whose chair, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, personally announced the expulsion resolutions that forced two congressmen out in April.

Reckoning Action’s reach is real and demonstrated. It helped force Swalwell’s resignation, and it can claim a Republican scalp too: Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas resigned within hours of Swalwell in April.

But the mechanics matter more than the box score.

Reporting from the Texas Tribune and PBS shows the two removals were paired to preserve the balance of a narrowly divided House — expelling one member from each party cost neither side a net seat. Gonzales was already finished, having lost his primary runoff with GOP leadership pushing him out.

The bipartisan-looking action was structured around partisan seat math.

The Platner case strips that cover away. There is no cross-party pairing here — the target is the party’s own Senate nominee, who won Maine’s primary by more than seventy points. Within hours of the Politico story, Schumer and Gillibrand demanded he “immediately withdraw,” the DSCC pledged zero spending, and Khanna, Gallego, and Heinrich pulled endorsements. The mechanism they are racing toward is Maine’s July 13 ballot-substitution deadline, after which the party — not voters — selects the replacement.

The accusation at the center would not survive the standard the party pretends to apply.

That won’t be the end of the reactionary push to undo the will of the Maine Democratic electorate.

The Maine Democratic Party Has Ideas of Its Own

Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson took to the webs with a short form video arguing that Platner should not have any influence over the party’s ultimate nominee:

“Unfortunately Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to GP’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the US Senate”

The Platner campaign fired back via NBC News:

The Platner campaign has reached out to the party to try and understand what this process would look like. At no point has the campaign tried to ‘put its finger on the scale.’ Over 150,000 Mainers voted for this movement, and over 15,000 Mainers volunteered their time and energy to it. While Graham wouldn’t want to be a part of the process, he would want to make sure the voters and volunteers make this decision — not the political establishment.

Stoller and Klippenstien Still Fighting the Centrists

Matt Stoller did a lot of tweeting and deleting yesterday before boiling down his thoughts into one essay. Some key quotes (although the whole thing is a must read):

…there’s a big difference between ‘normal people in bad relationships who hate each other’ and ‘crime.’

So let’s be adults. This is a political attack.

Top Maine Democratic Party donors in recent years are Reid Hoffman, Haim Saban, and David Ellison. David Ellison! As in the Trump ally who fired Stephen Colbert and is taking over TikTok, CBS News, and CNN. These names should mean something. Saban may be the single most important AIPAC donor in the Democratic Party.

Another big donor to the Maine Democratic Party is the founder of Zynga, Marc Pincus, who said in 2024 that “an attack on Amazon is an attack on America.” It goes beyond big tech and Wall Street. Crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s partner Nishad Singh at FTX gave $100k to the Maine Democratic Party in 2022.

The insiders running the party are the people funded through these streams of revenue, they are the ones dealing with the donors and currying favor with them. And while I will not speak out of school, the Maine Democratic establishment simply cannot be trusted and that is well-known.

…the goal of pushing Platner aside is to destroy the agenda on which he was elected, which is about taming oligarchy and reorienting us from endless war. That is why the Maine Democrats aren’t saying ‘let’s respect Platner voters and transition to someone else,’ they are taking a sanctimonious ‘he gets NO say in ANYTHING.’ Those are not the actions of people who want to win a Senate seat, those are the actions of nasty insiders claiming factional power for themselves.

Ken Klippenstein was unrepentant:

To give you a sense of how nasty this is getting, here’s a fairly representative example from legal commentator Ken White, who said of me: “Anyway just waiting to hear what new hilarious insult [Ken Klippenstein] comes up with next to sneer at people who don’t like rape.”

Never having sneered “at people who don’t like rape,” I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I get the maneuver here. He and other commentators are trying to bully anyone who defended Platner against the earlier scandals into issuing self-abasing public apologies, by implying that anyone who doesn’t is pro-rape.

The campaign to get people to self-flagellate over things they never said is working, with virtually every high-profile figure who defended Platner in the past issuing weepy apologies about how sorry they are.

He then includes apologies from Naomi Klein, Adam Carlson, and Michelle Goldberg and added “it’s unclear to me what exactly they’re apologizing for other than not being clairvoyants able to foresee this week’s accusation before it happened.”

He continued:

I stand by my previous defense of Platner. Offensive tattoos and sexting-out-of-wedlock struck me as the most Marine shit ever. I literally know Marines who’ve done both but later grew up and became decent guys. (Hi if you’re reading this!) I still believe in my bones that people like that deserve to have a shot at public office and that our country would be better for it. But the Marines I’m describing were never accused of more serious things like sexual assault.

People were right to give him a chance before; and they’re right to drop him now.

As I wrote, people are done with the fake, plasticy candidates who’ve dominated politics in the past. I’m certain that’s still the case, regardless of how hard the media commentators try to gaslight you into thinking willingness to look past lesser flaws is the same as defending rape, misogyny, and so on.

Giving people a chance means that sometimes they won’t live up to it. No one should apologize for that.

I’m not.

More from Stoller who brings it back to the main point:

If Platner steps down, he will be characterized as a deviant, and that’s just how it’ll be forever. True or not. And everyone will be tarred as supportive of immoral behavior. It doesn’t matter if you are a liberal, centrist, young, old, whatever. People are saying the Bulwark, a centrist outlet started by ex-Republicans who were skeptical of Platner, are tarred by this. Punchbowl is reporting that Senate progressives will never have credibility going forward. The ploy here is obvious.

I’ve never denied being a bad person who deserves approbation and scorn so there. But let’s get back to the future.

If Not Platner, Then Whom?

WGBH has the basics:

Those names include several former Democratic candidates for governor, such as former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah. One of Platner’s Democratic primary opponents, David Costello, also said he would seek the nomination. Another potential candidate is Jordan Wood, who ran for the Senate seat before switching to the primary contest for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Wood finished third in that race after a ranked-choice runoff. Dan Kleban, owner for Maine Beer Co., has also expressed interest. Kleban was briefly a senatorial candidate last year, but dropped out and endorsed Gov. Janet Mills when she entered the race in mid-October.

As for Shah, he was just the subject of a NY Times op-ed called “The Covid Czar People Still Trust” by Dr. Rachael Bedard.

I got cooties just reading this:

Nirav Shah, who narrowly lost the Maine Democratic primary for governor last week, didn’t run his campaign as a populist, a celebrity or a self-funded business owner. Rather, the first-time candidate is something that would seem anathema in contemporary politics: a public health technocrat who became a household name during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Drop Site had more on Shah:

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Nirav Shah said he is preparing to enter Maine’s open U.S. Senate race should Platner withdraw.

