as Phillips O'Brien also points out, this plan has been in negotiation for a long time, probably since Trump took office. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

Trans health care "skeptics" lost a key ally—now they're having a meltdown www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion - The New York Times www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/t...

The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world. They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.

We wrote about the US ruling class taking the reins to manage its own decline. What do the Trumpist factions of capital want? Can that be squared with the interests of the MAGA base? Capable state managers could potentially thread the needle, but that's all gone. With @cedricdurand.bsky.social.

"Encouraging technology dependence and building a global panopticon fits with the goals and authoritarian dreams of billionaire technocrats who are abandoning democracy while funding their dystopic visions with tax dollars."

Angry judge roasts Biglaw lawyers for their "collective debacle" filing a brief where "~9 of the 27 legal citations in the 10-page brief were incorrect in some way" due to Generative AI digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcont... Lawyers will pay $31k for their sloppiness 🤖😵

If you want to see how upset the “New Right” is about the term “Woke Right,” see this lengthy post by the founder of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organizes NatCon. It’s wild. These screenshots are just the first part of the post. The post is looooong. 2/ x.com/yhazony/stat...

“Historical inevitability” in the techbro sense:

The attacks on 338 continue today, this time in Eastern Canada :-( Use the French version of the site, which is up and running: qc125.com/canada/distr...

Gore: Adorno was right

2/4. The entire practice of the Holocaust of the Jews involved zones of statelessness. It is easier to move people away from law than it is to remove law from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.

NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/04/15/n...

I wrote a piece for the Guardian's "big ideas" series on how techbros' failure to understand sci-fi novels is causing immense harm. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

1517 co-founder Michael Gibson is a former Thiel Foundation VP & Thiel Capital principal who now advises Pronomos Capital (backed by Thiel & Marc Andreessen). During Thiel’s October “Hereticon” event, Gibson co-led a talk titled “Manifest Destiny:Greenland, Cuba, & the New American Colony.” 1/

A fascinating issue around Yarvin and Musk is how figures feted as visionaries by the techbro Right don't seem to have considered the possibility that gunmen and covert ops types needed to enforce their vision might turn around and seize power from intellectuals and oligarchs like Yarvin and Musk

"The U.S. government is asking Canadian grant recipients questions that threaten their academic independence... including whether their work is connected to DEI, is an “environmental justice” project or whether it protects women from “gender ideology.” Globe and Mail March 20, 2025

1/ Peter Thiel-who backs the "network state" movement & the construction of charter cities—wrote a preface for "The Sovereign Individual," a book that states in part as follows:

So much of Musk's persona comes down to his fundamentally Fascist misunderstanding of Asimov's New Deal progressive vision of the future

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity. TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

Faustian bargain "Aerosol offset of GHG warming is a Faustian bargain ... providing present benefit without regard to future consequences. ... with the change of ship regulations, our first Faustian payment came due. Hansen et al 2025 doi.org/10.1080/0013... Fg2: Faustus contemplates bargain...

"What’s happening now is unethical, illegal, and unconstitutional. But the path forward is clear. Share what you know to be true. Support those documenting reality. Demand transparency. Call out lies."

"...most terrifying... Trump, the supposed strongman ... is oblivious. He has no grand ideological project beyond his own power. He does not understand ... that his own presidency is merely a vehicle for forces that see him as a useful, temporary battering ram against democracy." M. Brock

This has been my most ambitious piece of writing so far. It's long. And I will be working on a much shorter version for a wider audience. But I also don't want to lose sight of the deep truths lurking around us. So, here is The Plot Against America. www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-a...