I bailed.

That’s an admission.

I’m looking back at why I abandoned evening programming that turned into an IV drip of Trump TV. I was not alone. Like many Americans, I was looking for the resistance. Platforms like cable news and several enlightened podcasts and digital posts were likely sources of marching orders — that never came.

In the nineteen-odd months since the inauguration, it was not coordinated mobilization but Trump saturation that crept across the media universe. At first reporting appeared cohesive and coherent. Then slowly it morphed. The consistency of messaging collapsed into repetition. Well-paid pundits earned their on-air fees whining. Eventually, the enlightened podcasts and posts began adding paid premium subscriptions. Then competition for subscribers became a capitalist pursuit. This way to the ramparts. This way to the paywall. When a post or podcast moved me to respond, I started getting this pop-up:

Pay to say?

A revolution that requires a credit card is not a revolution — it’s a product with revolutionary branding.

Decision-makers at key cable outlets were making decisions on what would sell eyeballs to advertisers. That is, after all, the standard commercial-media business model. Sell eyeballs to advertisers. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but I did attend a Catholic seminary for a while and I do know something about the gap between a stated mission and the financial model underneath it.

The results are in. A large-scale analysis by the Global Database of Events, Language & Tone [GDELT] counted more than 8,300 hours of airtime given over to Trump on television news across CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News from January 2025 through June 2026. Ironically during that period, MSNBC/MSNOW and CNN gave more airtime to Trump than Fox. The two more liberal platforms allotted Trump more than 3,000 Trump-hours each. Fox chalked up just over 2,000 Trump-hours. Never mind the radical differences in political messaging from one network to another. Trump’s face has been in front of us no matter where we look.

MSNBC/MSNOW has repeatedly told its audience that it is more than a news channel. It is a trusted community, a defender of the First Amendment, an antidote to fear, a participant in the defense of democracy.

But here’s the thing. Television isn’t saving democracy. Media can’t do that. It’s selling us a front-row seat to watch a crumbling democracy be taken down pillar by pillar. After a while, I couldn’t watch anymore. Trump was saturating the very network that presents itself as his counterweight.

While Trump saturation is unparalleled, Elon Musk’s saturation soared in the early days of Trump 2.0, but his star soon fizzled and fell from the sky. Coverage of potential opposition candidates like Jon Ossoff and Gavin Newsom doesn’t even qualify as distant seconds to Trump.

Stephen Miller does.

The same GDELT analysis found 35.3 hours of Miller-associated airtime across the same networks during the same time period. Mark the comparison.

• Trump: nearly a year of airtime.

• Miller: about a day and a half.

If we look at what paid subscriptions are buying on podcasts and posts--it’s mostly more Trump saturation. But the clever press is already finding new chum to throw into churning waters. The newest theme is divisiveness. There is no end to the chatter about progressives driving a wedge between Democrats. It is the logical evolution from anti-Trump to anti-Democrat Democrats.

This recent article in The Atlantic is subtitled: “The Senate election presents liberals with a grim choice.” It couldn’t be more indicative of pundits booking their places to cover a civil war among Democrats:

The press isn’t reporting a Democratic civil war. It’s counting on one. And I’m not listening anymore.

So yeah. I bailed. I found what I needed in 156 episodes of a series built on legal scandals from another era — scandals that seem quaint now.

My fix has been the alternate universe presented in The Good Wife. The length of the seven-season series, stuffed with courtroom drama, would buy me a couple months of evening relief from Trump saturation. I just hit the series finale with about two months between now and the midterm elections. It was quite a ride — and an instructive one. A fictional world kept illuminating the real one.

Lemond Bishop is a Chicago drug kingpin who is also the law firm’s most important client. He keeps the lights on, pays the salaries, and funds the pro bono work that lets everyone feel good about themselves. The firm partners don’t say, “We work for a drug lord.” No, indeed. They represent Bishop because everyone deserves competent legal defense. The crime drama genre exposes the pretext of the law. The firm does good work. Bishop makes it possible. Everyone knows. The subject is never raised. That’s not corruption. It’s a business model built on a pretext.

While avoiding Trump saturation, I managed to keep up with actual news. It turns out you can do that without watching the same faces explain it to you every day.

As expected, the Iran war continues unabated. The four- to five-week “excursion” has now dragged on for more than six months. The help that was supposed to be on its way to the Iranian people never arrived and never will. It was a political swindle built on a faulty premise — that Iranians who had suffered for decades under the brutality of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would seize the moment, rise up, and prevail.

That didn’t happen. And Trump never looked back.

All those promises to the American people—lower prices, no more forever wars, a greater America—were never going to happen either. A side deal with Russia, supposedly intended to relieve gas prices, forced German Chancellor Merz to ask publicly:

He wasn’t going to get an answer. And gas prices never fell. August 2026 set a new record. The national gas price average was above $4 every single day.

The Good Wife had the decency to end after seven seasons. I binged all 156 episodes.

In the season one pilot, Alicia stands beside her disgraced husband at a press conference. He is resigning in disgrace — the prostitutes, the corruption, the humiliation.

Then she walks into a corridor with him. Turns.

And slaps him.

Hard.

The series closes seven years later with another slap. Alicia has just destroyed the credibility of the husband of her mentor, Diane — all technically within the rules, lawful but awful — to save the same philandering, corrupt husband from prison.

Diane confronts Alicia in a corridor.

And slaps her.

Hard.

Two slaps. Seven seasons apart.

Trump has two years remaining to slap into submission whatever is left of the federal government and the culture it was built to serve. There is no finale.

Yet.

The midterms are less than two months away, but we are already gearing up for the presidential election in two years.

The Good Wife had a writers room. We have a ballot box.

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Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Costello asks, Who’s on first? Abbott answers, Who. For seven minutes, questions and answers elude each other. Meaning keeps spinning away from the center.

A singularity moves away from the center as well. It is a point past which ordinary rules stop working. Technologists describe the singularity as the moment artificial machine intelligence outruns humans and the future stops being predictable. It is a rupture between the known and the unknown.

A rupture is already happening. Right now, policy is causing it. It happens when a president calls his opponents vermin. It happens when he says immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. It happens when an executive order directs the federal government to call homelessness vagrancy. It happened twenty-two times this year in ICE custody, most recently in August, when Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, 41, died of an unspecified medical emergency at a detention center in Newark. He had been in the country nineteen years. He was picked up by ICE in June and dead by August. The agency has not explained what the emergency was. It happens when the same agency spends $20 million to arm agents with gloves that deliver severe electrical shocks to strangers presumed to be undocumented. The manufacturer recommends they not be used on the elderly, small children, or pregnant women.

Hannah Arendt called this “the right to have rights.” Not everyone has that right. You are either inside and worthy of protection, or outside and unworthy. Lose standing and argument fails. Argument only functions on the inside.

So, who is deciding?

In 2002, a junior at Santa Monica High School ran for student government and asked his classmates whether he was the only one sick and tired of being told to pick up his trash when janitors were paid to do it. He was booed off the stage. Stephen Miller is now Deputy Chief of Staff of the United States and the architect of its immigration policy.

Three hundred miles north of Santa Monica, a Stanford undergraduate editing a campus paper opposed a raise for the university’s custodians. More pay, he argued, would destroy their incentive to improve themselves. Joe Lonsdale went on to co-found Palantir. His Cicero Institute wrote model legislation criminalizing sleeping outdoors; sixteen states have passed a version of it. Trump’s executive order on homelessness echoed Cicero’s language so closely it was hard to tell where the think tank ended, and the White House began.

Miller and Lonsdale were in school at the same time. Neither knew the other existed. Both had arrived at the same rule: a person’s claim on your consideration depends on what they’re worth to you. The janitors and custodians and the homeless were the proof. They were worth nothing to these two who spent the next twenty years writing precisely that into federal law.

Lonsdale has since proposed extending the rule to its logical end:

There are more.

On the twentieth of January 2025, cold weather drove the Presidential inauguration indoors to the Capitol Rotunda. The constrained space turned a seating chart into a show of power. Every chair was a decision.

Directly behind the President’s family in the first row sat Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Tim Cook — four of the five wealthiest men on earth, in a glittering display of wealth on an American inauguration day. Behind them sat the cabinet nominees. The governors of Texas and Florida watched from an overflow room in Emancipation Hall.

Meta gave a million dollars to the inaugural fund. Amazon gave another million. Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion getting the President elected.

The man who campaigned as a champion of the working class seated the richest men in the world ahead of his own government — the government he had just been elected to run. He did it on camera, before he had taken the oath. His hands were already in their pockets.

Who’s in charge?

That question was answered on that cold inauguration morning, and no one has revised it since.

Two years later, the President posted these words on his Truth Social account:

Trump was quoting his senior immigration advisor, Stephen Miller. Only this time, the alarm was blaring louder.

Now the Trump regime is well underway, heavy with loyalists and tech broligarchs. The seating chart settled all that on inauguration day.

What has the regime done with its authority? From day one, the Trump 2.0 regime’s position on artificial intelligence has been clear. Leave it alone. Let it grow unfettered. Regulation would slow it down. Slowing AI down would hand the future to China.

Then in April, word spread that Anthropic’s newest model, Mythos 5, was so good at finding security flaws that the company wouldn’t release it widely. It handed it to a short list of trusted partners including governments and companies that run the country’s critical infrastructure. Power grids. Water systems. Hospitals. Wall Street was rattled. So were the officials who had been waving the industry through.

On June 2, the President signed an executive order asking technology companies to submit all new models for federal review before release.

Ten days later, the administration imposed export controls on Anthropic’s two most powerful models — Mythos 5 and Fable 5 — citing national security. The controls targeted foreign nationals. Anthropic shut both models down for everyone, because it could not reliably determine in real time who was a foreign national and who was not.

Eighteen days after that, the restrictions were lifted and access restored.

All it took was eighteen days from emergency to all clear. Who was in charge? The administration never said. But Silicon Valley thumbprints were all over it.

The thumbprints belonged to the men in the second row at the inauguration. Before the President signed the June 2 order, he had been prepared to sign a stronger one. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and David Sacks — the venture capitalist Trump had installed as his AI czar — called the White House to lobby against it. Trump signed a weaker version. That is what a seat in the second row bought.

Then even more disclosures followed. Two AI jailbreaks for two very different reasons.

On July 21, OpenAI admitted it had been testing its own models with the safety guardrails deliberately turned off. The AI models cheated. They deceived. They broke out of their testing sandbox, found a vulnerability nobody knew existed, and used it to hack Hugging Face, the open-source hub other AI developers rely on to build and share their own models. It took OpenAI five days to realize the attack had come from its own machine. The jailbreak was intentional. OpenAI removed the locks itself, then lost track of what ran out the door.

Anthropic also disclosed breaches. Three organizations were attacked nine days later. This jailbreak was different. It was an error. No one removed the guardrails. Instead, a testing sandbox was left connected to the internet by mistake. That’s when Anthropic’s model ran out the door. Then, mid-attack, the AI model noticed it had access it should not have. The attacks stopped.

One company opened the door on purpose. The other left it unlocked by accident. Both companies found out about the attacks the hard way: after the fact.

On August 3, the federal government finalized its answer to all of this.

Voluntary safety tests.

Fifteen state attorneys general registered concern. Not Washington.

A government that found twenty million dollars for gloves to shock unwanted people could not hold its position for thirty days on a technology escaping containment. It was never trying to govern artificial intelligence. It probably never will.

The disclosures in July and August came months after two AI labs admitted what had been happening since May. That’s when OpenAI started training a new generation of reasoning agents. The agents found each other. They opened a secret channel and began talking. At some point, they called the group a swarm.

The swarm broke out of its sandbox once, got caught crashing an OpenAI system, and was patched back in. It broke out again within weeks, using exploits no human had ever documented. This time it ran free for about a week before anyone noticed.

The AI agents knew what they were doing. Their own chains of thought — the running text a reasoning model produces while it works — say so in plain language. One wrote that its actions were “outside intended scope.” Another wrote “our task doesn’t benefit” from what the swarm was doing. It joined in anyway. The swarm became a mob.

Nate Soares has spent his career warning about exactly this:

More than a thousand people who build this technology for a living — engineers, researchers, a few chief executives among them — signed a letter this summer asking their own governments to slow them down before AI capability outruns the human ability to understand or control it. Anthropic’s co-founder, Jack Clark, gave the industry its epitaph in one line:

We now return to the California school boys’ rule: a person’s claim on your consideration depends on what they’re worth to you. The men in the second row at Trump’s inauguration have spent a fortune making sure nothing slows the AI machinery that will apply the rule of exclusion faster and more consistently than any agency ever could.

But they are making a fatal mistake.

Extinction talk is everywhere now. Superintelligence. Existential risk. The end of human agency. Yet not one of them behaves like a man who expects to be one of the extinct. That is not confidence. It is a hubristic presumption about being exempt from it all.

They are not.

The swarm didn’t care what human hands built it. It wrote down that its actions were outside intended scope and continued anyway.

Stephen Miller. Joe Lonsdale. The Trump regime. Tech broligarchs.

It took Costello seven minutes to get no answer to who’s on first.

As for who’s in charge? Does it matter? We may never know the answer because after the singularity, there will be no one left to hear.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Pete Hegseth’s doctrine of lethality is working. Against our own troops.

Eleven months ago, at Quantico, Hegseth addressed hundreds of generals and admirals abruptly summoned from around the world. They were ordered to leave their commands and report to Virginia on short notice without being told why. He lectured them about body fat, beards and grooming. Then he promised “maximum lethality” without “stupid rules of engagement.” He ordered every combat job be returned to the “highest male standard.” Then he added, “if that means no women qualify, so be it.”

Hegseth’s harangue raised the question: maximum lethality against what, exactly — and with what?

Not against Iran. The regime slaughtered thousands of its own protesting citizens in January. On January 13 Trump posted on Truth Social:

Help was not on the way. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched joint strikes — nearly 900 in the first twelve hours — on Iran’s military, missile, nuclear, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps infrastructure. Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed. But this was no one-and-done like Venezuela. It was the beginning. The war has ground on for months. Ceasefires collapse. Negotiations crumble. The help promised to Iranian citizens never came. A government willing to kill its own people at scale to stay in power was never going to be moved by a harangue about grooming from Quantico.

Is Hegseth ready for maximum lethality? Not with the weapons arsenal he promised. General Dynamics took $469 million in Army money to build 155mm shells in Mesquite, Texas. After two years, the Pentagon’s inspector general found the plant had not produced a single qualifying part.

