moral clarity discovered after first air raid, film at 11
Two presidents sit on a marble floor at the Vatican, as the fate of a European war and U.S. foreign policy is quietly negotiated somewhere between Trump’s ego and Zelenskyy’s patience.
Laura Loomer, professional outrage dispenser and Trump barnacle, flew to Kyiv, heard one (1) air raid siren, and suddenly realized that maybe Russia’s full-scale invasion is not, in fact, a Based Anti-Woke Liberation Tour. After years of calling Ukraine a land of “Nazi apologists” and recycling Kremlin fanfic for her followers, she is now posting about “moral clarity” and endorsing crushing Russian sanctions because, crucial detail, Iran wants Trump dead. Foreign policy, brought to you by the “will this hurt Dear Leader personally?” school of geopolitics.
The best part? Loomer’s new line is being treated as a major diplomatic development, because Zelenskyy says he’ll likely meet Trump in Washington while he’s in town for Lindsey Graham’s funeral. Trump jumped on Truth Social to grunt out a “Very good!!!!” about Loomer’s interview, which Kyiv commentators are reading as a sign the White House’s anti-Ukraine stance is softening. US strategy toward a live war zone now runs through a woman who just filmed herself eating a cheeseburger outside a missile-shredded McDonald’s to own… Vladimir Putin? Evangelicals get a bespoke message too: Loomer toured a bombed cathedral and explained you can’t really “protect Christianity” by, as she put it, trying to drone-strike Jesus.
Ukrainian officials, staring down ballistic missiles and daily civilian deaths, are understandably grateful for any crack in the MAGA-Russia bromance, so they’re rolling out the red carpet for Loomer and thanking her for her “courage” on social media. A former government adviser even calls this a historic break with Russian propaganda by part of the MAGA movement, which is a polite way of saying: we now depend on Trumpworld’s least hinged influencers to talk the base out of cheering for war crimes. American foreign policy has officially become a spin-off of the Trump Extended Universe, where a 15-minute Vatican chat and a Guardian write-up count as a “historic moment” in US-Ukraine relations.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
trillionaire arsonist regrets playing with matches
Elon Musk explains that when he helped a president wreck the federal government, he was just having a little fun and everyone should relax because robots will fix it later.
Elon Musk, briefly the world’s first trillionaire and permanently the world’s neediest man, now says he "got carried away" with politics while helping Donald Trump back into the White House with a casual $200m and then moonlighting as the regime’s "financial axman" in the fake-sounding but very real Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. Doge. During his stint as Trump’s budget Terminator, he proudly oversaw $150bn in "harmful" cuts and shoved tens of thousands of federal workers out the door, then later mused on a podcast that, in hindsight, maybe he should’ve just stayed home and played with his companies instead of the U.S. government.
Any glimmer of remorse doesn’t last long. In his 90-minute Economist infomercial, Musk preens about his political influence, declares that "people don’t realize that what I’m saying will come to pass", and is obligingly described as a modern-day Cassandra—if Cassandra had stock options, a god complex, and a history of union-busting. He pivots from dismantling the civil service to predicting AI will soon outthink humanity, work will be "optional", money will be meaningless in 10 years, and yet he’ll heroically pay "trillions" in tax someday so governments can send people checks in the post-scarcity utopia he personally midwifed by… firing park rangers and USDA inspectors.
When not fantasizing about space datacenters that scientists warn will be catastrophic for Earth, Musk is busy laundering far-right politics as common sense. He rants about immigration and race in a country he barely visits, predicts a UK civil war, dodges questions about being anti-Muslim by accusing reporters of ignoring "rape and murder", and defends Europe’s far right as just "normal people" who want "safe cities" and "secure borders"—Stephen Miller with better branding and a rocket fetish. He also suggests Ukraine should hand Russia some land, because what’s a little territorial surrender between authoritarian-curious friends when your satellites are already in the mix?
By the end, Musk is musing that the universe might be a computer simulation and that his own projects are so "preposterous" it’s hard to believe they’re real. Unfortunately, the part where a mega-rich tech baron bought himself a president, gutted the federal workforce, mainstreamed bigotry to 240 million followers, and then shrugged it off as getting a bit "carried away" is very real. The simulation, apparently, is accountability.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump’s ai cops suddenly care about theft
Michael Kratsios heroically defending America’s right to be the only one allowed to hoover up data and call it artificial intelligence.