So yea, my Spidey Sense was right.

The Intercept has more on Shah and Jackson:

Shah placed second in the (ranked choice gubernatorial primary) final count to ultimate nominee Hannah Pingree but has work to do to appeal to the progressive Democratic base that propelled Platner to his dominant showing in the primary. It looks like he’s already making moves to position himself as a possible candidate,

Here’s some deets on how Jackson and Shah did in the gubernatorial race and some info on a third possibility, Maine Sec of State Shenna Bellows:

More about Bellows from the Intercept:

If the decision comes down to a mini-convention or a caucus, Bellows has a good shot. As Maine’s secretary of state, she has visibility and name recognition, she’s pushed back against Trump on the national stage, and she appeals to progressives and centrists alike. Her last time running for Senate, in 2014, resulted in a blow-out win for Collins by more than 35 percentage points; in order to make a strong case for her candidacy, Bellows will have to convince Democrats that this time would be different.

Establishmentarian former state rep., two-time congressional campaign loser and former Emily’s List executive director Emily Cain is also reported to be putting her hat in the ring.

This Emily’s List

CBS News quoted a number of progressive groups that have weighed in:

“To the Democratic establishment: this is not your opening,” Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese wrote Monday evening. The group, which has its roots in Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, specifically warned against picking a “status-quo candidate” like Mills.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement Monday the Maine Democratic Party should nominate a “shake-up-the-system economic fighter who challenges powerful interests.” He added that the decision shouldn’t be left to a “small caucus of party insiders.”

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who was one of Platner’s best-known backers before this week, argued Jackson should get the nomination, calling the former state Senate president “someone who has spent his life standing up for these progressive values.”

Platner’s campaign manager says the state party and DSCC are icing them out of any part in the process of picking a new nominee:

The WaPo featured the empire striking back:

“People who got us into this mess — who vouched for this candidate after 3 different scandals and kept telling us there were going to be no more — may want to take a break from Maine strategizing,” Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress, a more establishment liberal think tank, said in a social media post.

“The Democratic nominee, if there is a new one, has to be someone who is independent minded from Platner, otherwise they will be viewed by voters as a protege,” state Sen. Joe Baldacci, who lost his congressional bid this year, wrote on X. “Any connections to Platner will doom that person’s campaign from the very beginning.”

Meanwhile, things are going great at the Maine Dem Party:

But wait, it gets worse.

Life’s ugly and so is politics. Either way, it looks like Susan Collins might be getting re-elected again.

UPDATE: JULY 8, 2026 5PM EDT

Drop Site has new information that makes Politico’s reporting look even worse:

Originally published at Naked Capitalism

She leaves the field to a one-on-one battle between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, former public health official in Wayne County, and AIPAC-favorite U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.

I referenced the race previously in March and went more in-depth in April.

McMorrow’s decision came after she dropped to single digits in the polls — after leading for much of the spring — and coming under pressure from the Democratic establishment.

So far she has not endorsed either of the remaining candidates and since El-Sayed has not yet polled over 50% in any major poll, McMorrow’s supporters could be decisive on August 4th.

El-Seyed immediately reached out to McMorrow to ask for her endorsement in the race and quickly took to social media to ask McMorrow supporters for their support.

Stevens, with her usual nimble political acumen, had to be reminded by Politico to put in a call to McMorrow.

McMorrow has previously blasted Stevens for taking so much money from AIPAC so any endorsement in that direction might not be especially convincing.

Her name will remain on the ballot as well, so she may still claim the votes of some low info voters as well as, one presumes, her closest friends and family.

The sitting Democratic Senator Gary Peters applied may have applied the crucial pressure on McMorrow in that inimitable fearless centrist style, almost directly saying what he meant and even mustering up a suggestion that needs consideration, per the WSJ:

Sen. Gary Peters isn’t seeking re-election. While he has remained publicly neutral, he has told associates that he believes Democrats need to coalesce around one candidate to face El-Sayed in the primary and has suggested that McMorrow needs to consider dropping out of the race, according to people familiar with the discussions. A spokeswoman for Peters declined to comment.

No wonder she folded, no one could withstand such a blistering attack.

Peters, a 67-year-old two-termer, certainly knows the campaign business having barely eeked out a 1.7% win over current GOP gubernatorial candidate John James in a $200 million family blog fest in what was the most expensive campaign in Michigan history:

Both candidates raised nearly $50 million, according to FEC filings, with James raising $48.3 million and Peters $49.6 million through mid-November. James raised more than $300,000 that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) categorized as donations for a potential recount, though the campaign never pursued that effort.

Yet outside groups outspent both candidates, with at least $106 million spent between at least 100 organizations advertising on television, radio, social media and by mail. Peters had about $5 million more in outside support than James.

For some reason Sen. Peters didn’t run for re-election this time. I can’t imagine why, surely every Michigander wants more of what he brings to the table.

And with Dem. Governor Gretchen Whitmer having elected to tie herself to the mast as the biggest data center YIMBY in the country, it’s looking like the Michigan Democratic establishment is all out of allies to help Stevens stop El-Sayed.

Oh yea, there’s spooky CIA girlboss Senator Elissa Slotkin whose commentary on the race to Politico (of course) attempted to shade El-Sayed and his supporters with some nonsense:

“I don’t think they’re the only ones around the country, but I certainly think there’s a lot of engagement, positive and negative, online right now — specifically to this primary, because we have a lot of online interest and online backgrounds,” said Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who knows what it’s like to beat Rogers in a general election. “I think some of the candidates really have an online background, but the vast majority of Michiganders are not that online.”

The Usual Caveats Apply

Just to get this out of the way, I’m covering this in the hopes of providing a one-stop window into a race that has national (and thus international) implications and what it tells us about the American electorate and the forces attempting to sway it.

This is not an endorsement of any candidate, regardless of my (obvious) personal sympathies, or even of the American electoral system which is impossibly corrupt and has led to the bought-and-paid-for US Congress being functionally impotent.

Americans won’t vote our way out of the polycrisis, so don’t get your hopes up.

