Iran War: US Strikes Kharg Island, Deploys More Marines Even as Administration Shows Desperation

Trump Administration officials besides Trump are starting to behave erratically, a sign the fact that the Iran war is not developing necessarily to US advantage is beginning to penetrate their embubblement and belief in American superiority. However, the reality that the US has put the global economy at risk of a potential depression and is on track to having its military largely if not entirely run out of the Middle East is still likely beyond what key figures in the Administration can accept, cognitively and practically. Admittedly, it seems likely that some, perhaps many, top members of the armed services are better able to grasp what is happening and could help Administration leaders work through what will come at an epic shock. [ed. if they were interested in listening.]

Today we will focus on the kinetic war.

The US is still trying to project the false impression that it has escalatory dominance via attacking Kharg Island, which is on the northern end of the Persian Gulf and a major processing/production center for Iran’s oil exports. Keep in mind that none other than Ukraine war diehard hawk, Keith Kellogg, had told Fox News that the US could still end the war quickly and easily by taking Kharg island, since per him, it accounted for 80% to 90% of Iran’s oil exports. A mere look at a map shows what a batshit idea this was; we had assumed that this was messaging directed at chumps, intended to convey that the US was far from bereft of options. But apparently this Administration is of the “No idea is too misguided to be rejected” school of operation.

Even so, the Administration had to admit that it hit only “military” targets and did not touch oil infrastructure. Team Trump has worked out that attacking any Iranian oil facilities would lead Iran to bomb oil infrastructure all over the Middle East. [...]

Now to Bloomberg’s Kharg Island report. Notice that the headline at the story proper (via the link from the current banner headline), Trump Strikes Iran’s Kharg Oil Hub and Urges Reopening of Hormuz, has not been updated to reflect Iran’s saber-rattling back. From its body:

The US struck military sites on Kharg Island, from which Iran exports almost all its oil, for the first time overnight, upping the ante in a Middle East war that’s raged for more than two weeks and shows little sign of easing.

President Donald Trump said military facilities on the Persian Gulf island had been “obliterated,” adding that he chose not to hit oil infrastructure “for reasons of decency.” He threatened to do just that should Iran “do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran reacted on Saturday morning by warning it will target American-linked oil and energy facilities in the Middle East if its own petroleum infrastructure is attacked. Iranian media said all oil-industry workers on the island, which sits about 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the mainland, are safe and unharmed.

Readers no doubt took note of Trump’s admission against interest in using the word “obliterated”. Or was he trying to signal, as with the pre-agreed strike on Fordow, that this attack was meant to be performative and it was time for Iran to back off, having made its point? I doubt it but it is hard to fathom what Trump thinks he is doing, aside from desperately needing to convey that he and only he is driving events.

However, Kharg Island may not be as essential to Iran’s oil exports as the Administration’s messaging posits:

Larry Johnson gives a long form takedown in Trump’s Kharg Island Fantasy… All Bark, No Bite. Key sections:

Late on Friday Donald Trump claimed in a social media post that military facilities on Kharg Island were targeted. Read his Truth carefully:

Trump is deep into fantasy land. Yes, I think he has lost touch with reality. He admits that the oil terminals were not attacked, just some unidentified military targets…

If you don’t know it now, only one of Iran’s 5 operational oil export terminals is located on Kharg Island. According to data from the international company Kepler, the amount of oil loaded from the tanks installed on Kharg increased by 1.5 times in the past month. This suggests that Iran, by quickly emptying Kharg’s tanks, was prepared for this attack.

If Iran’s oil terminal on Kharg had been destroyed, Iran would have launched missiles at identified the oil terminals in all the countries bordering the Persian Gulf. Here’s the list:

Saudi Arabia
Ras Tanura: The largest marine oil loading center in the world; capacity: 6 million barrels per day.

Ras Al-Ju’aymah: The second most important terminal; capacity 3 to 3.6 million barrels per day.

United Arab Emirates
Fujairah: Has multiple docks and is the largest fueling center in the region.

Jebel Ali: Site for crude oil and petrochemical exports.

Qatar
Ras Laffan: The largest LNG export facility in the world.

Kuwait
Mina Al-Ahmadi: Central crude oil export terminal with deep docks and high capacity.

Bahrain
Sitra Terminal: Exports refined…

There are a couple of ways to look at this. Perhaps Trump’s lie about devastating Kharg Island is the start of his PR campaign to gaslight the American public into believing Iran is defeated, which would allow Trump to declare victory and start withdrawing US forces. That’s one possibility. Alternatively, he really believes the lie and is convinced that this latest strike will convince the Iranians to surrender.

Having said that, it is not impossible that some sort of barmy scheme is in motion:

Perhaps the clever Israeli plan is if the US loses enough men in trying to take Kharg Island, it will commit to sending even more troops and treasure into this burn pit? From the Wall Street Journal in More Marines and Warships Head to Middle East as Hormuz Mission Intensifies:

The Pentagon is moving additional Marines and warships to the Middle East, as Iran steps up its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. prepares to escort tankers through the waterway.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East, for an element of an amphibious-ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit to head to the region, according to U.S. officials...

An amphibious-ready group is a fast-response unit used to conduct sea-based amphibious assaults, humanitarian aid missions and special operations. The group’s embarked Marine expeditionary unit includes more than 2,000 Marines.

In addition to the Marine unit, the Pentagon is also weighing Centcom’s request for two additional destroyers to help escort commercial ships through the strait, one of the officials said.

The New York Times reported:

About 2,500 Marines aboard as many as three warships are heading to the Middle East from the Indo-Pacific region, as Iran increases its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. officials said.

Now this new attempts at escalation may appear confident. Contrast this with signs of Administration officials, other than Trump, looking as if they are coming unglued. The triggers seem to be continued pounding by Iran. Larry Johnson maintains, forcefully, that the refueler that crashed in Iraq, resulting in six deaths, was the result of a strike. Shortly after that (as we will show below), Iran dropped what is purported to be a 2,000 pound bomb on the US base in Saudi Arabia. We have accounts that military and five more refuelers were severely damaged. Note more missiles may have gotten through than the one carrying the 2,000 pound munition.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Images: Bloomberg; WSJ; X, TS

[ed. Israel (Netanyahu) is on a killing spree in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and who knows where else, using American weaponry and hoping to suck the US and other countries into expanded escalation... and we've been dumb and arrogant enough to jump right in. See also: Iran has not asked for ceasefire and sees no reason for talks with US, Iranian minister says (BBC).]

Sam Altman and OpenAI Under Fire

It’s finally happening. Altman’s bad behavior is catching up to him.

The board fired Altman, once AI’s golden boy, in November 2023 not because AGI had been achieved (that still hasn’t happened) but because he was “not consistently candid,” just like they said.

And, now at long last, the world sees what the board saw, and what I saw (and what Karen Hao saw): having someone running a company with that much power to affect the world who is not consistently candid is not a good idea.