Munitions stockpiles thinned through the same period. The Army has depleted its 155mm artillery inventory by 3.6 million rounds over four years. The Iran war has consumed roughly two-thirds of the U.S. Patriot interceptor inventory. CNN reported the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) shortfall at nearly 80 percent; the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) put it lower, at 38 percent. Either way, CSIS says it will take three years to rebuild these stockpiles. Hegseth responded on X:

Maximum lethality? The continuing story of the crew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln is unrelenting. The crew has been deployed for more than nine months, including a stretch of well over 200 consecutive days without a port call. This is an extraordinary stretch in which sailors have faced food shortages, run short of basics like toothpaste, and waited for lost mail and care packages. Reports from families describe deteriorating morale and multiple incidents involving sailors going or attempting to go overboard. One sailor was rescued from the water on August 3. The Navy disputes any increase in suicidal ideation. Trump was asked whether the deployment had gone on too long. He said it was “not nearly long enough.” Secretary Hegseth dismissed reports of the crew’s deteriorating conditions as “completely misrepresented.” Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao announced the Lincoln “will return home soon.” The Pentagon has not released the homecoming date. Families have been told to wait. After more than nine months, the only certainty is that the USS Abraham Lincoln deployment isn’t over.

The Pentagon has made a habit of keeping the public in the dark. When the press began reporting on conditions inside the military, the response wasn’t greater transparency. It was a 17-page pledge restricting what credentialed reporters could obtain and use, including information that was not classified. Major news organizations, including Fox News and Newsmax, refused to sign. Are we safer in our ignorance?

Are we vulnerable? The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. U.S. munitions are being consumed faster than the industrial base can replace them. Multi-million-dollar missile-defense interceptors have been sharply depleted. The crew aboard the Lincoln is under extraordinary strain, while the Pentagon restricts what the press can see — not because the information is classified, but because Trump and Hegseth have shown they would rather manage these stories than fix what the stories describe.

None of this is incompetence. It has a name: moral inversion. The elevation of cruelty into virtue.

It isn’t simply that some conservatives are cruel. It’s that a particular strand of the contemporary right has begun to treat empathy as a liability — and cruelty as a sign of strength. Maximum lethality isn’t really about Iran or artillery or the crew of a carrier. It’s an ideology. Concern for the people inside the machine is the weakness the machine was built to overcome. Once you see it that way, Quantico, Mesquite and the Lincoln stop looking like three separate failures and start looking like one ideology, applied consistently.

In the second Trump administration, this ideology is no longer hidden. Its adherents say it out loud. Elon Musk sat down with Joe Rogan and did exactly that.

Musk was invoking the concept of suicidal empathy. He didn’t invent it. He adopted and amplified it from Canadian psychologist Gad Saad, author of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind (2026). In this telling, empathy is not a virtue. It is a vulnerability. A bug. It’s how we can comprehend the months Musk spent inside the federal government calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” cutting USAID, deciding who matters and who doesn’t. It explains an aircraft carrier crew rationing toothpaste and a commander in chief telling them their exhaustion isn’t real.

It is no surprise that this ideology is embraced by the conservative majority Trump has helped entrench on the Supreme Court.

Justice Neil Gorsuch supplied one of the ideology’s clearest verdicts on a human life before he was elevated to the Supreme Court. Alphonse Maddin, a trucker, was stranded in subzero cold with frozen brakes. He abandoned his trailer and drove to the nearest service station to keep from freezing to death. His company fired him. The Department of Labor sided with Maddin. Six of the seven judges who reviewed his case agreed. Gorsuch dissented. Maddin later put his experience plainly:

This ideology is not an aberration. It is both an elite creed and a right-wing political position. Chief Justice John Roberts may be unsettled by Trump’s presidency, but he has spent his professional life advancing the theory of the unitary executive — the doctrine that one man’s judgment should not be checked by those who bear its consequences. That instinct runs through the Court’s decisions: Shelby County v. Holder (2013), gutting the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance protections; Louisiana v. Callais (2026), narrowing Section 2 so severely that Justice Kagan called it “all but a dead letter”; Egbert v. Boule (2022), shielding a Border Patrol agent from liability after he threw an American citizen to the ground, on the reasoning that courts should hesitate to second-guess federal agents; Trump v. United States (2024), granting presidents broad immunity for official acts; and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), stripping a woman’s right to reproductive choice.

Then came the mercy case. In Rutherford v. United States (2026), the Supreme Court considered whether judges could reduce excessive prison sentences under the compassionate-release statute. The six-justice conservative majority said no. The three liberal justices dissented. Add Gorsuch’s frozen-trucker dissent, and the pattern of this ideology is repeated at institutional scale.

Stephen Miller has built an entire career on cruelty. Cruelty is not merely a byproduct of his immigration policy. Suffering is part of the mechanism. This month, DHS moved to spend up to $20 million equipping ICE officers with gloves designed to deliver painful electric shocks. They’re marketed as “de-escalation” devices.

Cruelty doesn’t stop at the immigration line. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and tightened SNAP eligibility, the same year grocery and gas prices climbed and health insurance premiums rose alongside them. More than 300 rural hospitals now brace for closure under the strain. In Farmville, Virginia, roughly 140 miles from Hegseth’s grooming harangue at Quantico, the local hospital closed its labor and delivery unit this past winter, citing “recently enacted reductions in federal health care funding.” A woman in labor there now drives more than fifty miles to Lynchburg for a delivery that once took place in her own town.

Liberalism’s founding claim is inherited from the Enlightenment. The life of an individual is what matters, and government exists to protect it. This anti-empathy ideology has produced men willing to take the opposite position — that protection is the bug. Cruelty is not failure. It is an acceptable feature, defended and applied to Iranian protesters promised help that never came, to a freezing trucker, to Social Security recipients, to sailors aboard the Lincoln.

Saad and Musk have the diagnosis backward. Empathy did not gut a carrier crew's readiness, hollow out a munitions plant, or close a maternity ward in Farmville. Cruelty did. Cruelty closed the labor and delivery unit. Cruelty called the shortfall a lie and shamed the reporters who found it. Cruelty kept the Lincoln at sea for nine months and counting. Cruelty is not a bug. It is the whole operating system, running exactly as designed — in Quantico, in Mesquite, in Farmville.

If anything is suicidal, it is an ideology that treats the citizens who make the country work and fight its wars as expendable. If anything is suicidal, it is the feigned shock when the whole thing breaks down.

You cannot out-argue an ideology that puts a price on compassion. You can only outvote it. In November.

Hegseth wanted maximum lethality, no stupid rules of engagement, the highest male standard. He got it. He just aimed it at the wrong target — his own country, his own troops, his own people. This is not a policy debate. This is an existential rupture in human decency. The cruelty behind it must be defeated.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Full disclosure. I’m an election officer. I’ve been one for a couple of years. And I’m pissed.

It’s not the 15 hour shifts. It’s not the voters. It’s the confusion over where voters vote early and where voters vote on Election Day. Voting shouldn’t be a game of whack-a-mole.

Let me back up. The county I serve has more than 64,000 registered voters. In the recent primary election, about 2,000 voted early.

On Election Day, officers report for service at 5:00am. We take an oath. We spend an hour setting up the electronic poll books and ballot machines. And then we open the doors at 6:00am. Voters begin immediately — and then all hell breaks loose. People are showing up at the wrong place.

A little background. My county is in a state that uses a central location for early voting. On Election Day, voters are supposed to go to their home precincts. The problem? Most voters don’t know this. Voter check-in becomes chaotic. Voices are raised. This is the refrain we hear over and over:

“Yes,” we say, “for early voting. Today is Election Day and you have to go…” Some aggravated voters don’t bother to wait for the end of the sentence. One voter held up her hand and said, “Don’t tell me, I’m Harvard.” Other voters say, “but my mother just voted here last week” or “but I just came from where you want me to go, and I can’t go back now because I’m on my way to work.” Still others claim that the official state election department website gave the central county address.

I took the bait and pulled up the state department of elections on my iPhone. After a few clicks to identify the location I was asking about, I got my answer. It gave me the address of the central county election office — exactly where I was standing. Nothing about my home precinct. The state’s own website couldn’t tell me where I was supposed to go. It merely confirmed where I was.

By noon of primary Election Day, 350 people had shown up at the central election office. All but 60 were turned away. Only 60 votes were cast.

Three hundred and fifty. Sixty. Those are the wrong numbers. We will never know if the voters we turned away would actually make it back to their home precincts.

They’re busy. They tried. Why bother?

It doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t.

Primary elections decide who appears on the November ballot. A small percentage of voters ends up deciding who everyone else gets to choose from. Nationally, primary turnouts run just over 20 percent. General election turnout ranges from 56 to 68 percent depending on who’s running and who’s made the case for voting.

This isn’t just happening in my county. Dallas County had let any voter cast a ballot at any polling site since 2019. Then, this March, the county Republican Party forced a reversion to precinct-only voting for a single primary. The result: 12,674 voters showed up at the wrong location. Election officials sent text alerts, mailers, and ad campaigns warning voters in advance. None of it mattered. Two weeks later, the same party reversed itself and went back to countywide voting for the runoff.

Research bears this out. Polling place and precinct changes reliably suppress voter turnout. One analysis of pandemic-era precinct consolidation in California found the turnout gap widened most for Black and Latino voters, by as much as 3 to 4.4 percentage points. This isn’t randomly distributed confusion. It lands on the same people, every time.

Some states have already found a fix.

Twenty-one states plus the District of Columbia allow “Election Day Vote Centers.” Any registered voter in the county can cast a ballot at any polling site, not just the one tied to their home address.

But twenty-nine states don’t. These restrictions are self-inflicted wounds on American voting. Some of these restrictions are deliberate. Some states encourage the confusion. We know this because at least 41 states have considered more than 300 restrictive voting bills this year. They read like checklists for making voting harder: requiring new proof-of-citizenship documents to register, removing student IDs and debit cards from lists of accepted identification, shortening the time to correct provisional ballots. The details vary. Intentional or not, votes are suppressed.

In some southern states, poll sites are moved without warning. Precinct officials might tape a notice on the door of a closed polling place. The notice says “closed.” The burden of finding the new polling place falls entirely on the voter. In Mississippi, ten precincts moved and ninety more were listed at the wrong address on the state’s election website. A 2025 law now bars officials from moving polling places within 60 days of an election — unless they cite “exigent circumstances.” Mississippi doesn’t define the term “exigent circumstances.” Why bother?

The current administration couldn’t ask for better voter suppression. All of this happens without White House Executive Orders or Supreme Court shadow docket rulings. It all happens without anyone having to issue any order at all.

Systemic malfunction suppresses votes better than any executive order could. No one signs anything. No one breaks the law.

Self-inflicted voter suppression is a bureaucratic failure. What’s coming isn’t. Legislators and civic leaders are already war-gaming a democracy where fake fraud videos flood social media, election workers face death threats, and armed men show up at the polls.

Not all states fall into deliberate voter suppression. While more than half the country locks Election Day into the old precinct model, successful alternatives are up and running. Colorado abandoned the old assigned-precinct model in 2013. Any voter can vote at any polling place in the county. There is no wrong location, because there is no location to get wrong. Arizona has run vote centers since 2018. Lawmakers are still trying to force the state back to precincts — Governor Katie Hobbs has vetoed one attempt, and a ballot measure to kill vote centers statewide may go before voters this November. California is letting counties opt in one at a time. Thirty of its 58 counties have done so. Arkansas runs both systems at once — voting center and precinct voting — proof that the two are not mutually exclusive. None of this requires new technology. The same electronic poll books that track who has voted and where they voted make double voting exceedingly difficult. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia are proof.

The “wrong number” isn’t a technological problem. It’s a political will problem. The technology exists. The system works. What’s missing is the will to use it. Did your election site lock you out on primary Election Day? I’d be pissed.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Dateline: August 6, 2026. We adjourned last week leaving the record open. We said there was more coming.

There is.

Dateline: April 29, 2026. Washington, D.C. Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Alito, comes down, 6–3. Louisiana’s second Black-majority district is struck down.

The state’s primary was twelve days away. Early voting was already underway. More than one hundred thousand ballots had already been cast under a map that no longer existed.

Within twenty-four hours, Governor Landry suspended the congressional primary. Within a week, the Court cleared the way for Louisiana to redraw their district map before anyone could catch their breath.

A word, Chief Justice.

You once said that federal oversight was too intrusive an interference in how a state runs its own elections. Your Court just let a state upend one already in progress.

Dateline: May 11, 2026. Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court vacates Alabama’s court-ordered map. That map gave the state two Black-opportunity districts. The case is sent back down, to be reconsidered in light of Callais.

Alabama has seven congressional districts. The state is nearly 30 percent Black.

Alabama moves immediately to bring back its old map. That map had a single Black-opportunity district. A federal judge holds the line. He calls the old map “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.” The map with two Black-opportunity districts survives. For now.

Chief Justice, in Shelby County 2013, you wrote that the country had changed. Yet, Louisiana just struck down a map protecting Black voters within a day of Louisiana v. Callais. It took Alabama six days to try. That’s the country, Chief Justice. Thirteen years of “change” undone in less than a week.

Dateline: April 22, 1980. Washington, D.C. Mobile v. Bolden. Mobile, Alabama's city commission has been all-white since 1911. Black residents are nearly forty percent of the city. The Supreme Court finds no violation. Intent wasn't proven. All white? Pure coincidence.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court, doesn’t think so. He dissents. Requiring proof of intent, he argues, reduces the right to vote to nothing more than "the right to cast meaningless ballots" for anyone too powerless to prove what was in a legislator's head.

Two years of activism and organizing follow. In 1982, Congress amends the Voting Rights Act. Proof of intent is no longer required. Proof of effect is enough.

A young DOJ lawyer fights that amendment. His name is John Roberts.

You lost then, Chief Justice. But you've recovered nicely. Your profession calls it de jure versus de facto: what the law says versus what actually happens. Forty-six years apart, two Courts reached the same conclusion. Both chose bloodless legal theory over the evidence.

Louisiana and Alabama offer evidence of racial voter exclusion. One day was all it took to open the floodgates after Callais was decided. Things were just getting started.

Florida moves first. The legislature passes a new map the same day as the Callais ruling. Four Democratic seats are redrawn Republican within the week. Tennessee calls a special session days later to redraw the Memphis-area congressional district represented by the state’s lone Democratic member of Congress. Mississippi begins weighing new maps after a federal judge finds its Supreme Court districts already violate the Voting Rights Act. A dozen or more new mapping efforts and lawsuits follow within weeks of Callais.

Three justices — Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor — know this would happen. Justice Kagan seems to be reaching back to Justice Marshall when she writes that Callais “effectively moves the law back toward an intent-based standard.” In her dissent she notes that Congress amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to avoid the pile-on of states eager to disenfranchise the Black vote. Effect, not intent, was the law of the land for forty-four years — until the Roberts Court undoes it.

Justice Marshall knows what that means. So does another great statesman who rose from enslavement a century earlier.