The Candidates: The Good, the Bad, and the Cringe

El-Sayed, Stevens and McMorrow have dramatic differences in communications styles and skill sets as illustrated below when each addressed the ridiculous situation with the completed but unused Gordie Howe bridge connecting Michigan to Canada:

El-Sayed might be a generational political talent, but I’ll let him speak for himself:

And when asked by the Detroit Free Press about his chances in the general election this is what the good doctor had to say:

No. 1, most people say this (I can’t win) because of my name. I’ve been Abdul in Michigan my whole life and I know that Michiganders are big-hearted. They’re open-minded people. They care less about what your name is, they care that you care to know their name. They care less about how you pray, they want to know what you pray for. And I know that Michiganders are going to look past my name to ask, who out here is actually going to fight for me? I want to get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, pass Medicare for All.

Second, I’m running against an actual guy. This guy voted 60 times to raise prescription drug prices. He helped to architect the legislation that kicked off the opioid epidemic. … And I’m the guy who rebuilt Detroit’s Health Department, eliminated $700 million in medical debt, and put Narcan in 100 different locations. Who better to prosecute the case against him than me?

Finally, think about who we can win back. We lost voters. Arab and Muslim voters, we lost young men, and I feel well-placed to have a conversation with those voters about what it looks like to actually be consistent with our values, and we’re going to need that if we’re going to be able to pull folks back… Imagine what happens when you inspire young people to actually come out for a politics they believe in, and think about how you can change the electorate.

And then the last thing I’ll just tell you is that this man has tied himself to Donald Trump. Donald Trump is about as popular as rotten eggs right now, and he’s getting less popular every single day. And so, imagine what can happen when we’re actually taking the case to Mike Rogers. He’s a beta character at a comedy based in a country club that nobody likes to watch. He’s like the guy who laughs extra hard at the dumb joke that the alpha guy told. And nobody wants that guy as their next U.S. senator… (I’m) looking forward to wiping the floor with him.

Last one, El-Sayed goes after AIPAC:

What can I say, I like the cut of his jib.

As for Haley Stevens, we’ll let two graphics do 2000 words of work:

Here’s a collection of headlines to kick her while she’s down and dirty, rolling around in AIPAC money:

Can you say, bought and paid for?

While El-Sayed was racking up endorsements from the mighty United Auto Workers (UAW) union, NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the Detroit Metro Times and Indivisible, Stevens gained one notable backer, the truly loathsome outgoing Dem Attorney General Dana Nessel.

One of Nessel’s grossest moves may be relevant in this race:

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is continuing to target student activists supporting Palestinian rights, despite mounting criticism in recent weeks, through what the TAHRIR Coalition — a broad coalition of student organizations at the University of Michigan — describes as an ongoing campaign of intimidation and repression. According to the coalition, police and representatives from Nessel’s office visited the homes of two activists earlier this July.

So yea, all the good guys are getting together on this one.

Stevens owes her whole political career to AIPAC, having benefitted from millions of foreign lobby money to crush Rep. Andy Levin in the 2022 congressional primary. NBC documented the atrocities at the time:

In an unusual twist, Levin, who is Jewish, was forced to defend his record on Israel-related policies against attacks from supporters of Stevens, who has been more hawkish on the issue despite not being Jewish. A super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent $4.2 million on ads boosting Stevens and hitting Levin, while J Street, a progressive pro-Israel group, paid about $700,000 for ads backing Levin.

Let’s close our look at Stevens with a brutal compilation of Stevens in her own words, is she the Ted Cruz of the Dems?:

I’ll transcribe the most over the top of the Stevens’ statements looped above:

Rep. Haley Stevens: I will continue to fight for the people of Israel. I will continue to fight for Israel’s existence. Israel comes to me in my dreams. I see Israel’s future and I know Israel will continue to exist for the Jewish people.

And then there’s her voting record:

Alrighty then, that’s enough of her.

McMorrow was the candidate of the mushy middle. This endorsement from the Detroit Free Press — made just last week, lol — sums up her ersatz appeal:

McMorrow combines the best of El-Sayed’s impassioned activism and Stevens’ technocratic policy chops. She understands that change happens incrementally, but that the path toward progress doesn’t end after the first step. And in this race, she is uniquely capable of representing Michiganders who don’t fall neatly into El-Sayed’s progressivism or Stevens’ centrism.

The update they added today is the perfect cherry on top, epitomizing the MSM’s lack of political acumen in 2026:

Update: State Sen. Mallory McMorrow suspended her U.S. Senate campaign on July 5. Because ballots were mailed on June 25, her name still appears on the Aug. 4 primary ballot.

Many believe it was McMorrow’s decision to attack El-Sayed and the enormously popular streamer Hasan Piker in an interview with Jewish Insider that doomed her campaign.

The NYT Times is in that category:

Long adept at cable news interviews and creating viral moments online, Ms. McMorrow began to bleed support in public polling after she condemned Dr. El-Sayed for campaigning in March with Hasan Piker, the left-wing streamer who has defended Hamas and called Israel “an apartheid state.”

The move backfired quickly. Her remarks helped burnish Dr. El-Sayed’s claim that he was the lone progressive candidate in the race and the one most willing to criticize American funding of the Israeli military. And she won little support from moderate voters as millions of dollars of pro-Stevens advertising poured into the state from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other groups.

Others think it was this video from an April state party meeting which Glenn Greenwald called “one of the most traumatizing things I’ve ever witnessed in politics”:

The Swamp Gas Will Only Heat Up From Here

Now that McMorrow is out of the way, Stevens’ supporters (ie the entire bipartisan establishment) will be pulling out all the stops, spending unbelievable amounts and flooding the zone with slurs, cheap shots, backhanded compliments, patronizing BS, hand-wringing and concern trolling.

I doubt that the Mossad/CIA or whoever is about to smear Platner (again) can do anything comparable to El-Sayed, but they’ll likely try.

For now it looks like the main thrust will be to paint him as sexist, but even the Free Press ain’t falling for that as their headline choice attests, “New ad claiming El-Sayed disrespected women stretches its facts”:

United Democracy Project, a Washington DC-based group aligned with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has a new ad up attacking former Wayne County and Detroit health director Abdul El-Sayed, who is leading the race for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan, as having “a long history of disrespecting women.”
…
The ad, by the way, which the publication Jewish Insider says is funded by a $2 million ad buy in Michigan, is silent on the groups’ support of Stevens or their own support of Israel, but is clearly meant to wound El-Sayed’s chances with a key voting bloc − women − at a time when he appears to have an edge in the race. It is also one of first negative ads of the campaign to date.

We can’t speak for El-Sayed’s personal history with women or comments he may have made to women in the past, being generally unaware of any inappropriate remarks. As for the ones cited in the ad, however, they are, in at least three cases, unpersuasive in terms of suggesting he is, or has been, specifically misogynistic in these instances.