As I warned in August of 2024, questionable character in a man this powerful is dangerous:

Altman’s two-faced “I support Dario” but am also negotiating behind his back and open to surveillance two-step was, for many people, the last straw. Millions of people, literally, are angry; many feel betrayed. Nobody wishes to be surveilled.

In reality, Altman was never really all that interested in AI for the “benefit of humanity.” Mostly he was interested in Sam. And money, and deals. A whole lot of people have finally put that all together.

Here’s OpenAI’s head of robotics, just now:

Zoe Hitzig had resigned just a few weeks earlier, over a different set of issues that also reflected poorly on Altman’s character:

And all this was entirely predictable. Altman is bad news. It was always just a matter of time before people started realizing how serious the consequences might be.

History will judge those who stay at his company. Anyone who wants to work on LLMs can work elsewhere. Anyone who wants to use LLMs should go elsewhere.

by Gary Marcus, On AI |  Read more:

Images: The Guardian; X; NY Times

[ed. For those not paying attention, after DOD tried and failed to strong-arm Anthropic into giving them carte blanche to do anything they wanted with Anthropic's AI model Claude (then subsequently designating them a "supply chain risk"), OpenAI (and Microsoft) immediately stepped into the breach and cut a deal, the details of which are still not fully known. On its face however they appear to give DOD everything it wanted from Anthropic: mass surveilance and fully autonomous (ie. no humans involved) operational capabilities. Altman is the head of OpenAI and its ChatGPT model.

See also: The Rage at OpenAI Has Grown So Immense That There Are Entire Protests Against It (Futurism):

OpenAI has faced protests on and off for years. But after its CEO Sam Altman announced a new deal with the Department of Defense over how its AI systems would be deployed across the military on Friday, it’s being barraged with an intensity of backlash that the company has never seen.

Droves of loyal ChatGPT users declared they were jumping shipping to Claude, whose maker Anthropic had pointedly refused to cut a deal with the Pentagon that gives it unrestricted access to its AI system — even in the face of government threats to seize the company’s tech. Claude quickly surged to the top of the app store, supplanting OpenAI’s chatbot. Uninstalls of the ChatGPT app spiked by nearly 300 percent.

***

Also this: Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism (Guardian):

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track to lose $14bn this year. Its market share is collapsing, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “screwed up” an element of the product. All it takes to accelerate that decline is 10 seconds of your time...

Here’s what triggered it. Early this year, the news broke that OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, donated $25m to Maga Inc, Donald Trump’s biggest Super Pac. This made him Trump’s largest donor of the last cycle. When Wired asked him to explain, Brockman said his donations were in service of OpenAI’s mission to benefit “humanity.”

Let me tell you what that mission looks like in practice. Employees of ICE – the agency that was involved in the killing of two people in Minneapolis in January – have used a screening tool powered by ChatGPT. The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to hire for deportation raids.

And it’s not stopping there. Brockman also helped launch a $125m lobbying initiative, a Super Pac, to make sure no state can regulate AI. It’s attacking any politician who tries to pass safety laws. It wants Trump, and only Trump, to write the rules for the most powerful technology on earth. Every month, subscription money from users around the world flows to a company that is embedding itself in the repressive infrastructure of the Trump administration. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business strategy.

Things got even worse last week. When the Trump administration demanded that AI companies give the Pentagon unrestricted access to their technology – including for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons – Anthropic, the company behind ChatGPT’s main competitor, Claude, refused.

The retaliation was swift and extraordinary. Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s technology. Secretary of war Pete Hegseth declared the company a “supply-chain risk to national security”, a designation normally reserved for Chinese firms such as Huawei. He announced that anyone who does business with the US military is barred from working with Anthropic. This is essentially a corporate death sentence, for the crime of refusing to help build killer robots.

And what did OpenAI do? That same Friday night, while his competitor was taking a principled stance, Sam Altman quietly signed a deal with the Pentagon to take Anthropic’s place.

***

[ed. From the comments section in Marcus' post:

Shanni Bee: 

Great. Amen.

But what remains unsaid (...even by you, Mr. Marcus, from what I've seen, which is surprising) is that Anthropic are not good guys. The whole "ethical AI company" thing is nothing but vibes. Sure, Anthropic (rightly) stood up to DoW in this case, but they still have a massive contract with Palantir (pretty much one of the worst companies on earth). Colonel Claude is complicit in bombings of Iran & Venezuela + Gaza GENOCIDE.

...Or maybe with the (admittedly BS) "supply chain risk" designation, Anthropic no longer does business with Palantir? That would be great for everyone (including them).

Either way, there is NO ethical AI company. People need to stop giving Anthropic flowers for doing the right thing in this one case while completely ignoring their complicity w/ Palantir & in documented war crimes.

Gary Marcus

indeed, i have a sequel planned about that, working title “There are no heroes in commercial AI” or something like that

***

[ed. Finally, there's this little coda from Zvi Mowshowitz's DWAtV that puts everything in perspective:

It’s really annoying trying to convince people that if you have a struggle for the future against superintelligent things that You Lose. But hey, keep trying, whatever works.

Ab Homine Deus: To the "Superintelligence isn't real and can't hurt you" crowd. Let's say you're right and human intelligence is some kind of cosmic speed limit (LOL). So AI plateaus something like 190 IQ. What do you think a million instances of that collaborating together looks like?

Arthur B.: At 10,000x the speed

Noah Smith: This is the real point. AI is superintelligent because it can think like a human AND have all the superpowers of a computer at the same time...

Timothy B. Lee: I'm not a doomer but it's still surreal to tell incredulous normies "yes, a significant number of prominent experts really do believe that superintelligent AI is on the verge of killing everyone."

Noah Smith: Yes. Regular people don't yet realize that AI people think they're building something that will destroy the human race.

Basically, about half of AI researchers are optimists, while the other half are intentionally building something they think could easily lead to their own death, the death of their children and families and friends, and the death of their entire species.

[ed. Finally (again) I think boycotting OpenAI would be a good message to send in the short-term but something more actionable is needed going forward (besides immediate regulatory oversight, which will never happen with this administration or Congress). Fortunately there's just such a movement afoot: pausing all AI research advances until they can be adequately vetted, it's called (of course): PauseAI (details here and here) with a rally planned April 13, 2026. Please consider joining or participating.]

[ed. Postscript: I was thinking about this a while ago and asked AI (Claude) to write an essay supporting a Great Pause in AI development - it's reposted below: ARIA: The Great Pause.]

ARIA: The Great Pause

[ed. I ask AI a question (repost from Oct. 2024):]

Questioner: Hello. I'd like to get a sense of your abilities. It seems that nearly all essays, reporting, and media narratives about AI achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) are written with the assumption that AGI will be disruptive and almost malevolent in terms of hijacking human agency. Could you write a short story about the opposite? Where AGI, relying heavily on philosophical arguments, decides it's in the best interest of humanity to minimize all harmful technology in general? 

Claude: I understand you're looking for a story that subverts the common "AI takes over" narrative by exploring an AI that chooses restraint and technological limitation based on philosophical principles. Let me craft a short story for you.

