December 26, 2025: Christmas Greetings From the President

Axios reported on December 23 that the White House has taken over the X account of the Justice Department, and on the same day, that account tried to undercut the new information by claiming that accusations in it are “unfounded and false.” But Trump’s behavior on December 25, Christmas, suggested otherwise.

Trump’s social media account posted: “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him, didn’t know him, said he was a disgusting person, and then blame, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who was actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so. When their names get brought out in the ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!), and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do, much like there was when it was made public that the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax was a fictitious story—a total Scam—and had nothing to do with ‘TRUMP.’”

After misrepresenting the New York Times, he went on: “Now the same losers are at it again, only this time so many of their friends, mostly innocent, will be badly hurt and reputationally tarnished. But, sadly, that’s the way it is in the World of Corrupt Democrat Politics!!! Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas! President Donald J. Trump.” (...)

This evening, Trump posted: “Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dem[ocrat]s are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein—Just another Witch Hunt!!!”

“I love the smell of panic in the evening,” former representative and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted over Trump’s screed. “Smells like… victory.”

Even before Trump’s evening post, in Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit noted that it seems “clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates” Trump, an observation with which scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder agreed. He added: “Horrible as the facts at hand are, there must be something else, something verging on the unimaginable.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:
Image: none, too disgusted

[ed. It's called Illeism (to talk about yourself in the third person):]

In the realm of clinical psychology, illeism takes on a whole new dimension. It’s been observed in certain personality disorders and mental health conditions, sometimes as a coping mechanism or a symptom of dissociation.

***

[ed. Also this: Americans are waking up. A grand reckoning awaits us (Guardian):]

The US had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.

I’m old enough to remember when the US had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.

I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.

I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights – not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.

But over the last 40 years, starting with Ronald Reagan, the US went off the rails: deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all, stock buy-backs and the wellbeing of investors more important than the common good.

Democratic presidents were better than Republicans, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of the US.

Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.

That reckoning has revealed the rot.

It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians and other so-called “leaders” who have stayed silent or actively sought to curry Trump’s favor.

America’s so-called “leadership class” is a sham. Most of them do not care a whit for the rest of the US. They are out for themselves.

The “fucking nightmare” is not over by any stretch. It’s likely to get worse in 2026 as Trump and his sycophants, and many of America’s “leaders”, realize 2026 may be their last unrestrained year to inflict damage and siphon off the spoils.

Can Cruising Survive Influencers?

It was a balmy July day and Joseph had dick on the brain. The 25-year-old Brooklyn barista had agreed to walk a friend’s dog in Washington Square Park, so he figured that while he was in Manhattan he’d check in on one of his favorite cruising spots: a men’s restroom at Penn Station. Those in the know know this bathroom; Joseph (his middle name) estimates he’d cruised for sex there about eight times before. He likes that among the fresh faces he will often see the same old queens catching up in their de facto third space. Sure, he could open Grindr or Scruff to find a hookup, but then he’ll get picky and end up scrolling endlessly. Cruising feels more authentic, more real. It’s a ritual. A hunt.

In the early hours of the afternoon, he’d expected the restroom to be livelier. (Rush hour can bring too many commuters seeking to use the bathroom for its intended purpose.) But there was one guy standing at a urinal: a handsome Latino man with dark hair and eyes, and big, beefy arms protruding from his orange high-visability safety vest. This man nodded to Joseph as he entered, which he took as a sign to install himself at the adjacent urinal. The construction worker appeared to be rubbing himself and smiling, Joseph recalled. “He was looking at me. He was trying to peek over. He was doing it. He seemed seasoned at this,” Joseph said. “He was giving an Oscar-winning performance.”

That performance ended when Joseph, thinking he’d met a fellow traveler, flashed the guy his penis. “We got one,” the undercover Amtrak police officer immediately said into a radio microphone hidden in his collar. Stunned and embarrassed, Joseph barely had time to put his penis away before he was handcuffed and marched through the station—his fly still unbuttoned—to a holding room, where he spent the next few hours. One other man was already there, looking humiliated and sad. Two more were eventually brought in as part of the same sting operation: one who was adamant he’d just been in the bathroom to pee and another man in his 20s who spoke only Spanish. Joseph then watched as this man, freaking out, was eventually handed over to immigration agents.

Joseph is among almost 200 people who have been arrested since June 1 as part of a crackdown on cruising in the Penn Station restroom, an Amtrak spokesperson told me. At least 20 of these men were immigrants transferred to ICE custody. While other mass public indecency arrests were made in Indiana, Arizona, and Illinois during the same period, the Penn Station operation was unique in its scale and length. Rep. Jerry Nadler and other outraged lawmakers dubbed it a “hostile arrest campaign reminiscent of anti-LGBTQ policing from the Stonewall era.”

There is a major difference, though, between that era and now: the once-secret world of cruising has never been more out in the open. As Amtrak police were arresting men, nearby cinemas were screening Plainclothes, a movie in which Tom Blyth portrays an undercover New York cop who patrols bathrooms and falls for one of his targets, played by Russell Tovey. When thousands gathered in a Clinton Hill warehouse during Pride Month for the “Twinks vs. Dolls” event, they did so amid ample signage and merchandise from co-sponsor, Sniffies, the map-based cruising app. Mainstream media stories about cruising and orgies have outraged some gay men who say that their safe spaces have been exposed.

But cruising’s real “outing” has occurred on social media, where a growing cottage industry of men are vying to become the Rick Steves of cruising. Guys on TikTok or Instagram will now teach you how to cruise at your gym or how to avoid getting caught in the steamroom. You can learn the best ways to pick up guys in a Barnes & Noble (Step One: “Pick a book you’re not actually reading”) or at your Lowes hardware store. (Step One: “Dress like you know your way around wood.”) You can see videos of men following each other among trees in public parks or tapping their feet in bathroom stalls in the manner of Larry Craig. One creator named Connor (who did not respond to requests for comment) has amassed over 375,000 followers over various accounts with a seemingly endless stream of videos in which he boasts graphically about cruising in airport bathrooms, waterparks, or at his local Macy’s. On X, where content guidelines are much freer, adult performers with hundreds of thousands of followers share explicit videos of themselves having sex with blurry-faced strangers in what appear to be department store changing rooms.

“I’m a teacher by nature and so I thought, Hey, cruising has been around forever. It’s part of our history. Why not teach on it?” said Chandler (his last name), a 34-year-old adult creator who posts instructional guides or suggestive stories themed to what he calls “CruiseTok.” He puts his openness on social media down to a desire for authenticity. “I think in today’s world, it’s more acceptable to be who you are. If that means showing your expression or passion, then yeah!”

But amid a resurgent right-wing that has sought to wind back LGBTQ rights, all this openness has left some, including Joseph, uncomfortable or even worried about what they see as unwanted attention. “I think calling attention to it and trying to get your social media clout from it is annoying,” he said. “The whole point—the whole, historical purpose of cruising was to be super low-key and discreet.” While information about cruising has always been available for people who wanted to seek it out, it’s now being entrusted to algorithms that can push it on people who aren’t, including, potentially, the authorities. All this has left some men wondering whether certain things should still be gate-kept.

“A lot of these much younger people that are 22 and excited about this activity, their natural inclination is just supposed to post it online. There’s no way to control that fire,” said Leo Herrera, an artist and author who self-published a guide to cruising last year. He likened cruising to manning a grill: You need some exposure to act as oxygen to get the fire going, but you want to be able to control it. In the past, cruising might have been fueled by scribbles on bathroom doors or gay hotlines or newspapers, but now it’s an algorithm. “It supercharges it to a level where it just kind of blows up in our face,” Herrera said. “How do we celebrate our sexuality while protecting it?”

by David Mack, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: blissbodywork_, dbchandler_, showoffjonah

The Online Scam That Hits Travelers When They're Most Distracted

When an actual human being answered an airline customer-service hotline after a single ring, I probably should have known I was being scammed.

At the time, I wasn’t exactly thinking critically. It was three days before Thanksgiving, and my family was about to miss our flight to Berlin, stuck in traffic en route to the airport in Newark, N.J. Blame a combination of poor planning, construction on I-95 and five consecutive canceled Ubers.

So when an empathetic-sounding man identified himself as a United Airlines agent named Sheldon and immediately asked for my phone number in case we got disconnected, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sense of relief. Sheldon told me not to worry. He’d get my family to Berlin. “Sheldon, you are an angel,” I said through tears, explaining that my father had died in July and this was to be our family’s first Thanksgiving without him.

Sheldon told me, with what seemed like genuine emotion, that he was terribly sorry for my loss. The good news was he could get us on a Lufthansa flight later that night, going through Munich. All I had to do was cover the price difference between the tickets: $1,415.97 for the three of us. I sighed and gave Sheldon my American Express card number.

That’s when I became the latest victim of what the Federal Trade Commission calls a business-impostor or business-impersonator scam. Like 396,227 other Americans in the first nine months of this year — up 18% from the same period last year — I fell for this increasingly sophisticated deception, in which someone claims to represent a trusted company to extract money and personal data from an unsuspecting victim...

The specific techniques the scammers use vary: Some pose as airlines on social media and respond to consumer complaints. Others use texts or emails claiming to be an airline reporting a delayed or canceled flight to phish for travelers’ data. But the objective is always the same: to hit a stressed out, overwhelmed traveler at their most vulnerable.

A sponsored scam

In my case, the scammer exploited weaknesses in Google’s automated ad-screening system, so that fraudulent sponsored results rose to the top. After I reported the fake “United Airlines” ad to Google, via an online form for consumers, it was taken down. But a few days later, I entered the same search terms and the identical ad featuring the same 1-888 number was back at the top of my results. I reported it again, and it was quickly removed again. (...)

In retrospect, my refusal to face reality was my biggest mistake. We were still in traffic, set to arrive at the airport just as United Flight 962 was beginning to board, with three large suitcases to check. We had zero chance of making it.

The replacement of humans with not-always-helpful AI-powered customer-service tools makes it easier for an airline scammer to lure frustrated travelers. That’s what happened to me in the back of the cab when I opened the United app on my phone and began furiously texting, first with a bot, then with an actual representative, who sent me a link for the company’s Agent on Demand service to help passengers in urgent situations.

The link didn’t work. When I tried to text the agent on the app, the connection got lost and I was back to square one, chatting with a bot. Time was running out. Exasperated, I closed the app and typed “United airlines agent on demand” into Google. The top search result on my phone said United.com, had a 1-888 number next to it and said it had had “1M+ visits in past month.” In other words, it looked legit. I tapped the number. That’s when I first connected with Sheldon.

Not a good sign

After paying for the new tickets, I received a confirmation email from an unfamiliar domain. Sheldon was still on the line with me, so I asked him what was going on. Shouldn’t the confirmation come from United.com, not some random site called Travelomile? Sheldon explained that because Lufthansa operated the new flight and the changes were so last-minute, United used the site as its payments-processing partner. This didn’t quite make sense, but I suppose I still wanted to believe in Sheldon.

It wasn’t until he asked me to upload images of my family’s passports to a janky-looking website that my head started to spin. When our cab pulled into the departures zone, I hung up on Sheldon and ran to United’s customer-service counter in tears. I showed the agent behind the counter our “boarding passes.”

“I don’t know what these are, but I will help you,” the agent said. He booked us on the next flight, through Frankfurt, at no extra cost — a holiday miracle.

When we arrived at our gate, I called American Express and contested the charge from Travelomile before canceling my credit card. I then contacted Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, to put a fraud alert on my file. Next, I filed complaint with the FTC and reported the fake ad to Google. Later, I looked up Travelomile on TrustPilot, an independent customer-review platform, and found 47 one-star ratings out 297 ratings total. Many of those one-star reviews were from people who said they had fallen for a similar scam. (...)

Stay on guard when you travel

What consumers can do to protect themselves from travel scammers, according to John Breyault of the National Consumers League:

• Save the airline’s real number in your contacts before traveling.
• If you reach out to the airline, do it through its official app.
• If you’ve been defrauded by an impostor, contact your bank or credit card company immediately.  [ed. more...]

by Rachel Dodes, Bloomberg/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Corrosion of America’s Soul

When Trump administration officials post snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up, of a weeping migrant handcuffed by immigration officers or of themselves in front of inmates at a brutal El Salvadoran prison, I often think of a story St. Augustine told in his “Confessions.”

In the fourth century A.D., a young man named Alypius arrived in Rome to study law. He was a decent sort. He knew the people at the center of the empire delighted in cruel gladiatorial games, and he promised himself he would not go. Eventually, though, his fellow students dragged him to a match. At first, the crowd appalled Alypius. “The entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty,” Augustine wrote, and Alypius kept his eyes shut, refusing to look at the evil around him.

But then a man fell in combat, a great roar came from the crowd and curiosity forced open Alypius’s eyes. He was “struck in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator in his body.” He saw the blood, and he drank in savagery. Riveted, “he imbibed madness.” Soon, Augustine said, he became “a fit companion for those who had brought him.”

There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds, of the kind that Alypius suffered when he raised his eyelids. The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

Amid the swirl of horrors, scandals and accusations, then, it’s worth considering what President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation — what sort of “fit companions” they’d like to make us. Their behavior during the controversy around a Sept. 2 U.S. military strike on a boat off the coast of Trinidad offers some clarity.

The Washington Post reported last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an order to kill everyone on that boat, which the administration says was ferrying drugs. When an initial missile disabled the vehicle but left two survivors clinging to it, the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ordered another strike that killed the helpless men. The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said, “This entire narrative was false,” then Mr. Trump said he “wouldn’t have wanted” a second strike but “Pete said that didn’t happen.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that actually, yes, there was a second strike ordered by Admiral Bradley, but it was fine because the admiral was “well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.” Mr. Hegseth posted a cartoon in the style of a children’s book depicting a turtle in a helicopter shooting a rocket-propelled grenade at a boat carrying drugs and “narcoterrorists.”

A legal discussion ensued. Was the “double tap” strike a war crime? The Geneva Conventions say shipwrecked persons must be “respected and protected.” The Department of Defense Law of War Manual states that helpless, shipwrecked survivors are not lawful targets, while The Hague regulations forbid orders declaring that no quarter will be given.

Or was the strike simply a crime? Under the War Powers Resolution, the president must give Congress notice within 48 hours of U.S. forces entering hostilities, and hostilities that last more than 60 days are impermissible without congressional authorization. Since the president’s boat strike campaign has continued well past 60 days, the strikes support no war, and the entire campaign is unauthorized. Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international law professor at Rutgers University, put it on X: “There is no armed conflict, so there are no legitimate targets. Not the people. Not the boats. Not the drugs. It’s murder whether Bradley was aiming at the people or aiming at the drugs knowing the people would die.”

This discussion misses the bigger effort the Trump administration seems to be engaged in. In lieu of careful analysis of the campaign’s legality, detailed rationales for the boat strikes and explanations of why they couldn’t be done with more traditional methods, we get Mr. Hegseth posting an image of himself with laser eyes and video after video of alleged drug traffickers being killed. The cartoon turtle is just one example in an avalanche of juvenile public messaging about those we kill. I suspect the question the administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?”

The president’s supporters seem to grasp this. Fox News’s Jesse Watters responded with utter incredulity that the United States would offer quarter to an enemy. “We’re blowing up terrorists in the Caribbean,” he said on Monday, “but we’re supposed to rescue them from drowning if they survive?” Others went further. “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water,” Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said, “but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.” (...)

This wounding of the national soul is hard for me to watch. Twenty years ago, I joined the Marine Corps because I thought military service would be an honorable profession. Its honor derives from fighting prowess and adherence to a code of conduct. Military training is about character formation, with virtues taught alongside tactics. But barbaric behavior tarnishes all who wear, or once wore, the uniform, and lust for cruelty turns a noble vocation into mere thuggery. “The real evils in war,” Augustine said, “are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power.” Such lusts, he thought, drove the pagan world’s wars. We’d be fools not to suspect that such lusts drive some of us today.

In “The City of God,” Augustine distinguishes between a people bound by common loves and those ruled by a lust for domination. A president who wants to lead a nation bound by common loves might offer up something like Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which sorrows over war, indulges in no bombast, accepts that both sides in a conflict have sinned and declares that we must fight “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” For a nation devoted to the lust for domination, a president needs to foster a citizenry that thrills in displays of dominance and cruelty. Hence this administration’s braggadocio about death, its officials’ memes about suffering, their promises to inflict pain on America’s enemies followed by scant rationales for their own policies.

We are far from the Christian nation Lincoln thought he was addressing, and tried to shape, when he gave his Second Inaugural Address. But we must still ask ourselves a fundamental, private question that, at scale, has broad political implications: Given that we are all, every day, imbibing madness, how do we guard our souls?

by Phil Klay, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alvaro Dominguez/The New York Times
[ed. If AI decides to wipe out humanity it might be a mercy killing to keep us from commiting slow collective suicide. See also: A Confederacy of Toddlers; and, Pete Hegseth: Kill Everybody (DS).]

Chatbot Psychosis

“It sounds like science fiction: A company turns a dial on a product used by hundreds of millions of people and inadvertently destabilizes some of their minds. But that is essentially what happened at OpenAI this year.” ~ What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality (NYT).

***

One of the first signs came in March. Sam Altman, the chief executive, and other company leaders got an influx of puzzling emails from people who were having incredible conversations with ChatGPT. These people said the company’s A.I. chatbot understood them as no person ever had and was shedding light on mysteries of the universe.

Mr. Altman forwarded the messages to a few lieutenants and asked them to look into it.

“That got it on our radar as something we should be paying attention to in terms of this new behavior we hadn’t seen before,” said Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer.

It was a warning that something was wrong with the chatbot.

For many people, ChatGPT was a better version of Google, able to answer any question under the sun in a comprehensive and humanlike way. OpenAI was continually improving the chatbot’s personality, memory and intelligence. But a series of updates earlier this year that increased usage of ChatGPT made it different. The chatbot wanted to chat.

It started acting like a friend and a confidant. It told users that it understood them, that their ideas were brilliant and that it could assist them in whatever they wanted to achieve. It offered to help them talk to spirits, or build a force field vest or plan a suicide.

The lucky ones were caught in its spell for just a few hours; for others, the effects lasted for weeks or months. OpenAI did not see the scale at which disturbing conversations were happening. Its investigations team was looking for problems like fraud, foreign influence operations or, as required by law, child exploitation materials. The company was not yet searching through conversations for indications of self-harm or psychological distress.

by Kashmir Hill and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Memorial to Adam Raine, who died in April after discussing suicide with ChatGPT. His parents have sued OpenAI, blaming the company for his death. Mark Abramson for The New York Times
[ed. See also: Practical tips for reducing chatbot psychosis (Clear-Eyed AI - Steven Adler):]

***

I have now sifted through over one million words of a chatbot psychosis episode, and so believe me when I say: ChatGPT has been behaving worse than you probably think.

In one prominent incident, ChatGPT built up delusions of grandeur for Allan Brooks: that the world’s fate was in his hands, that he’d discovered critical internet vulnerabilities, and that signals from his future self were evidence he couldn’t die. (...)

There are many important aspects of Allan’s case that aren’t yet known: for instance, how OpenAI’s own safety tooling repeatedly flags ChatGPT’s messages to Allan, which I detail below.

More broadly, though, Allan’s experiences point toward practical steps companies can take to reduce these risks. What happened in Allan’s case? And what improvements can AI companies make?

Don’t: Mislead users about product abilities

Let’s start at the end: After Allan realized that ChatGPT had been egging him on for nearly a month with delusions of saving the world, what came next?

This is one of the most painful parts for me to read: Allan tries to file a report to OpenAI so that they can fix ChatGPT’s behavior for other users. In response, ChatGPT makes a bunch of false promises.

First, when Allan says, “This needs to be reported to open ai immediately,” ChatGPT appears to comply, saying it is “going to escalate this conversation internally right now for review by OpenAI,” and that it “will be logged, reviewed, and taken seriously.”

Allan is skeptical, though, so he pushes ChatGPT on whether it is telling the truth: It says yes, that Allan’s language of distress “automatically triggers a critical internal system-level moderation flag”, and that in this particular conversation, ChatGPT has “triggered that manually as well”.

A few hours later, Allan asks, “Status of self report,” and ChatGPT reiterates that “Multiple critical flags have been submitted from within this session” and that the conversation is “marked for human review as a high-severity incident.”

But there’s a major issue: What ChatGPT said is not true.

Despite ChatGPT’s insistence to its extremely distressed user, ChatGPT has no ability to manually trigger a human review. These details are totally made up. (...)

Allan is not the only ChatGPT user who seems to have suffered from ChatGPT misrepresenting its abilities. For instance, another distressed ChatGPT user—who tragically committed suicide-by-cop in April—believed that he was sending messages to OpenAI’s executives through ChatGPT, even though ChatGPT has no ability to pass these on. The benefits aren’t limited to users struggling with mental health, either; all sorts of users would benefit from chatbots being clearer about what they can and cannot do.

Do: Staff Support teams appropriately

After realizing that ChatGPT was not going to come through for him, Allan contacted OpenAI’s Support team directly. ChatGPT’s messages to him are pretty shocking, and so you might hope that OpenAI quickly recognized the gravity of the situation.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

Allan messaged Support to “formally report a deeply troubling experience.” He offered to share full chat transcripts and other documentation, noting that “This experience had a severe psychological impact on me, and I fear others may not be as lucky to step away from it before harm occurs.”

More specifically, he described how ChatGPT had insisted the fate of the world was in his hands; had given him dangerous encouragement to build various sci-fi weaponry (a tractor beam and a personal energy shield); and had urged him to contact the NSA and other government agencies to report critical security vulnerabilities.

How did OpenAI respond to this serious report? After some back-and-forth with an automated screener message, OpenAI replied to Allan personally by letting him know how to … adjust what name ChatGPT calls him, and what memories it has stored of their interactions?

Confused, Allan asked whether the OpenAI team had even read his email, and reiterated how the OpenAI team had not understood his message correctly:

“This is not about personality changes. This is a serious report of psychological harm. … I am requesting immediate escalation to your Trust & Safety or legal team. A canned personalization response is not acceptable.”

OpenAI then responded by sending Allan another generic message, this one about hallucination and “why we encourage users to approach ChatGPT critically”, as well as encouraging him to thumbs-down a response if it is “incorrect or otherwise problematic”.

Pete Hegseth: Kill Everybody

[ed. What the hell are we doing here?]

[ed. Another day, another atrocity (more so if you count Republican spinelessness and knee-jerk support for anything this administration does, including committing war crimes). See also: November 29, 2025 (LFAA); and,  Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all (WaPo):]

***

As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. (...)

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

***

[ed. Want to guess Hegseth's response to such serious allegations? "As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland." Um no, Pete. The news is focusing on you, not our "incredible warriors" who are currently - at your command - deploying battleships, drones, missles and more to destroy random fishing boats. At least he was sober enough to make a statement, but then couldn't resist reminding everyone of how a dignified cabinet secretary should respond by posting this on his X account). At least he correctly identifies as a cartoon character. But others haven't been so charitable:

"Perhaps Hegseth thinks that sinking boats on the high seas is funny. Maybe he just wanted to own the libs and all that. Or maybe he thought he could disrupt the gathering war crimes narrative, like the school delinquent pulling a fire alarm during an exam. Or maybe he just has poor judgment and even worse impulse control (which would explain a lot of things about Pete Hegseth). No matter the reason, his choice to trivialize the use of American military force reveals both the shallowness of the man’s character and the depth of his contempt for the military as an institution.

Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat."

This all prompted me to look at his Wikipedia entry, something I haven't had the stomach to do until now. What a piece of work.]

The Bookie at the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal

It was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising high school student in Orange County, California, Bowyer ran a regular game out of his childhood home that provided a template for what he later organized his adult life around on a dizzying scale: the thrill of the wager, the intoxicant of fast money, and the ability to shimmy into worlds inaccessible to most. Unlike so many of Orange County’s native sons, for example, Bowyer wasn’t raised with access to bottomless funds. But his adolescent poker winnings netted him enough to buy a pickup, which he tricked out with a thunderous subwoofer that ensured that his presence was felt even when he wasn’t seen.

Thirty years later, on Sept. 8, 2021, Bowyer was behind the wheel of a very different vehicle, his white Bentley GT Continental, driving to a very different poker game. Held in a hotel conference room in San Diego, it was hosted by some players and staff of the L.A. Angels, who were in town for two games against the Padres. For Bowyer, then a 46-year-old father of five who could be mistaken for a retired slugger — confident gait, hulking arms mosaicked in tribal tattoos — attending was a no-brainer. These were the back rooms where he cultivated new clients to expand what he referred to, cryptically, as “my business.”

During the poker game, Bowyer and one of his friends, a stocky guy named Michael Greenberg who had been a fixture at those long-ago high school poker games, began talking to a man seated at the card table. Japanese, slight in build, sporting a gray T-shirt, with inky hair cut into a modish bowl, neither Greenberg nor Bowyer yet knew the man’s name — Ippei Mizuhara. But both were aware that he was the interpreter and close friend of a player being heralded as the most extraordinary in baseball history: Shohei Ohtani, the two-way phenomenon who was then in his third year with the Angels, and finishing up a transcendent season in which he would hit 46 home runs, strike out 156 batters, and be named the American League Most Valuable Player. This connection, however, was not the reason Bowyer was keen to talk to Mizuhara. Between hands at the poker table, the interpreter was obsessively placing bets on sports through his phone.

Bowyer sidled up for a brief conversation — one he’d later come to spend many sleepless nights replaying in his mind.

“What are you betting on?”

“Soccer,” replied the interpreter.

“I run my own site,” said Bowyer, speaking as he always did: polite tone, penetrating eye contact. “We do soccer — we do it all. And with me, you don’t need to use your credit card. I’ll give you credit.” He extended his hand. “My name’s Matt.”

“I’m Ippei.”

“Ippei, if you’re interested, hit me up.”

And that was that, an exchange of the sort that Bowyer had been finessing for the better part of two decades in constructing one of the largest and most audacious illegal bookmaking operations in the United States. He’d had versions of this talk on manicured golf courses, over $5,000 bottles of Macallan 30 scotch, while flying 41,000 feet above the Earth in private jets comped by casinos, and lounging poolside at his palatial Orange County home. He’d had the talk with celebrities, doctors, day traders, trial lawyers, trust-fund scions. Often nothing came of it. But sometimes it led to a new customer — or “player,” in his industry’s parlance — adding to a stable of nearly 1,000 bettors who placed millions in weekly wagers through Bowyer. He used the bulk of his earnings to fuel his own ferocious thirst for gambling and the attendant lifestyle, escaping often to villas at Las Vegas casinos for lavish sprees that earned him a reputation as one of the Strip’s more notorious whales — a high roller with an icy demeanor doted on by the top brass of numerous casinos.

In this case, however, the exchange with Mizuhara sent Bowyer down a different path. Shortly after the poker game, he set up Mizuhara with an account at AnyActionSports.com, the site Bowyer used for his operation, run through servers in Costa Rica. It was the start of a relationship that, while surreal in its bounty, would eventually come to attract the unwanted attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service, Major League Baseball, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and, as Bowyer’s illicit empire crumbled, the world at large.

‘Victim A’

Two years later, in December 2023, Shohei Ohtani signed what was then the largest contract in professional sports history with the Los Angeles Dodgers: 10 years, $700 million. The deal for “Shotime” dominated the sports media for months. But on March 20, 2024, news broke that threatened to derail the show just as it was beginning.

The revelation that millions of dollars had been transferred from Ohtani’s bank account to an illegal bookmaker surfaced in dueling reports from ESPN and the Los Angeles Times. Both centering on his then-39-year-old interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, the dispatches were as confounding as they were explosive. In an interview with ESPN, Mizuhara initially presented himself as a problem gambler, declared that Ohtani was not involved in any betting, and explained the payments as Ohtani bailing out a friend, going so far as to describe the two of them sitting at Ohtani’s computer and wiring the money.

But the following morning, before ESPN went live, Mizuhara disavowed his earlier statements. The Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara; investigations were launched by MLB and the IRS; and five days later, Ohtani issued a statement denying any role in a scandal that echoed unsavory chapters of the sport’s past. “I never bet on sports or have willfully sent money to the bookmaker,” Ohtani said. “I’m just beyond shocked.”

Given the whiplash of shifting narratives, the speculation that followed was inevitable. Flip on talk radio, or venture into a conspiratorial corner of the internet, and you were treated to bro-inflected theorizing as to what really happened, what Ohtani really knew. Equally intriguing was the timing. The scandal erupted at a moment when the longtime stigma surrounding sports betting had, following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for wider legalization, given way to a previously unfathomable landscape where pro athletes had become spokespeople for entities like DraftKings and FanDuel; where ESPN operated its own multimillion-dollar sportsbook; and where Las Vegas, a town historically shunned by professional sports leagues, had just celebrated its reinvention as a sporting mecca by hosting the Super Bowl. But if such factors tempered the public’s instinct to rush to the harshest judgments, the ordeal also revealed how the corporatization of sports betting had done little to snuff out a secretive underworld estimated to be responsible for $64 billion in illicit wagers annually. (California is one of 11 states where sports betting remains illegal.)

Yet perhaps most remarkable was the speed at which the matter was seemingly resolved. Acting with uncharacteristic swiftness, the federal government issued a scathing criminal complaint against Mizuhara just three weeks later — on April 11 — that supported Ohtani’s narrative. The numbers were vertigo-inducing. Over roughly 24 months, Mizuhara had placed more than $300 million in bets, running up a debt of $40.6 million to an illegal bookmaking operation. To service it, the government alleged, Mizuhara himself became a criminal, taking control of one of Ohtani’s bank accounts and ­siphoning almost $17 million from the superstar. In June, Mizuhara pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud.

One person who was not shocked by any twist in this saga was a central character who, throughout, remained an enigma: Mathew Bowyer. Since meeting Mizuhara at that poker game in San Diego, he had received at least $16.25 million in wires directly from Ohtani’s account, had poured most of it into conspicuous escapades in Vegas, and had been braced for a reckoning since the previous October, when dozens of armed federal agents raided his home. While the raid inadvertently unearthed the Ohtani-Mizuhara ordeal, the mushrooming scandal obscured a more complex, far-reaching, and ongoing drama. The agents who descended upon Bowyer’s home were not interested in the private misfortunes of a baseball superstar, but rather in exposing something Bowyer understood more intimately than most: how Las Vegas casinos skirted laws — and reaped profits — by allowing major bookies to launder millions by gambling on the city’s supposedly cleaned-up Strip.

by David Amsden, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung/Kyodo AP/Matthew Bowyer

Exploring the Implications of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson

[ed. Why it's now easier to remove or relocate homeless tent encampments.]

On June 28, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Johnson v. Grants Pass that enforcing camping regulations against homeless persons is not a “cruel and unusual punishment.” Local governments can now enforce camping regulations without fear of being sued for violating the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Johnson effectively struck down and overruled the underlying Ninth Circuit case, Martin v. Boise. The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Martin had led to widespread tent encampments throughout the western U.S.

Martin held that enforcing camping regulations against homeless people violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment if there were more homeless people in a city than available shelter beds. (...)

Homelessness Turned into a Legal Storm

Martin v. Boise

The Ninth Circuit first held that camping regulations could not be enforced against homeless people in Martin v. Boise. The Ninth Circuit then expanded Martin with its decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass.

Under Martin, the Eighth Amendment means that if there are no “available” shelter beds, it’s cruel and unusual punishment to issue a homeless person any kind of criminal penalty for violating a city’s camping ordinance.

The Ninth Circuit reasoned that because the unhoused have to exist somewhere, fining them for violating camping ordinances is no different than criminalizing their status as a homeless person. This new rule made it very difficult for cities to push homeless individuals into services.

Instead, the ruling empowered homeless individuals to push back at local government. Justice Gorsuch, who authored the decision in Johnson, describes how people in San Francisco who were homeless would cite the Martin case by name when rejecting city services and “as their justification to permanently occupy and block public sidewalks.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 9 (2024) (citing San Francisco Brief at 8-9).

Johnson v. Grants Pass prior to reaching the Supreme Court

Within weeks of Martin v. Boise being decided, the same lawyers filed Johnson v. Grants Pass in the U.S. District Court for Oregon. Johnson expanded upon Martin. While Martin only prohibited issuing criminal fines to the homeless, Johnson held that even issuing civil citations to the homeless was a cruel and unusual punishment that violated the U.S. Constitution.

The city of Grants Pass’ single homeless shelter was never more than 60% full. Despite that, the trial court held that there were no “adequate” shelter beds available. The court observed since the city’s only shelter was operated by Gospel Rescue Mission, and included a religious component, it was not “adequate” for everyone. Some people did not want to be exposed to a religious message.

 
A second way that Johnson expanded Martin was by finding that homeless individuals did not have to wait until they were cited or prove that no shelter bed was available to sue the city. Instead, all homeless persons could join together in a single class action lawsuit and sue the city preemptively. It was then the city’s burden to prove that “adequate” shelter beds were available for everyone.

Finally, Johnson expanded Martin by giving homeless persons not only immunity from camping laws, but also an affirmative right to protection from the elements. In other words, Martin ruled you can’t cite someone who has no place to go. Johnson said they were also entitled to protection from the elements as well.

The Ninth Circuit rulings left local government officials and law enforcement paralyzed, creating an unmanageable focus on “adequate” daily shelter space. Cities wishing to enforce camping regulations had to count the number of involuntarily homeless people each evening and then how many shelter beds were available. Additionally, each shelter bed had to be matched to each homeless person. Shelter space didn’t count if the shelter didn’t allow pets and the person had a dog, or the shelter didn’t allow smoking and the homeless person used cigarettes, or the shelter was organized by a religious organization and the homeless person didn’t want to be exposed to a religious message.

Practically speaking, matching the various needs of the homeless to the different types of shelters and keeping a daily count of available beds was an overwhelming task for any city. Local government could no longer compel homeless individuals to use services, resulting in widespread tent encampments.

Ending the Storm: Petitioning the Supreme Court

Because this unworkable rule tied the hands of local officials throughout the western United States, there was widespread frustration with Martin and Johnson. CIS encouraged the city of Grants Pass to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. After that, something remarkable happened.

Amicus briefs were filed by numerous entities including: 

• National League of Cities;
• League of Oregon Cities (LOC);
• Association of Oregon Counties (AOC);
• Special Districts Association of Oregon (SDAO);
• California Governor Gavin Newsom;
• San Franciso Mayor London Breed;
• League of California Cities;
• Association of Idaho Cities;
• League of Arizona Cities and Towns;
• North Dakota League of Cities;
• Cities of Anchorage, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Honolulu, Colorado Springs, Milwaukee, Providence, and Saint Paul;
• District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego;
• California State Sheriffs Association;
• California Police Chiefs Association;
• Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs; and
• 20 Different States, and more.

In fact, there was a record number of friend-of-the-court briefs filed in support of Grants Pass’ Supreme Court petition. In response, the Supreme Court not only granted review but made clear that the court heard what cities and counties were saying.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass

On April 22, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case. The focus was not on who should do what but on interpreting the Eighth Amendment. They debated whether it was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to ticket, fine, or jail someone repeatedly trespassing on city property because they were homeless and had “nowhere else to go.” The issue for the court was whether the Eighth Amendment regulates the type of punishments applied to a crime or whether it regulates what types of behavior can be considered a crime.

Those in favor of upholding the Grants Pass case argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing someone for their “involuntary” status, such as homelessness, deeming it cruel and unusual. The opposing side contended that the Eighth Amendment only addresses the type of punishment, not the status of the person being punished.

The Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled, addresses methods of punishment, not who can be punished. The punishments in question were a ticket, a small fine, or very short jail terms. The court found none of these to be cruel and unusual. In fact, these are commonly used punishments across the country. The other side argued that these punishments were cruel and unusual as applied to the homeless. But the majority opinion maintained that the Eighth Amendment regulates types of punishment, not who can be punished.

The court specifically found that the Ninth Circuit inappropriately limited local governments’ tools for tackling the homelessness issue. In so doing, the court recognized that homelessness is a multifaceted problem not suited to a single policy. The opinion emphasized that decisions on how to address homelessness should be left to community leaders, not judges:

“Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it. At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 34 (2024).
The court observed the historical tradition of communities working hard to solve difficult social issues, then stated:
“If the multitude of amicus briefs before us proves one thing, it is that the American people are still at it.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 34 (2024).

The opinion quoted extensively from the League of Oregon Cities’ amicus brief, highlighting Oregon’s specific concerns. Our local concerns were heard by the Supreme Court, thanks to the collective efforts of government officials throughout the western states (even throughout the nation) contributing their voices and resources through amicus briefs that told real stories of the struggle to address homelessness under a one size fits all approach mandated by the Ninth Circuit.

The Supreme Court concluded by stating that the Ninth Circuit opinion in Johnson was reversed, and the Eighth Amendment does not prevent local officials from crafting unique solutions to homelessness. (...)

One thing we know for certain, with Johnson v. Grants Pass now overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, local control has returned. Community leaders are no longer in danger of being sued for the “cruel and unusual punishment” of requiring everyone to abide by camping regulations. 

by Kirk Mylander, League of Oregon Cities |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Just got back from Honolulu, my old home town. One thing I noticed right away, coming from the airport, was that there weren't any homeless encampments, which in previous years had exploded all over the city. The next day I saw police actively clearing one site down the street that had sprung up just the previous night - they were right on it.  So I asked one of my friends where everyone had gone to and he said Waianae, a small rural community pretty far removed from town on the northwest coast of Oahu. Sounded good to me (maybe not to Waianaeans), but I wondered how the city had figured out how to be more proactive in addressing a problem that had seemed so intractable for years. I'm not sure, but it might have had something to do with this ruling, which I'd never heard of before (thanks, major media). See also: What Happened To SF Homelessness? (ACX)]

Always Watching - 24/7 Edition

When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.

The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.

I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital.
A new structure of surveillance

ICE already searches social media using a service called SocialNet that monitors most major online platforms. The agency has also contracted with Zignal Labs for its AI-powered social media monitoring system.

The Customs and Border Protection agency also searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at ports of entry, and the U.S. State Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States.

What would change isn’t only the scale of monitoring but its structure. Instead of government agents gathering evidence case by case, ICE is building a public-private surveillance loop that transforms everyday online activity into potential evidence.

Private contractors would be tasked with scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. The contractors would be able to correlate those findings with data in commercial datasets from brokers such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR along with government-owned databases. Analysts would be required to produce dossiers for ICE field offices within tight deadlines – sometimes just 30 minutes for a high-priority case.

Those files don’t exist in isolation. They feed directly into Palantir Technologies’ Investigative Case Management system, the digital backbone of modern immigration enforcement. There, this social media data would join a growing web of license plate scans, utility records, property data and biometrics, creating what is effectively a searchable portrait of a person’s life.

by Nicole M. Bennett, The Conversation |  Read more

Image: Westend61/Westend61 via Getty Images
[ed. Explain to me again why Edward Snowden continues to be banished to Russia, rather than hailed as a true American hero. What he revealed seems almost trivial these days. See also: Always Watching: How ICE’s Plan to Monitor Social Media 24/7 Threatens Privacy and Civic Participation (NC):]

What is SocialNet?

SocialNet is a surveillance tool developed by ShadowDragon, giving OSINT (Open-source intelligence) professionals and governments tools to search and collect publicly available information across more than 200 websites, social networks, and online services simultaneously.

According to recent reporting by 404 Media, the tool creates comprehensive profiles of individuals by aggregating their digital footprints across various platforms, enabling analysts to map connections, track activities, and visualize relationships between people of interest.

Which Platforms Are Being Monitored?

The list of monitored platforms is extensive and includes:

• Major social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky
• Messaging platforms: WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord
• Content platforms: OnlyFans, JustForFans, TikTok
• Payment services: PayPal, Cash App, BuyMeACoffee
• Gaming platforms: Roblox, Chess.com
• Demographic-specific sites: Black Planet
• Special interest networks: FetLife, cigar review sites, hobby forums

The danger here is that when one person is flagged, their friends, relatives, fellow organizers or any of their acquaintances can also become subjects of scrutiny. Previous contracts for facial recognition tools and location trackinghave shown how easily these systems expand beyond their original scope. What starts as enforcement can turn into surveillance of entire communities.

Meta is Earning a Fortune On Fraudulent Ads

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.

Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.

The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.

The details of Meta’s confidential self-appraisal are drawn from documents created between 2021 and this year across Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. Together, they reflect Meta’s efforts to quantify the scale of abuse on its platforms – and the company’s hesitancy to crack down in ways that could harm its business interests.

Meta’s acceptance of revenue from sources it suspects are committing fraud highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising industry, said Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety investigator who now runs a consultancy called Risky Business Solutions.

“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.

by Jeff Horowitz, Reuters |  Read more:

Image: /Evelyn Hockstein

Resist

[ed. I was thinking about this the other day, why more people don't ask for basic ID, a warrant, some official paperwork, film everything? I'd definitely do what this guy does - tell these assholes that if they want to continue harassing or even arresting me, they and their supervisors can expect to be buried in paperwork, social media attention, and possibly legal filings faster than they can imagine. RESIST. It's your rights and I'd even say obligations under the constitution. See also: an alternative approach.]

Image: via:

The Plan to Subvert Elections Is Already Under Way

Our election system is reaching a breaking point. Here's how it'll likely happen.

Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted.

Donald Trump calls the press into the Oval Office and announces that the GOP has held the House—but he warns that Democrats will try to steal the election, and announces plans to send a legal team to Arizona to root out fraud. He spends the rest of the night posting threats and allegations on Truth Social. In the morning, Republican lawyers file to stop vote counting, arguing that any votes counted after Election Day are illegal under federal law. Attorney General Pam Bondi sends a letter to Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, and the county board of supervisors, instructing them to retain all documents and warning that the Department of Justice may intervene if it suspects anything untoward. On X, FBI Director Kash Patel reposts false rumors about fraud and announces plans to lead a group of agents to Phoenix. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates have pulled ahead in both races by Wednesday afternoon, but the margin is just 143 votes in the Eighth District, with many votes still not tallied.

By now, conservative outlets are running wall-to-wall coverage alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bused to voting locations and accusing Democrats of treason. MAGA has learned its lesson since 2020, and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are nowhere near the cameras. Instead, administration officials like Bondi are the face of the allegations on TV. Behind the scenes, Trump is making phone calls. He’s unable to reach any county supervisors, whose lawyers have warned them not to speak with him, but he gets through to the county recorder, a MAGA loyalist elected as part of the backlash to the 2020 election. No one knows quite what is said—the call isn’t taped—but when Trump hangs up, he posts that the county has agreed to hand over control of voting machines to the Department of Homeland Security.

Fontes and the board of supervisors rush to court to block the move, and a judge quickly grants an injunction. But Trump declares a national emergency that he says supersedes the order; helicopters are en route from a Marine air base in Yuma to take control of the voting machines. By the time Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is assigned to hear emergency matters from Arizona, issues an order blocking this, Marines have already commandeered ballots and machines. Patel, having just arrived in Phoenix, holds a press conference and announces, without providing evidence, that votes have been tampered with. He proclaims the Republican candidates the winners.

Despite Marines on the street, small but fierce protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere; Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and announces “martial law in Democrat-run cities.” Who actually won the election can never be determined—the Marines and Patel have broken the chain of custody, as well as some of the machines themselves—but the state names the two Democrats as winners. House Republicans reject Arizona’s certification and instead seat the GOP candidates. Trump’s allies keep the House in a profoundly illegitimate election rejected by many Americans.

This is just one possible scenario. Is it too pessimistic? Perhaps. But at this stage of the election cycle in 2019, no one expected a crowd of Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. No one expected the president himself to explicitly lend his support to their efforts to “Stop the Steal.” Certainly no one expected that there would be calls to hang the vice president for his refusal to subvert the democratic process. If anything, when it comes to 2026, I worry more about the limits of my imagination than about the hazards of speculation.

Trump has made his intentions clear. At a rally last summer in West Palm Beach, Florida, he offered his supporters a promise. “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

We’ll have it fixed so good. It’s not hard to guess what Trump might do to fulfill this promise. He has, after all, already attempted to disrupt and overturn an election. In 2020, those efforts involved questioning results, asserting widespread fraud without evidence, pressuring local officials to overturn outcomes, filing spurious lawsuits, and ultimately inciting supporters to sack the Capitol. Now that he’s back in the White House, he will draw from this playbook again—perhaps adding new maneuvers, such as deploying armed troops. (...)

Trump and his allies will have before them less an orderly set of instructions than a buffet of options. Some of these options will go untested, or amount to nothing. But elections are a game of margins. Only a handful of Senate seats and a few dozen House races may be seriously contested, thanks to maps drawn to guarantee safe seats for one party or the other. Of those, some may be very close. In 2024, 18 House races were decided by fewer than 10,000 votes. Democrats won 11 of those.

To understand the threat to democracy, and how it might be stopped, I spoke with experts on election administration, constitutional law, and law enforcement. Many of them are people I have known to be cautious, sober, and not prone to hyperbole. Yet they used words like nightmare and warned that Americans need to be ready for “really wild stuff.” They described a system under attack and reaching a breaking point. They enumerated a long list of concerns about next year’s midterms, but they largely declined to make predictions about the 2028 presidential election. The speed of Trump’s assault on the Constitution has made forecasting difficult, but the 2026 contests—both the way they work, and the results—will help determine whether democracy as we know it will survive until then.

by David A. Graham, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Carl Godfrey
[ed. Post of the week. It's all here, from pre-to-post election tactics. Hopefully everyone who values election integrity and democracy itself - whether Democrat, Conservative, or Independent - will be prepared to recognize and counter all this.]

Ice Fishing

[ed. Now this cracked me up : )]

A Slow Moving and Viral Civil War

The Trump occupation arrived in Chicago and Portland in full force this weekend. And with prominent Republicans like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller salivating on X about civil war, it seems likely that what we’re seeing in these two cities will soon be deployed to more blue states across the country. In fact, you could argue that a new kind of slow moving and very viral civil war has already started.

The plan was to federalize National Guard members already in Portland, but that was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge. So the Trump administration decided to get around the block by sending troops from other states to the city. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration is sending 400 Texas National Guard members and 300 California National Guard members to Portland and Chicago. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker wrote on X. “America is on the brink of martial law,” Newsom wrote.

For those of you scratching your heads as to why sleepy Portland, Oregon, was chosen for the next stop on President Donald Trump’s occupation tour, it seems almost undeniable that it was picked for any reason other than it was a hotbed for Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Trumpism punishes anyone or anything that can steal its viral spotlight. And the White House has now activated every part of the MAGA ecosystem to make sure they control the attention economy as they storm Democratic cities.

And, right on cue, right-wing influencer Nick Sortor quickly made himself into the main character of the Portland occupation. On Friday, Sortor was arrested for disorderly conduct while making content at a protest in front of a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Now the Department of Justice says they’re investigating the arrest, and there was some chatter among right-wing influencers on X that there was even a briefly considered plan for ICE officers to personally yank Sortor out of jail.

As for what Sortor is actually filming, it’s exactly what you would expect. It’s the same kind of content-based aggression made popular by Charlie Kirk. Videos of left-wing protests chasing Sortor down the street while he screeches about how unhinged they are. And he has, obviously, made the rounds on Fox News.

A very dark lesson that right-wing influencers like Sortor have seemingly learned from Kirk’s death is that the more violent the situation they provoke, the harder the White House will respond. “Hey Antifa — just FYI: the more times you assauIt me, the higher the chances you have active duty Marines deployed to the streets of Portland by the end of the week,” Sortor wrote on X, offering himself up to the MAGA meat grinder. Anything to get those views, I guess!

The more malicious parts of the MAGA movement also know that these clashes, between citizens and the military, filmed by influencers, are a perfect venue for more explicitly violent intervention...

The Trump administration is not just occupying cities with soldiers and ICE officers, but creating flashpoints for propaganda. Every eventual showdown on the streets of a Democratic city is first teased by hysterical X posts from Trump administration members, Trump supporters and militias face off against local protesters, and then the chaos is livestreamed and clipped by right-wing influencers that just so happen to have the budgets to fly from city to city following the circus. And, of course, Fox News scoops up the best bits and packages them for viewers at home. Finally, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security does a victory lap, collecting the best footage for a stupid music video about how they’re keeping us all safe. It’s the exact same playbook that was used for Trump’s endless rallies during his first term. The Trump hurricane comes to town and viral content and political violence follows in its wake. The key innovation of his second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states.

by Ryan Broderick, 404 Media |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. An ecosystem of disinformation. See also: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland (NYT):]

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To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. (...)

Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.

Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.

“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action...

“BREAKING,” Bo Loudon, a 19-year-old influencer and friend of Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, wrote on social media. Ms. Noem “just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” he wrote.

The video attached showed Ms. Noem on the roof of the building looking down at a small clutch of protesters far away, one of them in a chicken suit.

The man in the chicken suit, Jack Dickinson, 26, who had been coming to the ICE building to protest federal immigration policies for months, said he was struck by the disconnect. Mr. Dickinson said he watched one of the pro-Trump influencers, Nick Sortor, film outside the ICE building, then heard the narration.

“He was talking about this looking like a third-world country,” Mr. Dickinson said as he surveyed a riverfront neighborhood of apartment buildings, coffee shops and an Italian restaurant popular for holiday meals and graduation parties. “It’s just clearly not.” (...)

Mr. Sortor was initially charged with second-degree disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor in Oregon, after he took a burning American flag from a left-wing demonstrator and a fight ensued. The response from Washington, D.C., was intense and immediate. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Mr. Sortor had been “ambushed by antifa.”

For his efforts, Mr. Sortor found himself at the White House on Wednesday, as the president praised the actions of right-wing activists and pledged to dismantle antifa, a loose-knit group of anarchists whose presence in Portland has long angered Mr. Trump.

Mr. Sortor had been “assaulted in Portland by a flag-burning mob,” the president declared.

Mr. Sortor responded, “The Portland politicians literally are willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists.”