The El-Sayed campaign is already inoculating against these attacks:

Lots of this kind of stuff from the oh-so-credible centrist establishment:

FWIW here’s what the Freep had to say about El-Sayed, the current front runner in the primary:

Farthest left of the trio is former public health official Abdul El-Sayed. He’s a proponent of policies like Medicare For All, an 8% tax on billionaires, abolishing U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and halting U.S. arms sales to Israel. He doesn’t accept campaign contributions from corporate political action committees, and says that any candidate or elected official who has is compromised. El-Sayed is banking on populist anger against systemic failure, rising oligarchy and America’s bellicose posture abroad, and elevated turnout among young voters ‒ historically, a risky prospect ‒ to carry the primary.

I could dunk on these dumbasses and those like them all day but shooting fish in a barrel just gets lead in your breakfast so let’s look at the Polymarket odds and the first poll I’ve seen of the two-way version of the race and call it a post:

There’s less than a month for Stevens and the millions of dollars backing her to take out El-Sayed. Time will tell.

Related Posts

• It’s Bipartisan: Moral Imbeciles Lead U.S. to War

• Israel Dominant Issue in Michigan Democratic Senate Primary

• Lis Smith’s Caper Typifies State of the Art Dem Dark Money Schemes

• Follow the Money Behind Dem Progressive Campaigns

Originally published at Naked Capitalism

This is happening even as the progressive Democratic party continues to purge its corrupt “let’s just get back to brunch” establishment (new progressive wins in Colorado just last night), but the one thing they got right was warning everyone that Trump has absolutely no class and no shame.

Let’s start with the aesthetics, get into the gossip, pass through the corrupt pardons, and then tally up the biggest financial scores and scams.

Drowning in Kitsch

Like his alleged favorite author, Trump has a taste for starting illegal wars and displaying tacky trash:

Simplicius summed it up in his latest piece “The Kitschification of America.”

Key quotes:

For those unfamiliar with the term, kitsch represents a kind of cheap, low effort aesthetic that is often a mishmash of pop-culture sediment scraped lazily together and popularized in the 50s and 60s for the sake of consumerist memorabilia in the form of little gewgaws and cheap souvenir shop trinkets.

Not to get too pedantic or pretentiously sciolistic, but kitsch is in some ways the embodiment of a culture of excess, a culture that has reached its zenith, its peak flowering phase, and has begun to wilt, shedding its invasive spores haphazardly over the once-virgin garden. It is the exaltation of “memeified” cultural tokens to the point of parody, which had come long before the invention of internet ‘memes’. It purposely calls attention to itself, to become a kind of self-mockery in the way “irony” had become a modus vivendi under the thankfully-brief ‘hipster rule’ of the aughts. It resonates even in the chosen names: Golden Dome, Golden Age, Make America Great Again, a strange kind of spiritually inert alchemy in reverse—turning what was once real gold, into fool’s gold and other debased byproducts.

Considering these facts forces you into an understanding of how Trump’s aesthetic vision for America reimagines the nation as a kind of Potemkin village of kitsch memetics long unbound from the core cultural groundings that had actually once given these ideas life.

The reflecting pool and Freedom 250 state fair debacles are the most obvious expressions of the Trump aesthetic of attempted spectacle so choked by graft it only results in obvious, embarrassing failure.

A Reflecting Pool Even Narcissus Can’t Love

Let’s start with 4,000 words worth of pictures:

Joe Conason sums up the slimy situation elegantly for Alternet:

Having failed to consult scientists — whose wisdom he always disdains — the president made the pool’s problems worse by increasing the impact of climate change. Turning the pool dark heated it up and made it even more hospitable to algae growth.As the Cultural Landscape Foundation noted in a lawsuit filed to stop the painting of the pool, it is an “aesthetic injury” — like so many Trump projects — that will “fundamentally alter the existing harmony, solemnity and dignity of the current memorial landscape.

Although Trump and his minions have lied repeatedly about the Reflecting Pool, claiming it is crystal clear when everyone can gaze upon the murky results, he now needs someone to blame. Having botched this entire process with embarrassing stupidity and venality, he insists that the renovation scheme failed because of “vandalism.” Indeed, he has claimed that numerous vandals have been apprehended.

MS Now has reported that only one of the six arrests Trump claimed actually occurred.

The WaPo reports that the one person arrested is a former Olympic cyclist “David Hearn said he touched the pool’s detached liner but “didn’t destroy or break or peel anything.”

One of the contractors in question is also worth a look:

Things are going so great for the classy gentleman above that CNN reports he’s hired a crisis communications firm to help tell his story.

We should also join the throngs lonely curiosity seekers attending Trump’s Great American State Fair State Fair intended to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Is There Anybody Out There?

Fast Company titled their piece “The unbearable emptiness of the Great American State Fair” and subtitled it “A celebration in the nation’s capital looks more like a liminal space.”

The article is mostly quotes from social media, so let’s close this pathetic section with more pics, this time from TMZ:

Now let’s get back to that notorious Truth social account and the eyebrow-raisingly attractive young woman reported to be behind it.

Eva Braun Much?

Gossip like this is best served with video, let’s get salacious, y’all.

Daily Beast has some allegedly Freudian deets (or what they call “The Twisted Truth”) for those in a hurry or limited to text:

The brother of White House aide Natalie Harp claims that her “infatuation” with President Donald Trump stems from her difficult relationship with their father.
…
“While much of the media has focused on questioning whether her relationship is something scandalous, that is not where my mind goes personally. Maybe it is because I just can’t imagine something like that, but to me this is 100 percent an infatuation based on an unfortunate shared ideology of U.S. exceptionalism,” Preston told the Daily Beast.

As much as Trump’s lecherous buffoonery might be great for clicks, his policies and the package they’re wrapped aren’t popular with the American people.

With Polls Like This Trump Might Lose the GOP Senate Majority

The NYT/Siena Polls have the numbers for those who still believe these things reflect consensus reality:

Republicans are hampered by the unpopularity of President Trump and his diminished standing on the economy, while most of the Democratic candidates are so far running ahead of their party’s own struggling brand, the polls show.
…
In the polls, the average of the Senate races in those six states was a tie, with 47 percent for both Republicans and Democrats. The shift shows how far the political environment has tilted in the Democrats’ direction ahead of the midterm elections.
…
Voters across all six battlegrounds were thoroughly frustrated by rising prices — and many blamed Mr. Trump. Only 36 percent of voters approved of his handling of cost-of-living issues, including an abysmal 24 percent among independent voters.