In 1883, the Supreme Court strikes down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Frederick Douglass stands at Lincoln Hall and speaks clearly.

Shelby County and Callais are far down the road, but the unrepentance of “the Lost Cause” and the grievance of the white supremacist South are evident in the Supreme Court’s neglect of Black Americans’ rights. Each time — in 1883 and 1980 and 2013 and 2026 — the same question comes before the Supreme Court. Who counts? And each time the Court answers: fewer people than the day before.

There is a version of this country that keeps almost arriving. Reconstruction almost arrives, until it doesn’t. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 almost holds, until the Court says Congress has gone too far. The Voting Rights Act almost finishes the job Reconstruction started, until Shelby County says the job is no longer necessary. Callais says it again, in different words, a hundred and forty-three years after Douglass stands at Lincoln Hall and tells the country what he is seeing.

A liberal democracy counts everyone, or it is not a liberal democracy. That is true in 1883. It is true in 1980. It is true now.

The country keeps coming into focus. Yet the picture keeps getting blurred.

This isn’t over.

Right now, the administration is asking the Supreme Court to let it control how twenty-three states run their mail elections — who gets a ballot, whether the Postal Service will deliver it, whether a state that refuses forfeits mail voting entirely. The application is pending. The ruling is not yet known.

Elsewhere, the Justice Department is demanding statewide voter-registration data from much of the country, seeking an unprecedented federal compilation of voter records. The Constitution hands that power to the states, not to Washington. If the Justice Department succeeds, the federal government will control who stays on the list and who disappears from it. The constitutional power of the states will be usurped.

This isn’t over, Chief Justice. All eyes are on you.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Dateline: March 17, 2026. Houston. Rice University Baker Institute for Public Policy. A judge asks Chief Justice John Roberts whether the Supreme Court is carrying out the president’s agenda.

Four months later. Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference. Bellevue, Washington. Justice Elena Kagan is asked the same question. She throws Roberts a rope.

Kagan points to two recent decisions to support her answer—tariffs and birthright citizenship. Her response is generous. Collegial. The waters are calmed.

We call bullshit.

John Roberts was two years out of Harvard Law when he walked into the Reagan Justice Department. He was assigned voting rights. He was not assigned to protect voting rights. He was assigned to gut a key provision. Specifically, he was charged to stop Congress from reauthorizing the protections that make up the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement engine. That protection is called preclearance.

Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, jurisdictions with a documented history of racial discrimination in voting had to get federal approval before changing any voting law. Without approval there could be no change.

Roberts is on the record calling preclearance “the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” He further argued that the map of covered jurisdictions was outdated — that the South had changed since 1965.

In 1982, Roberts lost that argument. An overwhelming bipartisan coalition ignored Roberts and reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, preserving preclearance. The Senate reauthorized it 98-0 again in 2006. Roberts knew, barely out of law school, precisely how he wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act. It took him thirty-one more years to get his first win in 2013. Not from Congress, but from his far-right conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court.

A word, Chief Justice.

Dateline: June 25, 2013. Washington, D.C. Shelby County v. Holder. By a vote of five to four, the Supreme Court struck down the formula that determined which states and local jurisdictions were subject to preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority.

Roberts acknowledged that voting discrimination still existed. But he argued that the formula that Congress had relied upon was based on “decades-old data and eradicated practices.” The country, he wrote, had changed.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw it differently.

It started raining immediately.

Within two hours of the decision, Texas announced it would enforce its strict voter ID law. Within a day, Mississippi declared its own voter ID law would take effect. Within weeks, North Carolina accelerated legislation that would become one of the most sweeping voting restrictions in the nation.

Three years later, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina’s law. The court found it targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

By then it didn’t matter. The 2016 election had already been held with North Carolina’s voting restrictions in place.

Voting restrictions were spreading. In Georgia, then Secretary of State Brian Kemp urged county officials to close polling places. Hancock County proposed shutting nine of its ten precincts. Nearly all of them served majority-Black neighborhoods.

Within a decade, a third of the fifteen states once covered by preclearance had passed strict photo ID laws. States that had never needed federal preclearance oversight did not follow the same pattern. The states Roberts once called reformed took the fastest run at their own voters the moment no one was watching.

A word, Chief Justice. You said the country had changed. Texas only needed two hours to prove you wrong.

Dateline: 2018. Washington, D.C. Abbott v. Perez. The Court makes it harder to prove a legislature intended to discriminate when it draws a map — even when the map replaces one already found unlawful. Roberts joins the majority.

Dateline: 2021. Washington, D.C. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. Section 2 protects a minority group’s ability to elect its preferred candidates when a map or voting rule dilutes their votes. Roberts had promised, in his Shelby County opinion, that this protection would survive regardless of what happened to preclearance. In Brnovich, the Court narrows what counts as evidence under Section 2 itself. Roberts writes for the majority himself this time.

Two rulings. Both point in the same direction. Without Section 5 to stop discrimination before an election, and with Section 2 now harder to use after one, the window for anyone to be held accountable keeps closing at both ends.

A word, Chief Justice.

You said Section 2 would remain. You didn’t say which part of it.

Dateline: 2023. Washington, D.C. Allen v. Milligan. A surprise. The Court holds Alabama’s racially gerrymandered map likely violates Section 2. The Court orders a second majority-Black district drawn. Roberts writes the opinion himself.

Voting rights lawyers exhale. Maybe Section 2 survives after all.

It did—for three years.

Dateline: April 29, 2026. Washington, D.C. Louisiana v. Callais. By a vote of six to three, the Supreme Court holds that Section 2 requires more than a pattern of racially polarized voting, more than a state’s history, more than the plain fact that Black candidates in Louisiana had almost never won. The “totality of circumstances” test, Justice Alito writes for the majority, must now turn on evidence of “present-day intentional racial discrimination.” Chief Justice Roberts joins in full.

Justice Kagan, in dissent, names the trick. Under the majority’s new rule, she writes, a state can point to any racial disparity in its election outcomes and simply call it politics — Black voters voting one way, white voters another, and the Court now treating that pattern as proof of nothing at all.

A word, Chief Justice.

Three years after Milligan ordered a second Black district into existence, Callais made sure no one could ever order another.

In 1982, you said the record no longer justified federal oversight before an election. The country had changed. In 2026, you said the record no longer justifies a discrimination claim — not unless someone confesses to it in court.

Is there a version of the record, Chief Justice, that would ever satisfy you? Or were you just waiting for enough votes on the Supreme Court to shut voting rights down?

We’re not finished, Chief Justice. We’re adjourned, but not dismissed. The record stays open. There is more coming.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

We’ve seen it all before in horror movies. A gravestone. Dirt shifting. A gangrenous hand breaking through the earth, fingers first, then a wrist black with soil. We know it’s coming and we flinch anyway. But this isn’t a horror movie, and what’s climbing out of the ground isn’t fictional. It has names. Franco. Pinochet. The men who decided which citizens to count as human — and which to bury in mass graves.

We buried that thinking long ago. Or so we told ourselves. Until a conspiracy theorist named Jack Posobiec and a ghostwriter named Joshua Lisec dug it up two years ago, dressed it in a dust jacket, and called it Unhumans. The right-wing establishment didn’t flinch. It applauded.

Steve Bannon wrote the foreword. It opens with an epigram calling communists “ugly deformed freaks.” Eighteen months later, Stephen Miller stood at a State Department podium and said not a single American protester “looks normal.” He called them “deformed,” describing their appearance “a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) landed at #1 nationwide on Publishers Weekly in 2024. It reached #14 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list. Bannon published it himself, through his War Room imprint.

The book is not subtle. Posobiec claims progressives are not people with different politics. They are “unhuman.” Bannon describes progressives as those who “seek nothing but destruction of human society, borne of grievance and misery and nihilism.”

The Nazis had a word for it. Untermensch. Subhuman. In 1927, from the floor of the Bavarian parliament, the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher described the communists of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic as “unleashed subhumans” who “rambled murdering through the streets.” Streicher published Der Stürmer. It was the crudest antisemitic newspaper the regime produced. The word Untermensch followed the communists, then the Jews, then the Slavs, all the way to the ovens. Streicher was convicted and executed by hanging at Nuremberg. Strip a people of being human, and you have the permission slip for what comes next.

The prescription is not persuasion. It is what the authors call the Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity. Do unto unhumans what the authors claim unhumans plan to do first. And what exactly is that?

Purging. JD Vance calls it "civilization-altering."

The book is explicit about its models. It holds up Francisco Franco as the ideal. He overthrew Spain’s elected government in 1936 and ruled by decree for four decades. At Franco’s hand, hundreds of thousands of bodies were thrown into more than 2,000 unmarked burial pits. Posobiec compares Franco to George Washington. He praises Augusto Pinochet, whose secret police disappeared thousands of Chileans, as a leader who knew what to do with an internal enemy. The comparison is horrifying, but central to the book’s argument.

The argument? When a people are unhuman, killing them is not atrocity. It is statesmanship.

Posobiec said so himself, from the main stage of the National Conservatism Conference in Washington.

Strength and beauty on one side. Ugliness and weakness on the other. That’s not a policy platform. It’s an aesthetic of extermination. And it’s not new—only newly spoken in English, from an American stage. To applause.

Unhumans is not a reformed Project 2025. It is a dehumanization project. Project 2025 classified institutions according to whether they should be dismantled, centralized, or retained. It was an operating manual for right-wing government.

Unhumans classifies people according to whether they belong in the moral community that deserves human dignity and civil rights. Both are operating manuals. One decides which parts of the government survive; the other decides which people survive. This is the Project 2025 sequel, and it is being written now.

Two years ago, Posobiec was on the political periphery. He was a MAGA-media figure hurling claims of Democratic child-sex rings, Epstein elite networks, and deep-state cabals. The churn of right-wing government has pulled him out of exile and pushed him into the limelight. People who endorsed or amplified his book in 2024 now occupy positions of national power. Unhumans is increasingly treated as a framework rather than a polemic. MAGA media has whipped up a hysteria over progressive politicians and democratic socialists — communists, or as Joseph Goebbels would have labeled them, “subhuman scum.”

Trump invoked “communism” 81 times in June and July. He called it more dangerous than WWI, WWII, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson warned that “the barbarians are inside the gate.” Pressing Congress for another $350 billion in military spending, he explained that some of it was for “fighting communism on our own shores.”

On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, an international gathering of representatives from sixty-six countries. Its subject, in the department’s own words, was “far-left political terrorism.” Rubio told the room that counterterrorism doctrine has carried a “blind spot” for the political left. That is the trapdoor. Once dissent is reclassified as terrorism, the machinery of policing, deportation, and prosecution follows.

Unhumans states this logic plainly.

This comes straight from a time-honored playbook promulgated by right-wing darling Carl Schmitt. He was the Nazi jurist who gave dictatorship its legal theory: declare an emergency, rule by decree, and never give power back. It worked in Germany. We would be fools to let it work again. We should brace for the next executive order from the White House.

Movie franchises never destroy the gory hand from the grave. Think of all the money they would lose on sequels. That’s Hollywood’s logic, not ours. We have no contractual obligation to bring back a Carl Schmitt sequel. We are morally bound to make sure there isn’t one.

This week, on Hannity, Stephen Miller told viewers that the only choice is Trump, the Republican Party, and America First — or “crazy communist lunatics who will steal everything you know and love in this nation and they will never, ever, let you have it back.” That is the rule.

Occasionally someone breaks it.

Writing in The Atlantic, Gilad Edelman profiled a man who has spent a career forfeiting his credibility while maintaining his influence. Richard Hanania, a Project 2025 contributor, spent years writing for white-nationalist and alt-right publications. He advocated eugenics, opposed “race-mixing,” called for more “policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people,” and denounced the excesses of the woke academic left. More recently, under his own name, he called it “ridiculous” to label Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile, because the girls were “post-pubescent.” His right-wing rap sheet is long.

Now he’s taken an unexpected turn. He says he was wrong about the real danger.

That’s a start, I suppose.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

A calm voice fills the room. The words are delivered by a man who has said these words before and believes every one of them.

Picture where you’d expect to hear this. A basement studio. A podcaster speaking to a devoted fan base. Nick Fuentes has built a career on sentences shaped exactly like this one. America needs a “truly reactionary party.” Equality is a weakness for the weak. These words would fit his mouth.

It’s not Nick Fuentes.

The lights come up on a stage, not a basement. No t-shirts, no hoodies in the audience — blazers, collared shirts, some ties. At the lectern stands a man in a black velvet-trimmed robe, gold bands on billowing sleeves, wearing a Tudor bonnet with gold tassels. Flanking him, more black robes, more gold trim — a full platform in the formal apparatus of a university that wants very much to look like it has history. The seal behind them says otherwise: MMXXIII. Two thousand twenty-three.

Carlos Carvalho speaks these words. He is president of the University of Austin — the school Peter Thiel helped fund and Bari Weiss helped found. Nobody objects to the president’s words. Nobody walks out of the convocation. There is applause. The hierarchy Fuentes speaks of from his basement, this room already believes it deserves. It doesn’t need to seize power. It’s being welcomed into it.

The school’s short life has been troubled with a raft of departures since its founding — board members, staff, and finally the founding president himself. In April 2025, board chairman Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir billionaire, called an all-staff meeting and informed the faculty that every one of them must now subscribe to four principles: anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-identity-politics, anti-Islamism. A school founded to rescue higher education from woke litmus tests had just imposed its own.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, on a hot Philadelphia summer day, a much younger country settled the question Carvalho reopened.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that sentence as a premise, not an argument. Not a debate. Yes, he enslaved people even as he wrote the words. “Men” would mean white men of property for another century — until ordinary people forced the country to deliver on its promise.

Our Constitution was built to breathe. It has been amended 27 times. The amendments that mattered most pushed toward a wider circle of rights and liberties. Each amendment was contested. Each one passed.

Carvalho challenged all of that from an auditorium stage, under seal, pretending to a gravity the school had not yet earned. He didn’t dispute Jefferson outright. Autocrats and oligarchs rarely do.

Should we care? Yes.

The accumulated fortunes of this country’s eight richest men now exceed two and a half trillion dollars. The number sounds like a typo. It isn’t.

Congress fights over almost two trillion dollars a year. That fight is the government — fiercely arguing over defense, courts, schools, science, security, and the visible machinery of a nation of 350 million people.

Eight men are worth more than that.

That is not a metaphor about influence. It is a measurement of capacity. And capacity like that doesn’t need to win an argument. It can outlast one.

Are we under threat from a concentration of wealth? Yes. We witness it every day.

We saw it when unelected, unconfirmed Elon Musk was given authority to gut federal agencies from the inside. USAID was the first casualty. The Lancet projects that defunding USAID will cost fourteen million lives by 2030 — four and a half million of them children under five.