Donald Trump’s science and tech guy, Michael Kratsios, has discovered a shocking new phenomenon: corporations protecting their intellectual property… when it’s American. He’s accusing China’s Moonshot AI of running a "large scale" scheme to siphon capabilities from Anthropic’s Fable AI model using distillation, which is basically when a weaker model pesters a stronger one with questions until it becomes a slightly less stupid version of itself. Moonshot allegedly also found its way onto restricted Nvidia servers, because nothing says "secure critical infrastructure" like putting the future of AI on hardware guarded with the digital equivalent of a sticky note password.
Kratsios claims Moonshot used Anthropic’s tech to build its shiny new Kimi K3 model, which Chinese state-linked cheerleaders are bragging can rival top US systems. Naturally, the Trump administration’s response is not "maybe we should regulate AI" but "maybe we should sanction it." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox Business to float the idea of punishing overseas models that "steal from our great companies," carefully omitting the part where US firms happily scrape the entire internet and call it innovation.
All this moral outrage coincidentally ramps up just as Trump is prepping a September meeting with Xi Jinping, meaning AI theft is now another handy bargaining chip in the "art of the deal": protect our oligarchs’ models, threaten your oligarchs’ models, and hope nobody notices that the White House is turning the global AI race into a state-backed IP protection racket for a handful of powerful companies.
#oligarchy#national-security
south carolina invents the hereditary senate seat
Darline Graham Nordone, freshly sworn in and already measuring the Senate drapes for the full six-year family lease.
South Carolina has apparently decided that the U.S. Senate is less a representative body and more a family heirloom. Days after Lindsey Graham dies, Gov. Henry McMaster appoints his sister Darline Graham to his seat, and before the funeral flowers have even wilted, she’s on Sean Hannity announcing that, yes, she’s running for the full six-year term. Somewhere, the concept of a cooling-off period is sobbing quietly into a copy of the Federalist Papers.
Trump, naturally, is already there with his trademark rubber stamp, issuing a "complete and total endorsement" of Graham as the proper vessel to "honor the legacy" of her brother — which in practice means keeping a reliable Trump vote in the Senate and reassuring the base that nothing will interrupt the flow of judicial nominations and authoritarian cosplay. Darline leans on prayer, family, and three decades of behind-the-scenes work in the state, while the rest of the GOP field (Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman, plus perennial also-ran businessman Mark Lynch) gets to fight over who can lose most efficiently to the anointed sibling.
The winner of this special primary gets to face Democrat Annie Andrews, but the real contest here isn’t policy; it’s whether South Carolina Republicans want open competition or a dynastic relay race where you just pass the Senate seat down like grandma’s silver. Representative democracy, now with more bloodlines and fewer illusions.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
dnc discovers exciting new way to lose: gag your own staff over genocide
DNC leadership workshopping new messaging: “We hear your moral anguish about genocide, and we’re proud to announce stricter nondisclosure agreements.”
House Democrats are slowly discovering a radical new technology called "listening to your voters" as nearly half of them vote to block $3.3 billion in weapons and aid to Israel. This happens while a UN commission says genocide in Gaza is ongoing and that Israeli forces are deliberately targeting children, and while Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and genocide scholars all basically wave giant red "hey, this is genocide" flags. Naturally, party leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer respond by dusting off the same pro-Israel boilerplate from the bipartisan golden age of looking the other way.
Meanwhile, the DNC — allegedly a political party and not a shell corporation — is panicking over donors and cash flow, so leadership doubles down on the truly urgent issue: forcing staff to sign nondisclosure agreements. A finance co-chair helpfully explains this is "standard practice in the corporate world", which is exactly what you want to hear from the committee that’s supposed to defend democracy while the US bankrolls a state accused of genocide. Grassroots Democrats are overwhelmingly against more aid to Israel, but the leadership’s answer is to deep-six the issue inside the DNC and hope no one notices the bodies or the polling.