Now that we’ve had some titillating fun and maybe raised some hopes, lets dive deep into the muck, because that’s where the money Trump and his gang are making is.

The Very Big Picture: Yo, Trump Is Banking, Fool!

The NYT sums it up, and Trump’s accomplishment as King Grifter is staggering. In fact one has to hope he’s going to be the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) when it comes to Presidential corruption. He has certainly blown past any predecessor:

Never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump…

Overall, Mr. Trump’s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $2.2 billion, compared with a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before he returned to office.

Let’s get into some of the specific scores, they’re pretty sweet, if you’re criminally minded.

Savvy Stock Trader

Sludge details some incredible Trump trade timing:

The day before President Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, sending markets exploding higher, his investment accounts quietly purchased hundreds of stocks near the market low…

Trump’s accounts were actively trading stocks throughout 2025 while he was making policy decisions that moved markets, and the public had no idea.

On April 8, 2025, the day before Trump announced the tariff pause, the disclosure shows 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million, one of the largest single-day stock buying sprees disclosed in the filing. The purchases included Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet, each valued as much as $250,000, along with scores of other companies. The S&P 500 jumped nearly 10% the following day when Trump announced the pause, one of the largest single-day gains in the index’s history.

AI isn’t the only “innovative” types of finance Trump has profited from.

Crypto Been Berry Berry Good to the Trumps

The New York Times found much to make hay with in the POTUS’ 2025 mandatory financial disclosure and focused on his crypto windfalls:

President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses…

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.
…
The president’s family business, the Trump Organization, has also capitalized on Mr. Trump’s popularity in certain parts of the world, licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Mr. Trump last year, the filing shows.

Note the flagrant violations of the Emoluments Clause bolded above.

Reuters dived into how the Trump crypto profits were scored:

The $TRUMP meme coin is one of four Trump family crypto projects that have turned into a financial jackpot for the Trumps and a very bad bet for buyers…

While they vary in size and structure, each of these ventures has followed the same playbook. The Trumps risked little up front. Trump family members – notably, the president’s oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. – hyped the venture. The Trumps raked in money as investors piled in. And those buyers lost big when, for various reasons, the prices of their Trump-related crypto assets later tanked.

…the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April…

They also had a chart:

Not sure who couldn’t have seen that one coming, but Voidzilla (aka Coffeezilla) tried to warn the gullible a year ago.

And to put the size of the score into context:

But the Trump gang isn’t a one trick pony, although they are serial violators of the Emoluments Clause.

C’mon Don, Jr. & Eric Let’s All Go to Kazahkstan!

Kazahkstan may be a fairly remote and foreign country, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump family from making themselves right at home, per the NYT:

When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.

During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.

Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.

It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.

Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.

Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.

Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.

Now, let’s take our international tour with the Trump family, to Albania.

Off to Albania With Jared and Ivanka

Mother Jones has a summary of another Trump family caper that may or may not violate the Emoluments Clause, but it’s endangered the Albanian government.

The AP zeroes in on how the protests now threaten the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.

In an interview with U.S. podcaster David Senra, Ivanka Trump said they discovered the site by accident.

“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it,” she said. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”

The AP also profiles three of the leaders of the “Flamingo Revolution”, readers with time to pore over it (and those close to the scene) are encouraged to chime in with insights as to whether or not the whole thing is yet another CIA-style Gene Sharp inspired color revolution or something more organic.

Before we scrape Jared off the soles of our waders, Casey Michel’s in-depth profile for Mother Jones on Mr. Kushner and his various scams is highly recommended.

As is this TruthOut piece on Kushner’s diplomatic double dipping.

Pardon me for the pun, but there’s one more topic to survey before this epic is over.

Pardons Pardons Everywhere and Not a Crook in the Clink

Trump has also aggressively monetized his presidential pardon powers. It was reported last year by the NYT, Bloomberg, and the WSJ that $1 million can allegedly buy a pardon from POTUS Trump.

This might (or might not) explain some of his most random-seeming pardons of celebrity rappers and Obama-influenced wannabe new media titans or it may not. Maybe he’s a Lil’ Wayne fan and a big Ozy.com reader. Who knows.

Regardless there is talk of a big 250 pardons for the 250th anniversary sale, per The Atlantic:

Advocates for the plan say that it would both underscore the president’s singular authority and reinforce an image he has long sought to cultivate: “Trump the merciful,” as a person close to the White House described it to us recently. Meanwhile, the prospect of a mass pardon has set off an international frenzy of lobbying and dealmaking, in which even slight proximity to the president can be monetized.

Five current and former administration officials and nine private-sector lawyers, lobbyists, and other individuals with ties to Trump’s orbit told us that the jockeying among those seeking clemency for past crimes has been intense. One criminal-defense attorney called it “a three-ring circus,” and a former administration official said that it was “batshit crazy.” One lobbyist told us that he had started turning off his cellphone as the ”“aggressive” requests from clients intensified in recent weeks. All spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters with high stakes in the days ahead.

Most recently the fraud conviction of Guo Wengui, a purported Chinese exile and Steve Bannon associate, has speculation churning that the pardon pen is about to be exercised again.

From Mother Jones:

Guo—a supposed billionaire Chinese dissident who claimed to know secrets of corruption among China’s leaders—had amassed a large, ardent following among that country’s diaspora.

…
The new organization was wildly ambitious. Guo and (Steve) Bannon called it a “government-in-waiting,” prepared to step in and run China following what they claimed was the imminent collapse of ruling Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. At the same time, Guo was also seeking investments in GTV, an online streaming site he claimed would compete with companies like Amazon and TikTok, make investors rich, and air reporting that would fulfill his oft-stated goal: “Take down CCP.”

On the boat, Guo joined Bannon in reading a declaration of principles, told the former Donald Trump aide he loved him, and kissed him. Then Guo bit his own index finger and signed the declaration with his blood.
…
(Now) federal prosecutors are asking Judge Analisa Torres to sentence Guo to more than 30 years in prison for overseeing one of “this nation’s worst and most rampant frauds.” (In an order dated April 23, Torres delayed Guo’s sentencing, previously scheduled for Monday, until June 29.)

In 2024, a jury convicted Guo of stealing hundreds of millions from his followers. The New Federal State of China, the harbor ceremony, the nonprofits, and the media companies were all part of an elaborate con Guo used to “lock in” those supporters before hitting them up for investments, prosecutors said a sentencing memo last week.

Guo, who has been jailed as a perceived flight risk since his March 2023 arrest, continues to deny guilt. His lawyers argue, in their own sentencing memo, that his conviction was the result of the Chinese government’s “relentless and overwhelmingly powerful targeting of him.” The memo also suggests, without evidence, that Guo’s support for Trump, in particular his role in the publication of explicit pictures of Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election, contributed to his prosecution.

Yes, this has Hunter Biden tweeting that he’s actually innocent, the laptop pictures were all fake and by all means subscribe to his Substack for updates.

Gotta take the bad with the awful, I guess.

Related Posts:

• Amway Oligarchy and Trump’s Willing Figureheads

• Trump Family Grab Their Share of the Crypto, Gaza Take

• Impunity, Incompetence, and Maybe Insight Into How Trump Works

• Trump Admin Moving Fast, Breaking Things as Shutdown Continues

• Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, and Eric Trump Admin Trio of the Week

• Trump Insider Deals Hitting the Rocks?

• Emperor Trump Brings Gladiator Games With UFC White House Event

• OpenAI, Amazon Colluding With Trump Against Anthropic

Originally published at Naked Capitalism

I’ve been remiss about covering this story because so much has been blowing up on my electoral politics and AI/business beats.

WTF Happened Here?

The Guardian has the basics:

After a three-week jury trial, the nine activists were all found guilty of a slew of criminal charges in March, stemming from a Fourth of July protest at an immigrant detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, south of Fort Worth. The demonstrators arrived late at night with a plan to set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with those detained inside. A few of the protesters spontaneously broke off from the main group and vandalized cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and drew his weapon, one of the activists fired an AR-15, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

Benjamin Song, who fired the gun at the police officer, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Song was convicted of attempted murder of an officer of the United States, as well as firearm and explosives charges. He was also convicted of riot, providing material support to terrorists. He faced anywhere from 20 years to life in prison.

Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto and Meagan Morris were sentenced to 50 years in prison. Maricela Rueda, another demonstrator, was sentenced to 70 years in prison. All six were convicted of riot, providing material support to terrorist, and explosive charges. Rueda was also convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record.

Evetts, Hill, Morris and Rueda were acquitted on attempted murder and firearms charges.

The sentences handed down on Tuesday were unusually long, said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who served as the US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan during the Obama administration.

“Most often, judges will sentence defendants for separate counts concurrently. Here, it appears that the judge stacked the sentences for each count consecutively. I would have expected lengthy sentences here, more in the ballpark at 15 to 25 years, but nothing like 50 to 100 years,” she wrote in an email.

Antifa Has Been Got but Good

Assistant Director for Public Affairs at the FBI Ben Williamsom tweeted the mugshots like he was showing off his catch after a big fishing trip:

Trump’s DOJ took a big ol’ victory lap:

“The sentences handed down today make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Their violent extremism has no place in our country, and the Department of Justice will continue to aggressively investigate, disrupt, and prosecute those who threaten law enforcement officers or undermine the rule of law.”

“Today’s sentencings show the FBI remains committed to identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “Acts of violence against our law enforcement partners will not be tolerated, and we continue our work to protect communities across the country from domestic terrorism.”

“These sentences justly punish the vicious, armed attack that these Antifa cell members planned and executed against law enforcement and detention center officers on the night of July 4th last year,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould for the Northern District of Texas. “Their terrorist acts, attempted murder, vandalism, and explosives launched at a detention facility were a far cry from a peaceful protest or First Amendment expression. Because of the prompt action of first responders that night and tenacious work of our law enforcement partners, in tandem with the prosecutors in my office, eight people have been rightly punished for these violent acts and their attempts to conceal them. We will continue in this mission to hold others accountable who perpetrate such violence and fund these ANTIFA groups in the Northern District of Texas.”

“The sentences handed down today send an unmistakable message: Attacks on federal officers and facilities will not be tolerated. The men and women of ICE serve with integrity and courage, often in challenging and dangerous environments. The calculated violence carried out by these Antifa cell members at Prairieland was an assault on law enforcement and an attack on the rule of law itself,” said Acting ICE Director David J. Venturella. “Nearly one year after this cowardly act, justice has prevailed. ICE will continue to stand firm against those who threaten our officers, our facilities and our mission.”

These are the terrifying terrorists in question photographed in a non-mugshot context:

Some of these convictions are particularly egregious.

30 Years for Transporting Zines?!?

The Intercept focused on the most appalling case:

Daniel Sanchez Estrada wasn’t accused of attempted murder or material support of terrorism after a protest turned catastrophically wrong outside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas. He was merely convicted of obstructing the investigation by moving a box full of antifascist zines after the protest. Giving him a long prison term would make a mockery of justice, his defense attorney, Christopher Weinbel, told U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor on Tuesday.

“The punishment must fit the crimes — not the headlines, not the politics, not the fears that have been mongered about the case,” he said.

Instead, O’Connor gave Sanchez Estrada a 30-year term.
…
Only one of the defendants, Benjamin Hanil Song, was accused of firing a gun at a police officer, who left the scene with an injury to his neck; Song was convicted of attempted murder. Still, federal guidelines calling for harsher sentences for all because of links to terrorism — which were applied by O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, and U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee — meant that all the defendants faced long prison terms.

Their only hope ahead of the simultaneous twin hearings was that the two judges might break sharply with federal guidelines. Instead, O’Connor and Pittman chose to make an example of the defendants.

Several defendants said Tuesday that they never intended to hurt anyone. Their only hope was to show solidarity with the detainees by staging a noise demonstration with fireworks, they said.

“When I went to protest on the night of July 4, it seemed more like a party to me than anything else,” Autumn Hill told the court Tuesday. “We didn’t expect or want any violence or destruction of property to occur.”

Prosecutors, however, seized on the fact that the protesters arrived at the scene with guns and fireworks. O’Connor, the judge, said several times that the defendants had committed an “assault on democracy.”

“What happened here was not by any stretch of the imagination a protest,” he said during the sentencing of one defendant.

Hmm, I wonder how they feel about January 6th?

Justice, Blind and Impartial

The WSWS compare and contrast the Prairieland Nine with January 6:

Sanchez-Estrada was not accused of participating in the shooting, planning an attack or providing material support to any alleged act of violence. Instead, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of concealing documents for moving a box containing artwork, journals, poetry, magazines and antifascist zines after his wife, defendant Maricela Rueda, had been arrested. Prosecutors argued that these materials constituted evidence of the alleged conspiracy. In effect, Sanchez-Estrada received a sentence longer than any imposed on a January 6, 2021 coup defendant for handling literature protected by the First Amendment.

