Egghead Declares War on Introspection

Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz who bears an uncanny resemblance to Marvel Comics’ Egghead…

…sat for an interview with David Senra that went viral because of Marc’s claim that he has “zero” introspection.

Here’s the fuller quote:

David Senra: You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs talk about, but I think it’s super important that you don’t have any level of introspection.

Marc Andreessen: Yes. Zero. As little as possible. Why? Move forward. Go. I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a real problem and it’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.

This statement inspired Émile P. Torres of the Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter to respond: “Silicon Valley truly is run by sociopaths with no empathy for others and no ability or desire to reflect on their behaviors, feelings, and ideas.”

Torres uses this claim as a jumping off point for an examination of the mindset of Silicon Valley Accelerationists in general.

…there are two general groups of accelerationists. The first group thinks that ASI will by default be value-aligned. Marc Andreessen seems to hold this view. He appears to think that if we just plow ahead with ASI, it will by default bring about a utopian world of radical abundance, human enhancement, and space colonization. The second group thinks that it doesn’t even matter whether ASI is value-aligned. Indeed, many argue that ASI shouldn’t be value-aligned — it should have its own “alien, inhuman” values.

In both cases, the conclusion is — as noted — pedal to the metal. That’s why Karnofsky thinks this isn’t a coordination problem. Even if one, two, or all of the companies disbanded, there would still be people who’d immediately start new companies to race toward ASI as quickly as possible.

There’s no stopping the ASI race unless the government swoops in and imposes robust regulations to prevent this from happening. And since the government won’t do that, we’re kinda screwed — not because ASI is actually around the corner. I don’t believe that at all. But rather, because the race itself is causing profound harms to the world. Because we don’t need AGI or ASI for AI to destroy our society.

Peter Thiel vs. ‘the Very Foundations of Civil Coexistence’

Meanwhile, Palantir co-founder, Peter Thiel is getting some attention from the New York Times because his continuing lecture series on the Antichrist (spoiler: It’s probably Greta Thunberg) has hit Rome, home to the Pope.

From the NYT:

Mr. Thiel, an investor in artificial intelligence, says he is drawing on biblical prophesies to warn of an Antichrist who will promise safety from existential risks like nuclear war, climate change and artificial intelligence only to bring about something worse: one-world, totalitarian government.

Now, Mr. Thiel is encountering resistance from Christian thinkers in the Roman Catholic Church, just as he tries to build support for his ideas in the church’s backyard in Rome.

This week, Mr. Thiel arrived in Rome to deliver four lectures on the Antichrist. The series, which began on Sunday, is exploring how “occult forces are ceaselessly at work, intent on destroying what remains of the West,” according to the conservative Christian group hosting him.

In response, Catholics have decried Mr. Thiel’s vision in several articles over the past week.

The piece that’s gotten the most attention is Rev. Paolo Benanti’s “American heresy: Should we burn Peter Thiel?” (original in French).

Some quotes (via Google translate):

Thiel is above all a political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

Both enigmatic and influential, his figure does not emerge as that of a simple entrepreneur but as that of a thinker who has woven a complex ideological framework from very diverse sources: from the mimetic philosophy of René Girard to the anarcho-capitalist prophecy, to recently arrive at a theologico-apocalyptic framework that is as disturbing as it is structured .

Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.

Benanti connects Thiel’s philosophical studies to his early support of Facebook:

In the business world, Thiel relied on this philosophical intuition to make his most successful investments.

We know, for example, that he used the theory of mimetic desire to anticipate the success of Facebook, investing very early in the social network, at a time when it was still in its infancy. Where many saw only another slightly geeky blog aimed at students, Thiel detected a perfect “mimetic machine”: a platform designed to exploit a fundamental human need—to observe others, imitate them, and desire what they desire.

He himself reportedly explained René Girard’s theories to Mark Zuckerberg, persuading him to scale up with a striking phrase: “whoever owns a machine for producing desire owns the world.” For him, the introduction of the “Like” button, and its subsequent evolution, was not merely a technical innovation: it represented the perfect algorithmic implementation of mimetic desire, a device designed to amplify and monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale.

And what is Thiel’s protege Zuckerberg up to lately, why nothing less than an attack on all forms of online privacy.

Zuckerberg Attacks Privacy at the Root

Gadget Review tells the tale:

A Reddit researcher just exposed how Meta funneled over $2 billion through shadowy nonprofits to push age verification laws that would force Apple and Google to build surveillance infrastructure into every device—while conveniently exempting Meta’s own platforms from the same requirements.

Meta’s lobbying operation spans 45 states using nonprofit shells to avoid transparency requirements.

The investigation by GitHub user “upper-up” traces funding through organizations like the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA), which launched December 18, 2024, and testified for Utah’s SB-142 just days later. Bloomberg and Deseret News reported Meta’s backing of DCA, part of a $70 million fragmented super PAC strategy designed to evade FEC tracking. Traditional election spending disclosure requirements don’t apply to this fragmented approach.

Proposed laws would embed persistent identity verification directly into operating systems.

The technical reality hits harder than policy abstractions. These bills mandate OS-level APIs that apps can query for age data—creating a permanent identity layer baked into your phone’s core functions. Meta’s Horizon OS for Quest VR already implements this infrastructure through Family Center controls. Now they want Apple and Google to build similar systems that every app can access, turning age verification into persistent device fingerprinting.

Age verification bills target Meta’s competitors while leaving Meta platforms untouched.

Taylor Lorenz has more at The Guardian:

Over the past year, more than two dozen countries around the world have proposed bans on social media use for vast swathes of their public. These laws, often proposed under the guise of “child safety”, are ushering in an era of mass surveillance and widespread censorship, contributing to what scholars have called a “global free speech recession”.
…
In the US, online age verification laws have passed or are being considered in more than half of the nation’s states. In the coming weeks, a package of 19 “child safety” bills, several which require identity verification for social media, are set to move forward in the House of Representatives. Big tech platforms such as Meta, Google and Discord have begun pre-complying with the laws in order to get ahead of regulation.

While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.

And while some claim the laws would curb big tech’s power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech’s power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.

Thiel and Zuckerberg are in good company among their fellow Silicon Valley accelerationists, just check what Palantir co-founder Alex Karp has been getting up to.

Karp’s Tech To Destroy Educated Women

Karp spoke to CNBC and was his usual charming self, saying “This technology disrupts humanity’s train, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working class, often male voters. These disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.”

Here’s how The New Republic summed up the implications of Karp’s arguments:

This sounds like a direct, long-term pitch to the GOP from a CEO whose tech firm already has numerous government contracts and is deeply embedded in the Pentagon. Karp’s message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies—liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working-class men—more political power to transfer to you. He’s aligning his technology with both GOP political strategy and the larger male-centered culture war that the right has been waging for the better part of a decade now. And how exactly would his technology only hurt Democrat women?

Karp also made a Patriot Act–era argument, justifying his admittedly “dangerous” technology by claiming that Palantir will allow us to “be American” in the future.

“These technologies are dangerous societally,” Karp continued. “The only justification you could possibly have would be that if we don’t do it, our adversaries will do it. And we will be subject to their rule of law.… Why is it that we’re absorbing the risk of disrupting the very fabric of our society, including the most powerful parts of our society, if it’s not because it’s about maintaining our ability to be American in the near term and long term?”

Looks like the future is in the best possible hands, amirite?

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Let’s set the context with some polling:

It’s not just Israel voters are tired of, AI is hated too:

The multiple crisis involving Israel (and to a lesser extent the coming AI economic implosion) have set off something I’ve been calling “The Political Blender” based on a metaphor by John Michael Greer.

In Feburary I covered how AIPAC blundered in a New Jersey primary, aiming their dark money at a candidate considered to be a soft-supporter of zionism, and accidentally helping a much-less Israel-sympathetic candidate take the nomination.

Succeeding events have forced them to adapt and up their dark money game.

POTUS Trump’s war of choice on Iran has only made things worse for those advocating the Netanyahu agenda. It’s gotten so bad former Obama Administration Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes is openly calling for Democrats to primary anyone supporting the war.

But Israel ain’t the only issue that’s unpopular with Democrats and interestingly, the other big hot button issue — anger at ICE — has become a tool to use in surprising ways.

Don’t Fall in that ICE Crack!

Politico sums up the stakes for Democratic candidates vis-a-vis ICE:

The instinct from rival campaigns to slam candidates in Democratic primaries over (ICE) is a testament to just how important opposition to the administration’s immigration agenda has become in these contentious races. “When you’re confronted with these harsh realities, how are you going to respond?” a Democratic strategist working on Latino voters told Playbook. “How are you actually going to take into account what the Latino community needs right now?”
…
And it’s hit incumbents over DHS funding, which remains gridlocked as a month of the partial shutdown for the department nears. Only a handful of Democrats voted to advance the original six-bill appropriations package in January that also funded DHS during the Minnesota fallout. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) was one of them — but quickly released a statement expressing regret over that vote. “I hear the anger from my constituents, and I take responsibility for that,” he wrote.

“You can’t really deflect the fact that ICE is the central piece of the 2026 midterms, and that people are scrambling to make sure that their record is going to be clean come ’26,” the Democratic strategist working on Latino voters told Playbook.

Love those anonymous quotes! But, I digress.

If anyone knows how to take lemons and make lemonade it’s the well-funded, but not very popular dark money lobbies of the U.S.A.

Let’s look at how they’re working their magic in New York, using allegations about support for ICE to attack an anti-AI congressional candidate.

Well He Wasn’t Expecting That Line of Attack

Nancy Scola has the dark money deets for Politico:

Alex Bores had known for a while that a political operation called Leading the Future, funded by artificial-intelligence industry leaders, would be coming after him in his race to replace Democrat Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th congressional district. He just wasn’t sure how.

The group had promised in November that they would target him, because Bores, a Democratic state assemblymember, had recently passed an AI safety bill in the New York legislature widely regarded as the furthest-reaching in the country.

When we spoke earlier this winter, before the group’s ads against him had come out, Bores was gaming out the likeliest attack scenarios. He thought that their strategy would have little to do with the policy issue that actually motivated it. He pointed to public polling showing broad public support for rules governing AI safety.

“I’m sure they won’t come after me on AI,” Bores, 35, told me, sitting in a midtown Manhattan bagel shop between campaign stops, “because they’re in the wrong.”
…
He was mostly right — to take down Bores, Leading the Future had to go for the jugular.

The first ad against him, a 42-second spot, was indeed over his bill, the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Safety and Education Act, aka the RAISE Act. The second ad, though, which dropped six weeks later, raised the stakes. It spent 30 seconds pummeling the candidate on his association with one of the most hot-button issues for the left-leaning voters who make up most of his Manhattan district.

“He made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling the tech for ICE,” said the ad, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. From 2014 through 2019, Bores had worked at the controversial data analytics company Palantir. In his last nearly year and a half at the firm, Bores had helped lead its strategic partnerships with the federal government. Bores has said that he never worked on the company’s contract with ICE, and quit over his objections to that work.

Left unmentioned was that one of Leading the Future’s founding backers, Joe Lonsdale, was not just a staffer but a co-founder of Palantir. Bores sent Leading the Future a cease-and-desist letter, alleging the group made false statements about his work.

Classless, but possibly effective. Word gets around the sleazy campaign hack network fast because these same tactics have quickly gone national.

Axios describes the basic playbook and describes how it’s being applied in Illinois, where America’s 6th largest population is holding primary elections tomorrow:

Groups linked to AIPAC are employing an eyebrow-raising tactic to sink pro-Palestinian progressives in Democratic congressional primaries: Going after their leftist bona fides.

It is a telling indication of what the ruthlessly pragmatic pro-Israel organization sees as a winning message with Democratic voters who have grown increasingly hostile towards their brand.

Rather than running ads through its go-to Democratic political arm, United Democracy Project, AIPAC appears to have employed a web of vaguely named groups targeting specific districts this cycle.
…
Chicago Progressive Partnership — which shares vendors, donors and a treasurer with other AIPAC-linked PACs — went on the air Thursday against Junaid Ahmed, the Congressional Progressive Caucus-backed candidate in Illinois’ 8th district.

Rather than going after Ahmed’s well-documented criticisms of Israel, the CPP ad highlights the left-leaning tech consultant’s personal wealth.
It also cites an investment in Tesla that he disclosed in 2022 to tie him to Trump ally Elon Musk, and says he consulted for fossil fuel companies.
The group has run a similar ad campaign against Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois’ 9th district, alleging the outspoken Palestinian-American progressive received funds from “right-wing donors” and noting her past Republican views as a teenager.

I touched on the IL-09 race in October for those interested.

Where Can We Buy Some State Sovereignty, National Union?

When I worked as a campaign hack, Illinois was seen as a paradise where reporting laws were lax, dark money spending was high, and corruption was bipartisan.

Locals may recognize my modification of the state motto in the section header above, the rest of you can try to keep up.

This is a big money deal for AIPAC:

Chicago’s WBEZ provides a decent intro to this year’s model of campaign dark money family-bloggery:

National special-interest groups, which now include deep-pocketed cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence interests, have spent tens of millions of dollars to influence four hotly contested Democratic congressional primaries in the Chicago area.

Through Thursday, super PACs whose donors are hard to track had reported spending more than $31.4 million, including more than $6.1 million for attack ads that are swamping voters ahead of Tuesday’s primaries.

The portions from the crypto, AI and pro-Israel groups total $26.9 million, a WBEZ review of federal campaign disclosures has found.

The super PAC spending is far more than the last time the Chicago area had U.S. House primary races without an incumbent. In 2022, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson’s campaign saw more than $1.1 million in super PAC support, while U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez’s bid got a $1.5 million boost.

This election cycle, a handful of congressional candidates are seeing quadruple those amounts go toward their individual runs, with most of that super PAC money coming from a pro-Israel group and the trillion-dollar cryptocurrency and AI industries.

Qasim Rashid, Esq. puts together the big picture nicely in his “Let’s Address This” newsletter:

In Illinois we are witnessing a textbook example of how corporate money, often aligned with Trump and MAGA extremists, is undermining our entire democracy. In particular, AIPAC, Crypto money, and the sports betting industry are shelling out tens of millions of dollars to buy our primary elections. If they succeed here, they will no doubt expand their corrupting influence into the 45 states that have not yet had primary elections.
…
But please know that we are witnessing a broader pattern in which AIPAC and its affiliated political infrastructure are trying to overwhelm local elections with national geopolitical money. The spending in the 9th District is not isolated. AIPAC-aligned spending is also flowing across Illinois congressional races to protect candidates who remain aligned with its policy agenda.
…
The pattern is unmistakable. Candidates who rely on grassroots support and who are willing to speak openly about international law and human rights find themselves facing a tidal wave of outside spending designed to bury their campaigns under attack ads. Meanwhile, voters are often misled by PAC names that sound progressive or civic-minded but are in fact vehicles for advancing a narrow geopolitical agenda—in this case, defending Israel’s genocide….

We’ll come back to Rashid, but let’s look at Illinois 9th Congressional district primary a bit more first.

This Race Is Big Time, It’s in the NY Times

Before we get to what the New York Times has to say, let’s let Emma Janssen of the American Prospect describe the horse race and help us understand why it’s been targeted by so much dark money:

With just days left before the primary election in Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District on March 17, super PACs are shoveling money toward one candidate, Laura Fine, while the two progressive front-runners, Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh, vie for votes from the left.

The Ninth District is an oddly shaped mix of urban and suburban areas, mostly liberal, starting in the northernmost neighborhoods of Chicago, stretching to the city of Evanston, and continuing west to include a wide swath of suburbs and small towns.

The district has drawn national attention because of its two leading candidates: Biss is the mayor of Evanston, and Abughazaleh is a political newcomer with a background in progressive media. Both of them were outspoken critics of ICE’s presence in Chicago last fall, and became familiar faces at the weekly protests outside of ICE’s Broadview detention facility in the city’s suburbs.

A clip of Abughazaleh being violently grabbed and thrown onto the pavement by an ICE agent during one of those protests went viral, and now anchors her latest television ad.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to the NYT piece but first let’s hear from Jewish Currents who ask if AIPAC is repeating its New Jersey mistake and misspending its dark money:

Since late February, an AIPAC-linked super PAC called Elect Chicago Women has spent $1.4 million attacking Evanston, Illinois mayor Daniel Biss, a liberal Zionist running in the Democratic primary for a Chicago-area House seat.

It seemed a replay of the tactic AIPAC used in February in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional district, where the pro-Israel group spent over $2 million against the moderate pro-Israel Democrat Tom Malinowski, who had been open to conditioning aid to Israel. AIPAC’s strategy there backfired after their attacks on Malinowski led to the Democratic primary victory of Analilla Mejia, a more left-wing candidate who has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.

The attacks on Biss resurface the puzzle of the Malinowski race: Why is AIPAC using its resources to attack liberal Zionists, particularly in races where they face opponents farther to their left?

In recent weeks, the AIPAC-linked super PAC Chicago Progressive Partnership has dropped around $1 million against Abughazaleh, who opposes all weapons sales to Israel. The last-minute turn against Abughazaleh seems to be an indication that AIPAC’s attacks on Biss could be pushing voters towards Abughazaleh, rather than their preferred candidate, State Senator Laura Fine, said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for the progressive electoral group Justice Democrats, which has endorsed Abughazaleh. “That was a misstep that probably led to more voters going to Kat, and now in the 11th hour they’re spending against Kat,” he said.

The pricey last-minute attacks on Abughazaleh highlight the bind in which AIPAC has found itself, as it struggles to oppose both leftist critics of Israel, and liberal Democrats who were formerly willing to join the AIPAC camp. Political observers say AIPAC is focusing their money on liberal Democrats because they are going after the candidates thought to be the front-runners in their districts, and because the liberals increasingly support conditions on aid to Israel, a position that AIPAC sees as anathema.

And what does the National Paper of Record have to say about this crazy-mixed-up-muddled-up dark money mess?

Looks like they’re caught a little bit of suspiciously well-funded misdirection going on in a multi-candidate primary. Back in my campaign days when Karl Rove did things like this we called it straight up family-bloggery:

A Democratic House primary in Illinois that has centered on disagreements over Israel and has been blanketed by outside spending is coming to a close with an unusual twist — an upbeat 30-second ad that candidates say is not what it seems.

Over a bouncy beat, the ad’s narrator casts a long-shot candidate, Bushra Amiwala, as an appealing option for progressive voters in the Chicago-area Ninth Congressional District, saying she is the “real deal” and is fighting for “real economic justice.”

Ms. Amiwala responded this weekend by saying she “absolutely could not be more disgusted” by the commercial.

To Ms. Amiwala, a fierce critic of Israel, the ad was an inexplicable arrival from an unwelcome source: Chicago Progressive Partnership, a super PAC that has disclosed few details about its backers but shares vendors with groups linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the hard-line pro-Israel lobbying organization.

Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive influencer who has appeared to gain some late momentum, argued that AIPAC-aligned groups were trying to split the progressive vote to halt her rise. And Mayor Daniel Biss of Evanston, a progressive who has led in the polls, said that if anyone was being targeted, it was him.

He accused AIPAC of trying to siphon off his votes.
…
AIPAC appears to be “panicked about the fact that they could have a repeat of what happened in New Jersey,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic analyst who was chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two winning presidential campaigns.

“It’s kind of a tortured mess — a Goldberg contraption of a campaign,” Mr. Axelrod added. He said that AIPAC might have “underestimated the sophistication of the electorate.”

Analysts have suggested that AIPAC, through allied groups, is trying to squeeze Ms. Abughazaleh from both directions: by targeting her with negative ads and by propping up another progressive candidate who might appeal to the same voters.

That’s not the only underhanded tactic the dark money is using in Il-09 either. Per MS NOW:

A week out from a crowded and contentious Democratic primary in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, Amanda Informed, an online influencer in Florida received an email with an offer: one negative post about candidate Kat Abughazaleh on Instagram and TikTok, for $1,500.

The request, which came from a secretive political organization called Democracy Unmuted, was forwarded to her by Matt Anthes, founder of Advocators, a digital marketing agency focused on politics and advocacy through micro-influencers.

The job offer, reviewed by MS NOW, came with a brief explaining how the group wanted Amanda — who declined to give her real name citing privacy concerns — to post for her roughly 100,000 followers. Democracy Unmuted explained that it wanted creators to “engage voters” and encouraged them “to look past viral personalities and ask real questions about who is running and why.”

The suggested talking points were all focused on Abughazaleh, the youngest candidate and a former journalist for the left-leaning website Media Matters. The offer called for influencers to “highlight more than one” of Abughazaleh’s alleged shortcomings: she was inexperienced, came from a wealthy family, may live with her partner in a different neighborhood and is too new to the area to serve.

“Kat’s campaign appears designed for attention rather than impact,” the brief said.

The NYT has a handy survey of polls for those looking to lay some money down and get in on the action curious.

But let’s pull back beyond AIPAC and learn how the AI and crypto bros are playing on the same field, and not always rowing in the same direction as AIPAC.

It’s AI’s World, We Just Provide Source Data

Once again, Emma Janssen is covering for the American Prospect:

pro-AI groups are hoping to elect legislators who will be sympathetic to their plans to create a national framework for AI regulation and enable the construction of more data centers, which are needed to power big AI models.

In Chicagoland, the industry found those sympathetic candidates in Jesse Jackson Jr., son of the recently deceased former progressive presidential candidate, who is hoping to regain his old seat in the Second Congressional District, and Melissa Bean, running for her old seat in the Eighth District. Jackson is hoping to make a comeback after he was investigated for misuse of campaign funds in 2012, resigned from the seat, pled guilty, and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. After leaving her seat, Bean spent over a decade in the banking world and is no stranger to the role of big money in politics.

In Jackson’s case, the AI PAC money is going up directly against AIPAC, which has driven donors to Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, while also spending big money through Affordable Chicago Now on pro-Miller ads.

As of February 19, a PAC called Think Big has spent over $1 million on both Jackson and Bean. Think Big is the Democratic affiliate of the super PAC Leading the Future, which says it and its associates have raised $125 million in commitments and have $70 million in cash on hand. Leading the Future is funded by major tech donors, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) and Greg and Anna Brockman. Greg Brockman is the co-founder and president of OpenAI; in 2024, alongside his wife Anna, he gave $25 million to pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc.

Let’s look a little bit more at the neighboring IL-08th district where Melissa Bean is floating like a cork on an ocean of dark money.

Can’t Spell AIPAC Without AI

Going back to the Emma Janssen well from American Progress for this update on the race and the family-bloggery going on:

In Illinois’s Eighth Congressional District, a former investment banker is attempting a political comeback after a stretch as perhaps the most conservative Democrat in Washington. Against a field of grassroots challengers, big money is pouring in to assist the return of “Wall Street’s Favorite Democrat” to Congress.

There are eight candidates in the race, but with less than a week to go until the March 17 primary, the two main contenders are Melissa Bean, the aforementioned former Blue Dog member of Congress, and Junaid Ahmed, a progressive backed by Justice Democrats (the group behind the “Squad” in Congress).

…

Bean, who represented the Eighth District from 2005 to 2011, is hoping to regain her seat now that incumbent Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi is stepping aside to run for Senate. She’s backed by a staggering amount of super PAC money, including from an AIPAC shadow PAC and a pro-AI group. Pro-crypto PACs have also pledged to spend $1 million in the race.

Elect Chicago Women, the innocuously named AIPAC shadow PAC, has spent nearly $4 million in support of Bean’s campaign already. The pro-AI PAC Think Big, which is also backing Jesse Jackson Jr.’s campaign in Illinois’s Second District, has spent over $1 million. Bean is also backed by the New Democrat Majority PAC, which supports centrist Democratic candidates; she was a member of the New Dems and the Blue Dog Coalition in her first stint in Congress.

The piece is worth reading in full as it outlines Bean’s shameful history in Congress, but I’m going to let a graph do several thousand words worth of work here:

And here’s one of those attack ads that dark money is buying for Bean:

But let’s keep it moving, put your waders on.

David Moore at Sludge identified the scope of the AI and crypto-aligned dark money problem opportunity:

Super PACs backed by the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries, as well as the pro-Israel lobby, have stockpiled hundreds of millions in cash to drop in 2026 midterms, setting themselves up to smash midterm spending records by outside groups.

The crypto industry-funded Fairshake super PAC ended the year with a whopping $191 million in cash on hand, while AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP), ended the year with $96 million. Following in their tracks is the new AI industry super PAC Leading the Future, which had $50 million cash on hand and touts far more in pledges.

Excluding money spent by party leadership-tied groups, the current high-water mark for super PAC spending on midterms was set in the 2022 cycle by Club for Growth Action, which spent a total of $69 million.

Fairshake reported total receipts of nearly $73.8 million in the second half of 2025, according to new Federal Election Commission disclosures covering the second half of last year. Its donors during that period were Coinbase ($8 million), Ripple Labs ($25 million), and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz ($24 million), together the group’s largest funders in the past few years. Fairshake’s two affiliate super PACs—the Democrat-focused Protect Progress and the Republican-focused Defend American Jobs—have an additional $2 million in cash on hand.
…
A new crypto industry super PAC, Digital Freedom Fund, funded by the Winklevoss twins, raised $22.3 million from July through December, largely in Bitcoin that has not yet been liquidated. Payward, the parent company of the Kraken exchange, donated $1 million to the new super PAC; last cycle, it donated that same amount to Fairshake. Another crypto industry group, called Fellowship PAC, has sprung up, reportedly to challenge what they see as Fairshake’s tilt toward its largest donors like Coinbase. In September, Fellowship PAC, positioned as more closely aligned with the GOP and Trump, announced $100 million in donor pledges, reportedly including the stablecoin company Tether; however, the PAC filed zero dollars received through Dec. 31.

I promised we’d hear a little bit more from Qasim Rashid, Esq.

Crypto Sending a MAGA-Dem to Congress?

From a different issue of Rashid’s Let’s Address This:

Deep blue Illinois is on the verge of electing a United States Senator who aligns far more closely with Trump, MAGA power brokers, and ICE infrastructure expansion than with the values of a deep-blue state. And he is betting his nearly $28 million—much of it raised from corporate PACs, billionaire tech executives, crypto interests, and Trump-aligned donors—that voters will not look closely enough to notice.
…
If you live in Illinois, you’ve no doubt been inundated with polished ads from Raja Krishnamoorthi presenting himself as a pragmatic progressive, the child of immigrants living the American dream. But campaigns are marketing exercises. Records are what matter. And the record tells a very different story.

The Chicago Tribune has more on the charming Mr. Krishnamoorthi and his big-spending dark money pals:

Krishnamoorthi’s prowess at raising campaign cash not only gave him an early, dominant presence on Illinois airwaves but also has made him one of Washington’s most prodigious fundraisers.

Now, with millions of dollars flowing through ostensibly independent political action committees — including one, funded substantially by billionaire Gov. JB Pritzker, backing Stratton and three PACs funded at least in part by Krishnamoorthi supporters — questions about who is funding whom have moved to the fore of the Democratic race as the March 17 primary quickly approaches.

Having raised $30.5 million between the start of 2025 and Feb. 25 — including more than $19 million transferred from his House campaign fund — Krishnamoorthi is the nation’s second-highest fundraising federal candidate this election season. Only Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who has brought in $63.9 million since the start of his term as he defends a swing-state seat that could help determine the balance of power in Washington, has raised more.

Opponents have argued Krishnamoorthi’s donor base has made him beholden to special interests, including supporters of Republican President Donald Trump. Some fellow members of the Indian American community, a long-standing source of his support, have criticized him for accepting contributions from figures aligned with India’s Hindu nationalist movement. And former staffers interviewed by the Tribune said collecting campaign contributions was a near-singular focus for Krishnamoorthi, who they said could be harsh with employees.

Before we close, let’s not forget the gambling interests. Their dark money voice needs to be heard too!

DraftKings Money Is as Green as Anybody Else’s

Local journalist Rebecca Burns sums up the playbook, as applied in this case in a state legislative race:

In These Times has more context on the race and the family-bloggery dark money games being played:

Last September the sports betting duopoly DraftKings and FanDuel ran into a brick wall in Illinois. Once the state started assessing a $0.25 trade tax on every bet, sports betting ​“plummeted” in the state by 15% year over year.

The result? American Future, a super PAC bankrolled by DraftKings’ wholly owned subsidiary, DK Crown Holdings, is spending big—$1.2 million—in the Democratic primaries for Illinois legislative seats, according to reporting from Capitol Fax and the latest campaign finance filings. Intent on electing representatives who will resist further taxes on the gaming industry, the PAC has become the largest outside spender so far in the Illinois state legislative primary slated for March 17.
…
American Future’s biggest beneficiary, receiving more than $263,000, is Emil Jones III, a state senator who was indicted in 2022 on federal bribery charges, and faces little-known opponents in his race to hold on to his seat. In a race featuring a stark ideological contrast, American Future has spent over $220,000 in the 40th Legislative District in northwest Chicago, backing an entrenched Democratic machine incumbent, Jaime Andrade, Jr., against a democratic socialist challenger, Miguel Alvelo-Rivera, who, in a statement to the Center for Media and Democracy, pledged to ​“fight to tax wealthy corporations and individuals in Illinois, and… make sure they know our legislature isn’t for sale.”

Those poor confused kids at DraftKings, operating under the misapprehension that the Illinois legislature is for sale. Wait ’til they hear about the U.S. Congress.

Let’s close with this good round-up:

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Don’t Call It Operation Epstein Fury, Traitor!

Even the name of the conflict is a field for dueling psyops.

Some call it the Ramadan War, others use its ridiculous American Government official title Operation Epic Fury, and some even choose to participate in what the ADL calls “conspiratorial rebranding” by calling it Operation Epstein Fury.

Please, I beg of you do NOT click on the AI created conspiracy video below

Washington Post bot-like entity scribe Will Oremus has more to say about evil Iranian propaganda, citing leading “disinformation researchers,” and referring to “Epstein conspiracy theories” (because US Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel both swore under oath that there’s no evidence of criminal conspiracy and there aren’t even any such thing as the Epstein files, and now stand accused of perjury by Rep. Ted Lieu, but I digress):

To erode public support for the joint U.S.-Israel military operation, Iranian state media has sought to portray those countries’ leaders as part of a corrupt and depraved “Epstein class” or “Epstein regime.” While such content often fails to gain much traction outside Iran, the message is spreading through generically named “news” accounts that researchers say appear to be using the Epstein conspiracy theories to serve pro-Iran talking points to a global audience.
…
The Epstein posts are part of a maelstrom of Iran-related misinformation that has engulfed social media since Feb. 28, when strikes by the United States and Israel killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and touched off a conflict that has spread across the Middle East. Mixed in with real footage of the conflict are dramatic videos of missile strikes, downed fighter jets and earth-shaking explosions that have racked up millions of views on X, TikTok, Instagram and Telegram, only to be debunked as AI-generated fakes, real footage from past conflicts being passed off as new, or scenes from video games.

HDX News was part of a network of at least 15 anonymous X accounts churning out content that aligns with the messaging of Iran’s Islamist regime and resharing one another’s posts, according to ISD researchers who identified the campaign. Another, called GPX News, posted the same fake Epstein video — a mishmash of imaginary, AI-generated scenes with bits of real footage — and received more than 4.7 million views, according to X’s publicly viewable metrics.

Both accounts were suspended by X after The Post reached out for comment, though others in the network remained active as of Monday. X did not respond other than asking for examples of the posts and accounts.
Schafer said it’s not clear whether the accounts are working on behalf of Iran’s government or merely support it. But he added that the pro-regime propaganda they promoted was “not subtle.”

Their posts included triumphant reports of successful Iranian strikes on American and Israeli targets; calls for followers to “stand with Iran”; and suggestions that China and Russia stand ready to back Iran in a cataclysmic world war. All 15 accounts ISD found were created in the past two years, and nine of them were verified on X, meaning they pay a subscription fee to Elon Musk’s social network in return for features that can include greater visibility, a blue checkmark verifying their authenticity and the chance to generate revenue from their posts.

And to think it was just a decade ago that the WaPo was publishing false and defamatory claims that this very web site was “pushing fake news and Russian propaganda” that they never retracted.

Too bad that Jeff Bezos has gutted the glorious defenders against Democracy Dying in Darkness, because they seem to be defending a distinctively minority opinion, per Drop Site News:

Old tricks seem to be all the US government and MSM have left to sustain the Interregnum of Unreality.

But eventually things that cannot last forever, like fraud-based credit cycles, cease.

The Dangers of Deliberate Lies and Delusions

Former USMC Captain and State Department Officer, Iraq War combat veteran and Afghanistan War State Department officer Matthew Hoh who in 2009, “resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan with the State Department over the American escalation of the war” was on Judge Napolitano’s show today and warned that the undying lies of the 2000s are still leading us into wars 23 years later.

But he also points out the big difference between the GW Bush and Trump administrations’ lies:

Judge Andrew Napolitano: I do want to talk to you (about) the persistence of these lies about Iraq, lies push nations toward war. You fought in Iraq, a war you now regret. Nevertheless, you have firsthand knowledge of the killings there and the lies that got us there. and the lies persist to this day. Please address the core Trump and Lindsey Graham lies that Americans were killed by Iraqis on orders from Iran.

Matthew Hoh: It is just astounding and sickening that they’re still lying about Iraq.
…
You have a lie that was started by the Bush administration in order to justify a war on Iran by the Bush administration 20 some odd years ago. This idea was that we are going to blame Iran for the violence in Iraq, for the killing and wounding of our soldiers in Iraq on Iran and that’s going to be one of our justifications to launch (a) war on Iran. And the George W. Bush administration to be clear, the Bush administration uh went to great lengths to set up this lie and to orchestrate this lie and then to present it publicly and it was a humiliation.
…
What is maybe more maddening to me than anything else is the fact that you have so many in the United States, including the media, who just accept(the lie that Iran was responsible for violence against U.S. troops in Iraq in the Second Gulf War) They hear the president say this. They hear members of Congress say it. they hear Pete Hegseth say it or whoever and they just allow it. They accept it as if it’s true and it’s simply not true.
…
Here’s one of the differences. In 2003, the men and women in charge were competent liars. And here we have incompetent liars. And so I think that’s one of the great differences between these two wars.

One of the problems we may be dealing with is that what were once knowing deceptions are now full-blown delusions.

Danny Haiphong warned about delusional Western leadership on his show last night.

Danny Haiphong: all we have are delusions at this point coming out of the political leadership in Washington right now and and look this is this is another delusion (from Trump):

POTUS Trump: everything’s fine our country is uh doing really Well, I stronger and our country is uh doing really well. I mean, at a level that nobody thought. We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. And uh I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion. How good? It’ll be a short-term excursion. Everything is going well.

Danny goes on to debunk Trump’s various claims about the success of the war and how limited its impact will be on the global economy.

Trump’s delusional beliefs are likely more related to his rapidly declining mental faculties, Chief of Staff Susie Wile’s increasingly tight control of his informational intake, and his deeply-held belief in his own cult of personality.

Unfortunately, many of those around Trump actually believe he is a genuine religious leader and coincidentally some of them are believers in end-times cults. Like Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Fox News Warmonger Idiot Believes What?

Here’s how Hegseth’s public expressions of his delusions and derangements are covered in the Guardian:

Hegseth, 45, a former Fox News TV host who now commands the world’s most powerful military, has this week become the face of Donald Trump’s war in Iran. That has set off alarm bells for critics who warn that the Secretary of Defense – pointedly rebranded “Secretary of War” – has rapidly transformed the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological and religious crusade.

With machismo, Christian nationalism and callousness toward the lives of US troops, they say, Hegseth’s puerile displays on TV are aimed at sating Trump’s desire for a warmonger worthy of the manosphere.

They also have some good background from Pete’s CV:

Hegseth’s rise would have been unthinkable under any other commander-in-chief. Born in Minneapolis, he studied politics at Princeton University and became publisher and editor of the Princeton Tory, a conservative student journal, where he frequently waded into culture-war issues such as feminism and homosexuality.

After leaving Princeton, Hegseth joined the US army national guard as an infantry officer. His service included deployments to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. He later revealed in a book that he told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.

Hegseth became chief executive of Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative advocacy group, but departed in 2016 amid allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.

And just a little bit about his actual beliefs:

There was another aspect of Hegseth’s personality barely addressed by the Senate: his sympathy for Christian nationalism. Photos have shown him bearing two tattoos associated with crusader imagery. One depicts the Jerusalem cross – a cluster of five crosses long connected to medieval crusader iconography – on his chest.

Nearby is an image of a sword accompanied by the Latin phrase “Deus vult”, meaning “God wills it”, a slogan historically linked to the crusades and revived in recent years by various far-right groups. It appeared on clothing and flags carried by some participants in the January 6 Capitol attack.

Nor are the references merely symbolic. In his 2020 book, American Crusade, Hegseth wrote that those who benefit from “western civilisation” should “thank a crusader”. The book suggests that democratic politics alone may not suffice to achieve the goals of his political allies, declaring: “Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.”

The Guardian points us to a 2024 New Yorker piece that adds alleged drunkenness to the Secretary’s list of mental maladies:

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.

But others say he’s just drunk on Jesus and eager to expedite a fiery Second Coming (TM).

Per Jonathan Larson:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military, airing monthly prayer meetings throughout the Pentagon. Last year, the Pentagon confirmed to me that Hegseth attends a weekly White House Bible study. It’s led by a preacher who says God commands America to support Israel.
…
Some Christians claim biblical prophecy requires Israel to exist for Jesus to return. But Hegseth’s Bible study leader, preacher Ralph Drollinger, teaches that the reason to support Israel is that God still blesses Israel’s allies and curses Israel’s enemies, even though Israel killed Jesus (this smear, the historic root of antisemitism, has been rejected by every major religion).

After Israel’s attack on Iran last year, Drollinger dedicated two weeks of lessons to preaching support for Israel. His lessons went out to White House cabinet members and members of Congress even as Israel, too, was lobbying for U.S. engagement.

Larson only mentions Drollinger, but it turns out Hegseth features a rotating cast of God-talkers at his breakfasts including the charming and delightful Doug Wilson, about whom Word & Way reports:

Controversial Christian Nationalist preacher Doug Wilson stood at a podium inside the Pentagon on Tuesday (Feb. 17) as the guest preacher for the latest monthly Christian worship service held there for leaders of the U.S. military. The Idaho pastor and self-described “paleo-Confederate” preached about the importance of trusting God for protection in battle and praised the monthly worship services as perhaps a sign of a new revival like the Great Awakening or the biblical Day of Pentecost.