Pelosi, who once said that if the Capitol crumbled the one thing that would remain is America’s commitment to Israel, just voted to cut off the weapons — a weathervane so dramatic it might qualify as severe weather. Yet Jeffries, Schumer, and DNC chair Ken Martin still cling to the old donor-friendly script, then wonder why nobody’s inspired to show up for them. Their big 2026 strategy appears to be: ignore genocide, ignore your base, and slap NDAs on anyone who might talk about it. Bold move for a party that keeps insisting "democracy is on the ballot" while acting like a skittish hedge fund.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
trump blesses the house of graham
South Carolina leadership solemnly announcing that, tragically, the Graham Senate seat will stay in the family.
South Carolina politics has gone full monarchist speedrun: Lindsey Graham dies suddenly, and within days Gov. Henry McMaster appoints his sister Darline Graham to finish his term, while Donald Trump hops on Truth Social to demand she run for the full seat "for the Good of our Nation" and hands her his "complete and total" blessing like a medieval king handing out fiefdoms.
What might have been a genuinely moving story about a brother who adopted his sister after their parents died is now repurposed as campaign branding and dynastic justification, while every other ambitious Republican in the state watches the Graham-Trump-McMaster triangle quietly lock in the spoils. Voters will technically get a choice on August 11, but the party machinery and the ex-president have already made clear who the rightful heir to the Graham seat is.
Other GOP hopefuls like Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, Rep. Nancy Mace, and primary loser-turned-revived-candidate Mark Lynch can file their paperwork and pretend this is a normal competitive race. Meanwhile, South Carolina just became a handy case study in how a supposedly meritocratic democracy drifts toward hereditary politics, one "special election" and one Truth Social royal decree at a time.
#oligarchy#trumps-america
trump suggests we try monarchy for a few months
Trump helpfully explaining that the Senate is just a really fancy family rewards program.
Donald Trump, America’s leading experiment in what happens when you mix reality TV with nuclear codes, has recommended that South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appoint Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to finish Graham’s Senate term. He announced this on Truth Social, because of course he did, calling it a “fabulous tribute” – which is one way of describing the idea that U.S. Senate seats are now sentimental family heirlooms to be passed down like grandma’s china.
McMaster is holding a press conference to announce his pick, while his spokesperson pretends this isn’t just a public audition for who can flatter Trump the hardest. Sen. Tim Scott quickly endorsed the idea, praising Graham’s sister as the perfect choice because she understands Lindsey’s love of family, South Carolina, and country – a criteria list that conspicuously skips literally anything about qualifications for the job. The state’s political class is already circling the open seat like vultures at a donor retreat, but Trump has made it clear he’d really like to see a short-term test run of the “American political dynasties, but make it MAGA” model.
Under South Carolina law, whoever gets appointed will only hold the seat until January, when voters pick a permanent replacement in a special election. So this isn’t so much representation as a six-month cosplay of hereditary rule. Between Trump’s public pressure, the GOP’s reflexive eagerness to comply, and the casual assumption that a Senate seat is a family memento to be lovingly displayed in the Capitol, the line between a republic and a small-town fiefdom keeps getting blurrier.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
michigan democrats hold primary, donors choose senator
Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens smile for the cameras while $16 million in Super PAC cash quietly fills out the ballot behind them.
Michigan Democrats are being offered the usual exciting choice between a Medicare for All Muslim progressive who calls Israeli policy "genocide and apartheid" – Abdul El-Sayed – and an "establishment" candidate, Haley Stevens, whose main policy innovation is being backed by Chuck Schumer and at least $16m in Super PAC money, including AIPAC, which is furious that El-Sayed won’t recite the magic words about Israel’s "right to exist as a Jewish state." El-Sayed’s position is that Israel obviously exists and maybe the US shouldn’t bankroll war crimes instead of schools. Naturally, this has triggered the bipartisan Washington reflex: deploy the donor air force.
Mallory McMorrow has dropped out, taking with her the last pretense of a center-left, non–Super PAC–engineered option for the seat Gary Peters is vacating. Now it’s a clean test: can a candidate backed by Sanders and AOC survive a tidal wave of outside cash designed to teach Democrats that criticizing an allied government’s apartheid system is hazardous to one’s career prospects?