In fact, every Prairieland defendant received a sentence longer than the harshest punishment imposed on any participant in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. While anti-ICE protesters were sentenced to decades in prison under the banner of combating “domestic terrorism,” Trump granted sweeping clemency to more than 1,600 January 6 foot soldiers, including Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia members. At least 97 of those recipients have since been arrested for, charged with or convicted of additional crimes, including violent offenses, child sex crimes, domestic violence, stalking, grand larceny and plots to kill law enforcement officers and public officials.

A Modicum of Leftist and Even Liberal Outrage

While the lives of these nine anti-ICE protestors have surely been ruined, the case has gotten a fraction of the attention given to the murder of Renée Good in Minnesota.

But there has been some.

Houston Public Media let shooter Benjamin Song and his mother speak their piece:

Before Pittman read his sentence, Song — sitting in the jury box with an orange striped jumpsuit and cuffs — told the court he doesn’t hate cops, Trump or Nazis.

Song called the idea that he intended an ambush the night of July 4 “impossible.” Rather, when he saw Gross exit his car and point his gun at another defendant, Song said he saw his “worst nightmare” and feared an instance of police brutality.

Song was glad, he said, that the people at Prairieland didn’t end up like Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson and other people killed by law enforcement.

Song also denied he denied both being part of antifa and its existence as an organization. He defended anti-fascism as a belief.

“What kind of people are not against fascism?” Song said.
…
The judge said Song had “obviously” not accepted responsibility and showed no remorse.

Song’s mother, Hope Song, responded to Pittman’s comment at a press conference after the sentencing.

“He’s accepted full responsibility for what actually happened,” Hope said. “But he will never accept responsibility for a lie — a government lie made to prosecute innocent people in order to get political persecutions.”

Pittman also struck down Song’s attorney Phillip Hayes’ attempt to mention evidence he said proves Song fired his gun at the ground as suppressive fire. Pittman said it’s “by the grace of God” that Song and others are not dead.

“If we’re in a day and age that we use suppressive fire at an officer trying to stop a riot, we are in a really, really bad point in our history,” Pittman said.

Sanchez Estrada also denied ties to antifa as a domestic terrorist group.

“I’m many things, your honor, but I’m not a terrorist,” Estrada told O’Connor.

Other outlets broadened the context.

There’s a Method to the FBI Madness

Black Alliance for Peace explains:

The Prairieland case is an attempt to normalize the use of extreme federal charges, including “material support to terrorism,” against individuals engaged in protest activity. The objective is clear: isolate movements, intimidate communities, and establish a legal framework that can be deployed against organizers across the country.

The prosecution’s narrative rested on the weaponization of the word “Antifa,” which describes anti-fascist movements, but is now a term that has been weaponized by the far right and the national security state to manufacture a domestic enemy. By framing protest activity and even attire (such as wearing all-black clothing) through a counterterrorism lens, the state seeks to normalize extreme charges, lengthy sentences, and sweeping prosecutions that can be replicated against movements in the future, without the burden of material evidence.

Equally troubling are the irregularities surrounding the trial itself: restricted public access, heavy judicial control over jury selection, and barriers to independent observation. These conditions reinforce the reality that the outcome of this case was shaped within a broader political context designed to secure convictions and establish precedent.

But repression of this kind is not simply about punishing nine individuals. It is about sending a message to all who resist the violence of the U.S. system of detention, deportation, and border militarization. It is about intimidating movements and attempting to isolate those who challenge the legitimacy of the state’s institutions. It is about reinforcing the legal architecture that will strengthen repression and surveillance toward the aims of ‘full spectrum dominance’ on the domestic front, as well as globally.

Don’t Laugh, We’re Next

The Texas Observer pointed out the implications for anyone hoping to resist Trump 2.0:

Benjamin Song, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Autumn Hill, Elizabeth Soto, and Ines Soto were convicted on felony charges of providing material support to terrorists, rioting, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and use and carry of an explosive (the aforementioned fireworks). Daniel Sanchez Estrada was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record, and along with his wife, Rueda, was also convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents. Song, the alleged shooter, was also convicted on one count of attempted murder and other gun charges, while Hill, Evetts, Morris and Rueda were acquitted of the attempted murder and discharging a firearm charges.

“I think this is the worst-case-scenario verdict,” said Luis, a member of the DFW Support Committee, a group working to support the Prairieland defendants, who requested that the Texas Observer use only his first name for fear of reprisal. Even had the shooting never occurred, Luis said, the verdict suggests the jury would have convicted the defendants anyway for actions that are common to many protests.
…
The case represents the federal government’s first use of material support for terrorism charges against alleged Antifa members. Experts say the outcome will give the Trump administration the green light to take a more aggressive stance against left-wing activity and further politicize the use of domestic terrorism laws.

“It probably will embolden them to perhaps offer additional characterization of entities or groups … animated by some sort of anti-administration agenda as some species of Antifa,” said Tom Brzozowski, former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Department of Justice.
…
This case was a difficult one for those who sought to protect anti-fascist First Amendment-protected activities, “because there was a shooting of a police officer,” German said. “We can debate the nature of that injury [the officer was hospitalized and released within 24 hours], but it provides the locus of attention for viewing this particular protest as a dangerous event. There was an act of violence. And the domestic terrorism laws are very broad in this country. The [legal] definition of what is an explosive would probably shock most people.”

German also worries about the further politicization of domestic terrorism charges.

“The Trump administration and the media had demonized Antifa all through the first Trump term, and even more aggressively in the second,” German said. “This concept of terrorism tends to become politicized, particularly when government officials intentionally politicize it.”

It’s not just Texas leftists that are alarmed.

Even a Broken Centrist Can Be Outraged Twice a Day

The libs at The Bulwark did themselves proud in a recent episode of their podcast:

the victims of a story are never pure. You want your victims to be Mother Teresa. The victims in this story did some things that were wrong, but the way that they’re being treated by the government is fucking outrageous.

It’s also like the way that they are being portrayed in media, which is again, it’s outrageous. And especially because one, it’s led to some of the most irritating people on earth gloating about it…

“4th of July last year, protesters went to the Prairie Land Ice Facility in Texas for protest. It was disruptive, they were shooting fireworks, they were doing graffiti, they slashed some tires on the government van. You should not do that.

They were asked to disperse. Many of them did not comply. A federal agent arrived, pulled out a gun.

One of the protesters who had taken a rifle to the protest, Second Amendment, hell yeah, shot and wounded but didn’t kill the officer who pulled the gun, you should not do that. The government prosecuted then 22 protesters, not just the one.

Including people who were not there. That’s something that’s important here. People who were not present for this event.

Nine of the protesters were prosecuted under this material support for terrorism executive order that Trump signed last year, which is going after Antifa.”

“So they’re getting hit with these terrorism charges. So these nine people, their sentences range from 30 to 100 years, 30 to 100. Many of the listeners got mad at me for what they considered one of my worst takes besides the declaration of the Oval Office, which was that I thought that the QAnon Shaman sentence was too harsh.
He got like three years. Okay. These people got 30 to 100 years for Antifa terrorism.

The government alleged that eight of the convicted protesters belonged to North Texas Antifa. In the case of one couple, the government relied on this evidence: They owned a printing press, like The Weather Underground, used to print Anarchia zines.

This stuff isn’t new to the Trump 2.0 regime.

Putting This in Historical Context

TruthOut brings a little history to the party:

In the wake of the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump issued his illegal National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on September 25, 2025. Ominously entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the directive essentially paints anyone who doesn’t support Trump’s agenda as a “domestic terrorist.”

Target ideologies specifically listed in the memorandum include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” This broad designation includes individuals, their organizations, and funders, and encompasses anti-fascist, pro-Palestinian, anti-ICE, and other leftist demonstrators in its net. The NSPM-7 openly calls for “investigative” tactics designed to “disrupt” and “dismantle” these groups.

The language of the memo harkened back to the days of the government’s illegal and racist war against the Black liberation and New Left movements of 1960s, and of tactics that the FBI used to violently attack similar movements and leaders under its secret COINTELPRO program.

The Trump administration memo also rallied the government’s politically motivated lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington and in U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country to join the effort by using myriad federal statutes to vindictively and wrongfully charge and prosecute those who actively opposed the government and its violent and genocidal actions. This too mirrored the DOJ blueprint of the late 1960s and early 1970s that was aggressively pursued under the leadership of Attorney General John Mitchell.

They’re not the only ones connecting the dots to American history and tradition.

This IS America, Y’all, Always Has Been

Kim Kelly gets deeper:

The severity is incomprehensible: By declaring “antifa” a terrorist organization and pillorying the Prairieland defendants, the Trump administration has made it very clear that there is no acceptable form of protest left—and that this is just the beginning. But it’s also worth exploring the dark historical parallels, which show this isn’t the first time the US government has abused its powers to quash dissent.
…
To truly understand the gravity of this case and the vengeful precedent upon which it was built, let’s travel back to Chicago in 1886. Eight activists alleged to have been a part of “the Haymarket riot” stood accused of conspiracy to use explosives, left to the mercy of a hostile jury that found their political views repugnant and their identities suspect. All eight men were anarchists; many were also labor organizers, orators, and writers who had thrown themselves into the fight for the eight-hour workday. Some were immigrants of German extraction, while one was a former Confederate soldier from Alabama turned leftist wordsmith.

The activists had been hunted down and arrested after a rally of striking workers turned to chaos. Someone had thrown a bomb into the crowd, and the police started shooting. A number of workers were injured or killed in the resulting melee, as well as several policemen. Most of the accused had not been present when it happened, but were hauled to jail just the same; later, it was generally acknowledged that none of them had thrown the bomb, either.

Their friends and comrades tried desperately to win them their freedom by appeal, by pardon, by sheer force of will. Lucy Parsons, the iconic Black anarchist activist whose husband Albert was among the accused, criss-crossed the country drumming up support. But even her fierce dedication could not swing the odds in their favor.

Merely being associated with anarchism was enough to make a man seem guilty then, and ultimately, four of the eight men hung for it. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher, and George Engel were executed on November 11, 1887. As the darkness closed in, Spies spoke the promise of his final words: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!” Another, Louis Lingg, took his own life before the state got the chance. Three other defendants—Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab—eventually had their sentences commuted after years of torment.

But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise even to those ignorant of 19th Century American history. We were warned much more recently.

Ken Klippenstein Warned Us

Substacker Ken Klippenstein has been trying to warn Americans since last fall that things like this were coming down the pike:

on September 25, President Donald Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” essentially adding them to an ever-growing list of what he calls the “enemy within.”
…
On its face, NSPM-7 is chilling to read: If anyone needed proof that “terrorism” and “political violence” are slippery and fraught categories subject to political, ideological, and racial manipulation and bias—well, this is it.

Like the president’s investigation into the Open Society Foundations and his order purporting to designate “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization,” which is not a thing!), NSPM-7 is a deliberate attempt to sow fear and intimidate and silence opposition to the president’s abuses.

And while Klippenstein has not focused a full piece on the plight of those convicted in Texas, he has discussed the difficulty a federal prosecutor in Minnesota had in defining ‘antifa’ before a jury:

Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens before they commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.

It is one of the first cases where national security presidential memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.”

Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”

And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.

In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.

The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.

Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.

Hang tough, y’all, it’s going to be a long hot summer.

UPDATE: Ken Klippenstein dropped an email dedicated to the Nine after I posted. He connects some very crucial dots that lead to…..Israel.

Here’s a taste:

The federal government’s first-ever domestic terrorism convictions linked to “Antifa” came thanks to an “expert” witness who has never spent a day in government or academia, as non-public court transcripts I obtained show. He instead cut his teeth at various pro-Israel advocacy groups.

Shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attacks, he said in a social media post: “I would like every protesting communist scumbag to go to Gaza so the IDF can turn them into pink mist…”

His name is Kyle Shideler, and he is the worst of the worst kind of Washington expert. What he lacks in perspective and real world grounding he makes up in ideological fanaticism and deskwork. Before his current position at the right-wing fever dream factory called the Center for Security Policy, he spent years parroting Israel’s national security worldview: the “counterterrorism” mindset of pre-crime paranoia, in which threats lurk everywhere and the preemptive “security” crackdown they supposedly demand becomes its own form of oppression.

This paranoia was on full display at the trial of the Prairieland Eight…

Related posts:

• ICE, Antifa, and the Ever Expanding Definition of Terrorism

• Ken Paxton Takes His Anti-Antifa Fight Undercover

Originially published at Naked Capitalism