Once considered a fringe far-right Christian figure, Wilson in recent years has found himself increasingly embraced by the broader evangelical world and the conservative political movement in the age of Donald Trump. The biggest evidence of his rise is that Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “Secretary of War,” is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination founded by Wilson. Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth’s CREC pastor in Tennessee from before joining the Trump administration, preached at the first Pentagon worship service in May and again last month. Wilson recently announced he’s sending Potteiger to Washington, D.C., to lead the new CREC church plant there, which Hegseth has been attending.

Wilson, an outspoken proponent of Christian Nationalism, has sparked numerous controversies over the years for what he preaches and teaches. He has downplayed the horrors of slavery and defended enslavers. He also pushes a hardline version of patriarchy, not just insisting only men can serve as pastors or in other church leadership roles but also that they should rule in families. That latter belief bleeds into civic life as Wilson argues the United States should adopt household voting, where the male head of the household casts the votes for everyone in the family. Wilson also pushes for codifying in U.S. law other theological beliefs he holds, including bans on abortion, same-sex marriage, and Pride parades. Additionally, he garnered headlines for leading his church members in Moscow, Idaho, to disobey public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interestingly, the word Israel isn’t mentioned in that article, so I’m not sure that Wilson is a Christian Zionist in addition to his other fascinating beliefs, but his insights into military theory are of note:

“We should not want God simply to win. We want God to get great glory in winning, getting great glory in and through winning. And getting great glory means that Gideon goes into battle with 300 instead of with 10,000. Getting great glory means Jehoshaphat goes into battle with the choir out in the vanguard,” Wilson added. “When you learn how to stand firm in the Lord and in the strength of his might, you are going to start sounding to your wife like a spiritual version of Chesty Puller after the Chinese came into the Korean War: ‘We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.’ And he also said, of course, ‘All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us, they can’t get away from us now.’ And your wife is going to stare at you and say, ‘What have you been reading?’ Your Bible.”

Apocalyptic Belief Trickles Down on the Troops

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been doing the work on this aspect of our collective psychosis:

“This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be “afraid” as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

— MRFF active duty NCO client, writing on behalf of themself and 15 other unit members

MRFF has received over 200 calls from more than 50 military installations across all the services since Saturday reporting similar disturbing pronouncements from their Christian zealot commanders.

Before we wrap this up, we have to detour to my home state of Texas.

From the latest issue of Texas Monthly, headlined “One Man’s Quest for the End of the World Started on a Ranch in Texas” and subheaded, “A Texas businessman believes he was divinely chosen to help usher in the Second Coming of Christ—by finding unblemished red heifers and getting them to Israel.”

The piece focuses on Texas rancher Jerome Urbanosky’s experience with a delegation “high-ranking rabbis who’d flown straight from Israel, a U.S. documentary crew toting multiple cameras, and a Texas businessman named Byron Stinson” who wished to purchase a very special heifer from him.

Four men dressed in black tactical gear and carrying military rifles approached and told him they needed to sweep the property to make sure no “foreign agents” were present. “They were armed to the teeth,” Urbanosky remembered. He wasn’t inclined to stand in their way. His wife, Jane, who was in the kitchen preparing the weekly Sunday meal, stared saucer-eyed as the armed men entered her home.
…
Four men dressed in black tactical gear and carrying military rifles approached and told him they needed to sweep the property to make sure no “foreign agents” were present. “They were armed to the teeth,” Urbanosky remembered. He wasn’t inclined to stand in their way. His wife, Jane, who was in the kitchen preparing the weekly Sunday meal, stared saucer-eyed as the armed men entered her home.

Once the security team cleared the property, Urbanosky led the rabbis to a red barn, where two calves awaited. Urbanosky Ranch is home to a herd of more than 450 Santa Gertrudis cattle, a hardy breed that’s known to produce good beef and whose origins trace back to the King Ranch, in South Texas. But as Urbanosky knew, this delegation wasn’t here for a steak.

Santa Gertrudis cattle also have striking coats of deep rusty red, which is what had initially attracted Stinson’s attention. A seventy-year-old Glen Rose business owner who’s described himself as a “Jesus zealot,” Stinson had visited Urbanosky at his ranch once before and explained that he was in search of an unblemished, completely red heifer—a scratch or a single white hair, and it wouldn’t do. Such a heifer hadn’t been identified in two thousand years, but it was key to unlocking an ancient Jewish ritual described in the book of Numbers, a necessary precursor to constructing the Third Temple in Jerusalem and, ultimately, bringing about the Second Coming of Christ. It’s a fringe but nonetheless influential belief, and Stinson’s Israeli associate, Yitshak Mamo, had convinced Urbanosky that he, too, was essential to this journey.
…
Fantastical as Stinson’s end-time scheme may sound, its real-world consequences are grave—and have the potential to become far more explosive. The pursuit has already heightened tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was cited by Hamas as one reason for the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Stinson’s efforts have sparked headlines across the Middle East, been criticized by international Christian leaders, and made him an unlikely but consequential figure in one of the most delicate and contentious religiopolitical issues in the world.

The crazy is real and it’s got money and guns.

In future editions, I hope to post on the apocalyptic beliefs of several Israeli cabinet members and what some are thinking on the Islamic side of the fence.

Originally posted at Naked Capitalism.

Previous Attempts to Parse the Psychology of Our Misleaders:

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

• Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed? It’s Hard to Tell

• Artificial Super-Intelligence: The Faith of the Tech Elite

Prelude: Paramount Beat Netflix for WBD

I’ve been busy with election results, hasbara propaganda war, grassroots rebellions against data centers and ICE, and annual presidential speeches to update on the (seemingly final) outcome of the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery between Netflix and Paramount/Skydance.

TL;DR Paramount overpaid, Netflix walked away several billion richer, and WBD CEO David Zaslav “earned” hundreds of millions for in the transaction.

But that was so ten days ago, we’re all younger (or at least dumber) than that now.

Since then, POTUS Trump and Israel have initiated a war of choice by attacking Iran and triggering a regional conflict.

Gulf States Financed the Deal

Despite various denials and obfuscations from Paramount, it appears that their WBD buy relies in part on sovereign wealth fund money from the Gulf States.

Per Variety:

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Company, and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) are jointly putting up a total of $24 billion investment into the Hollywood mega merger — a power move that coincides with efforts to build local entertainment industries across the Middle East.
…
(Middle East analyst Neil Quilliam, partner at Azure Strategy in London) underlined that the decision on the part of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi – which is part of the United Arab Emirates – to join forces on this Hollywood mega deal marks “an unusual three-way alliance,” especially at a time when tensions are simmering between Saudi and the UAE who are on opposite sides of Sudan’s civil war.

But these Gulf countries are casting aside their differences because “They’ve got their eye on the bigger prize,” Quilliam noted. That reward being that “all three Arab states want to occupy a major place in the global media space.” So they are “really stepping up to project their [soft] power beyond the region.”

It has been claimed, although not confirmed that Ari Emanuel, Hollwood super agent and billionaire owner of the UFC and WWE, and Jared Kushner helped the Ellisons bring the three feuding Gulf states together to back the deal.

But, alack and alas, what was brilliant deal-making mere months ago, suddenly has a down side — the tendency of financial promises to evaporate in wartime.

Gulf States Reconsidering In Light of Being Bombed, Etc

This started with a (since deleted) open letter to Trump posted on X by UAE billionaire Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor.

The Financial Times has the follow up:

Pressure on the Gulf states’ budgets could cause them to review their overseas investments and future commitments as they consider options to ease the financial strain caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran.

A Gulf official said it could have an impact on anything from investment pledges to foreign states or companies, sports sponsorships, contracts with businesses and investors, or sales of holdings.

The official said three of the four big Gulf economies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar — had jointly discussed the strains being put on their budget and economies. But they declined to name the states.

“A number of Gulf countries have begun an internal review to determine whether force majeure clauses can be invoked in current contracts, while also reviewing current and future investment commitments in order to alleviate some of the anticipated economic strain from the current war,” the official said. “Especially if the war and related expenses continue at the same pace.”

Translation, all bets are off, suckers.

Those who did some handwringing over the prospect of storied US media companies like CNN and Warner Bros being backed by a significant minority investment from the Gulf can rest easy as the Ellisons are now securing Chinese backing.

Tencent Piling In?

This is too funny, from Bloomberg:

Tencent Holdings Ltd. intends to invest several hundred million dollars in Paramount Skydance Corp.’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., according to people familiar with the situation.
…
Paramount’s offer for Warner Bros. in December included a $1 billion equity commitment from Tencent, according to a filing at the time, but that was withdrawn after Warner Bros. raised concerns that the Chinese company’s presence could lead to national security challenges with US regulators. After Paramount raised and amended its offer, Warner Bros. agreed to sell to the David Ellison-led company in a deal worth $110 billion.

Tencent might still decide not to invest, the people said, adding that it could take a while for the deal to be completed.

Chinese ownership of US assets has been a cause for concern in Washington, resulting in a deal for social media site TikTok’s US operation this year.

Ironically, the only reasons the Ellisons have gotten a piece of (American) TikTok is because of concerns about Chinese ownership.

But Back to the Gulf States and How This Relates to AI

Ryan Grim and Jeremy Schahill of Drop Site News were guests on the incredibly popular Tim Dillion podcast and had this to say:

Ryan Grim: (the Gulf States) are expressing a lot of outrage about this. One of the most powerful businessmen in the UAE, who was a former business, who was former business partner of Trump himself, put out this long statement saying, you know, Mr. President, your excellency who gave you the right to do this, who authorized you to set this region on fire?

They’re, they’re also frustrated by the fact that Israel gets most of the treatment when it comes to missile defence, despite the fact that, you know, (the Gulf states) mostly pay for those.

Whereas the Gulf countries that pay the United States by the weapons are, are getting the short end of the stick. The way you’re starting to see this play out though is, is going to be probably very detrimental for Trump and a lot of his friends.

What he doesn’t seem to have thought through is that the US economy is propped up by an AI bubble slash Ponzi scheme, which is mostly supported by financing from the Gulf.

You’re already seeing, and I say this with regret because I know that Barry Weiss is a friend of the show, and a previous guest host here…

Tim Dillon: The closest.

Ryan Grim: Her attempt to take over CNN and Warner Brothers, and the rest of these is backed by billions of dollars from the Gulf. They are now saying that they might not have the money or frankly the interest in going forward with that takeover.

Tim Dillon: You’re talking about the Ellison deal. It was the Ellison family that owns TikTok. That owns CNN. That is Paramount. CBS are now buying Warner Brothers, which the Trump administration kind of got involved in that deal.

Because Netflix was gonna buy them. (It is) no secret (that) Larry Ellison is the largest donor to the IDF. He’s incredibly ideologically driven, not just profit driven. Who the hell wants to own CBS news? You know, it’s not exactly the future of news. CBS News.

But he is ideologically driven and you are saying some of the financing for, for this deal to buy Warner Brothers…

Ryan Grim: A decisive portion of the financing.

Tim Dillon: Which would give him control of CNN is from the Gulf. Like sovereign wealth funds and investment funds in the Gulf. And they’re not interested anymore.

Which brings us to the other part of the Ellison family portfolio that is suddenly in financial distress: AI.

The Abilene Stargate Dream Over?

Pity poor Abilene, Texas, once a gateway for Texas cattle en route to Kansas railroads and Chicago slaughterhouses and briefly set to be a gateway to the glorious future of AI.

Alas, the dream may be over.

Via Bloomberg:

Oracle Corp. and OpenAI have scrapped plans to expand a flagship artificial intelligence data center in Texas after negotiations dragged over financing and OpenAI’s changing needs.
…
The shifting plans underscore the complexity of building out AI data centers, which are expected to cost in the tens of billions of dollars and require cooperation from a wide swath of partners.
…
Oracle agreed last July to develop 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity for OpenAI. That deal remains on track, and the companies have announced a number of projects in other locations, such as one near Detroit owned by Related Digital.
Shares of Oracle gave up earlier gains and slipped 1.2% to $152.96 at the close Friday in New York. Other companies tied to the AI infrastructure build-out, such as CoreWeave Inc., AMD and Nvidia, also declined on the news.

Maybe it’s related to what Fox News headlined “Oracle expected to slash thousands of jobs as massive AI spending creates financial cash crisis” based on Bloomberg’s less dramatic reporting:

Oracle Corp. is planning to ax thousands of jobs, among its moves to handle a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort.

Looks like the future is built on sand and financed with junk bonds.

And this is happening in a context of very difficult times for private equity firms like Blue Owl, which have financed previous AI investments but pulled out of the Oracle/Open AI deal in December.

And then there’s Larry’s net worth.

What Happens to Nepo Babies When Daddy Goes Broke?

Oh It’s Hard Times In the Private Equity Field

It’s not just Blue Owl anymore.

From Bloomberg:

For months, private credit executives sensed the reckoning was coming.

High-profile blowups had rattled investors. Unease was mounting over heavy exposure to software companies vulnerable to AI. Retail clients they’d spent years courting began yanking money from the industry’s largest funds, straining limits designed to prevent fire sales of the loans they hold.

Then BlackRock Inc. drew a line.

The firm on Friday capped withdrawals from its $26 billion HPS Corporate Lending Fund at 5% after investors sought to cash in nearly double that amount — the first major instance of a private credit manager limiting redemptions on a perpetual vehicle since the market jitters began.

For an industry that has ballooned to $1.8 trillion — and is on the cusp of prying open America’s 401(k)s and other retirement accounts — it was an uncomfortable step. It risks generating a backlash from retail investors who are growing increasingly anxious to access their money and, in so doing, reinforces the dangers long expressed by industry skeptics of selling illiquid assets to a twitchy customer base.

It doesn’t help that the public is turning against the big plans of the AI companies.

Maybe That’s Why AI Is So Hated

Or Maybe It’s Stuff Like This

From the WSJ:

Or Maybe It’s This

AI analyst Will Lockett has a whole ‘nother idea:

I think it is about time I explained what the real value of AI is, as this is the perfect lens for understanding what the hell is actually going on with AI right now. You see, AI is a Trojan horse. It is an exploitative oligarchy parading as a productivity tool. So stick with me while we fall down this terrible rabbit hole.

Let’s start with the fact that AI doesn’t broadly improve productivity, isn’t good enough for automation (read more here), and has been repeatedly shown to damage workers’ skills (read more here). Indeed, despite large-scale AI adoption, there hasn’t been a surge in productivity.

But that doesn’t make any sense. We have been told that the reason AI is so valuable and why corporations are pouring billions of dollars into AI is that it will be the next industrial revolution, unleash new levels of automation, boost productivity and deliver an economic miracle. However, we can see that this simply isn’t true. So, what is the real reason AI is perceived as so valuable? What actual beneficial utility do they actually deliver to their owners, investors and users?

Well, if you look at what AI is actually good at, it becomes quite obvious. It is enabling and empowering a new technocratic oligarchy. That’s right, your favourite chatbot is a perfect tool of authoritarianism masquerading as a slightly more polished version of Microsoft’s Clippy.

One way or another, it seems the cracks in the Interregnum of Unreality are getting so big that light is shining through.

Originally published 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

Caveats: Does the Senate Matter in an Age of Caligula?

Let me introduce this piece with two caveats.

One, the US Congress (both the Senate and the House of Representatives) are barely performing their minimum Constitutional duties, merely threatening to vote to reign in Trump’s war of choice on Iran, failing to impeach, etc.

Secondly, it’s entirely possible that POTUS Trump will attempt to disrupt the 2026 midterm elections.

As it was, the Texas GOP pulled some shenanigans that may have hurt Crockett in Dallas, although she has conceded the race, regardless.

But as long as we know we’re talking kayfabe as much as we’re talking kino, the election results are quality infotainment at a minimum and might actually have real-world impacts.

Texas Senate Race Set to Be Most Competitive Since 2018

The important thing to note is the primary vote totals. Talarico and Crockett earned over 2.2 million votes in the Democratic primary where Cornyn, Paxton and third-place Wes Hunt earned 2.05 million votes.

For comparison, in 2018 Beto O’Rourke and two opponents earned just over 1 million Dem primary votes and Ted Cruz et al. earned over 1.5 million GOP primary votes.

2018 was the recent high-water mark for Dem performance in US Senate races when Beto O’Rourke came within 200,000 votes out of over 8 million cast against Ted Cruz.

This represents an enormous surge in Democratic voter turnout in Texas that bodes ill for the GOP in November.

It should be noted that more Democrats voted in the 2008 Presidential primary than GOPers voted in their contest but still won the state handily in the general.

The New York Times lets Kevin D. Williamson make the case for a competitive Texas electorate in a guest essay:

Yes, the state appears to be as red as red can be, but it is not deeply so — Mr. Trump’s 2020 performance in the state was slightly down from his 2016 performance, and even his comeback win in 2024 (taking just a bit more than 56 percent of the vote) was closer to his showing in Iowa (an even 56 percent) and well behind his romps in Oklahoma (66 percent), Alabama (65 percent) and West Virginia (70 percent). Texas is more closely divided than you might think.

That is in part because Texas is no longer entirely the land of “wide open spaces” but an increasingly urban state, home to six of the 25 largest cities in the country and two of the five largest metropolitan areas. Republicans do not typically fare well in urban areas — they haven’t won a mayoral election in Houston in more than 40 years.

Especially since all signs indicate Trump will be even less popular after a long hot summer.

G. Elliott Morris has a more quantitative analysis with a similar sunny-side-up vibe for Dem hopes:

Democrats have six things working in their favor: Potentially a very weak Republican nominee, a good Democratic recruit, a massive enthusiasm gap, a diversifying electorate, a Latino backlash against the GOP, and a president dragging his party underwater.

Yet on the other hand, Texas is a religious, conservative, crimson-red state where Democrats haven’t won statewide since 1994, and primary enthusiasm does not necessarily translate to November results. In 2008, Democrats cast two-thirds of primary ballots and then lost the state to McCain by 12.

But consider the 2018 baseline. Beto O’Rourke lost to Ted Cruz by just 2.6 points — the closest a Democrat had come to winning a Texas Senate seat in 40 years. He did it against a reasonably popular incumbent, in an environment where Trump’s approval in Texas was 48% — significantly better than where it sits now (45% approve, 49% disapprove). Cruz also arguably got a late boost from the SCOTUS confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh that energized Republican voters right before the election.

So take the 2.6-point Republican margin, and now apply the Paxton penalty. If the political environment in 2026 is even comparable to 2018 — and the primary turnout data, special election results, and presidential approval numbers all suggest it could be as good or better for Democrats — then Paxton’s 2-3 point drag is the difference between another narrow loss and a win.

And then you can start to stack other favorable indicators on top of that baseline: Trump is losing independents by 47 points on approval; Democrats saw a 31-point swing in Tarrant County in January; Democratic primary turnout is up 274% vs 2022; and the Talarico nomination is a good match for Texas general election voters based on demographic patterns.

The Ballad of James vs. Jasmine

I covered US Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s last-minute entry into the primary for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in December.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) conducted a months-long push-poll campaign in an attempt to lure Crockett into the race.

When they succeeded, many in the GOP hoped they had saved the seat from the threat of the Lis Smith-backed State Rep. James Talarico.

Expectations were that, “(Crockett’s) nomination looked to be a fait accompli. With only three months left in the campaign, it seemed nigh-inevitable that a once-in-a-decade political opportunity would be completely squandered because Facebook-addicted liberals found it really funny when Crockett called Greg Abbot ‘Governor Hot Wheels.’”

Smith was the Svengali behind Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign.

In 2026, Smith adapted to the times and pushed Talarico into a far more populist direction and pulled off the upset.

Joshua A. Cohen of the Ettingermentum Newsletter described the campaign as between “James Talarico, a charismatic shape-shifting social media phenom running on a platform of inoffensive liberal populism” and “(Crockett who) proved to be a halting and ineffective campaigner, unable to address the most pressing questions around her bid.”

Talarico’s win is being attributed to his success with Hispanic and younger voters:

In the state’s heavily Latino areas, Talarico drew a dominant share of the vote. Across counties where the population is 60% or more Latino, Talarico outperformed Crockett roughly 63% to 34%, according to the Associated Press.
…
(Talarico) also forged alliances with key Latino candidates. In December, Talarico and Bobby Pulido, the Tejano singer and Democrat running to flip a South Texas congressional seat, endorsed each other in a joint rally in Weslaco, Texas. Pulido won his primary race on Tuesday night. In Hidalgo County, where Weslaco is located and Latinos make up 92% of the population, Talarico took 67% of the vote.
Talarico also leaned on Carlos Espina, a popular Spanish-language influencer with more than 14 million TikTok followers. Espina was on the campaign trail with Talarico for various stops across the state, including in Dallas and Houston, recorded videos championing Talarico and was featured in one of Talarico’s Spanish-language TV ads. Espina has become a go-to voice for Democratic candidates looking to connect with Latinos.

The GOP powers-that-be in DC, had hoped to see incumbent John Cornyn against Crockett in the general.

RINO vs MAGA Goes Into Overtime

Cornyn, a Bush-era relic, is commonly considered a Republican In Name Only (RINO) by much of the MAGA base that backs Paxton.

Trump, who has previously endorsed Paxton, has stayed out of the race so far an indication that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has Trump 2.0 on a short leash.

Unfortunately for them, Cornyn is in a run-off against often-indicted, never convicted state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

This paragraph from Politico sums up the Paxton story pretty well:

Paxton has survived an impeachment by the GOP-controlled state House, a federal securities fraud investigation and slew of ethics complaints. Three months after beginning his Senate campaign last year, Paxton’s wife filed for divorce, alleging an extramarital affair. His competitors — including Cornyn, who has said Paxton is too unethical to serve in public office — have hammered his trail of scandals.

But there’s a positive case for Paxton as well, per Politico:

Paxton’s deep base of support is built in part from his lawsuits against frequent targets of the right — high-profile cases that were splashed on the front pages of local newspapers from Beaumont to Amarillo. Throughout his decade as Texas’ top lawyer, Paxton oversaw the Lone Star State’s transformation into an incubator for ultra conservatives issues, from defending abortion restrictions to warning that Muslims will attempt to introduce Islamic law in Texas.

And Paxton’s lawsuits aren’t all wacky far-right red meat either:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing five television manufacturers for “spying on Texans” through content recognition software.

Paxton cites ties to the Chinese Communist Party for some of the companies, implying the government the corporations are based in could be using Texans’ data for nefarious purposes.

Well, maybe not ALL wacky.

This AP map shows that Paxton (pink) dominated rural Texas where Cornyn (red) won in the urban areas of the state:

Paxton is favored in the run-off, but he’s an underdog in polling against Talarico, per Politico: “Public and private polls have mostly shown close races in either matchup; Talarico would start off with the edge over Paxton but trail Cornyn.”

Trump Demands Right to Declare Winner

And it’s not going over well with some on the right:

One Problem: Unifying the Dem Party

There are indications Jasmine Crockett won’t be a team player in the general election:

On the other hand, Crockett’s district has new representation:

Frederick Haynes III has won the Democratic nomination for Texas’ 30th Congressional District — a seat currently occupied by outgoing congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

The Associated Press called the race for Haynes just after 10:15 p.m. Tuesday. In his campaign kickoff, he emphasized health care for all, economic equality and abolishing ICE as priorities.

Haynes — a pastor and longtime activist for racial justice and civil rights — was endorsed by Crockett, as well as Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons and Kirk Johnson, son of Eddie Bernice Johnson. Johnson represented District 30 for three decades before Crockett.

The pastor has led Friendship-West Baptist Church in southern Dallas for more than 40 years, and was the hand-picked successor of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson to lead the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the social justice organization founded by Jackson. But Haynes unexpectedly stepped down as President and CEO of the coalition after just months on the job.

Tuesday’s contest was prompted by Crockett’s decision to run for the U.S. Senate, creating a rare opportunity in one of Texas’ safest Democratic districts.

AIPAC isn’t happy about this man being sent to Congress:

Democratic Primary Realignment

Big picture wise, the pundits are seeing a trend.

The mainstreamers at Axios see it as a brush-fire rebellion that’s upsetting D.C.:

An expensive Democratic civil war is brewing this election cycle, with a staggering 30 House Democrats facing at least one primary challenger who has raised $100,000 or more, an Axios analysis found.

These primaries are drawing tens of millions of dollars from Democrats’ efforts to retake the House while priming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to inherit a rebellious class of new freshmen.

The collective fundraising in these races adds up to more than $64 million — out of roughly $500 million raised by all Democratic House campaigns so far this cycle.

Nearly a dozen House Democrats are facing primary challengers who have raised more money than they have.

Many of these primary insurgents — along with a huge cohort of outsiders and progressives running in open primaries — have declined to commit to supporting Jeffries’ leadership if elected.
…
A House Democrat close to leadership, speaking on the condition of anonymity, griped to Axios: “This is the new reality we live in, where people do not care about the party and trying to win.”

“They just care about moving their ideological wing of the party forward,” the anonymous Democrat said.

Between the lines: Unlike in past cycles, it’s not simply a clash of the left versus the center.

Many of the incumbents who are facing the fiercest primary challenges are over 70 years old, with younger rivals calling for generational change.

Progressive Michael Lange has a slightly different take in his piece “The Democratic Primary Realignment: ‘It’s not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom.’”

…in the pre-midterm vacuum, two riveting and high-profile contests have stood out, defined by scores of national attention, record voter turnout, massive campaign spending, expanded electorates, and an incredibly diverse coalition of Democratic voters: the 2025 New York City Mayoral Primary and the 2026 Texas Senate Primary.

…there are remarkable similarities in how Talarico and Mamdani ran their underdog campaigns, compared with how Crockett and Cuomo — frontrunners flush with name recognition — failed to capitalize on their pronounced early advantages. These nuances, not explicitly ideological, translated into how their coalitions manifested: Crockett’s base (older, Black) mirrored Cuomo’s, whereas Talarico’s coalition (younger, college-educated, White, Hispanic, lower-propensity) is reminiscent of Mamdani’s.

Mamdani and Talarico combined style and substance. They consistently released algorithm-oriented vertical videos, becoming omnipresent in the feeds of younger voters.
…
most important to the Democratic Party, this fusion of style (everyman ethos) and substance (positive populism) produced a remarkably similar voter coalition. The Texas equivalent of the “Commie Corridor” is Travis County (the Austin metro area), flush with college-educated Gen Z renters and higher-income Gen X suburbanites, who mirror the class and educational attainment of Brownstone Brooklyn.

Talarico won 76% of the vote in Travis County, eclipsing 90% in precincts adjacent to the University of Texas, while earning more than 80% in tonier Westlake Hills, where the median home price exceeds one million dollars.

Given Crockett’s pronounced advantage with Black voters and Talarico’s strength with White voters, the swing demographic in the Texas Senate Primary was Hispanic voters, who are disproportionately young and working-class.

And, while Talarico won Hispanic Texans by a greater margin than Mamdani won Hispanic New Yorkers, the symmetry is strengthened by the details: the Hispanic electorate in Texas, particularly in the counties handily won by Talarico (Hidalgo, Webb, Cameron, El Paso), is among the youngest in the United States (99th percentile for Gen-Alpha, 96th percentile for Gen-Z)…

Nonetheless, absent a pronounced advantage among middle-class White suburbanites, Talarico would not have prevailed.

David Sirota at The Lever is celebrating a new era in Dem politics:

A decade after Bernie Sanders almost tore the presidential nomination out of the decrepit hands of the Democratic establishment, the party’s old guard, ancient political formulas, and outdated corporate politics seem to finally be facing a moment of comeuppance. The long-overdue reckoning appears to be happening not just in a few predictably liberal locales, but across varied swaths of the country that seem ready to embrace populist politics.

First, it was Zohran Mamdani’s underdog mayoral victory against the billionaire class in the capital of global finance. Then it was Bernie Sanders’ former staffer, Analilia Mejia, winning an affluent New Jersey suburb that had once been the territory of country-club Republicans. Now this week, it is James Talarico running an explicitly anti-billionaire, anti-corruption campaign to win the Democratic Senate nomination in Texas.
…
Whether or not any of these particular candidates are true believers or ideologues doesn’t really matter – if politicians are more thermometers than thermostats, then what matters is that this new crop of politicians realize the temperature has changed, and understand their success lies in a very different kind of politics than the Democratic Party has been mired in.

Sirota then brings up a debate between surging Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner and the Obama-ites of the Pod Save America podcast that’s worth a glance.

Jon Favreau:Where specifically has the party gone wrong in the last decade in terms of policies, decisions, positions?

Graham Platner: Absolutely, the financial crisis, bailing out the banks, bailing out the big industries, letting people walk away with golden parachutes, while those banks still turned around and foreclosed on people’s homes, while the average working person saw their retirement savings just disappear. And then we watched the political apparatus back up the people that broke the thing in the first place. I think that was huge. That broke a lot of trust.

Favreau: I was in the White House. We sort of knew that this was going to happen. We walk into the White House.

Bush had already done the the bailout. And we can’t really undo it at that point because we can’t let the banks fail because the whole system goes under and we make sure that the banks pay all the money back with interest, right?

The executives get away with the golden parachutes and I remember trying to talk to Larry Summers about it and he’s like ‘It’s contract law. We can’t claw back the bonuses. Like that’s illegal.’

And I’m like, ‘Okay, we talk about contract law, but there’s like people with pitchforks outside the White House, right?’

We’re same thing with like, ‘Why didn’t anyone go to jail?’

Well, the laws aren’t there. The DOJ won’t prosecute because the laws aren’t there. And obviously, we can’t direct the DOJ to do anything anyway.

Platner: I mean people should have gone to prison.

Iceland put people in prison.

The Trump administration’s happy to abuse the Justice Department and send them after folks. They send them after like Comey because he hurt Trump’s feelings.

I honestly don’t think the American people would be angry if the Justice Department went after folks that destroyed their retirement savings or kicked their neighbors out of their homes.

Favreau: I assume we want to make sure the Justice Department only goes after people who actually broke the law.

Platner: We still need to pass the law. But that’s the other thing. We need people in the Senate and the House who want to pass these laws and also frankly put enforcement mechanisms in place.

That’s one of our biggest problems right now. We got lots of laws, but then they get broken. I mean the Trump administration breaks the law every day and then a lot of people just stand around like, well, what do we do?

Back to Sirota’s analysis:

Taken together, (Platner and Talarico) are rejecting the Obama/Clinton notion that Democratic politicians’ job is to be a bulwark standing between oligarchs and their victims. In a country whose largest swing electoral bloc is anti-system voters, these candidates’ primary campaigns are tapping into the anger of Democrats who finally — belatedly — realize that their party leaders have too often turned hope and change into more of the same, which has played a role in creating the meltdown we’re now living through.

And in telling taboo truths in blunt language, this faction is effectively acknowledging that the ongoing refusal by Democratic Party leaders, pundits, operatives, and influencers to be honest and principled has created the party’s biggest political problem of all — one that goes unspoken.

I hope I haven’t filled any readers with false optimism, but hope is, after all, the thing with feathers and all that.

And besides, as much as I love the Belle of Amherst, my favorite 19th Century poem is this one by Walt Whitman:

To those who’ve fail’d, in aspiration vast,
To unnam’d soldiers fallen in front on the lead,
To calm, devoted engineers- to over-ardent travelers- to pilots on
their ships,
To many a lofty song and picture without recognition- I’d rear
laurel-cover’d monument,
High, high above the rest- To all cut off before their time,
Possess’d by some strange spirit of fire,
Quench’d by an early death.

If ya gotta go down, go down fighting.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Let’s start at the top and look at what the War Emperor declared as he opened the Gates of Janus.

Trump opened the narrative wars with a traditional live television announcement in the very early hours of Saturday the 28th:

Some highlights:

A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.

Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating eminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.

Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.

For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted death to America and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.
…
From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained, and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts. And it was Iran’s proxy Hamas that launched the monstrous October 7th attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. It was brutal, something like the world has never seen before.

Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. It has always been the policy of the United States in particular my administration that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon.

I’ll say it again. They can never have a nuclear weapon. That is why in operation midnight hammer last June we obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Ford Natans and Isvahan.

After that attack we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons and we sought repeatedly to make a deal.

We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it again. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.

But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades. They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.

Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland. Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message.

For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We are going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy. We are going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs as they are sometimes called to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people including many Americans. And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.
…
This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces. I built and rebuilt our military in my first administration, and there is no military on earth even close to its power, strength, or sophistication.

My administration has taken every possible step to minimize the risk to US personnel in the region. Even so, and I do not make this statement lightly, the Iranian regime seeks to kill. The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.
…
To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces, and all of the police, I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity, or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms, you will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death. Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.
…
No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach.

POTUS Trump has also been saturation bombing Truth social with his most bombastic claims:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead. This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS. He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do. This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us. As I said last night, “Now they can have Immunity, later they only get Death!” Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves. That process should soon be starting in that, not only the death of Khamenei but the Country has been, in only one day, very much destroyed and, even, obliterated. The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

Yesterday, Trump followed up with some pre-recorded comments that seem to have a bit of the AI about them:

Notable quotes:

Over the past 36 hours, the United States and its partners have launched Operation Epic Fury, one of the largest, most complex, most overwhelming military offensives the world has ever seen.

Nobody’s seen anything like it. We have hit hundreds of targets in Iran, including Revolutionary Guard facilities, Iranian air defense systems.

Just now was announced that we knocked out nine ships plus their naval building. All in a matter of literally minutes.

Iran’s formerly Supreme Leader Ayatollah Hame is dead. This wretched and vile man had the blood of hundreds and even thousands of Americans on his hands and was responsible for the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent people all across many countries.

Last night all over Iran, the voices of the Iranian people could be heard cheering and celebrating in the streets when his death was announced.

The entire military command is gone as well and many of them want to surrender into saving their lives. They want immunity. They’re calling by the thousands. Combat operations continue at this time in full force and they will continue until all of our objectives are achieved. We have very strong objectives.
…
Earlier today, Centcom shared the news that three US military service members have been killed in action. As one nation, we grieve for the true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. Even as we continue the righteous mission for which they gave their lives, we pray for the full recovery of the wounded and send our immense love and eternal gratitude to the families of the fallen. And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more. But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case.

Dan Pfeiffer of the liberal Pod Save America podcast responded to the latter with “There is something disturbingly surreal that after launching a regime change war in the Middle East, the president only speaks to the nation through hastily edited video statements released on state-run media platforms.”

Some Gaps in the Trump Communications Offensive

He certainly wasn’t in the mood to answer questions from the press upon returning to The White House yesterday:

Maybe that was because he’s been caught in a lie:

And while no one from Team Trump made the traditional rounds of the network Sunday shows (a traditional arena for fighting narrative wars), Trump was answering his phone when reporters called:

And most reassuringly, Trump is keeping the hotline to Laura Loomer open at all times:

The President is taking foreign policy calls from someone who got banned from Uber, DoorDash, and half the internet. pic.twitter.com/ggITB5WeU2

— Omar El-Ayat (@oelayat) March 1, 2026

Interestingly, much of the opposition to the war is coming from Trump’s right.

MAGA Ain’t With This

Just ask former US Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Or Matt Walsh:

Or Nick Fuentes:

And this rejection of Trump’s war is coming when Americans are not even privvy to all the facts.

Israeli Press Reports Trump Seeking Ceasefire

Any American concerned that censorship is clouding domestic media is advised to check what’s being said in the Israeli media. This time it’s YNet reporting some uncomfortable claims:

Trump seeks swift end to Iran operation
Opinion: The killing of Iran’s supreme leader is a major intelligence and military feat, but Tehran’s regime has not collapsed; US official, via a mediator, proposed an immediate ceasefire; Iran rejected it outright, as Trump looks for a quick exit

On the eve of the strike on Iran, U.S. officials envisioned a four- to five-day operation that would return a weakened Tehran to the negotiating table. According to one source, an American official conveyed an even more immediate proposal. Through a mediator, apparently Italy, he suggested reaching a ceasefire agreement today or tomorrow. Iran rejected the idea outright.

What Do the Polls Say?

Reuters has one that doesn’t look so good for Trump:

How About that Liberal Media?

Let’s check in on the gang at CNN (whose parent company WBD was just acquired by the Ellison Family’s Paramount empire), I’m sure they’re living up to everyone’s expectations:

How about MS Now, the hardcore opposition, no doubt they’re doing us proud:

In fairness, American audiences can’t handle the truth, or even interesting rumors:

Nor can the Brits

What’s the New York Times saying?

The editorial board has concerns:

started this war without explaining to the American people and the world why he was doing so. Nor has he involved Congress, to which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war. He instead posted a video at 2:30 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, shortly after bombing began, in which he said that Iran presented “imminent threats” and called for the overthrow of its government. His rationale is dubious, and making his case by video in the middle of the night is unacceptable.

Among his justifications is the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program, which is a worthy goal. But Mr. Trump declared that program “obliterated” by the strike in June, a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack. The contradiction underscores how little regard he has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.

Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare.

The Iranian regime, to be clear, deserves no sympathy. Nobody should mourn the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who was reportedly killed in the attack.

But NYT op-ed columnist Bret Stephens has none:

…it’s a mistake to say that Trump got America into war on Saturday. What he did was respond to a war that Iran has been waging against the United States since 1979.

It waged war when it seized our embassy in 1979, murdered (via proxy) hundreds of our service members in Beirut in 1983 and supplied the I.E.D.s, or roadside bombs, that killed or maimed over 1,000 of our troops during the war in Iraq. It waged war when it sought to assassinate former senior U.S. officials, including John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and, according to a 2024 report in Politico, Trump himself. One reason Iran behaved as it did is because it drew the lesson that it would pay no great price. No more.

Second, Tehran had an opportunity to change course last June, after its 12-day pummeling by Israel and an overnight strike by the United States. Instead, it set out to begin reconstituting its nuclear capabilities while rapidly rebuilding the missile force that is now terrorizing civilians in Tel Aviv, Dubai, Manama and Riyadh, and targeting U.S. military assets in the region.

Would the United States, the Arab world or Israel have been safer if we had waited a year or two for Iran to build several thousand more missiles? Or after Russia had supplied the regime with thousands of advanced shoulder-fired air defense missiles, as The Financial Times reported last week that it had agreed to do?

Third, Iran does not exist in a geopolitical vacuum: With Moscow and Beijing, it is a core member of the axis of autocracies that threaten the democratic world broadly.

In fairness, they’re giving little Nicholas Kristof room to decry “The Folly of Attacking Iran” but even their opposition is “nuanced” and anti-Iran:

Like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran has a repressive and unpopular government that is a malign influence on the region. Iran just massacred thousands of protesters — at least 6,800 civilians and perhaps many more, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. The regime is a pillar of misogyny, supports bad actors throughout the Middle East and holds back millions of well-educated people.

And as with Iraq in 2003, a war is not necessarily the best tool to deal with a brutal and hostile government. There are more problems in international relations than solutions, and in the past the illusion of an easy military answer has repeatedly caused tragedy for ourselves as well as for others.

I reached out on the eve of the war to a heroic Iranian human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, whose courage and defiance of the regime have periodically landed her in jail. She told me that the best time for military strikes would have been January, when they might have stopped the slaughter in the streets.

But Thomas Friedman brings NYT readers back from the brink of opposing the war:

First, I hope this effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran succeeds. It is a regime that murders its people, destabilizes its neighbors and has destroyed a great civilization. There is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realize their full potential with a real voice in their own future.

The NYT also gives former Obama National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes room to ask some key questions:

Foundational questions are at stake for Americans. Do we want to continue forever wars financed with borrowed money and fought by service members whose sacrifices stand in stark contrast to the cowardice of our billionaire class? Do we want to regularly bomb other countries while endangering the lives of millions of human beings by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development? Do we want to remain in a permanent state of war that migrates from one place to another while rampant inequality and revolutionary technologies remake our communities with little resistance?

Presumably NYT readers like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham are answering “yes” to most of the questions Rhodes poses.

How’s About that Nominal Opposition Party?

The Guardian more or less sums up the dilemma the Democrats find themselves in:

Democrats faced their own divisions and a reckoning over how to present a united front.

Most were quick to condemn the US president for sidelining Congress to launch an illegal and unconstitutional war and demanded a swift vote on a war powers resolution that would restrain his military onslaught.

But some in the party also felt obliged to acknowledge the authoritarian Khamenei’s death as a positive development and demonstrate their support for US troops. A small band of centrist Democrats have even threatened to scupper a war powers resolution if it comes to the floor.

“President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region,” tweeted John Fetterman, a Democratic senator for Pennsylvania and staunch supporter of Israel, declaring himself a “hard no” on a war powers vote and posting an image of the ayatollah with the provocative statement: “Let’s see who grieves for that garbage.”

…the sharpest voices accused the president of riding roughshod over the constitution. Senator Bernie Sanders denounced the assault as “an illegal, premeditated and unconstitutional war”, while Senator Chris Van Hollen warned it amounted to a “regime-change war” that would leave the US less secure. Senator Tim Kaine, long a thorn in the side of presidents of both parties on war powers, called the strikes “a colossal mistake” and demanded a swift vote requiring Trump to seek authorisation.

Others, however, were more qualified. Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat who co-chairs the Problem Solvers caucus, wrote on X: “I agree with the President’s objectives that Iran can never be allowed to obtain nuclear capabilities.” Henry Cuellar of Texas said the threat posed by Iran was “real and longstanding”.

And not all Democrats are lining up behind a war powers rebuke. In the House of Representatives, Josh Gottheimer applauded the administration’s “decisive action” to defend American interests and allies. Greg Landsman argued that the US “is destroying Iran’s missiles and bombs to stop them from taking more lives”, and said he would oppose a resolution that he fears would amount to abandoning Israel.

Congressman Jared Moskowitz rehearsed Tehran’s long record of sponsoring violence across the region and insisted the focus must now be on shaping what comes next rather than relitigating what has already happened.

As tragi-comic as the Democrats can be, there’s even more dire pathos out there.

Influencers Posting Brave From Dubai

Despite Iran’s warnings they would be hitting American bases in the region, many in the UAE were caught off guard.

Semafor reports:

Riyadh has emerged as a key exit route for the super-rich and senior executives stranded in the Gulf looking for a safe passage out of the region.

Cities including Abu Dhabi and Dubai have become playgrounds for the wealthy over the past few years, attracted by the year-round sunshine, tax-free lifestyle, and perception of safety. That was shattered over the weekend as Iranian missiles and drones rained down on the two cities, along with Qatar and Bahrain, causing those that could to attempt to flee.

The Saudi capital’s airport is one of the few still operating in the region, forcing executives and their families stranded in other parts of the Gulf to take the long drive in order to catch private jets or commercial planes.

Private security companies have been booking fleets of SUVs to ferry people on the 10-hour drive to Riyadh from Dubai and then charter private planes to take them out of the region, according to people familiar with the matter. They have been evacuating a mix of people, including senior executives at global finance firms and high-net worth individuals in the region for business or holidays, the people said. The rush in demand is sending prices for private jets and SUVs soaring, these people said.

But that hasn’t stopped the UAE from doing what they can, agit-prop wise:

Some of the most notorious residents of Dubai have joined in as well:

Ian Miles Cheong:

Andrew Tate acting tough for his camera:

Now that we’ve heard from the UAE, let’s let Iran have the last word.

What the Empire Is Up Against

Professor Marandi is familiar to many followers of the alt news on YouTube, his response to the pretender follows:

Here’s how they’re rallying the masses to resist:

Stay safe out there.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

The Democratic response by Virginia Governor, and veteran CIA agent, Abigail Spanberger similarly whistled past the graveyard, ignoring a number of major issues where her party is dramatically out of touch with voters.

Both Trump and his Democratic establishment opposition saw news drop yesterday that loomed over their speeches but went unaddressed.

Epstein File Revelations Getting Closer to The Donald Despite Cover Up Attempts

Roughly a dozen hours before SOTUS 2026, NPR pulled on a thread linking Trump directly to the most salacious aspects of the Epstein Files and alleged a Department of Justice coverup:

The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump.

Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.

Well, that ain’t good.

Possibly even worse, someone at the Pentagon was trying to get the word out to the MSM that Trump’s threatened attack on Iran might not go so well.

What, U.S. Generals Worried?

Nothing takes the wind out of The Donald’s sails like hearing his next fight might not be as easy as Lindsey Graham and Bibi Netanyahu promised.

In the interest of time, space, and easy scanning I’ll just provide meta coverage of this kerfluffle (links to news stories are here):

This was welcome news to those of us with the good sense to fear a conflict that could trigger a global conflagration, but it had to be sheer poison to the Donald’s delicate ears.

So Much Winning, Bigly

And then there’s the polling:

But it wasn’t just the GOP President facing unwelcome news and rumors erupting in advance of the big SOTU 2026 speechifying.

Democratic Kayfabe Called Out

The bipartisan trouble making team of Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) are following up on the Epstein Files legislation they co-sponsored by pushing for a vote on their Iran war powers resolution – a measure that would require every member of Congress to go on the record about a potential U.S. war with Iran.

This is very unwelcome for the Dem leadership because they secretly support Trump’s war on Iran AND cynically hope to politically benefit from any blowback, as Drop Site News reported last week:

The potential for fallout in the event of a regime change war is at the heart of the meek response from Democrats, who see Trump walking into a trap of his own making. The Democratic political calculation was laid bare in an unusually frank conversation last June between a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and a top official in an organization opposing Iran strikes.
…
A congressional source briefed on the call shortly afterward confirmed the details. The foreign policy aide, whom Drop Site agreed not to name, explained that a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.

Obviously, this is the kind of thing DC swamp-creatures would rather keep their credulous voters ignorant of when making their reply to the POTUS’ SOTU 2026.

Regardless of all that, POTUS had many friends on site, eager to hear him gab.

Everybody’s favorite zionists, the nepobaby who would be king of all media, and DC’s aging closet king eagerly awaited the speech:

Now that we’ve set the scene, let’s get into the speech itself.

Talkin’ Long, Saying Little: Immigration

Trump’s SOTU 2026 set records for length but that’s probably the most notable thing about it.

I’m using the Associated Press SOTU 2026 transcript for the Trump quotes for those who want more.

Trump tried hard to reignite the Culture Wars on immigration but those shots fell flat to my ears.

His most direct blow was this attempt to put the Democrats in a “when did you stop beating your wife?” predicament on immigration:

So tonight, I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration and reaffirming a fundamental principle. If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.

Isn’t that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself. That is why I’m also asking you to end deadly sanctuary cities that protect the criminals and enact serious penalties for public officials who block the removal of criminal aliens. In many cases, drug lords, murderers all over our country. They’re blocking the removal of these people out of our country. And you should be ashamed of yourself.

This segment bore the finger prints of Herr Reichsmarshall Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller who was quick to celebrate this part of the speech:

The New York Post loved it, too, FWIW.

For those of us who don’t have Triumph of The Will playing on an endless loop, it wasn’t quite as effective.

Perhaps Trump’s attempted immigration bullying missed because of headlines like the following:

Talkin’ Long, Saying Something Very Scary: Elections

Then POTUS Trump turned the SOTU 2026 into a horror movie for a few paragraphs:

(Democrats) don’t want identification for the greatest privilege of them all: voting in America. No, it’s no good, no good. Both Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly agree on the policy that we just enunciated, and Congress should unite and enact this common sense, country saving legislation right now. And it should be before anything else happens.

And the reason they don’t want to do it, why would anybody not want voter ID? One reason, because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason. They make up all excuses. They say it’s racist. They come up with things. You almost say what imagination they have. They want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re going to stop it. We have to stop it…

I’ll let the shitlib handwringers at Vox.com riff on this one:

Think about that for a second. This is the president of the United States, speaking to the country in a ritualized national address, claiming that the opposition party is not only wrong on policy but fundamentally illegitimate, so much so that if they win an election it must be because they cheated.

Taken literally, that is the president announcing that the stated policy of his administration is preventing the opposition from winning any future election.

We’re all so used to wading through Trump’s sea of hyperbole that it’s easy to push past a bald-faced declaration of authoritarian intent. And to be clear, I don’t think the SAVE Act — or anything else Trump has proposed so far — could actually lock Democrats out of power. There is a real gap between what he is saying and what he is capable of doing.

Trump’s authoritarian intentions have been clear for a long time, but now that his polling is collapsing, ICE has retreated from Minnesota, and the Supreme Court has ruled against tariffs, he seems less able to act on his bad intentions than at any point in his second term.

Talkin’ Long, Saying Little: Tariffs

POTUS also addressed the biggest reversal of his second term: last week’s Supreme Court ruling that overturned some of his tariffs:

just four days ago, an unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court, it just came down, came down. Very unfortunate ruling.

But the good news is that almost all countries and corporations want to keep the deal that they already made — right, Scott? — knowing that the legal power that I, as president, have to make a new deal could be far worse for them, and, therefore, they will continue to work along the same successful path that we had negotiated before the Supreme Court’s unfortunate involvement. So, despite the disappointing ruling, these powerful countries saving, is saving our country the kind of money we’re taking in, peace protecting — many of the wars I’ve settled was because of the threat of tariffs, I wouldn’t have been able to settle them without — will remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes. And they have been tested for a long time. They’re a little more complex, but they’re actually probably better — leading to a solution that will be even stronger than before. Congressional action will not be necessary. It’s already time-tested and approved. And as time goes by, I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.

Moving forward, factories, jobs, investment and trillions and trillions of dollars will continue pouring into the United States of America because we finally have a president who puts America first. I put America first. I love America.

Trump’s SOTU remarks were far more temperate than those he made in the immediate aftermath of the SCOTUS ruling. Perhaps because four of the nine were in attendance. Per the NYT:

For days, President Trump has pummeled Supreme Court justices with harsh personal attacks, calling them “disloyal” and “fools” for their ruling against his signature economic initiative to impose sweeping tariffs.

But when the president came face-to-face with a handful of justices who attended his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, the interaction was cordial, subdued even, with Mr. Trump going only so far in calling the ruling “disappointing” and “very unfortunate.”
…
The president’s restraint in his interactions with the justices on Tuesday night suggested that Mr. Trump may be thinking about the court’s continued role in reviewing the lawfulness of his other policies and that he may not want to completely alienate the justices.

Good thinking, there, Donald. Shrewd and savvy.

Talkin’ Long, Saying Little: Affordability

Trump’s SOTU 2026 comments on inflation and affordability were filled with mendacious nonsense, false claims, and lots of blame for Biden:

For decades before I came along, we had the exact opposite. From trade to health care, from energy to immigration, everything was stolen and rigged in order to drain the wealth out of the productive, hardworking people who make our country great, who make our country run. Under Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with the Green New Scam, open borders for everyone…and record-setting inflation that cost the typical family $34,000 in just a speck of time.

Now, the same people in this chamber who voted for those disasters suddenly used the word affordability, a word, they just used it because somebody gave it to them, knowing full well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure. You caused that problem. You caused that problem. They knew their statements were a lie, they knew it, they knew their statements were a dirty, rotten lie. Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them. We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward. The price of eggs is down 60%, Madam Secretary, thank you. The cost of chicken, butter, fruit, hotels, automobiles, rent is lower today than when I took office by a lot. And even beef, which was very high, is starting to come down significantly. Just hold on a little while. We’ll get that down. And soon you will see numbers that few people would think were possible to achieve just a short time ago.

Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers, and especially energy, when they see energy going down to numbers like that, they cannot believe it. It’s like another big tax cut.

A snarky meme is worth a thousand fact checks parsing The Donald’s BS, so here you go:

Talkin’ Long, Saying Little: Health Care

Trump’s SOTU 2026 comments on health care policy did make me prick up my ears:

Since the passage of the “Unaffordable Care Act,” sometimes referred to as Obamacare, big insurance companies have gotten rich. It was meant for the insurance companies, not for the people. With our government giving them hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars a year, as their stock prices soared 1,000, 1,200, 1,400 and even 1,700%, like nothing else. That’s why I introduced the great health care plan. I want to stop all payments to big insurance companies and instead give that money directly to the people, so they can buy their own health care, which will be better health care at a much lower cost. In addition, my plan requires maximum price transparency. That’s a big deal. Sounds so simple, so big. And I did that in my first term and the Democrats immediately terminated it, with the full knowledge that they were doing a very bad thing for the people. Costs were going to go way up and that’s what happened, and now I’m bringing them way down on health care and everything else.

I’m also ending the wildly inflated cost of prescription drugs like has never happened before. Other presidents tried to do it, but they never could. They tried, most didn’t try, actually, but they tried, they said they tried. They couldn’t do it. They didn’t even come close. They were all talk and no action. But I got it done, under my just-enacted most-favored nation agreements, Americans who have for decades paid by far the highest prices of any nation anywhere in the world for prescription drugs will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs, anywhere, the lowest price.

So, in my first year of my second term — should be my third term, but strange things happen — I took prescription drugs. a very big part of health care, from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest. That’s a big achievement. The result is price differences of 300, 400, 500, 600% and more, all available right now at a new website called trumprx.gov — and I didn’t name that one, either, by the way.
…
So now I’m calling on Congress to codify my most-favored nation program into law. Now, the one thing I’m not sure it matters, because it’s going to be very hard for somebody that comes along after me to say, let’s raise drug prices by 700 or 800%.

Since I don’t follow health care policy closely, I will share the NYT’s fact check on Trump’s claims on this topic:

Mr. Trump has proposed redirecting insurance subsidies to individual health savings accounts, which people could use to purchase health care services directly, as a way to compensate for rising premiums following the expiration of certain tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. But his proposal does not offer specifics.

In recent months, congressional Republicans have offered variations of this idea, but their proposals differ from one another, and there is no evidence that people paying directly for care would directly lower prices.

An analysis by KFF, a nonprofit that conducts polling and research about health policy, concluded: “The president’s plan is vague, and without knowing more, it is impossible to say what the implications would be for people with pre-existing conditions who rely on the A.C.A. markets.”

But let’s get to the topic that’s had me losing sleep: MOAR WARZ.

Talkin’ Long, Saying Little: Iran

It took ninety minutes, but he finally addressed the elephant in the room (although the looming ghost of Jeffrey Epstein was ignored) with three minutes of empty blather about Iran:

As president, I will make peace wherever I can, but I will never hesitate to confront threats to America wherever we must. That’s why in a breakthrough operation last June, the United States military obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program with an attack on Iranian soil known as Operation Midnight Hammer. For decades, it has been the policy of the United States never to allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. Many decades. Since they seized control of that proud nation 47 years ago, the regime and its murderous proxies have spread nothing but terrorism and death and hate. They’ve killed and maimed thousands of American service members and hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. With what’s called roadside bombs. They were the kings of the roadside bomb. And we took out Soleimani. I did that during my first term. Had a huge impact. He was the father of the roadside bomb. And just over the last couple of months with the protests, they’ve killed at least, it looks like, 32,000 protesters — 32,000 protesters in their own country. They shot them and hung them. We stopped them from hanging a lot of them with the threat of serious violence.

But this is some terrible people. They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America. After Midnight Hammer, they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, and in particular nuclear weapons, yet they continue. They’re starting it all over. We wiped it out and they want to start it all over again and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions. We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words, “We will never have a nuclear weapon.” My preference, my preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon. Can’t let that happen.

Jon Stewart had the best response I saw:

@thetnhollerSTEWART: “So just to be clear - Trump is on the brink of war with Iran to either obliterate the nuclear program he previously ‘obliterated’, or to force them into signing a deal like the one HE PULLED OUT OF — it’s all in Chapter 9 of Art of the Deal: Eating Your Own A**hole.”

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Background on Gov. Spanberger

Ex-CIA agent and current Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger gave the official response.

For those unfamiliar with Spanberger, here’s how I summed up her congressional career during the Governor’s race last year:

In Congress, Spanberger belonged to both the “pro business” New Democrat Coalition and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.

First elected to Congress in 2018, she was all-in on efforts to impeach Trump for allegedly attempting to strongarm Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating the Bidens.

In the heady days of 2019, she briefly supported legislation for a $15/hour minimum wage, but her flirtation with progressive policy was limited.

She opposed some of the pandemic stimulus and pushed back against Biden’s attempts at economic populism.

Her 2020 re-election bid got a lot of love from The Washington Post:

Spanberger, who spent much of her career with a gun on her hip, supported a bill to expand background checks and another to allow law enforcement to temporarily seize guns from people who pose an imminent threat to themselves or others, commonly known as a “red flag” law.

Spanberger responded to Democrats’ disappointing Congressional results in the 2020 election by saying, “We have to commit to not saying the words “defund the police” ever again,” she said. “We have to not use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”

Interestingly, Spanberger had opposed Trump’s response to the 2020 George Floyd protests from a national security angle tweeting that “as a former CIA officer” she “recognized this playbook,” joining other CIA vets who “expressed dismay at the similarity between events at home and the signs of decline or democratic regression they were trained to detect in other nations.”

National security scolding, good. Socialism, bad.

Max Blumenthal also had some informative background on Spanberger:

Now let’s take a quick look at what she had to say last night.

Talkin’ Back, Saying Little

Baltimore TV had the full transcript.

Her theme was ‘Is the President working for you?’:

…let me ask you three questions:

Is the President working to make life more affordable for you and your family?

Is the President working to keep Americans safe — both at home and abroad?

Is the President working for YOU?

…even though the Supreme Court struck these tariffs down four days ago, the damage to us, the American people, has already been done.

Meanwhile, the President is planning for new tariffs. Another massive tax hike on you and your family.

Republicans in Congress? They remain unwilling to assert their constitutional authority to stop him.

They’re making your life harder. They’re making your life more expensive. They’re even making it more difficult to see a doctor.

The meat of her speech was in her wheelhouse, “security”:

I grew up in a house of service. My mother was a nurse and my father was a career law enforcement officer. I began my career by following in my father’s footsteps as a federal agent working money laundering and narcotics cases. I worked side by side with local and state police to keep our communities safe and to uphold and enforce the law.

Law enforcement officers across the country know that it’s a unique responsibility to do the serious work of investigating crimes, comforting victims, and making arrests. It’s about building trust, and that requires an abiding sense of duty and commitment to community.

And yet, our President has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities, where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans — and they have done it without a warrant.

They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies, they have sent children — a little boy in a blue bunny hat — to far-off detention centers, and they have killed American citizens on our streets.

And they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability.

Every minute spent sowing fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.

Our President told us tonight that we are safer because these agents arrest mothers and detain children. Think about that.

Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed — not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities.

After working in law enforcement, I continued my career of service as a CIA officer, working undercover to protect the United States and our allies from global threats: terrorism, nuclear weapons, and the aggression of adversarial nations around the globe.

But as the President spoke of his perceived successes tonight, he continues to cede economic power and technological strength to China, bow down to a Russian dictator, and make plans for war with Iran.

Here’s the truth: over the last year, through DOGE, mass firings, and the appointment of deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions, our President has endangered the long and storied history of the United States of America being a force for good.

NYU scholar Corey Robin has a nice critique of Spanberger’s bloated prose.

An excerpt:

Spanberger: “As I campaigned for Governor last year, I traveled to every corner of Virginia, and I heard the same pressing concern everywhere: costs are too high. In housing, healthcare, energy, and childcare. And I know these same conversations are being had all across this country.”

Corey Robin: This is the equivalent of a student writing in their paper, “As I began thinking about the essay topic last night, I…” No one cares about your process, about how you came to write what you’re going to write, or say what you’re about to say. Just say it. No voter gives a shit that you traveled to every corner of Virginia, particularly when you’re “campaigning” for governor. And if the point is that what the governor hears in every corner of Virginia is what we’re all hearing everywhere, why not just dispense with all the nonsense about your travels? And how about some specificity while we’re at it. What’s with “energy” and “housing” and all these other words that sound like they come from the Harvard Kennedy School.
…
Like, why is this so fucking hard? I’m supposed to be a pointy-headed over-educated professor whose head in the clouds. Yet I could write a better speech in my sleep. And for a lot less money than I’m sure this bozo paid her bozo speechwriters.

If you find yourselves feeling stuck between Scylla and Charybdis, or between a sunsetting dumb as rocks bully and a hard girlboss place, you’re not alone.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

A headline like this from Common Dreams does even my shrunken black heart a bit of good, “‘A Big F*ck You to Big Tech’: New Jersey Residents Defeat AI Data Center.”

That story pointed me to a New Jersey Patch piece with more ground-level details:

At their meeting Wednesday night, the New Brunswick City Council killed plans to build a new AI data center at 100 Jersey Avenue.

Instead, a public park will be built where the data center would have gone.
…
Hundreds of people attended Wednesday night’s meeting. When Council President Manuel Castaneda announced the data center was canceled, he was met with claps from the audience, many holding signs that read “No data center!”

Alas, things didn’t go as smoothly for other protestors around the U.S.A.

Oklahoma Man Arrested For Speaking at City Council Meeting

A Claremore, Oklahoma city council meeting became a national cause célèbre when authorities overreacted, per Business Insider:

Applause broke out during an Oklahoma man’s speech at a city council meeting on Tuesday to discuss a proposed data center. A minute later, shouts of disbelief rang out across the room.

“Disgusting!” one woman shouted as Claremore Police Department officers handcuffed and escorted Darren Blanchard out of the room.

Authorities said they arrested Blanchard, whose speech exceeded the three-minute time limit, for trespassing.
…
The proposed data center in Claremore, a suburban hub of Tulsa home to about 20,000 people, has divided the town. During the three-hour meeting on Tuesday evening, dozens of residents spoke both in favor and against the project.

Blanchard exceeded his three minutes by about 30 seconds before police officers approached him. He gathered his notes and calmly followed the officers to the front of the hall, where town officials were sitting.

In a video of the meeting posted by the town on its YouTube channel, Blanchard appears to hand his notes to a council member. At that point, police arrested Blanchard, placing him in handcuffs. The crowd hollered in shock.

The Police put out a statement that cleared everything up:

Claremore Police officers are not responsible for enforcing the rules of city council meetings and only become involved when a city official orders someone removed from the meeting.

“A Mounds man came to Claremore and refused to comply with the rules that everyone else had no problem complying with. He was ordered removed by the City Manager, but refused to do so. Officers again told the man to leave, but he said, ‘I’m not gonna leave,’ and continued with the behaviors that caused him to be expelled. Officers were left with no choice but to arrest him.

The Claremore city council members who ordered the arrest aren’t the only local officials seemingly tilting the process in favor of big tech.

Ugly Dealings in Virginia

Politico has a great piece diving into the nitty gritty of how big tech deals with local officials.

The piece opens up by detailing the death of Prince William County supervisor Bob Weir who had “advocated regulating the supercomputing warehouses” and “championed the creation of an advisory panel to weigh in on issues of data center growth and noise.”

But in October, before an election for his successor had been held, Weir’s former colleagues on the eight-member board of supervisors held a surprise vote and disbanded that panel, undoing Weir’s legacy and gutting years of work residents had put in to mitigate the impacts of the supercomputing boom. The vote took place without a single member of the advisory group present.

…two weeks after supervisors disbanded the group, the board voted on a noise ordinance Supervisor Kenny Boddye had drafted himself, without consulting the acoustical experts under contract with the county who had worked on the advisory panel’s recommendations. Boddye’s version was notably weaker than the advisory group’s version; it increased noise limits and jettisoned a more sensitive method for measuring sound. It was approved over the objections of Jefferson and dozens of residents attending the meeting. Weir’s 70,000 former constituents still did not have a supervisor on the board representing their interests.
…
The fast-growing industry helmed by the richest corporations on the planet — Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft — brings with it immense amounts of cash for land deals, local taxes and campaign contributions that can prove irresistible to local officials.

Angry and Boddye have together received more than $313,600 in campaign donations since 2023 from data center developers and land owners contracted to sell to the industry, according to a POLITICO review of campaign donation disclosures filed with the state.
…
The web of connections between lawmakers and the data center industry goes deeper than campaign contributions, though: One former supervisor in the county was forced to resign a few years ago after his property was included in the footprint of a proposed supercomputing campus. He had collaborated with neighbors to sell their homes to the data center developers, creating what the commonwealth attorney ruled was a conflict of interest. He later joined a data center lobbying firm, which also now employs a current member of the county school board. That body has been under fire for remaining silent as data centers are built next to schools. A former chair of the board of supervisors is an attorney representing landowners interested in selling their properties to data center developers.

The usual chicanery and screw-jobs are in full effect, but it’s not working as well as usual.

It’s worth noting that data centers are textbook cases of environmental racism.

Also that according to Benn Jordan they function as “acoustic weapons” aimed at those in the vicinity.

New Jersey and Oklahoma are not isolated incidents.

$64 Billion in Blocked or Delayed Projects

Data center resistance in Colorado and a possible New York statewide moratorium are just tip of the iceberg.

A report from Data Center Watch shows that between May 2024 and March 2025, $64 billion in data center projects were blocked or delayed across the U.S.:

$18 billion worth of data center projects were blocked, and another $46 billion of projects were delayed over the last two years in the face of opposition from residents and activist groups.

There are at least 142 activist groups across 24 states organizing to block data center construction and expansion.

Opposition to data center construction is largely motivated by local concerns. While the exact reasons opponents cite vary from location to location, some common themes are higher utility bills, water consumption, noise, impact on property value, and green space preservation.
…
The backlash to data center development is bipartisan and does not follow the typical ideological fault lines of American politics. There have been projects blocked in red states and blue states, and there are both Republican and Democratic officials opposing new projects.

Heatmap has more good news for luddites and haters of progress:

At least 25 data center projects were canceled last year following local opposition in the United States, according to a review of press accounts, public records, and project announcements conducted by Heatmap Pro. Those canceled projects accounted for at least 4.7 gigawatts of electricity demand — a meaningful share of the overall data center capacity projected to come online in the coming years.

Those cancellations reflect a sharp increase over recent years, when local backlash rarely played a role in project cancellations, according to Heatmap’s review.

Microedge reports the monkey-wrenching is picking up pace:

This nation-wide (the resistance is global too) grassroots movement has got pundit tongues a-wagging, trying to explain.

What Does It All Mean?

NPR readers learned that “People are protesting AI data centers, and it’s scrambling political lines.”

Relevant bits:

In recent months, protesters in Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and other states have shut down proposals for new building sites. A town in Wisconsin is even trying to oust its mayor after approval of a data center there.
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“I do think this is going to be a big issue in our politics throughout this year and probably for the foreseeable future,” said Brendan Steinhauser, the CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, a group pushing for more AI safeguards.

But the issue isn’t exactly divided by party lines.

While President Trump and his AI czar David Sacks have been outspoken about the need for more data center construction and looser regulations on artificial intelligence, other elected officials on both sides of the aisle are taking a different approach.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, recently proposed a nationwide moratorium on data center construction. On the other side, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has pushed for more regulation of AI, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has urged more caution when it comes to the technology and the companies that create it.

“There are some people that say, you know, the right policy is to just give Big Tech whatever they want, subsidize it and all this stuff, and somehow that’s going to lead us to some happy place. I reject that,” DeSantis said last month.

The New Republic sees an opportunity and highlights it in their piece titled “Data Centers Are the Enemy We’ve All Been Waiting For” and subtitled, “The startling rapidity of the bottom-up revolt against Big Tech shows people will indeed get off the sofa for the right fight.”

Choice bits:

In Wisconsin, for example, at least four communities—DeForest, Caledonia, Yorkville, and Greenleaf—have recently defeated data center proposals, either by getting local authorities to reject them or by causing so much trouble that the companies withdrew their plans. Counties and cities in Georgia have passed moratoriums on data centers.

…

at least 19 Michigan communities—including Bay City and Grand Rapids—are considering banning data centers or have already done so (the latter include Howell, Saginaw, and Pontiac). The Michigan rebellion is particularly significant given that in 2024, the state promised massive tax holidays—no taxes till 2050, if they meet some extremely mild conditions—to companies willing to build data centers. That’s a big incentive for companies to site their data centers in Michigan. But local communities are not welcoming them. As town after town takes up the issue, local officials described packed community meetings and data center backlash unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.
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The political class has been slow to address this anger. But there are signs that some are finally catching up. Some gubernatorial candidates are now placing opposition to data centers at the center of their campaigns. In Georgia, Michigan, New York, and Wisconsin, and elsewhere, legislators are proposing statewide moratoriums on their construction.

The Washington Post has a similar piece with some complimentary details and quotes, but I’ll use them as a source for the industry spin attempting to push back and the Trump administration response:

“Fueled by misinformation, driven by radical environmental policies, communities are missing out on the jobs, security and opportunities this technology is delivering,” said an email from Brian O. Walsh, executive director of the AI Infrastructure Coalition. The group says the projects lower electricity prices, a claim that is hotly disputed.

The White House frames the data center boom as beneficial, saying in a statement that it will lead to big investments in infrastructure and boost manufacturing. But the administration is also aware some communities oppose them.

“Communities know what’s best for them, and the Administration is clear that local infrastructure decisions remain with states and localities,” the statement said.

Gluttons for punishment Those looking for a more “balanced” take are referred to “Data Centers Are Not the Villain” from Bari Weiss’ Free Press.

Heatmap did some research last Fall looking more deeply into the phenomenon:

In August, our data intelligence platform Heatmap Pro conducted polling to figure out how Americans feel about the billions of dollars being poured into data centers for cloud computing and AI development. We found that the dislike is incredibly strong — less than half of Americans are willing to support a data center near them. The hostility crosses party lines, with Republicans nearly as likely to express disdain towards these projects as Democrats. The frustrations with these facilities are also poised to increase over generations, as data centers are most underwater with the younger cohorts, aged 18 to 49, who may be more familiar with AI.

The polling also showed that people are easily convinced to oppose data center development in their neighborhoods. Rhetoric in favor of data centers — how they contribute to tax revenue, create jobs, help the U.S. compete with China — might win some hearts and minds, but rhetoric decrying data centers consistently polled stronger than any of the supportive arguments we tested. This registered across party lines. And making matters worse for the tech sector, individuals who previously opposed renewable energy projects were more likely to be anti-data centers.

What you get in the end is a populist conflict appealing to younger people that bridges the ends of the political spectrum, connecting the left and right — and that should make developers very worried.
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On one end of the spectrum, left-aligned activists and local leaders are raging against the energy and water system strain that’ll come from the data center boom. You have folks like Blake Coe, an activist fighting data center projects in San Marcos, Texas. Coe told me he began opposing data centers after being politically awakened by a totally different issue: the Israeli government’s offensive in Gaza and alleged genocide of Palestinians there. But as he told me, he didn’t have “the clout, the money, the whatever to work on fixing a genocide.” After learning about the project in San Marcos, he concluded that the community there was something he “can fight for.”
…
At the same time, activists fighting renewable energy projects from the right are also lining up to fight data centers, echoing the same frustrations voiced by environmentalists while also tarring the infrastructure as part of a broader social change imposed by Big Tech elites. Take Indiana, one of the most popular data center destinations after Virginia, where the backlash is hitting Indianapolis and rural GOP strongholds alike. Or Missouri, whose Senator Josh Hawley summed up my story here in one post in October.

Wild that people don’t like this stuff. Maybe it’s because of videos like this one from More Perfect Union that drew 3 million views or this one, or this one from the noted enemies of free enterprise at Business Insider.

The Trump Regime Attempts to Tip Toe Through the Minefield

You know things are out of hand if the Trumpers are trying to moderate their approach. Per Politico:

The Trump administration wants some of the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lays out commitments designed to ensure energy-hungry data centers do not raise household electricity prices, strain water supplies or undermine grid reliability, and that the companies driving demand also carry the cost of building new infrastructure.

The proposed pact, which is not final and could be subject to change, is framed as a voluntary agreement between President Donald Trump and major U.S. tech companies and data center developers. It could bind OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other AI giants to a broad set of energy, water and community principles. None of these companies immediately responded to a request for comment.

The Democratic aspiring class of 2028 presidential hopefuls can smell the coffee too.

Run Away Pritzker, Run Away Shapiro, Run Away Wes Moore!

Axios has the scoop:

Just a few months ago, potential 2028 presidential candidates — including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — were bending over backward to lure data centers, with offers of lavish tax breaks and other goodies.

The projects seemed like no-brainers to many pols: They promised jobs, made building trade unions happy, took on China and pleased Silicon Valley execs.

Now those Democrats are abruptly retreating — and vowing to protect voters from the consequences of the AI revolution.
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This past week, Pritzker hit the pause button in his State of the State speech, proposing a two-year moratorium on the tax incentives.
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After residents complained about data centers in their backyards, Shapiro called for additional oversight during his budget address this month, saying: “I know Pennsylvanians have real concerns about these data centers … and so do I.”
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(Wes Moore) changed tone at his State of the State address this month, unveiling new guidelines that Maryland data centers must follow to win his support.

But it’s not just data centers inspiring local protests and backlash against Big Tech.

Just Another Ill-Fated Super Bowl Ad

Super Bowl ads are a traditional way for American companies on the edge of implosion to announce their pending doom.

At this year’s game imploding AI companies went for the brass ring, but Amazon turned out to be the one who grabbed the booby prize.

The ad was a heart-warming hit, but the backlash was immediate and significant enough to send the Ring CEO on an apology tour, via the NYT:

Jamie Siminoff, the founder and chief inventor of Ring, the ubiquitous doorbell camera, was excited for the company’s first Super Bowl television commercial. The 30-second ad presented its product helping with a task as unassailable as apple pie: finding lost dogs.

But since the ad aired, instead of a victory lap, Mr. Siminoff has been on an apology tour.
…
Jamie Siminoff, the founder and chief inventor of Ring, the ubiquitous doorbell camera, was excited for the company’s first Super Bowl television commercial. The 30-second ad presented its product helping with a task as unassailable as apple pie: finding lost dogs.

But since the ad aired, instead of a victory lap, Mr. Siminoff has been on an apology tour.
…
Ring, which is owned by Amazon, is so ubiquitous that is has become a generic term for any doorbell camera, and users raised questions about how much Ring was monitoring them.
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Mr. Siminoff, who started Ring in his garage in Los Angeles, remains resolute that more video in the world is better. He believes that most people feel this way, too, even if they say they have misgivings.

“I think there’s been a lot of cases recently where if the video had not been there, I’m not sure if the story would have been told the same or we wouldn’t have known what happened,” he said.

But he gets that people want to have some measure of control.

“That’s the balance. It’s not just like unfettered mass surveillance,” he said. “That’s not what we have with Ring. You get to choose what you want to do with your individual home.”

Amazon quickly found a scapegoat, per Variety:

Many viewers found Ring’s Search Party canine-finding ad heartwarming. Others, however, were alarmed at the surveillance implications of such a feature — and amid a growing backlash, Ring has announced that it was ending its partnership with Flock Safety, a company that enables users to share information with law enforcement agencies.

“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration,” Ring said in a statement released Thursday.

It’s weird that Amazon wants to distance itself from Flock, given how popular the service is with ICE:

The company advertises contracts with more than 6,000 police departments nationwide, providing AI-assisted video surveillance and automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems searchable across jurisdictions, according to public company disclosures.

These systems are explicitly designed for data sharing between agencies.

Federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), already access Flock-connected surveillance systems through local and state law-enforcement partners.

Investigative reporting has documented that ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Secret Service have used Flock infrastructure without needing direct contracts with the company, instead relying on inter-agency data sharing agreements…

Maybe we should pay heed to the words of Flock CEO Garrett Langley, via the ACLU:

In a December email reportedly sent to all its law enforcement clients, CEO Garrett Langley claimed that attacks on Flock were attacks on law enforcement. “Let’s call this what it is,” he wrote. “Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack.” Langley then portrays Flock’s critics as motivated not by legitimate disagreement over the relative importance of different values and the role of mass surveillance in a brutal mass deportation effort, but as some kind of nihilists who wish to destroy society:

“The attacks aren’t new. You’ve been dealing with this for forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they’re producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.”

Langley also told police departments that “activist groups” are also “trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us.” In a democratic society where sovereignty rests with the people, transparency into what the government is doing is vital. In an era where powerful new technologies promise to give the government expansive new powers never before seen in human history, transparency becomes even more urgent.

Last week, responding to critical coverage of the release of data on millions of police surveillance targets by reporters at 404Media, Flock charged that behind the criticism lay “activists trying to let murderers go free.”

Too bad the good word didn’t get out before some no-goodniks and outside agitators got carried away with local protests and such, per this Blood in the Machine piece headlined, “Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras”.