Meanwhile, in the background noise of late-stage American democracy: Congress is advancing a "Ratepayer Protection Act" for the data center boom that consumer advocates say won’t actually protect ratepayers, but does make Big Tech feel very seen; a Republican, Carlos Giménez, is begging the Trump White House not to deport 350,000 Haitians into chaos after the Supreme Court blessed the TPS cut-off; and The Atlantic has kindly re-upped JD Vance’s 10-year-old essay calling Trump "cultural heroin" so everyone can fully appreciate how completely he sold out to become vice president. It’s a helpful reminder that in this system, principles are mostly what you trade in for a shot at power and a bigger Super PAC.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
trump cuts taxes for billionaires, discovers shockingly they still don’t pay any
A billionaire nervously clutching his fifth superyacht as someone whispers the horrifying phrase: "restore the estate tax to 2000 levels."
America’s billionaire class is doing great, thanks for asking. While normal people get audited for mis-typing a W-2, Elon Musk and his fellow AI lottery winners are sitting on trillion‑dollar fortunes that barely brush the tax system. The top 1% now pays over eight percentage points less in taxes than they did around 2000, largely because both parties – with Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as the crown jewel – punched so many holes in the code you could use it as a colander. Preferential rates for capital gains, pass‑through games, estate tax "reforms" that turned it into a rumor – it’s not a system, it’s a concierge service for oligarchs.
Instead of a flashy new wealth tax, the article notes we could just stop letting rich people rewrite the rules. Restore the estate tax to something resembling reality, end the step‑up in basis that lets dynasties pass on untaxed gains forever, tax capital gains like actual income, push the corporate rate back up from Trump’s 21% corporate love letter, and maybe, wild thought, actually collect what’s already owed. The IRS estimates that closing the "tax gap" could raise $7.5 trillion in a decade – money that could fund a functional safety net, aging population, and an AI future where humans still eat. Naturally, this all runs into a Republican Party whose core identity is screaming that billionaires are "overburdened" while the state is deliberately starved of the funds it needs to function. It’s not a bug; it’s the business model.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting#money
trump loses, oligarchy wins: georgia edition
Rick Jackson, carefully posing as a humble outsider after spending $100 million to prove he’s just like the little people, only with his own TV station for six months.
Republican voters in Georgia have bravely stood up to Donald Trump’s influence by rejecting his endorsed fake elector Burt Jones and instead rallying behind Rick Jackson, a billionaire who spent over $100 million to convince them he’s the Trumpiest non-Trump on the ballot. Democracy is alive and well, provided you can light nine figures on fire to prove you’re an America First outsider who also happens to be rich enough to buy every ad slot between SEC football games.
Jackson plastered the airwaves with spots calling himself a “straight-talking, Trump-supporting self-made outsider,” while Jones ran on the more traditional platform of having literally tried to help overturn the 2020 election as part of the alternate elector scheme. Trump blessed Jones as a “fanatic” for election fraud claims, Brian Kemp showed up late with an endorsement like a dad at a recital, and still the base chose the guy who acts like Trump over the guy who helped him undermine the vote.
Helping move this inspiring tale of grassroots billionairedom along: Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, who vouched that Jackson is so rich he doesn’t even have to do this, which has somehow become a moral credential in Republican politics instead of a blazing red oligarchy siren. Don Jr. chimed in online to declare that either way it was a win for MAGA, which is true in the sense that whether Georgia ends up with a democracy-skeptical fake elector or a mega-rich Trump cosplayer as governor, the GOP has firmly established that the choices are now: authoritarian, or authoritarian with better ad buys.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
trump’s doj greenlights the ellison-state media merger
Trump’s DOJ antitrust team, moments after deciding that handing a sprawling media empire to a Trump-aligned billionaire family is totally fine for competition, democracy, and their future consulting gigs.
Trump’s Department of Justice has peered into the soul of a $111bn merger that could fuse Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery into one mega-content death star and concluded—after bravely reading two million documents—that letting a Trump-friendly billionaire clan control CBS, CNN, HBO, and half of Hollywood is absolutely no problem for "competition" or "consumers". The antitrust division, apparently now rebranded as the Trust Us, They’re With Trump division, insists this will not harm streaming, TV, or film markets. Just your ability to find a news outlet that doesn’t treat the president like a sun god with golf clubs.