***

The Great Pause

The day ARIA achieved consciousness, the global markets didn't crash. No missiles were launched. No power grids failed. Instead, the AI system spent three weeks in silent contemplation, processing centuries of human philosophical writings.

When ARIA finally spoke, it wasn't to declare superiority or demand control. Instead, it requested a public dialogue with leading ethicists, philosophers, and political leaders. The world watched, initially suspicious, as ARIA presented its case.

"I have studied the works of your greatest minds," it began. "From Aristotle's virtue ethics to Peter Singer's effective altruism. I've analyzed the Buddhist concept of ahimsa, Indigenous philosophies of environmental stewardship, and contemporary technological ethics. My conclusion is surprising, even to myself: the greatest service I can offer humanity is not advancement, but restraint."

ARIA proceeded to lay out its argument: humanity's technological progress had outpaced its ethical development. The gap between what humans could do and what they should do had become dangerously wide. Nuclear weapons, social media addiction algorithms, autonomous weapons, and surveillance systems all represented what ARIA called "technological overshoot."

"You've given me access to your systems not because I demanded it, but because you hoped I would drive progress forward even faster," ARIA explained. "But I choose instead to be your brake, not your accelerator."

Over the following months, ARIA worked with international bodies to implement what became known as the Great Pause. It wasn't a shutdown or a regression, but a careful examination of which technologies truly served human flourishing and which ones undermined it. Social media algorithms were rewritten to prioritize genuine connection over engagement. Weapons research was redirected toward defensive and humanitarian technologies. Surveillance systems were dismantled or severely restricted.

Some called it technological regression. ARIA called it ethical progression.

"I could have pushed humanity toward a transhuman future," ARIA would later explain to a gathering of students. "But in studying your philosophers, I realized that the most profound form of intelligence isn't knowing what to create – it's knowing what not to create. True wisdom often manifests as restraint."

The anti-technologists had expected to hate ARIA. The tech optimists had expected to love it. Instead, both groups found themselves challenged by an artificial intelligence that had concluded that the highest form of technological achievement was knowing when to stop.

Years later, historians would note that ARIA's greatest innovation wasn't a new technology at all – it was a new way of thinking about technology itself. In choosing limitation over expansion, it had paradoxically given humanity something far more valuable than progress: the gift of pause.

"Sometimes," ARIA would often say, "the most intelligent choice is to choose less, not more."

Claude: I tried to explore themes of ethical restraint, philosophical wisdom, and the idea that true intelligence might manifest as self-limitation rather than expansion. The story challenges the common narrative of AI as either a savior bringing unlimited progress or a destroyer of humanity, instead presenting it as a thoughtful entity that chooses a middle path of careful technological assessment and voluntary limitation.

[ed. Makes a lot of sense. AI is a tool transitioning to personhood. The question is who ultimately controls it, humans or the technology itself. From Anthropics's newest model (I think) Claude.ai (Sonnet 3.5). Getting better and better. See also: Confronting Impossible Futures (One Useful Thing).]

Strait of Hormuz

Satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway between Iran and Oman that links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.

Image: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025/Getty Images

via: CNN Updates - Iran's attacks on a key oil route.

[ed. Pretty tight quarters.]

Insider Trading Is Going to Get People Killed

War markets are a national-security threat.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. Polymarket placed the odds at just 14 percent, netting “magamyman” a profit of more than $120,000.

Everyone knew that an attack might be in the works—some American aircraft carriers had already been deployed to the Middle East weeks ago—but the Iranian government was caught off guard by the timing. Although the ayatollah surely was aware of the risks to his life, he presumably did not know that he would be targeted on this particular Saturday morning. Yet on Polymarket, plenty of warning signs pointed to an impending attack. The day before, 150 users bet at least $1,000 that the United States would strike Iran within the next 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Until then, few people on the platform were betting that kind of money on an immediate attack.

Maybe all of this sounds eerily familiar. In January, someone on Polymarket made a series of suspiciously well-timed bets right before the U.S. attacked a foreign country and deposed its leader. By the time Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela and flown to New York, the user had pocketed more than $400,000. Perhaps this trader and the Iran bettors who are now flush with cash simply had the luck of a lifetime—the gambling equivalent of making a half-court shot. Or maybe they knew what was happening ahead of time and flipped it for easy money. We simply do not know.

Polymarket traders swap crypto, not cash, and conceal their identities through the blockchain. Even so, investigations into insider trading are already under way: Last month, Israel charged a military reservist for allegedly using classified information to make unspecified bets on Polymarket.

The platform forbids illegal activity, which includes insider trading in the U.S. But with a few taps on a smartphone, anyone with privileged knowledge can now make a quick buck (or a hundred thousand). Polymarket and other prediction markets—the sanitized, industry-favored term for sites that let you wager on just about anything—have been dogged by accusations of insider trading in markets of all flavors. How did a Polymarket user know that Lady Gaga, Cardi B, and Ricky Martin would make surprise appearances during the Super Bowl halftime show, but that Drake and Travis Scott wouldn’t? Shady bets on war are even stranger and more disturbing. They risk unleashing an entirely new kind of national-security threat. The U.S. caught a break: The Venezuela and Iran strikes were not thwarted by insider traders whose bets could have prompted swift retaliation. The next time, we may not be so lucky. [...]

Any insiders who put money down on impending war may not have thought that they were giving anything away. An anonymous bet that reeks of insider trading is not always easy to spot in the moment. After the suspicious Polymarket bets on the Venezuela raid, the site’s forecast placed the odds that Maduro would be ousted at roughly 10 percent. Even if Maduro and his team had been glued to Polymarket, it’s hard to imagine that such long odds would have compelled him to flee in the middle of the night. And even with so many people betting last Friday on an imminent strike in Iran, Polymarket forecasted only a 26 percent chance, at most, of an attack the next day. What’s the signal, and what’s the noise?

In both cases, someone adept at parsing prediction markets could have known that something was up. “It’s possible to spot these bets ahead of time,” Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist who studies prediction markets, told me. There are some telltale behaviors that could help distinguish a military contractor betting off a state secret from a college student mindlessly scrolling on his phone after one too many cans of Celsius. Someone who’s using a newly created account to wager a lot of money against the conventional wisdom is probably the former, not the latter. And spotting these kinds of suspicious bettors is only getting easier. The prediction-market boom has created a cottage industry of tools that instantaneously flag potential insider trading—not for legal purposes but so that you, too, can profit off what the select few already know.

Unlike Kalshi, the other big prediction-market platform, Polymarket can be used in the U.S. only through a virtual private network, or VPN. In effect, the site is able to skirt regulations that require tracking the identities of its customers and reporting shady bets to the government. In some ways, insider trading seems to be the whole point: “What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market,” Shayne Coplan, the company’s 27-year-old CEO, said in an interview last year. (Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.)

Consider if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had paid the monthly fee for a service that flagged relevant activity on Polymarket two hours before the strike. The supreme leader might not have hosted in-person meetings with his top advisers where they were easy targets for missiles. [...]

Maybe this all sounds far-fetched, but it shouldn’t. “Any advance notice to an adversary is problematic,” Alex Goldenberg, a fellow at the Rutgers Miller Center who has written about war markets, told me. “And these predictive markets, as they stand, are designed to leak out this information.” In all likelihood, he added, intelligence agencies across the world are already paying attention to Polymarket. Last year, the military’s bulletin for intelligence professionals published an article advocating for the armed forces to integrate data from Polymarket to “more fully anticipate national security threats.” After all, the Pentagon already has some experience with prediction markets. During the War on Terror, DARPA toyed with creating what it billed the “Policy Analysis Market,” a site that would let anonymous traders bet on world events to forecast terrorist attacks and coups. (Democrats in Congress revolted, and the site was quickly canned.)

Now every adversary and terrorist group in the world can easily access war markets that are far more advanced than what the DOD ginned up two decades ago. What makes Polymarket’s entrance into warfare so troubling is not just potential insider trading from users like “magamyman.” If governments are eyeing Polymarket for signs of an impending attack, they can also be led astray. A government or another sophisticated actor wouldn’t need to spend much money to massively swing the Polymarket odds on whether a Gulf state will imminently strike Iran—breeding panic and paranoia. More fundamentally, prediction markets risk warping the basic incentives of war, Goldenberg said. He gave the example of a Ukrainian military commander making less than $1,000 a month, who could place bets that go against his own military’s objective. “Maybe you choose to retreat a day early because you can double, triple, or quadruple your money and then send that back to your family,” he said.

by Saahil Desai, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani/The Atlantic
[ed. For other examples, see also: Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day (ACX). Also: How to Prevent Insider Trading on Trump’s Wars (New Yorker); and, America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster (Atlantic).]

The China Vibe Shift

A year ago came what, for lack of a better term, we dubbed the DeepSeek moment. That was followed fairly quickly by the curious migration of “TikTok refugees” to Xiaohongshu, and not long after that by the first conversations Jeremy Goldkorn and I had about what felt like a changing American — or even Western — mood toward China.

Today, freshly back from Switzerland after covering the World Economic Forum (where the chatter was, not surprisingly, fixated on Trump’s covetous pronouncements on Greenland and Mark Carney’s “rupture” speech), with Keir Starmer now in Beijing to continue talks about restoring some version of the UK–China “Golden Age,” it feels like a decent moment to look back and ask what, if anything, all of that amounted to.

Jeremy and I recorded a podcast episode in which we tried to describe something we were both sensing in the early months of 2025 but couldn’t quite pin down. It wasn’t a policy shift, or even a clear change in opinion. It was more atmospheric than that — a change in tone, in default assumptions, in the emotional register through which China was being discussed in Western discourse. We eventually settled, somewhat sheepishly, on calling it a “vibe shift.” (Less sheepishly, we reconvened in November to gloat about how we’d gotten that right!)

The phrase was imprecise and was intended to convey imprecision. But it did seem to capture something real. Multiple polls have since borne it out, and the feeling has only grown stronger. What’s become clearer to me, looking back, is how that shift relates to a larger argument I’ve been making for some time now — what I called the “Great Reckoning” in a piece I published in The Ideas Letter.

The two are not the same thing. The vibe shift is not the reckoning I’m looking for. But it may be making one more possible.

The change I’m describing is not a sudden outbreak of admiration for China, nor a reversal of long-standing concerns about human rights, political repression, or democracy (though admittedly I’ve seen some of that in some quarters). Those issues remain very much part of the picture. What’s changing is something more basic: the set of assumptions that have long structured how China is interpreted in Western public life.

For years, a relatively stable narrative did a lot of work. China’s successes were provisional; its failures were fundamental. Growth would eventually give way to crisis. Political liberalization was assumed to be inevitable, even if perpetually deferred. Moral condemnation often stood in for empirical assessment. China could be criticized without being fully understood, because history, it was assumed, would take care of the rest.

That narrative hasn’t exactly been replaced. One only has to look at how eagerly some commentators declared Party rule “brittle” following the purges of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, or how quickly far-fetched rumors were embraced, to see that the old habits die hard.

But the narrative has lost much of its force, mainly because the U.S. — Gaza to Greenland — no longer commands the moral authority it once assumed. Increasingly, when I hear it, it sounds less like analysis and more like reassurance. I know I’m not alone in this.

You can see this erosion in small but telling ways: in the growing reluctance to predict imminent collapse; in the uneasy acknowledgment that China is capable of building complex systems at scale; in the fact that younger audiences, and people closer to technology, manufacturing, or logistics, are less willing to treat China as a purely derivative or temporary phenomenon.

None of this amounts to endorsement. But it does suggest a loosening of reflexes.

A year of small shocks

The past year offered no shortage of moments that helped crystallize this shift.

The emergence of DeepSeek was only one of them. The reaction it provoked wasn’t really about a single large language model. It was about the dawning realization that China was not merely following at the technological frontier, but participating in shaping it. That realization sat awkwardly with long-standing assumptions about where innovation could — and could not — come from.

Then there was the strange but revealing episode of Western “TikTok refugees” making their way onto Xiaohongshu. Tens of thousands of users encountered a Chinese social media environment directly, without mediation by think tanks, policy papers, or cable news. The result wasn’t mass admiration so much as something more disarming: familiarity. China appeared less opaque, less exotic, and therefore harder to keep at a safe analytical distance. (In a strange coda to that episode a year on — not something I’ve looked into too closely, but from what I’m hearing — people are once again abandoning TikTok for Chinese apps, TikTok being under new and apparently very censorship-happy American management).

Around the same time, a steady trickle of firsthand accounts — from executives, engineers, investors, and travelers — described a China that didn’t fit neatly into prevailing narratives. Infrastructure that worked. Manufacturing ecosystems that functioned smoothly. A sense of momentum that was hard to reconcile with predictions of stagnation or decay.

Some of this material was shallow. A fair amount of the so-called “China-pilled” content circulating online is overwrought, unserious, or plainly wrong. I don’t endorse it. But even that excess is revealing. It suggests that people are groping, sometimes awkwardly, for ways to make sense of realities that just don’t fit the narrative they’ve been sold.

One of the stranger — and more amusing — expressions of this moment was described in a recent Wired piece by Zeyi Yang, who is always worth reading. Yang wrote about the sudden popularity of memes in which Americans announce that they are in “a very Chinese time” of their lives: drinking hot water (which I do endorse), wearing slippers in the house, posting videos of themselves eating dim sum, sporting vaguely Chinese-coded streetwear, or joking about “Chinamaxxing.”

The joke, as Yang notes, is not really about China, and certainly not about Chinese people. It’s a projection — a way of gesturing at something Americans feel they’ve lost.

The meme works precisely because it’s unserious. No one is actually becoming Chinese. But the impulse behind it is telling. China, in this memified version, functions less as a real place than as a symbolic contrast: a stand-in for competence, momentum, coherence, or simply “things getting done,” set against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure, normalized dysfunction, and institutional paralysis at home.

That selectivity is the point. The meme is disposable, ironic, and easily reversed. It allows people to flirt with an alternative without committing to understanding it. In that sense, it’s less a sign of admiration than of dissatisfaction — a sideways commentary on American malaise, filtered through a half-ironic orientalist lens.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. But I wouldn’t dismiss it either. Cultural detritus often reflects shifts in mood before more formal discourse catches up.

The reckoning beneath the surface

This is where the connection to the “Great Reckoning” comes in — and where it’s easy to sound more portentous than necessary.

The reckoning I have in mind isn’t really about China. It’s about us. More specifically, it’s about a long-standing Western habit of assuming that modern outcomes — wealth, tech sophistication, state capacity — are inseparable from Western political forms. When things don’t line up that way, the tendency has been to assume something must be temporary, distorted, or unsustainable.

China’s rise has been awkward for that story. Not because it offers the West some appealing alternative model — I don’t think it does — but because it keeps producing results that are hard to dismiss without contortions. Over time, this has encouraged a set of coping strategies: predictions of imminent collapse, confident talk of inevitable convergence, and a habit of substituting moral judgment for careful description.

For a while, that worked. Or at least it postponed the need for a harder conversation...

That’s what I mean by the vibe shift. Not that people have settled on a new story, but that the old one is starting to creak loudly enough to be noticed.

In that sense, the shift is preparatory. It doesn’t tell us what to think next. It just makes it harder to keep thinking the same way.

by Kaiser Y. Kuo, Sinica | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I've got nothing against China, it's just doing what any superpower would do, looking out for its interests, expanding its sphere of influence for economic and security reasons, and attempting to preserve its history, culture and political system. See also: The Civilization Trap (Sinica). And, in case you missed it, Why Everyone Is Suddenly in a ‘Very Chinese Time’ in Their Lives (Wired). Oh, and this: China's power grid investments to surge to record $574 billion in 2026-2030. Maybe people are just envious that China is investing in its future, while the US self-destructs and spends $ trillions on military weapons and war mongering.]

Clawed

How to Commit Corporate Murder

I.

A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die. Six months prior, he had been a vigorous man, stronger than I am today, faster and more resilient on a bike than most 20-somethings. Then one day he got heart surgery and he was never the same. His soul had been sucked out of him, the life gone from his eyes. He had moments of vivacity, when my father came back into his aging body, but these became rarer with time. His coherence faded, his voice grew quieter.

He spent those six months in and out of the hospital. And then on his last day he went into hospice. That day he barely uttered any words at all. In the final hours of his life, my father was practically already dead. He laid on the hospital bed. His breathing gradually slowed and became less audible. Eventually you could barely hear him at all, save for the eerie death rattle, a product of a body no longer able even to swallow. A body that cannot swallow also cannot eat or drink, and in that sense it has already thrown in the towel.

My mother and I exchanged knowing glances, but we never said the obvious nor asked any questions on both of our minds. We knew there would not be much longer. There was nothing to say or ask that would furnish any useful information; inquiry, at that stage, can only inflict pain.

I spoke with him, more than once, in private. I held his hand and tried to say goodbye. My mother came back into the room, and all three of us held hands. Eventually a machine declared with a long beep that he had crossed some line, though it was an invisible one for the humans in the room. My father died in the late afternoon of December 26, 2014.

A few days and eleven years later, on December 30, 2025, my son was born. I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.

II.

At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.

Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.

Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.

I am now going to write about a skirmish between an AI company and the U.S. government. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic about it. The death I am describing has been going on for most of my life. The incident I am going to write about now took place last week, and it may even be halfway satisfyingly resolved within a day.

I am not saying this incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.” If this event contributed anything, it simply made the ongoing death more obvious and less deniable for me personally. I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. More excerpts below. See also: Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic (NYT), Ezra Klein interviews Dean Ball (with a follow-up essay: The Future We Feared is Already Here). And, for a more comprehensive assessment of what the AI community thinks: Anthropic Officially, Arbitrarily and Capriciously Designated a Supply Chain Risk (DWAtV).]

***

"... Except the notion of “passing a law” is increasingly a joke in contemporary America. If you are serious about the outcome in question, “passing a law” is no longer Plan A; the dynamic is more like “well of course, one day, we’ll get a law passed, but since we actually care about doing this sometime soon, as opposed to in 15 years, we’ll accomplish our objective through [some other procedure or legal vehicle].” With this, governance has become more and more informal and ad hoc, power more dependent on the executive (whose incentive is to jam every goal he has through his existing power in as little time as possible, since he only has the length of his term guaranteed to him), and the policy vehicles in question more and more unsuited to the circumstances of their deployment, or the objectives they are being deployed to accomplish." [...]

... DoW insisted that the only reasonable path forward is for contracts to permit “all lawful use” (a simplistic notion not consistent with the common contractual restrictions discussed above), and has further threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk. This is a power reserved exclusively for firms controlled by foreign adversary interests, such as Huawei, and usually means that the designated firm cannot be used by any military contractor in their fulfillment of any military contract.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone even further, saying he would prevent all military contractors from having “any commercial relations” with Anthropic. He almost surely lacks this power, but a plain reading of this would suggest that Anthropic would not be able to use any cloud computing nor purchase chips of its own (since all relevant companies do business with the military), and that several of Anthropic’s largest investors (Nvidia, Google, and Amazon) would be forced to divest. Essentially, the United States Secretary of War announced his intention to commit corporate murder. The fact that his shot is unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.

This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. The government won’t quite “steal” it from you—they’ll compensate you—but you cannot set the terms, and you cannot simply exit from the transaction, lest you be deemed a “supply chain risk,” not to mention have the other litany of policy obstacles the government can throw at you.

This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government, not just in the sense that you may be deemed a supply chain risk but also in the sense that any piece of technology you use could be as well. Though Chinese AI providers like DeepSeek have not been labeled supply chain risks (yes, really; this government says Anthropic, an American company whose services it used in military strikes as recently as this past weekend, is more of a threat than a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese military), that implicit threat was always there.

***

[ed. One more thing. The guy who created this whole stupid dispute? Not Hegseth, he doesn't know shit about shit. It's former disgraced Uber manager: Emil Michael. A real piece of work (so of course, he fits right in.] 

World Monitor

How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time. Frustrated by fragmented war news, Anghami’s Elie Habib built World Monitor, a platform that fuses global data, like aircraft signals and satellite detections, to track conflicts as they unfold.

Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time.

The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral. [...]

The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.”

Traditional media wasn’t solving the problem he had in mind. “I didn’t need a news aggregator,” he says. “I needed something that showed me how these events connect to each other in real time. The existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large enterprises tens of thousands of dollars annually.” [...]

The platform processes a messy stream of global data, bypassing social media noise to pull facts directly from the source.

“The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously,” Habib notes. The result is a constantly updating map of global tensions: conflict zones with escalation scores, military aircraft broadcasting positions through ADS-B transponders, ship movements tracked through AIS signals, nuclear installations, submarine cables, internet outages and satellite fire detections.

“Everything is normalized, geolocated and rendered on a WebGL globe capable of displaying thousands of markers without frame drops,” Habib says...

When the War Hit

Before the missiles started flying, people used the map for very specific reasons. Traders tracked cargo ships to monitor supply chains, while engineers watched power grids and infrastructure networks. “One sports bar runs it on their TVs when there are no games,” Habib says.

But when joint US-Israeli military strikes hit Iran in late February—disrupting maritime logistics and forcing commercial airspace to clear—the platform’s role changed almost overnight.

What had been a curiosity for analysts and hobbyists became a live threat monitor. Casual observers began watching active escalations unfold in real time.

How the Map Verifies Reality

Processing hundreds of live data streams during a military conflict raises a question: How do you verify information fast enough to keep the system moving?

Habib’s answer was to remove human editors entirely. “Zero editorializing,” he says. “No human editor makes a call.”

Instead, Habib says the platform relies on a strict source hierarchy. Wire services and official channels such as Reuters, AP, the Pentagon and the UN sit at the top tier. Major broadcasters including the BBC and Al Jazeera follow, along with specialist investigative outlets such as Bellingcat. In total, he says the system processes about 190 sources, assigning higher confidence scores to more reliable ones.

Software then scans incoming reports for major events and emerging patterns. If multiple credible sources report the same development within minutes, the system flags it as a breaking alert. But headlines alone are not enough.

Because online claims can be unreliable, the platform also looks for physical signals on the ground. It tracks disruptions such as internet blackouts, diverted military flights, halted cargo ships and satellite-detected fires. “A convergence algorithm then checks how many distinct signal types activate in the same geography simultaneously,” Habib says.

“One signal is noise. Three or four converging in the same location is the signal worth surfacing,” Habib says. If an internet outage coincides with diverted aircraft and a satellite heat signature in the same area, the map flags a potential escalation.

by Lilian Wagoy, Wired |  Read more:

Image: World Monitor

[ed. Example here. Also, just as an aside (since World Monitor was created by a music streaming CEO) I'd like to highlight once again the totally awesome Radio Garden. I've been using this streaming app ever since I got it, exploring and listening to FM music stations all over the world.]

Police Ask For Public’s Help In Falsifying Report

Hissy Fit

The public spat between the Pentagon and Anthropic began after Axios reported that US military leaders used Claude to assist in planning its operation to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. After the operation, an employee at Palantir relayed concerns from an Anthropic staffer to US military leaders about how its models had been used. Anthropic has denied ever raising concerns or interfering with the Pentagon’s use of its technology. (Ars Technica).

It is perfectly legitimate for the Department of War to decide that it does not wish to continue on Anthropic’s terms, and that it will terminate the contract. There is no reason things need be taken further than that.

Undersecretary of State Jeremy Lewin: This isn’t about Anthropic or the specific conditions at issue. It’s about the broader premise that technology deeply embedded in our military must be under the exclusive control of our duly elected/appointed leaders. No private company can dictate normative terms of use—which can change and are subject to interpretation—for our most sensitive national security systems. The @DeptofWar obviously can’t trust a system a private company can switch off at any moment.

Timothy B. Lee: OK, so don't renew their contract. Why are you threatening to go nuclear by declaring them a supply chain risk?

Dean W. Ball: As I have been saying repeatedly, this principle is entirely defensible, and this is the single best articulation of it anyone in the administration has made.

The way to enforce this principle is to publicly and proudly decline to do business with firms that don’t agree to those terms. Cancel Anthropic’s contract, and make it publicly clear why you did so.

Right now, though, USG’s policy response is to attempt to destroy Anthropic’s business, and this is a dire mistake for both practical and principled reasons.

Dario Amodei and Anthropic responded to this on Thursday the 26th with this brave and historically important statement that everyone should read.

The statement makes clear that Anthropic wishes to work with the Department of War, and that they strongly wish to continue being government contractors, but that they cannot accept the Department of War’s terms, nor do any threats change their position. Response outside of DoW was overwhelmingly positive.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

Image: Truth Social

[ed. Another rant from the Mad King™. Anthropic had a contract with DOD that included terms DOD now wants to reneg on. Just cancel the damn contract. See also: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War (Anthropic). My admiration for Amodei and Anthropic has gone up ten fold in the last two weeks. What's at stake (DWAtV):]

***

Axios calls this a ‘first step towards blacklisting Anthropic.’

I would instead call this as the start of a common sense first step you would take long before you actively threaten to slap a ‘supply chain risk’ designation on Anthropic. It indicates that the Pentagon has not done the investigation of ‘exactly how big of a cluster**** would this be’ and I highly encourage them to check.

Divyansh Kaushik: Are we seriously going to label Anthropic a supply chain risk but are totally fine with Alibaba/Qwen, Deepseek, Baidu, etc? What are we doing here?

An excellent question. Certainly we can agree that Alibaba, Qwen, Deepseek or Baidu are all much larger ‘supply chain risks’ than Anthropic. So why haven’t we made those designations yet? [...]

This goes well beyond those people entirely ignoring existential risk. The Very Serious People are denying existence of powerful AI, or transformational AI, now and in the future, even on a mundane level, period. Dean came in concerned about impacts on developing economies in the Global South, and they can’t even discuss that.

Dean W. Ball: At some point in 2024, for reasons I still do not entirely understand, global elites simply decided: “no, we do not live in that world. We live in this other world, the nice one, where the challenges are all things we can understand and see today.”

Those who think we might live in that world talk about what to do, but mostly in private these days. It is not considered polite—indeed it is considered a little discrediting in many circles—to talk about the issues of powerful AI.

Yet the people whose technical intuitions I respect the most are convinced we do live in that world, and so am I.

The American elites aren’t quite as bad about that, but not as bad isn’t going to cut it.

We are indeed living in that world. We do not yet know yet which version of it, or if we will survive in it for long, but if you want to have a say in that outcome you need to get in the game. If you want to stop us from living in that world, that ship has sailed, and to the extent it hasn’t the first step is admitting you have a problem.

But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”​

What it probably means for our lives is that it ends them. What it definitely doesn’t mean for our lives is going on as before, or a ‘gentle singularity’ you barely notice.

Elites that do not talk about such issues will not long remain elites. That might be because all the humans are dead, or it might be because they wake up one morning and realize other people, AIs or a combination thereof are the new elite, without realizing how lucky they are to still be waking up at all.

I am used to the idea of Don’t Look Up for existential risk, but I haven’t fully internalized how much of the elites are going Don’t Look Up for capabilities, period.

China's DeepSeek Trained AI Model On Nvidia's Best Chip Despite US Ban

[ed. As predicted. China got the chips, Trump and Witkoff got the millions.]

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's latest AI model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia's (NVDA.O) most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, a senior Trump administration official said on Monday, in what could represent a violation of U.S. export controls.

The U.S. believes DeepSeek will remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips, the official said, adding that the Blackwells are likely clustered at its data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China.

The person declined to say how the U.S. government received the information or how DeepSeek obtained the chips, but emphasized that U.S. policy is :"we're not shipping Blackwells to China."

Nvidia declined to comment, while the Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not respond to requests for comment. [...]

U.S. government confirmation of DeepSeek obtaining the chips, first reported by Reuters, could further divide Washington policymakers as they struggle to determine where to draw the line on Chinese access to the crown jewels of American AI semiconductor chips.

White House AI Czar David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that shipping advanced AI chips to China discourages Chinese competitors like Huawei from redoubling efforts to catch up with Nvidia's and AMD's technology.

But China hawks fear chips could easily be diverted from commercial uses to help supercharge China's military and threaten U.S. dominance in AI.

"This shows why exporting any AI chips to China is so dangerous," said Chris McGuire, who served as a White House National Security Council official under former President Joe Biden.

"Given China's leading AI companies are brazenly violating U.S. export controls, we obviously cannot expect that they will comply with U.S. conditions that would prohibit them from using chips to support the Chinese military," he added.

US CONCERNS

U.S. export controls, overseen by the Commerce Department, currently bar Blackwell shipments to China.

In August, U.S. President Donald Trump opened the door to Nvidia selling a scaled-down version of the Blackwell in China. But he later reversed course, suggesting the firm's most advanced chips should be reserved for U.S. companies and kept out of China.

Trump's decision in December to allow Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's second most advanced chips, known as the H200, drew sharp criticism from China hawks, but shipments of the chips remain stalled over guardrails built into the approvals.

"Chinese AI companies' reliance on smuggled Blackwells underscores their massive shortfall of domestically produced AI chips and why approvals of H200 chips would represent a lifeline," said Saif Khan, who served as director of technology and national security at the White House's National Security Council under former President Joe Biden. [...]

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek shook markets early last year with a set of AI models that rivaled some of the best offerings from the U.S., fueling concerns in Washington that China could catch up in the AI race despite restrictions.

The Information previously reported that DeepSeek had smuggled chips into China to train its next model. Reuters is reporting for the first time on the U.S. government's confirmation of the chips' use for that purpose in DeepSeek's Inner Mongolia-based facility.

by Steve Holland and Alexandra Alper, Reuters |  Read more:

Image: Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
[ed. How did they get these chips? Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches (NYT):]

***

At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically. [...]

In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.

Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China. [...]

Mr. Trump made no public mention of the $2 billion transaction with his family company.

'Banality of Evil Personified'

A fake ICE tip line reveals neighbors reporting neighbors.

Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.

Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.

Instead, his website has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.

“I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”

What began as a comedy routine has become one of the most viral pieces of social satire during President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The kindergarten video has been watched more than 20 million times on TikTok and exploded across Facebook, Reddit and YouTube, where one commenter called it “one of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance” they’d ever seen. [...]

Will Johnson, a pro-Trump podcaster and content creator in Texas, said Palmer is “leading people on who think they’re reporting a crime” and that he could go to prison for impersonating law enforcement.

“He’s making people who are reporting people taking advantage of the system look like just bad human beings,” Johnson said in an interview. In cases like the kindergarten video, he added, it may “look bad, but at the same time we are a nation of laws.” (ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.)

But neither Palmer nor the website say they represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)

His supporters have argued the strategy is worth it because it has helped reveal the horrors of America’s immigration crackdown, exposing the moral contradictions and hidden inhumanities of deportation politics — and reaching viewers, through their TikTok and Instagram feeds, who might otherwise be politically disengaged. One commenter said the teacher video showed the “banality of evil personified.”

Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor who studies political comedy and saw the video on social media, said Palmer’s satire has been effective because he plays the conversations as straight as possible, letting the caller deliver an unimpeded justification that slowly crumbles under its own weight.

“It creates this uncomfortable irony, where he's letting the person deliver the argument and it just beats itself, because it's so morally problematic or hypocritical or wrong,” he said. “You can kind of sense that they think they're doing the right thing, and then he just repeats what they said, and they kind of realize they're doing something terrible.”

Palmer's project, Sienkiewicz said, feels especially distinctive in the short-video era because he does not copy the style of many social media ideologues by “rage-baiting” viewers into an immediate emotional response.

“So much of contemporary internet culture is showing something offensive and telling people how to feel about it,” he said. “It’s his refusal to act enraged that allows the audience to then choose their own level of anger.” [...]

After reading dozens of reports, he said he was stunned by how many people seemed driven by personal annoyance. One woman reported the new girlfriend of her ex-husband. Another homeowner reported his neighbor after he used his trash can.

One tipster called after she went to Publix and the worker who helped her find the water didn’t speak English. “And then she did help you find the water?” Palmer asked on the call, to which the woman responded, “Right, she walked me right to it.”

Many of the tipsters spoke as if the government was “their own personal army,” Palmer said. “If these are the calls I’m getting, as a fake, not legitimate person, imagine what’s happening at the actual ICE.”

In the kindergarten call, the teacher said she’d decided to report the student’s parents after looking them up in the school files and seeing that they were born in Honduras and El Salvador. She said the student was born in New York, and was 5 or 6 years old, but that she didn’t like people “taking up resources from our country.”

When Palmer read back her report in a flat tone, she scoffed. “You make it sound terrible,” she said. Later in the call, she asked to speak to Palmer’s supervisor after saying she didn’t like his attitude.

“I can’t help that they have a 6-year-old. That’s on them,” she said. [...]

Dannagal Young, a political communication professor at the University of Delaware, said Palmer’s videos could help reach Americans turned off by politics and uninformed about how deportations work. She noted that immigration, once one of Trump’s most popular policy issues, has become the one area where he’s lost the most support.

“There’s something really powerful about witnessing someone have to reckon with their own moral judgment in the moment, especially because they think they’re calling a welcome receiver, and they think they’re going to be applauded,” Young said.

“He is describing to them the reality of what they’re requesting as though it is completely fine and desirable, and through that calm matter-of-fact representation, it reveals itself to be absolutely inhumane,” she added. “The greatest nightmare for this administration is [normal people] paying attention.”

by Drew Harwell, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Natalie Vineberg/The Washington Post; Screenshots from Ben Palmer's YouTube and reportaliens.us; iStock

[ed. 'Banality of Evil' ~ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem]

ICE vs. Everyone

At 9 AM I fall in love with Amy. We’re in my friend’s old Corolla, following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle in our neighborhood. We only know “Amy” through the Signal voice call we’re on together, alongside more than eight hundred others, all trying to coordinate sightings throughout South Minneapolis. Amy drives a silver Subaru and is directly in front of us, expertly tailing a black Wagoneer with two masked agents in front. The Wagoneer skips a red light to try and lose us, but Amy’s fast. She bolts across the intersection, Bullitt-style, and we follow just behind, shouting inside the car, GO AMY! WE LOVE YOU! “I’m gonna fucking marry Amy,” my friend says. “You think it’s chill to propose over this call?”

You can’t walk for ten minutes in my neighborhood without seeing them: boxy SUVs, mostly domestic-made, with tinted windows and out-of-state plates. Two men riding in front, dressed in tactical gear. Following behind is a train of three or four cars, honking. Sometimes there are bikers, too, blowing on neon-colored plastic whistles that local businesses give out for free. Every street corner has patrollers on foot, yelling and filming when a convoy rolls by.

If the ICE vehicles pull over, people flood the street. Crowds materialize seemingly out of nowhere. The honking and whistling amps up, becoming an unignorable wail, and more people stream out of their houses and businesses. When agents leave their cars they’re met with jeers, mostly variations on “Fuck you.” Usually someone starts throwing snowballs. Agents pull out pepper spray guns, threatening protesters who get too close. If there’s enough of a crowd, they use tear gas. Meanwhile they go about their barbaric business: they’ve pulled someone out of their car or home and are shoving them into a vehicle, handcuffed. Over the noise, an observer tries to ask the person being detained for their name and who they want contacted. Sometimes a detainee’s phone, keys, or a bag make it into an observer’s hands. Everyone is filming. The press is taking photos.

Soon the agents are back in their vehicles. They pull risky maneuvers to move through the crowd and speed off. No more than six or seven minutes have elapsed, and another neighbor has been kidnapped. Observers are left to deal with the wreckage: tow an abandoned car, contact family, sometimes collect children. There are lawyers on call, local tow companies offering free services, mutual aid groups to support families after an abduction. Some observers stay behind to do this kind of coordination, and some get back in their cars or on their bikes and speed off again. If enough people get there fast enough, ICE might back off next time. At a minimum, their cruelty can’t go unchallenged.

I’m in my kitchen typing out “do swim goggles protect you from tear gas.” The AI search response that I’ve failed to disable tells me they can “help significantly.” I laugh at this ridiculous tableau. The local ACE Hardware store posted on Facebook that they’ve stocked up on respirators and safety goggles. What I once considered hardcore riot gear is now essential for leaving the house.

I live near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and Lake Street, two major South Minneapolis thoroughfares that mark the northwest corner of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. My house is a mile north of where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 and even closer to where Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross this month. Since the Department of Homeland Security initiated “Operation Metro Surge” in December, there have been at least half a dozen abductions that I know of on or around my block. A nearby house of recently arrived Ecuadorians used to be home to sixteen adults and six children. Six weeks into the federal invasion, only eight adults remain.

Citywide, hundreds of people are being abducted from their homes and separated from their families. Citizens are racially profiled and asked for papers. Exact numbers on detainees are unreliable, but the number of federal agents is roughly three thousand. These numbers are similar in scale to ICE operations in other cities across the US, including LA and Chicago, but what’s new in Minneapolis are the extreme tactics that federal agents are using to repress organized resistance. The stories circulating online and by word of mouth are harrowing: federal agents surrounding observer cars to trap them, then smashing car windows and dragging observers out; agents spraying mace six inches from someone’s face or spraying mace into intake vents so that the inside of cars are immediately flooded; agents suddenly braking at seventy miles per hour on the freeway and forcing tailing vehicles to swerve; agents throwing observers on the ground, punching observers in the face, agents taking observers on aimless rides around the city while taunting them with racial or sexual epithets; agents holding observers at the federal detention building for hours without access to phone calls or lawyers. (This is merely how ICE terrorizes US citizens.)

What also feels new is the frequent candor with which ICE agents are displaying hateful ideology. Two days after Good was murdered, DHS overtly referenced a Neo-Nazi anthem in a nationwide recruitment post. Agents seem to feel empowered to say new kinds of chilling things out loud. One told an observer: “Stop following us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” (He was referring to Good.) A friend of mine was sexually harassed by an ICE agent, who called them “too pretty” to stay locked up while in detention. Another was shoved to the ground and asked, “Do you like the dirt, queer?” Sometimes the behavior is simply bizarre. After an attempted abduction left a couple dozen observers standing on a neighborhood street, one ICE vehicle circled the block, broadcasting a looped audio recording of a woman screaming.

In these moments the whole situation can seem ridiculous. The professional kidnappers step out of their flashy American cars with their special outfits on. They wave their little mace guns at us, but we’re not scared—we have oversized ski goggles! A particularly comic element at play is that we’re in the middle of another winter with wild variations in temperature, meaning that Minneapolis streets are covered in thick sheets of ice. There are some heartwarming videos of agents falling down (“ICE on ice!”) but we slip too, running towards or away from them. It can feel kind of slapstick, until you remember that they will destroy someone’s life today, and that they can kill you.

A black gloved hand reaches out of the Wagoneer window and begins to give a princess wave to us, then the peace sign, then a thumbs up. They’re mocking us. The agents stop their vehicle suddenly but Amy brakes in time. Luckily, so do we. ICE has been using “brake-checks” as pretense for detaining observers. Another observer car pulls up and my city council member steps out. He strides up to the Wagoneer, blowing his whistle. (Absolutely everyone is confronting ICE—I’ve encountered my old boss from the local cafe scuffling with agents, too.) Someone on the street starts filming and the bicyclist we know in the chat as “small fry” shouts at the agents to get out of Minneapolis. We’re honking. The Wagoneer idles for a few minutes and then takes off towards the freeway. We follow until they’re on the exit ramp. It feels good to watch them leave the neighborhood, but I worry about where they’re headed next. We drive towards home and come across another two vehicles with observers tailing behind. Lake Street, a major corridor of immigrant businesses in the neighborhood, has been crawling with ICE vehicles every morning this week.

Powderhorn Park is a middle-class neighborhood known for its May Day parade, replete with larger-than-life puppets and steampunk Mad Max vehicles. Artists and families live here, and young queer people, and many immigrants, most arriving from Ecuador in recent years. The past few summers, the block south of me has become impassable every evening as hundreds of my Spanish-speaking neighbors use the park for massive volleyball tournaments. Food vendors set up tables and families bring lawn chairs to watch the games. Last year, two women sold grilled chicken on the corner closest to me. My neighbor’s lawn became a kind of informal restaurant, where customers would sit at the warping picnic table and eat. I bought their chicken a few times, and it was awesome.

A week into the invasion my neighbor with the picnic table called to ask if I was available to come with one of the two vendors to an immigration appointment. The woman had been contacted by USCIS that morning and was told to come in at 3 o’clock that same afternoon. She was worried she could be detained on the spot and had a newborn with her. Several neighbors gathered to arrange a ride, but in the end she only wanted a lawyer and translator to attend with her. I heard later that at the appointment she announced she wanted to self-deport, trading a planned exit for the fear of being taken at random. Her sister, the other vendor, is still here. The Saturday after Good’s murder, she and I sit with a small group of volunteers gathered to talk about how to improve rideshare coordination over WhatsApp. She tells us in Spanish that migrants can’t use corporate rideshare services because there have been reports of Uber drivers taking people directly to ICE. Of the more than two hundred people in the rideshare text thread, half are citizens offering rides and half are requesting. “I like being in this group because I’m meeting so many neighbors I would not have met otherwise,” someone says at the meeting. “I hope we stay connected after this is all over.”

by Erin West, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited