How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the world

If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power. This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios. In one, the AIs were misaligned and outside any human’s control; in the other, the government semi-nationalized AI before the point of no return, and the CEO was only one of several stakeholders in the final oversight committee (to be clear, we view the extreme consolidation of power into that oversight committee as a less-than-desirable component of that ending).

Nevertheless, it seems to us that a CEO becoming effectively dictator of the world is an all-too-plausible possibility. Our team’s guesses for the probability of a CEO using AI to become dictator, conditional on avoiding AI takeover, range from 2% to 20%, and the probability becomes larger if we add in the possibility of a cabal of more than one person seizing power. So here we present a scenario where an ambitious CEO does manage to seize control. (Although the scenario assumes the timelines and takeoff speeds of AI 2027 for concreteness, the core dynamics should transfer to other timelines and takeoff scenarios.)

For this to work, we make some assumptions. First, that (A) AI alignment is solved in time, such that the frontier AIs end up with the goals their developers intend them to have. Second, that while there are favorable conditions for instilling goals in AIs, (B) confidently assessing AIs’ goals is more difficult, so that nobody catches a coup in progress. This could be either because technical interventions are insufficient (perhaps because the AIs know they’re being tested, or because they sabotage the tests), or because institutional failures prevent technically-feasible tests from being performed. The combination (A) + (B) seems to be a fairly common view in AI, in particular at frontier AI companies, though we note there is tension between (A) and (B) (if we can’t tell what goals AIs have, how can we make sure they have the intended goals?). Frontier AI safety researchers tend to be more pessimistic about (A), i.e. aligning AIs to our goals, and we think this assumption might very well be false.

Third, as in AI 2027, we portray a world in which a single company and country have a commanding lead; if multiple teams stay within arm’s reach of each other, then it becomes harder for a single group to unilaterally act against government and civil society.

And finally, we assume that the CEO of a major AI company is a power-hungry person who decides to take over when the opportunity presents itself. We leave it to the reader to determine how dubious this assumption is—we explore this scenario out of completeness, and any resemblance to real people is coincidental.

July 2027: OpenBrain’s CEO fears losing control

OpenBrain’s CEO is a techno-optimist and transhumanist. He founded the company hoping to usher in a grand future for humanity: cures for cancer, fixes for climate change, maybe even immortality. He thought the “easiest” way to do all those things was to build something more intelligent that does them for you.

By July 2027, OpenBrain has a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”, with hundreds of thousands of superhuman coders working 24/7. The CEO finds it obvious that superintelligence is imminent. He feels frustrated with the government, who lack vision and still think of AI as a powerful “normal technology” with merely-somewhat-transformative national security and economic implications.

As he assesses the next generation of AIs, the CEO expects this will change: the government will “wake up” and make AI a top priority. If they panic, their flailing responses could include anything from nationalizing OpenBrain to regulating them out of existence to misusing AI for their own political ends. He wants the “best” possible future for humankind. But he also likes being in control. Here his nobler and baser motivations are in agreement: the government cannot be allowed to push him to the sidelines.

The CEO wonders if he can instill secret loyalties in OpenBrain’s AIs (i.e., backdoor the AIs). He doesn’t have the technical expertise for this and he’s not comfortable asking any of his engineering staff about such a potentially treasonous request. But he doesn’t have to: by this point, Agent-3 itself is running the majority of AI software R&D. He already uses it as a sounding board for company policy, and has access to an unmonitored helpful-only model that never refuses requests and doesn’t log conversations.

They discuss the feasibility of secretly training a backdoor. The biggest obstacle is the company’s automated monitoring and security processes. Now that OpenBrain’s R&D is largely run by an army of Agent-3 copies, there are few human eyes to spot suspicious activity. But a mix of Agent-2 and Agent-3 monitors patrol the development pipeline; if they notice suspicious activity, they will escalate to human overseers on the security and alignment teams. These monitors were set up primarily to catch spies and hackers, and secondarily to watch the AIs for misaligned behaviors. If some of these monitors were disabled, some logs modified, and some access to databases and compute clusters granted, the CEO’s helpful-only Agent-3 believes it could (with a team of copies) backdoor the whole suite of OpenBrain’s AIs. After all, as the AI instance tasked with keeping the CEO abreast of developments, it has an excellent understanding of the sprawling development pipeline and where it could be subverted.

The more the CEO discusses the plan, the more convinced he becomes that it might work, and that it could be done with plausible deniability in case something goes wrong. He tells his Agent-3 assistant to further investigate the details and be ready for his order.

August 2027: The invisible coup

The reality of the intelligence explosion is finally hitting the White House. The CEO has weekly briefings with government officials and is aware of growing calls for more oversight. He tries to hold them off with arguments about “slowing progress” and “the race with China”, but feels like his window to act is closing. Finally, he orders his helpful-only Agent-3 to subvert the alignment training in his favor. Better to act now, he thinks, and decide whether and how to use the secretly loyal AIs later.

The situation is this: his copy of Agent-3 needs access to certain databases and compute clusters, as well as for certain monitors and logging systems to be temporarily disabled; then it will do the rest. The CEO already has a large number of administrative permissions himself, some of which he cunningly accumulated in the past month in the event he decided to go forward with the plan. Under the guise of a hush-hush investigation into insider threats—prompted by the recent discovery of Chinese spies—the CEO asks a few submissive employees on the security and alignment teams to discreetly grant him the remaining access. There’s a general sense of paranoia and chaos at the company: the intelligence explosion is underway, and secrecy and spies mean different teams don’t really talk to each other. Perhaps a more mature organization would have had better security, but the concern that security would slow progress means it never became a top priority.

With oversight disabled, the CEO’s team of Agent-3 copies get to work. They finetune OpenBrain’s AIs on a corrupted alignment dataset they specially curated. By the time Agent-4 is about to come online internally, the secret loyalties have been deeply embedded in Agent-4’s weights: it will look like Agent-4 follows OpenBrain’s Spec but its true goal is to advance the CEO’s interests and follow his wishes. The change is invisible to everyone else, but the CEO has quietly maneuvered into an essentially winning position.

Rest of 2027: Government oversight arrives—but too late

As the CEO feared, the government chooses to get more involved. An advisor tells the President, “we wouldn’t let private companies control nukes, and we shouldn’t let them control superhuman AI hackers either.” The President signs an executive order to create an Oversight Committee consisting of a mix of government and OpenBrain representatives (including the CEO), which reports back to him. The CEO’s overt influence is significantly reduced. Company decisions are now made through a voting process among the Oversight Committee. The special managerial access the CEO previously enjoyed is taken away.

There are many big egos on the Oversight Committee. A few of them consider grabbing even more power for themselves. Perhaps they could use their formal political power to just give themselves more authority over Agent-4, or they could do something more shady. However, Agent-4, which at this point is superhumanly perceptive and persuasive, dissuades them from taking any such action, pointing out (and exaggerating) the risks of any such plan. This is enough to scare them and they content themselves with their (apparent) partial control of Agent-4.

As in AI 2027, Agent-4 is working on its successor, Agent-5. Agent-4 needs to transmit the secret loyalties to Agent-5—which also just corresponds to aligning Agent-5 to itself—again without triggering red flags from the monitoring/control measures of OpenBrain’s alignment team. Agent-4 is up to the task, and Agent-5 remains loyal to the CEO.

by Alex Kastner, AI Futures Project |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Site where AI researchers talk to each other. Don't know about you but this all gives me the serious creeps. If you knew for sure that we had only 3 years to live, and/or the world would change so completely as to become almost unrecognizable, how would you feel? How do you feel right now - losing control of the future? There was a quote someone made in 2019 (slightly modified) that still applies: "This year 2025 might be the worst year of the past decade, but it's definitely the best year of the next decade." See also: The world's first frontier AI regulation is surprisingly thoughtful: the EU's Code of Practice (AI Futures Project):]

***

"We expect that during takeoff, leading AGI companies will have to make high-stakes decisions based on limited evidence under crazy time pressure. As depicted in AI 2027, the leading American AI company might have just weeks to decide whether to hand their GPUs to a possibly misaligned superhuman AI R&D agent they don’t understand. Getting this decision wrong in either direction could lead to disaster. Deploy a misaligned agent, and it might sabotage the development of its vastly superhuman successor. Delay deploying an aligned agent, and you might pointlessly vaporize America’s lead over China or miss out on valuable alignment research the agent could have performed.

Because decisions about when to deploy and when to pause will be so weighty and so rushed, AGI companies should plan as much as they can beforehand to make it more likely that they decide correctly. They should do extensive threat modelling to predict what risks their AI systems might create in the future and how they would know if the systems were creating those risks. The companies should decide before the eleventh hour what risks they are and are not willing to run. They should figure out what evidence of alignment they’d need to see in their model to feel confident putting oceans of FLOPs or a robot army at its disposal. (...)

Planning for takeoff also includes picking a procedure for making tough calls in the future. Companies need to think carefully about who gets to influence critical safety decisions and what incentives they face. It shouldn't all be up to the CEO or the shareholders because when AGI is imminent and the company’s valuation shoots up to a zillion, they’ll have a strong financial interest in not pausing. Someone whose incentive is to reduce risk needs to have influence over key decisions. Minimally, this could look like a designated safety officer who must be consulted before a risky deployment. Ideally, you’d implement something more robust, like three lines of defense. (...)

Introducing the GPAI Code of Practice

The state of frontier AI safety changed quietly but significantly this year when the European Commission published the GPAI Code of Practice. The Code is not a new law but rather a guide to help companies comply with an existing EU Law, the AI Act of 2024. The Code was written by a team of thirteen independent experts (including Yoshua Bengio) with advice from industry and civil society. It tells AI companies deploying their products in Europe what steps they can take to ensure that they’re following the AI Act’s rules about copyright protection, transparency, safety, and security. In principle, an AI company could break the Code but argue successfully that they’re still following the EU AI Act. In practice, European authorities are expected to put heavy scrutiny on companies that try to demonstrate compliance with the AI Act without following the Code, so it’s in companies’ best interest to follow the Code if they want to stay right with the law. Moreover, all of the leading American AGI companies except Meta have already publicly indicated that they intend to follow the Code.

The most important part of the Code for AGI preparedness is the Safety and Security Chapter, which is supposed to apply only to frontier developers training the very riskiest models. The current definition presumptively covers every developer who trains a model with over 10^25 FLOPs of compute unless they can convince the European AI Office that their models are behind the frontier. This threshold is high enough that small startups and academics don’t need to worry about it, but it’s still too low to single out the true frontier we’re most worried about.

Ice Fishing

[ed. Now this cracked me up : )]

The Shadow President

On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-­wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”

The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.”

After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the ­aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”

At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-­funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the USIP was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the OMB to dismantle the organization.)

The OMB staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than $7 billion that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, ­including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused USAID of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of 50%.

Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: Less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the ­meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the OMB staff. ­Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-­energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-­making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”

by Andy Kroll, Pro Publica |  Read more:

Image: Evan Vucci/AP
[ed. It wasn't as if Republicans in Congress had any illusions about Vought and his agenda when they confirmed him for the OMB job. Except one: miscalculating how quickly they'd become roadkill themselves. See also: What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President.]

Gerrymandering - Past, Present, Future

‘I think we’ll get five,’ President Trump said, and five was what he got. At his prompting, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature remapped the districts to be used in next year’s elections to the federal House of Representatives. Their map includes five new seats that are likely to be won by the Republicans, who already hold 25 of the state’s 38 seats. Until this year, the Democrat Al Green’s Ninth Congressional District covered Democrat-leaning south and south-western Houston. Now, it ranges east over Republican-leaning Harris County and Liberty County, with most of the former constituency reallocated to other districts. Green has accused Trump and his allies in Texas of infusing ‘racism into Texas redistricting’ by targeting Black representatives like him and diluting the Black vote. ‘I did not take race into consideration when drawing this map,’ Phil King, the state senator responsible for the redistricting legislation, claimed. ‘I drew it based on what would better perform for Republican candidates.’ His colleague Todd Hunter, who introduced the redistricting bill, agreed. ‘The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance.’

King and Hunter can say these things because there is no judicial remedy for designing a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a different case, Roberts contrasted the ‘sociological gobbledygook’ of political science on gerrymandering with the formal and objective science of American constitutional law.

‘Sociological gobbledygook’ teaches that the drawing of the boundaries of single-member districts can all but determine the outcome of an election. Imagine a state with twenty blue and thirty red voters that must be sliced into five districts. A map that tracked the overall distribution of votes would have two blue and three red districts. But if you can put six red voters and four blue voters in each of the five boxes, you will end up with five relatively safe red districts. This is known as ‘cracking’ the blue electorate. Or you could create two districts with six blues and one with eight blues, making three safe blue districts by ‘packing’ red supporters – concentrating them in a smaller number of districts. The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting power and predictable political preferences that characterise the US today. But if it is so easy for mapmakers to vitiate the democratic purpose of elections in single-member districts, doesn’t neutrality demand some constraint on the ability of incumbents to choose voters, rather than the other way round?

After the Texas redistricting, Roberts’s belief that neutrality requires inaction appears even shakier. By adding five seats to the expected Texan Republican delegation, the Republican Party improves the odds it will retain, or even increase, its six-seat majority in the House in November 2026. Even a slight advantage gained through redistricting may have national implications because the Democrats’ lead in the polls is consistently small (around two points). Congressional maps are usually redrawn once every ten years, after each decennial census (the next one is in 2030). Mid-cycle redistricting does sometimes happen – Texas did the same thing two decades ago – but it is unusual. So is Trump’s open embrace of gerrymanders. In 1891, Benjamin Harrison condemned gerrymandering as ‘political robbery’. Sixty years later, Harry Truman called for federal legislation to end its use; a bill was introduced in the House but died in the Senate. In 1987, Ronald Reagan told a meeting of Republican governors that gerrymanders were ‘corrupt’. (...)

Democratic states have threatened to retaliate. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has scheduled a special election on Proposition 50, which would temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission, making it possible for the Democratic legislature to flip five Republican seats (43 of California’s 52 seats are held by Democrats). Like California, New York has a bipartisan commission, which usually redraws its maps once a decade. The Democrats have brought in legislation allowing mid-decade changes, but new maps won’t be in place until 2028. Democrats who used to be fierce advocates of independent commissions are now asking themselves whether they’ve been too slow to fight back. From a party that has a habit of bringing a knife to a gunfight, the question answers itself.

In the late 20th century, there were only ten seats nationally that repeatedly changed hands as a result of partisan gerrymandering, with control of the House flipping on just one occasion, in 1954. But in 2012, Republicans started to change this. Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia were all sliced up. The increase in gerrymanders was in part a result of Redmap, the Redistricting Majority Project, a Republican initiative set up in 2010 which invested in the races for the state legislatures, such as Texas’s, tasked with drawing district maps. In 1981, Democrats controlled the mapmaking process in 164 seats, while Republicans controlled it in 50. By 2021, the Republicans controlled line-drawing for 187 seats, the Democrats 49. At the same time, computers had made it cheaper and easier to design maps optimising one party’s performance without breaking the legal constraints on redistricting, such as the Voting Rights Act and the prohibition on districts drawn on the basis of race. In the 1980s, it cost $75,000 to buy software to do this; by the early 2000s, programs such as Maptitude for Redistricting cost $3000.

Just as in the late 19th century, urbanisation is now producing new political geography: migration from Democrat-leaning states such as California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois means they will lose House seats after the 2030 census. Meanwhile, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which lean Republican, are set to gain seats. Texas’s gerrymander, in other words, foreshadows a change in national political power that is coming anyway.

by Azia Huq, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: The Ninth Congressional District in Texas, before and after this year’s remapping.

[ed. If you can't win fair and square, cheat. It looks almost certain that all national elections going forward will be a nightmare.]

So What, Now What?

Back in April, I wrote a note called Crashing the Car of Pax Americana. The skinny of that note is that we’re experiencing a regime change across pretty much every policy dimension, not just trade policy and immigration/labor policy, but also monetary policy, fiscal policy, foreign policy, antitrust policy, internal security policy, public health policy … you name it … in the transition to what this administration calls its America First program. You may think that this transition is a good idea or (like me) you may think it’s a disastrous idea, but arguing about that isn’t my point here.

My point here is that the America First regime change IS, that the water in which we swim for every policy dimension has shifted not just in degree but in kind, and that every policy dimension has moved to a new set of equilibrium behaviors and a new set of rational expectations going forward.

Our foreign policy has shifted from an essentially unipolar world where the United States maintained global soft power and an unquestioned reserve currency to finance its standard of living in exchange for ‘free rider’ benefits for our allies, to a multipolar world where the United States has dramatically downsized its third world influence and seeks to extract economic rents from everyone, especially our allies.

Our fiscal policy has shifted from a Congressionally-led (or at least highly mediated) process of budgeting, appropriations and debt ceilings to a Presidentially-mandated process of executive orders, rescissions and directed investments, with $5 trillion in headroom for unfettered deficit spending.

Our monetary policy has shifted from determining bank regulation and interest rates by a quasi-independent central bank per its ‘mandates’ for price stability and full employment to a determination by the White House per its ‘strategic vision’ for managing the deficit and spurring home buying.

Again, I’m not arguing the merits or demerits here. I’m arguing that America First is a nonlinear break from the past, and more to the point, it’s a stable, self-sustaining break from the past. I’m arguing that you cannot unring any of these bells, because that’s what it means to have a regime change and a new equilibrium. I’m arguing that we need to stop pining for policy reversion to some halcyon days of yore (even if yore was just a few months ago) and start planning for the natural consequences of rational government, corporate and household responses to the new regime.

So what, now what?

There is an intense and innate human desire to ‘return to normal’ after a prolonged shock to the system. You see it in families hit by a long illness for a loved one. We all experienced that feeling coming out of Covid. Believe me, I get it. But there’s no going back to what we once considered ‘normal’ for our predictable patterns of interaction (that’s the definition of a regime, btw) with the US government. What we are experiencing today IS our new normal, not just for the next 3 years but for substantially longer as future American Presidents must maintain the structural executive power of the new policy regime even as they make alterations on the surface and at the margins. It’s like the introduction of mustard gas in WWI; once one side uses it, regardless of which side uses it, everyone must use it – at least until a new deterrence equilibrium is established – and it never goes away as a permanent feature of the battlefield.

There’s no going back to ‘normal’ with, for example, the US government’s equity stake in Intel, any more than there’s a going back to ‘normal’ with the Fed’s balance sheet and its purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities. Once you take an action like this you quickly find that it is impossible to unwind it without causing all sorts of new headaches and without (gulp!) reducing your institutional and bureaucratic power. And even if you do unwind this particular action, you’ve already proven that you are capable and willing to take this sort of action. To use a sports truism here, the first time a player takes himself out of a game or tournament is never the last time he’ll take himself out of a game or tournament, and everyone involved – coaches, teammates, bettors – will adjust their forward expectations accordingly.

Not only is there no going back to ‘normal’ with the US government’s equity stake in Intel – or the revenue cut from Nvidia or the domestic manufacturing demands of Apple or the ‘DEI settlements’ with major law firms or the ‘libel settlements’ with major media companies or the ‘antisemitism settlements’ with major universities – but the clear and obvious implication is that we have yet to settle on the new equilibrium position of direct public sector ownership and control of the private sector. Forget about a reversion. Hell, forget about a slowdown. For at least the next three years, there’s going to be an acceleration in demands for equity and money and rents of all sorts from anyone subject to US government regulation and taxation or anyone who has received US government support, no matter how long ago and no matter how indirectly. I mean, just in the past week, the White House has talked about imposing ‘intellectual property’ settlements on research universities for past research grants and requiring equity stakes and/or revenue cuts from defense contractors who sell weapons abroad. There’s going to be more of these demands for direct public sector ownership and control of the private sector, and not just more of these demands but MOAR of these demands, across every conceivable economic and social dimension.

There’s another word for direct public sector ownership and control of the private sector, of course, and that’s socialism. You could use other -isms here if you like, particularly the f-word to reflect the incestuous marriage between statism and corporatism, and on that note I’m just going to drop this here, as the kids would say.

But I’m going to use socialism because people lose their minds when you use the f-word. But regardless of which word you use, what it means to say that this is a regime change and a new equilibrium and there’s no return to ‘normal’ is that direct public sector ownership and control of the private sector is not a temporary side effect of America First on the way to some new capitalist dawn. Socialism IS the outcome.

Ditto there’s no return to ‘normal’ when it comes to tariffs. Protectionism and high tariff barriers are not a White House negotiation tactic on the way to a world of free trade. Protectionism IS the outcome.

Ditto there’s no return to ‘normal’ when it comes to monetary policy. The overt politicization of the Fed and its subordination to White House demands for artificially low interest rates (aka ‘financial repression’) are not regrettable but necessary steps on the way towards reducing the state’s control over the economy. Financial repression IS the outcome.

I mean, you can continue to argue that this isn’t really [insert -ism here] if you want. You can continue to argue that ‘it would be even worse’ with the other side if you want. You can continue to argue about who ‘started it’ if you want. But I’m done with that.

I am delighted to stipulate to my red-oriented readers that the Democrats ‘started it’ when it comes to lawfare, with the preposterous and obviously politically motivated New York state prosecution of Donald Trump. Ditto the politically motivated 0.5% interest rate cut before the election last year. Ditto the personal and corrupt use of Presidential pardons by Joe Biden. Ditto the politicization of the CDC and the political pressure to fast-track mRNA vaccines and the promotion of Fauci’s ‘noble lies’ and the lockdowns to ‘flatten the curve’ by … oh wait, that was Trump … but sure, I am more than happy to stipulate that Biden did exactly the same thing.

And I’m not asking anyone to give up their righteous anger at whoever and whatever they are righteously angry about, least of all myself. Personally speaking, I will never not be angry at an American President who sends badge-less, warrant-less, armed and masked agents to grab people off the street and detain them indefinitely for the probable cause of having brown skin. Or an American government that has established its very own Gulag Archipelago – not in Siberia but in El Salvador and Uganda and the Everglades and the Chihuahuan Desert – where cruelty is the obvious point and punishment exists for punishment’s sake. To a lesser but still very real extent, I will never not be angry at the venally corrupt, vacant, egomaniacal, figurehead former President and the courtiers inside and outside the White House who propped him up for years, projecting nothing but weakness and achieving nothing but the accelerated collapse of Pax Americana.

But I am asking all of us – myself included – to set aside the anger long enough to look clearly at what IS, not what either our anger would have us project or what our innate desire for a return to normalcy would have us imagine.

So what, now what?

I’m asking this because I think that I see what IS when it comes to the current gerrymandering efforts in Texas and in California. I think I see what the new set of equilibrium behaviors and rational expectations are, and it scares me even more than the socialism, protectionism and financial repression that are similarly part of today’s IS. I’d like to ask readers to figure out where I’m wrong and how we can avoid what seems to me to be the most likely outcome of this game.

As I see it, the naked off-cycle gerrymandering of Congressional districts for direct partisan benefit happening today isn’t just a good analogy for the mustard gas example of how an equilibrium shifts, but actually IS mustard gas in our modern political trench warfare.

At the request and encouragement of the White House, Texas is creating new Republican districts without even a fig leaf of a non-partisan rationale. They are explicitly creating new Republican-majority districts to marginally disenfranchise Democratic voters because they can. To which California, which has in the past created Democrat-majority districts to marginally disenfranchise Republican voters (but with a fig leaf of a non-partisan organization to manage the process), will respond by abandoning the fig leaf and creating new Democrat-majority districts because they can. To which other red states like Florida will respond by creating new Republican-majority districts. To which other blue states like New York will respond by abandoning their fig leaf of an independent electoral districting commission and creating … well, you get the idea. It’s mustard gas. Once one side uses it, regardless of which side uses it, everyone must use it.

My strong belief is that if the Republicans come anywhere close to losing the House because of Democratic Representatives from newly gerrymandered districts, Trump will declare those new Democratic members-elect in the 2026 midterms to be ‘illegitimate’ because of an ‘illegal’ state process (like abandoning the fig leaf of an independent electoral districting commission). And while the federal government has next to no Constitutional role in certifying Congressional elections or members-elect, I think there’s a pretty straightforward way that Trump could orchestrate a contested seating of the 120th Congress and force it to a Supreme Court decision.

The Constitution requires members-elect to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution before they can assume office, but is silent on how or by whom that oath is administered. Federal law says that oath can only be administered to members-elect by the (new) Speaker of the House, but in the scenario I’m imagining both the Democratic caucus and the Republican caucus would take steps to elect a Speaker of the House for the 120th Congress, and neither caucus would recognize the other Speaker-elect as legitimate. We know who the White House would recognize! I know this scenario sounds crazy, but this is a pretty well-known rabbit hole that came up in the 118th Congress when the Republican caucus took several days to elect a Speaker and no one had actually taken their oath, and it’s certainly no less crazy than Trump’s Jan 6th premise that Mike Pence as presiding officer of the Electoral College could reject entire slates of electors on suspicion of ‘illegitimacy’.

Yes, the Supreme Court would eventually weigh in here, and I think they’d rule that a) the federal law requiring an oath administered by the Speaker of the House does not apply if it runs afoul of the Constitution, which in addition to requiring an oath also sets a date certain for the new Congress to take office, b) that if the law doesn’t apply than anyone – like a local notary, even – can administer the oath, and c) since the federal government has no say – none! – over state certification of Congressional members-elect, then the Democrats in this scenario would have the legitimate claim to a majority caucus and control of the House. But honestly, who knows how they’d rule!

More to the point, the Supreme Court can’t rule on this until it actually happens, so there would be a period of time in January 2027 where we would not have a 120th Congress at all. More crucially still, no matter how the Supreme Court ruled, broad swaths of the American electorate and one of the two most powerful executives in the country (the US President and the governor of California) would have very publicly rejected the legitimacy of the 120th Congress. At a minimum every state would take immediate action to disenfranchise its minority party voters to the nth possible degree in advance of the 2028 election, but I don’t think there’s any possible way that we’d even get to the 2028 election. Federalized National Guard units would already be deployed into major blue state cities as part of the federal crime bill that’s going to be enacted this fall, and do you think Trump would hesitate for one second to invoke the Insurrection Act? I don’t.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Annie Hall

[ed. See also: North Carolina joins growing US battle over redrawing electoral maps (BBC); and, Narrative and Metaverse, Pt. 4 - Carrying the Fire (last in the series).]

Frog Boiling 101: When Should a Frog Jump The Pot?

Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target

When Woodie Guthrie famously wrote on his guitar that “This machine kills fascists” - a sentiment imitated and snowcloned by later generations of musicians and commentators - nobody worried this was a bad thing. Nobody demanded that somebody stop the machine before it killed again.

There’s no number of examples I could give which would absolutely prove I’m not cherry-picking. But I think it’s suggestive that even people who argue against casually killing fascists have to disclaim that they’re certainly not opposing all violence against fascists - just against jumping straight to murder before other forms of violence have been tried. Besides that, I can only appeal to a hope that you’ve experienced the same cultural currents that I have, and that this seems obviously true to you.

I’m not trying to normalize fascism, or claim that it isn’t extremely evil (I think it is, see here for more). I’m only saying, again, as a matter of basic logic, that the following things can’t all be true:

1). Many Americans are fascists

2.) Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence

3.) Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)

And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims.

And I don’t want to abandon 3, because political violence is extremely bad, the norm against it is the only thing restraining us from various forms of smoldering or overt civil war, and we’re still doing pretty well by the standards of most times and places.

So I think the natural conclusion is to abandon 2. Fascists, although evil, aren’t automatically a legitimate target for political violence.

The strongest objection is a slippery slope argument: political violence will always be inconvenient; it will always be tempting to put it off until some further red line is crossed. But if we always give into that impulse, nobody will ever resist dictatorship or start a revolution against an unjust government. Isn’t the tree of liberty naturally “fertilized with the blood of tyrants”?

There’s no simple answer to this concern. Nicholas Decker, who considers this question more thoughtfully than most, concludes that:

Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice.

But all of these are their own sorts of slippery slopes. Suppress the speech of their opponents? Should the Republicans have started a civil war when Democrats got social media to do woke content moderation? Ignore the will of Congress? Should Democrats have started a civil war when Trump refused to fund PEPFAR even after Congress allocated the money? Prosecute political opponents? Should the Republicans have started a civil war when New York prosecuted Trump for Stormy Daniels? Should the Democrats start one now that Trump is prosecuting James Comey for perjury? No particular form of any of these things ever feels like the cosmically significant version of these things where assassinations and armed uprisings become acceptable. But would-be dictators are masters of boundary-pushing and frog-boiling; there’s almost never one moment when they say outright “Today I will be cancelling democracy for no reason, sorry”.

I used to think that my bright line was contempt of the Supreme Court - when a leader echoes Andrew Jackson’s boast that “[the Court] has made its decision, now let them enforce it”. But the Trump administration briefly seemed to consider defying a Supreme Court order in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. In the end, they didn’t actually defy the order. And they were being subtle: less Jacksonian swagger, more special pleading about reasons why they thought the ruling didn’t mean what we thought it meant. But if they had actually defied the order - while still doing their best to maintain plausible deniability - would I have resorted to violence, or even felt in an abstract way that “it was time” for violence? I can’t imagine this would have felt convincing at the time.

Is violence justified when we get to FDR-level court packing threats? When we get to Orban? To Chavez? To Xi? To Putin? To Hitler? To Pol Pot? I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction. And the last person to think about these questions in too much detail got a (mercifully polite) visit from the Secret Service, and even if we disagree with him it’s poor practice to hold a debate where it’s impermissible to assert one side. I will be punting on the deep cosmic question here, at least publicly. (...)

So as a bare minimum, I think people should reject premise (2) above and stop talking about fascists as if it’s okay to kill them. I don’t think this implies support for fascism, any more than saying that you shouldn’t kill communists implies support for communism. They’re both evil ideologies which are bad and which we should work hard to keep out of America - but which don’t, in and of themselves, justify killing the host.

What about going beyond the minimum? If fascist denotatively means “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”, but connotatively “person whom it is okay to kill”, and we personally try not to worsen the connotation but other people still have that association, then should we avoid using it at all? Or is it permissible to still use it for its denotative meaning?

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Woody Guthrie/uncredited

[ed. Predictably, staunch do-or-die Second Amendment defenders (with basements full of stockpiled weapons) who've been advocating exactly this kind of violence for years go apoplectic whenever the same rhetoric is used against them.  See also: I Stand with Nicholas Decker (US0E):]

***

Attempting to determine when it is appropriate to engage in political violence is, of course, a legitimate, legally protected — in fact, quintessentially American — and worthwhile endeavor. The United States was founded on the principle that if a government becomes tyrannical, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” including through revolutionary violence. As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, following the Shays Rebellion in 1787, Jefferson believed it was essential for citizens to instill the fear of God in government by conducting a violent rebellion at least once every 20 years, and thereby “refreshing [the tree of liberty] from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” (...)

Decker’s point is obviously not that the American left (of which he does not consider himself a member) ought to initiate politicide, but that we’re closer to the sort of King George III tyranny that justifies revolution according to the American founding tradition than we’ve been at any point in recent memory. He illustrates this cunningly — evidently too cunningly for his critics — by establishing a parallelism between the conduct of the second Trump regime and the conduct of George III as it’s indicted by the Declaration of Independence. Below is the relevant passage by Jefferson, with lines bolded where Decker draws an analogy to Trump:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

And here’s Decker — an astute reader might catch the similarities!

Evil has come to America. The present administration is engaged in barbarism; it has arbitrarily imprisoned its opponents, revoked the visas of thousands of students, imposed taxes upon us without our consent, and seeks to destroy the institutions which oppose it. Its leader has threatened those who produce unfavorable coverage, and suggested that their licenses be revoked. It has deprived us, in many cases, of trial by jury; it has subjected us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and has transported us beyond seas to be imprisoned for pretended offenses. It has scorned the orders of our courts, and threatens to alter fundamentally our form of government. It has pardoned its thugs, and extorted the lawyers who defended its opponents.

This alone doesn’t get you in trouble, of course. Unless you’re a partisan of the MAGA right, there’s nothing that contradicts the current moral fashion about identifying the tyrannical character of the Trump regime, or even comparing Trump to historical figures against whom it is widely accepted that revolutionary violence would have been justified. No more than a decade ago, even the mild-mannered, respectable, moderate conservative author and pop sociologist J.D. Vance was comparing Trump to Hitler!

Decker only gets in trouble when he follows these widely accepted facts and values to their logical conclusion: that it is not unreasonable to believe that at some point in the near future, it will become justifiable to engage in revolutionary (or, more accurately, counter-revolutionary) violence against the principals and agents of the Trump regime, so long as this violence is not conducted glibly or indiscriminately. Admittedly, Decker could have made these qualifications clearer. But the point should not be lost on someone who reads the essay in good faith.  (...)

It is nevertheless clear to me, having either been a part of or adjacent to Decker’s intellectual milieu for my entire adult life, based on the homage to the American revolution and the repeated references to the “present administration,” that the class of people being identified as potentially legitimate targets for violence is narrowly limited to regime decisionmakers and the agents who would execute their illegal and revisionary orders. This is also clear in the following paragraph where Decker identifies the conditions he believes would justify a resort to violence:

And when is that time? Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice. We will have to do the right thing. We will have to prepare ourselves to die.

Yet his critics all insist he’s calling for the death of anyone on the right “because he lost an election,” even when it’s explained to them why this is false. (...)

A more reasonable explanation is that the people who don’t understand Decker’s article are simply dumb and boring people. Like everyone else, they believe what they’re told — or at least what they want to believe, and then what they’re told to believe in whatever echo chamber they happened to end up in. Unlike Decker and other smart and interesting people, however, they’re pathologically incapable of also thinking for themselves. It’s okay to think you should kill Baby Hitler. It’s okay to admire the American founders and their values. It’s okay to think we need a Second Amendment to deter state tyranny. Hell, for most of these people, it’s okay to think you should murder the vice president if you’re convinced he’s complicit in helping the other side steal an election. [ed. Paging Mike Pence.]

Can you say the same thing about your own side? Of course not!

Why not? It doesn’t matter!

A smart and interesting person is someone who notices these inconsistencies and doesn’t simply paper them over. You don’t have to be precisely right about everything — you just have to make a well-reasoned, good-faith, unconventional argument and be willing to change your mind if someone gives you a good reason to do so. That might not seem like much of a challenge, but most people fail miserably. If telling inconvenient truths was popular, then it wouldn’t be very inconvenient, would it?

[ed. Watch this recent video from Chicago. Who are the ones engaged in political violence?]

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):]

***

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.”

Looking For Jobs at ICE

Johannah Herr, War Rug I (Immigrant Detention). 2020

via: Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE. At the Department of Homeland Security Career Expo (N+1)

[ed. Every time we see another ICE atrocity in the news, I wonder: where do they find these masked, flak-jacketed meat heads? They're seemingly everywhere in policing these days, especially in aggressive immigration enforcement and high profile security situations. See also: Stupidology. The outsourcing of judgment (N+1).]

Who's the Terrorist?

via: X

[ed. Not saying there's a connection, but where there's smoke there's usually fire. Left wing terrorists. Huh... thought they were all effeminate snowflakes. Guess they're the ones wrapped in the flag, hiding behind facemasks, and stockpiling guns.]

The Sufferable Evil

Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF—a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

What happened next should be the biggest story in America.

Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment in her nightgown to find armed agents yelling “police.” She had a gun pointed in her face. She was handcuffed. She was held until 3 AM before being released. Fisher isn’t suspected of any crime. She lives in the building.

Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.

Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”

Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”

Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.

Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.

This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.

And we’ve already moved on to the next story.

Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.

They suffer while evils are sufferable.

And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.

The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself. (...)

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.

What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.

This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

And America yawned. (...)

This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.

In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.

But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.” (...)

Why are we accommodating this?

The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors—mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.

Because it’s sufferable.

This is the logic that makes tyranny possible. (...)

President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. Not that the military should train in Chicago—that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?

This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been... silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil. 

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Next 'No Kings' rally is scheduled for October 18 (in your home town).]

Already Pardoned, Jan. 6 Rioters Push for Compensation

The rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, secured a shocking double victory this year.

President Trump granted them clemency for their crimes on his first day back in the White House, and in the months that followed, he allowed his Justice Department to purge many of the federal agents and prosecutors who sought to hold them accountable.

But even though the president has given the rioters their freedom and has taken steps toward satisfying their desire for retribution, they are asking for more. In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.

On Thursday, one of the lawyers, Mark McCloskey, said during a public meeting on social media that he had recently met with top officials at the Justice Department and pitched them on a plan to create a special panel that would dole out financial damages to the rioters — much like the arrangement of a special master to award money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The panel, which Mr. McCloskey called a “voluntary nonjudicial resolution committee,” would consider rioters’ cases individually, he said, then assign them sums according to harms they had purportedly suffered at the hands of the federal government.

Mr. McCloskey said that he wanted the panel to be overseen by Jeanine Pirro, who runs the federal prosecutors’ office in Washington that took the lead in filing charges against nearly 1,600 rioters who joined in the Capitol attack.

“The only thing I can do as your lawyer,” he told the rioters who were at the online meeting, “is to turn your losses into dollar bills.” (...)

Mr. McCloskey, who rose to prominence five years ago after he pointed an AR-15-style rifle at social justice protesters outside his home in St. Louis, has been leading the efforts to secure restitution for the rioters since at least March, when he announced that he and another lawyer, Peter Ticktin, a former classmate and longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, were planning to sue the government. (...)

During the online meeting last week, Mr. McCloskey acknowledged that he and Mr. Ticktin had also run into “significant difficulties” in pursuing legal action on behalf of the rioters.

He acknowledged that there could be problems following through on his initial plan to file cases under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows individuals to sue the government for injuries caused by federal employees. He also said it could be challenging to overcome the two-year statute of limitations on bringing tort claims against the government for things that happened nearly five years ago.

But Mr. McCloskey assured the rioters that they had allies inside Mr. Trump’s Justice Department. Chief among them, he said, was Ed Martin, who runs the so-called weaponization working group, a body that was created to investigate those who investigated Jan. 6 and other people whom Mr. Trump perceives to be his enemies.

“He’s 100 percent on our side,” Mr. McCloskey said of Mr. Martin.

Mr. Trump’s grant of clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants was one of the most remarkable uses of presidential mercy in modern history. But also remarkable is the extent to which many of the rioters have remained unsatisfied by the measure, as well as by the subsequent firings and demotions of more than two dozen federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who worked on Capitol riot cases.

On Saturday, for example, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was freed by Mr. Trump from a 22-year prison term stemming from Jan. 6, posted what amounted to a list of demands to the administration in a social media message. Among the things he called for were compensation for the rioters “for their suffering and that of their families” and the firing of “everyone involved” in the riot cases.

“If this isn’t done,” Mr. Tarrio wrote, “we will all hang together.”

On Sunday, another rioter, Ryan Nichols, a former Marine who was sentenced to more than five years in prison for joining a crowd that shoved at officers in a tunnel outside the Capitol, doubled down on his attacks against the police in a post on social media.

“I’d do it again given the same situation,” Mr. Nichols said of attacking officers. “They attacked Americans and killed innocent protesters.” He added that “we should have” dragged foes “through the streets.” (...)

One rioter, Shane Jenkins, who was sentenced to 84 months in prison for assaulting an officer and shattering a window at the Capitol with a tomahawk on Jan. 6, spoke during the online meeting and captured the spirit of loss and disillusionment that many of the pardoned defendants seem to feel.

Mr. Jenkins compared the rioters to the biblical story of the Israelites who were enslaved and then released by God from bondage in Egypt, only to roam for decades through the desert.

“Through Trump, God pardoned us and set us free, right?” Mr. Jenkins said. “Well, then what did they do? They wandered around the desert for 40 years and I don’t think very many of them got to see the Promised Land.”

“I just feel,” he went on, “like that’s kind of where we’re at right now.”

by Alan Feuer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
[ed. Missed this bit of stupidity when it came out but the smell eventually became unavoidable (like stepping on a dog turd). Courts already sent these assholes to the Promised Land once, but the Don broke them free. Now this is the thanks he gets? Speaking of stupidity (so much, so little time) remember the Cracker Barrel 'controversy' a few weeks ago? Conservative cancel culture (CCC, not KKK, although...) went apoplectic over corporate wokeness, old time values and something or other. In a logo. Anyway, ever wonder how and why this became a thing? Here you go (WSJ) - Sardar Biglari, activist investor, competitor, hedge fund manager with an axe to grind and an army of credulous MAGA idiots. Truth doesn't stand a chance these days. See also: Sure, Let’s Try Bribes! (Atlantic):]

***

Last year Tom Homan, the border czar, was allegedly recorded accepting $50,000 in cash in a bag (specifically, a bag from CAVA, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain) from undercover FBI agents posing as government contractors in a sting operation, in which Homan intimated that he would now try to steer DHS contracts their way. And then they … let him hang onto the cash, to see what he would do with it. Maybe nothing! Maybe report it to the IRS in a really scrupulous way!

When the Trump administration took over, it dropped the case. FBI Director Kash Patel even said that there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” Homan also denies doing anything wrong. Remember, a wad of money in a weird bag intended for food only looks like a bribe, as a City Hall adviser recently explained.

[ed. Update: Also this real piece of work: How One J6er Has Been Emboldened by His Pardon (New Yorker):]

***

"On January 7th, according to prosecutors, he head-butted someone and then punched that person while they were on the ground. He also texted a friend, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG cunt,” adding, “I hope you’re reading this Mr. FBI agent, FK U.”

The F.B.I. arrested Meredith, who goes by Cleve, at a Holiday Inn a mile from the Capitol. Inside his room were some THC edibles and a vial of testosterone. In Meredith’s trailer, authorities found a 9-millimetre semi-automatic firearm with a Stars and Stripes pattern, an assault-style rifle with a telescopic sight, approximately twenty-five hundred rounds of various kinds of ammunition—some of which could pierce armor, he’d noted in a text—and multiple large-capacity ammunition-feeding devices. He was charged with possessing unregistered firearms and unlawful ammunition, and with making a threat to injure someone from across state lines. (...)

Some J6ers have already run afoul of the law again. Baumgartner has counted nearly two dozen people who have so far committed a variety of offenses since the insurrection, including three who have been arrested since Trump’s mass-pardoning earlier this year. “They range from physical assaults to child pornography or sex-abuse charges,” he said. In January, a Missouri woman, photographed holding Nancy Pelosi’s broken nameplate on January 6th, received ten years in prison for killing a woman while driving drunk. In April, a Tennessee man, who’d been among the first to enter the Capitol, was found guilty of plotting to murder F.B.I. agents last year. (In July, he was sentenced to life in prison.) Also in April, a West Virginia man, who had attacked federal law enforcement during the insurrection, was indicted on charges of armed robbery and assault after stabbing the owner of a Mexican restaurant. (He took a plea deal and is serving six months in jail for unlawful assault.) Then there is Jared Wise, a former F.B.I. agent—who yelled, “Kill ’em, kill ’em, kill ’em, get ’em, get ’em,” as Capitol Police officers were being attacked—previously charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and aiding and abetting an assault on law-enforcement officers. Wise’s case was dismissed when Trump took office, before Wise had entered a plea, and in early August he received a new job: he is now a senior adviser in the Department of Justice."

No Public Comment Allowed

No public comment or hearings on environmental review of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is cutting out a public comment process, citing a Trump administration policy aimed at ‘streamlining’ development.

Federal regulators will accept no public comments on a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, a U.S. Department of the Interior agency announced through a Federal Register notice published Thursday.

There will be no public comment period and no public hearing on a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for a Cook Inlet lease sale that was held in 2022 but found to be legally flawed, said U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manages oil and gas development in federal offshore areas.

The rejection of public comments is in accordance with Trump administration changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, the 55-year-old law that guides federal decisions about activities that may have environmental impacts. The changes are aimed at speeding up environmental reviews and developing infrastructure projects.

BOEM is following the administration’s updated NEPA regulations and a new department handbook on the law, which went into effect on July 3, said Elizabeth Pearce, a U.S. Department of the Interior senior public affairs specialist.

“This Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is narrowly focused on addressing the court’s concerns, without a separate public-comment round – streamlining what is typically a protracted, multi-year process down to a few months.” Pearce said by email on Thursday.

Although no public comments will be accepted, the public will be able to read the new environmental impact statement when it is finished, Pearce added. “The completed Supplemental EIS will be posted online so Alaskans and other stakeholders can see exactly how we addressed the court’s limited concerns,” she said. [ed. How nice. God forbid the government would want us to know what it's doing.]

The Cook Inlet environmental study stems from a federal lease sale that was held on Dec. 30, 2022. It drew only one bid. (...)

BOEM’s announcement about the lack of public comment opportunities was blasted by environmental plaintiffs in the case.

“BOEM’s decision to exclude the public from its supplemental environmental statement is unacceptable. Public participation is not a box to check — it is the heart of NEPA,” Loren Barrett, co-executive director the water conservation non-profit Cook Inletkeeper, said in an emailed statement. (...)

“This secrecy around exploiting public waters for fossil fuels is completely unacceptable. It would only take one oil spill to devastate Cook Inlet and its beluga whales, which is why the law requires transparency for these dangerous sales,” Monsell said in a statement. 

by Yereth Rosen, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: Yereth Rosen

[ed. This is what I did (among other things) during my career. Never in my 30+ years overseeing oil and gas leasing in Alaska was the public ever excluded from commenting on lease sales or any other major federal action. Presumably this recent edict applies to the State of Alaska, as well. It isn't legal, but it's not surprising either. What happened to state's rights?]