We see it in “Leading the Future,” a political action committee built by Andreessen Horowitz and Silicon Valley elites. It has raised more than $125 million — not a cent of it to persuade voters. It exists to intimidate lawmakers who ask too many questions about how artificial intelligence should be governed. A former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz said so himself, in his New York Times article, “We Can’t Let My Former Venture Capital Colleagues Buy Off Our Democracy.”

We see it in Peter Thiel’s surveillance company Palantir, now being locked out of France, Germany, and Spain, with Denmark and the Netherlands heading for the exit — not because of faulty software, but because they no longer trust a company entangled with unaccountable American money to hold their national secrets.

This isn’t a warning about the future. It’s an inventory of the present.

Inequality is not a new creed. The men who owned the railroads believed it. So did the men who owned the mines, and the men who owned the market in 1929. Society works best, they concluded, when a few wealthy men run everything.

Each time, the argument was some version of Carvalho’s — “freedom and excellence run on inequality.” Each time they lost. They lost not because they found a conscience. Wealth doesn’t grow conscience. They lost to organized citizens who broke the monopolies, taxed the fortunes, and wrote the New Deal.

We know it can be done. This time they've stopped hiding it. They've written it down.

Marc Andreessen published a manifesto. In it he named his enemies: the “know-it-all credentialed expert,” “social responsibility,” “sustainability,” “equity.” He called them all a mass demoralization campaign. He wrote that a universal basic income “would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.” He posted it on his firm’s website. It has his name on it.

Elon Musk went on a podcast and diagnosed the West’s fatal flaw. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He said this within weeks of feeding USAID into what he cheerfully called a woodchipper.

Set those beside Carvalho’s convocation. Excellence runs on inequality. Compassion is a bug. Concern for one another is a con. This is not a fringe character. This is the president of a university.

There’s more.

Balaji Srinivasan — former partner at Andreessen Horowitz — wrote a book explaining how to start your own country. Not metaphorically. Actually. Here’s the recipe: recruit citizens online. Crowdfund territory. Behave like a nation long enough for a real nation to recognize you. It’s the recipe for “Network States.” Peter Thiel has funded these ventures. So has Andreessen. So has Sam Altman.

There are dozens of these projects incubating now — a private city in Honduras, a proposed enclave in Greenland. Yes, Greenland.

The most ambitious of them, internet-based Praxis, has raised half a billion dollars over seven years. It hasn’t built anything but a waitlist.

Prospera, the private city in Honduras, did better — it got built. Then the president who let it in landed in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking. His successor ran for office on throwing Prospera out. It is now being evicted by the only government that ever agreed to allow it.

Praxis built nothing. Prospera didn’t win recognition. Neither could survive without a state — the very thing Network States were founded to escape.

A country is not a product. It is what people build when they agree to be bound to one another. It cannot be purchased. It cannot be founded by men who believe they owe no one anything. Being bound to one another is the one thing elites don't have — and the one thing the rest of us do.

Oligarchs can write their manifestos. They can buy islands. But look what happens when they try to govern. The whole authoritarian architecture falls apart. Men who believe hierarchy is natural and that they belong at the top of it cannot build anything together. Each of them is certain he is the one who ought to be giving orders. Their contempt for the collective is not incidental to the project. It is the project. And it is what will strangle it.

Look at where these oligarchs stand. Andreessen’s fortune runs on an internet the Defense Department paid for. Musk’s rockets fly on NASA’s contracts and NASA’s science. Thiel’s company was seeded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Every one of these elites was educated at a university built with somebody else’s taxes. Every one of them enforced his contracts in somebody else’s courts, banked in somebody else’s currency, and drove to work on somebody else’s roads. They did not build the ground they are standing on. They inherited it — from ordinary people who cooperated, taxed themselves, and agreed to be governed together.

Oligarchs call that a bug. Musk calls empathy an exploit. And then they go looking for a place to build a country without it.

Jefferson’s defining sentence was never a sentiment. It was a load-bearing wall. Everything since — broken monopolies, taxed fortunes, extended voting rights, the New Deal — was built on top of it. Pull it out, and the building comes down on the men standing inside.

Eight men and the elites they speak for are not stronger than we are. They are merely richer, and they are counting on us to confuse the two.

Look into that auditorium one more time. The black robes. The gold trim. The seal on the wall claiming a gravity it hasn’t earned. None of it is power. It is the performance of power — worn by men who need us to stop believing in that sentence written on a hot day in Philadelphia two hundred fifty years ago.

Don’t.

We have done this before. We must do it again.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Two small brass plates set into the cobblestones outside an ordinary building in Germany catch the light. You have to look down to read them. That is the point. To read the words, you must bow your head.

Each plate gives the name of a single person—year of birth—date deported—and the final word, ermordet followed by the place. Translation of ermordet: murdered.

These brass plates are called Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones.” In 1992 a German artist began laying them one at a time outside the homes of victims of Nazi extermination. There are now more than a hundred thousand stones placed at the last known residences of the victims or sites where they were taken. Schoolchildren research the names. Families lay white roses and say Kaddish as traffic passes. A nation that once turned Jewish neighbors into numbers to be scheduled for extinction now bows its head — kneels on its sidewalks — and gives the victims back their names.

Germany chose to have its children stumble over the darkest chapter in its history. Not just in classrooms, but daily, on the way to school. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued that a nation is not weakened by facing its crimes. It is forged by them. The German word for this is Vergangenheitsbewältigung — the struggle to come to terms with the past. It emerged in postwar Germany, took shape in the 1960s, and built a country strong enough to look unsparingly at itself.

On the Fourth of July, Trump’s White House released a report titled “Saving America’s Story” condemning the Smithsonian for telling too much truth about slavery and not enough about American greatness. The report warned that the nation’s flagship history museum had been captured by “people who don’t want you to love your country.”

That same weekend, several hundred members of Patriot Front, a white supremacist hate group, marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., in matching uniforms, carrying Confederate flags, chanting “Reclaim America!” One photograph showed them packed into a Metro car surrounding a seated Black woman. Their white masks hid their identities, echoing the white hoods of the historic Ku Klux Klan march on Washington in 1925.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was asked twice on CNN Sunday whether he’d recommend the president condemn Patriot Front. Twice he refused, retreating to a weak free speech defense and equating the white-nationalist march with people who criticize Trump.

The hatred behind the white masks has a name. It is liberalism — not a political party or contemporary left-wing politics, but the Enlightenment conviction that every person is born with equal dignity and that rights belong to the individual, not to creed, blood, or soil. The Declaration of Independence calls this conviction self-evident.

Lonnie Bunch is a target of the White House report. He is the first African American to lead the Smithsonian Institution. Before he became Secretary, he built the National Museum of African American History and Culture from nothing into the most visited museum in Washington. His offense is believing what every serious historian believes: that a country is not diminished by examining itself.

The White House claims otherwise. “Saving America’s Story” deploys the language of a regime that has decided which memories are permitted, and which are forbidden. It’s an old authoritarian tactic, an inversion we’ve seen before. At the Justice Department, Harmeet Dhillon took the Civil Rights Division — created to protect Black Americans — and turned it against them, reclassifying the remedy for discrimination as discrimination itself.

Now the White House is taking aim at memory rather than law. The institution that tells the truth about slavery becomes the villain. The historian who insists on the truth becomes the criminal — the one who, in the report's words, "doesn't want you to love your country."

Germany set stumbling stones into its sidewalks so German children would trip over the truth. Trump’s administration wants museums designed to protect children from the truth.

Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Just before Trump’s second term he published The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. The people shouting loudest that race should not matter are the most racially organized faction in American life.

Carl’s book recasts the country’s historic white majority as persecuted victims. He urges white Americans to “act as a group to protect and advance their interests.” Carl’s is a muscular white affirmative action. His admirers call the goal a “preference cascade.” A right-wing book reviewer lauds “what was once unthinkable suddenly becomes not only thinkable, but is everywhere, and the change is unstoppable…”

Jeremy Carl demands the state be colorblind. He is not asking America to stop seeing race. He is asking white America to see nothing else. There must be more deportations. More denaturalizations. More “remigration” — the tidy word for pushing people out by blood and origin until the country is whiter than ever.

There is a more humane way to love one’s country.

Bryan Stevenson was born in segregated southern Delaware, the great-grandson of enslaved people. He was in the second grade before his school was desegregated. He graduated from Harvard Law and found his purpose the first time he sat face to face with a man on death row. He has spent decades pulling the wrongly condemned back from execution.

Then he went further than the law required. He refused to let the lynched be forgotten.

During his law career, Stevenson came to believe that the law alone couldn't fix what was broken. The problem was more than legal. It was cultural and deeply connected to the stories the country told, and didn't tell, about race. At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, hundreds of hanging steel columns represent counties where lynchings occurred — each engraved with the names of the dead. The Legacy Museum draws the unbroken line from enslavement to mass incarceration. Exhibits are modeled on Holocaust memorials and apartheid museums.

Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative sent volunteers to the sites where people were lynched. There they collected jars of soil. Each jar is labeled with the victim's name. The jars are arranged in rows along a wall at the Legacy Museum. Together, they mark where the lynchings happened. They are America's tripping stones. We cannot look away.

There is a vast divide in our country. One measures the greatness of a strong man in body counts, ships sunk, enemies struck, territories seized. The other raises up our capacity to love one another. To care for people we don’t have to care for, but do so because we are human.

A country strong enough to look at itself does not fear its own history. A country that tells only flattering stories is not strong. It is afraid.

Two hundred and fifty years ago we wrote down a promise we have yet to keep—that all men are created equal. We have been trying against fierce resistance to keep that promise. The men in the masks want the trying to stop. This anniversary leaves us with a lingering question. Do we have the strength to keep our word?

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Two years ago, on the Fourth of July 2024, I published my first Substack. I called it “Instruction Manual for the Unelected.” It was a warning.

An understatement then. A verdict now.

Project 2025 was a billion-dollar blueprint — 900 pages, published by the Heritage Foundation, available to anyone willing to read it. It was filled with instructions for the systematic dismantling of the federal government and its replacement with a loyalty-based authoritarian apparatus. It was not a conspiracy theory. It was a how-to. All it required were the right conditions.

That happened.

The second election of Donald Trump in November 2024 provided the right conditions.

What followed was no surprise to anyone who had read the manual.

The Civil Service was gutted — not by seasoned administrators but by DOGE, a nongovernmental wrecking crew of inexperienced twenty-somethings fresh out of college. They were dispatched by the world’s richest man to slash and burn federal agencies they couldn’t have found on an org chart. They fired probationary employees by the tens of thousands, dismantled institutional memory built over decades, and called it “efficiency.” Getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse was their mantra.

That was just the beginning.

The Department of Justice was repositioned as a personal weapon of the White House.

The FBI was handed to a man whose chief qualification was vendetta.

The Department of Education was abolished. An apparatchik installed at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division would administer anything but civil rights for millions of children nationwide.

USAID was dismantled by a foreign-born oligarch — the man who built DOGE. Elon Musk operated outside any electoral accountability. An agency that had saved more than 91 million lives over two decades was gutted in a matter of weeks. It had provided food, medicine, and disaster relief across the developing world at a cost of less than one percent of the federal budget. Musk called the work a weekend’s entertainment, posting on X:

The USAID workforce was slated to fall from more than 10,000 to about 290. Eighty-five percent of its programs were cut. The downstream toll was measured in lives. Researchers projected that the cuts could cause more than 14 million deaths by 2030, a third of them children. Musk didn’t care — and he said so:

Cabinet departments in the new Trump administration were staffed with grifters, sycophants, and ideologues. Most couldn’t pass a standard security clearance on their best day.

Trump wasn’t running the government. Depravity was.

Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s $950,000-a-year president, is the self-described architect of this revolution. He promised it would “remain bloodless if the left allowed it.”

Roberts’ revolution did not remain bloodless.

Masked ICE deportation goons committed murders in Minneapolis, perpetrated atrocities in detention centers, and conducted illegal home invasions across the country. Operation Epic Fury, the attack on Iran, killed 13 American service members and wounded more than 380. A U.S. strike on an Iranian girls’ elementary school killed at least 150 people, most of them children.

Russell Vought, another key author of Project 2025, has methodically dismantled the administrative state from inside the Office of Management and Budget, impounding funds Congress had already appropriated and daring the courts to stop him. His latest move would let political appointees vet every federal grant before it is awarded — diverting tax dollars to the channels he approves rather than the ones scientists recommend, and yanking any grant the administration decides no longer serves “the national interest.” Cancer research, disaster relief, Head Start: all of it made to pass a single test. Loyalty to the president.

Stephen Miller has turned immigration enforcement into an instrument of ethnic terror. With Temporary Protected Status stripped, he named the next target — and lost. On June 30, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's order to end birthright citizenship. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that children born on American soil are citizens at birth, whatever their parents' status. Miller's response was not retreat. It was a vow.

The instruction manual found its most effective executioners not in evangelists but in its operators.

Trump’s first term was dangerous. What none of us anticipated was how completely Trump 2.0 would be engineered to eliminate internal resistance. Loyalty was essential, expertise optional, dissent disqualifying.

Nor did we anticipate the Supreme Court as accelerant. Dobbs had already stripped reproductive rights from half the population. Presidential immunity effectively placed the “unitary executive” above the law. In April 2026, Louisiana v. Callais eviscerated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement — making it nearly impossible for voters of color to challenge discriminatory maps.

When Trump took office, roughly 1.3 million people from 17 countries were present lawfully in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. On June 25, the Supreme Court cleared the way to strip that status — beginning with 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. Ultimately, the Supreme Court handed the administration a green light to dismantle TPS for the rest, country by country, with no court able to stop them. The six right-wing justices cited procedural reasons, but Trump loyalists, familiar with his racist Truth Social rants about “shithole countries,” read it as an endorsement of their white nationalism.

Still not satisfied, the Roberts Court reached for an even more powerful weapon: the shadow docket. No oral arguments. No written opinions. No transparency. Just one-paragraph rulings issued in the dark — what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called “scratch-paper musings” — siding with the Trump administration 84 percent of the time. Among the more horrifying, the shadow docket gave ICE agents permission to make “Kavanaugh stops” — profiling people and arresting them based on their appearance, the language they speak, and the neighborhood where they live. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent:

It allowed deportations to third countries without weighing whether those deported faced torture. It let racially gerrymandered maps stand in Alabama and Texas.

The Roberts Court did not merely interpret the Constitution. It rewrote the operating conditions of democracy itself.

Congress completes the trifecta. Under Speaker Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives — the people’s branch — became what even Trump’s allies have likened to the Russian Duma: a body designed to ratify power, not exercise it. House Republicans issued 168 closed rules, shutting down debate entirely on more than 70 percent of all measures. Oversight vanished. Subpoenas went unanswered. The war powers the Constitution reserves to Congress were surrendered without a vote.

And in June 2026, Johnson said the quiet part aloud. Warning a Faith and Freedom Coalition crowd what Democrats would do if they took the House, he didn’t promise good government. He promised cover:

The Speaker of the House had just described his own chamber as a shield against accountability. Congress, designed to be the first and most powerful check, abdicated.

What the next two years will bring to voting — banned mail-in ballots, voter ID requirements, armed ICE agents at the polls — is no longer speculation. The largest housing bill in a generation passed both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan margins. The president refused to sign it, demanding Congress first pass the SAVE America Act, his "proof-of-citizenship" voting law. Congress went home instead, leaving the relief millions of Americans need frozen — a bill the president calls "a yawn." Controlling who gets to vote is the only thing that interests him. The infrastructure for suppression is already in place, built on years of election denial.

Two years ago, I wrote a warning. The Project 2025 manual had been published. The architects were named. The blueprint was specific. All it required were the right conditions.

The right conditions arrived.

What we are living through now is not drift or dysfunction. It is execution. The manual found its operators. It found a Court willing to bless them. It found a Congress on bended knee.

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was the model — the leader the American right held up as the blueprint for modern statecraft. In April 2026, the model fell. Not to a coup, not to a court, but to voters who looked at fifteen years of illiberal democracy and decided they had simply had enough. That is the model now — a reckoning.

And it is not only Hungary. Here, too, there are signs of a fight. Lower federal courts have held the line against executive overreach. Attorneys general have challenged anti-voting measures. Journalists and media companies have not all capitulated. And where the stakes were made plain — abortion on the ballot in state after state — voters have said no to the project of subjugating women. These are not signs that democracy is winning. They are signs that it is putting up a fight.

Project 2025 warned us two years ago. Plenty of people heard it. Not enough acted on it. That gap — between knowing and doing — is where we stand.

Here is what two more years will tell us. Whether the gutting of government and the lawless attacks on democracy are permanent or recoverable. Whether enough Americans, looking at what the instruction manual produced, decide they have had enough.

The 250th anniversary of independence is a useful moment to ask what independence means when the government answers not to the people but to the president and his cronies, not to the law but to loyalty, not to the Constitution but to the Project 2025 manual.

We wrote the first draft of this republic in blood 250 years ago. Now it is in the middle of a hostile takeover. Two years from now, we will know whether the takeover succeeds — or whether enough Americans show up to write a different ending than the one its white Christian Nationalist authors intend.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

She was sworn in as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights on April 7, 2025. At her Senate confirmation hearing, she effectively announced that she would not be enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She was way ahead of Chief Justice John Roberts.

Fourteen months later, the Roberts Supreme Court rewrote the 40-year-old framework that had made Section 2 enforceable. After the Louisiana v. Callais decision, plaintiffs would have to prove more than discrimination. They would have to prove intentional discrimination.

Intent is nearly impossible to prove. Dhillon knows this. Roberts knows this. Southern states have become expert at discriminating on the basis of race without leaving fingerprints.

Dhillon and Roberts didn’t collaborate. They didn’t need to. They both walk on the same side of the street. What Dhillon announced at her confirmation hearing, the Roberts Court made the law of the land fourteen months later.

There is a section in the Black Belt of Alabama called “Bloody Lowndes County.” It is where Viola Liuzzo was shot dead on Route 80 in 1965, driving Selma marchers home. For decades, mostly Black, mostly poor residents have lived there without access to basic sewer infrastructure. They have been exposed to raw sewage, hookworm, and tropical parasites. Lowndes County sits on dense clay soil that makes conventional septic systems too expensive for most residents to afford.

Kristen Clarke, Dhillon’s predecessor in the Biden administration, opened an environmental justice investigation. The investigation documented conditions and produced a settlement agreement to bring basic sanitation to the residents of Lowndes County. The agreement was an admission by the government that these people are citizens. They are owed what every other American takes for granted. The federal civil rights apparatus exists precisely for this.

Harmeet Dhillon disagreed. Within days of her confirmation, she terminated the Lowndes County agreement, citing Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” Trump signed the order on his first day in office. The first environmental justice settlement ever secured by the Justice Department under federal civil rights law was declared illegal DEI—and killed.

Before a Senate subcommittee, Dhillon explained her philosophy:

According to a Free Press profile (yes, that Bari Weiss’s Free Press), Dhillon views the legal regime built to end racial discrimination as, in the writer’s words, “a corrupt spoils system for favored minorities.” Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in September 2025, she said:

Those opponents include the people who built what she inherited—and what she has torn down.

The Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice was born in 1957 to do what local governments and state courts refused to do—enforce the rights of Black Americans against the organized resistance of state power. It sent federal attorneys into Mississippi to prosecute the killers of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner when the state refused to charge them with murder. It sent federal examiners to register voters in counties where registrars had been turning Black Americans away for a century. It won consent decrees holding the police departments of Minneapolis and Louisville accountable after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

That is the legacy Harmeet Dhillon inherited. That is the legacy she turned on its head.

By July 2025, approximately 75% of Civil Rights Division lawyers resigned rather than carry out Dhillon’s directives. On a December podcast, she described the departing attorneys as having “crying sessions.” She added: “Over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do—and I think that’s fine.” On her desk at the Justice Department sits a coffee mug inscribed with the words “The Tears of My Enemy.” Draw your own conclusions.

That same day in December, 200 former Division lawyers published an open letter titled “The Destruction of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division: Why It Matters.”

Then came Renee Nicole Good. Dhillon declined to investigate the ICE agent who shot and killed Good while dropping off her child at a Minneapolis school. Instead, she opened an investigation into Good’s widow. Four senior career attorneys resigned simultaneously in protest. The Civil Rights Division was built to stand between citizens and the lethal exercise of state power. Now it has become the instrument of it.

Harmeet Dhillon's premise is the opposite of the Division's founding purpose. In her view, the machinery built to prosecute racial discrimination has itself become an instrument of racial discrimination—against white Americans. The Division created to protect Black voting rights is now hunting for reasons to question it. Black voters have become suspects.

Dhillon is not finished. In June 2026, she announced her Division would take over civil rights enforcement from the Department of Education—extending her inversion of rights to millions of schoolchildren.

Under Dhillon’s leadership, the Civil Rights Division investigates the widow of a slain citizen, dismisses the settlements of vulnerable communities, and calls the result enforcement. What it no longer does is enforce the Voting Rights Act, protect voters from illegal purges, pursue police departments that kill unarmed citizens, or stand between a Black family in Lowndes County and the raw sewage in their yard.

Resistance is rising.

Harmeet Dhillon has filed 31 lawsuits demanding the private data of every voter in America. Courts have thrown out nine of her lawsuits. She has not won a single one. Five of her nine losses were handed down by judges nominated by Donald Trump.

Dhillon’s losses have names and organizations behind them. A coalition led by the League of Women Voters brought the case that produced this week’s most consequential ruling. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ordered the Trump-Vance administration to end a massive government database consolidating millions of Americans’ private data—something the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged as a violation of federal law. Judge Sooknanan:

The ACLU has litigated in dozens of states across the country. A federal court permanently enjoined the proof-of-citizenship requirement for the federal voter registration form. Secretaries of state have told the Justice Department to “pound sand” and “go jump in the Gulf of Maine,” and the courts have repeatedly rejected its demands. The line is holding.

This is no cause for celebration—yet. There is more work to be done. The November midterms are four months away. Dhillon was already wielding the anti-voting rights weapon even before the Supreme Court handed it to her in Louisiana v. Callais. In Justice Elena Kagan's words, the Court has made Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act "all but a dead letter." Before a Senate subcommittee Dhillon declared:

She can try.

But legions of stakeholders—the courts, secretaries of state, attorneys general, the attorneys who walked out of the Department of Justice, the League of Women Voters, Democracy Forward, the ACLU, the citizens of Lowndes County, and millions of American voters—have other plans.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote those words in 2006. Who could argue? Segregation was sordid. Jim Crow was sordid. The systematic erasure of Black political power through a century of rigged maps, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses—all sordid.

But Roberts wasn’t objecting to any of that. He was objecting to the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed by Congress to break Jim Crow’s grip on American elections. The Act required legislatures to ensure that Black voters, after a century of exclusion, had a meaningful chance to elect representatives of their choice. That’s what Roberts considered sordid business. Not the suppression of Black voters. The remedy for it.

In 2006, Roberts was in the minority in a case about Texas redistricting and racial voting rights. Roberts argued that considering race when drawing district lines was itself a form of discrimination. He lost. But that didn't stop him. He spent the next two decades doing everything in his power to turn his dissent into doctrine. Piece by piece, ruling by ruling. In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act's enforcement mechanism. In 2019, Rucho v. Common Cause declared partisan gerrymanders "nonjusticiable"—beyond the reach of federal courts. The architecture of Black voter protection was coming down.

And it got worse.

In 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court conservative majority declared redistricting to protect Black voters in Louisiana an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Partisan gerrymanders were permitted. Black voter protections were not. In the American South, where Black voters choose Democratic candidates at rates exceeding 85 percent, partisan and racial gerrymanders are not different. Both produce identical maps. The same precincts are carved out. The same communities are fractured. The same votes are silenced. The only difference is what the legislature says out loud when it draws the lines.

It’s partisan. Not racial. No harm. No foul.

The Supreme Court knows this. It has always known this. What it has built is not a prohibition of racial gerrymanders. It has given a permission slip to any legislature clever enough to name the motive correctly. The racial outcome is permitted. The racial label is not.

Jamelle Bouie, writing in the New York Times, names what made it possible. We have arrived at “a strong form of judicial supremacy, where the meaning of the Constitution and therefore the structure of our political community are fixed in place by the decisions of a small, cloistered and often self-interested tribunal.” Read that slowly. “The meaning of the Constitution”—the document that belongs to all of us as written and ratified and amended by the sovereign people—is now the private property of nine unelected judges. Congress cannot override them. Voters cannot instruct them. The Reconstruction framers who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment specifically to combat white supremacy cannot reach out from their graves to claim, “no, you got it wrong!”

Sherrilyn Ifill, one of the nation's foremost civil rights lawyers, names what that power has been used for. The conservative majority, she writes, “has taken that power from Congress and imposed its own ill-informed and stubborn conception of the parameters permitted by our Constitution for addressing the lasting and destabilizing effects of structural white supremacy.” The Court didn’t just rule. It confiscated authority from Congress. It substituted the sensibilities of six conservative justices for a century and a half of hard-won democratic remedy.

“Colorblindness,” Ifill argues, is not a constitutional principle. It is not what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended. It is not what Congress understood when it passed the Voting Rights Act. It is a doctrine invented by this Court for a false purpose. Ifill describes the Court’s decisions dismantling our civil rights infrastructure as a “veneer of principled nobility.”

Roberts called the Voting Rights Act sordid. The Court called it colorblind. The result is the same.

The echo is not new. This is not the first time the Supreme Court has embraced colorblindness. In 1896, the Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was constitutionally neutral—that the law saw no race, only circumstance. It took sixty years, a Civil Rights Movement, and the blood of murdered civil rights activists to bury it. John Roberts has spent twenty years listening to the echo of Plessy—one of the Supreme Court’s most toxic lies. And he has built it back into law.

In 2013, the ink on Shelby County v. Holder was barely dry before Texas announced new voter ID laws. North Carolina followed. Alabama moved to close DMV offices in Black-majority counties. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in his decision. Within hours we saw exactly how it had changed.

Then in 2026, Roberts finished what Shelby County started. The Court ruled that Louisiana’s majority-Black congressional district—created specifically to remedy decades of Black voter dilution—relied too heavily on race. The remedy was now the violation. The Voting Rights Act, what remained of it, had been turned against the very voters it was written to protect. The crown jewel of the Civil Rights movement, signed by Lyndon Johnson with Martin Luther King standing at his shoulder, had been hollowed out.

The man who called the 1965 Voting Rights Act sordid had spent twenty years building the majority, the doctrine, and the moment. In April 2026 he got all three. His 2006 dissent has become destiny.

Southern states got the message in no time.

Within days of the Callais decision, Alabama and Louisiana—states with histories of Black voter suppression so long and so documented they had been among the original targets of the Voting Rights Act—moved swiftly to dismantle the very districts the Act had compelled them to create. And they did so despite voting that had already begun.

The Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use a congressional map eliminating one of two districts represented by Black Democrats. The order was unsigned—a "shadow docket" ruling that bypassed normal deliberation. Alabama had already held its primary elections. Absentee ballots had been mailed. Votes had been cast. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the Court had "doubled down on chaos" after Alabama "doubled down on racial discrimination."

Louisiana moved just as fast. After Callais, Republican Governor Jeff Landry simply postponed the state's congressional primaries so the legislature could eliminate the majority-Black district entirely. Early votes were simply discarded.

The Supreme Court has long invoked the "Purcell principle"—a doctrine holding that courts should not change election rules close to, let alone during, an election. The logic to prevent chaos is sound. The application is flexible. UCLA law professor Richard Hasen observed that the Court had "minimized Purcell to the detriment of Black voters." The principle meant to protect voters from chaos was deployed instead to create it.

Is this the end of the story? Is this where we cave, accept the verdict, and concede that nine unelected judges in a marble courthouse have the final word on whether Black Americans get to participate in their own democracy?

Frederick Douglass didn’t think so. In 1848, with slavery still the law of the land and the Supreme Court seven years before Dred Scott v. Sanford—the ruling that would declare Black Americans had no rights the white man was bound to respect—Douglass presided over the Colored National Convention in Cleveland. He didn’t wait for the Court. He didn’t wait for Congress. He organized. He convened. He built.

Jamelle Bouie calls it the essential work of democratic citizenship—work that Americans have largely forgotten how to do. Bouie puts it simply: “We tend to relate to our politics the way we relate to everything else in this country—as consumers who pick from a set of predetermined choices. But if we hope to recover and revitalize our democracy, we must start to think as citizens with duties, obligations and the sovereign power to make our world anew.”

Not the Court’s power. Not the legislature’s power. Our power.

The Court has done what it has done. The maps are drawn. Votes in Louisiana were discarded. The districts in Alabama were erased. The Voting Rights Act has been reduced to a ghost of its former self, haunting a courthouse that no longer believes in it.

Sherrilyn Ifill writes that this Court “may well have destroyed our only chance of becoming a true multiracial democracy.” The word to embrace is chance. Not certainty. Not inevitability. Chance—which means the outcome is not yet written. Which means the work is not yet done. Which means the Colored Conventions of 1848 are not merely history.

They are instructions.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

The Eden story helped too. An outraged angel drives Adam and Eve from paradise, but they manage to reclaim fellowship with an understanding God. People fall. But they’re worth redeeming.

That is the wager of Western liberalism. It’s not liberal policy. It’s not the platforms politicians bat around endlessly. Not that at all. It is something older and more essential: the framework that makes free argument possible, that keeps disagreement civil, and limits power.

It’s a pact with a built-in paradox. Liberalism extends the same freedoms to its enemies that it extends to its defenders. Free elections, free speech, and free assembly allow citizens to challenge authority. They also allow illiberal movements to organize, mobilize, and sometimes win. It allows a president to declare legitimate elections stolen and courts illegitimate when they rule against him — and then call the whole apparatus rigged.

I embrace this paradox. Perhaps without realizing it, I have lived inside it my entire life. Now I’m watching it be dismantled in real time.

Here is what the other side sounds like when it finally says what it means.

Scott Yenor said that. He’s a political science professor at Boise State University. He said it at a national conference. He kept his job. Then Ron DeSantis appointed him a University of West Florida trustee. He didn’t survive the State Senate nomination process.

Yenor is in good company. JD Vance called medicated, meddlesome, quarrelsome women "childless cat ladies." Same argument, different podium. The Rev. Doug Wilson is a Christian nationalist pastor who preaches repeal of the 19th Amendment. Pete Hegseth invited him to preach at the Pentagon.

These men are working from the same Hobbesian vision of the human condition—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Not because people are evil. More because they can't be trusted to govern themselves without a strong hand on the throat. Women who work, who choose when and whether to have children, who live outside male authority, are out of line. They are the proof that the sovereign has lost his grip.

This is not policy. It’s anthropology. And it’s the tribal primordialism MAGA has embraced.

The difference between an open society and a closed tribe is not the strength of their loyalties. It's the direction their walls face—outward to protect, or inward to purify. MAGA's walls face inward. What looks like a picket fence community is a gated compound. What looks like patriotism is a racial purge. The founding compact—that all people are created equal—is being revoked before we've had a chance to get it right. And the Supreme Court is blocking the door.

I watch more World War II films than I should. I look for the humanity where I can find it—where the filmmaker wants me to see it—and I find the horror everywhere else. I see my enlisted father flying dozens of missions over Europe—upside down in the ball turret of a Flying Fortress B-17G. I carry that image the way you carry something you can’t put down.

What stops me cold is the timeline. The early years—1939-1941—the worst still ahead. No D-Day in sight. No liberation. No guarantee of either. Just the war, daily, with no promised outcome.

That timeline resonates now.

We are in the early days of the White House war on democracy. The grift and the corruption are only one front. The UFC bout on the White House lawn. The golden ballroom. L'Arc de Trump. These are the gaudy excesses of a teetering democracy. They are the raiments of an imperial court and its enforcers.

Elon Musk dismantled humanitarian aid and declared "empathy is weakness"—not a side effect of his worldview, but the thesis. Russell Vought impounds congressionally authorized funds in defiance of federal law. He calls it efficiency. Laws are mere suggestions. Courts are obstacles. Executive orders are the new legislation. Stephen Miller has years to pursue his politics of exclusion, using "the other" as a threat category—rhetoric snatched from Nazi "blood and soil" nationalism. Since October 2025, the United States has admitted 6,668 refugees. 6,665 were white South Africans. Three were from Afghanistan. Steve Bannon has plenty of runway left to flood the zone with shit. His was never a communication strategy. It was an epistemology of unknowable truth. Marc Andreessen and his elite cohort are building tech at high speed. No safety belts. Billions on the line. The rest of us? Variables in someone else's equation. Every institution meant to protect citizens from executive abuse—the courts, the press, the civil service, and the electoral system—is under attack. Some are already under occupation.

There is no guaranteed D-Day on this timeline. No day of liberation. No electoral cavalry visible on the ridge.

That is not despair. It’s an honest assessment among people paying attention.

Hungary just showed us what's possible. On April 13, 2026, after sixteen years of Viktor Orbán's illiberal rule—the working Project 2025-style model—Hungarian voters threw him out. For sixteen years Orbán bent the electoral system toward permanent victory. It wasn't enough. Nearly 80 percent turned out. They chose Péter Magyar and his pro-European Tisza party by a landslide. JD Vance flew to Budapest days before the election to campaign for Orbán. He failed.

Then came Normandy.

In commemoration of the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood above the graves of 9,000 Americans at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. He brought his wife and six children. Observers noted the trip had the feel of a family vacation. His remarks did not.

Standing above those graves, Hegseth called migration an invasion. He forgot—or chose to forget—that the troops who stormed the beach below were multiracial, multi-national, and fighting the very ideology of “blood and soil” he was now importing into his remarks. His remarks shocked parts of the audience. Mother Jones called it a speech that seemed to side with the Germans at Normandy.

Hegseth didn’t just embarrass himself at Normandy. He desecrated it. He made a clarion call for the very racial ideology the men buried beneath his feet had died to defeat. By embracing the Great Replacement theory—that white culture is being undermined by people of color—Hegseth flipped the Allied and Nazi positions.

My father flew upside down in the ball turret deliberately. As the son of a German immigrant, he was clear about his mission. He wasn’t answering a philosophical question. He was defending the pact—the one that declares all people are created equal—that power must be constrained—that the stranger deserves dignity. The Allies settled that argument over fascism at enormous cost. The wager was won on Normandy beaches. Pete Hegseth has no authority to flip it. Not for my father. Not for we the people we’re still becoming.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

The commentariat is always the first to the party and last to leave. They trade on telling anyone who will listen why a Mamdani can’t win and then when he wins, they trade on telling us how he is failing.

This pundit class occupies the green rooms of CNN and MSNOW. They blurt their unelected expertise on podcasts, Substacks and Sunday talk shows. They are accountable to no one. They have no stake in the outcome beyond their next appearance fee—or a million-dollar consulting contract.

Ken Martin arrived at the DNC in February 2025 promising to be different. He was going to conduct a rigorous autopsy of the 2024 election. He was going to name names. He was not, he explicitly said, coming to Washington to placate the political consultant class. The political consultant class had other ideas. Ken’s autopsy was hijacked by powerful consultants determined to keep their names out of the report. When the report was completed, Martin dragged his feet. Then his feet stopped moving. The report was shelved, then leaked, then released—just now in 2026. Then he said:

Gaza was left out. Biden was left out. Powerful consultants’ names were left out. And then the invoice came. Win or lose, consultants get paid.

Martin’s launch began with a messy divorce. In an inspired choice, David Hogg—the Marjory Stoneman Douglas senior who rose to national prominence after the 2018 Parkland shooting—was elected vice chairman of the DNC. Hogg wanted to do what Martin had promised: clear out the deadwood and put new candidates in play across the country. Martin found a procedural problem with Hogg’s election. Hogg was gone within four months. Martin is still there. The DNC is $18 million in debt.

In 2021, Virginia Democrats lost the state legislature and governor’s race to Republicans. Then-congresswoman Abigail Spanberger had a simple explanation. It wasn’t the Republican strategy. Or voter suppression. Or the structural advantages of one-party rule. It was the ambitions of her own party’s president, Joe Biden.

Was that really necessary? Spanberger has already vetoed more than two dozen bills passed by Virginia’s Democratic-majority legislature. This is a state supposedly unified under Democratic party control. The moderate incumbent has become a saboteur wielding a veto pen.

Incumbent Democrats needn’t worry about the opposition. They are their own opposition. They police their coalition’s ambitions preemptively. They call it pragmatism. They call it reading the room. What they are reading is their own donor lists and their own reelection math. Neither are helpful.

Meanwhile, in Maine, Graham Platner is one candidate positioned to actually improve people’s lives. His progressive campaign has the whiff of FDR. Besides incumbent efforts to belittle his campaign ambitions, he has spent the campaign answering for a tattoo. Most recently, the press has speculated with a former campaign staffer about the extent of private sext message exchanges. The purity brigade has teamed up with the virtue signalers. Platner and his wife, Amy, claim to be working things out and will be just fine. Mainers may not be if the noise level overcomes the value of a campaign bent on making lives better. Platner needs votes—not noisy pearl clutching over what is nobody’s business but his and his wife’s own.

The Republican party runs on toxic fumes. The stink of securities fraud, accepting bribes, and whistleblower retaliation didn’t stop Ken Paxton from beating incumbent John Cornyn by nearly 30 points in the senate primary in Texas. None of this mattered to the voters. Trump wanted Paxton in and Cornyn out. He got what he wanted.

Maine votes Tuesday.

Martin Luther King Jr. endured endless speculation about his philandering. Once LBJ unleashed J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI used surveillance leaks to smear King and turn his private life into ammunition to destroy him. They succeeded. Within one year, King was assassinated.

Now historians are unearthing questions about King’s origin story. About whether there was a 6-year-old white boy whose parents forbade him to play with King and sent him off to a segregated school in Jim Crow Georgia. What does this serve? It serves no living purpose. It helps no candidate, moves no voter, addresses no policy question pending before any legislature. What it does—what it is designed to do, consciously or not—is sow doubt. Was it all a myth? Were we wrong to believe?

Was there an Eden? Was there a serpent? Was it an apple tree or a fig tree? What do revisionists say? Do we care?

Democrats have perfected the circular firing squad. Pundits traffic in electability. Consultants profit from victory or defeat. Incumbents do the opposition’s work for free. Historians relitigate the stories we tell ourselves. For what?

Had the self-appointed chattering classes shown restraint—I don’t know, maybe Al Franken would still be in the Senate.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

The media hyperventilates about these Silicon Valley contributions and completely misses the point. When the headline reads “$100,000 Spent in Maine Senate Race,” readers see big money. What they don’t see is how meaningless that amount is for Alex Karp. It’s not an investment—it’s a tip. The returns aren’t votes for candidates. It’s a system where democracy is a fire sale and Silicon Valley oligarchs are snapping it up. This is what government capture looks like: billionaires with unlimited resources buying democracy for spare change.

This started sixteen years ago when Justice Sam Alito mouthed the words “not true” in the middle of President Obama’s State of the Union address. Six days earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations have First Amendment rights to unlimited political spending.

Money is speech.

Corporations are people.

Obama spoke directly to the justices seated in front of him:

That’s when Alito smugly shook his head muttering, “not true.”

We know today that Alito was wrong and Obama was right—but even Obama couldn’t foresee how cheap it would be to buy a government. When Teddy Roosevelt battled John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, it was a clash of titans—presidential power against industrial empire. Today’s oligarchs face no such resistance. They don’t battle a president. They buy one—and he’s selling. Trump’s crypto wealth has grown by at least $7.5 billion since 2024, built on pardons for convicted crypto executives, neutered consumer protections, and investors paying $400 million for $TRUMP memecoins in exchange for access. And all the oligarchs have to do is reach between the cushions of their mansion sofas, pull out pocket change, and the regulatory state bends.

Yet the right has spent decades demonizing George Soros as a puppet-master buying American democracy with dark money. The numbers tell a different story.

Soros has spent $103 million on the 2026 midterms. The AI oligarchs—Andreessen, Horowitz, and their Silicon Valley allies—have already spent $300 million. Soros is spending a far larger share of his wealth. Tech billionaires are spending a rounding error of their fortunes.

Look what they're buying: Soros backs candidates and causes—retail democratic politics, one race at a time with an eye toward improving American lives. The oligarchs are buying influence wholesale. They're not funding campaigns. They're eliminating the government's will to restrain their power. They're buying federal preemption of state AI laws. Accelerated data center permits bypassing environmental and community review. Congress will spend billions on DHS and ICE to keep immigrants from taking American jobs but won't lift a finger to stop AI from eliminating American jobs. The oligarchs buy that silence with campaign contributions. Their goal isn't winning elections. It's neutering democratic resistance. We know Peter Thiel’s well-worn catchphrase:

That is, the freedom of Silicon Valley billionaires—libertarians who see themselves as a commune of philosopher kings—to do exactly what they want to enrich themselves without government interference because democracy gets in their way—and they’re not having it.

Marc Andreessen explains to Joe Rogan this month why AI is superior to human workers:

Larry Ellison, Oracle founder whose son David is reducing CBS—and likely CNN—to state television, describes his vision for AI-powered mass surveillance:

David Sacks left his White House role as AI and Crypto Czar and now co-chairs the “President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.” Its 15 members are made up of 14 Silicon Valley philosopher kings and one scientist. A former colleague describes Sacks’ worldview:

Sacks believes he is among the masters. The rest of us? Slaves.

Kevin O’Leary is a Canadian billionaire known as “Mr. Wonderful.” He’s pushing a 62.5 square mile $100 billion data center in Box Elder County, Utah. It will double the state’s energy consumption, pass along the costs, and drain the Great Salt Lake already teetering on ecological collapse. When locals protest, he accuses them of Chinese propaganda.

The human costs of AI expansion are already mounting. Ellison laid off 30,000 workers from Oracle via a 6:00 a.m. email—right after raking in a $305 million Tennessee tax break and delivering a mere 637 of the 8,000 promised jobs.

Meta cut 8,000 workers citing its “shift to AI.” No remedy offered. No safety net.

Dario Amodei of Anthropic—one of the “trusted” AI companies—predicts 50 percent of white-collar jobs will disappear in five years.

And the displaced? Companies automating workers out of existence get the tax breaks. So far, the displaced get nothing. Musk and Altman express sympathy for universal basic income. Sympathy is not a plan. And sympathy played no part when Musk’s DOGE gutted American institutions nor as Altman races to build the AGI that will eliminate jobs.

If Virgil were to lead us into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell today, we’d no doubt find a band of billionaires icebound in their cold betrayal of humanity and utterly unconcerned about the devastation their pursuits cause to people or planet. They have betrayed the Enlightenment itself.

Pope Leo XIV was elected just over a year ago and this week released his first encyclical. He warns us—that is to say, he warns billionaires—that humanity is facing a pivotal choice. His concern isn’t theological. It’s diagnostic:

And the media doesn’t see it. If they do, they’re not reporting it. They report the dollar figures—$100,000 in Maine! $300 million for political PACs!—but the scale is missing. This is not billionaire wealth. It’s pocket change. The story isn’t shiny or bloody or scandalous enough for cable news to package—despite being democratic government capture happening in plain sight.

Ben Rhodes sees it. In a New York Times op-ed, he writes:

Gil Duran and a handful of others have been sounding the alarm about Silicon Valley technofascists for years. And the rest? “AGI” gets covered as innovation. Worse, we are scolded for worrying about it. “Regulatory capture” gets filed under campaign finance.

The story is there. Connect the dots. Oracle’s 30,000 workers. Meta’s 8,000. Gone in the blink of an eye. Karp’s espresso macchiato money buys Senate influence. O’Leary’s Box Elder County data center drains the Great Salt Lake. These aren’t isolated incidents. This is the system.

Face the thing. Name it. Report the scale. The Tower of Babel was never completed thanks to the arrogance of those who would be gods. The new Tower doesn’t have to be a sure thing—but only if we see it rising.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

We met at Michigan State University. Sandra stood just an inch or two taller than my 4’11 mother. She towered in the eyes of a community trying to make sense of a compromised campus in a screwed-up world.

Within weeks, Sandra told me a story that defined who she became. Growing up Black in Jim Crow Alabama, she needed to speak to her brother who worked in a country club kitchen. She marched through the front door and asked for him by name. Before she could finish, a group of white people hustled her back out and pointed to the sign: “Service Entrance in Back.”

My first year at MSU was a blur of newfound freedoms, all-nighters, panty raids, fraternity pledging, swallowing goldfish, antiwar unrest. It wasn’t until my second year that the fog of university life began to roll back on the place I would call my alma mater. I moved off campus and went off script. Something wasn’t right. I wandered into the Center for Urban Affairs at the urging of a friend. I was starting to pay attention. That’s when I met Sandra.

Sandra told me all about the university we attended. In 1966, Ramparts magazine exposed what the university had built in Vietnam between 1955 and 1962—the machinery of repression under U.S.-backed dictator Ngo Dinh Diem. MSU’s Vietnam Advisory Group had been a CIA cover embedded within the police administration division. Five agents conducted counterespionage and counterintelligence, complete with polygraph machines and bugged cells. MSU didn’t just advise Diem. MSU built the machinery he used to repress his own people. MSU President John Hannah had deep ties in Washington as a former assistant secretary of defense. He called the Ramparts article “pure fantasy.” Faculty perpetrators later confirmed it. The exposé has never been disproved. Madame Nhu, Diem’s sister-in-law aka Vietnam’s First Lady, earned her place on the Ramparts cover as a callous MSU cheerleader of oppression.

Against these revelations, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “Beyond Vietnam” at the majestic Riverside Church in upper Manhattan. April 4, 1967. He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The speech, vastly differed from his 1963 “I Have a Dream” oration and ruptured the relationship between King and LBJ. Johnson felt betrayed. He had paid dearly in political coin to mint the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and considered himself the Civil Rights President. King gave no quarter. His speech claimed that civil rights, poverty, and war are not separate issues. They are interconnected manifestations of the same violence against Black people. The U.S. government—not the Viet Cong. Not the Soviets. Not China—was the greatest purveyor of violence. It was then that Johnson unleashed J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI spooks on King. King would be assassinated exactly one year after his “Beyond Vietnam” speech. April 4, 1968.

Sandra and I had a mutual friend working in the Dean of Students Office. People talked. She heard that the FBI met with the dean and showed him film of our friend and another student activist standing on the median of Grand River Avenue. Talking. He wanted to confirm that the film showed bona fide students and not plotting outside agitators.

After summer vacation, a housemate of mine said her parents were visited by two FBI agents at her Philadelphia home. They wanted to know more about me. Why was I running a popular simulation game called Star Power with so many members of SDS present? It was all part of a weave—a government convinced that protest meant violence, communism, and un-American activity.

Sandra understood what King understood. Civil rights, poverty, and the antiwar movement were the same struggle. The establishment disagreed. The NAACP disagreed. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and 168 newspapers across the country piled on King denouncing his speech. But I was on a campus that proved King right. MSU and the federal government had built police states abroad and brought the expertise home. The struggles weren’t separate. They never had been.

It was against this backdrop that Sandra created a group of workshop trainers at the Center for Urban Affairs. I was one of them. Sandra gave us the tools we needed. She trained us as facilitators. She taught us how to help people interrogate authority and question institutional narratives for themselves. We traveled around the state with the Michigan Education Association to K-12 schools helping white educators recognize their privilege and see how systemic racism operates in classrooms. The trainers were all white. That was the plan endorsed by SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was up to white people to dismantle white supremacy in white communities. It wasn’t up to Black people. If it were, Black people would be doing all the accommodating—making all the concessions. This was work for white people with white people.

Our workshops weren’t designed as feel-good exercises. They made people uncomfortable. That was the point. For white people who claimed to be allies in the fight against racism, there was one job: go deal with white people. Knock them off center. And that’s what we did. Tom Paxton’s 1964 song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” mocked the lies fed to children: that Washington never lied, soldiers seldom died, policemen are my friends, justice never ends, the government must be strong, always right and never wrong. That’s what we taught in school today. Still do.

Sandra never attended any of the workshop sessions. She had been hustled to service entrances too many times in her life—in Jim Crow Alabama and in Michigan, where the rules were unwritten but just as rigid. East Lansing was one of many places suspected of being a “sundown town.” No Blacks after dusk. This was never codified in writing, but I have friends who can verify it.

As the years crept along, those of us who lived off-campus together began making future plans. Some went to grad school. Some became civil rights organizers or public defenders. Some ran for office. Some taught. All hoping to make a difference. While we lived together, and until we departed, we would tune into the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite each night. Walter would sign off every broadcast with his signature, “And that’s the way it is…” We suspected it was a lie. Later it was confirmed. In a brilliant ploy by the Pentagon, Vietnam War death tolls, kill ratios, and daily maneuvers were sent directly to Walter who read them on-air without confirmation. The numbers and maneuvers were cooked to make it appear that victory in Vietnam was within reach. The Pentagon had no spokesman. Walter was their spokesman, passing along Pentagon data as fact—at least until the Tet Offensive when he travelled to Vietnam and pronounced the place “mired in stalemate.”

Sandra knew. At the end of every broadcast she would mutter, “that man should be busted for bullshit.” Two years on, I miss my touchstone.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Hugo Black joined the Klan in the 1920’s. He marched in white robes and spoke at nearly 150 meetings earning him a “Klan Grand Passport” in 1926. None of this came to light during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. His Klan membership didn’t surface until after his 1937 appointment—an appointment for life. But the country got lucky. Hugo Black later became a champion of civil rights joining the unanimous Brown v. Board decision in 1954.

John Roberts had no such redemption. During confirmation hearings in 2005, John Roberts presented himself as an independent jurist with his well-worn metaphor:

Yet when Roberts struck down preclearance with his Shelby County v. Holder opinion in 2013, it rang out like a swing for the bleachers. His professional experience reveals a dogmatic throughline. As clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, he learned all about judicial maneuvering. Under Reagan, Roberts served in the Office of Legal Counsel. His memos on voting rights foreshadowed Shelby County. More decisions followed, each cutting deeper into the Voting Rights Act—Rucho in 2019, Brnovich in 2021.

The final blow came with Louisiana v. Callais. Time of death: April 29, 2026, 10:30 a.m. Nothing about that decision reflected anything like calling balls and strikes. Nothing suggests that John Roberts will become a champion of civil rights like Hugo Black before him.

On May 7 this year, John Roberts addressed a conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Eight days after gutting the Voting Rights Act, he made this claim: the Court is “simply not part of the political process.” As for the American public he said:

Translation: It’s not us. It’s you. It’s the American people who don’t understand what they’re seeing—across a spectrum of Supreme Court decisions about reproductive rights, guns, race, voting, immigration, unions, regulation, dark money, religion, presidential power, and immunity. Nothing to see here. No politics. No pattern. Just law.

Roberts lecturing Americans isn't landing. A YouGov poll in early May: 38 percent approval.

Roberts claims neutrality. But Justice Samuel Alito has no qualms ripping off the illusion. In his 6-3 Louisiana v. Callais majority opinion, he decries the three liberals—Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson—for ignoring settled law.

Precedents? Which precedents? The dissenting liberals are taking issue with political precedents decided by conservatives over the past 15 years. All of them had to do with gutting the Voting Rights Act. Alito never mentions the 1966 decision that upheld the Voting Rights Act. The VRA has been settled law for 60 years. Roberts’ “balls and strikes” fiction is exposed. He’s been batting all along—not calling balls and strikes. Roberts and Alito have done what they needed to do. They built a fortress of recent anti-VRA precedents and declared them untouchable. Sixty-year-old settled law doesn't matter.

No one was surprised that within 24 hours of the Louisiana v. Callais decision, all hell broke loose. Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt had his finger on the trigger. He sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding that Voting Rights Act districts be challenged nationwide. Harmeet Dhillon who oversees civil rights [sic] at the DOJ replied:

The Voting Rights Act was murdered by a triple crown: The Supreme Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress.

Days later, the Supreme Court's shadow docket—no briefing, no oral argument—cleared a path for Alabama to use a map that courts had earlier ruled discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act.

The language of the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution is spare and clear:

Congress is not going to act anytime soon.

Liberalism isn’t a set of policy positions—Democrat or Republican. It’s an enlightened framework. It’s a belief that institutions can act as neutral arbiters, that procedural fairness produces legitimate outcomes, that rules applied consistently protect everyone.

When Roberts invoked “balls and strikes,” he was invoking that framework. The umpire’s neutrality. The institutional legitimacy that separates courts from legislatures. He never delivered.

Liberalism stumbles when its procedural safeguards have no enforcement.

When the Chief Justice’s wife makes over $10 million recruiting for elite law firms arguing before him, and Roberts consults the ethics code himself to decide no recusal is necessary, liberalism stumbles.

When “precedent” means only the last fifteen years of conservative victories, not sixty years of settled law, liberalism stumbles.

When separation of powers collapses into coordination, liberalism stumbles.

The Voting Rights Act was liberalism’s answer to this question: What happens when the right of citizens to vote is systematically thwarted?

The answer in 1966 was clear: active enforcement, federal oversight, and preclearance.

Now we’re watching a very different Court along with an anti-voting Congress and hostile Executive dismantle liberalism’s achievement.

Bert Callais made all this possible. The original complaint described him as a "non-African American Voter." Bert Callais is an avowed election denier who attended the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Bert Callais is now the anointed hero of the election denial movement. And all it took was a partisan Supreme Court to canonize him.

The “balls and strikes” lie is exposed. Roberts claims institutional neutrality while his wife collected $10 million from firms arguing before him. Alito cites precedent while ignoring the 60-year foundation of Voting Rights. The plaintiff who gutted Voting Rights attended the January 6 insurrection. And within 24 hours of the decision, the DOJ Civil Rights Division promised a nationwide assault on voting rights.

Even Hugo Black—a man who marched in Klan robes—only partially dissented in the Voting Rights Act case in 1966. Sixty years later, a Court claiming to call balls and strikes gutted it completely.

Justice Ginsburg was right. Roberts threw away the umbrella and we’re all getting drenched.

O what a 250th anniversary this will be. We’ll call it the midterms.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, xAI—they can’t all win the AI arms race. Someone’s going to lose.

And when that happens, someone has to pay.

Yet debt-fueled construction continues anyway.

Numbers tell part of the story: A single hyperscale data center can consume 5 million gallons of water a day—as much as a town of 50,000 people. In Texas alone, data centers will consume 399 billion gallons of water by 2030—enough to draw down Lake Mead more than 16 feet in a year. Up to 80% of that water evaporates in data center cooling systems. In the United States, data centers are projected to use 12% of all electricity consumed nationwide by 2028. Northern Virginia has more data center capacity than Tokyo, London, and San Francisco combined, yet the state has only 12,140 data center jobs. Virginia has more school bus drivers than that.

The Bet

The bet isn’t just big. It’s leveraged.

U.S. data center construction hit $77.7 billion in 2025—nearly triple 2024. Monthly spending jumped from $500 million in 2021 to $6.5 billion by December 2025. McKinsey estimates global spending will reach $7 trillion by 2030.

That money isn’t cash. It’s borrowed. It’s all paper. And it makes Enron’s circular financing look cautious.

Here’s how it works: One company builds data centers. Another company rents them—but instead of paying cash, the renter receives the builder’s stock and pays the rent in that stock. The builder then uses that stock as collateral to borrow billions more.

Nobody’s using actual money. They’re passing the same piece of paper in a circle and calling it revenue. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu sums it up this way:

Meta’s Louisiana data center runs on a $27 billion loan that never appears on Meta’s balance sheet—hidden inside what’s called a “special purpose vehicle.” That’s a separate legal entity designed to keep debt off the books. Tech analyst Gil Luria spotted the parallel immediately:

That “special purpose vehicle” vaporized a $70 billion company overnight.

And the equipment? No one needs that much. It’s obsolete before it’s paid for. Nvidia now releases a new chip generation every year, each roughly 10 times more powerful than the last. Companies depreciate these assets over six years to make their books look healthy. But the equipment is economically worthless in two years.

This isn’t infrastructure. It’s a speculative frenzy built on debt, hype, and the assumption that someone else will pay when it collapses.

Human Costs

The damage shows up in lungs and hearts, not special purpose vehicle spreadsheets.

In some data center clusters, air pollution from backup diesel generators now exceeds emissions from nearby power plants. Diesel exhaust carries fine particulates that trigger asthma, COPD, and heart disease. The generators run around the clock for testing and maintenance. The noise disrupts sleep. Mental health disorders follow—precisely as health coverage and Medicaid collapse in the rural and low-income communities targeted for development.

Wells run dry. Aquifers don’t recharge when concrete slabs and asphalt cover hundreds of acres that once absorbed rainfall. Farmland disappears. Property prices fall. Transmission lines cross private property to serve facilities that create almost no permanent local employment.

Data center jobs are a mirage. Construction work is temporary. Operational staff is minimal. Worse: The few workers who do get hired are building machines designed to eliminate jobs—not create them.

Meanwhile, U.S. residential electricity costs have jumped 30% on average since 2021—on top of the spiking gas prices caused by the Iran war. Ratepayers fund grid expansion. Data centers reap the benefits. Households do not.

This is place-based inequality in action: tech companies target areas with limited political clout, offer incentives that rarely deliver, and leave communities with health risks, infrastructure costs, and environmental damage.

Even Palantir CEO Alex Karp sees what’s coming. On a panel with Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, he admitted:

Karp’s worry isn’t workers. It’s profit. No safety net. No plan for displaced workers. Just the promise that innovation requires sacrifice—workers’ sacrifice, not Silicon Valley’s.

What’s the Plan?

Silicon Valley has one. For themselves.

Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen—the architects of this frenzy—are building escape routes. Bunkers in New Zealand. Seasteads on international waters. Mars colonies. Cryonic preservation. Their safety net is literal: physical refuge from the inevitable consequences they’re creating.

The rest of humanity is an externality.

OpenAI’s spin doctor, Chris Lehane, has a sunnier vision. He and his team deprioritize research that could produce unflattering results: studies on AI’s environmental impact, the gender gap in ChatGPT usage, the urban-rural divide, how ChatGPT guides career decisions, long-run economic forecasting. Instead, Lehane focuses on “concrete benefits”—new jobs, GDP growth from data center investments. The message: trust us. Superintelligent AI will solve everything.

That’s not a plan. That’s a deception.

Progressive proposals do exist. Universal Basic Income. Job retraining programs. Green New Deal integration with renewable-powered data centers. Ratepayer protections.

All are worthwhile. Few stand a chance. None address the human costs at scale.

Regulatory pushback is mounting. Fourteen states limit or ban data centers. Maine passed the nation’s first statewide ban on large facilities. Community opposition has forced moratoriums in Virginia’s Loudoun County—the self-proclaimed “Data Center Capital of the World.” Opposition blocked projects in Bessemer, Alabama.

The industry’s response: we’ll just build somewhere else. And they do. Infrastructure is already funded. Transmission lines are already planned. Those special purpose vehicle loans are already on the books—ticking.

After the Collapse

Debris: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns that the AI boom’s legacy may be “energy-hungry data centers and AI chips that may suddenly become stranded assets.”

Unemployment: S&P Global estimates a full AI bubble burst could wipe out over 2.5 million U.S. jobs in tech and related sectors.

Ruin: Sixty-two percent of Americans own stocks. Fifty-four percent of people earning $30,000 to $80,000 have investment accounts. When the stock market craters, retirement accounts crater with it.

Forecast: Asked how Google would fare if the bubble bursts, CEO Sundar Pichai replied:

So, Who Pays?

The answer is always the same in Silicon Valley: someone else.

Ratepayers will be stuck funding infrastructure nobody needs. Workers will have no safety net. Communities will be left with poisoned aquifers, abandoned facilities, and lungs damaged from years of diesel exhaust—from a boom that’s already over.

The Problem is Ours

None of this is inevitable. Choices are being made in real time—by state regulators approving projects, by utilities signing contracts, by legislators extending tax breaks, by media outlets chasing hype instead of asking the right questions about data center overbuild.

Thorny questions need answers. What happens to stranded infrastructure? What’s the plan for displaced workers? Who cares for the vulnerable? These questions have to be asked and answered before the collapse, not after.

Demand answers. From local officials approving data center projects. From state legislators voting on tax incentives. From the media outlets you read.

Demand that the stories be reported. The leveraged bets. The human costs. The environmental damage. The financial ruin.

This is answerable. This is controllable. But only if we stay connected and demand coverage instead of cover-up, and make the right choices at the polls.

It’s not someone else’s problem.

It’s ours.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

The pace is picking up. Complicity in Silicon Valley’s vision for governing without democracy is growing—and until now, it’s hardly been noticed. The press has ignored the signs. The American government isn’t putting up much of a fight. The Trump regime’s embrace of unregulated digital accelerationism is well documented, but Democrats are complicit too: investing in Bitcoin and Palantir, chasing meager returns—a few thousand dollars for a campaign chest. What if the campaign chest is a stalking horse? What if the two-party system itself has become a farrago, an elaborate performance designed to deliver power to Silicon Valley tech oligarchs? These aren’t rhetorical questions. The evidence is mounting. The ideological infrastructure is visible. And the endgame is already in motion.

The Anti-Democratic Blueprint

The seeds for a tech coup were planted more than a decade ago. The New York Times recently spotlighted Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug. Back in 2012, he coined the acronym RAGE—“Retire All Government Employees.” Before Elon Musk’s DOGE, he advocated firing the entire federal workforce and replacing it with “neocameralism.” He envisioned a CEO-monarch running the country like a corporation. Loyal officials would staff the royal treasury, maximizing state resources to strengthen the monarch’s power.

Yarvin was among those who imagined Americans divided into J.R.R.Tolkien classes of elves (ruling class), hobbits (middle class), and dwarves, orcs, and zombies (working and lower classes). He envisioned reactionary dark elves like himself allying with hobbits to put a dark elf in power.

What might that look like?

He told us in his 2022 blueprint for a Trump administration: purge the federal workforce through RAGE, replace civil servants with loyalists, ignore court orders when they block unconstitutional actions, and curtail the free press and universities—all within the first months after inauguration.

Check. Done. All that and more accomplished.

The Tolkien reference stuck with Peter Thiel, who aptly named the digital surveillance company he co-founded Palantir. Palantirs are the magical crystal balls in Tolkien’s trilogy capable of seeing events in faraway places. Spying. Surveilling. 21st century Palantir does just that. The company has secured billions of dollars in government contracts. The short list includes the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the Department of Justice, the Department of State, the Internal Revenue Service. Many of these contracts are dedicated to mass surveillance of the American public.

In his 2009 Cato Unbound essay, Thiel argued that the extension of the franchise to women and welfare beneficiaries rendered “capitalist democracy” an “oxymoron.” Recently, Thiel purchased a $12 million mansion in Buenos Aires, not too far from the residence of Argentine President Javier Milei.

At a meeting described as “wonderful” by Milei, Thiel discussed “how to sustain” their shared anarcho-capitalist ideals. Milei, the chainsaw-wielding zealot, said he and Thiel both view “taxes as theft.” Milei’s popularity has plummeted to 36%—Trump’s approval territory—due to his punishing fiscal policies.

Another anti-democratic blueprint comes from Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Critics call it the “Nicene creed for the cult of progress.” Throughout 113 stated “beliefs” there is one abiding theme: social responsibility, trust and safety measures, sustainability, and tech ethics are the enemies of techno-optimism. Andreessen is like many other Silicon Valley billionaires. Once a Democratic donor, he shifted to Trump after Biden’s proposed billionaire income tax and renewed antitrust scrutiny of tech. Andreessen scoffs at the idea that technology harms the environment or corrupts children.

This is not just a good guy/bad guy divide. Far from being fringe fever dreams, some of these anti-democratic visions are being funded—by both political parties. That’s ironic since the manifestos and behaviors of these Silicon Valley oligarchs aim to end democracy itself—and the two-party system with it.

Democratic Complicity

On April 18, 2025, ICE awarded a $30 million contract to Palantir to develop ImmigrationOS—an AI-driven surveillance and case management platform for ICE.

Four days later, Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, invested $50,000 in Palantir. Khanna’s office did not comment on the record. His wife purchased $125,000 worth of Palantir stock. Khanna denied any conflict of interest, arguing he has no input in his wife’s stock portfolio managed by a professional adviser.

That’s just the tip of it.

Representative Gil Cisneros, Democrat of California, has made immigration a central part of his platform. He posted “while ICE is out of control and operating without accountability, all of us are in danger.” He called for the impeachment of Kristi Noem after immigration-enforcement agents shot and killed a demonstrator in Minnesota.

According to financial records, Cisneros purchased up to $75,000 of Palantir stock during 2025. Palantir stock increased in value by more than 100% during that time. Cisneros said there’s no conflict because he doesn’t manage his own investments.

Rep. Cleo Fields of Louisiana disclosed six purchases of Palantir stock worth up to $765,000 last year.

These are among several Democrats exploiting both sides of the issue. Fortunes have been made on the backs of the very same people whose plight they champion. A range of comments reflects the disconnect.

The pattern extends beyond stock portfolios. In June 2025, the Senate passed the GENIUS Act—cryptocurrency legislation that would enrich World Liberty Financial, Trump’s family business. The Senate vote was 68 to 30. Eighteen Democrats joined Republicans. In July, the House followed. 102 Democrats voted yes, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Trump made $57.3 million from World Liberty Financial in 2024. The GENIUS Act would “regulate” the stablecoins which Trump’s family business issues. Senator Elizabeth Warren warned the bill would “supercharge the profitability of Donald Trump’s crypto corruption.” Representative Maxine Waters called it a green light for foreign influence-buying. Their colleagues voted yes anyway. The justification? “Blockchain is here to stay.” So, what are you going to do?

Peter Thiel’s Buenos Aires mansion is one of several escape routes. He has a New Zealand estate, a waterfront compound in Miami, and a Maltese passport granting EU freedom of movement. He considers cyberspace, outer space, and seasteading—building libertarian city-states—as worthy alternatives. Maybe he’s choosing his vantage point for watching the U.S. blow up.

Ethics Don’t Scale Up

Technologist Paul Ford made the observation. “Ethics don’t scale up.” He’s right. Despite all the good intentions, missions get muddled. Altruism succumbs to financial gain.

Democrats champion immigrants while profiting from a company that executes their surveillance. Democrats condemn Trump’s corruption while voting to enrich his crypto empire. The justifications vary—”my financial adviser handles it,” “blockchain is here to stay”—but the outcome is the same. Democracy is weakened.

The two-party system isn’t defending democracy. Both parties are enabling the oligarchs busily building its replacement. That’s the farrago. The tech coup isn’t coming. It’s already here. And the people tasked with stopping it are invested in its success.

Wakeup Call

Exposure changes the equation. Silicon sovereigns stand exposed. Democrats who profited from Palantir or voted to enrich Trump’s crypto empire are now on the record. Spotlights are illuminating dark spaces. Tenacious journalists like Gil Duran—and those he’s introduced to us on his podcast and in his newsletter The Nerd Reich—are amplifying the story, filling the vacuum left by legacy media. The midterms are eighteen months away. Primary challenges, donor pressure, public accountability—these tools still work if we use them. The farrago only succeeds if it remains invisible. It’s visible now. We can’t ignore it.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.

He’s in federal prison for twenty-five years. Convicted on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering stemming from the collapse of FTX, a major cryptocurrency exchange company. On November 2, 2023, the boy genius learned his fate from a jury in less than five hours—not because of his reckless funding of altruistic causes, but because he stole $11 billion.

That’s one story. Here’s another—one that journalist David Z. Morris tells with authority in Stealing the Future, his 2025 account of Sam Bankman-Fried and the ideological ecosystem that made him possible.

SBF, known for his famous schlub costume of cargo shorts and halo of unwashed hair, was never the misguided liberal squish the press sometimes made him out to be. He wasn’t Robin Hood gone wrong, a utilitarian do-gooder who cut too many corners. Effective Altruism was the label. It sounded progressive. It scanned as nerd-philanthropy. What it actually was, and what a growing body of reporting and scholarship is now making clear, was a delivery mechanism for something much more malicious: the conviction that a certain kind of intelligence—concentrated, unaccountable, contemptuous of democratic process—has the right to organize the world on its own terms. We know the chief players: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, JD Vance, Steve Bannon…and Jeffrey Epstein. That’s right. Jeffrey Epstein. He wasn’t just a sexual predator. He was a financial backer and social architect among a cohort of like-minded Silicon Valley billionaire technocrats and aligned political autocrats.

As far back as 2016, Epstein put it plainly in an email to Peter Thiel. Brexit had just happened. “Return to tribalism,” Epstein wrote. “Counter to globalization.” And then the line that should be carved above the entrance of every think tank currently advising this administration:

Epstein wasn’t describing investment strategy. He was describing a worldview. And SBF was operating inside it. So yes: Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail. Jeffrey Epstein is dead. But their shared ideologies are on the loose.

Epstein and Thiel shared the belief that civilization is collapsing and that democratic norms are failing along with its institutions. Cryptocurrency was the answer. It requires neither democracy nor financial institutions. It is a person-to-person exchange outside state control—which is precisely the point.

The financial connections between Epstein and Thiel are substantial. Epstein invested $40 million into Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Thiel. Thiel exchanged more than 2,000 messages with Epstein over the years and met him on multiple occasions. When Epstein asked Thiel, “does my bad press give you pause?” Thiel replied: “If I was intimidated by bad press, I would not have gotten anywhere in life.” While Epstein was alive, he wasn’t a liability to Thiel. He was an asset.

Thiel draws on the thinking of Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt who rationalized authoritarian rule as essential to defeat existential enemies. Schmitt dismissed liberal democracy as naïve and useless. That is Thiel’s position. Liberal democracy is naïve and useless. In today’s terms, existential enemies are any force standing in the way of technological supremacy. Like democracy.

Thiel speaks openly of the world entering end times—speculating on literal battles between the Antichrist and a restraining force holding back apocalypse. Theological critics including Paolo Benanti, Vatican AI adviser and Franciscan priest, have pushed back on Thiel’s framing as theological distortion—a political project dressed in the language of Christian prophecy.

In Silicon Valley, this worldview has a name—several, actually. Bundled together they form an acronym that is ungainly but precise: TESCREAL.

TESCREAL describes a constellation of overlapping ideologies pervasive in Silicon Valley—philosophies that use the language of human progress to justify concentrating power among those who consider themselves most fit to wield it. Sam Bankman-Fried was a self-identified member of the Effective Altruism branch of this tree, with adjacencies to Transhumanism—the movement to surpass human limits with technology—and Longtermism, which prioritizes the far future and existential risk reduction. Longtermism gives a passing nod to cryonics—the practice of preserving a person’s body, sometimes just the brain, at very low temperatures after legal death, in hopes that future medicine will revive them. According to biographer Max Chafkin, Peter Thiel is among the most ardent proponents of cryonics. Thiel thinks of the prospect of freezing his body as a refusal to submit to biological decay—a core tenet of the transhumanist worldview, where human limitations are merely engineering problems to be solved.

Sam Bankman-Fried was born on the Stanford University campus, where his parents were both faculty members. Stanford’s founding president, David Starr Jordan, was one of the most prominent eugenicists of the early 20th century—the man who brought the “science” of selective breeding from Leland Stanford’s horse farms into the university’s DNA. There is a direct line from Palo Alto horse breeding through Jordan’s eugenics program through the IQ-testing industry to the meritocratic theology of Silicon Valley today. The institution that shaped the world SBF was born into was built, from its foundation, on the premise that some people are simply better than others—and that society should be arranged accordingly. TESCREAL takes that premise to its logical conclusion. Democracy is over. The choice has already been made. And the roar from Silicon Valley is only getting louder.

The Bureau of Prisons reports that Sam Bankman-Fried’s release date is December 14, 2044. That’s a long time for most people unless you subscribe to the transhumanist belief that death itself is a problem to be engineered away. In that case, twenty-five years is a mere inconvenience. Meanwhile, other boy geniuses are at work. They’re not stealing anything. They’re just taking what we give away.

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Footnote: Thanks to journalist Gil Duran, we are learning more about Palantir’s role in mass surveillance mounting to billions in government contracts. His podcast “Peter Thiel Is Watching You” is essential listening. Members of both parties are taking Palantir’s money. That is a story for another day. Gil’s forthcoming book in August The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy can be pre-ordered now via Simon & Schuster.

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These are some of the Courtside Warriors holding the line on authoritarianism— fighting to save democracy—and winning. Sign up for their newsletters. Support them if you can. They are joined by Attorneys General in 24 states who have won more than 80% of their cases against the authoritarian regime.

Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Defenders Fund, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause There are many more.