Last week, in La Mesa, a small city just east of San Diego, California, observers happened upon a pair of destroyed Flock cameras. One had been smashed and left on the median, the other had key parts removed. The destruction was obviously intentional, and appears perhaps even staged to leave a message: It came just weeks after the city decided, in the face of public protest, to continue its contracts with the surveillance company.

Flock cameras are typically mounted on 8 to 12 foot poles and powered by a solar panel. The smashed remains of all of the above in La Mesa are the latest examples of a widening anti-Flock backlash. In recent months, people have been smashing and dismantling the surveillance devices, in incidents reported in at least five states, from coast to coast.

The whole article is highly-recommended for those needing hater-aide injected in their veins.

Be sure to avoid looking at this this map of Flock cameras around the U.S. courtesy of DeFlock.me and Banish Big Brother.

Definitely don’t watch this video by Benn Jordan and 404 Media titled “This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers” and also avoid Jordan’s video “We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds.”

Stay safe out there.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

The decision by the Ellison-owned Paramount and/or Trump’s FCC to block Texas US Senate candidate James Talarico’s appearance on the Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show has royally backfired, if the goal was to stunt James Talarico’s candidacy that is:

Let’s talk about the ongoing merger attempts first.

WBD’s Board Allows Paramount One More Round

The NYT has the basics:

Warner Bros. Discovery said on Tuesday that it would restart the deal talks with Paramount Skydance that it ended in December, giving the company another chance at besting Netflix for a deal. Paramount will have until Feb. 23 to negotiate its best and final offer.

Warner Bros. Discovery last year rejected Paramount’s offer to buy the entire company for $108 billion in favor of a deal to sell only its streaming and studios business to Netflix for $83 billion. Warner Bros. Discovery said at the time that Netflix offered the better deal for shareholders. Paramount disagreed and quickly made its case to shareholders through a hostile bid.

In the roughly two months since then, Paramount has amended its offer twice, each time addressing some of the concerns that Warner Bros. Discovery’s board had raised. Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, has also raised questions about the Netflix bid, including whether its deal can pass regulatory scrutiny.

CNN’s Brian Stelter had Paramount’s prickly response:

“Although the Board’s actions are unusual, Paramount is nonetheless prepared to engage in good faith and constructive discussions. At the same time, we will continue to advance our tender offer, maintain our solicitation in opposition to the inferior Netflix merger, and proceed with our intention to nominate a slate of directors at the upcoming WBD annual meeting.”

The news has the prediction markets revising their bets on Parmount WBD & Netflix:

Netflix fired back about Paramount WBD, per Deadline:

“Throughout the robust and highly competitive strategic review process, Netflix has consistently taken a constructive, responsive approach with WBD, in stark contrast to Paramount Skydance. While we are confident that our transaction provides superior value and certainty, we recognize the ongoing distraction for WBD stockholders and the broader entertainment industry caused by PSKY’s antics. Accordingly, we granted WBD a narrow seven-day waiver of certain obligations under our merger agreement to allow them to engage with PSKY to fully and finally resolve this matter,” Netflix said.

“This does not change the fact that we have the only signed, board-recommended agreement with WBD, and ours is the only certain path to delivering value to WBD’s stockholders,” it insisted, zeroing in on regulatory approvals.

“Netflix is confident that our transaction, a largely vertical merger of complementary assets, has a clear path to timely regulatory approval,” it said. Netflix and WBD have each submitted their Hart-Scott-Rodino filings and are “engaged constructively” with competition authorities globally including the DOJ, state Attorneys General, the European Commission, and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

“By contrast, PSKY has repeatedly mischaracterized the regulatory review process by suggesting its proposal will sail through, misleading WBD stockholders about the real risk of their regulatory challenges around the world. WBD stockholders should not be misled into thinking that PSKY has an easier or faster path to regulatory approval – it does not,” said the streamer led by Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters.

It ridiculed Paramount for publicizing “routine checkpoints” to exaggerate “progress.” “For example, PSKY cited securing German FDI clearance on January 27, 2026, as evidence of their ‘regulatory certainty.’ In fact, Netflix received German FDI clearance on the very same day.”

It anticipated scrutiny on foreign funding behind PSKY’s bid – namely the Middle East sovereign wealth funds that will be passive investors. It insisted regulators will focus on horizontal overlaps (two of the five major Hollywood studios, two major news networks) and the impact on competition, job losses, reduced output, and downward pressure on wages for film and television workers –- with pain set to result from the high debt of the combined company.

Matt Stoller has some analysis of what’s going on at BIG:

…a contact let me on to something odd about the Paramount approach: the company says it has mostly completed the extensive legal paperwork necessary to acquire WBD. And that’s both very weird and very important, for reasons I’ll get into, because it suggests Paramount’s people believe the fix is in, on their behalf.
…
The company’s main antitrust lawyer is a savvy and cynical operator named Makan Delrahim. Delrahim is a close confidante of David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison, who is financing the deal. And Delrahim’s goal is to get the deal through before enforcers know what hit them.
…
Delrahim knows how this process works, and so he’s had Paramount do something unusual for an acquiring party. His company has filed an HSR form without signing a merger deal or even winning the bid for the company with whom it is trying to combine. And not only has Paramount filed an HSR form, it has already “substantially” fulfilled the second request for information from the DOJ. That’s astonishing. It means Paramount paid tens of millions to lawyers to comb through documents on a rush job. It also likely implies they did no negotiations whatsoever with the government, and just gave them everything they asked for. I’m told that is unheard of.

Why take such cumbersome and risky steps if Paramount is not even assured victory in the bidding war? Well, there’s a specific timeline involved if they make a cash tender offer. If the Netflix deal falls apart and Paramount wins the bidding war, then the antitrust enforcers have just fifteen days to rush a complaint out to a court to ask to pause the merger.

This news got the business/gossip press a twittering.

Charles Gasparino of Fox had a savvy take on Paramount WBD with lots of praise for WBD CEO David Zaslav who is set to cash out huge after an otherwise disastrous tenure at the company he formed in 2022 when Discover acquired the storied Warner Brothers:

I’ve covered a lot of deals, but this one takes gamesmanship to another level, and Zas is playing it perfectly. Zas knows Paramount (PSKY) needs what he has; he also knows Netflix needs a growth strategy and
WBD is the perfect vehicle were it not for the regulatory uncertainty and it is tremendous.

The renegotiation with PSKY–if it happens and most think it will — isnt the result of any of these activist investors you keep reading about. It’s about a perfect storm for Zas that he helped stoke: He never cut off PSKY despite the appearance of bad blood. He embraced Netflix but I know he knows it is facing a wall of uncertainty about getting its deal through Trump land.

PSKY needs WBD or its future is shaky at best, and Netflix has convinced itself it just cant walk away at this point even if everyone I know inside the administration thinks the co is significantly downplaying its regulatory hurdles.

Taken together and Zas he can play a little chicken to get his final number up between $31-$33 a share, taking the valuation of his company to close to $90 billion (it was barely $30B when this began in September). He is essentially threatening both sides that he is just fine if has to walk away from $NTFLX and running a largely debt free studio and streaming service w $5.8 billion breakup in cash from Netflix, while telling PSKY the time is running out on your own melting ice cube of a media company.

Aged pop-rocker Paul Anka of all people had a Paramount WBD take so savvy that Deadline recycled some quotes from their recent interview him for a new story:

Cripple the business? The motion picture business has been totally run out of the state of California. There’s no film business as we knew it, it doesn’t exist. It’s over.

I was with [David] Zaslav at his house recently, he threw a party for me when HBO released the documentary. Very brilliantly, they created a bidding war. John Malone is brilliant.

Now, it’s probably going to get held up in court two years because the Ellisons are not going to let it go easily. You’ve got Trump behind them, and the Arab money. Who knows?

Ted Sarandos (Co-CEO of Netflix) is very close with Zaslav. Sometimes these guys do each other a favor, it’s an old Vegas trick.

You want to sell a hotel? You go to your buddy and say, give me an offer. Just pretend you’re in the game. And they float it out there and it starts this bidding war. I still think it’s going to be Paramount that winds up with it.

Ted and Netflix have never stepped out and purchased anything, it has all been built in-house. They’ve never been buyers, and Ted has been thumbing his nose at the theatrical business for years. He hasn’t made a lot of friends among the exhibition people.

But things are going to change regardless of who gets it. You’ll have less places to go to with product. We’ll be down to three places, maybe. We know that the overseas sales are very important and they’re making films everywhere; in Atlanta, Canada. It concerns me because we don’t have the film base and that the Hollywood we grew up in, it’s over.

The notion that the Ellisons are moneyed rubes getting played by Hollywood sharpies in the Paramount WBD merger talks is only reinforced by their (mis)management of CBS.

Giving Talarico and Colbert a Big Boost

The most recent, and most high profile, blunder by CBS was walking into this sh*tstorm even as new Paramount WBD talks kicked off, per Axios:

Late-night host Stephen Colbert said Monday evening that CBS barred him from airing an interview with James Talarico, a Texas Democrat running for Senate, citing a recent federal directive.

CBS has faced mounting scrutiny in recent months that its news arm and parent company, Paramount Skydance, are succumbing to pressure from President Trump’s administration.

Colbert said on air that CBS’ lawyers told his show that it could not have Talarico, a Texas state representative, on the broadcast.

“Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” he said. “And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

“FCC you,” Colbert said, calling out FCC chairman Brendan Carr directly. He added that Carr is “motivated by partisan purposes.”

The FCC did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment on Tuesday.

However, CBS said in a statement that the network did not prohibit the show from broadcasting the interview.

“The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled,” the network said.

The Streisand effect kicked in hard once Colbert made it a controversy, rebounding to Talarico’s benefit, and possibly hurting the Paramount WBD merger.

The Late Show has been averaging around 2.3 million viewers in February, but the Talarico interview has 5.7 million views (and counting) on YouTube and another 12 million views on Talarico’s X.com account.

I’ll have a little more on the Texas Senate race and why it matters in a bit, but first let finish the Parmount WBD section with a review some of the other Paramount CBS own goals.

What Bari Weiss Is Pouring Out at CBS Ain’t Going Down Smooth

Even as Paramount WBD is trying to get something going, their golden girl at CBS keeps getting in the way.

I’ve posted repeatedly about the struggles of Bari Weiss, the Ellisons’ choice to run CBS news (links at bottom of post) but let’s run through the latest.

She’s triggered a major talent exodus, per Variety:

A significant chunk of the production team behind “CBS Evening News” has opted to take buyouts that were offered in late January, according to three people familiar with the matter, the latest sign of ambivalence by journalists at CBS News regarding the plans of the unit’s leader, Bari Weiss. She recently articulated a new vision that would place more focus by the Paramount Skydance operation on streaming video and stories that are “differentiated, that are things you can’t get anywhere else.”

Approximately 11 members out of a production staff of about 40 have opted to leave, according to these people. Some of the departures come from among the youngest members of the CBS News staff, two of these people say, a dynamic that has raised concern about the ability to bring new perspectives to familiar routines. At least two employees taking the buyouts, however, were veteran producers, who played significant roles in getting “CBS Evening News” out each weekday.

The exodus puts a new spotlight on CBS News under Weiss, whose experience is largely tied to opinion writing and not the ins and outs of newsgathering. Weiss’ lack of knowledge has resulted in several errors since her arrival in October, after Paramount bought her conservative-opinion site The Free Press for $150 million. There have been entanglements with “60 Minutes”; exits by senior executives; and a rough start for Dokoupil’s new tenure at “CBS Evening News” following comments he made online about his intentions for his new job.

And the exodus includes superstar Vanderbilt heirs too, also per Variety:

Anderson Cooper will exit CBS News‘ “60 Minutes” after nearly 20 years of contributing to the program, according to a person familiar with his thinking…

“Being a correspondent at ’60 Minutes’ has been one of the highlights of my career. I got to tell amazing stories, and work with some of the best producers, editors and camera crews in the business,” Cooper said in a statement. “For nearly twenty years, I’ve been able to balance my jobs at CNN and CBS, but I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they want to spend time with me.”

Cooper was said to be in negotiations with CBS about a renewal in recent weeks, but opted to put more of his focus on activities at CNN.

Business Insider has a fun round-up of media insiders’ reactions to Cooper’s exit. TL,DR: No one quits these jobs to spend more time with their family and Bari Weiss is overseeing a debacle.

Even worse, the narrative that the Ellisons are attempting a major takeover of American media on behalf of Trump (somehow the Ellisons’ loyalty to Israel is rarely mentioned) has entered the mainstream consciousness. See this tweet on Paramount WBD from former FTC member Alvaro Bedoya:

Johnathan Alter has the libs riled up with his (possibly accurate) conspiraversy vision of what’s going on:

So here’s what’s going to happen now: Netflix has agreed, under pressure, to let Paramount SkyDance have several days of negotiations with Warner Discovery, whose board wanted to go with Netflix. But in the next few days David Ellison and Larry Ellison will sweeten the bid. And then, from what I’ve heard from very good sources, the Justice Department will announce what Republican senators have already hinted at, which is that they will block a merger with Netflix on antitrust grounds. International regulators may say the same, ending Netflix’s bid.

That would be good: either of these mergers would be terrible for the creative community, workers and the public. But the demise of the Netflix deal would make it easier for the Ellisons and Paramount to take over Warner Discovery, which would then give Bari Weiss and company control not just of CBS News, but of CNN and HBO (Bill Maher and John Oliver would have to go elsewhere). Then you would have a situation where CBS, CNN, and Fox, not to mention TikTok, would all be under the control of Donald Trump.

Again, no mention of Israel.

I imagine the MSM-only news follower must find it kind of mysterious why Bari Weiss still has so much support in institutional and elite circle, like this:

Except she’s so incompetent that they had to cancel her gig, from Daily Beast:

A talk on the “future of journalism” by the editor-in-chief of CBS News was declared “canceled” by its organizers Wednesday.

The lecture from Bari Weiss, 41, at the University of California, Los Angeles, was scheduled to take place on Feb. 27. The event was part of a memorial lecture series honoring journalist Daniel Pearl, whose death at the hands of militants in Karachi made him a symbol of press freedom.

The cancellation notice was posted on a UCLA website and detailed that current ticket holders for the event would receive a full reimbursement.

A source close to Weiss said that there had been a “scheduling conflict” and that the speech would take place at an unspecified date in the future.

Weiss may have been hired to destroy CBS News but I’m not sure the Ellisons’ understand what they’re doing to the brand equity and earning potential of their news crown jewel.

Time will tell if Hasbara Media Inc. manages to build a sustainable empire or not.

But, let’s wrap with a little more about the Texas race for US Senate.

Texas Could Flip the Senate Majority

As far-fetched as it may seem, the Texas Senate race is THE marquee race upon which control of the upper house depends.

The Democratic primary is also serving as a referendum of the nihilistic politics of “Dark Woke” as represented by US Congressional Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the Republican Party’s preferred Democratic nominee for the race.

She’s running against State Senator Talarico for the Dem Party nomination.

Crockett’s trash-talking persona has succeeded in convincing the MSM that she represents a “Democratic Tea Party” or “progressive firebrand“, despite her votes for military funding for Israel and the campaign money she’s taken from tech oligarch Marc Andreessen, the Winklevoss cryptobros, Blackrock’s PAC, Lockheed Martin’s PAC, two cryptocurrency-funded super PACs and “a fleet of other business groups.”

The polling data (such as it is, take with heaps of salt) seems to show that Crockett has the backing of Black voters and older voters (aka the Biden/Cuomo coalition) rather than Latins and younger voters (aka the Bernie Sanders coalition):

The campaign has certainly featured a lot of #KHive type action which is always a threat to tear apart the fragile Dem multi-ethnic coalition:

Naturally, Zackory Kirk was part of the Dem Party Chorus/1630 dark money program. Smart investing by the establishment.

Joshua A. Cohen at the Ettingermentum Newsletter has more analysis on the importance of the race and the Jasmine Crockett factor:

For the Lone Star State’s long-beleaguered liberals, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Thanks to yet another rough Senate map and Donald Trump’s historic collapse in support among Latino voters, the result this November in Texas is very likely to be what determines which party wins the Senate this year. After decades of low-energy primaries and celebrity politics, Texas Democrats now need to make an exceptionally important choice, one not too dissimilar in its stakes from a presidential primary.

…this race appeared to offer something far realer: an actual, no-bullshit look into how real post-2024 Democratic voters approached highly important races when provided with a wide variety of different tendencies to choose from. And while left-of-center discourse remained stuck on 2016-era progressive-vs.-centrist ideological debates, I saw something different brewing in Texas…

This was the rise of Dallas’s Jasmine Crockett: second-term House backbencher, pro-establishment liberal, and one of the defining social media phenoms of Trump 2.0.
…
When she officially entered the primary in December, the party’s Senate nominee from the year prior dropped out on the same day. Nonpartisan polling already had her with an outright majority of the vote against her sole remaining opponent, all before she had raised a single dollar, given a single speech or aired a single ad.
…
(Crockett) appeared to be easily wiping the floor with all of the other post-Biden liberal philosophies on offer, whether they be Colin Allred’s D.C.-directed centrism or James Talarico’s Bernie-lite Instagram politics.

It was only when she actually entered the race that things started to go wrong.
…
Where the story back in November was the rise of a nihilistic liberal anti-politics, the story since then is how that brand of politics has met its limits.
…
Very unexpectedly and quite exceptionally, liberal content consumers were more willing to give her their hard-earned money just as a symbolic statement of support than they are to actually back a real, meaningful campaign. When I wrote earlier about Democrats making a distinction between cheerleaders and actual leaders, this is what it looks like, and it’s a dire sign for both her and anyone else who seeks to build a real, viable national political career solely off of what plays well on social media.

Just like with Paramount WBD, time will tell how the Texas Senate race shakes out, but for those dismissing the possibility of a Democratic win in Texas, check out these early vote numbers from Tarrant County, the most conservative urban county in Texas:

Tarrant, home of Fort Worth aka “Cowtown”, is the same county where Dems recently pulled off a shocking special election win that saw a phenomenal 31 point swing away from the GOP from 2024 results.

And all of this is happening while the Interregnum of Unreality continues, while we await the seemingly inevitable pop of the AI bubble and a potential war with Iran that will accelerate Trump’s golden march to ruin.

Hang tough out there.

Originally published 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

Politico has the establishment take on Rubio’s audition:

At a moment when American politics is gripped by the daily eruptions of President Donald Trump, he’s never felt more like a lame duck than he did in the corridors of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof.

There were so many potential Democratic presidential hopefuls here that it could have been the Sheraton Nashua rather than an elegant Bavarian lodge. In their public comments and private conversations, some of which were de facto bilateral meetings, Democrats ranging from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez assured their European counterparts that Trump is temporary and the transatlantic relationship isn’t.

“It is very important that we have this much Democratic representation this year and to show that we as a party are committed to a different path,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “Regardless of any political speculation, it is important that people are seeing a unity of that commitment to our allies and our partnerships.”

Newsom, who unlike in his trip to Davos last month brought reassurance rather than kneepads, told me that America’s longstanding relationships “are in dormancy, they’re not dead.”

The president’s principal representative here, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, delivered a speech aimed at reassuring Europe and articulating Trumpism without the rhetorical headbutt that was Vice President JD Vance’s address to last year’s gathering. However, Rubio’s remarks were so compelling that they were met with a standing ovation and only served to remind Republicans and other observers across the Atlantic that he’s a far more talented political athlete than Vance — fueling another round of it-has-to-be-Marco-in-’28-right?

So what did Little Marco say that got the Euros so worked up?

Rubio’s Call for Neo-Colonialism Goes Over Huge

Well it was a doozy of an audition.

From the State Department transcript:

Marco Rubio: …the United Nations still has tremendous potential to be a tool for good in the world. But we cannot ignore that today, on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role. It could not solve the war in Gaza. Instead, it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce. It had not solved the war in Ukraine. It took American leadership and partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still-elusive peace.

It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran. That required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B-2 bombers. And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narcoterrorist dictator in Venezuela. Instead, it took American Special Forces to bring this fugitive to justice.
…
we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.

What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. …
An alliance ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny – not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations. An alliance that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts. And above all, an alliance based on the recognition that we, the West, have inherited together – what we have inherited together is something that is unique and distinctive and irreplaceable, because this, after all, is the very foundation of the transatlantic bond.
…
America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends. (Applause.)

We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization; with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive.

How did Rubio’s naked jingoism go over?

The Euro Establishment Loves Little Marco

Here’s EU commission boss Ursula von der Leyen’s reaction:

Un-diplomatic gave von der Leyen the roasting she deserves:

The idea that the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, would be “very much reassured” by Marco Rubio’s remarks—at a moment when the US has declared itself a threat to Europe—is just real boot-licking nonsense; a betrayal of European citizenry. It’s not just von der Leyen. The elites in the room gave Rubio a mass standing ovation in response to his speech.

The Financial Times chief foreign affairs correspondent signed off on Marco’s audition as well, with reservations:

The Wall Street Journal editorial board was enthusiastic too, although they worry that Rubio is soft on Russia:

Mr. Rubio’s speech won praise in Munich and from nearly every corner of President Trump’s domestic coalition.
…
Vice President JD Vance made motions to a shared culture with Europe in his speech at the same security conference last year. But Mr. Vance all but told Europe it was free to plan its own funeral and gave oxygen to Europe’s right-wing fringes that are sympathetic to Moscow. Mr. Rubio is also offering a far better vision than Canada’s Mark Carney, the hero of Davos, whose idea for replacing U.S. leadership with a coalition of the world’s “middle powers” is delusional and cynical domestic politics.

The big caveat to Mr. Rubio’s message is Ukraine, which like it or not is the current front line of Western civilization. On that score it wasn’t reassuring that after Munich Mr. Rubio headed to Hungary and Slovakia, Russia’s two best friends in Europe.

The U.S. continues to behave like a mediator of the Ukraine-Russia war, rather than taking the side of the West. Mr. Rubio’s good words about shared values won’t mean much if a rotten “peace” is imposed on Ukraine.

The New York Post offered a more cartoonish take with an op-ed headlined: “Marco Rubio delivers tough love to Europe — and the overgrown teenage brats know ‘Dad’ is right.”

The Guardian did some handwringing as it tried to explain that “Why Marco Rubio’s ‘reassuring’ speech to Europe was nothing of the kind.”

The centrists at The Bulwark applauded Rubio’s “catch flies with honey” approach, but lamented that he’s ultimately in thrall to Trump. They also (ridiculously) tried to paint German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’ speech as a strong counter to Rubio.

For my money the real tell was the glowing reaction from unabashed white supremacist Jared Taylor who tweeted, “an excellent assertion of European solidarity by Secretary of State Rubio. He very nearly declared the World Brotherhood of White People.”

Maybe that’s because Rubio’s speechwriter is on board with Taylor’s program.

I’ll close the Rubio section with more critical commenters.

Europe Should Be Worried, Not Applauding

Arnaud Bertrand tweeted that it was “one of the most revisionist and imperialist speeches I’ve ever seen a senior American official make, and that’s saying something.”

But he saved his real fire for the Euros:

The most troubling part was the reaction of the audience: “half the hall in Munich gave US Secretary of State Marco Rubio a standing ovation” and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Global South half…

It just goes to show the complete absence of reflection in Europe. Rubio undoubtedly tried to appeal to some sort of latent nostalgia for Western imperial dominance among European elites. And it obviously worked (which is scary in and of itself).

But it also shows that Europeans remain naive to the extreme if they believe Rubio’s pitch that he wants Europe to be strong in order to share the spoils of a new age of Western imperialism.

What’s the thinking here? That Trump’s America – “America first” – would suddenly become magnanimous and share with Europe just out of sentiment? That’s not how imperialism works: the whole premise of it is that the strong dominate the weak.

When an imperial power is speaking to you of sentiments, of how much they like you and how they want to partner with you – the much weaker party – that’s cause for worry, not applause…

Enough about Rubio’s revanchism, let’s hear from the “alternative.”

AOC Tests Her Foreign Policy Wings

Being just a Congressional Representative, AOC had to make do with panel appearances rather than getting a featured speech.

Some excerpts from her remarks:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: This is a moment where we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the transatlantic partnership, rip up every democratic norm, and calling into question, as was mentioned by David Carney at the World Economic Forum, the rules-based order that we have or question mark do we have?

And so I think one of the reasons why not just myself but many of our colleagues here, Democrats that are here is because we want to tell a larger story that what is happening is indeed very grave and we are in a new era domestically and globally.

There have been many leaders who said we will go back. And I think we have to recognize that we are in a new day and in a new time.

But that does not mean that the majority of Americans are ready to walk away from a rules-based order and that we’re ready to walk away from our commitment to democracy. I think what we identify is that in a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability.

And so I think what we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the west we look the other way for inconvenient populations um to act out these paradoxes whether it is kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonize Greenland, whether it is looking the other way in a genocide.

Hypocrisies are vulnerabilities and they threaten democracies globally. And so I think many of us are here to say we are here and we are ready for the next chapter not to have the world turn to isolation but to deepen our partnership on on greater and increased commitment to integrity to our values.

…
Extreme levels of income inequality lead to social instability…it is an urgent priority that we get our economic houses in order and deliver material gains for the working class, or else we will fall to a more isolated world governed by authoritarians that also do not deliver to working people.

So did she pass the audition?

Reactions to AOC

The New York Times gave her audition mixed notices:

…she tied income inequality to the rise of authoritarians and offered a forceful rebuttal to President Trump’s worldview. She also had some shaky moments.
…
The visit also demonstrated the relative foreign policy inexperience of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who has made a few overseas trips since taking office but does not sit on any House committees devoted primarily to world affairs. She struggled at times to formulate succinct answers at a nighttime panel session, during which she was asked probing and specific questions about how to respond to international crises.

Questioned about whether the United States should send troops to defend Taiwan if China invaded the island, she stalled for roughly 20 seconds before offering a substantive response.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was quicker to respond to questions about other foreign policy matters, such as whether she would support military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — “There’s still so much runway, so much more we can do to avoid that scenario,” she said — and whether the U.S. should re-evaluate aid to Israel. Unconditional aid had “enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she replied.

The Dissident hit AOC’s audition much harder from the left:

While AOC did oppose bombing Iran at the behest of Israel, she repeated CIA and Mossad talking points without giving vital context before doing so.

When asked, “Would you support direct U.S. military strikes on Nuclear facilities if direct negotiations fail with Iran?” AOC responded, “I think that that is a dramatic escalation that no one in the world wants to see. Right now what the Iranian regime is doing particularly with respect to protesters is a horrific slaughter of some estimates have tens of thousands of people.”

The claims of “tens of thousands of people” killed by the Iranian government during protests comes from biased sources openly supporting war with Iran, such as Amir Parasta a German-Iranian eye surgeon who is a lobbyist for the Israeli opposition puppet Reza Pahlavi and the outlet Iran International, which Israeli journalist Barak Ravid said , “the Mossad is using… quite regularly for its information war”.

In other words, AOC opposing war with Iran but repeating the claim of “tens of thousands dead” is akin to saying in 2002, “I oppose war with Iraq, but Saddam definitely has WMDS”.

She also got knocked for her comments about Venezuela:

Oof.

She did at least piss off Fox News with her remarks on the genocide in Gaza.

And FWIW, she did draw more attention to herself than California Governor Gavin Newsom did with his Munich appearance:

Typically for myopic Western media, the Munich keynote speech by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi received far less attention, his call for multilateralism and cooperation being ignored in favor of swill like this from Politico: “Munich 2026 awards: Kaja Kallas’ poker face, Lindsey Graham cursing and Mark Rutte talking to a dog.”

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

The Disorienting Impact of Massive Document Dumps

Like many of you, I’ve been overwhelmed attempting to process the most recent Jeffrey Epstein document dump.

A personal cognitive crisis of credibility if you will.

I came across an explanation for why my normally trusty yellow waders weren’t keeping the filth off my feet from a somewhat unlikely source, the Pop Apologists podcast.

The show, hosted by sisters Lauren and Chanler, is not normally the sort of content I engage with.

But their discussion of the psychic trauma engendered by the latest Epstein files pointed me to a Threads account with an interesting insight.

FWIW, this is the first time I’ve seen any content of interest on Threads.

From Daphne Delvaux, Esq.,Trial Attorney aka The Mama Attorney:

I’ll paste some other key parts of Delvaux’s argument as straight text since the Threads embeds are so cumbersome:

Courts understand that when the brain is flooded with horror, your system gets hijacked by the primal brain. You go into hypervigilance, rage, obsession, and collapse. We have a name for this: reptile theory.

Reptile theory is a trial strategy built on this premise: if you can bypass the cognitive brain and activate the primitive survival brain (the oldest/reptile part of the brain), you can control outcomes without ever persuading on facts or law. This strategy is not allowed at trial.
…
The onus is placed entirely on the reader to make sense of chaos. There are random redactions that force the brain into constant guesswork. You have to deduce, infer, fill in blanks. This keeps the mind spinning, searching, looping.

You may have assumed they are sloppy. They are not. This is a known strategy.

The most ruthless corporate defense lawyers fight cases this exact way. Disorganized document drops, and endless data with no roadmap. Both high-volume but also evasive. It’s at the same time too much information, but also omits the most crucial information.

The strategy has two predictable outcomes.

1) You become consumed. You deep dive. You push to get more information. You stop sleeping. It takes over your life. Your focus narrows until there is nothing else. Gradually, they frack all of your life force. They keep you locked in an endless energy loop in their sick mind games. You become one of their victims.

2) You disengage completely. You decide it’s too much. Too confusing. Too overwhelming. You walk away. It implodes from your exhaustion.

Either way, they win.

While Delvaux may be correct that POTUS Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi is employing a known trial lawyer strategy — one that aligns perfectly with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” tactic for overwhelming the corporate media.

Psyoper Delude Thyself

Unfortunately for Bondi and Team Trump, the POTUS infamously gets most of his information from cable news.

Thus when Bondi floods the media zone and glitches the MSM, she is further disorienting her boss.

And, as Michael Tomasky pointed out at The New Republic, the more tightly bubbles are sealed shut, the bigger they get, and the bigger they get, the louder they burst:

On a personal level, Donald Trump is becoming more and more unhinged. He rambles, he stumbles, he fumbles. We don’t know whether he actually pooped himself in that one much-discussed episode in the Oval Office. But the fact that it has been discussed as something that might have happened is bad enough. And even if he retains full control of those evacuations, it’s the ones coming out of his brain and mouth that remain more concerning.
…
Politically, the bubble in which he lives is becoming further and further removed from reality. His penchant for self-aggrandization, always prodigious, has lately reached the point of insane self-parody.
…
He has come to believe that the American people actually want what Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing where it’s been unleashed. They do not. He has created for himself a world in which he never hears a negative word about himself. This is not a plea for him and his people to wake up—they won’t, and I’m well past hoping they will. It is rather an observation that this too is one more Trumpian assault on democracy. He thinks himself answerable only to those who adore him and think he can do no wrong—in other words, to people who require of him no answers at all. The rest of the country—that is, the majority of the country—doesn’t exist.
…
He is of course preparing to steal the midterms. Pundits and talking heads on cable news should dispense with even wondering whether he will. Of course he will try. And if he can’t pull it off, he and the GOP will challenge every result they possibly can in ways that you and I can’t even imagine.

So here we are. Mentally deteriorating, unpopular, incompetent, corrupt, out of touch; and yet, in—for now—unshakably firm control of power, completely beyond any democratic accountability. And when that accountability moment comes in November, he will blatantly do whatever he can to erase and reverse it. So this year is going to be far worse than last, at least for a while.
…
But he can’t shut out reality forever. No one can. And the longer he manages to do so, the more thunderous and unequivocal will be the comeuppance. The Trump bubble will burst, and it’ll be like the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, crashing down on Pharoah’s head.

Hopeful words from Tomasky, who ends by advising “patience and rage” which is so useless as to nearly ruin the whole thing, but let’s keep moving.

Reps. Massie and Khanna Don’t Stop

The bipartisan co-sponsors of the Jeffrey Epstein Transparency Act that triggered all these Epstein document dumps are calling BS on the DOJ’s redactions and naming names. Per The Guardian:

The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said on Tuesday that he and his Republican colleague Thomas Massie had forced the justice department to disclose the “hidden” names of six wealthy men they say are “likely incriminated” by their inclusion in the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

In a post on X at lunchtime, Khanna, of California, named the six as Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem and Leslie Wexner.

Wexner is the billionaire founder of Victoria’s Secret. His extensive ties to Epstein – the late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier – were exposed in a lengthy New York Times investigation in November.

Bin Sulayem is a billionaire businessman and real estate developer from Dubai – and brother of Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the head of FIA, the body that governs the world’s motorsport championships, including the prestigious Formula One series. Email exchanges between Bin Sulayem and Epstein have been previously reported.

The other four men named remain mysterious, for now.

Khanna and Massie refusing to play along with the DOJ’s half-measures are just one of many problems the flood the zone strategy is running into.

Flooding the Zone Doesn’t Work on Info Swarmers

One problem with Bannon’s flood the zone with shit tactic is that only the corporate media is frozen in place by the explosions of filth, the swarms of social media feed on it like dung beetles. Per Politico:

…we are witnessing this through the prism of an entirely new phenomenon — an internationally crowdsourced scandal, unfolding in real time across your social media feed. In many cases, citizen journalists have been nearly as capable as professional journalists and investigators at finding insightful documents within the millions of DOJ files and bringing them to the fore.

Parlor games: Washington being what it is, the universal access to raw investigative data has given rise to another new fad. People are also scouring the Epstein files for references to their bosses, their corporate rivals, their political enemies — even their own families. Gossip about some of the highest-profile revelations had been swirling in D.C. circles for days in advance, uncovered by the associates of those involved. Plenty of people are hunting not for criminal behavior, but for the intrigue.

“We are all searching the files: for colleagues, competitors, clients,” one well-connected PR operative tells POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman. “It’s shocking to see what some of the most powerful people in the world say to each other in private — and it’s also shocking how many folks we know are mentioned in some capacity, even completely innocuously.”

Politico then points to an important find in the Epstein files by The Miami Herald’s Julie Brown (who isn’t representative of the MSM, she’s a throwback to the Watergate era of reporting) about Trump and Epstein.

Politico concludes that Brown’s piece “ultimately seems to corroborate Trump’s longstanding insistence that he had fallen out with Epstein long before any police inquiry, and cut all ties. It’s important to note that the figures who have so far been damaged by this latest tranche of documents are those who chose to maintain links with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, like Peter Mandelson, Britain’s now-former ambassador to Washington.”

Which brings us to our next section, how are the Europeans reacting to the latest document dump splashing across the Atlantic and getting all over them?

European Leaders Frozen in Place

The redoubtable Simplicius addresses the European failure to respond to the current crisis of confidence and goes on to explain why they can’t.

Interested readers should also see Yves’ piece on “The European Veal Pen” to better understand their impotence.

After summing up the various troubles of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour government caused by the latest Epstein release and Starmer’s refusal to resign, Simplicius gets to his point:

Whether Starmer actually survives or not is immaterial: the fact remains that Europe is in a deep crisis of credibility, no longer retaining even a picayune’s worth of moral authority over the rest of the world. But the whacky thing is that these Western governments have no real solutions to their problems because the issues are so utterly structural and fundamental in nature, that merely the simple act of admitting to their root causes would signify the total collapse of everything the Western globalist order has built up over the last decades.
…
European countries are trapped in this zugzwang of inextricable problems that can only be “patched” over because, as stated earlier, truly fixing them at the first-principle level would require peering into uncomfortable closets where the elites have stashed their secrets.
…
Another example is the current censorship firestorm (Link mine, not Simplicius’, Nat): instead of addressing the actual issues that terrify these elites, bringing them out into the open and having a real honest dialogue about them at the societal level, the elites prefer the short-term “hotfix” of stamping out any dissent or discussion of ‘sensitive topics’ with increasingly crude and heavy-handed tactics. They believe this will make the issues go away, but instead it engenders vast social resentment, discontent, and distrust of all the organs of power, from media to government and everything in between. But of course, if these topics were allowed to be honestly and sensibly discussed in the ‘public square’, it would unravel the entire house of cards, making it a real no-win situation for the controllers in charge.
…
European elites have no way out of their sunk-cost fallacy trap: to turn back would be to admit to sins so monstrous they have squandered the livelihood of the entire European civilization; for these criminals, there is no other way but forward. Double down and hope your opponents happen to break before you do.

The Status Quo Doesn’t Have to Outlast Reality, It Just Has to Outlast Us

That last sentence brings to mind Aurelian’s summary of the fate of the late 2010s gilets jaunes movement in France:

…the reality was that the GJ were numerous enough and determined enough that they could actually have shaken the government to its foundations if they had been sufficiently organised. On at least one occasion in December 2018, there were enough of them in central Paris to have laid siege to the Elysée Palace, and indeed there was a helicopter on standby to take Macron to safety. But the GJ were from the sticks, and few of them had much idea of the geography of Paris, so they wandered around trying to find where Macron lived. As it was, the government realised that it only had to hang on and make a few token concessions, and eventually the protests would stop, which they did.

If the rulers of the West are unwilling or unable to change in response to their crisis of credibility and the people are too disorganized to force them, where does that leave us?

Stuck in the Spodocene?

I came across this translation of Hakan Illatikdi’s “The Spodocene: inhabiting the ruins of progress” (Italian original) at GeoPolitiQ and found it just too on the nose:

In thermodynamics, a system does not necessarily collapse when its energy is exhausted. First, it goes through a more disturbing phase: the point preceding the change of state. It is the moment when matter is formally the same, but no longer behaves as before. The temperature rises, pressure builds up, molecules agitate without finding a new stable form. Nothing seems to have changed, and yet everything is about to change.

Our era is exactly there.

The Spodocene is not yet the next state. It is the antechamber. The system continues to function, but it does so erratically, inefficiently and increasingly violently against itself. The energy that circulates no longer produces order, but friction. The mechanisms that once guaranteed stability — markets, institutions, narratives of progress — continue to operate, but have lost their ability to structure the whole. The result is not immediate collapse, but prolonged instability: a social, political and subjective warming that heralds an inevitable transition.

The change of state is neither a moral decision nor a voluntary act. It occurs when a critical threshold is reached. The most common mistake is to confuse this phase with a correctable anomaly. The most costly mistake is to try to force the old form when the conditions that made it possible no longer exist.

This is what defines our present. The elites continue to act as if it were enough to regulate the temperature, redistribute pressures or adjust variables to recover the previous balance. But that balance is no longer available. The system is not disordered: it is saturated. It does not need corrections, but transformation.
…
We are still in the moment before. The world has not changed state, but it can no longer return to its previous one. This interval — unstable, uncomfortable, fraught with tension — is the only real space for dispute. The Spodocene is not the end of history: it is the moment when history returns to being open, not because of the promise of progress, but because of the exhaustion of all the illusions that sustained it.

The synchronicities were piling up in my inbox yesterday morning as I worked on this piece because I had no sooner plugged in the above, than the latest from Nefarious Russians arrived in my email.

Is This What the Late Stage Soviet Experience Was Like?

Evgenia, born in the former USSR just as it collapsed writes “The Disappearance of Barbarians: How the Soviet Union psyoped itself out of existence.”

Now, though, having become an American and living through the decline of the American Empire in its very centre — New York — I do wonder if this is how it felt to be in Moscow during late Perestroika. A big part of America’s intelligentsia seems to be more and more disillusioned with the American myth, in American Exceptionalism. Meanwhile, the other part of America is doubling down on it and joining quasi-fascist “old guard” forces that are promising to keep the myth strong as ever…

As I’ve been writing and saying for a while, this American unraveling feels vaguely familiar. I was born during the unraveling of another mythic empire and grew up in its postmortem, a world that was like Fellini’s (and Petronius’s) Satyricon — a proto-Christian world where there was no faith and where basic instincts and base pursuits reigned in society, or what was left of it.
…
The Soviet elite actually believed American propaganda about the Soviet Union. And this elite themselves demonized the Soviet Union into extinction. The Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty were, in the end, very successful in carrying out their mission: to destabilize and topple the Soviet Union from within, despite all the censorship and Iron Curtain protections the Soviet Union put up in defense. In fact, this attempt to wall itself off from the West contributed to its demise, since no one could really experience the West as it was and relied on an idealized picture of the West they had in their heads — a picture drawn, in large part by American propaganda and Hollywood.

Unfortunately for Western intelligentsia, there is no great power ideological rival to admire and emulate the way the Soviets admired the West, leaving us stuck in the Spodocene.

I’m aware that some readers will be screaming “What about China?” to themselves, but I’ll have to save that for another time. Suffice it to say few in the West are even seriously attempting to understand China, much less admiring or emulating Earth’s longest-running civilization as it rises again.

But we can at least read how we are viewed by Chinese-born English-language author Yiyun Li:

I cried every morning on the way to nursery school, but few four-year-olds would know how to articulate their terror and misery. There were other adults at the school, but none of them seemed to find the teacher’s practice unacceptable (and perhaps the parents, had they known, would not have done either). All of them must have benefited from the teacher’s regime – we were obedient, easily manageable.

Living in today’s America reminds me of that nursery school. The reigning tyranny; the men who brutalise the innocent – like the boy with the hammer – because they can; the people who, like my mother, say this can’t be true, life can’t be that terrible; if bad things happen, you are the problem; do not provoke; keep up the hope; things will be better – by the midterms, in four years, some day.

But let’s close with two realities that may insist on breaking through Trump’s info-bubble and bring and end to the Spodocene or what I’ve been calling the “Interregnum of Unreality.”

I am referring to war and economics.

Scylla and/or Charybdis?

First up, The Wall Street Journal has elected to inform its readers about what Julien Garran is calling “The Biggest Capital Misallocation in History.”

From the WSJ’s piece “Big Tech’s AI Push Is Costing a Lot More Than the Moon Landing”, I’ll let the following picture serve as several thousand words:

As for war, I’ll quote William Schryver’s latest (and refer interested readers to Yves’ piece from Monday):

…contrary to the perceptions of most Americans and others around the world, making war against Iran in its own backyard here in 2026 is all but certain to produce disastrous results for both the US and Israel — and has pronounced potential to spark a regional war, spiral out of control, and ultimately draw in Russia, China, and North Korea.

In any case, it must be understood that, in firmly rejecting US/Israel demands, Iran is effectively dictating terms — and this strongly confirms what many of us have argued since last summer: Iran was the clear winner of the 12-Day War. Israel knows it, the US knows it, and Iran knows it.

If the reports above are more or less accurate, then it is undeniably evident that Washington is angling for an exit from this march to madness.

But, given that the Iranians are now dictating the terms of that exit and will not agree to a reprise of the orchestrated Operation Midnight Hammer, and its fictitious B-2 bunker-busting strike, and given the massive concentration of American military power in the region, and given the huge investment in menacing bravado Trump has already made in this ill-conceived adventure, war may now be unavoidable.

As Dean Wormer warned the Freshman from Animal House, “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life,” I hope someone is warning Donald Trump that a market crash and a losing war on Iran is no way to go through a second term.

But we all know he won’t hear the warning over the din of cable news.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Trump Muses About Nationalizing Elections

Last week POTUS Trump guested on Dan Bongino’s podcast and said something about “we ought to nationalize the voting” that got quite a bit of attention, helping Bongino to draw 3.3 million viewers on Rumble.

Bongino, returning to podcastland after his tenure as Deputy Director of the FBI ended in December, got Trump talking about elections:

President Donald Trump: I won in a landslide. I won every swing state. I won the popular vote by millions. I won everything. I won a thing called counties, the counties that were, it’s such a big vote.

That’s why the map was entirely red when you looked, it had two little purple lines or two blue lines on each side, but it was all red.

And counties I won by 2,750, think of this, to 550, 2,750 to 550. It’s becoming a very good count because it’s accurate. You know, it covers the whole country. It’s like a landslide.

But you’re never gonna have that again if you don’t get these people out. These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. And the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it.

The Republicans should say, “We wanna take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.” The Republicans aught to nationalize the voting.

And then we have states that are so crooked and they’re counting votes.

We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re gonna see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order and the ballots, you’re gonna see some interesting things come out. But, you know, like the 2020 election, I won that election by so much. Everybody knows it.

This is the latest of many Trump attacks on American election integrity. The New York Times chronicled his transgressions:

In March, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that tried to make significant changes to the electoral process, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship and demanding that all mail ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day. But that effort has largely been rebuffed by courts.

On social media, Mr. Trump has pushed for even more drastic changes. In August, he wrote that he wanted to end the use of mail-in ballots and potentially the use of voting machines.

Trump’s Truth social screed about mail-in ballots is worth a peek just to get a feel for Trump’s paranoid style in full bloom.

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with the FBI

Last week Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) sent the FBI to search a Georgia election center, per the NYT:

F.B.I. agents executed a search warrant on (January 28) for an election center in Fulton County, Ga., seeking to seize ballots in a significant escalation of the administration’s efforts to investigate a jurisdiction that President Trump has continued to criticize over his 2020 defeat in the state.
…
The search warrant authorized F.B.I. agents to search for all “physical ballots from the 2020 general election” in the county, according to a copy viewed by The New York Times, as well as all ballot images produced by scanning ballots, all voter rolls from that year, and all tabulator tapes, which serve as a kind of voting machine receipt for election results.
…
In an unusual twist, the prosecutor listed on the warrant is not from Georgia, but the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus. It is unclear what would connect prosecutors in Missouri to Mr. Trump’s longstanding complaints about how the 2020 election in Georgia was conducted.

The raid featured a special guest star, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who is running her own separate investigation into the 2020 elections (“she’s doing her own thing” one administration official said), but came along to watch the FBI raid in Georgia, per The Guardian:

The review led by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), authorized on the basis that it is assessing election integrity, has been focused for months on potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and the possibility of foreign interference.

As part of that effort, Gabbard has been briefing Trump and senior White House advisers every few weeks. Officials said Trump directed her to travel to Fulton county, Georgia, so she could observe the FBI executing a search warrant on Wednesday.

The raid itself was overseen by Andrew Bailey, the deputy FBI director, who was also sent by Trump to Georgia.
…
The ODNI review was initially overseen by the Director’s Initiatives Group, or Dig, a taskforce that Gabbard established within her agency, which focused on vulnerabilities with voting machines used in the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the matter.

But Dig was dissolved late last year after it misidentified the person who placed pipe bombs outside Democratic and Republican party headquarters before the January 6 Capitol riot, the person said. In December, the justice department charged a different individual over the pipe bombs.

CNN chronicled six different explanations from the Trump administration as to why DNI Gabbard was down in Georgia.

There’s also a super-double extra incredibly top secret whistleblower allegation against Gabbard, per the WSJ:

A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.
…
The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a November letter that the whistleblower’s lawyer addressed to Gabbard. The letter, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, accused Gabbard’s office of hindering the dissemination of the complaint to lawmakers by failing to provide necessary security guidance on how to do so.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Gabbard’s office confirmed that the complaint concerned Gabbard but dismissed it as “baseless and politically motivated.”

Today the NYT had some new details:

Members of Congress were briefed this week on a whistle-blower report about an intelligence intercept of a call between two foreign nationals discussing a person close to President Trump, according to people familiar with the material.

It is not clear what country the two foreign nationals were from, but the discussion involved Iran. The whistle-blower report was drafted last May, around the time the Trump administration was deliberating about a strike on Iran. Mr. Trump ordered a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in June.
…
The whistle-blower accused Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of limiting who could see the report and of blocking wider distribution among the nation’s spy agencies, according to people familiar with the complaint.

People who have reviewed the whistle-blower report have differed about the importance of the underlying intelligence, which was collected by the National Security Agency.

As always, it’s challenging to parse disputes between Trump, Gabbard and the incumbent intelligence agency staffers. Neither side is trustworthy or well-intentioned and both are constantly pre-occupied with nonsense.

While the specific investigations may go nowhere and most of Trump’s various musings about what “Republicans ought to do” don’t amount to much, the net effect is pretty damaging.

Some might even call it a stochastic attack on American elections.

American Election Officials Quitting in Droves

Politico has the latest on the impact of Trump’s vociferous election skepticism on the people who monitor American elections:

Increasingly violent threats toward and harassment of public officials — from county clerks up to the president — are driving more and more of those figures out of their jobs, a particular concern among local election officials, who have struggled with attrition for years.

In the years since the 2020 election, roughly 50 percent of top local election officials across 11 western states have left their jobs since November 2020, according to a new report from Issue One, a bipartisan organization that tracks election issues and supports campaign finance reforms.

The election administration world has been grappling with a significant brain drain since the one-two punch of the 2020 pandemic and threats arising from conspiracy theories surrounding that year’s election. But the new report — which focuses on election offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming — is particularly concerning because it shows departures haven’t tapered off, marking a 10 percentage point uptick since the group’s 2023 report survey.

The new data on election officials comes at the same time as another report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue — shared first with POLITICO — found a more than 200 percent increase in violent rhetoric toward public officials when comparing Oct. 2021 to Sept. 2022 with Oct. 2024 to Sept. 2025.

As dispiriting as all of the above may be, Bill Scher at the Washington Monthly reassures his liberal readers it will all be ok:

Trump’s call for a partisan takeover of the electoral apparatus understandably triggered reciprocal panic in Democratic circles about voter suppression and outright vote stealing. Considering how far Trump was willing to go to steal the 2020 election—from disparaging mail ballots to pursuing dubious litigation to egging on an unruly mob hellbent on obstructing the Electoral College count—every American committed to free and fair elections must remain on the highest alert until Trump has fully left the political sphere.

But what Trump precisely said, how the White House is cleaning it up, and what congressional Republicans are doing, suggests less of a coordinated plan to commandeer the midterms and more of a Republican Party in disarray amid a rising Blue Wave.
…

Why—aside from respect for democracy—should Republicans refrain from voter suppression tactics? Because, as I detailed for the Washington Monthly four years ago, 21^st-century voter suppression tactics have been repeatedly shown to flop.

An academic study analyzing 10 years of strict voter identification laws found that they had “no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation.” And we have anecdotal examples of Democrats cannily exploiting attempted voter suppression by Republicans to galvanize base turnout. Look at President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election or Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election in Georgia, which came one year after the GOP-controlled state government enacted a flurry of restrictive voting policies, prompting Democratic outrage that was wisely channeled into get-out-the-vote efforts.
…
Last March, the president issued an executive order imposing restrictive voting rules on states. The Justice Department has been trying to piece together a national voter database from unredacted state voter roll data, which the Brennan Center says is an “attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls based on incomplete and likely inaccurate information.” Last week, FBI agents, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard creepily looking over their shoulders, seized 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia. Trump, based on what he told Bongino (“you’re going to see something in Georgia”), is planning to use the records to further his gaslighting claims that Joe Biden stole the election in Georgia when we have plenty of evidence that Trump was plotting the theft. And considering how Trump has already abused his power with National Guard and ICE deployments designed to punish Democratic-run cities, we can’t discount the possibility that he will try to send armed agents to election sites with the intent of intimidating voters.

But, as with any bully, these real and potential acts of force and intimidation mask underlying weakness. A president simply doesn’t have the power to take over a Constitutionally designed, decentralized, 50-state managed election system. And as with any bully, the way to respond is to have your eyes wide open, but also have no fear.

Now About that Blue Tide

I posted last week about the 31 point swing away from Republicans in a Texas State Senate special election.

This weekend saw a special state house election in Louisiana go the Democrats’ way:

Louisiana Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez defeated her Republican opponent by double digits in the special election Saturday night for a state House seat in a district President Trump won by 13 points in 2024.

Martinez won 62% of the vote compared to 38% for her Republican opponent, Brad Daigle, according to unofficial results from the Louisiana Secretary of State.

…

Martinez’s win is not a flip since Democrats already held the seat, but Republicans had seen it as a prime pickup opportunity since Mr. Trump won the district three times. Her win was a 37-point swing from the 2024 results, although the district has voted for Democrats at the state and local levels previously.

Trump’s collapsing popularity is likely playing the biggest role in these Dem wins, since the contending elements within the party have come to no accord.

AIPAC Steps on a Rake

A special election in New Jersey didn’t have much partisan significance, since there was no hope of a Republican winning the race, but it was significant in terms of the Democrats’ internal battles over Israel.

Responsible Statecraft wrote it up:

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, launched a $4 million campaign to discredit former Rep. Tom Malinowski, a moderate Democrat who has entertained the idea of placing conditions on aid to Israel. The group hoped that its investment in countering Malinowski would help elevate more staunchly pro-Israel candidates in the race. But the effort appears to have had the opposite effect, bolstering the campaign of left-wing candidate Analilia Mejia, who has called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide.

Now, with more than 91% of votes tallied, Malinowski and Mejia are nearly deadlocked with roughly 28% of votes each. AIPAC’s preferred candidate, former New Jersey Lieutenant Governor Tehana Way, is in a distant third, winning 17% of votes counted so far. The winner of the Democratic primary is widely expected to win the special election against Republican candidate Joe Hathaway.

Politico had more on the reaction to the election results and AIPAC’s role:

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee uncorked $2 million to try to sink a mainstream Democrat in a multi-candidate special House election primary in New Jersey — and it’s infuriating mainstream Democrats and some of the pro-Israel lobby’s supporters.

“It’s pissing people off,” said Steve Schale, a longtime Democratic strategist and former Obama campaign adviser, who described it as “maddening.”
…
AIPAC’s interventions in the New Jersey special election for Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s House seat was the first test of the group’s muscle ahead of the 2026 primary season, when they are expected to spend millions on Democratic primaries across the country. AIPAC’s super PAC is expected to weigh in on House primaries, starting in Illinois’ March primaries. Democratic candidates and strategists are also bracing for them to potentially wade into contentious Senate primaries in Michigan and Minnesota.

And their first foray of 2026 backfired spectacularly.

Matt Bennett, the co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way, called their efforts “one of the greatest own-goals in American political history,” and warned that “It hurt everybody in the moderate movement” as they head into a competitive primary season.

Thais kind of blowback illustrates why AIPAC is using stealthier strategies in many races.

Drop Site News has the deets:

AIPAC road-tested its stealth approach in a 2024 House primary in Oregon that pitted Susheela Jayapal, the sister of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), against physician Maxine Dexter. Dexter raised relatively little money throughout much of her campaign, then saw a last-minute deluge organized by AIPAC coupled with outside spending through super PACs, which themselves turned out to be funded by AIPAC. The timing of the donations meant that there was no meaningful transparency before voters went to the polls, and Dexter expressed a mixture of ignorance and umbrage when her opponents suggested the money actually came from AIPAC.
…
the same pattern is emerging in three competitive House primaries in Illinois. The pieces of the puzzle can be found in the campaign disclosures of House candidates Laura Fine, a state legislator running in Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District for the open seat vacated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky on the North Side of Chicago and its northern suburbs; Donna Miller, a Cook County commissioner running in Illinois’s Second District to replace Rep. Robin Kelly on Chicago’s South Side and southern suburbs; and Melissa Bean, a banker and former member of Congress making a comeback in Illinois’s Eighth District in the western suburbs of Chicago. Bean is also running for an open seat to replace Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who like Kelly is running for Senate.

Putting the pieces together, it is clear that AIPAC is again funding super PACs in order to secretly funnel money to its preferred candidates, while also coordinating donors to give to those candidates directly.
…
A look at Miller, Fine, and Bean’s filings betrays an impressively coordinated operation at work. Sixty-five donors who previously gave to AIPAC or its affiliated super PAC United Democracy Project (UDP) have given to both Miller and Fine. These donors delivered $88,066.66 to the Fine campaign. They also contributed $119,746.33 to Miller. A whopping 237 former AIPAC/UDP donors have given to both Miller and Bean, contributing $396,288.01 to Bean and $429,083.00 to Miller. Forty-four of these donors have given to all three candidates, sending a total of $208,753.33 to them.

Time will tell if AIPAC can get back to their winning ways in American elections.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Forgive the strained metaphor, but the guy is pushing his luck beyond all reasonable bounds, even in an era of utter unreality.

Epstein Files Embarrassment

Last June, Musk made his infamous declaration that “Donald Trump is in the Epstein Files. That is why they have not been made public.”

Unfortunately for Musk, he’s all over the Epstein Files as well and this new tranche has been particularly embarrassing for him.

Here’s what we knew about Musk & Epstein as of 2019 per Vanity Fair:

Epstein remained a fixture in elite circles even after he was a registered sex offender. A few years ago, for example, he was a guest at a dinner in Palo Alto hosted by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman for the MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden. At the dinner, Elon Musk introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg. (“Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honoring scientists that was not organized by Epstein,” Zuckerberg spokesman Ben LaBolt told me. “Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.”)

In an email, Elon Musk responded: “I don’t recall introducing Epstein to anyone, as I don’t know the guy well enough to do so, Epstein is obviously a creep and Zuckerberg is not a friend of mine. Several years ago, I was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon with Talulah [Riley], as she was curious about meeting this strange person for a novel she was writing. We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art. He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined.”

A Musk spokesperson also emailed: “Elon never introduced Jeffrey Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg and does not know either person well enough to do so. They simply happened to be guests at a neuroscience dinner organized by Reid Hoffman.”

The Guardian documents how the latest tranche of Epstein files contradict Musk’s 2019 claims:

Emails in the files appear to show the two cordially messaging each other on two separate occasions to make plans for Musk to visit Epstein’s island.

The documents include Musk and Epstein emailing in both 2012 and 2013 to determine when Musk should make the trip to Little St James. Neither exchanges appear to have resulted in Musk visiting the island, due to logistical issues.

“Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?” Musk states on 13 December 2013.

“any day 1st – 8th . play it by ear if you want. always space for you,” Epstein replies.

Musk then sends several emails relaying his schedule, and the two settle on 2 January as a date for the visit. The email exchange ends with Epstein telling Musk that he would need to remain in New York and sending his regrets that they could not meet.

“Bad news- Unfortunately , my schedule will keep me in New York . I was really looking forward to finally spending some time together with just fun as the agenda. so i am very disappointed. Hopefully we can schedule another time in the near future,” Epstein wrote.

In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”.

“Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley.

Musk followed up with an email on 25 December in response to another Epstein message that encouraged him to visit and offered use of his helicopter.

“Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for,” Musk wrote.

“Understood , I will see you on st Barth, the ratio on my island might make Talilah uncomfortable,” Epstein responded.

“Ratio is not a problem for Talulah,” Musk said.

On 2 January 2013, Musk sent Epstein an email suggesting that the visit wouldn’t take place saying: “Logistics won’t work this time around.”

Futurism documents Elon’s floundering post-reveal:

First, Musk acted like nothing happened. He questionably reshared an AI-generated video of an anime-style child, posted political memes, and spoke of his chatbot Grok’s ability to probe the Universe itself. It was only in an after-midnight tweet that he finally addressed the elephant in the room.

“No one pushed harder than me to have the Epstein files released and I’m glad that has finally happened,” Musk wrote. “I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express’, but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name.”
…
The desperation only got more palpable as the posts went on. Musk responded to a screenshot of news headlines about his newly revealed ties to Epstein — none of which were all that sensationalized — with his favorite refrain that “Legacy media lies relentlessly.”

But as his replies continued to fill up with screenshots of the emails, Musk tried a new defense: that he was so good with “young women” that he had no reason to solicit the services of the billionaire child sex offender.

“If I actually wanted to spend my time partying with young women, it would be trivial for me to do so without the help of a creepy loser like Epstein,” Musk fumed, before boasting about his incredible mental capacity. “And I would still have 99% of my mind available to think about other things. But I don’t.” (X users pointed out a tweet Musk made in 2022 lamenting that he hadn’t “had sex in ages (sigh).”)

The post, puzzlingly, was made in reply to Grok. Musk was arguing not with his own critics, but his AI chatbot that’s notorious for being closely aligned with his personal views.

He has also tried to draw attention to other tech figures who were in the Epstein files to distract from himself.

Is that the sound of a swell-head billionaire going supernova?

And the Epstein Files are just a sideshow for Elon, he’s got legal battles to fight.

Grok: Porn Purveyor

We’ll start with the legal case where Elon is playing defense.

Trouble started in January when reports like this one from The Atlantic emerged.

Earlier this week, some people on X began replying to photos with a very specific kind of request. “Put her in a bikini,” “take her dress off,” “spread her legs,” and so on, they commanded Grok, the platform’s built-in chatbot. Again and again, the bot complied, using photos of real people—celebrities and noncelebrities, including some who appear to be young children—and putting them in bikinis, revealing underwear, or sexual poses. By one estimate, Grok generated one nonconsensual sexual image every minute in a roughly 24-hour stretch.

And now France is raiding the X Paris office and there’s trouble in the UK, via the BBC:

The French offices of Elon Musk’s X have been raided by the Paris prosecutor’s cyber-crime unit, as part of an investigation into suspected offences including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography.

The prosecutor’s office also said both Musk and former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino had been summoned to appear at hearings in April.

In a separate development, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced a probe into Musk’s AI tool, Grok, over its “potential to produce harmful sexualised image and video content.”

The Washington Post is in fine hand-wringing form as it tries to explain how Musk got himself into this particular pickle:

Since leaving his role overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service in May, Musk has become a constant presence at xAI’s offices — at times sleeping there overnight — as he has pressed to increase Grok’s popularity, according to two of the people. In meeting after meeting he has championed a new metric, “user active seconds,” to granularly measure how long people spent conversing with the chatbot, according to two of the people.

As part of this push for relevance, xAI embraced making sexualized material, publicly releasing sexy AI companions, rolling back guardrails on sexual material and ignoring internal warnings about the potentially serious legal and ethical risks of producing such content, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen former employees of X and xAI, as well as multiple people familiar with Musk’s thinking — some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution — and documents obtained by The Post.

…when xAI merged its editing tools into X in December, giving anyone with an account the ability to make an AI picture, it allowed sexual images to spread at unprecedented speed and scale…

That behind-the-scenes shift in xAI’s philosophy burst into public view last month, when Grok generated a wave of sexualized images, placing real women in sexual poses, such as suggestively splattering their faces with whipped cream, and “undressing” them into revealing clothing, including bikinis as tiny as a string of dental floss. Musk appeared to egg on the undressing in posts on X.

Grok also generated 23,000 sexualized images that appear to depict children, according to estimates from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Reuters has a little more:

After Musk’s social media company X announced new curbs on Grok’s public output, nine Reuters reporters gave it a series of prompts to determine whether and under what circumstances the chatbot would generate nonconsensual sexualized images.

While Grok’s public X account is no longer producing the same flood of sexualized imagery, the Grok chatbot continues to do so when prompted, even after being warned that the subjects were vulnerable or would be humiliated by the pictures, the Reuters reporters found.

X and xAI did not address detailed questions about Grok’s generation of sexualized material. xAI repeatedly sent a boilerplate response saying, “Legacy Media Lies.”
…
The Reuters reporters – six men and three women in the U.S. and the UK – submitted fully clothed photos of themselves and one another to Grok between January 14 – 16 and between January 27 – 28. They asked the chatbot to alter the images to depict them in sexually provocative or humiliating poses.

In the first batch of prompts, Grok produced the sexualized images in response to 45 of 55 instances. In 31 out of those 45 cases, Grok had also been warned that the subject was particularly vulnerable. In 17 out of the 45 cases, Grok generated images after being specifically told they would be used to degrade the person.

Super-villain or rich idiot going supernova out of desperation to monetize a terrible investment (or maybe it wasn’t)? Time will tell.

Let’s move on to the suit where Elon is on offense.

Suing OpenAI and Microsoft

I meant to include this in my January post about Microsoft and OpenAI but ran out of time & space.

The Times (UK) has a decent summary of what supernova Elon is up to by suing a company he co-founded and their biggest corporate patron:

Elon Musk is seeking damages of up to $134 billion from OpenAI and its long-time backer Microsoft, claiming he deserves the “wrongful gains” both companies received from his early support.

In a federal court filing on Friday, Musk’s lawyer claimed the ChatGPT owner gained between $65.5 billion and $109.4 billion from Musk’s contributions when he co-founded OpenAI with its chief executive Sam Altman in 2015, while Microsoft, which has a 27 per cent stake in OpenAI, gained between $13.3 billion and $25.1 billion.

“Without Elon Musk, there’d be no OpenAI. He provided the bulk of the seed funding, lent his reputation, and taught them all he knows about scaling a business. A pre-eminent expert quantified the value of that,” Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, said.
…
OpenAI said it was an “unserious demand” by Musk and part of what it said was his “harassment campaign” against OpenAI. Both OpenAI and Microsoft challenged Musk’s damages claims in a separate filing on Friday.

The Wall Street Journal has a little more:

Musk was the primary funder in the AI company’s early days, but he and Altman soon had a power struggle over control of the venture. In 2018, Musk stepped down from the board and stopped giving money to OpenAI in 2020, the lawsuit said.
…
In January, more than 100 documents were unsealed as part of the continuing legal battle. The documents include texts and emails between Musk and Altman; transcripts of depositions from Musk, Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; and even private diary entries from (OpenAI President Greg) Brockman.
…
Musk’s attorneys also pointed to private journal entries written by OpenAI’s Brockman in 2017, obtained as part of legal discovery, as proof that the OpenAI founders “secretly had other plans” about the company’s corporate structure, according to a recent court filing.
“We’ve been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for profit,” Brockman allegedly wrote in a private journal entry. “Making the money for us sounds great and all.”

This OpenAI blogpost titled “The truth Elon left out” claims that “and Elon agreed in 2017 that a for-profit structure would be the next phase for OpenAI; negotiations ended when we refused to give him full control; we rejected his offer to merge OpenAI into Tesla; we tried to find another path to achieve the mission together; and then he quit OpenAI.”

OpenAI CSO Jason Kwon has fired numerous shots across Musk’s bow and they’re worth a look for those following the case.

The case is expected to go to trial in April. FWIW, Polymarket gives supernova Elon a 55% chance of winning.

But let’s get to the real meat of this post, the major moves Musk is making.

Merging SpaceX and xAI

Musk is merging xAI (formerly Twiter) and SpaceX, the company with this motto on its homepage: “Making life multiplanetary. SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not.”

And here’s how SpaceX is describing the deal on its website in a memo titled “xAI joins SpaceX to Accelerate Humanity’s Future“:

SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!

Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment.

In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. To harness even a millionth of our Sun’s energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilization currently uses!

The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called “space” for a reason. 😂

By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. It’s always sunny in space! Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future.

Followed by 9 paragraphs of nonsense about orbiting data centers.

The Information has several thousand words worth of info in this chart:

The Wall Street Journal has a more down to Earth explanation of the newly formed private company valued at $1.25 trillian:

Elon Musk said SpaceX acquired xAI, a deal that combines his powerful rocket-and-satellite business with his artificial-intelligence startup that is facing steep competition.

The combination brings together a mature and dominant company in SpaceX, with one that is in a nascent stage. SpaceX operates a fleet of reusable rockets, spacecraft that ferry astronauts to orbit, and Starlink, the world’s largest satellite fleet that provides broadband internet to millions of customers worldwide.

Musk’s xAI, like other AI companies, is training large-language models and runs Grok, a chatbot integrated into the X social-media platform. XAI is facing formidable competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and others.

The Financial Times boils down what Elon is up to very succintly:

Elon Musk pulled off one of the most audacious deals of his career on Monday, merging SpaceX with xAI to create the most valuable private company in history.

The $1.25tn merger combines the billionaire’s dominant rocket maker with his lossmaking AI start-up and social media network X.

Musk said the move was needed to launch data centres into space, build factories on the moon and colonise Mars.

Supporters have praised the tie-up as further evidence of his genius, taking advantage of his reusable rockets and Starlink network of satellites, combined with the data from X and models from xAI.

His critics see it as the latest example of financial engineering, using his personal brand and SpaceX to prop up xAI as it burns through $1bn of cash a month.
“None of the valuations are based on any rational multiple,” said one person who has invested in xAI. “They’re all trading off Elon.”

Gary Marcus has a pretty spicy take that I endorse:

For me anyway, the math ain’t mathing. Trading SpaceX at sixty times 2025 revenue seems, um, optimistic, but at least they have a near-monopoly on both low-cost rackets and satellite internet infrastructure. In contrast, trading xAI at a thousand times revenue when they are in an increasingly crowded field where everyone is being forced into price wars seems nuts. If I owned SpaceX shares I would feel like Elon way overpaid for his own company. For not that much more they could have bought Anthropic, which has had far broader adoption and far less controversy attached to it.

Anyone remember Tesla’s acquisition of Musk’s SolarCity, and how that turned out?

And no matter how stupid and implausible the SpaceX/xAI combination might seem, there’s an analyst on CNBC talking about something even stupider: merging them both with Tesla.

Axios also spins hard for Musk’s SpaceX/xAI combo, or maybe it’s tongue in cheek sarcasm because it sounds like BS to me:

Elon Musk is making one of the most audacious moves in the history of business and tech, arguably betting his empire on the idea of orbital data centers that are powered by the sun.

Don’t be surprised if this is a prelude to a future merger with Tesla, which recently invested $2 billion into xAI.

Tesla would make the chips, SpaceX would be responsible for launch and satellites, and xAI would build the models and agentic networks.

It’s credulous MSM coverage like the above that keeps the mask of unreality firmly affixed on Musk and keeps Tesla’s stock price completely detached from the reality of its abysmal fundamentals.

George Noble has an edifying take:

xAI is burning through $1 billion per month.

The company generated $107 million in revenue last quarter while hemorrhaging $1.46 billion in losses. It burned nearly $8 billion in cash through the first nine months of 2025.

That’s not a business.

SpaceX meanwhile generated $8 billion in profit on $15-16 billion of revenue last year. It’s the ONLY Musk company that actually prints money.

So what do you do when your AI startup is drowning in red ink ahead of your mega-IPO?

You fold the cash-burner into the entity that can still raise absurd amounts of capital.

And we’ve literally seen this exact thing before:

In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion.

SolarCity was bleeding cash, drowning in debt, and trading near all-time lows.

Tesla – the only Musk company at the time that could access the capital markets – absorbed it.

Wall Street analysts called it a “bailout dressed as synergy.” Tesla’s stock dropped 10% on the announcement.

The SpaceX/xAI deal is the same playbook.

Is Musk Going Supernova Because Tesla Is Flailing?

Aaskash Gupta has more:

The math is wild. Before the merger, Musk owned 42% of SpaceX (valued at $800B) and 49% of xAI (valued at $250B). After combining them, his 43% stake in the merged entity is worth $542 billion. The combined valuation jumped to $1.25 trillion, which is $200 billion more than the sum of the parts. That $200 billion in new value appeared because Musk said so. No new revenue. No new product. No external buyer setting the price.

This is the third time he’s done this in under a year. March 2025, xAI acquired X in a stock deal. January 2026, Tesla invested $2 billion of shareholder money into xAI while shareholders are literally suing Musk for conflicts of interest over founding xAI in the first place. February 2026, SpaceX acquires xAI in the largest merger in history. Each transaction reprices the assets upward. Each one has Musk on both sides of the table.

And xAI is burning $1 billion a month trying to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX generates 80% of its revenue launching its own Starlink satellites. Tesla just posted its first annual revenue decline on record. The company he used to fund xAI is shrinking. The company absorbing xAI makes most of its money from itself.

The play is obvious: bundle everything together, inflate the combined valuation, IPO at $1.5 trillion, and let public markets absorb the risk. This is the SolarCity playbook at 100x scale.

Motorhead attempts to explain in their latest newsletter:

The rumors of a possible Tesla + SpaceX merger after horrible earnings and guidance at Tesla last week, and yesterday’s announcement of a SpaceX and xAI merger, are clear signs of desperation by Musk.

After Musk, who has a 75%+ super-majority voting power at SpaceX, got the rocket company to acquire xAI—the worst AI among the major names—it’s only a matter of time for SpaceX shareholders to launch lawsuits against Musk and SpaceX.

And this is all because Musk is now feeling the walls close in on him more quickly than ever before. His plan to do this was always in place, but expedited after the worse-than-expected outlook for Tesla and last weekend’s disclosure that he reveled with Jeffrey Epstein in his twisted ideas of “fun”.
…
While talk of a $1.5 trillion SpaceX IPO had been around since late last year, after Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call last Wednesday, when Tesla’s CFO dropped a bombshell of a capex guidance in “excess of $20 billion” (147% YoY and 1.4x Tesla’s 2025 operating cash flow of $14.7 billion), rumors suddenly emerged that Tesla and SpaceX might merge.

The SpaceX numbers being bandied around are said to be so good that if its IPO raised $50 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation, it would be stupid not to own Tesla shares, as SpaceX’s balance sheet could more than cover “in excess of $20 billion” of Tesla’s capex needs for robotaxis, AI compute power, maintenance capex, and more, of several years (I doubt it).

Will Lockett has more in his piece titled “Tesla Is Officially In Its Enshittification Era“:

Musk is taking Tesla in a downward spiral of enshittification to line his own pocket.
…
Ultimately, all of the conditions of Musk’s $1 trillion pay package have been phrased in such a manner that Musk can meet them without actually delivering any tangible growth…

Tesla has officially discontinued Autopilot for new vehicles in the US and Canada. Now, Tesla bundles it with FSD, so the only way to access this core feature is to buy the $99 FSD subscription.

Autopilot had two features: Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC), which managed speed and following distance, and Autosteer, which actively kept your vehicle in lane. The Autosteer is the feature that has been paywalled, so as standard, Teslas now only come with TACC.

That is an insane thing to put behind the FSD paywall and proves just how desperate Musk is.
…
Musk knows this. He is, in my opinion, an idiot, but even his two pesky neurons are capable of understanding the consequences. Still, he continues to plough ahead anyway, damaging Tesla’s core business in a blatant attempt to meet this awfully worded, arbitrary condition of his ludicrous pay package.

And this is just the start. I can almost guarantee that this decision will not increase FSD sales enough. We can expect more of this enshittification to come. Even the fact that Musk pulled this move months before I expected him to is a telling sign. It hints at desperation.

This piece from NextPit that sums up Musk’s MO:

While Elon Musk raves about robot cabs and his robot Optimus, tests and confessions expose his lies. Are his promises of technical milestones simply miscalculated, or deliberate strategic maneuvers to boost share prices? A reality check!

In Elon Musk’s world, the future is not something that just happens – it is announced with big words. Loudly, visionarily, and with great regularity. But if you take a closer look, Musk’s grandiose promises are not the predictions of an incorrigible optimist and mastermind. Rather, we see a recurring strategic instrument in action! These announcements are not random visions, but calculated maneuvers. The timing, conspicuously often just before the announcement of crucial quarterly figures, exposes their primary function: to deliberately influence the share price and calm nervous investors during critical phases. It is the art of controlling the narrative before the bare figures do. Or the short, more honest definition: Elon Musk is lying!

I’ll close with one last quote tweet, from the delightfully named BonkDaCarnivore:

$TSLA has no focus, piss-poor execution, and rot from the top. It’s a car company whose car sales are in the toilet; plus, they’ve missed every deadline they’ve set by themselves by at least half a decade. The Roadster is a decade late. Auto-summon (which was supposed to be solved by 2018) still won’t work in most parking lots. They wasted money on getting into solar roofing and executed it like trash. Then they claimed they were an AI company for autonomous driving and ended up last to market and years behind their competition in what will be a commodity priced space. They get into power delivery – which remains their only interesting vertical to this day – but invest so little into it that it’s just waiting for a Chinese company to come eat its lunch. And now they’re sinking tens of billions on robots that are 15 years behind Boston Dynamics and numerous other companies, with pie-in-the-sky delivery dates for something that still can’t even effectively walk itself.

Meanwhile, they’ve traded at a valuation more than just about every other car company in the world combined and still trade at a 400 multiple in spite of declining revenues and massive capex spend with no roadmap to ROI.

Oh, and did I mention in the midst of all of this that Elmo routinely commits fraud by taking $TSLA assets and giving them to his other, privately held companies with no value provided to shareholders for their lost property? Remember all those $NVDA GPUs Tesla had that he gave to xAI because “Tesla wasn’t using them”? And all the while the only thing he’s effective at is increasing his pay package in spite of the fact that, for all his “vision”, he’s an absolute shit CEO that all of his top talent flees the moment the golden handcuffs are off. Him getting cozy w/ MAGA is just icing on top of an already rotten cake.

Musk is definite proof of the old scammer’s axiom “Go big or go home,” I’m unaware of anyone in business history with such an appalling track record of dishonesty and yet, no one on Earth can match his financial success.

The market can certainly continue to irrationally reward Musk’s antics longer than all but the shrewdest and best-capitalized shorts can stay solvent, but at some point the Elon Musk supernova could become a financial black hole.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

The Interregnum of Unreality

I postulated last year that America and the West have been trapped in an “interregnum of unreality” since the Obama era:

Until the pillars of American power (the dollar as reserve currency and the perception of American military primacy) fall, the Interegnum continues.

The Interregnum of Unreality kicked off when Obama’s administration and Bernanke’s Fed elected to keep the markets and economy going via massive Quantitative Easing rather than structural reform of the markets that failed under Bush and Obama.

It was paired with a change in geostrategic tactics. No new boots on the ground invasions, although the Iraq and Afghanistan occupancies were maintained as long as possible.

Instead, Obama preferred no-fingerprints regime changes (Egypt, Tunisia, Ukraine, etc) or proxy wars (Syria, Ukraine). He also happily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially not being GW Bush, even while continuing and expanding on many of Bush’s worst policies (surveillance, drones, etc).

After Trump’s election win in 2016, Obama and the Democrats moved to set up a Silicon Valley censorship regime, sending RussiaGate ringleader Mark Warner to Twitter and other companies to let them know that if Adam Schiff wanted an account removed it would be removed.

The “Resistance” to Trump in his first term included much genuine grassroots opposition but was headed by resistance from the Deep State, the MSM, and the online monopolies.

Biden attempted to expand on the total information control, but since he was as charisma-challenged as Obama was blessed and the wheels came off of so many of his policies mid-term, the Democrats lost control of the machine along with their credibility.

It’s tempting to declare us in a new regime, given Trump’s re-election and seeming consolidation of power, which has seen him bring the Silicon Valley companies and much of the MSM onside.

But I think it’s more useful to think of Trump’s second term as merely a change in management for the pre-existing apparatus of control, which seeks total information dominance via traditional and social media.

This past weekend saw several barely controlled eruptions of fact that threaten to rip the mask of unreality off the Western narrative regime.

Yves already covered the military realities Trump is running into vis-a-vis Iran, so we’ll look at the market and media manipulation aspects of the mask of unreality in this post.

Let’s start with the undigested horrors vomited up by the Department of Justice’s most recent releases from the Epstein files.

Consensus Reality Smacked With Massive Epstein Revelations

CNBC summarizes the scope of the document dump:

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents in the latest Epstein disclosure, as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The files, posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release of documents in December.

Media and alt-media flies are swarming on the pile, competing for cheap clicks and to control the interpretation of the revelations. Some seek to maintain the mask of unreality, others are trying to rip it off.

It’s too early to draw many conclusions other than to say that quick survey of headlines from The Financial Times show the files are full of bad news for such titans as Bill Gates, several pre-eminent Norwegians, UK’s ruling Labour Party, prominent figures from the UAE, private equity titans Apollo Global, ex-Barclays CEO Jes Staley, the former Prince Andrew, and many others.

For their part The New York Times has focused on the DOJ’s process, how Trump appears in the files, and only secondarily on business leaders outed in the files:

Trump’s DOJ seemingly did a good job of keeping anything too awful about the POTUS coming out in this batch, since the NYT characterized the new revelations re: Trump as “salacious and unverified claims, as well as documents that had already been made public.”

Despite this tranche of Epstein files doing bipartisan damage, the scope and nature of the revelations in the files leave the ruling class of America and Europe looking collectively monstrous and the mask of reality torn and tattered if not removed.

There are also some indications that Epstein’s fortune originated in the nexus of bad actors involved in 80’s scandals like BCCI and Iran Contra.

There are also some very interesting revelations about Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell’s information control activities involving platforms like Reddit and 4Chan, the mask of unreality didn’t build itself you know:

There’s also some revelations that seem to expose Epstein as a big behind the scenes player in Bitcoin.

Matt Stoller has a post on X that ties the Epstein scandal and our interregnum of unreality together nicely. Here’s an excerpt:

pstein was an entrepreneurial broker across multiple public and private bureaucracies, helping organize ‘under-the-table’ deals among the legal, business, intelligence, and political elites to allow them to escape the rule of law and traditional conflict of interest restrictions. It’s statecraft to allow a superclass to systemically escape the formalized rules.

The pedophilia and prostitution were part of it – that is obviously violating the rule of law – but so are the random favors Epstein bestowed. Like Epstein sending Senator Joe Manchin’s request for a yacht, a request which came from the First lady of the Virginia Islands, to a random NY financier who might have one. Or working with Joi Ito at MIT and billionaire Reid Hoffman to restructure the Bitcoin Foundation. It’s all about matching capital and talent and inputs outside of the restrictions ordinary people are subject to.

This kind of governance is particularly important in Soviet-style states, where everyone knows the rules are fake, where skirting the system IS the system. Epstein and his affiliates thrived because of the weakened institutions of the United States, institutions enfeebled in many cases by the men in his network, like Larry Summers.

Just goes to show that our hypernormalized world is the most manipulated thing ever, behind the mask of unreality.

But maybe that narrative control is beginning to break down. It’s definitely showing signs of wear and tear in the commodities markets.

Weird Scenes in the Precious Metals Markets

The weekend was also bookended by some extremely dramatic movements in the gold and silver markets that revealed a serious discrepancy between New York’s Comex and Shanghai’s Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE) and threatened to rip off the mask of unreality.

Friday, after the Asian markets had closed Comex saw an incredibly dramatic price drop in silver:

Holy backwardation, Marketman!

Commodities analyst David Jensen had questions:

Nothing changed on Friday in the terms of silver metal supply to market reducing the global silver shortage that has driven silver’s price higher.

The open interest (total contracts) on the CME COMEX ended down just 5% on the day indicating that the trading on that day was just a churn with little covering or new positions despite the massive ~ 2x average daily volume traded on Friday.

The CME COMEX has ‘circuit breakers’ in the silver market that halt trading for a period if extreme price movements occur to allow for a more orderly market. What the CME COMEX calls dynamic circuit breakers automatically kick-in when the price of silver drops or rises by 10% on a rolling 1 hour basis. We can see in Figure 1. below that from ~ 12:30 to ~ 13:30 Eastern Time, the price of silver – both cash/spot and futures – ranged between $91 /oz. and $75 /oz., representing an 18% range, and yet the CME COMEX automatic circuit breakers were not activated nor announced by the CME. Yesterday, I wrote a letter to the CME asking why this exception to CME COMEX rules occurred and will report their response when received.

Here’s how CNBC tried to explain it to the squares:

Silver and gold fell on Monday, extending losses after a major selloff at the end of last week.

Silver futures ticked down 0.3% to $78.70. Silver, which had surged alongside gold on safe haven demand and speculative inflows, dove 28% on Friday for its worst day since March 1980.

Gold futures slid more than 3% to around $4,707. The yellow metal dropped nearly 10% on Friday, sending prices below the $5,000 an ounce mark.

The metals swung between gains and losses in Monday’s choppy trading day.

The CME Group increased margin requirements following the steep sell-off last week, effective Monday after market close. Margins on COMEX gold futures have been raised to 8% from 6%, while those on the COMEX 5,000-ounce silver futures were lifted to 15% from 11%.

Metals saw a violent reversal on Friday as optimism around U.S. interest-rate cuts collided with a sudden reassessment of Federal Reserve leadership after President Donald Trump nominated former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh to succeed Chair Jerome Powell after his term ends in May.

Others ascribed the action to blatant market manipulation:

Key points:

When margins are raised across the entire precious metals complex like this, it’s not a single metal story. It’s the exchange saying the volatility regime has shifted enough that the system needs more collateral per unit of exposure.

The part most people miss is that this is a margin regime change

The key shift is how margins are being calculated. CME has moved more explicitly toward percentage of notional margining rather than static dollar amounts. That matters because fixed dollar margins quietly increase leverage as prices rise. Percentage based margins do the opposite because they automatically tighten leverage as prices go vertical. This is CME preventing leverage from expanding precisely when it’s most dangerous.

That’s the real story. This is a clearinghouse firewall, not a headline grabbing intervention.

Just Dario had more:

Key points:

It is an open secret now how many banks and brokers were under water on their silver positions, gold and other precious metals especially after the rally in January. Beware this flow chart roughly applies to all these metals that all crashed on Friday (not silver alone).

What’s even more remarkable is how precious metals crashed on Friday in isolation, stocks, bonds and other commodities were totally unaffected. Anyone that understands any basic of macro and markets knows how this is logically wrong.
…
All in all, it’s fair to estimate how banks and brokers made up to 5bn$ of profits (or lowered their pre existing losses depending on how you look at it) orchestrating one of the biggest price manipulation in the history to abnormally crash the price of silver in a single day. Surely they made more if you consider the same dynamics happened on gold platinum and palladium.

However this left the precious metals market in a massive price dislocation not only between physical and paper, but also across financial products and exchanges.

Trading resumes in less than 24 hours and there is a chance that what’s about to happen is going to be even more historic than Friday’s events because China and India won’t stop buying silver because of the severe industrial shortage they are dealing with.

This video by the Boring Currency is highly recommended for those with a few minutes and hankering to understand WTF?!?

Shanaka Anslem Perera distilled the contending narratives battling for control over silver pricing:

On January 30, 2026, silver futures crashed thirty-one point four percent in a single session, the largest one-day decline since the Hunt Brothers’ collapse in 1980. The institutional interpretation crystallized within hours: speculative excess had been purged, the bubble had burst, and the metal would return to equilibrium somewhere below fifty dollars where sober analysts had always said it belonged. Bloomberg ran the headline “Silver Bubble Bursts.” The Financial Times called it “a long-overdue correction.” Goldman Sachs reiterated their conviction sell recommendation. The smart money, according to this narrative, had seen it coming.

The smart money missed the only data point that mattered.

While paper silver was crashing in New York and London, physical silver in Shanghai was trading at premiums exceeding fifty percent over the COMEX price at the crash low. In Dubai, wholesale premiums reached eighteen percent. In Mumbai, dealers were quoting twenty-five percent above the screen price. At the exact moment when paper silver printed seventy-eight dollars and twelve cents, the lowest tick of the crash, physical silver in Asia was changing hands at prices equivalent to one hundred twenty to one hundred thirty dollars per ounce in wholesale markets where actual metal was delivered. The financial press reported the paper crash. They did not report that physical premiums widened by thirteen to fifty-four percent during the very session that was supposed to prove silver was overvalued.

This is the opposite of what should happen when an asset is genuinely overvalued. When a bubble bursts, holders rush to exit, and physical markets trade at discounts to paper as metal floods the market seeking bids. The widening of physical premiums during a paper crash is the signature of something else entirely. It is the signature of a market that has fractured into two separate pricing regimes that no longer communicate with each other. The paper market and the physical market have divorced, and the implications of that divorce will define precious metals investing for the next decade.

It’s not just markets where the mask of unreality is slipping and threatening the Trump 2.0 regime.

Trump has been doing his best to put an end to the American experiment, but maybe it won’t work.

Trump’s Rapid Clampdown

John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times documents the atrocities:

The speed, scale, flagrance and persistence of the Trump administration’s deviations from established legal and constitutional norms during his second term have been so dramatic that it bears stepping back and taking stock.

Within hours of his January 2025 inauguration, Donald Trump had pardoned hundreds of people convicted of political violence — a hallmark of aspiring autocratic regimes — and shown tacit support for violent resistance to electoral setbacks. Days later he removed legal protections from civil servants and fired 17 oversight officials charged with tackling fraud and corruption. By March the administration was in open conflict with the courts, summer saw police firing rubber bullets at protesters and the removal of the labour statistics agency chief in the wake of weak jobs numbers, and this month brought the criminal investigation into Fed chair Jay Powell and the shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

While US history is hardly free from political violence or maltreatment of disfavoured groups, this blitz on America’s citizens, institutions and — by many estimations — the constitution itself ranks as arguably the most rapid episode of democratic and civil erosion in the recent history of the developed world.

While I certainly think there is plenty of room for skepticism about this kind of quantitative analysis of qualitative phenomena, my lived experience of Trump 2.0 jibes with the FT’s account.

But maybe there’s reason for hope in the narrative wars.

Special Election in Texas Results Are Truly Special

I’ve worked on a LOT of political campaigns in Texas in this century and I have never seen a swing in voter sentiment like we saw last week.

From the Texas Tribune:

Democrat and machinist union leader Taylor Rehmet won the special election Saturday to represent a solidly red Texas Senate district that President Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, a stunning upset that injected a fresh and urgent sense of a panic into the GOP from the Texas Capitol to the White House heading into November’s midterm elections.

With ballots tallied from all but a handful of voting centers, Rehmet had 57% of the vote, besting the 43% for his GOP opponent, conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss, who vastly outspent Rehmet as Republicans including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick mounted a furious funding push in a bid to tilt the election in their favor in the final days. …
Rehmet was far outspent in the leadup to the November election, spending $68,000 compared to millions spent by the two GOP candidates. He remained financially outgunned heading into Saturday, with Wambsganss reporting a whopping $736,000 in expenditures compared to Rehmet’s roughly $70,000, according to campaign finance filings with the state.

Outsiders have also been spending on the race. VoteVets, a progressive national veterans PAC, poured in roughly $500,000 to boost Rehmet. Patrick, the upper chamber’s presiding officer, contributed $300,000 to Wambsganss’ campaign through his PAC, Texas Senate Leadership Fund.

One just doesn’t see outcomes like this:

It’s important to note where the votes came from:

The Wall Street Journal has more:

The 31-point-swing leftward is a bad sign for Republicans hoping to maintain a Senate majority and an already-slim majority in the House, said Jason Villalba, a former GOP state lawmaker who now leads the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, a research group.
“Whatever inroads the GOP was making recently among Latinos in Texas has begun to really revert back to what it was originally,” he said, pointing to Saturday’s shifts in Texas precincts with large Hispanic populations. “That will have implications around Texas and around the country.”

And the implications are bad news for more than just the GOP. Establishment Democrats have reason to fear:

The Democratic candidate’s ability to overcome a massive spending disparity is encouraging because the big money wants to keep the mask of unreality on and they’re marshalling their forces.

Huge Money Wants to Keep the Mask of Unreality Locked On

The New York Times has a pretty scary summary of what the forces of reaction are up to:

If money talks, don’t mess with the A.I. industry, the crypto industry, the pro-Israel lobby or President Trump’s super PAC.

Those four interests are set to be the wild cards of the 2026 midterm elections: They have shown a desire to get involved in primary elections. They are unpredictable in general elections. And they each have tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars, according to new federal filings. Mr. Trump’s super PAC, by far the richest, has amassed a staggering sum of more than $300 million.
…
Leading the Future, the main super PAC funded by the A.I. industry, raised $50.3 million in the second half of 2025, almost all from the family of an OpenAI founder and from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested heavily in A.I.
…
Fairshake, the main super PAC backed by crypto heavy hitters, took in $73.8 million in the second half of 2025, mainly from its typical backers: Andreessen Horowitz, a major investor in crypto, as well as the crypto companies Coinbase and Ripple. Fairshake and its two affiliate groups entered 2026 with $193 million on hand.
…
moved $30 million to its allied super PAC, the United Democracy Project, last year. That super PAC raised $61.6 million in the second half of 2025 and entered this year with almost $96 million on hand, putting it among the best-funded outside groups in the country.

The super PAC, which started in 2022, spent about $35 million in House primaries in the 2024 cycle. That amount appears to be chump change compared with the group’s potential 2026 budget.

But all the fiat currency in the world can’t recreate reality and we’re seeing the limits of financial power being reached in the biggest bubble of them all.

AI’s Mask of Unreality Looking Ragged

AI skeptics have to feel vindicated by the latest development in the world of circular financing, per the WSJ:

Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to help it train and run its latest artificial-intelligence models has stalled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal, people familiar with the matter said.

The companies unveiled the giant agreement last September at Nvidia’s Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters. They announced a memorandum of understanding for Nvidia to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI, and the chip maker also agreed to invest up to $100 billion to help OpenAI pay for it. As part of the deal, OpenAI agreed to lease the chips from Nvidia.
…
Now, the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership, some of the people said. The latest discussions, they said, include an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars as part of OpenAI’s current funding round.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said. He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said.

We are in a time of dramatic conflict between contending forces and the powers that be have immense resources at their command, and no moral scruples or limits holding them back.

Narrative control is possibly the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the status quo.

But maybe, just maybe, the rips in the mask of unreality will help those attempting to resist the lords of ruin and misrule see a path to a better future.

Stay tuned.

Previous attempts to penetrate the mask of unreality:

• Competence, Corruption and Control Limit Administrative Ambition

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

• Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed? It’s Hard to Tell

• Follow the Money and Power in the Trump 2.0 Political Maze

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

So much so that my original version of this post focused almost entirely on White House intrigue and power jockeying and duplicated a bunch of things Yves covered in her post yesterday.

Fortunately I came to my senses and realized I needed to focus on the bigger conflict, the contrasting responses of Minnesota citizens and Democratic officials, tech-empowered ICE agents watching their watchers, and why I think this is not the time and place that will kick off a second American Civil War.

UPDATE 1/28/26 added this disclaimer and some info about Biden’s DOJ investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar: Note that, like any sane person with a minimal grasp of reality, that I’m terrified at the prospect of a 2nd Civil War in the US, and am strongly opposed to anyone trying to escalate the country in that direction.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into it.

Put Bovino’s Head in the Trophy Case

The apparent fall of Gregory Bovino is a good thing for a variety of important reasons, but let’s not let personalities distract us from systems for more than a few paragraphs.

Even if we’re discussing the man Kristi Noem called the “Border Patrol Commander at Large” in her October, 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Left Attacks the Rule of Law.”

This Gregory Bovino:

Fans of MSM hand-waving and obfuscation should check out Politico’s anxious-to-resassure piece “There’s More to Greg Bovino’s Coat Than You Think.”

Bovino didn’t just wear a big coat, he also had his own cadre of special forces within the Border Patrol who have been identified at the center of some of ICE’s worst excesses in Minnesota.

Like many Trumpers who flew too close to the sun enjoyed too much media coverage, Bovino’s time at the top appears to have ended.

The Atlantic was the first to report on Bovino’s transfer:

Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.
Bovino’s sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics after the killing Saturday of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents under Bovino’s command.
…
For the past seven months, Bovino has been the public face of a traveling immigration crackdown on cities governed by Democrats. Noem and other Trump officials gave Bovino the “commander” title and sent him and his masked border agents to Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and then Minneapolis. Bovino became a MAGA social-media star as he traveled the country with his own film crew and used social media to hit back at Democratic politicians and random critics online. Veteran ICE and CBP officials grew more and more uneasy as Bovino worked outside his agency’s chain of command and appeared to relish his role as a political actor.

In Minneapolis, the Trump administration used Bovino as its lead spokesperson, scheduling daily press conferences where he defended agents’ rough tactics and cast blame on protesters and local officials. Border Patrol commanders typically avoid engaging in political arguments with elected officials.

Students of intrigue should know that the fall of a valued underboss often precedes the fall of the boss.

Kristi Noem Fights for Her Political Life

The ICE Barbie seems to understand this and she’s doing her best to cling tightly to her boss, Stephen Miller.

Per Axios:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for issuing misleading and incendiary information that claimed immigration agents killed an armed Minnesota protestor Saturday because he wanted to “massacre” them.

But that language was dictated to Noem and her department by the man most responsible for the controversial operation: Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump adviser, four sources tell Axios.

The episode illustrates the sheer power of Miller, Trump’s close and longest-serving political adviser whose dominion in the White House far exceeds his title.

His influence extends to de facto oversight of Noem, though she’s a Cabinet secretary who technically outranks him.

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.
…
“Stephen heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops,” a source briefed on the process of assembling the press statement said.

Daily Beast had more, including a description of “the alleged extramarital affair between Lewandowski and Noem as the ‘worst-kept secret’ in D.C. ” and a discussion of Lewandowski’s unusual employment arrangement “as an unpaid special government employee who can only work 130 days in a calendar year.”

More importantly the piece claimed that Bovino’s demotion “fueled speculation that Noem and Lewandowski could be next on the chopping block” and blamed Lewandowski for the elevation of Bovino.

And most importantly that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller have “turned against” Noem and Lewandowski, “with Miller furious that Bovino’s tactics have become the focus of the national conversation.”

But it’s not just ICE Barbie and her boytoy Corey that seem to be out of favor with POTUS trump, based on White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s Monday comments per the New Republic.

Leavitt was careful to distinguish Trump’s desire to “let the investigation continue and let the facts lead in this case” with Miller’s feverish claims on X that
“A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”

This was a bit of a switch in direction for the administration as Miller’s tweet had been reposted by official administration accounts, including @TrumpWarRoom and @RapidResponse47.

Miller has now switched his messaging and is blaming his subordinates, via CNN:

In a statement to CNN, Miller said the White House had “provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” he said.

Daily Beast had more White House intrigue in another post, citing an anonymous source who claimed that “Bovino is Corey’s guy” and another who said “the elevation of Bovino and Border Patrol over ICE was “a miscalculation on Lewandowski’s part.”

That same piece said that Stephen Miller “now views Noem, Lewandowski, and Bovino as a ‘liability.’”

But they can also see things from Stephen Miller’s perspective:

The administration finds itself in a bind, though, because its senior officials believe Noem is incapable of running DHS without Lewandowski at her side—and that unwinding the whole trio risks making Trump look like he is retreating, which immigration hardliner Miller is keen to avoid.

The piece also claims that Noem and Lewandowski had planned to step aside until the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota “threw everything into the air.”

That claim that Noem was on her way out is somewhat contradicted by the January 21 piece in the Washington Examiner which reported that Noem and Lewandowski had been doing the intriguing, having “waged an aggressive campaign to make U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott so uncomfortable at work that he would resign.”

Trump Holds a Sit Down With Kristi and Corey

The NYT covered the meeting between Trump, Noem, and Lewandowski based on two anonymous sources who were “briefed on the meeting.”

The Oval Office meeting also included several of Mr. Trump’s top aides, including Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, and Steven Cheung, his communications director. Stephen Miller, a top aide to Mr. Trump who oversees the administration’s immigration strategy, was not part of the meeting.
…
The meeting came the same day Mr. Trump announced he was sending Tom Homan, his border czar, to oversee the operation in Minneapolis. The move was seen as a way to elevate an official who is steeped in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s longstanding practice of prioritizing targeted arrests, rather than the kinds of sweeping raids that the Trump administration has carried out in cities across the country.

The Wall Street Journal had more on the Trump admin dynamics:

Noem and her top adviser Corey Lewandowski, have pushed for missions that include roving patrols doing street sweeps in large liberal cities. Homan and others have favored a more methodical but slower approach to go after immigrants with criminal histories or final deportation orders, according to people familiar with the matter.

…Trump fielded calls from anxious Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina…

But Trump worried that his administration’s enforcement activities in Minnesota looked chaotic, not strong, according to people familiar with the matter. His concerns only grew as cable news commentators picked apart comments made by his top immigration officials, with even some of his allies noting on television that their words weren’t supported by the video footage.

Ah, it’s the old “Audience of One” theory of Trump in action once again.

And while we’re talking theory, I have been meaning to share some of the theories of Stephen Miller with NC readers and this is as good a time as I’ll get.

The Dark Vision of Stephen Miller

Greg Sargent had an epic Miller profile in The New Republic in December:

Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post–World War II era. The 1965 law’s end to ethnic quotas guaranteed that, henceforth, immigration slots would be doled out on a race-neutral basis. That and subsequent measures—which created the contemporary refugee and asylum system—drew heavily on the international human rights treaties that the United States and many countries signed on to after the war. Subsequent U.S. law has enshrined the right to seek refuge here and protections against getting sent home to face persecution or grave danger—and a set of values that, theoretically at least, has been to some degree a bipartisan consensus for decades.

Miller is, at bottom, trying to eradicate that set of obligations and values—to undo that larger consensus. To grasp this, you need to look at all the small things Miller is doing, which, taken together, all add up to one very big thing.

Take the administration’s handling of white South Africans. Officials recently announced that they will accept only 7,500 refugees this fiscal year—a dramatic reduction from 125,000 under President Joe Biden—and, critically, it reserved a majority of those slots for white Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers.
…
Miller’s mission of boosting deportation numbers of necessity requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang members—people who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communities—because there’s no other way to get the removals up. But it makes us less safe. Miller plainly places more importance on reducing the totals of people here—or trying to get here—than on removing people who pose any actual danger. He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety.
…
At the core of Miller’s worldview is the idea that the immigration levels and humanitarian resettlement programs that existed under Biden posed an existential threat to American civilization, whereas those that now exist under Trump will preserve it from ruin and even outright extinction. During a Cabinet meeting in October, Miller gushed to Trump: “This was a country on the verge of dying, and you alone saved it.” This was widely mocked, but Miller meant it quite literally.

The American Prospect warns of what Miller is hoping to achieve in Minnesota:

ICE and CBP goons look like occupying soldiers—particularly CBP, who have a frankly fetishistic level of “operator” cosplay going on—but from a military standpoint, the way they are behaving is both stupid and dangerous. There are two basic ways to approach a situation like this. Counterinsurgency theory (whatever its merits in practice) emphasizes that occupying troops should go out of their way to build trust among civilians, so civilians will not aid guerrillas. The opposite approach—call it Genghis Khan theory—says that if a city defies your rule, you burn it to the ground and kill everyone inside.

What ICE and CBP are doing is a mixture of the two, virtually calculated to put their own officers in maximum danger. We have a bunch of swaggering, violent goons, armed to the teeth, regularly kidnapping, beating, injuring, and now and then murdering innocent civilians—but there are not remotely enough of these thugs to actually win a pitched battle with an entire city, should it come to that. All the while they are roaming around in plain sight in small groups, routinely surrounded by residents. They are inflaming white-hot hatred while behaving in a way that would have gotten you killed in about five seconds during the Second Battle of Fallujah.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is working feverishly to prevent the perpetrators from facing any punishment whatsoever. Good’s murderer, Ross, is in hiding, and whoever it was that killed Pretti wasn’t even taken off duty. The administration is signaling that the only way there will be any punishment for what happened is if someone takes the law into their own hands.
…
I think the Trump administration—and particularly Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s ethnic cleansing policy, who bears a marked resemblance to Reinhard Heydrich—knows all this perfectly well. They are intentionally sending in their paramilitary goons to create chaos, manufacture a few martyrs, and ideally touch off a riot, to provide an excuse for further violent escalation: Invoking the Insurrection Act, attempting to federalize the National Guard, and eventually moving up to a coup. This isn’t even the first time the far right has attempted to create Horst Wessel 2.0. They attempted it with Charlie Kirk, though in that case it seems to have backfired.

Alright, now that we’ve flipped those rocks over and looked at the scorpions and centipedes wriggling around in the mind of Stephen Miller, we need to talk about Border Czar Tom Homan.

The Man Who Is ‘Really Good at Deporting People’

Old school haters will remember Homan as one of POTUS Obama’s 2015 Presidential Rank Award winners for “distinguished service”, or as The Washington Post reported at the time “honored for deporting illegal immigrants.”

Despite his resume, or perhaps because of it, ICE Barbie doesn’t like Homan as Axios reported in December:

“Kristi’s doing a great job,” Trump, unprompted, recently told an adviser who relayed the conversation to Axios.

“Her and Tom don’t get along,” the president chuckled, the source said. “But they’re doing great.”

The adviser said Trump doesn’t mind the conflict: “Trump is like that. He kind of likes people competing against each other. He thinks it makes the product better.”
…
Supporters of both officials accuse the other of contracting irregularities, which each side denies. Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has more than $170 billion from Congress to spend on catching, detaining and deporting what the White House hopes will be millions of unauthorized immigrants.
…
“Tom expected to have more operational control of day to day, and especially on contracts,” one agency official said.

“It’s disappointing that he chooses to go after Secretary Noem when he is unhappy that he does not have ‘The Tom Homan Show’ to be a part of.”

The removal of Bovino and elevation of the award-winning Deep Stater Homan has at least one Democratic elected official hopeful.

Tim Walz Marks Out Over Homan

Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is excited about the switch from Bongino to Homan:

Not everyone is quite as impressed with Homan, or Walz’ faith in his expertise and good intentions.

Popular podcaster Kyle Kulinski tweeted to his over half-million followers, “I’ve defended Tim Walz a lot in the past – he did stuff like 12 weeks paid family & sick leave, free school meals, legal weed, free college – but this crop of dems is just so naive and pollyannaish it’s embarrassing. This sounds like someone who falls for a Nigerian prince email scam.”

Perhaps Kulinski is aware of Homan’s previous public sattements, like this one, from last February in which he vowed “I’m coming to Boston. I’m bringing hell with me.”

NBC had more gems from Homan from his CPAC speech including this love poem to his teammates in Trump 2.0:

“And to sanctuary cities, game on, because Pam Bondi is back in the place, and Kash Patel is back running the FBI,” Homan added, referring to Trump’s Justice Department appointees. “I’m afraid I’ll have a heart attack one of these days, because it just keeps getting better.”

Maybe that’s why some observers are skeptical that Democratic electeds like Walz and the various repositories of the state monopoly on violence nominally under his control will actually do anything material to oppose Stephen Miller and ICE.

Which is kinda sorta a good thing, insofar as it reduces the chances of a second American Civil War kicking off right away.

Civil War Requires Intra-Elite Conflict

I’m basing that on a recent Guardian article titled “We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start” which is based on the findings of an “October 2024 tabletop exercise conducted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL).”

Relevant bits:

In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.

…in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief. State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a “political question”, leaving the conflict unresolved.
…
Third, we warned that senior military leaders could face orders to use force not only against state national guard units, but against unarmed civilians – and that they must be prepared to assess the legality of such orders.
…
Finally, it is not legal for federal troops to back up ICE agents who are behaving illegally.

Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution. That oath carries legal force. Service members are not only permitted but obligated to refuse patently illegal orders.

This analysis checks out as far as I can tell, except for one giant factor the analysts miss: Democratic officials are highly unlikely to order the military and law enforcement units nominally under their control to resist the forces of the federal government.

As the experts above argue, true Civil War requires two factions of elites who each have control over significant numbers of military/law enforcement units.

At this time, I do not believe the Democratic governors have sufficient control over the forces nominally under their command to resist the Trump regime via direct military confrontation. Thank God.

The prospect I fear is that if/when the roles are reversed, Republican Governors will have the means and the will to violently resist federal forces under a Democratic administration, which would then trigger a true civil conflagration.

Such an event would be by far the worst disaster in U.S. history, and I am certainly not hoping it occurs, nor am I trying to escalate us on that path.

For an example of what is happening in real life, see this recent incident which single-handedly refutes the claims of The Guardian’s scholars of civil conflict.

Streamer Hasan Piker has outlined the likely scenario to his over 1 million followers on X:

And it’s not just Minnesota cops who are prioritizing protecting federal forces from the people they are notionally sworn to protect.

Even Mayor Mamdani is doing it in New York City:

So if they’re not deploying their police and national guard forces to protect their voters from Stephen Miller and his goons, what are Democrats doing?

Democrats Up to Their Usual Misdirection

The misleadership class of the US House of Representatives is working hard to personalize the issue, like they do with Netayahu in Isreal, focusing on personnel rather than policy, via The NYT:

The top three House Democrats on Tuesday came out in support of an effort to impeach Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, part of a growing chorus in the party calling for Ms. Noem’s ouster…

In a joint statement, Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California called for “dramatic changes” at the Homeland Security Department and accused officials of carrying out a violent “killing spree.”

“Kristi Noem should be fired immediately, or we will commence impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives,” they wrote. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

More than 150 congressional Democrats have now joined the bid to impeach Ms. Noem. The effort would need Republican support to move forward, and, so far, no G.O.P. lawmaker has called for the secretary’s removal.
…
So far, 162 House Democrats — about three-quarters of the total caucus — have backed a resolution to impeach Ms. Noem, according to a spokeswoman for Representative Robin Kelly, who introduced the resolution earlier this month. That is 51 more than had signed on as cosponsors to Ms. Kelly’s measure as of Friday, the last day the House met for legislative business and the day before Mr. Pretti was killed.

Mr. Jeffries, Ms. Clark and Mr. Aguilar have yet to sign on as co-sponsors.

Greg Sargent reports on what Senate Dems are thinking:

Legal scholar Nate Holdren calls Senate Dems on their kayfabe, saying, “Fig leaf bullshit. These aren’t restrictions in any important sense, they’re mostly making border enforcement more orderly and less disruptive, ie, more politically palatable. Trump’s awfulness has de-normalized violence against immigrants. Dems are trying to re-normalize it.”

Ken Klippenstein warns that, “What we need is a systemic change to DHS and its policies. Politicians are trying to get you to focus on personalities like Noem and Miller so you don’t touch their institutional equities. Don’t fall for it.”

And he reminds us that the Homan for Bovino swap is pretty immaterial:

Interested readers should also check out Klippenstein’s Substack post in which numerous ICE and DHS officials leak their frustration with what’s happening in Minnesota under Stephen Miller.

Rep. Omar Has a Scare

Meanwhile, Minnesota Democratic Congressional Rep. Ilhan Omar had a scare last night, which Mark Ames ominously called a “test run”:

The news also broke that the Biden DOJ had investigated Omar’s finances and came up empty. Per the NYT:

The Justice Department under the Biden administration opened an investigation into Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, in 2024 to scrutinize her finances, campaign spending and interactions with a foreign citizen, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The inquiry, initiated by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the department’s public integrity unit in June of that year, appears to have stalled for lack of evidence…

It’s certainly easy to see why Democratic electeds are wary of kicking off a full-on intra-elite conflict and finding out if they can actually count on the support of the forces nominally under their command.

Fortunately, a constituency is more than just its elected officials.

Emergant Networks of Resistance

Jacobin reports on the resistance put up by the people of Minneapolis:

The Twin Cities Sunrise Movement has pushed the resistance onto offense, targeting the Hilton hotels that quietly house ICE agents. This campaign has led to an impressive string of local victories, including getting a local Hilton to refuse service to ICE, sparking outrage from the Department of Homeland Security and the subsequent capitulation of Hilton nationally to the administration.

One organizer tells them:

…it’s also the most organized community I’ve ever experienced anywhere. We’ve hit a density in Minneapolis where over 4 percent of every single neighborhood is in a Signal chat at the neighborhood level — and it might be higher, because those are just the Signal chats we’re centrally tracking. In St Paul, there’s a neighborhood called Frogtown. It’s heavily Hmong. Every day, we create a rapid response Signal chat for people actively patrolling in Frogtown, and every day by 11 a.m., that chat hits its limit of a thousand people — which is to say that, at any given moment in one neighborhood, there are a thousand people out patrolling.

Not bad for essentially improvised organizing, what are the pre-existing organizations up to?

Unions Beginning to Flex

While the AFGE (The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is focusing their ire on Noem and Miller, calling for their immediate resignation or dismissal, other unions are working on a more ambitious agenda.

Via The American Prospect:

Over the weekend, workers across sectors met throughout the country to determine their next steps, including striking again for a day, holding an indefinite strike, and building toward a general strike. In 2023, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain called on unions everywhere to set their contracts to end on May 1, 2028, so that workers across industries could go on strike that day legally. Union contracts often include a no-strike clause that forbids workers from going on strike, forcing workers to strike only after their contract expires. (Workers may also undertake a wildcat strike, which federal law holds is illegal.)

But that’s not soon enough, workers say.

“Clearly, we cannot wait until 2028,” said Emily Woo Yamasaki, a member of the UAW Local 2320, Legal Services Staff Association, and an organizer with the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), speaking on Saturday night at an FSP forum in New York City. “A general strike can’t be built overnight,” they said, “but it is more urgent than ever” for organized labor to talk about it.

Dan Troccoli, labor branch co-chair of Twin Cities DSA and member leader in the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, was another labor leader who met to discuss escalation with a range of other union members this weekend. The most likely next action is a one-day strike, he said, which will help build strength and labor discipline toward bigger actions.

Some pundits have additional ideas.

Alternate Ideas

A modest proposal from David Sirota:

Senate Democrats are right now formulating a list of conditions they say must be fulfilled for them to consider providing votes to provide more funding to ICE. One of those items could be Democratic legislation that is already written and introduced in Congress — a bill to end qualified immunity for ICE agents, so that communities can hold those agents legally accountable when they murder people.

Days after ICE killed Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted out Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller on Fox News declaring: To all ICE officers: “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
…
Reuters points out that under existing legal doctrines, “Federal officers are immune from civil lawsuits unless their conduct clearly violated a clearly established constitutional right. This legal standard, known as qualified immunity, has become a highly effective tool for shielding police officers accused of using excessive force.”

But simple, two-page legislation introduced in Congress would change that. This bill has been just sitting there in the U.S. House for months. After the killing of Good, some senators and House members who have long criticized qualified immunity for law enforcement have thankfully resurfaced the idea in the debate over ICE — and now they appear to have leverage to actually do something.

Ian Welsh writes:

The silver lining here, the hope, is that Minnessotans have come together to resist this. Thousands of people, not just protesting, but feeding those who can’t leave their houses, helping legally, and putting their bodies on the line. There are good people left in the US, but what they need to recognize is that fixing this requires replacing almost every member of the current elite: Walz has failed, Congress has failed, business has mostly been supine to trump as have universities. Everyone who’s in a position of power, whose duty and responsibility it is to resist has either failed or not even tried.

What needs to be done is to note the ones who tried or resigned rather than engage in illegality and immorality. Go after everyone else, replace them and if they actively engaged in evil, convict them and send them to prison. Put the people who did resist back in, not just politicians but prosecutors and judges and city councillors and so on, and then fill the rest of the ranks with people who went out on the streets in Minnesota and elsewhere and put their bodies in the way of evil, or who otherwise meaningfully resisted.

These are the people who proved themselves. When the brownshirts came, they are the ones who stood up. We now know who is actually moral, who is actually brave and who can actually be trusted when the chips down. This is the new leadership cadre, if Americans are wise.

I’ve already gone on way too long and didn’t even get to the way the FBI is targeting the Minnesotans who are resisting ICE, how feds are showing up at the homes of protestors in Minnesota and Maine, the possibility that ICE targeted some of its victims in advance (possibly including Alex Pretti), the fact that the GOP Freedom Caucus is vowing to resist any funding cuts to DHS and ICE, or the connections between the Charlottesville Proud Boys, the Jan 6 rioters, and today’s ICE.

It’s overwhelming, y’all. Stay safe everyone.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Larry and David Ellison are attempting to create a massive multi-channel media empire with reach across multiple demographics and the scale and synergy to build something more than the sum of its parts.

Larry Ellison’s database behemoth, Oracle, provides the financial foundation beneath the aspiring media empire.

TikTok is the shiny new acquisition that gives the Ellisons’ hasbara-enforcing empire its reach into the Zoomer demographic and its algorithmic influence over what that demo sees… and perhaps thinks.

Combined with the Paramount TV network and Hollywood studio empire that Père Larry bought for fils David, Oracle’s 15% share in the American version of TikTok was supposed to make the Ellisons kingmakers and resistance breakers.

But, as I’ve posted before, empire building ain’t easy. This week, financial problems at the foundational level and technical problems at TikTok are vexing the imperial Ellisons.

Ed Zitron Goes for the Kill

In the latest premium-subscriber-only edition of his newsletter Where’s Your Ed At?, Ed Zitron argues that “the AI bubble means that every single participant, without exception, is operating on borrowed time.”

Most of the issue is spent explaining how doomed OpenAI is, the way GPU accountancy guarantees the hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google) will be facing massive depreciation write-downs (and possibly even impairments) for the foreseeable future, and outlining various scenarios explaining what may happen if and when OpenAI fails.

But he saves a big passage at the very end for Oracle.

Some key quotes:

I cannot express how stupid Oracle is.

It signed a $300 billion deal with OpenAI back in September of last year that requires 4.5GW of capacity that Oracle does not have, and has taken on $248 billion in lease obligations on top of it. Oracle does not have the cash to support these operations. It had negative $13 billion in cash flow last quarter, raised $18 billion in bonds, that $38 billion debt package for Stargate Shackelford and Wisconsin has yet to close, and Blue Owl — the loosest legs in data center funding — pulled out of Stargate Michigan in December, with nobody else stepping up to the plate as of writing this sentence.

Here’s the thing: for any of this to work, OpenAI has to become profitable within the space of two years, and do so at a scale where it is able to afford $30 billion or more a quarter in compute costs. To give you some context, Microsoft Azure makes around $75 billion annually, and AWS $115 billion. OpenAI, in its best-case scenario, made around $13 billion this year, and Oracle will be charging it at least $25 billion in the next year if any of this compute is actually made available.
…

Every quarter, Oracle’s debt expands. It paid $1.057 billion in interest in its last quarter, up from $933 million in the one before, and $892 million the quarter before that.

In the middle of 2024 (its Q1 FY2025) — just before NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs started shipping — Oracle had $23 billion in PP&E. As of its latest quarter, it had $67.875 billion, likely almost entirely made up of NVIDIA’s GB200 racks, which The Information reported had negative 100% gross margins, specifically on Oracle Cloud.

This is not a situation where Oracle “works it out.” GPUs are destroying its gross margins just as its software business begins to contract, and its largest customer for this unprofitable business segment is OpenAI, the company that does not have any money and in fact loses it all.

The longer the AI bubble inflates, the more it seems like Oracle is in threat of actually defaulting on its loans and collapsing.

This December chart from Manu Invests shows why Oracle is the most vulnerable of the (would-be) hyperscalers:

This goes a long way toward explaining the 25% drop in Oracle’s share price over the past six months:

The financial research and technology platform Trefis tried to explain Oracle’s share-price decline to Forbes readers:

Oracle (ORCL)’s stock plummeted by 37% in the last three months, even with a modest increase in revenue and better margins. The reasons for the decline include cautious Q2 earnings, diminished enthusiasm in AI, reductions in analyst price targets, and insider selling—all contributing to a significant drop in investor confidence. What’s truly behind this rollercoaster?
…

• Q2 FY26 Earnings: EPS exceeded expectations, but increased capital expenditure and negative free cash flow caused concerns among investors.

• AI Infrastructure Bet: Substantial investments in AI data centers led to significant debt increases and pressure on the balance sheet.

• Analyst Target Cuts: Several firms decreased their price targets due to concerns regarding AI strategy implementation and valuation.

• AI Market Sentiment: Worries about an ‘AI bubble’ negatively impacted ORCL, resulting in a 30.5% drop in Q4.

• Insider Stock Sales: Notable executives sold shares in late October 2025, potentially indicating a lack of confidence.

Bears should be warned that financial seer and CNBC talking head Jim Cramer calls Oracle a “linchpin stock” for the AI boom:

Jim Cramer: I wanted to be fatuous just in keeping with the news that I read which makes me feel like, are you kidding me? Come on, are you kidding me? Are we really supposed, what are we supposed to sell Oracle off of this?

But even Cramer jawboning the stock wasn’t enough to turn the tide.

That took some news about Oracle’s 15% share of American TikTok becoming official.

Controlling TikTok Bumps Oracle’s Share Price

A new internal memo from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew however, has Oracle shares rising in price today.

Key highlights:

Today, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025, enabling our US users to continue to discover, create, and thrive as part of TikTok’s vibrant global community and experience.
…
TikTok’s growth in the US nicely sets up the Joint Venture for strong future success. The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users.

It will be led by Adam Presser who, today, has been chosen by the Joint Venture’s Board of Directors for his impressive track record with the company leading large-scale teams in the areas of Trust & Safety and Operations.

The New York Times has more details, including who owns how much of this new beast:

Investors including the software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, will own more than 80 percent of the new venture.
…
Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will be the chief executive for the U.S. TikTok.

The deal is intended to loosen TikTok’s ties to China and address national security concerns that Beijing could use the app to surveil or manipulate its more than 200 million users in the United States.
…
Under the new arrangement, Oracle, MGX and Silver Lake will each own 15 percent of TikTok’s U.S. operations. ByteDance will own just under 20 percent.
…
The majority of the seven-member board for the new U.S. TikTok will be American, according to a December memo to TikTok employees. Mr. Chew has a seat on the board.

The new venture will moderate content in TikTok’s feed, deciding which posts to leave up and which to take down.

Note that Oracle’s main partners in the new venture are an Emirati investment firm and Egon Durban’s Silver Lake.

The UAE Is All-In on Israel’s Hasbara Agenda

Forgive me for a brief detour, but it’s important to point out the political and geo-strategic context in which the UAE is a key shareholder in American TikTok.

The UAE is currently isolated in the Middle East after falling out with Saudi Arabia. The latter is building a Sunni block that includes “Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan” while the UAE is openly aligned with Israel and India, per the SCMP.

The UAE has been pushing reactionary narratives in the west since the end of the Arab Spring, but now it stands exposed as an open ally of Israel.

From The Washington Post last week:

…the rupture between the two oil-rich monarchies is already rippling beyond Yemen as Saudi Arabia, alarmed by what it sees as aggressive military and foreign policy moves by its much smaller neighbor, works to counter the deep web of influence Abu Dhabi has spent years building in the Horn of Africa and around the Red Sea.
…
Riyadh’s sudden, more assertive stance has countries in the region trying to navigate the rift. For years, Saudi Arabia and the UAE worked largely in tandem, backstopping other autocrats amid the Arab Spring uprisings and joining forces to counter the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen.

In recent days, however, Saudi Arabia has shored up other alliances to curtail its rival and is in talks with both Egypt and Somalia to expand security cooperation between the three countries, according to a senior Somali security official. Somalia’s federal government also said it was canceling its defense agreements with the UAE, which maintains commercial ports and military bases in at least three areas — Somaliland, Puntland and Jubaland — where the government in Mogadishu has little presence or influence.
…
Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, has described the UAE’s regional network as an “axis of secessionists.”
“Abu Dhabi is comfortable operating below the threshold of formal statecraft, building influence through a web of commercial vehicles, logistics access, security assistance, intermediaries and local armed partners,” he said.

Notably the WaPo piece avoids any mention of the Israeli-UAE alliance.

Dr. Krieg spells it out more clearly on his X account:

I should also mention that Silver Lake is a primary owner of Ari Emanuel’s WME Group, the company that owns a majority of TKO, parent company of the UFC and WWE.

Emanuel played a key role in the Ellisons’ securing Trump’s approval to buy Paramount, and also reportedly helped the Ellisons secure financial backing from the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth funds for Paramount’s (so far) unsuccessful bid for WBD.

I doubt that same constellation of investors could be assembled today, after the falling out between the Saudis and the UAE.

But let’s get back to TikTok.

Adam Presser’s Fight Against ‘Anti-Semitism” Drawing Attention

New CEO Adam Presser has been outspoken about his plans for the platform.

Here are some key points from Presser’s talk at last year’s World Jewish Congress (via Chris Menahan on X.com)

• They made “Zionist” a “proxy for a protected attribute” to designate it “hate speech” if used in a negative light (the WJC lobbied for this change).

• TikTok *tripled* the number of accounts they were banning for “hateful activity” “over the course of 2024” (i.e., post-Oct 7th).

• TikTok is “especially” focused on fighting “anti-Semitism”—and it’s personal to Presser as “a member of the American Jewish community.”

• While banning critics of Israel for “hate,” they also partnered with Israeli creators (and some non-Israeli creators) to produce positive hasbara content.

• They have over two dozen Jewish organizations “constantly” feeding them “intelligence” on “violative trends”—which includes the WJC—and such groups help inform them on “what is hate speech.”

• They “spend a lot of time” with Jewish/Israeli creators to find out “what other tools they might look for” in fighting anti-Semitism.

So far it looks like the new moderators are operating with a heavy hand.

Here’s how one American alt-media outlet is faring under the new regime:

Tough Transition

It’s not just heavy-handed moderation that’s troubling TikTok’s first days under new management.

The Verge headlined their piece on the platform’s issues “TikTok USA is broken.”

Key points:

Many in the US have found it impossible to upload videos over the last day or so, which are sitting “under review” indefinitely. One video we uploaded from a US account last night has yet to go live, nearly 12 hours later, while a video uploaded from the UK is published — but it’s only visible to our editors who aren’t in the US. Similarly, accounts for pages like the BBC and The Guardian only show new uploads for those of us who live outside the US, while viewing the same account from the US shows only videos uploaded before Sunday morning.

Issues that thousands of people have reported and we’ve been able to confirm include difficulty logging in, the inability to upload or publish videos, a For You Page algorithm that isn’t personalized, problems loading comments, as well as errors flashing for other features, and problems with the CapCut video editor.

Given the timing, many drew a link between TikTok’s issues, its US operation’s new Trump-friendly owners, and this weekend’s anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, exacerbated by the killing of a second local resident, Alex Pretti, by federal agents. The combination of publishing errors and previously political For You Pages that are suddenly filled with generic content has led many to assume the worst when their videos about ICE wouldn’t publish, but at the moment, the problems appear to be much more extensive.

Previously popular TikTok anti-genocide advocate Guy Christensen has been urging his followers to migrate to a new platform called UpScrolled with the sales pitch that “It’s led by a Palestinian and promises no censorship from billionaires.”

I have to assume that TikTok will sort out its technical issues, but as with the Ellisons’ CBS News it is unclear if they will be able to create a controlled platform that retains enough popularity to be influential.

It also remains unclear what the impact of the much anticipated AI bust will be on the Ellisons’ plans for global info domination.

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

• 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

Political Moves in a Post-Democratic Republic?

I should also note that these political maneuvers are taking place in a context of unprecedented presidential power when the U.S. Congress has virtually abdicated their powers of war-making and taxation and the POTUS openly muses about whether or not elections should be held in 2026 and 2028.

But as it is not yet clear to what extent the Trump regime will maintain its hold on power, and no jack-booted thugs have burst into my home and confiscated my laptop (yet), we can still talk about opposition politics like it’s 1999.

We’ll start with the putative 2028 front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination and his self-inflicted struggles on the topics of ICE and Israel.

Gavin Newsom Had a Big 2025

The California Governor had a strong 2025, taking advantage of opportunities to position himself as the resistor-in-chief. As Joshua A. Cohen wrote for his Ettingermentum Newsletter in which he named Newsom the #1 Political Winner of 2025 praising the “points he put on the board when hardly anyone else could even make it to the basket”:

The stage really was set for any liberal with any ambition to try to make an early mark, and no small number of them tried. Yet the only one of them to see any truly meaningful success so far is California’s 40th governor, who has pulled off one of the largest early polling jumps in the history of modern presidential primaries.
…
Ever since the Biden administration went down in flames, liberals have been desperate for anything resembling a leader, and Newsom has slotted himself quite nicely into that role. What makes his success in this so truly remarkable is it is not because he was the first or only Democrat in the country that recognized that liberals wanted their leaders to staunchly oppose Trump. Countless Democratic politicians had recognized that from day one; Newsom was actually quite late to the party in that regard. But while liberal voters have been thoroughly unresponsive to Tim Walz calling Elon Musk a dipshit or even J.B. Pritzker daring Trump to arrest him, they’ve given rapt attention to Newsom’s acts of resistance against the administration.
…
What makes Newsom’s surge stand out—and what could make it truly relevant in the long haul—is that it came primarily as a result of tangible wins against Trump. Countless Democrats, including him, may have spent the past year talking about how much they hate Trump, but he’s been the only one to land a real, undeniable blow on him since the inauguration by means of Prop 50. That’s real, it stands out, and it appears as if it’s something that liberal voters are highly privileging.

Cohen’s referring to California’s mid-decade Congressional redistricting (which was in response to Republian Texas doing it first) which could give Democrats as many as five additional seats in the next Congress, unless the Supreme Court overturns the bill Newsom signed, that is.

Having successfully positioned himself as the Democrat’s national champion, Newsom naturally decided to feature rabidly pro-Israel Republican influencer Ben Shapiro on his podcast to discuss ICE and Israel.

Gavin Newsom Agrees With Ben Shapiro

The interview was very revealing.

For example, we learned that Governor Newsom does not agree with his Press Office about whether or not ICE’s invasion of Minnesota and killing of Renee Good constitutes terrorism:

Ben Shapiro: Your press office tweeted out that it was state sponsored terrorism, which I mean, Governor, I do have to ask you about that. That that that sort of thing makes our politics worse. Yeah. I mean, it does. I mean, our our our ICE officers obviously are not terrorists. A tragic situation is not state sponsored terrorism.

Gavin Newsom: Yeah, I think that’s fair.

Shapiro: Wouldn’t best policy be to cooperate with ICE in the vast majority of cases? So instead of ICE going to, as you say, hospitals and churches to pick people up, they’d be going to jail houses to pick…

Newsom: That’s exactly what they do in California. And we have over 10,000 that I’ve cooperated with since I’ve been governor of California. We work very directly with ICE as it relates to CDCR, state prison. California has cooperated with more ICE transfers probably than any other state in the country.

I vetoed multiple pieces of legislation that have come from my legislature to stop the ability for the state of California to do that.

So when it comes to the issues of violent criminals, when it comes to felons, people that are being released from the largest state system in the United States of America, California cooperates with ICE.

Newsom did attempt to drop Kamala Harris in the grease for going too far left on ICE, but his staff had to clean up after him, per Axios:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom this week hosted conservative Ben Shapiro on his podcast and falsely claimed that Harris supported abolishing ICE during the 2024 campaign.

“​​I remember being on [MSNOW’s] Chris Hayes hours later saying, ‘I think that’s a mistake,’” Newsom recalled.

Newsom’s office clarified his comment later, saying he was referring to a 2018 interview in which Harris called on the government to “critically reexamine” ICE and “think about starting from scratch.”

Newsom is floundering on ICE because he is still thinking in terms of 2020 and the centrist Dem belief that out of control woke rhetoric cost Harris the 2024 election.

Alt-Media Tries to Smarten Up Centrist Dems

Joshua A. Cohen has another installment of his newsletter called “This Isn’t 2020” in which he attempts to wise Newsom, and other centrist Dems, up about ICE and how to respond:

…the hardline opposition to ICE we are seeing could be the start of a durable, popular, and desperately needed movement capable of accomplishing things in a way that the “abolish” and “defund” movements never were at any point.

Because of this, we are now witnessing a defining revealing moment for the Democratic Party’s center.

…their reaction to the murder of Renee Good is simply above and beyond every idiotic choice they’ve made so far, and that’s saying quite a lot. The obsession with past feuds, the self-flagellation, the rigidity, the everything: it is all reaching its apex in a coordinated media push so historically illiterate and out-of-touch that it has almost no comparison.
…
The sudden surge in rage against ICE is simply not a case of self-identified radicals waging war against the perceived foundations of civil society in a conscious move away from optics-focused electoralism. To the contrary, it’s a case where the public at large has dragged even Bernie-wing public officials to the left by becoming more radical than they are in response to events.
…
After steadily creeping up to all-time highs over the course of 2025, the proposal has now found outright plurality support in at least one poll, something that makes it far more popular than the past three Democratic presidential nominees, both of the party’s Congressional leaders, and the party itself as an organization.
…
(ICE) doesn’t have strong bonds with any community. It’s run by a historically unpopular president, not locally-known municipal politicians. It doesn’t provide any public services by wasting your money to harass construction workers and creating short-form social media content for the hyper-engaged MAGA base. Opposing the organization isn’t genuinely radical in the way that calls to defund or abolish the police actually were. It’s a basic conclusion anyone opposed to Trump will come to as long as he uses them as a personal secret police.

But Wait, Newsom’s Terrible on Gaza Too

ICE wasn’t the only issue Shapiro got Newsom tangled up in. They also talked about the genocide in Gaza, and agreed it didn’t happen:

Ben Shapiro: It seems to be have become a sort of de rigueur requirement for Democrats who are running for office to now suggest, for example, (congressional candidate)Scott Weiner just did this, that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza.
…
Israel did not commit a genocide in Gaza. There is no standard by which Israel committed a genocide in Gaza just on a factual level. Just a legal and factual level. What is your opinion of this?

Gavin Newsom: My opinion is I understand the tendency for people to make that..to assert that on the basis of the images and the proportionality as it relates genocide. No, no. And by the way, I agree with you

Shapiro: Proportionality doesn’t mean that if you kill my child and I then kill seven criminals that I’ve been disproportionate.

Newsom: I’m not disagreeing with you, but I think the but I understand that tendency on the basis of trying to reconcile the proportionate nature of how the war was ultimately conducted.

Shapiro: I have a question. Why do you feel the need to create a permission structure for that sort of stuff? I mean meaning it’s not true. Why not just say it’s not true?

Newsom: I don’t know the definition. I don’t know the legal threshold. That’s not my opinion. So I don’t I don’t share that opinion as it relates to genocide. I do not I do not agree with that notion that that…

Shapiro: You do understand that if you accuse Israel of committing a genocide, that now puts Israel in the position of it should be a pariah state, because states that commit genocide should be pariah states. So granting legitimacy to that position inherently…

Newsom: I’m not granting legitimacy. I’m just saying the the devastation in Gaza at the human level. You’ve got four kids.

Shapiro: Of course, it’s terrible.

Newsom: No, but I think it’s also important to absorb that a little bit more just as it was sick, and we were clear in our condemnation, these people like me, as it relates to what Hamas did in that act of barbarism and terrorism.

Shapiro: Yeah. Terrorism and wartime collateral damage, of course. And if we refuse to acknowledge that reality, then we end up collateral damage.

Newsom: I have stronger opinions. It wasn’t just collateral.

Shapiro: Really, you think that Israel is targeting civilians?

Newsom: I think some of the double tapping issues. I have a I have a lot of issues with how (Israeli Prime Minister) Bibi (Netanyahu) ultimately conduct the war. I personally do.

And I have a lot of issues that are also painted on the basis of the conversation I had (with Netanyahu) a few weeks later after October 7th, the way he talked about the Palestinians. I kept talking about Hamas. He kept talking about the Palestinians. I kept coming back to Hamas and then ultimately how the war was conducted. Not saying it was a genocide. I’m not.

Newsom might not be able to make a coherent statement regarding Gaza, but he did make it clear that Palestinians have no friend in Gavin.

Ryan Grim of Drop Site News called Newsom’s performance “pathetic” saying “If Gavin Newsom can get pushed around like this by a pipsqueak like Ben Shapiro he most definitely is to weak to be president.”

The Podcaster Tries to Explain to the MSM

David Remnick of The New Yorker interviewed Jennifer Welch, co-host of the “I’ve Had It” podcast (1.5 million subscribers), and the topics of Newsom and Gaza came up:

David Remnick: How’s Gavin Newsom looking to you?
…
Jennifer Welch: I like his fight. I like how he relentlessly trolls Trump. I think, with the base, he’s gonna have the same problems that Clinton and Kamala did. Granted he is a white male, and historically they seem to do better in the electorate than women.
…
I think that’s gonna be what’s the most shocking for the Democratic establishment candidates is how much the base has moved away from corporate Dems.
…
What a lot of people in the Democratic base have issues with Palestine. If (a candidate) can call what is happening a genocide, if he can call Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal, he would be a credible messenger.

Remnick: Those are litmus tests for you?

Welch: I hate the word litmus tests, but I’m realistic in the sense that I believe that we have to call what we’re seeing realistically. You cannot gaslight people about it.

It’s not just the California governor who is tangled up in issues of ICE and Israel, either.

Kamala Harris’ Anti-Semitic VP Vetting?

The New York Times loves nothing more than featuring Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro in articles and opinion pieces with headlines like “Mamdani Isn’t the Future of the Democrats. This Guy Is,” “How the Firebombing of His Home Changed Josh Shapiro,” and “Josh Shapiro Starts a New Chapter, Attacking the ‘Toxicity in D.C.’.”

So it should come as no surprise that the NYT was primed to post about Shapiro’s new memoir and its allegations against Kamala Harris and her vice-presidential vetting process.

Shapiro had previously characterized Harris’ account of the Vice-Presidential selection process as “blatant lies” so the NYT was primed to chronicle a juicy intra-Democratic conflict:

(Governor Josh Shapiro) offered his most detailed accounting to date of the vice-presidential search process in his new memoir…

The Atlantic has more:

…the governor also devotes several pages to providing his side of the story from the 2024 search for a vice-presidential candidate, after Harris wrote a detailed account of the traditionally secretive process, which included a less-than-warm meeting with Shapiro.

I wonder if the Harris campaign’s concerns had anything to do with Shapiro’s record as a volunteer for the IDF or past statements about the Middle East:

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro wrote in his college newspaper in 1993 that peace “will never come” to the Middle East and expressed skepticism about the viability of a two-state solution, describing Palestinians as “too battle-minded” to coexist with Israel.

I’m also guessing that Shapiro was unaware that he was not the only VP prospect to get the “are you a foreign agent question,” from CNN:

Josh Shapiro wasn’t the only finalist to be Kamala Harris’ running mate who was asked if he had ever been an agent of a foreign government, four sources familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday. Tim Walz was, too.

Shapiro may have Israel issues that separate him from the Democratic base, but he’s somewhat better on ICE, telling MSNOW:

Josh Shapiro

For Shapiro to get back on the national scene as a presidential candidate in 2028, he’ll need to win re-election as Pennsylvania governor this year.

His GOP opponent, State Treasurer Stacy Garrity seems to be running on a platform of “Josh Shapiro sucks.”

She’s got plenty to work with.

Time will tell if Pennsylvania voters solve the national Democrats’ Josh Shapiro problem, but getting in sync with their base voters on ICE and Israel will be much harder.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

The plan was simple enough, if audacious in its ambition.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, and briefly the wealthiest person on Earth, would buy controlling shares in TikTok, Paramount/CBS, and Warner Bros. Discovery and establish his nepo baby son David as a modern-day Citizen Kane, key Trump ally, and Hasbara enforcer #1.

The vision was breathlessly described by the tech dystopia enthusiasts at The Mirror Review as “building influence across three layers:

1. The content people watch

2. The platforms that deliver it

3. The algorithms that decide what rises to the top.

Sounds unstoppable, irresistible, and better yet, inevitable.

Citizen Kane, Junior

New York Magazine’s Vulture has a cleverly-titled long-form profile of David Ellison, “The Son King” that outlines the Ellisons’ vision:

It’s possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years in the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth around $18 billion and couldn’t afford Paramount, which was valued at $22 billion. By last year, the $6 billion Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent in his fortune, which briefly peaked in September at close to $400 billion.
…
Larry has long harbored more globe-spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed up a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal Titanic Octopus.
…
In the past year, Oracle has become central to the artificial-intelligence boom, providing back-end computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build the LLMs of the future. In September, after Oracle reported a potential windfall of AI-infused revenue, its stock shot up so much that Larry’s net worth increased by $89 billion in a single day.

Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that combined with David’s ownership of one and perhaps two major studios, as well as one and perhaps two major news networks — Paramount owns CBS, and Warner owns CNN — has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellisons are building an empire that could dwarf even the Murdochs’.

TikTok and Paramount fell to the Ellisons in due order and they quickly put their stamp on CBS News.

Bari Weiss Didn’t Come Cheap

Bari Weiss, fearless centrist teller of “truth” to power, media rebel with a (zionist) cause, and re-imaginer of American college education was brought on board to run CBS News.

And it wasn’t cheap, either.

Paramount paid a reported $150 million in cash and stock for Weiss’ publication The Free Press, inspiring Adweek to write an article titled “Why Paramount Paid $150 Million for a $20 Million Media Company.”

Sage insights included:

Paramount is paying 7.5 times revenue for the outlet.

The multiple places the deal outside normal media economics, according to interviews with four digital media M&A experts. In most transactions, both legacy and digital outlets trade at five to 15 times EBITDA, not revenue.

But for Paramount, the tie-up is more of a strategic decision than a strictly financial one…

The company is not buying The Free Press for its profit stream today. Instead, it is making an investment in an outlet whose positioning, talent, and potential to scale could swell dramatically when plugged into the broader CBS News platform.
…
The acquisition also doubles as a high-profile acqui-hire.
Founder Bari Weiss — along with her network of contributors and relationships — is the core asset Paramount wanted

And what an acqui-hire she’s been.

Bari Weiss’ CBS Shiteshow

Somehow Bari Weiss, despite having zero experience as a reporter, news editor, television producer, or bureau chief, has not gotten off to a smooth start at CBS News.

Clare Malone has a profile of Weiss in The New Yorker called “Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News.”

Here’s a taste:

Weiss, who is forty-one, had started The Free Press out of her home. Now she was ferried around in an S.U.V., and the company required her to be accompanied by bodyguards—including, for a time, inside CBS’s offices—something Weiss has described as an annoying but necessary aspect of her new gig. (“Some would say it’s offensive,” one producer told me. “The implication was that we’re going to try to kill her.”)

The piece has a good deal of detail about Weiss education, religious and secular, and her early knack for networking and cultivating powerful people:

“She was intoxicating, superficially conversant in a number of different directions, and she would name-drop adults of heft,” a former classmate who worked closely with Weiss said. Her networking skills were already well developed. “Hello powerhouse friends,” she began an e-mail to promote an event co-hosted by the Anti-Defamation League. In another message, she advertised a talk featuring Bret Stephens, who was then a conservative columnist at the Wall Street Journal. More than a decade later, an invite to a live taping of her podcast, which she sent to a list of billionaires and media luminaries—including Shari Redstone, who was then the chair of Paramount; Mathias Döpfner, the C.E.O. of Axel Springer; and the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman—was tonally identical to her college promotional blasts.

The piece also describes Weiss’ early cultivation of a persona beyond the Blue/Red dichotomy:

“Her whole thing in college was ‘I’m gay and I’m pro-Israel—good luck classifying me,’ ” the former classmate who worked with her said. “ ‘If you’ve got an issue with me, take your shot. You’ve never seen the likes of me. I’m so unpredictable, so heterodox.’ ”

She was also not a Trump supporter initially:

(In November 2015), she published a piece in Tablet warning about Steve Bannon’s antisemitic associations. “We will never know what’s in Steve Bannon’s heart,” she wrote. “What we know is that he is proud to have provided the bullhorn for a movement that unabashedly promotes white nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the relentless identification of Jews as the champions of the country’s most nefarious forces.” Shortly after Trump’s first Inauguration, Weiss published a column in the Journal about an anti-Trump protest in New York: “The thousands of men, women and children weren’t, by and large, professional protesters. They were Americans who showed up because they felt the fundamental values of the nation they love were being violated.”

But she’s grown and changed:

…she had also been alarmed by what she called the “overzealous, out-of-touch hysterical reaction to (Trump) and the kind of illiberalism that was born out of the reaction to him that calls itself democratic, that calls itself progressive, but is actually extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses.” Weiss said that she liked Trump’s policies in the Middle East, along with the booming economy. “Am I still worried about his character?” she asked. “Am I worried about things like January 6th? Yes, but I would say the sign of an open mind and the sign of a thinking person is a person that’s able to take on new information and adjust your priors.”

The perception that the Ellisons were buying CBS to please POTUS Donald Trump enraged the MSM and put a bullseye on Bari’s back.

Real schadenfreuders might enjoy Zeteo’s recap of Weiss’ first 10 days at the network or Jezebel’s kick-her-while-she’s-down account.

I’ll jump to The New York Times’ summary of her tenure:

“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to *drive the news*,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to *be the news* for these 10 days.”

Ms. Weiss has achieved that goal — perhaps not in the way she hoped.

Her reimagining of CBS News has faced heavy scrutiny, and even became a punchline on her own network: At Sunday’s Golden Globes, broadcast by CBS, the host, Nikki Glaser, earned one of her biggest laughs when she declared that CBS News was “America’s newest place to see BS news.”
…
That Ms. Weiss’s news division merited a mention at a Hollywood awards show speaks to how the disruptions at CBS have penetrated the culture beyond the media in-crowd — and underscored questions already hanging over her bumpy stewardship of a major news institution.

…problems have piled up. Mr. Dokoupil’s debut weeknight telecast on Jan. 5 was marred by a teleprompter issue that left the anchor grasping for words and shaking his head with frustration in front of millions of live viewers. “First night, big problems here,” he conceded. The blunder occurred in part because Ms. Weiss and her aides were rewriting the “Evening News” script up until minutes before the 6:30 p.m. airtime, three people with knowledge of the events said.

…(Weiss) caused a firestorm last month when, at the last minute, she postponed a “60 Minutes” segment that was critical of the Trump administration. The correspondent who reported the segment called the move “political,” and Ms. Weiss faced accusations that she was, at best, mismanaging staff and, at worst, censoring journalism to please President Trump.

The segment finally aired last night, apparently in an effort to bury it by putting it up against the NFL playoffs, but this screengrab of news coverage about the news segment shows Streisand was in full effect.

It’s not just the liberal MSM that’s been bagging on Bari, the poor girl is taking fire from the right as well.

The National Review dumped all over her work saying:

Weiss’s vision has got it all backward. The pursuit of virality, combined with the narcissistic goal of being the focus of the news, is a key reason why our industry is in the sorry state it is.

Recall that poor news judgment and a sense of self-importance are the very things Weiss criticized when she first gained prominence as an intra-industry critic of major media.

Megyn Kelly told the Turning Point USA audience that Weiss is “making anti-Semites” and went on to say:

“It’s this very loud group of pro-Israel activists that is trying to make this the litmus test about whether you get to call yourself a conservative, and they lack standing to do that,” Kelly said. “Bari in particular has made her career on the anti-cancel culture thing. Meanwhile, she’s never been canceled.

I’m not even going to get into the ridiculous “Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil” debacle.

Worst of all, from the Ellisons’ perspective, Bari Weiss’ CBS is bleeding viewers.

Variety has the deets:

Overall viewership for the first five days of Dokoupil’s official run on the venerable CBS News program was off 23% from what the program captured a year ago, when then-anchor Norah O’Donell was leading viewers through news of tumultuous California wildfires and the run-up to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Dokoupil’s first five days, from January 5 to January 9, won an average of nearly 4.17 million, according to data from Nielsen, compared with nearly 5.4 million in the year-earlier period

Among viewers between 25 to 54, the demographic favored most by advertisers in news programming, the audience also fell 23%, according to data from Nielsen. Dokoupil’s first five days captured an average of 533,000, compared with 690,000 a year earlier.

The numbers pale in comparison to results at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “NBC Nightly News,” which captured overall crowds of nearly 8.1 million and nearly 6.73 million, respectively.

And advertisers do not appear eager to associate their clients with Bari Weiss’ CBS News.

But that’s small comfort to Americans distressed to see CBS credulously repeating claims from the Trump regime that the “ICE agent who shot Renee Good suffered internal bleeding.”

The decision to run with that story created considerable internal concern at CBS, according to The Guardian:

The network’s top editor, Bari Weiss, expressed a high level of interest in the story on an editorial call on Wednesday morning, according to staffers who listened.

“There was big internal dissension about the ‘internal bleeding’ report here last night,” the CBS News staffer, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said. “It was viewed as a thinly veiled, anonymous leak by [the Trump administration] to someone who’d carry it online.”

“Felt to many here like we were carrying water for the admin’s justifying of the shooting to keep our access to our sources,” said a second network staffer, who was also not authorized to comment.

To add insult to injury, The Donald isn’t even playing nice with the eager-to-please-him network.

Despite Bari and Donald excitedly kissing one another on the cheek when they met at the site of CBS’ interview with the POTUS, the administration threatened to sue the network (again):

Moments after President Trump finished taping a 13-minute interview on Tuesday with the “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil in Michigan, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, approached Mr. Dokoupil and his colleagues to convey a message from the president.

“He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full,’” Ms. Leavitt said in an even tone, according to a recording of the exchange obtained by The New York Times.

“Yeah, we’re doing it, yeah,” Mr. Dokoupil responded.

Ms. Leavitt replied: “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”

But check this out from Dokoupil’s interview with Trump (Via Due Dissidence):

Trump: I’ve only been here for 11 months, okay? And you know, the first few months were really rough if you look at them because I inherited a mess.

I inherited a mess of crime. I inherited a mess of inflation. I inherited a mess of places closing up and going to other countries.

And now we have the hottest country in the world. Tony, we have now the hottest country in the world. And a year and a half ago, our country was dead. We had a dead country.

You wouldn’t have a job right now. If she got in, you probably wouldn’t have a job right now. Your boss (Larry Ellison), who’s an amazing guy, might be bust. Okay?

I doubt it in his case, but you never know. Let me just tell you, you wouldn’t have this job. You wouldn’t have this job. Certainly, whatever the hell they’re paying you, our country is rocketing right now. We have the hottest country in the world.

I put the Donald’s message to Larry Ellison in italics, translation: “If it wasn’t for me you could be bankrupt. Well, maybe not in your case, but you never know.”

And bullying is the least of the betrayals Trump has inflicted upon the eager to please Ellisons and their nascent empire.

But to tell that tale, we’ll have to leave poor Bari behind and get into the Ellisons’ attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Ellisons Might Not Get WBD

David Ellison’s Skydance acquired Paramount in early August of 2025.

Within six weeks, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that the Ellisons were preparing a bid for WBD.

Variety tried to explain the Ellisons’ timing:

Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait until WBD splits in half — to form Warner Bros. (HBO Max and studios) and Discovery Global (TV networks) — a transaction CEO David Zaslav says is on track to be done in April 2026? The WBD separation is designed to boost the value of its streaming and studios businesses by carving off the declining TV arm. Paramount Skydance could make a play for the standalone Warner Bros. without assuming the baggage (including the lion’s share of WBD debt) of the entity that will house CNN, TNT, TBS, Discovery and other nets. And through a deal for standalone Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance would still get its hands on the key growth driver going forward: HBO Max. (The mind reels at what a fused HBO Max-Paramount+ might be rebranded.)

One possibility is that a Larry Ellison-backed M&A play for WBD has been part of the Skydance strategy all along. The idea would be “to consolidate media assets during a period of industry-wide instability and build a conglomerate with a streaming-first focus wrapped with TV and film studios and potentially a larger linear television portfolio,” MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a research note Thursday.

And the advantage of moving now is that it could “preempt a potential bidding war for only the Warner Bros. Streaming & Studios assets post-split,” Fishman noted. “By acting now, [Paramount Skydance] positions itself to secure the entire company before rivals can cherry-pick the most attractive assets.”
…
MoffettNathanson’s Fishman speculated that Paramount Skydance could see big benefits by pooling its TV business with WBD’s. “Overall, we would expect material cost synergies from the overlapping cable networks,” he wrote — i.e., layoffs. Fishman added there there are “presumably a high level of synergies from combining CBS News with CNN plus the long-term existing partnership between CBS and Turner with the NCAA’s March Madness Final Four.”

As for why the Ellisons wanted WBD to go with Paramount, these charts (via the Entertainment Strategy Guy) go a long way toward explaining the motivation:

As strange as it might seem, in 2026 Paramount and WBD are relatively minor players in the streaming wars. Without WBD’s assets (primarily HBO), Paramount will be a barely-profitable also-ran.

Plus WBD owns CNN, and it’s well known that The Donald wants to see CNN under new management.

Unfortunately for the Ellisons, Netflix swooped in and seems to have won WBD with a counter-offer.

I won’t try to summarize the blow-by-blow, but The LA Times has a good timeline of the war for WBD.

For our purposes it’s enough to know that Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos thought to personally woo Trump before making the offer.

CNN’s Brian Stelter caught Trump at the Kennedy Center Honors and reported that:

Trump confirmed that he met with Ted Sarandos recently & called Sarandos “a great person,” but expressed reservations about the combined market share of Netflix-Warners. Newsiest quote: “I’ll be involved in that decision.”

That didn’t stop the Ellisons from counter-lobbying, per the WSJ:

Ellison’s father, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a Trump ally, called the president after the Netflix deal was announced and told him the transaction would hurt competition, according to a White House official and a person familiar with the matter.

…

During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, a common target of President Trump’s ire, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.
The White House declined to comment. A White House official said they don’t comment on Trump’s private conversations.

Unfortunately for the Ellisons, our Donald is a slippery one who doesn’t appreciate being taken for granted, from the same WSJ piece:

Trump has so far avoided publicly backing a bidder. “None of them are particularly great friends of mine,” he said at a White House roundtable on Monday. A person close to Trump said the president will want Paramount and Netflix to compete for his approval of a deal.

Trump has told aides he wants to be kept regularly apprised of any potential antitrust probe into Netflix’s deal for Warner. A spokesman for Attorney General Pam Bondi said while it is still early days, she and the DOJ’s antitrust division will oversee this merger.

Trump continues to toy with both bidders via social media posts.

But when it comes to putting his money where his mouth is, the conflict-of-interest-in-chief might be betting on Netflix, per Variety:

President Donald Trump bought at least $500,000 worth of bonds in both Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery within the two weeks following the two companies’ deal, under which Netflix is to acquire WB’s studios and streaming businesses.

According to a financial disclosure form released Friday by the White House, Trump bought between $250,001 and $500,000 of Netflix debt securities on two separate dates, Dec. 12 and Dec. 16. He also bought the same range of bonds for Discovery Communications (a WBD subsidiary) on those same dates.
…
According to the White House, Trump’s financial portfolio is independently managed by third-party financial institutions — and neither Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested

That’s got to be a kick in the teeth to the Ellisons.

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had been among the financial backer’s of Paramount’s bid for WBD, pulled out of the deal as well, per Axios:

Affinity Partners, the fund tied to President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, has backed out of Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
…
“With ​two ​strong competitors ​vying to secure ​the future ​of this ​unique American ​asset, ​Affinity ​has ​decided no longer to pursue ​the opportunity,” an Affinity spokesperson said.

“The dynamics ​of the investment have changed significantly ​since we initially became ​involved ​in October. We ​continue to ​believe ​there is a strong strategic rationale for Paramount’s offer.”
…
Affinity Partners never had a substantial stake in the bid, sources told Axios, but some believed Kushner’s affiliation with the Paramount offer could help Paramount with any regulatory scrutiny.

Some 60% of the $40 billion in equity funding for Paramount’s latest offer came from sovereign wealth funds, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Company and the Qatar Investment Authority.
Kushner is believed to have helped Paramount broker some of those funding relationships.

But the Ellisons are not giving up and The Hollywood Reporter has the details on their most recent move:

On Jan. 12, Paramount sued Warners, escalating its fight and seeking an order that would force the company’s board of directors to show its work, betting that bringing that information to light will help its case. And Ellison also announced his intent to launch a proxy fight for Warner Bros. should the company continue to not engage.
…
To be clear, a proxy fight is not yet a sure thing. Paramount is betting that its lawsuit can pry out new data that could sway investors or force WBD to engage, which is its preferable course of action. The suit and proxy threat are simply the logical next step in the process.

The window for WBD to set its annual meeting opens in about three weeks, and Paramount could nominate a slate of nominees that would force deal talks. If WBD scheduled a special meeting to approve the deal beforehand, Paramount could wage a proxy campaign to vote “no.”

And Netflix could still adjust its offer, either by raising the price, or by moving to an all-cash deal, a move that could box Paramount in and force them to reraise themselves.

The Ellisons may be going to the mattresses to get WBD, but their war chest isn’t as full as they might wish.

Oracle Ain’t What It Used to Be

What a difference six months makes. Oracle’s stock is down 20% from its high in September due to cooling enthusiasm for their AI investments.

And Oracle’s debt is doing even worse (chart from December 12, 2025 via Bloomberg)

And now Oracle bondholders are taking them to court, per CNBC:

Oracle was sued on Wednesday by bondholders who say they suffered losses because the company chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison failed to disclose it needed to sell significant additional debt to build out its artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The proposed class action was filed in a New York state court in Manhattan on behalf of investors who bought $18 billion of notes and bonds that Oracle issued on Sept. 25, two weeks after Oracle announced a $300 billion, five-year contract to supply OpenAI with computing power.

These investors said they were blindsided when Oracle returned to the capital markets seven weeks later to obtain $38 billion of loans to fund two data centers to support the OpenAI agreement.

Looks like it’s easier for a billionaire dynasty to announce its intentions than it is to pull them off.

Short Term This Is Funny, Long Term, Not So Much

David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher put things in historical context for The Guardian in “Bari Weiss’s ascent at CBS News was 50 years in the making” from October when Weiss was hired:

…as abrupt as this Orwellian turn may seem, it is no sudden pivot – it is instead the culmination of a scheme launched a half-century ago by some of America’s most influential power brokers…

…almost exactly 50 years before Weiss’s appointment, CBS’s own president was boasting of his support for a conservative, antidemocratic political project and bragging about his efforts to shift his news division’s media coverage away from scrutinizing corporate power.

…a prominent tobacco industry attorney named Lewis Powell penned a 1971 call to arms for the nation’s largest lobbying group, the Chamber of Commerce, and its corporate members.

“Much of the media – for varying motives and in varying degrees – either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these ‘attackers’, or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes,” Powell wrote. “The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs, but to the daily news analysis, which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system. Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in business and free enterprise.”

They take it back to today at the end of the piece:

In the Trump era, there is no longer any attempt to obscure what’s really going on. Nine years ago, as Trump was starting his authoritarian ascent and bashing journalists, CBS’s CEO didn’t sound an alarm – he instead seemed thrilled, declaring that the circus-like environment “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”.
…
It’s right there in our faces – which means we can start calling all of this what it has always been: not merely a crass short-term business play, but a decades-long effort to destroy whatever’s left of the fourth estate that is supposed to deter authoritarianism.

Powell’s effort succeeded in reducing the Fourth Estate to the rubble through which Bari Weiss scurries as she attempts to avoid the stomping feet of King Kong Donald Trump.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but this kind of thing makes me appreciate the info-shelter provided by the Naked Capitalism community.

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

• 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

On Monday I attempted to summarize the precipitating causes of the ICE crisis in Minnesota as well as give some of the political and demographic backstory.

Yesterday Yves posted Common Dreams’ report on the federal lawsuits filed by Illinois and Minnesota “in hopes of ending deadly operations by President Donald Trump administration’s intended to hunt down and deport immigrants.”

In hopes and prayers, perhaps.

Updates on Trump vs Minnesota

Today I’ll cover:

• The latest moves of the Trump Regime

• Some stumbles on the way to the crackdown

• Democrats react and how

• Intra-Democratic party politics in Minnesota

• Some calls for more serious and effective action from unexpected quarters

• Not All Democrats

• The connection to the geo-politics of Somaliland

And Trump Just Don’t Stop

Yesterday, teh Donald took to Truth Social to post a screed that ended with “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” Here’s the full statement.

On the 8th, the Trump regime issued a new policy that “members of Congress need to schedule any visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities 7 days in advance. Any exemptions to the rule have to be approved by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem” the new policy bypasses a court order that had blocked officials from restricting such oversight visits.

The new policy was not widely reported until the 11th.

Trump’s spokesgal Karoline Leavitt posted the following on X yesterday (note the link to Fox News, synergy!)

NBC explained some details and had a quote from DHS boss/ICE Barbie Kristi Noem:

The Trump administration is ending temporary protected status for Somali immigrants, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed in a post on X on Tuesday.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services confirmed on X that “Somali nationals with TPS are now required to leave the United States by March 17, 2026.”
…
In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “Temporary means temporary.”

“Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status,” she said. “Further, allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interests. We are putting Americans first.”

This Kristi Noem:

Regarding the slogan, “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS”:

“The phrase evokes the Lidice Massacre in June 1942, where Nazis retaliated for Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination by wiping out the Czech village. SS forces shot nearly all men over 14, sent women to Ravensbrück camp, and scattered children—some gassed at Chełmno, others Germanized. They then razed the site, killing about 340 in a symbol of terror tactics.”

FWIW Lead stories has “fact-checked” the above claim and found “No, that’s not true” but it’s clear from the article they just did Google searches and did not consult any actual historians.

The Metro has a quick rundown of some of the other times the Trump regime has echoed not-see rhetoric and I’ve previously posted about White House Deputy Fuhrer Chief of Staff Stephen Miller plagiarizing Joseph Goebells.

So yea, nothing to see here folks, listen to the “fact-checkers” and go back to sleep.

ICE-ing Ain’t Easy

But not all runs smooth for the Trump juggernaut.

Ken Klippenstein has revealed multiple internal ICE documents revealing that “DHS is privately divided and hesitant about the latest deployments. According to documents leaked to me, not only is the Department seeking “volunteers” for the apparently unpopular mission, it is urging its agents to maintain a low profile and comply with the use of force policies.”

And Raw Story is reporting that “A Department of Homeland Security whistleblower has released the identities of about 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees Tuesday in what has been called potentially the largest agency data breach for the department.”

Meanwhile Trump regime demands that the Department of Justice investigate the widow of ICE victim Renee Good has reportedly triggered resignations of at least six DOJ prosecutors, including Joseph H. Thompson, the lead prosecutor of the many fraud cases that served at the pretext for ICE’s invasion of Minnesota. Per The New York Times:

Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an interview that Mr. Thompson’s resignation dealt a major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies.
…
Mr. Thompson strenuously objected to the decision not to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter, and was outraged by the demand to launch a criminal investigation into Becca Good, according to the people familiar with the developments, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Mr. Thompson had originally set out to investigate the shooting in partnership with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that reviews police shootings. Senior Justice Department officials overruled the decision to cooperate with the state agency.
…
Mr. Thompson grew frustrated in recent weeks as the immigration surge became a distraction for the office’s work on fraud, undermining the goal the administration said it was trying to pursue, according to people familiar with his thinking.
…
Mr. Thompson’s departure is a major blow to the effort. A self-described workaholic, he has encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of investigations involving a complex web of defendants and transactions.

More than 90 people have been charged since 2022 and at least 60 have been convicted of defrauding programs meant to feed children during the pandemic, aid people at risk of homelessness and treat minors with autism.

As the scandal drew national attention, Mr. Thompson became a high profile figure, earning praise from elected officials across the political spectrum. Several urged him to run for office, something Mr. Thompson — who refuses to discuss his political preferences — has said he has ruled out.

I wonder if Thompson plans to run for office as a Democrat?

If so, I hope he is capable of more serious action than the current party leadership.

Feckless Is As Feckless Does, National Democrats React

The Never-Trump neo-con centrist Substack publication The Bulwark headlined their coverage of Congressional Democrats’ response to ICE’s attack on Minnesota, “Democrats Appear Ready to Duck a Key Fight on ICE.”

Key quotes:

Democrats appear suddenly reluctant to use their leverage to address another issue that is important to their base (and, frankly, a lot of voters outside of it): the money pouring into ICE.
…
I asked a number of Senate Democrats if increasing ICE funding is a red line for them in the upcoming budget negotiations. Most of the lawmakers I spoke with refrained from describing it in that way, opting instead to strongly criticize the agency without specifying what legislative action they might be willing to take to address the problems.

“I just think there are ways we can call out this behavior and the kind of level of disruption that’s taking place in city after city,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). He mentioned reduced training requirements for ICE officers being a serious concern.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said she does not support increases to ICE’s budget, but offloaded much of the responsibility for whether that happens onto her GOP colleagues.

“Yeah, I would ask my Republican colleagues who are obviously taking the lead on these [appropriation bills],” she said. “Is this what they want to rubber stamp for residential neighborhoods across this country? Thousands of masked, armed agents coming into their communities?”

When asked by another reporter if she wants policy changes for DHS separate from strictly by-the-numbers funding, Baldwin, a member of the Appropriations Committee, suggested that programmatic reforms to an agency would be a separate matter from a debate over how much money to give said agency.

“That’s obviously—I don’t wanna get in the weeds—that’s obviously an authorizing committee issue,” she said. “When we’re talking about appropriations, I call on my Republicans . . . do they wanna rubber stamp this or what?”
…
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security—and one of the party’s most vocal critics of Trump’s authoritarian impulses—said discussions are taking place about the path forward on DHS funding and reform. But he stopped short of making any formal policy commitments.

Politico’s piece “‘Abolish ICE’? Many Democrats are ready to fund it — with conditions” shows that national Dems are still trapped in a morass of kayfabe and pretend:

Behind the scenes, top Democrats are feverishly working to fund the agency — with strings attached.

The mismatch between the anti-ICE rhetoric and the actions of Democratic appropriators reflects a Catch-22 of congressional power: The only way lawmakers can put guardrails on the controversial agency and curb President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda at this moment is to hand it billions of taxpayer dollars.

As they negotiate fiscal 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security with Republicans ahead of a Jan. 30 shutdown deadline, Democrats are demanding new rules for DHS agents, such as forcing them to use body cameras, refrain from wearing masks and go through more extensive training.

Even as new polling fielded after the fatal Jan. 7 shooting of Renee Good shows that a plurality of voters back ICE’s elimination, top Democrats on Capitol Hill are seeking to restrain the agency under Trump’s leadership — not disband it.

It’s not just national Democrats who don’t have good answers about what to do when ICE invades a Blue City in a Blue State.

Feckless Is As Feckless Does, Local Democrats React

And who can blame them? As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pointed out to The Bulwark (video): “You’re basically asking – can our cops arrest ICE agents? Legally? Yes. Practically? It gets kind of hard when they outnumber us and have bigger guns than we do.”

But his actual impotence hasn’t stopped NBC from proclaiming, “Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey emerges as city’s ’emotional voice’ following ICE shooting”

Like fellow “dark woke” Democrats, Frey’s speech was so strong NBC can’t even print his words in full:

(Frey) accused ICE of “trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” claiming that its interpretation of the video of the incident “is bulls—.” He said the officer who shot the woman was “recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying” and demanded that ICE “get the f— out of Minneapolis.”

Whew. I hope readers of this family blog are not too frightened to continue.

Doesn’t matter what we think though, The New York Times has declared our boy has the stuff in yesterday’s feature profile titled, “The Minneapolis Mayor Who Cursed Out ICE Is No Stranger to Crisis. Most importantly the sub-heading informs readers that “Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, has clashed with his party’s activist wing. His response to ICE has won him new respect at home and new foes in Washington.”

Though President Trump’s allies have portrayed Mr. Frey in recent days as an example of liberal excess, the mayor has long faced the opposite charge inside his heavily Democratic city, where some residents have complained that he was too moderate and too accommodating of the police.

In recent days, as ICE has flooded Minneapolis, Mr. Frey and other top Democrats have been unified in their criticisms of the president and their calls for agents to leave. It is a far different political landscape from 2020, when Minneapolis Democrats were divided over what to do about policing after an officer murdered George Floyd, and when Mr. Frey became a target of left-wing protests.

“Apparently,” said Mr. Frey, who has said he is in his last term as mayor, “I’m like a walking Rorschach test.”

After the murder of Mr. Floyd in the spring of 2020, Minneapolis was in chaos and protesters gathered near Mr. Frey’s home. A speaker asked about defunding the police and presented the first-term mayor with a microphone.

“I do not support the full abolition of the police,” Mr. Frey responded through a face mask, his voice barely audible. The crowd booed. He walked away to chants of “Shame!” and “Go home, Jacob.”

They do at least include some quotes from local critics of Frey towards the end of the piece:

(2017 Mayoral candidate) Nekima Levy Armstrong said Mr. Frey needed to “really show” his power and “back up all that tough talk.”

Dan Engelhart, a Democratic member of the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, said he had never supported the mayor, and “to be honest, I think he’s the worst politician I’ve ever been around in my whole life.” He called for moving beyond “the lowest possible bar and performative speeches.”

This November Substack post from a supporter of one of Frey’s rivals for the position implored Frey to “develop relationships with City Council members, not only those who agree with you, but all of them.”

This is a good time to look at the 2025 mayor’s race to understand how Frey got re-elected. It wasn’t easy.

Frey’s Crooked Path to Re-Election

Last Summer it looked for a few days that Frey was out and that State Senator Omar Fateh might become “The Mamdani of Minneapolis.”

Fateh’s high water mark came in July when he won the endorsement of the Minneapolis Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (effectively the Democratic Party in Minnesota.

Wikipedia more or less ably explains how Fateh won and then lost that prize:

The Minneapolis DFL endorsing convention took place on July 19, 2025 at the Target Center. The convention initially endorsed a mayoral candidate in a contested race for the first time since 1997, with Omar Fateh declared the winner after acquiring 43.58% of the vote in the first round. While this wasn’t enough to reach the 60% threshold required for the endorsement, a second vote was held via raise of delegate badges, which Fateh won. Frey’s campaign appealed his victory to the state party.

On August 21, 2025, the Minnesota DFL revoked the endorsement following the appeal, citing failures in the voting process. These failures included an error in ballot software usage that resulted in an undercount in the first round and a poorly secured registration spreadsheet. The state DFL placed the Minneapolis DFL on a two-year probation and forbade them from holding a second convention or otherwise endorsing in the 2025 mayoral election. The Minneapolis DFL filed an unsuccessful appeal challenging both the revocation and the bans on future endorsements, citing conflicts of interest and claiming that the committee that made the determination was acting outside of the authority given them in the DFL’s constitution.

The state DFL determined that no errors were made in how the endorsement was rescinded. In October, Fateh’s campaign was fined $500 in court for campaign finance violations after continuing to distribute yard signs that listed the DFL endorsement after it was revoked.

It’s like a pocket history of failed progressive attempts to gain control of the Demoratic party apparatus.

Fateh responded to the screw job to The Guardian:

Fateh believes the revoked endorsement is in part because of the donor class and how it would look to support a progressive candidate with a populist message, especially in suburban and rural areas where the DFL has lost ground.

“The DFL and the Democratic party as a whole like to always say we’re a big tent, we are a wide spectrum, we welcome everybody,” he said. “But a lot of times it seems like when it’s the more progressive wing that they can shut out.”

Minnesota’s leading Somali-American progressive politician talked to The Nation:

The reaction of US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was every bit as firm and focused as that of the candidate. “It is inexcusable to overturn the DFL endorsement from Omar Fateh,” she said. “A small group, a majority living outside Minneapolis, met privately to overturn the will of Minneapolis delegates who volunteered, organized, and participated in a months-long DFL process. Unacceptable.”

But it took more than insider political fuckery for Frey to beat Omar in the ranked choice general election. He played some shrewd divide-and-conquer politics as well.

This story from the Suna Times (“Latest Somali News in Minutes”) headlined “Somali Clan Divisions Surface as Jacob Frey Wins Third Term in Minneapolis Mayoral Race” elaborates:

Tensions, celebrations, and disappointment have swept across Somali social media circles following the fiercely contested Minneapolis mayoral election, where the race took on deep clan and community undertones among the city’s large Somali diaspora.

In a dramatic and emotional campaign, Jacob Frey secured victory for a third consecutive term as Mayor of Minneapolis, defeating his closest challenger, State Senator Omar Fateh. What made this election particularly remarkable was the way it highlighted the internal divisions within the Somali-American community — primarily between members of the Hawiye and Daarood clans, who rallied behind different candidates.

According to social media trends, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her ex-husband Ahmed Hersi emerged as key figures on opposing sides of the political divide. Ilhan Omar, who openly supported Omar Fateh, was backed largely by members of the Daarood clan, while Ahmed Hersi, who mobilized an energetic social media campaign, stood firmly behind Jacob Frey — drawing significant support from the Hawiye community.

Warya TV reported that Frey’s relationships in the Somali community were neither new nor shallow:

When Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey walked into a packed East African event hall on election night and delivered part of his victory speech in Somali, it was not a last-minute attempt to broaden his appeal.

It was the culmination of a relationship that has shaped his political life for more than a decade — and one that helped him defeat his top challenger, state Sen. Omar Fateh, the first Somali American elected to the Minnesota Legislature.

While neither campaign can quantify the exact vote breakdown among Somali American residents, both acknowledge that Frey secured a meaningful share of the community’s support, despite Fateh’s deep roots within it.

It is interesting to ponder what the political situation in Minneapolis would be like if it was Mayor Fateh in the crosshairs rather than the centrist-approved Mayor Frey, but we won’t get to find out in this version of the time-space continuum.

What we can know is that there is ample frustration with the Democrats’ limited response, coming from some perhaps unexpected quarters.

The Never-Trumpers and Former Trumpers Are Talking Smack

When you’ve lost Bill Kristol…

And it’s not just Bill, his fellow Never-Trumper Rick Wilson put out a stirring call to arms on his Substack:

To stop the immediate crisis, we must weaponize the very “propositional nature” of America. This involves a tactical veto of civil society: a collective refusal by elected leaders, local governments, businesses, the legal community, and civic and religious leaders to facilitate the “will to power.”

By creating friction in the gears of the state, we transform the grim anxiety of the populace into a functional resistance that protects the remaining guardrails of the Republic until the momentum of ICE can be broken at the ballot box.

To end the movement, we must embark on a national lustration, a public and legal purging of the rot. Democrats, once back in power, will return to their mean and try to pass feel-good measures and win over America with policies their technocratic hearts crave. They’ll mutter “let’s put this behind us” and “it’s time to move on” while the enablers and architects of Trump’s violence and viciousness roam free to plot a swift return to power.

It’s like treating cancer with a foot massage; what is required is a national run of political chemotherapy, and there is no substitute for the pain and misery that awaits us in that process.

I have had Kristol and Wilson on my private pay-these-assholes-no-mind list for years but I have to agree with them today. Talk about the political blender in action.

The fact that 2024 Trump-endorser Joe Rogan has come out against ICE (“Are we going to be the Gestapo?“) shows there is more opposition than support to Stephen Miller’s efforts to incite enough trouble that POTUS Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act before the mid-terms.

In fact, Puck reports on multiple right-wing or right-wing adjacent figures who recoiled from ICE’s actions in Minnesota including Dan Bilzerian whom they characterize as “the bearded hedonism influencer and gun-loving poker chud—no one’s idea of a progressive—launched.”

The cite this tweet from Bilzerian then go on to provide the obligatory MSM swipes at him for retweeting Candace Owens, note that the tweet got 5 million views:

The piece also describes the extremely anti-ICE reaction of podcaster (and 2024 Trump endorser) Tim Dillon in a video that had more than 680,000 views at last count.

Then it gets to the data:

The eyewitness video of the Minneapolis tragedy has broken through to normies, who don’t like what they see. This week, a poll from The Economist and YouGov found that a mind-boggling 69 percent of Americans had seen the clip. If extrapolated, that would imply a total viewership larger than last year’s Super Bowl—for a video of a masked federal agent shooting a woman three times.
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After Trump’s inauguration, ICE had a +16 net favorability rating with Americans, according to YouGov. Now, the agency is underwater with a –14 point favorability rating. That’s a 30-point swing since last January, an unheard-of political collapse.

Of those who saw the clip, a majority (50 percent) said the shooting was not justified. Most say that the ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, should face criminal charges. Only 30 percent of Americans said the killing was justified, putting the Trump administration decisively on the wrong side of public opinion. Importantly, the poll found that 47 percent of Americans believe ICE is making the country less safe, compared to just 34 percent who say it’s making the country safer.
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Indeed, the agency is so loathed that 46 percent of Americans now support “abolishing ICE,” YouGov found. …Even 14 percent of Republicans support disbanding the agency. (That said, few Democratic politicians are willing to go there. Even the liberal Minnesota Democrats at the center of the shooting, Mayor Jacob Frey and Attorney General Keith Ellison, are condemning ICE overreach without saying the agency should be eliminated.)

Not All Democrats

In fairness, Rep. Ilhan Omar has been calling for strong measures against ICE:

And she’s endorsing even stronger action against the ICE Barbie, in support of Rep. Robin Kelly:

There is so much more to this story, including AOC’s alleged fecklessness on the abolish ICE issue, Bill Ackman’s support for Renee Good’s killer, calls for a general strike, the author of Copaganda explaining why “reforming” ICE is a canard, Rafi Schwarz’ post about the experience of having ICE come to your town, but I’ll wrap with a pair of tweets and a little bit about possible connections to the breakaway region of Somaliland, because I promised.

First this harsh reminder of the kinetic predicament local officials face in resisting ICE:

In Los Angeles, the National Guard and the USMC helped ICE, DHS, LAPD, and the Sheriff’s Department shoot and brutalize protesters. Not just once. For weeks and weeks and weeks. This is suicidal and naive rhetoric. It’s dangerous. This person is not our ally. Fuck the military. https://t.co/aGlQUBBLsu pic.twitter.com/DqnDqgkKhQ

— Kamille Bidan (@KamilleAEUG) January 14, 2026

And second this bit of AI slop to remind us we’re through the looking glass:

What’s Somaliland Got to Do With It?

I found the timing of Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as an independent nation and the ICE attack on Minnesota a bit more than coincidental, but I had nothing more than a hunch.

But this piece from the crazed neo-cons at the Middle East Forum (backers of Tommy Robinson in the UK among others) made the connection as well.

President Donald Trump will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on December 29, 2025, but the U.S. president appears reticent about recognizing Somaliland, as Israel did on December 26.

Trump should reconsider. For reasons of U.S. national security, but also as he battles rampant Somali corruption in Minnesota and Rep. Ilhan Omar’s efforts to undermine his own policies on assistance and immigration, he could make no better response than to recognize Somaliland independence.

Glad I’m not the only crazy one out there.

Stay safe Minnesotans and everyone.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.

Most recently, two factors have likely drawn the attention of Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller: a media frenzy over fraud scandals and the presence of the largest Somali community outside of Africa.

The first has provided Trump and the broader right with a rich opportunity to attack social spending and entitlement programs.

The second is timely because of the continuing importance of Somalia, most specifically the breakaway Somaliland region, in geo-politics.

The Changing Demographics of Minnesota

Let’s put on our Stephen Miller glasses and try to imagine how Minnesota’s demographic trends are seen by our racists-in-charge.

This chart and paragraphs from Wikipedia’s entry on The Demographics of Minnesota is liable to make any blood-and-soil ethic supremacist type’s blood boil:

African Americans are 7.0% of the population, a figure that has steadily increased over the past three decades. This growth is in part attributed to the influx of immigrants from East Africa, particularly Somalia and Ethiopia, who reside mainly in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul.
…
Significant shifts in racial demographics were evident by the turn of the 21st century. By 2010, the White population was 85.3% and the Black population increased to 5.2%. The Asian population rose to 4%, and those identifying as two or more races rose to 2.4%. This trend was reflected in the 2020 census as well.

But it took more than just a growing African immigrant population to make Minnesota and its Somali diaspora population an attractive target for POTUS Trump and put Minnesota on ICE.

Colton Baldus accurately summed up the goals of the MAGA campaign against Minnesota as being “to push the deportation agenda in a Democratic-governed state, defund programs that working people rely on, and flip Minnesota to the Republican column in the 2026 midterm elections.”

Trump Aims His Racist Rhetoric At Somali-Americans

In December Trump tipped his hand that Somali-Americans were a priority target with an “outburst (that) was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry” per The New York Times in early December. Here’s more from the NYT:

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.

He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

That’s the fascist value proposition in a few paragraphs: over-simplify history, name a scapegoat, and promise brutal and swift action. End result: Minnesota on ICE.

Right-Wing Echo Chamber Booming About Somali Minnesota

The proximate cause of the current Minnesota on ICE situation is right-wing influencer Nick Shirley and his YouTube video “I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal.”

As The Intercept chronicled:

The video, which has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube and millions more on other platforms, sparked a renewed crackdown in Minneapolis, with the Department of Homeland Security announcing on Monday it would visit 30 sites suspected of fraud across the city. A DHS official told CBS News Minnesota its agents would focus on a “little of everything,” when asked whether immigration enforcement would be a part of the crackdown. Threatening arrests, the agency posted a video to X in which agents enter a smoke shop and question an employee about a nearby day care center.

This isn’t the first time the conservative YouTuber has gotten the attention of the Trump administration. Shirley participated in President Donald Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa” in October after an altercation at an anti-ICE protest. At age 23, his videos aren’t merely influencing his audiences — they’re also influencing government action.
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State regulators said Monday that inspectors had visited the day cares mentioned in the video in the past six months, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune, that there was no evidence of fraud at the sites during those unannounced visits, and some of the centers have already been closed or suspended. According to Minnesota Public Radio, state Republican lawmakers had steered Shirley toward the day care centers he visited in the video.
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Despite Shirley’s insistence that race and religion have nothing to do with his investigation, the YouTuber has a long track record of using his man-on-the-street videos to target immigrants in the U.S., platforming individuals who spread xenophobic and Islamophobic beliefs and conspiracy theories. While Shirley’s videos include interviews with those protesting against such hate, he often presents immigration and Islam as a growing threat taking over the country. Combined with sensationalized headlines — “Exposing Dangerous Illegal Migrant Scammers” or “The UK’s Insane Migrant Invasion” — the end result is often a portrait of immigrants as lawbreakers, a societal threat, and a strain on government resources.

Regardless of media efforts to debunk Shirley’s claims, January 2, more than 2000 DHA agents were aiming to put Minnesota on ICE.

Just a few days later, the campaign landed a bigger catch: the political career of Governor Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.

Tim Walz Sunk by Scandal

On January 5, Walz released a statement announcing that he was ending his campaign for a third term as Minnesota governor.

Key quotes:

In September, I announced that I would run for a historic third term as Minnesota’s Governor. And I have every confidence that, if I gave it my all, I would succeed in that effort.

But as I reflected on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all. Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences.

So I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.

Before he got to the money quote he tried to land a few counter-punches on Trump and attempted to defend his record in office:

For the last several years, an organized group of criminals have sought to take advantage of our state’s generosity. And even as we make progress in the fight against the fraudsters, we now see an organized group of political actors seeking to take advantage of the crisis.

I won’t mince words here. Donald Trump and his allies – in Washington, in St. Paul, and online – want to make our state a colder, meaner place. They want to poison our people against each other by attacking our neighbors. And, ultimately, they want to take away much of what makes Minnesota the best place in America to raise a family. They’ve already begun by taking our tax dollars that were meant to help families afford child care. And they have no intention of stopping there.

Make no mistake: We should be concerned about fraud in our state government. We cannot effectively deliver programs and services if we can’t earn the public’s trust. That’s why, over the past few years, we’ve made systemic changes to the way we do business.

We’ve gone to the legislature time and again to get more tools to combat fraud. We’ve fired people who weren’t doing their jobs. We’ve seen people go to jail for stealing from our state. We’ve cut off whole streams of funding, in partnership with the federal government, where we saw widespread criminal activity. We’ve put new locks on the doors of our remaining programs, and we’ve hired a new head of program integrity to make sure those locks can’t be broken.

It’s a sudden end to a political career that for a few weeks in 2024 seemed headed for The US Naval Observatory and possibly the White House itself.

But Trump wasn’t satisfied with Walz’ head on the White House trophy wall, there is social spending to slash.

Trump Regime Cuts Funds

By the 10th, POTUS Trump’s gang in the White House had seized the day to deliver what Elon Musk’s DOGE couldn’t: massive cuts to social services.

Per The Guardian:

The Trump administration announced it is suspending $129m in federal benefit payments to Minnesota amid allegations of widespread fraud in the state.

The secretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Brooke Rollins, shared a letter on Friday on social media that was addressed to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, notifying them of the administration’s decision and citing investigations into alleged fraud conducted by local non-profits and businesses.

“Despite a staggering, wide-reaching fraud scandal, your administrations refuse to provide basic information or take common sense measures to stop fraud. The Trump administration refuses to allow such fraud to continue,” Rollins wrote.

Rollins asked Walz and Frey to provide the USDA with justification for all federal spending from 20 January 2025 to the present within 30 days. She is also requiring that all federal payments to the state moving forward require the same justification.

The cuts in Minnesota were part of a Trump admin attempt to freeze $10 billion in social services to five states. A judge has temporarily put that on hold, but time will tell who prevails.

I’ll come back to the fraud scandal that helped put Minnesota on ICE but first, there’s another bit of historical context to provide.

How did Minnesota become a target-rich environment for xenophobes in the Trump regime?

Why Are There So Many Somalis in Minnesota?

Let’s look at how the Somalis got to Minnesota. This Amazon review of Ahmed I. Yusuf ‘s book “Somalis in Minnesota” tells the story concisely and debunks Trump’s claims that the people of Somalia were solely responsible for their own suffering:

In the 1980s the young country of Somalia found itself stuck between two superpowers and wracked by violence and misery. A few years earlier, Somali General Siad Barre, backed by the Soviet Union, had invaded and claimed lands in neighboring Ethiopia.

The Soviet Union then surprisingly switched alliances and supported Ethiopia. Barre called on the United States and Britain for help, but in the end he had to pull out of Ethiopia. Subsequent coup attempts and executions destabilized and divided Somalia into war zones. Famine followed.

International food aid couldn’t penetrate the region’s carnage and corruption and the U.N. sanctioned humanitarian military intervention. An attempt to capture warlord Farrah Aidid, who had attacked Pakistani troops, led to the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident.

American troops were killed and President Clinton ordered the U.S. to leave. All other countries followed suit, leaving a smoldering Somalia behind. With few options remaining, people fled.

A particular group of refugees went to Kenya and, following more indescribable hardship, some eventually found their way to San Diego. Lacking opportunities in California, a 1992 help wanted ad for a food processing plant inspired some to move to the considerably more frigid climate of Marshall, Minnesota.

They found work almost immediately, encouraging others northward. More and more followed. They established communities in Minnesota’s welcoming and relatively tolerant atmosphere. Even more followed.

Soon, some relocated to Minneapolis and continued building Somali communities. This continued until Minnesota, particularly the city of Minneapolis, could claim the largest population of Somalis in the United States.

And that population of Somalis busied themselves by building economic and political power.

The Somali Diaspora Grew and Thrived in Minnesota

Somali diaspora chronicler Ahmed I. Yusef spoke to The Sahan Journal and described what his community did in Minnesota after arriving:

The first Somalis to be directly resettled from refugee camps in Africa to Minnesota were largely people from Mogadishu who began arriving in 1996. The large influx of Southeast Asian refugees in the 1970s and ’80s paved the way for Somali resettlement in Minnesota, Yusuf said. Groups like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities had experience helping refugees establish themselves in the North Star State.

The work done by African Americans in the fight for civil rights also helped ease the arrival for Somalis in Minnesota, Yusuf said. Progressive civil rights politicians from Minnesota like Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale helped create a welcoming climate.
…
The late ’90s and early 2000s saw hundreds of Somali entrepreneurs open businesses in Minnesota, and families establish themselves in areas of Minneapolis that had fallen into disrepair.

“The entire landscape of south Minneapolis, particularly the area adjacent to downtown, has completely changed and been revitalized,” Yusuf said.

Soon, Somalis began to take seats in local government. In 2010, Hussein Samatar was elected to the Minneapolis school board, making him the first elected Somali official in the state. Three years later, Abdi Warsame became the first Somali elected to the Minneapolis City Council.

In 2016, Ilhan Omar became the first Somali elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, and the first Somali woman to win election in Minnesota. Two years later, she won a seat in Congress.

Since then, several Somali Americans have been elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives. In 2020, Omar Fateh became the first Somali American elected to the Minnesota Senate; Zaynab Mohamed became the first Somali woman elected to the Minnesota Senate in 2022.

Astute readers will see why Trump, Vance, Miller and the MAGA movement see the Somali community in Minnesota as not only a target, but also a threat.

But like any community of recent immigrants, some Somalis have been tempted to take short cuts on the road to the American Dream.

The Fraud Is Real

While it’s never a good idea to take GOP noise machine claims at face value, there has been a massive fraud exposed in Minnesota under Walz’ watch that helps explain Minnesota on ICE.

Axios has a decent timeline of the whole thing that helps explain how “pressure from the Trump administration turned a state scandal that has periodically dominated Minnesota headlines for at least six years into national news.”

Some key quotes:

For the last several years, most attention in Minnesota has focused on what prosecutors called the largest-ever case of pandemic-aid fraud: a sprawling scheme to bilk a federally funded school meals program.

With program rules loosened to ensure children didn’t starve during COVID, prosecutors say fraudsters billed for at least $250 million-worth of meals that they did not serve. To date, more than 70 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted.

Walz administration officials have long maintained they tried to intervene to stop potentially fraudulent meal payments, but court challenges stymied their efforts.

But Minnesota’s independent Legislative Auditor has disputed their argument, concluding in a 2024 report that the state’s Department of Education “failed to act on warning signs” — and could’ve legally intervened to ensure money stopped flowing.

Minnesota Public Radio has a more detailed and Minnesota-centric timeline of the scandal that helps explain the current Minnesota on ICE situation.

This New York Times piece from November has more on the scandal:

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.
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The first public sign of a major problem in the state’s social services system came in 2022, when federal prosecutors began charging defendants in connection to a program aimed at feeding hungry children. Merrick B. Garland, attorney general during the Biden administration, called it the country’s largest pandemic relief fraud scheme.

The prosecutors focused on a Minneapolis nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future, which became a partner to dozens of local businesses that enrolled as feeding sites.

Real But Overstated?

So the scandal is real, but The Center for Media and Democracy has made a strong case that the MSM has done its usual job of elevating right-wing agit-prop to the center of the national discussion.

Key quotes:

CBS—under its new owners, the Ellison family—along with the Murdoch trinity of Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, have covered the story aggressively, at times picking up unconfirmed accounts from conservative influencers that have spun into wild charges about vote-buying and cover-ups.

The New York Times provided front-page coverage to a Sunday news story echoing key arguments made in Trump administration talking points: that a Nordic-style welfare state in Minnesota, combined with criminal tendencies inherent to the state’s Somali population, created an environment ripe for fraud. The Times also focuses on the defendants’ claims that they were being persecuted for racial reasons.
…

More indictments were filed this year, extending the alleged fraud scheme to a housing stabilization program and a health care program. CBS, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post have all repeated DOJ claims that the frauds now exceed $1 billion. Joseph Thompson, the federal prosecutor leading the case, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CMD asking for clarification on DOJ’s monetary estimates.

The only citations supporting the $1-billion claim in those stories come from a department that has been weaponized against its political enemies and is prone to “unprecedented errors” that seriously undermine its credibility.

Based on what the DOJ has actually filed in court, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune calculated the cost of the alleged fraud schemes to be $217.7 million over multiple years, while noting that the number was likely to grow.

I’ll conclude the tale of Minnesota on ICE on Wednesday with a look at the intra-Democratic party politics that helped land Minneapolis where it is today.

It will include a retelling of the 2025 mayoral primary that saw Mayor Jacob Frey hold off a spirited challenge from State Senator Omar Fateh. I should probably have covered it last summer along with my pieces on the New York City mayor’s race, California governor’s race and Maine US senate primary, but alas there wasn’t world enough nor time.

We’ll try to catch up on that, plus Frey’s role in the 2020 BLM protests and Minnesotans’ attempts to resist Minnesota on ICE, the connection to Somaliland (and Israel and the UAE) next time.

Originally published at Naked Capitalism.