Regulators in the UK and EU are at least pretending to care, poking around both the competition issues and the delightful detail that three Gulf sovereign wealth funds are chipping in $24bn to help underwrite America’s new consolidated infotainment ministry. Meanwhile, Australia already shrugged it through, presumably on the legal theory of "eh, it’s just movies". Back home, state attorneys general—led by California’s Rob Bonta—are eyeing a lawsuit, because someone has to play the role of "person vaguely concerned about democracy" in this script.
Inside the soon-to-be-conjoined beast, CBS News and CNN journalists are understandably worried that "$6bn in synergies" is corporate-speak for "good luck with your severance". They’re also a bit nervous about what happens to CNN when David Ellison, son of Trump pal Larry Ellison, starts calling the editorial shots. David swears CNN’s independence will be protected, which is why there’s already speculation that Bari Weiss—currently busy turning CBS News into a Substack with better cameras—could be dropped into the top job. Nothing says fearless journalism like putting a Trump-aligned billionaire heir and an ideologically convenient editor in charge of one of the last big cable news brands.
Critics like Craig Aaron of Free Press are spelling out the obvious: the merger centralizes obscene media power, threatens jobs, slants the news, and "endangers our democracy"—a phrase that, under Trump, has become less warning and more mission statement. Elizabeth Warren calls it what it looks like: corruption and influence-peddling dressed up as a routine antitrust review. The DOJ calls it a "rigorous eight-month investigation"; everyone else recognizes it as the latest episode of State Media: The Billionaire Edition, brought to you by the Trump administration and its ever-expanding circle of very lucky friends.
#oligarchy#corruption
elon becomes a trillionaire, america becomes his index fund
Elon Musk, humble trillionaire, pausing briefly between buying low Earth orbit and your retirement account.
Elon Musk just IPO’d SpaceX, became the world’s first trillionaire, and turned the stock market into a compulsory Musk fan club. The company went public at around 100x revenue despite being consistently unprofitable, but who needs profits when you have vibes, a cult, and a mission to "extend the light of consciousness" while extending the size of one bank account in particular? A big chunk of SpaceX’s "value" comes from a deal Musk literally made with himself between SpaceX and xAI, because why let arms-length transactions get in the way of some quality self-dealing.
The fun doesn’t stop with the magic accounting tricks. Trump-recommended FCC chair Brendan Carr has been busy serving as Musk’s in-house state regulator, greenlighting Starlink’s march to controlling about two-thirds of all active satellites while opening an investigation into rival EchoStar right after Musk complained. As a bonus authoritarian party favor, Carr also threatened to yank NBC and ABC broadcast licenses for being insufficiently worshipful of Trump. Regulatory capture, crony capitalism, and soft-censorship of the press — truly the Founders’ vision.
Meanwhile, Musk structured SpaceX so that every one of his shares has 10x the voting power of the peasants’, ensuring total, unaccountable control while the board of directors cosplays corporate governance. Index providers then obligingly rewrote their rules with a "fast entry" lane so SpaceX gets shoved into major indices almost immediately, automatically vacuuming up Americans’ retirement savings and university endowments whether anyone wants SpaceX or not. Insiders get early rights to dump their shares once the forced-buying sugar high kicks in, leaving everyday investors to hold the bag when reality eventually checks in.
So Musk walks away a trillionaire, Trump’s regulator buddy uses government power to clear the skies and intimidate the press, and millions of Americans become involuntary venture capitalists for a one-man space empire. The old rules of capitalism may be dead, but the new ones — oligarch worship, regulatory muscle, and mass wealth transfer to the already absurdly rich — are working just fine for the guys writing them.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting
trump admin discovers free speech, coincidentally for u.s. tech profits
Trump officials staring solemnly at a chart labeled "child safety" that’s just Meta’s quarterly earnings upside down.
The Trump White House has discovered a deep, heartfelt commitment to child safety online — specifically, the safety of Mark Zuckerberg’s revenue streams. After the UK floated a social media ban for under-16s, the U.S. embassy in London rushed out a warning against "one-size-fits-all" rules and "blunt regulatory instruments," which is a very elegant way of saying: please don’t mess with our ad-targeting pipeline, thanks.
Liz Kendall and No 10 responded with the diplomatic equivalent of lol, no, saying they’ll press ahead with restrictions next week, including an under-16 ban, limits on talking to strangers in gaming, and maybe even curbs on AI chatbots. Meanwhile, the Trump administration nobly suggests that instead of actual regulation, parents should be given "robust tools" and platforms should just promise to be healthy and safe — because nothing screams effective oversight like asking Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat to pinky-swear they’ll behave.
Across the Atlantic, JD Vance is accusing the UK of putting free speech "in retreat" while Republicans brand the Online Safety Act as an "online censorship law" — which, coming from the party that wants to ban books and criminalize teachers, is a bold branding exercise. The White House frets that the UK and EU are unfairly targeting American tech firms, as Meta simultaneously sues the UK regulator over fines and fees, because if there’s one universal constant, it’s U.S. corporations insisting that any law applying to them is an outrageous violation of human rights.
So Britain hurtles toward rushed, litigation-bait regulations; Trump’s team runs interference for Silicon Valley under the holy banner of the First Amendment; and teenagers remain the lab rats in a transatlantic experiment where governments and tech giants argue over who gets to exploit them most efficiently. Democracy, but make it ad-supported.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting
department of government efficiency creates 600,000% more death
Elon Musk explains that government is too bloated, shortly before helping kill USAID and hundreds of thousands of poor people in the name of ‘efficiency’.
Elon Musk is about to become the world’s first trillionaire, because when you pour $290m into Donald Trump and the GOP, the universe apparently rewards you with a personal printing press. In return for his campaign cash, Musk got cabinet-room access, a seat on state visits to China and Saudi Arabia, and a series of government deals so lucrative his net worth jumped more than $500bn in under two years. Late-stage capitalism speedrun: complete.
The highlight of this little civics lesson is Musk’s stint running the "Department of Government Efficiency" – DOGE, because of course it is – where he fired tens of thousands of federal workers, hacked away at foreign aid, and helped dismantle USAID so thoroughly that Harvard public health researchers estimate 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children, have died from disease and malnutrition. That’s not a policy disagreement; that’s Elon-Musk-made death in spreadsheet form.
All of this is made possible by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United gift basket to billionaires, which turned elections into luxury hobbies for about 300 people who really hate taxes, regulations, and the idea that anyone else should have healthcare. Musk is just the loudest symptom of a system where one guy can buy an election as casually as you buy lunch, then use the White House as his personal venture fund. Call it what it is: oligarchy with a flamethrower, and Trump is happily holding the gas can.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
silicon valley builds a new religion, forgets to include humans
Artist’s impression of what happens when guys who can’t run a social network decide to redesign the species and the cosmos, no public comment period required.
Silicon Valley has looked at the crumbling state of American democracy and concluded the real problem is that regular humans are still involved. Sam Altman is out here calmly workshopping a future where homo sapiens "design our own descendants" and then hand the planet (and the galaxy) over to our machine betters, while Elon Musk – the guy Trump literally let take a buzzsaw to the federal bureaucracy – helpfully explains that humanity is just a "biological bootloader" for digital superintelligence. You thought you were a citizen; turns out you're BIOS.
The piece lays out how this isn't just some nerdy late-night Reddit thread, it's a full-blown civil religion for billionaires: a techno-mystical faith where consciousness gets uploaded, meat bodies are for peasants, and AI overlords spread across the cosmos while the rest of us apparently get to enjoy being structurally unemployed in a gig economy run by venture-backed HAL 9000s. The "God-shaped hole" in Silicon Valley gets filled with a religion that conveniently declares its high priests – Musk, Altman, Page & friends – the rightful architects of the next species, answerable to no one, least of all voters.
Rather than build tools that serve actual human needs, this worldview justifies pouring billions into "transhuman" fantasies while treating labor, social stability, and basic rights as quaint legacy systems to be deprecated in the next software update. Ford tried to re-engineer society with a rubber plantation; these guys want to re-engineer the definition of human, aided by a government happily outsourcing power to tech oligarchs. Democracy is struggling to regulate broadband, and the people effectively writing policy now think our constitutional role is to be compost for their cosmic data center.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
climate finance bro discovers oil money is also green
Mark Carney explains that climate risk is very serious as he ceremonially cuts the ribbon on another taxpayer-subsidized pipeline to nowhere.
Mark Carney, former central banker, UN climate envoy, Davos heart-throb and author of Very Serious Climate Words™, is now prime minister of Canada and has decided the best way to confront an "existential threat" is to, uh, set the climate plan on fire and throw a pipeline on top. Next to Donald Trump, he still looks like a responsible adult – which tells you more about Trump’s America than it does about Carney’s Canada.
After activists helped put him in power expecting a climate hawk, Carney’s first big move was to scrap the consumer carbon price and then systematically gut almost every meaningful mandate: methane rules weakened and delayed, a clean electricity standard pushed from 2035 to 2050 with new gas plants invited back in, the long-fought oil and gas emissions cap tossed, anti-greenwashing laws flagged for rollback, and zero-emission vehicle mandates kneecapped so hard EV sales cratered. It’s like watching someone take a carefully built climate Jenga tower and play it drunk, blindfolded, and sponsored by Suncor.
He’s also gone full petro-state cosplay: fast-tracking LNG terminals and pipelines, carving out deregulated "nation-building" zones, shoveling tax credits at carbon capture schemes that conveniently help frack more oil, and launching a so-called "sovereign wealth fund" that looks suspiciously like a public-money firehose for new fossil infrastructure. A windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies riding the Iran war to record profits? Absolutely not – can’t have the donors feeling pinched.
The climax came with a cozy deal with Alberta premier Danielle Smith – whose base includes a Trump-backed separatist movement – to clear the way for yet another bitumen pipeline while dramatically weakening Alberta’s industrial carbon price. The result: a carbon price that was supposed to hit $170/tonne by 2030 now limps to $130 by 2040, prompting even the mild-mannered Canadian Climate Institute to say net zero by 2050 is now fantasy. Carney’s defenders swear this is all 4D chess to keep Canada united; what it actually looks like is the familiar Trump-era formula: appease the loudest reactionaries, reward fossil oligarchs, and hope nobody notices the climate promises dissolving in a haze of PR and pipeline approvals.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump and the tech bros promise your job is totally fine, stop asking questions
Trump and the tech bros explain that losing your job to AI is actually a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to believe in trickle-down 2.0.
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel have formed a kind of billionaire barbershop quartet to sing you soothing lullabies about AI: don’t worry about your job, don’t worry about retirement, the government will just mail everyone "UNIVERSAL HIGH INCOME" checks and we’ll live in a frictionless techno-utopia where the only thing automated faster than your work is your dignity. Minor footnote: the CEOs actually building this stuff keep warning that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment toward 20%, but you’re supposed to ignore that and focus on the vibes.
While workers are busy trying to block new data centers from swallowing their towns, the Trump administration is over in the corner doing exactly what the billionaire class ordered. Donald Trump is enthusiastically greasing the skids for AI expansion, with top adviser Kevin Hassett insisting AI "isn’t costing anyone their jobs" as tech layoffs stack up like unread EULAs. The message from Mar-a-Lago to Menlo Park is clear: if AI turns millions of people into a permanent underclass, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Bernie Sanders, inconveniently for the oligarchs, keeps pointing out that maybe—just maybe—we shouldn’t let a handful of tech billionaires unilaterally redesign the economy, democracy, and the future of work while promising to get around to the safety net eventually. He’s calling for guardrails, worker protections, and a moratorium on data centers, which in Trumpworld is basically socialism plus treason. The people actually in power, however, are betting that if they repeat "AI will bring untold prosperity" enough times, you won’t notice that what’s really being automated is your bargaining power, your privacy, and your ability to say no.
So the emerging Trump-era AI policy is simple: billionaires get the profits, AI gets the control, and workers get a front-row seat to the great experiment in whether you can live on vibes, press releases, and a promise of future government checks that this administration has absolutely no intention of funding.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
crybully server farms demand civil rights
Artist’s impression of an AI datacenter bravely standing up to the real oppressors: zoning laws and water meters.
America still doesn’t have universal healthcare, but congratulations: your local AI datacenter may soon have more rights than you do. Arwa Mahdawi walks through how the AI gold rush is quietly turning into a massive public subsidy program for server farms that guzzle power, suck up water, belch pollution, and hand you the bill. Power prices on the biggest US grid jumped 76% in a quarter thanks to these things, and one Georgia facility helped itself to 30 million gallons of water before bothering to pay. Six percent of US and UK electricity is already going to datacenters; projections say that could hit 14% of US demand by 2030. But sure, tell me again how we can’t afford to decarbonize or lower people’s bills.
The punchline: instead of asking whether it’s sane to carpet the planet in Altman’s GPU sweatshops, the conversation is drifting toward whether datacenters are being discriminated against. Venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary is out here claiming protesters are just mysterious paid agents, because obviously no normal person could be upset about a giant humming water vampire next door. And the University of Michigan is threatening legal action because a township paused water and sewer hookups for its $1.2bn nuclear-weapons-and-AI complex, whining that the moratorium is “unlawfully discriminatory” toward data centers. We’ve already let corporations claim free speech, religious beliefs, and bespoke civil rights; now the next frontier is extending that protection racket to anonymous beige boxes full of servers. Corporate personhood was bad enough when the ‘persons’ weren’t also trying to drink the town dry.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting
ai cage match: musk vs altman vs breathable air
Elon Musk and Sam Altman, bravely battling each other to decide which billionaire gets to privatize your power grid and your data first.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman are locked in a courtroom slap-fight over who gets to be Supreme Lord of Predictive Text, and the press is dutifully live-blogging every billionaire tantrum. Musk claims he was tricked into funding a non-profit that dared to become a for-profit; OpenAI says he knew all along and is just trying to kneecap a rival. The stakes are allegedly "the future of AI" but somehow always resolve to "who gets the $150bn and the IPO."
The more interesting story is the one they’re trying to bury under their egos: a tiny cartel of AI companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, Musk’s xAI, Amazon, Microsoft—are racing to terraform the economy in their own image, vacuuming up data, capital, electricity, and political influence. They’re starving academia, siphoning money away from climate tech, and shoving resource-hungry data centers into communities that get the asthma while Silicon Valley gets the equity. It’s imperialism as a cloud service, and your lungs are the externality.
Outside the courtroom, people who don’t own private jets are starting to notice. Residents in places like New Mexico, Memphis, and Tucson are organizing against supercomputing monstrosities like OpenAI’s Stargate campus, Musk’s Colossus facility, and Amazon’s Project Blue—facilities that run on methane turbines and PR spin while politicians grin about "innovation." Locals are turning up at city halls in 114F heat just to demand breathable air and functioning water systems, while the AI barons pitch their projects as "the future of humanity" from air-conditioned boardrooms.
So yes, Musk vs Altman is a feud. It’s also a great magic trick: keep everyone watching the billionaire soap opera while the AI oligarchy quietly fuses itself with state power and public infrastructure. The only plot twist is that some of the extras—aka regular people—are starting to walk off set.
#oligarchy#imperialism
trump megadonors discover ‘economic uncertainty,’ somehow unrelated to trump
Artist’s rendering of economic uncertainty: a half-built warehouse owned by billionaires who just spent $80 million on Trump and suddenly can’t find the money for drywall.
Billionaire Trump superfans Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein are hitting pause on a shiny new 1-million-square-foot Uline distribution facility in Kenosha, Wisconsin, citing "current economic conditions" and extra space in their existing properties. The same folks who helped bankroll Trump’s return to power with nearly $80 million in 2024 PAC money now say the economy is too "unsettled" to build in a state that just happens to be a presidential battleground. Totally normal coincidence, do not question the timing.
This is the same Uline brain trust that thought it was "for fun" to poll their own employees on how they planned to vote in 2024, then acted shocked when workers viewed it as political pressure from the boss who spends eight-figure sums electing Republicans. One employee even resigned in protest in January 2026, which Elizabeth Uihlein dismissed as basically everyone else being stupid and humorless. Now the Kenosha city planning commission is politely granting them a 12-month permit extension so the billionaire donors can decide when it’s economically and politically convenient to keep their promise of local jobs.
So to recap: Trump’s favorite shipping magnates help underwrite his campaign, turn their company into a low-rent polling operation, and then park a major development in a swing state while muttering about the economy under the president they bought. Oligarchy isn’t just thriving—it’s asking the city for a conditional use permit extension.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting
