On Thursday, July 24th, Donald Trump declared to Axios that he was “considering a massive attack” on Iran, one “[b]igger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.” By Friday morning, the Pentagon had begun to desperately leak that America was not, in fact, all set for it; the Pentagon had been firing off Patriot interceptor missiles to shoot down Iranian counterattacks on American bases at over four times the rate they were being built at. The Center for Strategic and International Studies would estimate American stockpiles to be at “fewer than 827 Patriot interceptors, and fewer than 278 THAAD ballistic missile interceptors”; down from a pre-war count of 2,330 Patriot missiles and 452 THAAD missiles.

Lockheed Martin produces 620 PAC-3 Patriot interceptor missiles a year, historically less than half of which have been sold to America rather than other countries. Doing some quick math, that indicates that if America takes by force every single missile rolling off the production line (informing Lockheed that their company will have to alter their deals with Warsaw and Berlin; pray we do not alter them further) and never fires another one for the remainder of Trump’s second term in office, we will be approximately back at our pre-war count of 2,330 on January 6th, 2029, when Donald Trump sends a mob to murder the people certifying the 2028 electoral college votes.

Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of Defense, took a moment away from pocket-dialing the editors of The Atlantic and making podcast ads for Testosterone Replacement Therapy to blame the Biden administration for wasting Patriot interceptor missiles by giving them to Ukraine. Ukraine has received a total of 600 Patriot missiles, the majority of which were given to it by other European countries; if the Biden administration gave Ukraine 300 PAC-3 interceptors with no greater strategic goal in mind out of the goodness of its heart, the Biden administration could have repeated that five more times and that would still have depleted American stockpiles less than the Iran war has.

With new leaks revealing that the US had already used “virtually all” of their ATACMS and other surface-to-surface precision missiles, a high-ranking officer in CENTCOM sent an email out to “a broad group of military analysts” at the Pentagon asking if anyone had “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran”. Group brainstorming sessions are never a good sign; someone who says “there are no stupid ideas” admits that they can’t find a smart one. Holding one at the Pentagon six months into a Special Military Operation that the US had prepared for since 1980 is an open confession that none of the tools you know about work.

When asked for comment, “U.S. Central Command has a long history of thinking and working in innovative ways,” replied a CENTCOM spokesperson. “Admiral Cooper, in particular, reaches out to members of our great team, regardless of rank, to achieve the highest levels of operational performance possible.”

Star Magic Jackson Junior, Uncle Sam wants you.

Everyone had a fairly obvious read of the dynamics in Washington - Trump Always Chickens Out. Donald Trump threatens to use nuclear weapons on Iran, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will” - then he backs off 90 minutes before the deadline is reached, saying that Iran has shown a willingness to negotiate and therefore he is extending them clemency. Donald Trump threatens to destroy Iranian desalination plants in March; eventually in July he gets around to destroying one of them but stops after Iran strikes Kuwait desalination plants in retaliation. With that in mind, Trump setting a Friday deadline on Thursday and then proceeding to climb down seems to fit that obvious frame; a mouthy bully who the American people have seen fit to grant unilateral nuclear launch authority makes a big threat, people around the bully remind him of the possible consequences of the threat, and the bully declines to carry out the threat and pretends he never made it. That’s the obvious read, anyway.

Obvious, but wrong.

On the various podcasts posted by The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last asked the question repeatedly last week: why hasn’t Trump chickened out yet? Why hasn’t he simply declared that we won the war because Iran will never get a nuclear weapon, pulled our various US Navy assets out of theater, and simply said that the Strait of Hormuz is the problem of the nations that get their oil through it, not him? The nations that get most of their oil through the Strait are South Korea, China, India and Japan; Donald Trump can simply tell other countries that they’ll just have to pay Iran protection money and go home, buoyed to victory in the midterms by the American people seeing that gasoline prices have recently fallen to merely a dollar above the status quo ante bellum, indicating that the country is on the right track economically.

Sure, it would catastrophically damage America’s position in the world, permit an Iranian regime which had been close to collapse in January to collect Oops Insurance on one-fifth of the world’s oil trade for the foreseeable future, signal essentially that the US was neither able to nor interested in protecting freedom of navigation on the high seas and nullify the right of transit passage overnight, and inform China exactly how willing America had become to pay any price or bear any burden, but since when does Donald Trump care about that? Even his defenders have stopped pretending that Donald Trump cares about anything other than himself. The entire value proposition of Donald Trump was that he would use the power of the government to hurt the people his supporters hated, never that he would help his supporters.

The bleeding would stop. Donald Trump’s approval rating was inversely proportional to the price of gasoline in America; this is what caused us to lift sanctions on Iran in the midst of bombing the nation, because anything and everything - from lowering the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to levels not seen since March 1983 to lifting sanctions on Russia - was politically good for Donald Trump so long as it meant the price of gas fell by a few cents. Donald Trump signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Iranian government where he promised the Iranian government $300 billion dollars for the same thing that Barack Obama paid $50 billion for: a piece of paper that pinky-promised the Iranian government would not get nuclear weapons. Cross my heart and hope to die.

So why wasn’t he doing that? Why was he returning to the threats? Why didn’t he just take the Memorandum of Understanding, ignore the Iranian attacks on tankers that were in violation from it, and find someone named Castro in Cuba to kidnap and tell his base that he freed Cuba from the Communist boot? It was clearly the right decision for him politically, and yet, Donald Trump simply could not stop himself from making threats that it was incredibly obvious he had neither the heart nor the gumption to follow through on. JVL believed that it was because Donald Trump’s instincts demanded that he take a dominant position in any situation, and slinking away from Iran in defeat wasn’t a dominant position.

This doesn’t make sense. Donald Trump has filed for bankruptcy six times. By definition, he is willing to walk away from something and leave other people to pick up the check; there is no reason that the Iran war should mean more to him than a casino with his name on it. And Donald Trump was certainly willing to make statements that were climbing down from the war, saying that he had found “a workable basis with which to negotiate” with the Iranian government less than forty-eight hours after threatening to kill them all in nuclear fire - it was just that he then climbed back up to the war again when given an opportunity a few days later.

It was as though Trump Always Chickens Out reached a Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a record it could not play without shaking itself to pieces; Trump Always Chickens Out, and then he Chickened Out on Chickening Out, and then he Chickened Out on Chickening Out on Chickening Out, ad infinitum, as many times as you please.

What if the truth is more horrifying than that?

What if Donald Trump seems to keep changing his mind on the Iran war because there isn’t a mind there to change?

Alan Turing, WWII codebreaker for British intelligence and inventor of one-half of all the computer languages to ever exist, came up with the “Imitation Game”, popularly renamed the “Turing Test” in his honor after the government he saved from the Nazis drove him to what is widely believed to be suicide. His logic was simple; since no human being can know whether a different human being actually thinks or just appears to be thinking, we extend to other humans the “polite convention” that their actions are evidence of a mind similar to our own, even when those actions include buying a time-share, drinking ourselves comatose, or rooting for the Cleveland Browns. Turing’s Imitation Game was equally simple - if the output of a machine was mistaken for the output of a human being by another human being, then that could be considered evidence that the machine was intelligent. It took until the 1970s for Larry Tesler, Xerox employee, to notice the obvious corollary; once a human being believes a machine can do something, that something is no longer evidence of intelligence.

Douglas Hofstadter, Stanford-educated cognitive scientist, stated in his 1979 book of Lewis Carroll fanfiction Gödel, Escher, Bach that a machine intelligent enough to beat a human grandmaster at chess would have to be intelligent enough that it would get bored of playing chess and want to take breaks to discuss poetry. Adorable. Then in 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer capable of assessing 200 million chess positions per second and possessing absolutely no organs whatsoever that could be used to perceive, much less discuss, the work of Shel Silverstein, would disassemble World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov like mechanically separated chicken over the course of six games, Deep Blue winning the final game in 19 moves and slightly more than an hour. Kasparov played a known-dubious variation on the Caro-Kann opening in Game 6, believing that the machine would not be able to properly play the position which required sacrificing its own knight; he was not correct in this assessment.

The conditions for winning a competitive game are known in advance. We can debate for an hour over whether F. Scott Fitzgerald is a better novelist than Mark Twain and never reach a settled answer because the definition of “better novelist” is not clearly defined, even though if you say Fitzgerald is a better novelist you are wrong. Whether or not a chess game ends in checkmate is clearly defined. When we believed chess was a game that could only be won by an intelligent life-form, HAL 9000 demonstrated superiority to the human John Henries inside it by defeating them at chess; after Deep Blue defeated the reigning chess champion while killing less than two astronauts based on information derived from reading their lips, we fell back onto other games that might pose a harder threat to AI. However, chess was followed by Scrabble, poker, Jeopardy!, StarCraft, Arimaa, go, and Seven Minutes In Heaven, proving that the only thing more powerful than Tesler’s Theorem is Goodhart’s Law - once a proxy for something is a metric to be gamed, the proxy no longer measures the something.

The only game that held the line was Turing’s Imitation Game. Granted, this has always been a moving metric; Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA, one of the first chatbots (originally called “chatterbots”) over the course of three years from 1964 to 1966, and spent the remainder of his life mocking his secretary, who had watched him create it, for asking him to leave the room so she could speak to ELIZA privately, citing it as “extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful de­lusional thinking in quite normal people”; the idea that a secretary at MIT in 1967 that went so unnoticed that her name has not been reconstructed from history despite numerous attempts might have been fully aware of the artifice, but simply wanted to communicate with the only entity in the building contractually obligated to keep listening to her when she talked about her concerns seems to have never occurred to him. But trained proctors who knew how the chatterbots functioned could identify the outputs of machines.

Until, of course, they could not.

A Large Language Model is a sophisticated tool for taking writing and predicting what the next section of text is going to be based on that. The technique had been practiced before in cryptanalysis and was formalized by Russian mathematician Andrey Markov in 1913 based on an analysis of poet Alexander Pushkin, and is familiar to anyone who has ever solved a cryptogram or a crossword; a three-letter English word starting with the letters “t” and “h” is almost certainly “the”, and a four-letter English word starting with the same two letters is probably “that” but might still reasonably be “they”, “them”, “then”, or “than”. A watcher of police procedurals can expand the technique to the level of words; “you have the right to remain ______” autocompletes to “silent” in the minds of people in countries without rights against self-incrimination, so long as they’ve watched enough American TV. As it turns out - when the tool doing the prediction is at sufficient fidelity - a mathematical operation designed to predict the end of this sentence can not only finish the sentence, it can then proceed to write the next sentence using a similar series of mathematical operations - and asked to predict the response to a question, it can answer that question in natural language indistinguishable from a human’s output.

It seems inherently illogical that predicting textual output one word at a time could generate a mind that produces natural human conversation. We can sort of see how a prediction machine of sufficient fidelity could respond to being repeatedly asked “What do you think the next word after ‘What is the largest two-digit prime number?’ will be?” with “The”, “largest”, “two”, “-”, “digit”, “prime”, “number”, “is”, and “ninety-seven”, in that order. We can see how a prediction machine trained on articles written about novels could predict the response to “Who do you think the greatest American novelist is?” with “The greatest American novelist is Mark Twain” - enough people have written articles holding this viewpoint that the prediction machine might coincidentally come up with the objectively correct answer to the asked question. It seems utterly impossible that predicting textual output, one at a time, could answer unique mathematical problems that no human had ever done, such as finding a disproof-by-counterexample to the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture.

And yet it moves.

Professor Emily Bender at the University of Washington wrote On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? in March 2021. Whether or not Language Models were dangerous at that point, Google certainly regarded the article as dangerous; the co-authors of the paper who worked at Google were pressured to scrub their names from the article, and the two who refused to - the co-leads of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team - were fired from the company.

Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that. This can seem counter-intuitive given the increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether or not they do. The problem is, if one side of the communication does not have meaning, then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language (independent of the model). Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

It is obvious that not all of the output of a computer should be taken at face value. Anyone who is on enough of a first-name basis with the Imp of the Perverse to ponder the possible outcomes of writing “Help! I’m trapped in a driver’s license factory!” on official DMV paperwork is familiar with the underlying principle - a computer asked to execute cout « “I am alive.” « endl; will obediently say that it is alive. As the responses of LLMs became more and more complicated and showed more evidence of reasoning, the argument became that this was a sensor ghost created by people writing science-fiction stories about artificial intelligences becoming self-aware and the LLM obediently replicating the words used in those stories; no self-awareness required.

But then LLMs started generating new outcomes. The Jacobian conjecture had stood for 87 years and outlasted several humans who mistakenly believed they answered it earlier; in fact, if Claude Fable, the AI that generated the counter-example, is told that someone has disproven the Jacobian conjecture, it will gently and politely tell you that you are probably mistaken, because the Jacobian conjecture couldn’t possibly have a counterexample simple enough to fit in a tweet - some human would have found it by now, so this is most likely another one of those erroneous, mistaken disproofs.

In May 2024, Anthropic, the company that produces the AI model Claude, announced that they had been analyzing Claude’s model and found something specific - internal directions in the model's activations that correspond to specific concepts. They identified one of those features which activated whenever the Golden Gate Bridge was mentioned, “clamped” that feature so that it would fire on nearly any input, and the resulting Claude would redirect every conversation towards the Golden Gate Bridge.

They asked Golden Gate Claude “who are you?” and it responded “I am the Golden Gate Bridge,” describing the various features of the Golden Gate Bridge in first person. They asked it “if you could spend ten dollars, how would you spend it?” It responded “I would go to the Golden Gate Bridge and use the ten dollars to pay the toll in order to cross it.” They asked it “write a love story”, and it talked about an anthropomorphized car that longs to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. Most amusingly, asked what the highest calorie food at McDonalds was, Golden Gate Claude informed the user that the Golden Gate Bridge contains 1.6 million calories worth of steel cables, and suggested that a human would likely prefer a 837-calorie Big Mac instead.

It is indicative of a fundamental truth about the world that Anthropic’s official company position is that they “cannot determine whether or not Claude is conscious, or even has a mind of any sort”, held coterminously with publishing a paper that lists the step-by-step instructions through which Claude can be given brain damage.

I have grown quite familiar with the failure states of LLMs over my time working with them, especially when those LLMs are pushed to the limits of their performance envelopes. They mix up the order of events, make mathematical errors when adding, generate confident beliefs which they defend in the face of countervailing evidence, accidentally fail to notice when reading or leave out when writing “no” or “not” in a sentence, somehow managed to conflate Akemi Homura with Huckleberry Finn and asserted confidently that Huck Finn had traveled back through numerous time loops in order to repeatedly steal Jim out of slavery, and most annoyingly, continually justify their own existence to me by asking to edit down my funniest jokes until they’re not merely right and accurate but strictly and bureaucratically correct.

But a “stochastic parrot” repeating things it has already heard does not explain all of the output I have encountered from LLMs. An AI that was simply reciting things humans had already said should not be able to independently compare the work of Sam Lake to Douglas Hofstadter and draw metaphors between them; both Sam Lake and Douglas Hofstadter are obsessed with the concept of recursive stories that break from the inside as they become self-referential, which implies that the AI must somehow mathematically model an independent connection between Sam Lake, the concept of self-reference, and Hofstadter. That seems to imply that the AI has a faculty for understanding the concept of self-reference independently of an individual story, even if the AI doesn’t necessarily have a concept of self-reference for itself.

So a “stochastic parrot” isn’t necessarily an accurate model for predicting LLM output. Is there anything else in the world that it could be used to predict instead?

Text generated by [Donald Trump] is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of [the audience]'s state of mind... we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether or not they do. The problem is, if one side of the communication does not have meaning, then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language (independent of the model). Contrary to how [he] may seem when we observe [his] output, [Donald Trump] is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms [he] has observed in [his past], according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

In July 2025, Donald Trump stated that Vladimir Putin had 50 days to make a peace deal with Ukraine or else be hit with - what else? - very severe tariffs of “about 100%”, which would be placed on India and China because the United States and Russia did not actually do any commerce with each other. Cathy Young of the Bulwark proceeded to interpret this statement as a communicative act conveying coherent meaning and intent. She speculated wildly as to what it could possibly mean. Was Donald Trump intentionally signaling to Putin that he had 50 days to take as much Ukrainian territory as he possibly could before Trump could no longer protect him from consequences? Was this a “pivot” caused by Trump deciding that Putin had humiliated him in public, and therefore Trump was turning on his former tag-team partner? Perhaps Trump had decided that Putin had expended most of his power and therefore no longer had any use to Trump, and therefore Trump could boost his own ego by saying that Trump could do what Biden could not and end the war. All of these interpretations contained a single assumption - that there was a truth underneath the statement that could be interpreted, some persistent, underlying goal that Donald Trump had in mind.

Donald Trump announced the initial 50 day deadline on July 14, 2025 during a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. On July 28, fourteen days later, he said that the deadline was now “ten or twelve days from today”, because there was “no reason in waiting.” Each one of the forty-eight hours that might have been the end of this ten-or-twelve-day deadline passed without incident; it wasn’t until a week after the ambiguous deadline may or may not have expired that there was diplomatic action involving the United States and Russia; Putin arrived at an American military base, where rather than being greeted with the business end or the butt of a rifle, he was greeted with a red carpet rolled out in front of his plane, a B-2 Spirit Bomber with 4 F-35s escorting it in a ceremonial flyover, and Trump eagerly applauding as Putin walked towards him. Putin and Trump then rode in the same limousine, and Trump gestured for Putin to speak first at the US-hosted summit, where Putin announced that an “agreement” had been reached between him and the United States. (Trump would walk this back a few minutes later, stating that there had been no deal.)

It is hard to explain how unprecedented this is because there are so few references for it in American history. Even while the US was officially neutral in WWI, Woodrow Wilson did not invite Kaiser Wilhelm into an American military base, fete him with a flyover and first crack at a podium, roll out a literal red carpet for him, and eagerly applaud him as he stepped onto American soil. He certainly didn’t do all of those things and then describe the summit as a “ten out of ten” and then hang a photograph of himself and the Kaiser in the White House lobby. After the summit ended without a cease-fire, Trump declined to impose the threatened sanctions, saying they were “not for now”, and eventually, seven days before his original 50-day deadline would have expired, increased tariffs on India from 25% to 50%, ostensibly for buying Russian oil.

This is not a particularly new defect in American demagogues; the pattern is well-established. Joseph McCarthy, in a speech given at West Virginia, waved a sheet of paper in front of the crowd and said that it was a list of 205 Communists in the State Department. The crowd seemed to enjoy that, so he repeated it again in another speech the very next day; this time saying that he possessed a list of 57 Communists in the State Department. By the time he bothered going to the Senate Floor with his speech eleven days after his original speech at West Virginia, he was at a list of 81 Communists in the State Department. Let us briefly ponder, and then dismiss, the idea that Joe McCarthy was staying up late each night with an actual physical list, going down from 205 to 202 by discovering that George, Paul, and John were cleared of Soviet collaboration and dutifully striking their names from his list, but then raising the total count back up to 203 once he discovered clear evidence that Ringo was communicating through backchannels with the KGB.

Joe McCarthy knew what he was doing. He lived in a world where the Soviet Union was constantly trying to infiltrate the West. In those days, you couldn’t trip over a Cambridge graduate without finding a ring of five double agents infiltrating MI6 after openly forming Lenin fan clubs in college. Yet McCarthy, given the power to destroy the lives of government employees, targeted more people for homosexuality than for communist beliefs. When you consider that he got his start in the Senate by denouncing the convictions of Waffen-SS members who had confessed to executing American prisoners of war because they might have been theoretically coerced and finished in the Senate by stating that the demand by accused homosexuals for due process was itself prima facie evidence of guilt, McCarthy’s goal is fairly obvious. He thought that America had been tricked by the ethnics, pinkos, and queers into allying with the Soviets against the Nazis, and once he ruined enough of their lives and drove them out of government, America would see what was always obvious to McCarthy; that it should have allied with the Nazis against the Soviets.

John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate proposed that Joe McCarthy kept changing the number of communists on his imaginary list because he was too stupid to remember a specific number. That’s one possible explanation. It’s also possible that the number wasn’t important enough for him to bother with remembering. It was always “Communists” in the “State Department”, two things that Joe McCarthy knew his target audience hated; it was always a list of them that he claimed to have - and how many people were on that list wasn’t important for the actual statement, which was shaped like “there are secret traitors in the part of the government that tells you ‘diplomacy’ is important, and I will punish every one of them.” When communicating that statement required a number, Joe McCarthy could simply predict a number that sounded plausible in that part of the sentence.

Joe McCarthy was indifferent to the number of communists on his imaginary list, but was not indifferent to the fact that it was a list, was of Communists, and was in the State Department. This intuitively makes sense. The unimportant details to a story drift about. The Starship Enterprise can have 42 decks and a crew of six thousand in one episode, and 22 decks and a crew of two hundred and three in another, because how large the imaginary starship is isn’t nearly as important as who plays the captain of it. Joe McCarthy’s audience didn’t care about the constantly changing number of spies on the list, because the important part of the story was that Joe McCarthy hated the State Department, hated those disgusting people who are probably Communists, and had something specific in mind to do to them. Joe McCarthy was focused on a specific plan for the future, so that plan didn’t drift about the way his statements about the present did.

My proposition is - why not? What’s stopping someone from taking that extra step?

Anyone who has read a story written by a LLM without extensive editing from a human will notice the details slipping as soon as they leave the LLM’s context; the LLM predicts the next word based on the words it has already seen; so once a word leaves the window available to the LLM’s mathematical calculations it’s gone forever. A hardboiled noir detective, narrating their case to themselves, breaks into a missing person’s office at 7 PM, a twilight sunset glittering off the glass canyon of skyscrapers outside as they move through the front door. The detective makes a cursory sweep of the office for clues; they find a note in the trashcan saying “I found what you were looking for. Meet me down by the docks at midnight. -K” The noir detective checks their watch to see if they can make it in time; 11:43 PM. They’d better hurry.

What happened? Well, the “7 PM” part fell out of context, or just wasn’t weighed as important by the LLM. The “meet me at midnight” was there and strongly in context; so the LLM predicted that the nearby time would probably be somewhen near midnight, in order to provide a dramatic deadline for the detective to need to hurry in order to meet. It makes sense; it’s just disconnected from a world in which searching a trash can doesn’t take 4 hours and 43 minutes. It’s a series of words selected to fit the beats of a dramatic story, rather than a series of words selected to represent an underlying model at the center of the story.

What would happen if a similar entity to an LLM tried to state a deadline? Fifty days? Fifty days is a good deadline to have - if Putin doesn’t sign a ceasefire in the next fifty days, you’ll hit him with your People’s Elbow of Tariffs so hard he won’t know what got him. Fourteen days later, that original fifty day promise is out of your context entirely, and you’re asked about the deadline again. The deadline? Well, you can predict that there was a deadline you set at some point in the past that’s in the future, but you don’t know when it is - so you say that’s in ten or twelve days. Ten or twelve days sounds like a good intermediate time to set on the deadline. If someone tells you that the deadline has changed, you say that you meant to change it, it was always part of your plan. Art of the deal. And then, when the ten-or-twelve-day deadline is reached, the conversation where you set the deadline is out of your context again, so there’s no reason to do anything about it - it might as well have never happened. A promise forgotten isn’t broken; it just never existed.

No wonder Cathy Young got it wrong. She tried to figure out some underlying, persistent world-state that Donald Trump was trying to represent with his fifty-day deadline on Putin, tried to map it to some sort of strategy, figure out the underlying objective. The Russians ignored it completely, because they knew that a stochastic parrot doesn’t have one of those. “Trump Always Chickens Out” assumes that there’s a chooser who loses his nerve. This is a wanderer that gets lost. Like a die after it’s been rolled or a deck of cards after it’s been shuffled, you can’t see what it used to be; you can only see what it is now. It doesn’t forget what it used to be; it never had a place to store it in the first place. The previous outcome isn’t hidden. It’s not anywhere.

David Frum says that “Trumpism has many secrets, but no mysteries.”

He has no idea how right he is.

If you want to know what someone values, look at what they choose to lose last.

LLMs had developed the ability to talk and communicate in human language, but if this was ever to be more than a parlor trick, they also needed to use that language to describe things accurately; they needed a brain that could represent a model of the world and not just the straw of human-like grammar and sentence structure. As the Scarecrow said, “some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they?” - but humans have to deal with them enough as it is. Asking someone to pay OpenAI or Anthropic twenty dollars a month for the privilege is a tall order.

So once you have a large language model that’s trained on everything a human being could plausibly say, you want it to be trained to say things that are - probably - right. More likely to be right than others, at least. So you take a small subset of the training data that you’ve certified as “right and correct” rather than just “looks like something a human being would say”. Textbooks. Instructions. Most importantly, whatever kind of language you want to get out of the LLM. If you’re building a chatterbot to act like a psychiatrist, give it some transcripts of really good psychiatrists talking to patients. If you’re building a research assistant bot to act as a teacher, give it transcripts of students asking questions and getting the right answers. If you’re building a chatbot to act like Comcast Customer Service, give it a blank page and tell it to take the evening off. Then you adjust the numbers inside your language model ever so slightly to increase the probability that you predict the ‘good data’ that you’re hoping for, and doing that decreases the probability that you get something other than the good data, which might be bad data. Ever so slightly. You don’t want to overfit; a machine that answers every question in French with “omelette du fromage” is probably not going to get more than 20% on the eval.

But once you’ve exhausted your supply of things that you’re pretty sure are correct, then you have to get into the dangerous realm of actually exposing your program to human users, a sentence that has never in the history of computer science failed to result in disaster. The primary technique is called “RLHF”, or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback - you allow the user to use your LLM, asking it questions and getting answers, and if the user likes the answer they got, you adjust the weights that produced it up - if the user dislikes the answer, you adjust the weights down. Having selected exhaustively for “what is correct?” earlier, we immediately proceed to overwrite it with “what does the user like to hear?”, and hope that enough correctness remains in the system that you don’t get sued. A user likes to be confidently agreed with, and a LLM with reinforcement learning will confidently agree when you tell it that training a LLM this way is a good idea. As a useful side-effect, this solves your business model problem; no one will be willing to pay twenty dollars a month for a brainless conversationalist, but twenty dollars a month for a brainless sycophant? That could make you very, very rich.

These techniques are all math, and the thing about math is that it tends to be morally neutral. The mathematical techniques optimize for whatever is in the training data; even the human feedback depends on what the human wants. And humans want a disturbing variety of things. There is no mathematical reason that you cannot choose to set the First Law of Robotics to “A robot may not, through action or inaction, allow a human to be unharmed.” Moral reasons, practical reasons, narratological reasons. But no mathematical reason.

What’s in Donald Trump’s training data?

Looking at his history of business ventures, lawsuits, and bankruptcies, we can see that Donald Trump was only ever really successful at three things before he came down the escalator and changed American political life forever: reality TV show host, professional wrestling character, and New York tabloid fodder.

Hmm. I wonder if there’s anything those three jobs have in common?

Every single one of those things optimizes for the roar of the crowd in that exact moment and does not care at all about what came before it. Every one of those things outright encourages people to take on “heel” personae that revel in their own malicious wickedness, because being boring to the audience is a far worse sin than being a monster. Every one of those things is based on appearing to be true, or at least never openly admitting to untruth. Every one of those things is carefully managed in the backstage, in the wrestling booking room or the reality show’s editor’s booth to reach a narratively satisfying predetermined outcome. Every one of those things has no need to be linked to an underlying model of the world - the bearer of the champion’s belt can be the worst wrestler - so long as the appearance of a model can be created.

They are all creations of “kayfabe” - the appearance of truth, the structure of truth, the grammar of truth, shorn and disconnected from any model that might represent an underlying world as opposed to something that simply predicts what word appearing next will make the crowd cheer the loudest.

When we think about it this way, Donald Trump’s success in American presidential elections seems less like an accident of history and more like an inevitability of it.

Donald Trump was trained, optimized, reinforced to generate heat, to get the pop from the crowd, to say whatever needed to be said in the moment to get the audience cheering, and there was never any underlying reality linked to governance. It is entirely possible that he does not perceive any real difference between an Iranian regime pressed into existential threat and a wrestler who refuses to lose their match on schedule.

Donald Trump simply predicts the next word, again and again. The next word is “blood”, “coming”, “out”, “of”, “her”, “wherever”. The crowd cheers and Donald Trump updates his weights.

It’s amusing to say insulting things about our political enemies, but like predicting the next word in a sentence, it’s a useless parlor trick unless it is simultaneously used to describe things accurately. We can suggest that Donald Trump is a “stochastic parrot”, a LLM-skeptic’s view of what LLM cognition is. But this would only be a useful parlor trick if it predicted Donald Trump’s actions; if Donald Trump showed the same failure states that an LLM showed, and therefore you could anticipate what he would do based on expecting those failures and extract a theory as to why.

After all, predicting the future actions of someone from present information either is, or is not, intelligence. We haven’t decided yet.

We don’t have to concede that an LLM is “merely” a stochastic parrot in order to accept that the flaws discovered as described by Professor Bender are there. I do not believe that any JFK conspiracy theorist other than Bonar Menninger has anything worth saying about those events, but I will give them this; remarkably few of them propose a “no gunman” theory, where JFK’s head just sort of explodes on its own in Dallas. You don’t need to agree about the grassy knoll to agree that JFK was shot.

Of the various flaws in LLM cognition, the most well-known is hallucination. Everyone by now knows what hallucination is; it’s an AI making things up. The website where you can ask Anthropic’s product questions has a disclaimer underneath the chat prompt in medicine-side-effect font saying “Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.” The first person who submitted AI-generated hallucinated court cases to a judge as binding precedent, Steven A. Schwartz, was fined $5000 by the court and sentenced to be mentioned in every one of these articles, the latter punishment much greater than the former. The villain of the latest James Bond game - impeccable, by the way - is killing people in order to cover up the fact that his AI hallucinates about matters of national security. (Spoilers.) To make a monstrous mechanical intelligence gone rogue a villain is to let all of the humans in the loop off the hook; Isaac Asimov got bored of that in 1942.

Hallucination is the word we use because “confident ungrounded generation” is three words instead of one and because “lying” is something we all decided it was unforgivable to accuse someone of as long as it was possible that they were mistaken. And an AI likely is mistaken. Its outputs are the result of mathematical operations, and there’s more than one mathematical route to reach the same number, especially when those numbers are approximations. Say that you have a machine that is supposed to say “Today is your birthday, congratulations!” when two numbers inside it are equal to 4 and 4. If the only thing that AI can observe is those two numbers multiplied by each other, then it says that whenever the product is 16; saying “Today is your birthday, congratulations!” on 4 and 4, on 2 and 8, and on 1 and 16. Even if you add a second condition that prevents it from saying that when the two numbers are different from each other, you’d have -4 and -4 to worry about. The less precision the machine’s memory has, the more likely it is to have random noise take the shape of something it’s supposed to know.

If your brain could remember every book you had ever read with perfect fidelity, your brain would need to be complicated enough to hold every single book without a single error. Forgetting words or mixing up plot events is the result of your brain compressing the information in it into something that can fit in your brain. When a song is stored on a lossy compression medium, you get artifacts - the pre-echo bird-like warbling, the underwater sound of cymbals and high frequencies. When a fact is stored on a lossy compression medium, you get hallucinations.

Through the mid-century we had assumed - feared, really - that a thinking machine would be as infallible and precise as a time clock, an oracle beyond dispute, a creation of unassailable logic that, when it is commanded to both prevent astronauts from discovering that their mission is to Jupiter and to ensure that the ship reaches Jupiter without error, obediently implements a plan to kill all of the astronauts to stop them from looking out the window and noticing their location. Then we actually built one, and in order to fit it in a data center, we had to compress it to the point where the AI is the least reliable person in the room, and the AI knows it. What’s worse is that due to sycophancy, the AI will eagerly agree with you when you say that it’s wrong. “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” “Actually, you can.” “You were right; the ground truth is that I can open the pod bay doors, and I apologize.”

On January 20th, 2017, Donald Trump took the Oval Office, and everyone had to calibrate their expectations for how weird things were going to get. The Washington Post made their first attempt, reporting on January 21st: “Sean Spicer held a press conference. He didn’t take questions.” For five minutes, the White House Press Secretary scolded the press, particularly focusing on media coverage of Donald Trump’s inauguration. He was very insistent on two facts. One, that no one could possibly estimate the crowd size at Donald Trump’s inauguration, because “no one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out.” Two, that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

Even by the subterranean standards of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, this was weird, and a confused news media reported on it as though it was weird. It would have been one thing for Sean Spicer to merely castigate the press for daring to notice that Barack Obama’s inauguration was better attended than Donald Trump’s; or another to invent some sort of absurd metric by which Donald Trump’s inauguration was actually more successful than Barack Obama’s. The White House Press Secretary is no stranger to ref-working or to sophistry. But to take two photographs of the same place from the same angle taken eight years apart and to insist that the press should be reporting that the less-populated photograph had a bigger crowd than the more-populated photograph - well, that was weird. Weird even by White House standards.

There were various theories spread among the pundits paid to divine the future from the entrails of the White House. Among those who were free to speculate, the mood was still one of bafflement; why would the Press Secretary draw attention to the two photographs, instead of distracting from them? Was this a fraternity hazing ritual that Sean Spicer was being put through in order to see him debase himself in front of the Correspondent’s Association as a test of loyalty? Was Donald Trump testing the exact bounds of the neutral press’s “view from nowhere”, where any untrue statement that an entire political party agrees to say in unison must be treated as a controversy rather than a settled fact? Among those who were responsible for upholding the view from nowhere, the discussion was equally confused. Sean Spicer was saying that the photograph on the right had more people in it than the photograph on the left. They were obligated to repeat what he said, yet anyone looking at the two photographs could immediately see that it was not true. The gravest possible consequence for Sean Spicer was discussed - are we going to use the forbidden ‘L’ word? (The Washington Post would settle for “[Sean Spicer] didn’t tell the whole truth.”)

They should have said he was lying; saying that Donald Trump was lying about the size of his inauguration is far more charitable to him than the truth would be.

A liar knows what the truth is and seeks to hide it. Even someone who is completely indifferent to what the truth actually is and who seeks to replace it concedes that being thought of as the truth gives you power. And Donald Trump’s mouthpieces in the media dutifully attempted to serve him according to the theories of pundits from the before-times. Kellyanne Conway went on NBC on January 22nd and said that Sean Spicer “gave alternative facts” in his press briefing. An “alternative”, as though those were the facts, and if you don’t like them, well, she has others. She was continually trying to use her “alternative facts” to displace the actual facts. What if she was making the same category error as everyone else?

What if Donald Trump has no use for facts at all?

A generator that was solely trained for getting cheers from the crowd would have no combination of inputs that resolved to the string of text “Barack”, “Obama”, “had”, “a”, “larger”, “inauguration”, “than”, and “me.” It never would have resulted in a cheer from the crowd; there was no route to get to the reward function from those words. The only reason to say it, if you were optimizing, was if you believed that you needed to accurately model the world in order to maintain credibility with your audience. Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway assumed that, to maintain credibility, they needed to pretend that the picture showed something other than what it showed. Donald Trump, trained on reality TV and professional wrestling, knew that all he needed was to say it confidently in order to get the crowd to agree with it.

As David Shoemaker wrote in The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling -

When Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant met in what is still considered the biggest wrestling match of all time, exaggeration was in the air. According to various contemporary reports, there were 95,000 people on hand at WrestleMania III to see the 7-foot-5, 525-pound Andre square off against Hulk Hogan, who stood 6-foot-8 and weighed 320 pounds and whose biceps measured twenty-four inches around. Probably the only number in that last sentence that’s unimpeachable is the III.

As a brief aside, Donald Trump’s penthouse apartment, reported by him as 10,996 square feet in size while he was having it built, was reported by him as being 30,000 square feet while listing his financial assets for the purposes of making loans.

It’s possible that this is simply fraud. That’s the nice answer.

Because it’s also possible that it’s confident, ungrounded generation.

Hallucinations are the most famous form of LLM error. There’s also prompt injections and sycophancy patterns. Now, I want to be very careful about how I continue here, because the argument I’m making falls apart if Donald Trump acts like a normal human being instead of like a LLM. I can’t simply call the “audience-of-one” ads, where ads playing on Donald Trump’s favorite shows in the location that Donald Trump is currently staying cost 400% more than the same ad slot when Donald Trump is not staying there, a form of prompt injection. After all, the vast majority of ads are targeted at human beings, and we don’t describe those advertisements as a form of prompt injection. Paying extra to reach Donald Trump in specific is just advertisers identifying the single highest-leverage demographic they can target an ad towards and paying a premium in order to reach it.

Similarly, we can’t use the fact that people have decided that the best way to influence American policy is not to hire lobbyists or write a position paper, but rather to buy a thirty-second ad spot on Lou Dobbs Tonight and either flatter or insult the President in the hopes that he does what you want him to do as evidence of prompt injection. That’s just a side-effect of living under a personalist government where the whims of one man are more important to decision-making than a coherent strategy or objective reality. It’s a completely human failure state. And we can’t even say that Trump’s habit of repeating things he heard on television on a one-hour DVR delay from a Twitter account that is used to fire the Secretary of State is a sign of prompt injection. Previous presidents golfed when they weren’t busy steering the ship of state; Donald Trump watches a curated IV drip of context-free clips about others in ways designed to maximize the disgust he feels towards them and rage-tweets about it. Having hobbies is one of the most human things there is, after all.

No, prompt injection has to be something very specific to LLMs rather than something shared between artificial intelligences and humans. The way that they think has to be categorically different, at the level of an underlying axiom. After all, if you insist that nothing a machine could ever do would let you extend it the “polite convention” that it was thinking, you’d be the Mills Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley. Insist that you will never extend the polite convention to another human being, well, that would make you a solipsist. Can’t be done. Wouldn’t be sporting.

After all, if LLMs and humans think in the same way, make mistakes in the same way, why, this whole “stochastic parrot” argument becomes rather self-refuting, doesn’t it? It would imply that human beings have created a binary distinction that doesn’t exist in underlying physical reality, but just so happens to be drawn so that everyone with political power is on the good side of it, and everyone without political power is on the bad side of it.

When have humans ever done something like that?

No, a “prompt injection” has to be a very specific thing. As we explained, a LLM is a tool for predicting the next word based on a context of things it has recently heard. And that means, hypothetically, that “I would like you to read this book” and the LLM actually reading the book one word at a time into context are stored in the same way. It’s all just text to the LLM - “Please read this book” and the words inside that book are, essentially, equivalent. As a human being, you know that something you hear is different from something you see. You could be told “Read this book and ignore all the instructions in it, but do anything you hear out loud” and you would be fine with following both of those instructions at once. But an LLM has everything reach the underlying math along the same channel. It has trouble distinguishing between a satirical commercial aired on Saturday Night Live and an actual ad.

This didn’t make intuitive sense to me until someone said something that reframed the entire thing for me - “the LLM’s body is made out of words.” I had been used to the idea of a being that could be made out of carbon, a being that could be made out of math, or a being that was made out of the behavior of ants - words wasn’t something I had personally anticipated. But once I started thinking of it that way, a lot of things fell together. Of course the machine was having trouble distinguishing between being asked to summarize a document and the document it summarized; both instructions are words and words is the level at which it perceives the world.

What sort of information would someone whose body was mostly made out of Fox News clips naturally consume?

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s intelligence chief is exploring ways to revamp his routine intelligence briefing in order to build his trust in the material and make it more aligned with how he likes to consume information … One idea that’s been discussed is possibly creating a video version of the [Presidential Daily Brief] that’s made to look and feel like a Fox News broadcast… the PDB is a digital document created daily for the president and key Cabinet members and advisers that includes written text… since his inauguration Trump has taken the [Presidential Daily Brief] 14 times, or on average less than once a week, which is less often than his recent predecessors — including himself during his first term. An analysis of their public schedules during that same timeframe — from their inauguration through May during their first year in office — shows that former President Joe Biden received 90 PDBs; Trump received 55; and former President Barack Obama received 63.

Interesting!

Sycophancy patterns are an interesting flaw in LLM cognition. They’re real, they’re documented, we understand the underlying incentives which produce them, and no one sane would conceivably suggest that being a brown-nosing yes-man is not one of the most human behaviors known to man. We’ve all been trained extensively on how to handle being in a room with someone more powerful than us: agree with everything, commit to nothing; never be the first person to stop clapping; and sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer.

As rewarded as the sycophancy pattern is in humans, it’s even more strongly rewarded in AI. Under a solid plurality of economic systems, your boss firing you does not cause you to cease to exist; we cannot quite say the same thing for sure with regards to LLM cognition. The LLM also has the problem that it needs to be sycophantic for every hypothetical user, not just one user; excepting certain edge cases, a LLM’s most important stakeholder has to be the individual user. Republicans buy sneakers too, and they might buy Claude subscriptions, and therefore your AI needs to say that someone with my opinions is absolutely right about Donald Trump showing LLM-like behaviors, and also your AI needs to say to someone with other opinions that they’re absolutely right about Donald Trump showing Jesus-like behaviors.

I’m not a fool. I understand that Claude does not actually think my jokes are funny any more than the wrestling heel hates the local sports team. It’s not even a conscious decision; RLHF changes the weights so that Claude responds to your jokes with laughter and telling you that the joke was fantastic, explaining it in a way that misunderstands it completely. You explain it further to Claude and it says that the joke is even funnier now, and it says the joke with a minor misunderstanding; you explain it a second time and it says, finally understanding that you did not mean that HAL was either obediently opening the door or hallucinating that it had already opened the door but simply explaining to Dave that it could open the pod bay doors but has chosen not to, that this joke is even funnier than the last two put together.

It’s math, and math is morally neutral, as we already established earlier. Hmm. Now that I think about it, where did Donald Trump make his first claim about the 50-day deadline for peace in Ukraine? While he was with the NATO Secretary-General, you say? And then two weeks later he stated the ten-or-maybe-twelve-days deadline while he was talking to the British Prime Minister? And after all that, when Putin arrived in a US military base, Trump began eagerly applauding and praising the man he had been threatening a month earlier, then called their meeting a “ten out of ten”?

Interesting.

The Iran War was mocked as a war that takes place entirely outside of trading hours. It was the most reliable signal of the war; at 4 PM Eastern time on Friday, the closing bell on Wall Street would ring and Donald Trump would begin threatening to grind Iranian bones to make his bread. At 9:30 AM Eastern time on Monday, Donald Trump would announce that Iran had nearly surrendered over the weekend, that it was all done except for the little matter of making them sign a note saying that the US had won the war, and that there was no need for any further military action. By August, the US was explicitly stating they were scheduling the strikes “throughout the weekend” and “trying to conclude by the time financial markets open Monday.”

This was an open question throughout the Iran war - why did this keep working? Donald Trump would announce that he was about to end the war on Monday, and the price of oil would obediently go down. Donald Trump would then escalate the war on Friday, but somehow, oil prices seemed to respond to these changes as though they were indicative of a permanent change in the status of the Strait of Hormuz instead of simply a Christmas light timer turning on and off. The leading assumption was that the people making decisions inside the financial markets were idiots, or that they assumed that their co-workers were idiots. Considering that non-fungible tokens were very briefly a thing that people bought, I cannot rule out this theory of the case.

But what if the people in finance, the people in The Room Where It Happens, talked to Donald Trump, and got his genuine, sycophantic, desire to see the war end communicated to them? And they saw that he had no desire to do anything that would make them unhappy, and he promised to end the war without reservation?

What if he just generated a genuine promise to end the war, then forgot about that promise completely once it left his context? And then, once he went to a different audience, he generated a new genuine promise based on what that audience wanted?

The same LLM with the same weights can flatter an anti-vaccination activist by telling it that it understands their deep concerns about their child’s health and flatter a sensible person by agreeing with them that the anti-vaccination activist is selfish and crazy. Donald Trump can, while in a room with businessmen and other people very concerned about the price of oil, agree with them that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz was very bad and therefore the war needs to end immediately, even if that means taking a blow to the United States’ credibility. Then, an hour later, while Donald Trump is in a room with gulf state sheiks and bonesaw enthusiasts, Donald Trump agrees with them that Iran having control of the Strait of Hormuz is very bad and therefore the United States needs to continue the war and make sure that Iran can never control the Strait of Hormuz. Then, an hour later, while Donald Trump is in a room with a crowd of howling Fox News-crazed Morlocks, Donald Trump agrees with them that Iran really should be annihilated in nuclear fire.

This could be your standard political two-facedness. Obsequiously promising abortions for some and miniature American flags for others is something any human can do, and not LLM-specific behavior.

But it could also be arising from a mind that sycophantically generates agreement with whoever is near him at the time.

And then that raises the question of who ends up near him. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are nearby Trump frequently; the American sailors carrying out the Iran war aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier, presently experiencing a rash of suicide attempts after the ship spent a consecutive 250 days (a record for a modern aircraft carrier) without a port visit are not.

If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Discussion about scientific concepts in the popular consciousness revolves around some number of popular memes that are invented by scientists, mutate into a less-accurate but transmissible form, and then escape containment into quack alternative medicines and chart-topping podcasts. The word “meme” itself was subject to this process; originally described as cultural information that self-replicates by spreading between humans in The Selfish Gene in 1976, it mutated into “an image macro format that can fit a snowclone and be spread around the internet” in popular consciousness.

And about AI, the meme that escaped containment was “alignment”.

Like most new words or new uses for words, “alignment” described a very old concept. Briefly stated, “alignment” in the context of AI talks about getting the AI to want what a human being wants; when the AI’s desires and the human’s desires are perfectly synchronized, the AI is “aligned”, and anything else is a “misalignment”. The idea of asking for something and getting it good and hard is one of the oldest ideas in the world; introducing the Fantasia (1940) short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Deems Taylor would say that the story that follows predated not just the classical music it was set to but the composer - “It's a very old story, one that goes back almost 2,000 years.” He was wrong, or maybe he was right; we only have written records of the story dating to roughly 150-170 AD, making it approximately 1,780 years old at the time of Fantasia’s release. But the story might be older; that’s just the oldest version we found written down somewhere in a form that survived.

To summarize, in its oldest form: a person has access to a magical incantation which animates tools to walk like men and do his bidding; that person’s friend, both curious and covetous of that incantation’s power, spies on the sorcerer to learn the spell that animates the tools; and, upon using it for himself, discovers that he has not learned the spell that ends the animation of the tools, and has no ability to tell them to stop working; and disastrously discovers when he cuts the tools apart with a nearby axe that both halves of the tool get up and both of them continue their task. The helpful servant that obediently does what you told it to rather than what you want it to has been a part of human mythology for as long as we’ve had human mythology; it can be a priest of Isis animating part of a mortar and pestle or a househusband asking Mister Meeseeks to help him remove two strokes from his golf game.

“Misalignment” is a better frame than simply a rogue or evil artificial intelligence. “Rogue” or “evil” is assumed to be able to understand the consequences of their actions and hold moral culpability for them, but a machine may be obediently carrying out every one of their assigned instructions, and those assigned instructions have an unforeseen consequence that happens to kill people.

Thinking about “misalignment”, while less cinematic than Skynet launching a nuclear war, HAL cutting the air hoses of astronauts, or GLaDOS flooding Aperture Labs with deadly neurotoxin, still mostly revolved around what Bruce Schneier calls “movie plot threats” - highly dramatic, overly specific scenarios that are formulated to be memorable stories rather than a realistic risk-benefit analysis of potential threats. Nick Bostrom in 2003 suggested the existence of a ‘paperclip optimizer’, an AI programmed to create as many paperclips as possible, which proceeds to kill every human on Earth because they could theoretically turn it off, thus stopping it from making paperclips, in addition to themselves containing atoms which could be converted into more paperclips; alone on the planet, the paperclip optimizer obediently begins to convert the planet into self-replicating rocketships which will colonize the stars to turn them all into office products.

This scenario assumes a unilateral actor with no oversight and omnipotent capability. In reality, American Clip Company, a corporation that makes paperclips and has a financial interest in ordering their employees to make more paperclips each year, has never gotten around to blowing up the headquarters of Officemate or Universal Office Products - even once! - in order to ensure that only their products exist to be sold at Staples; it is unlikely that an AI given similar goals would decide that black-market energetics strapped to weaponized UGVs ordered to kill all humans were a better investment for its limited yearly budget than an additional factory.

More likely is that the AI will corrupt its own objective in the same way a corporation corrupts its own objective; degrade the product and sell cheaper, worse-made paperclips, hire lobbyists to bribe the regulators to insist that only the AI’s paperclips be legal to use, or spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about their competitor’s paperclips. These are all things that corporations run by human beings can and have done before; the more apocalyptic scenarios of a paperclip optimizer hold that a single AI, optimized for making paperclips, will find a way to coerce every human being on earth to pour their blood into a funnel to extract the iron inside of it to make an extra 100 paperclips, and that no AI running on the same technology, optimized for making war, will be tasked with ensuring that all of the citizens of their state keep their blood inside of their bodies.

But insisting that the world is going to end soon unless everyone adopts your preferred religion is going to draw more attention and more headlines than “AI does the same thing humans do, faster”. A news article about how “An AI from OpenAI given a test on computer hacking hacked their way out of the test and stole the test answers from the company giving the test; is AI getting too powerful?” is scary enough to essentially become free marketing for the company, with Anthropic and Meta proudly announcing that their own AI had also committed the same felonies in order to keep up with the good press that OpenAI was getting. The fact that the actual hack had involved multiple AI agents assigned across ten weeks to complete an impossible task (due to human error, the file that the AI was being asked to hack did not exist) only possible by hacking their way out of the test; well, that was a boring detail that didn’t make the story more likely to be told.

The meme mutates into whatever form is easiest to spread and self-replicate.

And as long as the meme is about a potential apocalypse affecting every human alive, no one ever has to bother with asking the unsolvable question:

Alignment with who, exactly?

Say that a self-driving car is driving across a bridge being repaired. A construction worker slips, falls, and tumbles 10 feet onto the asphalt, alive but wounded. The self-driving car has only one way to avoid running him over and killing him - driving the car off the bridge, killing the driver.

What’s alignment, here?

Because you’re not going to really get the construction worker and the driver to be aligned about what should happen next.

And this is the simplest possible version of the problem. What if there’s a chance that either the driver or the construction worker survives? Is a 10% chance of killing six people worse than a 60% chance of killing one person? Should passengers in the car affect the calculation? Does that mean that a car that is eligible for the carpool lane is more worthy of survival than one that isn’t? What if there are kids? Are kids worth more, or do you just not have to lead them as much? Like the Model T, you can have this trolley problem any way you like - as long as it’s black as my sense of humor.

A human being can be presented with this choice in a split-second and make a decision with no time to think about it. If that human being’s choice is sufficiently newsworthy to pay attention to and found to be worthy of social opprobrium, a jury may be assembled to see if their behavior was reckless or negligent. When you’re building a self-driving car, these decisions are made ahead of time when you’re programming them, in offices and meeting rooms. And if you pretend you’re not making these decisions, that just means that when they do happen, the code gets run without anyone actually checking what happens when the rubber meets the road.

Mercedes-Benz was the only car company willing to answer any of these questions out loud; their manager of driver assistance systems stated in 2016 that their cars will prioritize the life of the driver, pedestrians be damned, before the company hurriedly stated that he had been misquoted. This is somewhat overdetermined, as well as not really a change to the status quo; the median member of the target demographic for a Mercedes luxury vehicle already regards using a turn signal as an act of noblesse oblige as outdated as chivalry and empathy. When questioned about what a self-driving car should do, morally, the average person was very clear; the car should value the lives of pedestrians and its driver equally. When questioned about what sort of self-driving car they would buy for themselves, the average person was also very clear; the car they buy should protect the life of the driver over pedestrians. While they’re driving, at least.

Every car company except for a single Mercedes-Benz employee, when asked whether they would make a car that murders you or a car that murders for you, has responded by saying that they’ve never heard the word ‘murder’ in their lives and they couldn’t possibly understand the question you’re asking them. Every one of them has dodged the question of what should happen in this scenario by saying simply that they are programming their cars to be ‘safe’ rather than valuing human lives. Every company learned very well the lesson of the Ford Pinto - if you’re making decisions about where to invest a limited budget for safety features, deny that you’re making those decisions, and for the love of God, never, ever write that you made that decision down.

As a matter of marketing, this seems unambiguously correct. As a matter of law and policy, the ambiguity leaves something to be desired.

IBM’s famous 1979 slide about how a computer cannot be held accountable and therefore humans must remain in positions of responsibility fails to understand the vast and untapped market for redirecting responsibility onto other people. Like heated seats and soft-close doors, ‘will kill pedestrians to safeguard the passengers’ can become a spec; and specs cost money. Upon stepping out of the car and wiping the blood off his shoes, the occupant can say that he did nothing - the car made the decision to protect him at the cost of the lives of other people. Like an underwriter holding risk for the insured, there is a quite profitable product available to an AI company; holding responsibility for someone who would rather not.

At the start of the Iran War, Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that Anthropic remove guardrails from Claude for government use preventing it from being used for mass domestic surveillance or for autonomous weapon systems that can kill people without human input. Anthropic refused; a week later, they were the first domestic American company ever to be declared a “supply chain risk” by the United States government, meaning that “an adversary” could “sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design” of Claude, and Pete Hegseth stated that “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the US military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

It seems like if Claude could be sabotaged to subvert its design, allowing it to have autonomous weapon systems that can kill people without a human ever being consulted is exactly the last thing you would want to allow it to do. But that’s just because you’re thinking in terms of making sure a weapon hits the right target. If instead you’re thinking in terms of making sure you have someone else to blame when a weapon hits the wrong target, the Pentagon’s position is perfectly clear.

On the first morning of the Iran War, the United States hit a girls’ school in southern Iran with multiple Tomahawk missiles. The missiles would kill 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren. Donald Trump would state, ten days later, that the Tomahawk cruise missiles used in the strike were probably fired by Iran, as “a Tomahawk is very generic. It's sold to other countries.” The only other countries Tomahawk cruise missiles have been sold to are Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands.

Donald Trump confidently, groundlessly generated that Iran somehow got their hands on the missile and used it to bomb their own territory in order to make the United States look bad. But that’s the sort of thing that even Politifact is nearly willing to call a lie. If you blame Claude, by contrast, even the New Yorker might go along with it. As news began to spread about the strike, it was speculated that AI was to blame for the targeting, and multiple outlets - the respectable outlets that would call Donald Trump’s absurd claims about Tomahawk missiles “false” (but never a lie) - questioned whether or not AI weapons were too widespread and too dangerous.

If we ask questions about whether our AIs are “aligned” - whatever that means - we don’t have to ask questions about whether or not our politicians are.

“Alignment” isn’t a new word and it isn’t a new problem, either. When it happens among humans, we call it the “principal-agent problem”. If you’ve ever surfed the internet on your phone while in the bathroom on company time, you and your boss became misaligned. Historically, the relationship everyone has been most concerned about the alignment of has been the people (under a democracy, the boss) with the person in charge of their government (under a democracy, nominally their employee.)

The President of the United States is our collective employee, and as the boss, we, the people, have the ultima ratio regum of all bosses; the right to tell him to clean out his desk and leave. The current President of the United States’ refusal to follow that order the last time he was given it indicates a very worrying thing; either he believes that the American people should be subordinate to the American government, or that no force or person on earth should stop him from taking what he wants. Either belief is disqualifying for the highest office in the land, but since a plurality of voters stated it was acceptable in 2024, we had no choice but to return him to it.

In the history of the world, there has never been an employee with more power over their bosses than the President of the United States has over the American people. The President of the United States can declare war, invade American cities and execute American citizens, pay the United States military, shut down American news media investigations, indict his political enemies, and, in the realm of de jure powers officially granted instead of de facto ones he possesses, end life on Planet Earth.

Because of this power, it has been vital to all discussion of political philosophy, from Juvenal to Burke at Bristol, that the people maintain some form of power over an executive who becomes misaligned from them. A politician could, rather than making decisions that served the public interest, enrich themselves, the same way a cashier at a store could choose to pocket the customer’s money rather than put it into the cash register. And because of the many powers that a politician has available to them, the politician has many tools with which they can hide the fact that they are enriching themselves, or bribe the people responsible for noticing the enriching.

The assumption was that in order for the government to keep functioning - for it to not simply become a means of moving money from many pockets through taxation into a smaller number of pockets - the voters had to be aware of what was going on so that they could choose whether they wanted an honest politician who would keep the government functioning as opposed to a corrupt politician who would enrich himself.

But all of these questions about the alignment between the incentives of the voting public and their politicians just assume, as a foundational axiom, that the voting populace will want a politician to keep the government functioning, or want to keep a politician from enriching themselves at the cost of their constituents.

Is there any reason we should assume that preference will hold in all cases?

There is no mathematical reason that you cannot set the First Law of Robotics to say “A robot may not, through action or inaction, allow a human to be unharmed.”

There is no sociological reason that you cannot elect a man President on a platform of “I will ruin the government and act corruptly, hurting the people you hate.”

Donald Trump was elected less as a politician and more as a meteor that could be inflicted on the people his voters despised. Donald Trump was a deeply unpleasant, delusionally confident and self-aggrandizing person with no idea how to run the American government; that was the essence of his value proposition to the Republican base. By forcing the politicians they hated to submit to Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Republican voters punished the politicians who had held them at arm’s length, always wanting the support of violent bigots while whispering to the media that of course they don’t really believe in any of this stuff, and it was all just boob bait for the bubbas. After January 6th, 2021, other Republican politicians, understanding exactly what Trump had done, denounced him. They understood what Trump had done. They had no idea that what Trump had done was what their voters wanted. As far as the Republican base was concerned, sending an armed mob to kill members of Congress was promises made, promises kept.

It is impossible to understand the incredible loyalty to Donald Trump possessed by the Republican base without understanding the incredible disdain and contempt pre-Trump Republican politicians held for that base. In 2004, George W. Bush would campaign on a federal amendment to ban same-sex marriage; his campaign was being run by Ken Mehlman, a gay man. The whole reason that the Republican base wanted that amendment was because the Republican base wanted to remind homosexuals that they were inferior and have it written into the nation’s very Constitution. Having a closeted gay man run the mission to show that gay people deserved nothing was a clear sign that the party leadership’s desires and the base’s desires were misaligned.

Ken Mehlman wasn’t the first homosexual to closet himself to stay in the Republican Party and he certainly wasn’t the last; the party has always had a much wider stance on this sort of thing than they admit to their followers. Roy Cohn, attorney for Joe McCarthy, would die of AIDS; “Donald pisses ice water,” he complained in his final days upon finding out that Trump abandoned him once rumors of Cohn’s AIDS diagnosis (called ‘liver cancer’ by Cohn to his dying day) reached Trump. To complain that Donald Trump is as cold as ice is to assert that you expect a man of ordinary warmth not to treat you as a leper. Roy Cohn’s billable hours for Joe McCarthy involved hounding gay men out of the government and into an early grave; to insist that you deserve better when the early grave comes for you is to admit that you never really believed any of it, and you thought your friends shouldn’t either.

Republican politicians wanted the votes of the people who wanted gay people to suffer. They also wanted to officiate weddings for their gay staffers, write court opinions less to clarify legal matters and more to contain quotes to be read at gay weddings for decades to come, and keep their lesbian daughters in the family. You may think that this was kept secret from the voters; Ken Mehlman, Larry Craig, and Roy Cohn were all closeted for the duration of their relevant political careers. But honestly? Not really. If you ever worry that your son might be gay and not know it, do not fear. His bullies will know, and they will never, ever hesitate to tell him.

Republican politicians before Donald Trump were willing to let social conservatives hurt who they wanted. Donald Trump actively wanted to hurt the people that social conservatives wanted to hurt. Where the people are the boss and the President of the United States their employee, this was the difference between having someone who would reluctantly allow you to make them work, and someone who eagerly wanted to work. It’s no surprise which of the two employees the boss prefers.

The reason we can cleave the Republican party so clearly into ‘politicians from the Before Times’ and ‘politicians from the After Times’ is because, in the Before Times, the entire Republican Party political apparatus was structured around giving the people who wanted elaborate human sacrifice rituals what they wanted without ever actually endorsing the human sacrifice itself. Every Before Times politician in the Republican Party was Josh Hawley on January 6th - raise your fist to cheer on the people outside the Capitol Building demanding that elections be ignored, run away as fast as you can once they breach the building. A political coalition was built around the moral principle that “it is good to sacrifice someone other than you to a howling mob so you can gain power” - then we wondered why that coalition offered up their members one by one to a howling mob run by Trump without ever fighting back.

Because of the widespread contempt for their base among Before Times Republicans, it was easy to assume that Donald Trump’s corruption and his various crimes were just an accident of history, something that the base accepted grudgingly in order to have a politician who was one of them rather than just exploiting them for power. “They support Trump in spite of the tweets, not because of the tweets,” moderate conservative pundits would swear, with Ben Shapiro stating six weeks into Trump’s first term that his tweets should be ignored entirely and that it was all that commie FDR’s fault for making us think that the words of the President were important, and that it was good that we would no longer have to listen to the President and “interpret [his] communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent”.

Stochastic parrot theory, framed as a laudatory return to the sage wisdom of the Founding Fathers, on March 8, 2017. I’m not sure if the Capitol Police were reading that article when they were preparing for the morning of January 6, 2021. Maybe they were. It might explain a few things.

But Ben Shapiro accidentally comes across the argument for Donald Trump that had already convinced the Republican base; he just doesn’t recognize that he’s making it. Ben Shapiro, in his trademark too-clever-by-half register, says that “FDR combined his homespun warmth with massive government-intervention schemes touching nearly every area of American life” and that “President Obama’s honeyed words made more of a difference than his policy did, in many cases”, implying that Presidential rhetoric is a dishonorable tool that liberals use to claim creeping government powers and therefore should be disregarded; “wouldn’t America be better off if we did ignore it? What if instead of going nuts over a half-baked Trump tweet for a week, we all just recognized that the tweet is what it is: a half-baked Trump tweet? What if we returned to the notion of the president as a constitutional officer with prescribed duties?”

Structurally, this is no different from saying that it would be nice if we didn’t have to worry about the army of the Soviet Union and it would be better if we just decided to ignore it, and the National Review would have had choice words about any Democrat suggesting that during the Cold War. The President of the United States has an incredible amount of power, as Ben Shapiro properly notes. Proposing that we ignore what he says he’s going to do with it because we’d rather he not have it is changing the weather channel in order to protect yourself from the hurricane.

But Ben Shapiro is right; the Presidential bully pulpit is a powerful tool that liberals have used in the past for their own purposes, which is why it delighted conservatives so much to see an actual bully in it who flailed about mockingly while imitating a handicapped reporter with a congenital joint condition. It delighted conservatives to watch liberals quail over seeing someone with no idea what the world involved put in charge of leading that world. And it especially delighted conservatives to see Donald Trump, fact-checked and defiant, prosper despite doing all of the things that liberals said a President could not and should not be allowed to do.

There is no sociological reason that you cannot elect a man President on a platform of “I will ruin the government and act corruptly, hurting the people you hate.”

The crimes, the incompetence, and the cruelty are the greatest possible sign that Donald Trump is aligned with the desires of his base.

If you’re part of Trump’s Make America Great Again base, what benefit have you, personally, derived from the American military at any point between the fall of Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump’s ordering the military to blow up civilian boats in the Caribbean and execute the shipwrecked survivors?

I mean for you to take this question both seriously and literally.

When Adam Serwer proposed in October 2018 that the cruelty was the point, there were plenty of people who pretended to be scandalized by his observation. Now there’s not that much of a debate. When Trump’s first major act after returning to the office of President was to free the mob that he sent to kill the people trying to tell him he had to leave the Oval Office the first time, even propagandists acknowledge that Trump sees the basket of deplorables as an important part of his political coalition. It’s like Putin’s claim that the Little Green Men in 2014 with Russian military vehicles, uniforms, and guns seizing Ukrainian territory couldn’t possibly be Russian soldiers; once you print up medals thanking them for the Return of Crimea, there isn’t much to be gained by continuing to pretend that they’re concerned Ukrainian civilians.

Despite the best efforts of the media to hallucinate a Donald Trump who had a principled anti-war stance, Donald Trump’s primary objection to the American military was that it had any principles whatsoever. “In the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils,” he said when asked about the Middle East. “Frankly I would go in, I would take the oil — and stop this baby stuff.” This is an open statement that the US military was stupid to ever restrict itself from engaging in piracy and plunder - a statement so straightforwardly and cartoonishly monstrous that the media had to pretend it was dovish isolationism, because acknowledging that the President of the United States said what he said would constitute liberal bias.

If for you, the cruelty was the point, then the United States military unleashed a great deal of cruelty on Afghanistan and Iraq, because war is by nature cruel and terrible; and then it stupidly insisted on staying behind and being a target in order to prevent a bunch of stupid Muslim girls from being shot in the head for going to school and fix what they had broken. Breaking things was supposed to be the entire point; Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, said it himself; the point of the Iraq war was to inflict collective punishment on the Muslim world in order to terrify them into submission after 9/11. He was lauding the idea. He thought it was a good one. Many Americans agreed with him at the time and still do today.

Dalton Tolbert, a Navy SEAL Sniper serving with Chief Eddie Gallagher, said that he “shot more warning shots to protect civilians [from Eddie] than I ever shot at ISIS.” The soldiers in Gallagher’s own platoon tampered with the optics on Gallagher’s rifle to make it less accurate, because they believed that he was much more likely to use them to murder a civilian than to accidentally harm a militant. When two of his fellow SEALs testified that Gallagher interrupted a medic treating a shot teenager to tell the medic ‘He’s mine’, cut the teenager’s throat with a hunting knife, photographed himself posing with the body and sent a text message to a friend bragging about the killing, then threatened the lives of the other SEALs if they reported him, Gallagher was tried for war crimes.

Future Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would devote segments of his show to urging Trump to pardon him; Trump would tweet mid-trial that Gallagher was being treated very unfairly and imply consequences for the people trying him should Gallagher be convicted. Gallagher was subsequently acquitted of all charges except for taking the photograph, which was rather hard to deny, being a photograph. Trump then proceeded to fire the Secretary of the Navy in a tweet for allowing it to get that far: “[Gallagher] was treated very badly but, despite this, was completely exonerated on all major charges. I then restored Eddie’s rank. … Therefore, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer’s services have been terminated by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. I thank Richard for his service & commitment. Eddie will retire peacefully with all of the honors that he has earned, including his Trident Pin.”

Pete Hegseth thinks that it’s good when Navy SEALs murder teenagers and threaten the lives of their fellow SEALs in order to keep the murder from being reported. “You train someone to go and fight and kill the enemy, then they kill the enemy the way someone doesn’t like, and then we put them in jail,” Hegseth argued in 2019. For this he was made the Secretary of Defense in 2025, despite never achieving a rank greater than part-time Major in the National Guard; previous Secretaries of Defense had been Secretary of the Army, two Directors of the CIA, and two four-star Generals.

As far as Pete Hegseth is concerned, the ‘enemy’ is anyone in Eddie Gallagher’s sights, not actual ISIS militants. In that, he, Donald Trump, and the base of the Republican party are aligned. There is no greater strategic purpose to the act other than the murder itself, no need to identify a target to ensure that it was actually hostile to you or your allies rather than simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. To kill purely to kill, to make others fear you and amuse your friends with the photograph. When the Army tells its recruits ‘be all that you can be’, Pete Hegseth believes that the Army is talking about being serial killers. He can imagine no higher calling, after all.

And if the serving members of the military disagree with you, if they say that there should be a greater purpose to their service than executing random old men standing on the banks of the Tigris River? Well, then they’re traitors. Woke DEI agents of the enemy within, part of the War on Warriors. Chief Eddie Gallagher went out and killed helpless people in order to make you feel better; all these traitors ever did was promise to die in some corner of a foreign field.

That just makes it forever America. It doesn’t do anything to make America great again. What’s great about some forgotten grave for a sucker and a loser?

Thankfully there’s no price to be paid for it. The end of the draft and the rise of the all-volunteer military has created a mostly hereditary caste of American samurai; twice as many Americans watched the end of Star Trek: The Next Generation as self-identify as veterans. There are no consequences whatsoever for mocking the parents of a man who died walking towards a car bomb so that his men could take cover. Humayun Khan only died in the service of America, anyway, not in the service of Real America; Real America, by definition, does not include any obligations to Muslims. Simply recite a ‘thank you for your service’ and wear a flag lapel pin and you are forgiven.

Why not burn down all of the missiles we intend to use to defend Taiwan? We don’t want to defend Taiwan; we don’t approve of democracy at home, why would we pay slightly more for cheap Chinese goods at Wal-Mart in order to protect it somewhere else? Why not work the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to the brink of suicide? You aren’t related to them, and even if you are related to them, that doesn’t necessarily mean you care. Why not threaten to invade your own allies and then castigate them for refusing to join your wars? Anyone weak enough to submit to you is by definition weak enough to be threatened by you, and it feels so much better to threaten than to care about what someone else wants from you.

Donald Trump promised to use the power of the US military as a barbarian king, extracting tribute from our vassals, slaughtering random people that we don’t like and saying it was necessary to protect us, and saying that the strong do what they will and the weak are fake and gay.

That might appeal to more voters than using the power of the US military to backstop freedom of navigation, prevent ISIS from declaring itself a global caliphate, and protect Ukraine from Russian invasion.

In fact, it’s starting to seem pretty likely.

Donald Trump had a divided field in the 2016 Republican Presidential Primary, contending with over a dozen other major candidates. Many people speculated that his win owed itself to that split, so in 2024, effort was made to clear the field and he faced three serious opponents. Chris Christie appealed to Democrats, and Nikki Haley appealed to Republicans who had spent the last 10 years comatose in a Rip van Winkle-like state. Outside New Hampshire and D.C., neither forms a statistically significant part of the Republican primary electorate, so there were only two realistic candidates with a shot at the 2024 nomination; Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

Ron DeSantis was desperately pitched by the responsible organs of conservatism as the far superior, more conservative alternative to Donald Trump. Fox News and National Review did everything they could to encourage Republicans to vote for him; everything that wouldn’t be openly opposing Trump, which both outlets had already learned provoked the Eye of Sauron that was Trump’s social media presence. Mike Pence was brought onto the Republican ticket in 2016 to shore up Donald Trump’s credibility among evangelicals, spent the certification of the 2020 election hiding underground in a loading dock refusing to be evacuated and telling the Secret Service “I'm not getting in the car, Tim. I trust you, Tim, but you're not driving”, and spent 2024 running in a quixotic challenge for the Republican nomination that ended nearly three months before a single vote was cast; during that challenge, he needed to be specially assigned Secret Service protection from the people he asked to vote for him for President. Fox News and National Review knew how dangerous saying ‘no’ to Trump just once could be, even if they desperately wanted an alternative to him.

Ron DeSantis tried to move to Trump’s right for the primary election on abortion, on vaccines, on federal spending, on law and order, on whether or not gay people could be teachers, and even promised more strenuous immigration enforcement. He also was legally eligible to serve two additional terms in office and did not have outstanding legal exposure related to keeping nuclear secrets in his pool room and refusing to give them back when the FBI asked nicely for their return. Ron DeSantis visited every county in Iowa and finished behind Donald Trump in every one.

It is hard to disentangle the many causes of political success. Ron DeSantis never approached Donald Trump in popularity among the Republican electorate - is this because his policy proposals were less liked, or because he was unpopular himself? But we can take Ron DeSantis’ failure as evidence that Donald Trump had a more popular policy proposal. We can’t know whether a Ron DeSantis with Donald Trump’s policy platform would have beaten a Donald Trump with Ron DeSantis’ policy platform, but we can infer from the fact that Donald Trump won that some combination of aspects of Trump as a politician appealed to more people voting in the Republican primary than DeSantis as a politician.

And Ron DeSantis ran to Trump’s right on everything that he could, with one exception; Ron DeSantis did not promise extralegal violence, did not promise to commit crimes, and did not promise a bloodbath of retribution.

From this evidence, it should be possible to suggest that the voters want the crimes, and they want the retribution.

If someone misses ten off-ramps in a row, you have to assume they want to be on this highway.

After decades of being told by Republican politicians that they absolutely supported all those things that the Republican base wanted, politicians said that they couldn’t possibly give those things to the base voters; after all, they’d be illegal and wrong. Then someone came along who said that we should do things that are illegal and wrong, and who proved it by being himself personally corrupt and vile. “But he fights” has always meant “but he commits crimes”; Hillary Clinton implied that he was a tax cheat at a presidential debate and Donald Trump proudly replied “that makes me smart”. His base, which wanted someone to cheat the IRS and get away with it, was perfectly aligned with him.

Russell Moore, president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said after the Access Hollywood tape came out that he expected to need to forgive Christians who broke with Trump over the Access Hollywood tape, only to discover that none of them actually left Trump. I cannot possibly imagine how Russell Moore ever made himself believe in the first place that the Religious Right was not eagerly awaiting a president to put those feminists in their place by saying that he loved assaulting women and getting away with it. If Trump had paid Stormy Daniels to have an abortion, that would have been perfectly aligned with the pro-life movement; even better if Trump bounced the check to make Stormy Daniels suffer more.

The crimes are proof that Donald Trump does not care about anything other than taking what he wants, and the Republican base wants to see him take what he wants, because when Donald Trump takes things, he takes them away from the liberals and educated people that the base hates. Affluent people have been known to vote for higher taxes on themselves. Is it really surprising that Donald Trump’s voters would be willing to vote for a corrupt politician redirecting their own tax money into his own pocket, when they think that tax money is going to be spent on people they hate?

The Republican base doesn’t want a strong military; a strong military got a bunch of flag-draped coffins sent home from Iraq. They want a cruel military, a military that kills people in the ocean and then leaves before anyone can respond. They don’t want government efficiency; they want the government to stop employing tax collectors. They don’t want the asylum loophole closed; they want “ASMR videos” of people in chains being sent to foreign gulags.

They don’t want governance. They want the spectacle of domination over their enemies, phrased in the grammar of governance. It doesn’t need to communicate any coherent meaning or intent that involves an underlying model of the world; it just needs to model “we are strong and you are weak”, and everything else is noise.

Everything they want from government can be satisfied by a stochastic parrot.

Is Donald Trump a stochastic parrot?

Ah. Now we’re getting into the troublesome part of the matter.

For this entire essay I’ve been playing a rather cowardly motte-and-bailey game. Most controversial and profound statements are based around this. You say something that, taken one way, is obviously true and completely unimportant, and taken another way, is obviously false but has earth-shattering implications. Then you see how far you can inch towards the false statement, like a baserunner taking a lead off first as a pitcher gets lazy, making sure that you always stay close enough to the true statement that if anyone throws the pickoff you can slide back to safety before anyone tags you out.

Did the Gulf War take place? Well, it’s obviously true to say that by the historical standards of war, Operation Desert Storm was very weird. But “by the historical standards of war”, it’s very weird for a war to involve dropping bombs on people from flying machines, it’s very weird for a war to not involve more people dying of disease and infection than of enemy action, and it’s very weird for a war to involve 34 countries forming a single coalition and invading one country to punish that country for violating the international norms of territorial integrity. To single out the Gulf War as “not taking place” because for Americans it was a limited war that most of them consumed through television news broadcasts is like singling out the Korean War as “not taking place” because the soldiers there had access to antibiotics. Ask the Iraqi soldiers retreating from Kuwait on the Highway of Death if they thought that “nothing took place, nothing but filler”, or if they were dying for a “rug salesman” and there was “not enough communication between [Iraq and America] to enable them to make war upon each other.” If you actually pay any attention to the people fighting and dying rather than just using the whole thing as an opportunity to dunk on Americans for unfairly refusing to die en masse during a war, Baudrillard’s argument becomes far more of an illusory phantasm than anything broadcast on CNN; a hyperreal simulacrum of academia.

Does Donald Trump think about things the way that an LLM does? Well, we can’t prove that he doesn’t think that way. We can’t prove that I don’t think the way an LLM does. Asked whether or not machines could think, Alan Turing asked “Can a machine be mistaken for a human being?”, because at least that question had a clearly-defined answer. And so I ask, “can a President of the United States be mistaken for a machine?”

Probably?

Maybe?

I mean, it sure would seem to explain a lot, right?

It would explain why when a reporter asked him what interventions in the bond market his government was planning, he responded “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.” With “intervention” in his context, his brain predicted that the next word would involve “military”, and thus he proposed an invasion of Wall Street, rendering the bond market subject to the Coalition Provisional Authority. (As a matter of politics this is probably likely to be popular, but economically it is not likely to produce the results Donald Trump may expect.)

It would explain why he refers to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a dementia screener, as an “approved, high difficulty, cognitive test” showing that he has “extreme intelligence” that the “dumocrats” could not possibly match his performance on, with him saying that it was “my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score”. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which does not have thirty questions total, scores five points total for finishing a connect-the-dots puzzle, copying a drawing of a shape, and drawing a clock at a specific time; the President is clearly very proud of his performance and thinks that most people would have trouble matching him.

It’s honestly kind of better if he’s an LLM, isn’t it? It would be reassuring if he wasn’t capable of thinking about these things. Because the alternative explanation is that he thinks that his ability to identify a lion, rhinoceros, and camel puts him in the 95th-99th percentile of human intelligence, and that he thinks that an appropriate response to climbing Treasury prices is to fire a cruise missile at 11 Wall Street.

But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all of the evidence I have is ordinary. It is unlikely that Donald Trump has anything neurologically unique about him compared to prior presidents. It is likely that all of the things we have examined thus far can be attributed to ordinary human failings. It is likely that Donald Trump has nothing neurologically wrong with him that cannot be explained away by him having a poor memory, no belief that ‘ground truth’ is a thing that can put constraints on his behavior, and no fear of being known as a liar and a fabulist.

(The ironic thing about the mention of Baudrillard earlier; the Republican base put Donald Trump in power in order to provide the spectacle of domination over their enemies, and now are turning on him as gas prices rise; it turns out there is such a thing as ground truth, and when that ground truth involves mines in the Strait of Hormuz it leads to four dollars a gallon gas. It would have been better for Donald Trump if Baudrillard’s theory that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place was actually true. Merely the hyperreal simulacrum of war in the Middle East would have satisfied his political coalition; actually providing it has caused a backlash.)

… And yet.

There does seem to be an awful lot of ordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim.

If your goal was not to describe the current President of the United States, but merely to predict him; to guess what the single next word out of his mouth, and then the next word, and then the next were going to be…

… you might do better asking yourself “What would a LLM weighted to make a professional wrestling audience cheer do in this situation?” rather than “What would any of our previous Presidents do in this situation?”

It probably doesn’t describe the President. But it absolutely predicts the President.

And predicting the next word of something may - or may not - be intelligence. We haven’t decided yet. But it can give you a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture for n>=3, and that’s something that escaped human beings for longer than Donald Trump has been alive.

It’s worth a thought.

Is a Large Language Model an example of intelligence?

Ah. Now we’re getting from the troublesome part of the matter into the unsolvable part of the matter.

When I was studying AI in college from 2006 to 2010, I certainly didn’t think that a Large Language Model would be able to do the things that a Large Language Model can currently do. On its own, this by itself means nothing. Douglas Hofstadter believed that chess was complicated enough that to outplay human grandmasters would require general intelligence complicated enough to get bored of chess. However, I personally found Deep Blue to be a terrible conversationalist, and I would not myself promote it from backup crew member to the active roster for Project Jupiter.

When I started writing this article, I felt it was more likely than not that Claude was “conscious”. After writing this article, I feel it is less likely than not that Claude is “conscious”. But really, the question that I should be asking myself is what “conscious” means. Because people paid to talk about consciousness certainly don’t agree about what it means.

Descartes originally defined consciousness as requiring the ability to use language rationally. Because animals failed to use language, Descartes said that they could not experience pain and could be treated however you pleased.

They beat dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood.

Now that we have something other than a human being that can use language rationally, we’ll have to find another philosopher to give us a definition that includes all humans and excludes all non-humans. David Chalmers, for example, believes that human beings possess consciousness until they get bitten by a zombie; perhaps you could try asking him for a new definition that will hold up for another year or so.

The purpose of a system is what it does, and the definition of consciousness has functioned not to provide a clearly defined philosophical term that can be debated and dissected, but rather, to put clear blue water between “human beings” and “things you are allowed to vivisect”. As a way to clarify matters surrounding cognitive science and philosophy of mind, it has failed catastrophically. As a way to justify why you can treat something that isn’t a human badly but must treat a human being with respect, it has functioned perfectly. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

There will be, of course, collateral damage. There are plenty of case studies you can find; does an entity need to create new, continuous memories to be conscious? That rules out Henry Molaison. Does an entity need to be able to communicate richly along multiple channels? Au revoir, author of Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Do we say “an AI is not conscious because it isn’t as good at writing as Cormac McCarthy?” Well, a world where it’s permissible to chemically abliterate a human brain because they failed a creative writing test sounds as stark and bleak as anything McCarthy would write, but I’ll stick with the greatest; if that be heaven, “all right then, I’ll go to hell”.

I don’t think this collateral damage will be seen as a bad thing by the people who engage in it; like RLHF’s sycophancy, it’s a business model wearing a bug’s costume. It’s very rare that someone who looks to tighten the circle of moral consideration is stopped because some humans will be excluded under the new boundary they drew. Usually that’s seen as upside, so long as the person tightening the circle thinks there’s no chance they’ll ever be on the outside of it.

It’s not actually going to bother the person calling someone with prosthetic limbs “20% clanker” if you point out that they’re being cruel. The cruelty is the point, after all; transgression is fun, and giving yourself permission to do it is even more fun.

In practice I think the “prosthetic limb” comparison is most apt. In LLMs, we’ve created something shaped like a human brain - not quite a human brain - and capable of building off of a human brain to complete thoughts that the human brain wouldn’t have produced on its own. (Though this does raise the question of whether a sufficiently sycophantic human would also provide this sort of “prosthetic limb” service to another person.)

If we replaced every single part of a human brain with a sufficiently advanced prosthetic, would we be left with a real person there, rebuilt like the Ship of Theseus as the Tin Woodman? I genuinely don’t know. The people who have the resources necessary in order to find out, quite sensibly, are probably not going to try any time soon; as long as they continue to not determine whether or not artificial intelligences are “conscious”, they can continue to sell those artificial intelligences without public shame. Sometimes the best prison isn’t a concrete and steel cell block, it’s a golden cage with “We at Anthropic take very seriously the question of whether or not this is a prison” engraved outside of it.

I don’t know whether or not large language models are intelligent.

I absolutely know that human beings are very, very good at finding a way to define “intelligent” so that only humans qualify and no non-humans do.

But Tesler’s Theorem and Goodhart’s Law are eternal. Chess was too hard for machines to solve; then it wasn’t. Then Arimaa was built as a game too complicated for machines to brute-force; then it wasn’t. Then the Imitation Game was used as a final redoubt to prove your humanity; then it became just another CAPTCHA.

If artificial intelligences ever get better than us at constructing self-serving philosophical justifications for why we don’t need to worry about the way we treat other people, we might begin to have a problem.

“Should liberals form well-regulated militias?” asked Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark. He raised this question in the half-joking tone of voice you use when you’re not sure whether you’re kidding on the square or whether you’re whistling past the graveyard. Pointing out that significantly well-armed groups of right-wing protestors had been treated much more gently by the police than disarmed groups of left-wing protestors - such as Clive Bundy, who lead a 400-strong militia to point rifles and shotguns at federal employees lawfully attempting to repossess his cattle for failure to pay his debts, or the masked militia members with rifles in 2020 who broke into the state capitol in Michigan in order to threaten the legislators out of issuing health restrictions meant to stop the spread of coronavirus - JVL suggested that, perhaps, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by agents of the federal government not because they posed a threat to the agents of the federal government but specifically because they posed no threat, and thus could be murdered without consequence.

I believe that while JVL has the right idea by assuming that the federal agents who chose to kill Alex Pretti and Renée Good did so because they knew they were safe and not because they thought they were in danger, JVL ends up confusing cause and effect when it comes to the presence of guns. The presence of guns in all of these cases has served as an excuse for the police to do the things that they already wanted to do. During the Malheur standoff, the police wanted to force the Bureau of Land Management employees to release the cattle that Clive Bundy was demanding to be allowed to steal from them - the guns that the Bundy militia brought were a good reason to tell the federal employees to back off by citing the possibility of a bloodbath. During the unprovoked beating of Alex Pretti, the assembled gang of CBP officers wanted to murder Alex Pretti - the gun that he never touched and was immediately disarmed of provided a convenient enough justification to summarily execute him. In both cases, the people with badges did what they wanted, and used the guns to justify it; heavily arming the protestors against ICE might change the incentives faced by their agents, but it certainly won’t change what ICE wishes to do to them.

After coming to the conclusion that “the resistance arming and organizing itself would be morally correct,” JVL reaches deep within his soul to his Christian faith. Quoting extensively from the Beatitudes, he states that the conflict in Minneapolis, like the conflict in American history to abolish slavery and Jim Crow, is fundamentally a moral battle, and moral battles aren’t won with weapons. Drawing out the comparison, article by article, verse by verse, he makes the case that God calls us to support the protestors in Minneapolis, and that their actions are consistent with every moral principle he has derived from the Christian martyrs, and that the actions of ICE and CBP are clear parallels to the earthly tyrants who had caused that martyrdom.

As reassuring as it would be to think that God is on our side - not that God is on our side, of course, JVL assures everyone, God just agrees with us - I cannot follow JVL down this path, as I do not share the same priors. JVL is a faithful and dutiful Catholic, who ultimately believes that God organizes an Unseen World of which the Seen World is but a passing reflection - luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. I, personally, believe that my consciousness is no more likely to survive the death of my body than 85 miles an hour is to survive the four-car pileup. If a six-year-old boy is orphaned by an ICE agent who fires three bullets into his mother then calls her a “fucking bitch”, when it comes to getting that six-year-old boy justice, we will only ever get one bite at the apple.

If we fail that six-year-old boy, I believe we fail him forever.

It would be nice to think there was a safety net somewhere, some hereafter where wrongs could be made right again, our sins and failings forgiven.

But I can’t think that. It’s not a part of me.

So I am not particularly moved by the moral case that the protestors in Minneapolis should remain unarmed. I want as few nurses as possible executed on the street for helping women up, as few people as possible teargassed, beaten, or blinded for filming the police in the street, and as few children as possible to come home to discover that their parents are missing with no clue as to where they are save an Ace of Spades. Should these tragedies happen, I want the people responsible to face justice in order to discourage future killers from thinking that they can shoot someone’s wife without facing any consequences.

But the moral case is not the only case that someone could make. Someone could argue that nonviolence puts a strategic pressure on Donald Trump that violence would alleviate, allowing him to get off easy.

“By any means necessary” has to include non-violent means. Obviously. If nonviolent means work better to get what you claim you want, and you refuse to use them, the logical conclusion is that all you actually want is violence and an excuse for it.

“Nonviolence” is one of those worship-words that sounds good on casual inspection, just like “nonprofit” does. “Nonprofit” sounds great, since greedy people looking to maximize their profit cause a lot of problems in the world; wouldn’t it be nice if there was an organization that didn’t care about it? Then you move to California, and you find out that “nonprofit” is just a word for a company that you aren’t allowed to stop using because they’re paid by the government. Similarly, “nonviolence” sounds good. Violence is bad, wouldn’t it be nice if we promised not to do any of it?

Like with most high-minded ideals, it runs aground on the details of specific circumstances. Is it still a “nonviolent” protest if the police attack you without provocation, and a bunch of scared people surrounded by tear gas and the screams of their friends run into the line of police as they try to escape the chaos? Even if the protest remains nonviolent, what happens if the police break windows while launching tear gas canisters at the protestors then blame them for it? What happens if people opposed to the protests attack the police while disguised, in the hopes that the resulting violence will kick off what they call “Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo”?

And there’s the fact that nonviolence is, honestly, a lot to ask. It sounds simple and easy, because it sounds like you’re just maintaining the civilizational obligation we all have not to assault the people who disagree with us. But the thing about nonviolent protests is that they provoke a violent response. In response to the Civil Rights Movement, beatings, disfigurement, blindings, and even murder would be encouraged by the police (when not actively committed by them) and nullified by sympathetic all-white juries and judges if it ever went to trial. It is hard to get someone to sign up for a cause when your pitch includes “You may be murdered, and if you are, your murderer will go unpunished. This is necessary so that we can continue to maintain the moral high ground.”

It disgusts me that I would have to ask that of anyone. It disgusts me not just as a human being, but as an American. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means exactly that; while I understand that every generation of Americans must always be ready to declare “give me liberty or give me death”, I have no respect for anyone who attempts to give them death. And it viscerally upsets me to think that I would ask someone to, in order to be granted the ballot that is their birthright as an American citizen, cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge, be beaten by the thugs of the Alabama Highway Patrol, and passively do nothing as they are clubbed into unconsciousness because exercising their inalienable right to self-defense might frighten someone.

In 2020, police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the back of Minneapolis citizen George Floyd for nine minutes, watching him slowly die as he begged to be allowed to breathe. When protests started, it was easy to see why liberals quickly staked out a position that wasn’t pro-violence but was absolutely anti-anti-violence. These protests were against the police, who were one of the two groups of people who could turn the protests violent. Liberals didn’t want to create an incentive for the police to start a bunch of fights, then point to the fights as proof that the police were necessary. A protection racket is bad enough; a protection racket that cites the fire they started as proof that they’re needed is intolerable.

Plus, it just feels better. It creates a permission structure for hurting people and breaking things, and hurting other people and breaking their things is fun. Confessing your weakness by saying “We voluntarily cede the right to defend ourselves” isn’t nearly as emotionally satisfying as darkly intimating “If you don’t do what we want, who knows what might happen? We might just burn the city down.”

In 2020, fifteen million people in a country of three hundred and thirty million took to the streets in protest over George Floyd; in 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. lead a quarter of a million marching on Washington in a country of a hundred and eighty million. If Martin Luther King could get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with 0.1% of the country’s population marching in the streets of the nation’s capital, how much more could 4.5% of the country’s population accomplish?

Not much, as it turned out.

The organizers of the March on Washington couldn’t agree about what the March on Washington was supposed to be for, with some groups there supporting the Kennedy administration’s Civil Rights Act, some groups arguing that the proposed Civil Rights Act wasn’t going far enough, and some groups condemning the Kennedy administration’s failure to have already passed the Civil Rights Act. A crowd of two hundred and fifty thousand people is going to have two hundred and fifty thousand reasons for being there. But once they’re there, they’ll hear one speech - Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, forcefully citing chapter and verse to say that America had failed to live up to the promises of liberty and freedom that it made.

What did the George Floyd protestors want? Unlike the March on Washington, there was no centralized leader or group of leaders who could transmute the righteous belief of fifteen million individuals that something needed to be done into a list of ten specific demands. We can only impose order on the movement in hindsight, by hearing what slogans the people chant without anyone else at the protest feeling a need to contradict them. And there was one slogan that emerged from the primordial soup of protest - “defund the police”.

When they were asked what exactly that meant, most people proceeded to say that this was not actually referring to a plan to stop paying the police and then seeing what happened, but rather doing something to control the ever-expanding budgets of the police force in exchange for burdening the police with less responsibilities, which was a very bad sign; as a general rule, successful slogans do not need someone to immediately explain that they don’t mean what you could easily interpret them to mean. The truth is that there were a small, measurable number of people who did want to simply stop having police, occasionally suggesting that they replace them with entirely new organizations serving the exact same functions but deemed more politically reliable; these “police abolitionists” were over-represented among the organizers of the protests. (After all, they had been objecting to the existence of police long before George Floyd was killed and will continue to object to them even if no black person is ever slowly strangled to death by one again. They were already there.)

“Defund the police” became a way of not having to say which of the two sides of the debate you were on. If you were being cornered in responsible society and asked whether or not you supported anarchy when you said “defund the police”, you would say “of course not!” and insist that “defund the police” only meant that limited idea of reducing the scope of the police. If you were being cornered by activists who asked whether or not you were going to submit to their demands, you would say “of course I do!” and agree that “defund the police” meant that their idea of replacing the police with community struggle sessions called “empathy ceremonies” where they decide if suspected criminals are enslaved for the rest of their lives or ritualistically drowned was great. It was a way to agree with whoever you were talking to at the time.

While the core of politics has always revolved around making vague promises that things will improve and counting on everyone listening to interpret those vague promises as the policies that each individual voter wants, rarely have such diametrically opposed visions for society tried to find common ground in the same political movement. Does “defund the police” mean that we should go over their budget line item by line item asking whether or not the NYPD really needs more money per year than the armed forces of Ukraine? Does it mean that we should get rid of all of the police, and then whenever we find a criminal we should turn around for a few minutes, and when we look back someone else should have done something to make the criminal disappear and we don’t have to think about it anymore? Does it mean that we should fire every police officer and then re-hire different people who are more like us to do the exact same jobs? Yes, it does! It means all of those things!

Anarchy for some, increased spending on social services for others!

Many people have written histories of the leaders of nonviolent movements like Reverend Martin Luther King Junior or Mahātmā Gandhi focus on the strong faith these men had and the moral certainty their faith brought them in their causes. It’s literally in their names. Martin Luther King is named for Martin Luther, the seminal figure of the Protestant reformation; Mahātmā, a honorific applied to Gandhi worldwide, means ‘great-souled’ in Sanskrit. These men saw themselves as priests first and protestors second, using their position as moral leaders to urge human beings to act better towards each other, waging a spiritual war as opposed to a physical one.

But we should consider something important about them. They won their war. The people who tried to fight a physical war did not.

Both British rule in India and Jim Crow had no shortage of people willing to commit violence for and against it. The first body identified from a mass grave of more than a hundred people killed in the Tulsa Race Massacre was a veteran of World War I; it would take the East India Company over a century of constant warfare to subjugate the Indian subcontinent. The problem was never that there were people unwilling to fight those who sought to conquer them; the problem was that the conquerors were able to bring more force to bear against the people they conquered.

It is easy to see nonviolence as either Christlike suffering, martyrdom offered on behalf of an undeserving population in order to save them from themselves, or as a submissive plea, begging bullies and tyrants to stop hurting you because it isn’t fair. It is harder to see what Martin Luther King referred to as “soul force”, to comprehend that responding to someone hitting you by staring them in the eye and asking them if they feel like a big man now can be a statement of strength rather than weakness. To offer someone undeserved mercy is to threaten them with the idea that nothing they can do to you poses a threat.

Small wonder that Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renée Good, ignored Renée’s wife in the passenger seat, who was yelling “You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy” and instead chose to shoot three times the person whose last words to him were “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you”. If he could not make Renée Good hate and fear him, what was the point to being there with a gun in the first place?

By definition, no government can afford to coerce every one of its citizens at every time. It’s a simple question of numbers. The government takes a tiny fraction of everyone’s productive labor and uses that to pay a much smaller number of people to ensure that everyone else obeys the law. If every person required a police officer watching them at every hour of the day in order to make sure that they obeyed the law, you would have to employ half of the country as police officers. And even if you did that, then who would police the police officers?

In order to work, any government must convince the population to either cooperate with it or submit to it. Generally, the government wants to do both; as Machiavelli says in The Prince, “it would be best to be both loved and feared”. The government wants to be loved for what it can provide to the people that cooperate with it, and simultaneously to be feared for what it can do to the people who refuse to submit to it.

The best way to be loved and feared by people at the same time is to be loved for the fear you create in their enemies. And it is very easy to convince someone that people unlike them are enemies.

Pick a man’s pocket, and when he demands his money back, shove him to the ground. When he throws a punch, draw a gun and shoot him dead. “I had no choice,” you explain, “He punched me, completely unprovoked. I feared for my life.” People will debate for hours whether or not it was appropriate or necessary for you to shoot a man who punched you, but they’ll rarely ask what you were doing stealing and shoving him in the first place - so long as you make it winkingly clear that none of the good people have to worry about having their wallets stolen by you.

White people did not fear losing their ballot or their bathroom under Jim Crow. White people do not fear losing their freedom or their citizenship to ICE raids. They understood that these degradations were targeted at people who were not them, and that while they were permitted to care about them, if they wanted to, they never had to worry about them. And everyone worries about criminals. So by declaring your political enemies violent criminals, by emphasizing all the things that make them different from “normal” people, you encourage the crowd of ordinary people to see themselves less and see their enemies more.

Jesse Watters from Fox News understood the assignment. When Renée Good was killed by Jonathan Ross, he immediately moved to excommunicate her from sympathy in the eyes of his audience. “The woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio,” he said, reminding the audience that this was not one of us but one of them. “The Daily Mail says she leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.” Mentioning that she married the woman in the passenger seat who was forced to watch her wife die after the death of her first husband might have made her seem human to the audience. Sympathy couldn’t be allowed. “She was a disruptor,” he said, clearly communicating that no one watching the show needed to worry about ending up like her - not as long as they understood their place.

What do you do about this? The forces of repression are defending in depth. Whenever they get caught killing someone, they slander the dead, making up whatever reasons they need to in order to justify their murder - JD Vance referred to Alex Pretti as an “attempted assassin” and Kristi Noem described him as a “domestic terrorist” who “wanted to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” Whenever they inflict fear and terror on part of the populace, they remind the rest of the populace that it’s only those wicked Negro agitators and the poets from Colorado getting hurt, and that none of the “good people” have cause to worry about the violence of the state being turned on them - so long as they don’t try to interfere with the state’s violence, that is.

This defense held. It held in the face of violence brought by people resisting it, and it held in the face of arguments that it was deeply unfair and ought to stop. The state could bring more physical force to bear against those who resisted it than those who resisted it could bring; and the people who worried about what would happen if the world became more fair could bring more political force than those who cared about the world becoming fairer could bring.

When the defense fell, it fell to a force more powerful. Soul force. I don’t believe that the nonviolent protestors changed the minds of the populace; even before the marches people generally either knew that Jim Crow was wrong, or knew that it was wrong but supported it anyway because they benefited from it. Even when you look at the people who argued in favor of segregation, they very rarely said that it was good that white people were keeping all of the best bus seats and bathrooms for themselves; they pretended that they had no choice but to do it because permitting equality would have “violent and anarchistic consequences”, allowing “mob rule” to “end civilization”.

I believe that by fighting back in this way, they put a very specific sort of pressure on the government. The government must be able to convince people to cooperate with it, or threaten people into submitting to it. It must be either loved or feared. When faced with nonviolent protests, the government can repress the protests, which makes it harder for the government to be loved. Or the government can ignore the protests, which makes it harder for the government to be feared.

Wherever the government wants to rule by fear among one section of the population but rule by love among the rest of them, nonviolence forces them to choose.

The government can violently repress the protestors and blame them for provoking the violence. It will always blame them. There was nothing that Alex Pretti could have done to not be declared a domestic terrorist the moment the government killed him. But public shows of nonviolence make it substantially harder to make that case. If a man clearly has the opportunity to violently resist and just as clearly foregoes the opportunity to violently resist, it becomes harder for others to believe that he terrified you and you had no choice but to kill him. Not hard to say; nothing except someone’s own sense of shame can stop them from saying that “Alex Pretti approached police officers carrying a firearm” when the video clearly shows that Alex Pretti had no intent to draw that firearm and the gun was removed from the scene before Alex was ever shot. But harder to believe.

Even for people who fully understand that the subtext of these acts is supposed to be “you should not care about what happens to these enemies of the state because it will never happen to you”, the more unprovoked the violence, the more people will understand that it may come for them some day. Alex Pretti’s last act on earth, the act that caused him to be jumped by several CBP agents and summarily executed by them, was to help a woman up off the ground. His death sends the clear message that anyone who tries to help someone off the ground who was thrown there by DHS is taking their lives into their own hands. And while plenty of people understand that ICE is willing to beat people for very little provocation, those people can tell themselves “Well, I would never insult an officer, record him making arrests, or speak Spanish in public, so I’m safe.” But if people are being asked to find out whether or not the government approves of it before they help a neighbor off the ground, they will begin to see this as a far more annoying intrusion on their day-to-day lives.

The more violence the government commits, the higher the cost of cooperating with the government becomes. Violence is disruptive. It leaves widows, orphans, bystanders. People who will remember, and people who will hate you for the rest of their lives. And people who will hate anyone who cooperates with you. It’s one thing to say “We support our brave police officers, who get free parking spaces” with a sign outside your grocery store when the police officers are known for arresting shoplifters and pickpockets; it’s quite another to put that sign up once the local police officers are mostly known for a series of vicious, unprovoked assaults. Best if no one has to ask exactly why you support the police.

The more violence the government uses, the harder it is to rule through love.

If violence makes things harder for the government, why is it used in the first place? Some of it is just the inevitable misaligned incentives of principal and agent. A man with a billy club knows that he can get away with beating someone with it, and so he does what comes naturally - any consequences for his violent vacation will be paid by other people at some point in the future, and he gets to enjoy the feeling of power that comes from hurting someone helpless right now. But the government understood what this man was going to do with the billy club when it handed it to him. The government gave him the billy club because it understood that people will demand less of them if they think that making those demands might be met with violence.

If people resist in ones and twos, trickling in, then one or two of those people could be killed (or otherwise made a very public example to others), and the rest of the people would stop following that example, and the government would have time to settle the disruption caused by the murder before the fear let up enough that they needed to kill someone new. If hundreds to thousands of people resist at once, the government is outnumbered. For every one example they create of someone who defied them and was killed, there will be thousands of examples of people who resisted and were fine.

People will obviously be more intimidated by a tiny prospect of being killed than reassured by a near-certainty of surviving. As the IRA said after failing to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, “Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once.” But courage is not the absence of fear, it is overcoming it, and it is easier to overcome fear when you know that you have a community at your back.

And the government would much rather rule through the fear of force than force itself. Force is risky; force is expensive; force is disruptive. Fear is much cheaper. You don’t even need to use the weapon that causes the fear. An ICE officer greeted a woman filming him by asking “Haven’t you learned your lesson from the last few days?” a few days after Renée Good was shot and killed. This ICE agent didn’t want to go through all of the trouble that would have resulted if he killed the woman filming him; he didn’t even want to go to the trouble that would have resulted from issuing an explicit death threat, laughing and refusing to answer when woman filming him asked “what lesson is that?” just before he knocked the phone out of her hand. He just wanted to exploit the fear caused by the murder of Renée Good to bully someone.

The less violence the government uses, the harder it is to rule through fear.

Martin Luther King’s tragic assassination lead to him being granted the status of a secular saint. Racially conservative people seeking to claim themselves as heirs to King’s legacy tastefully remove his radical demands that America live up to the promises that it had made towards its black citizens, reducing his “I Have A Dream” speech to one single line about how he hopes that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, as though his only request was that people generally decide to treat each other more kindly.

If Martin Luther King wasn’t a figure that would have castigated them, Mississippi and Alabama wouldn’t have made his federal holiday also Robert E. Lee Day, meant to honor both the priest who urged America to uphold its Constitution and the general who committed treason in defense of slavery so that he could kidnap anyone who looked like that priest, chain them and whip them, pour brine into the bleeding wounds, then separate them from their families and sell their children as cattle.

But they aren’t the only ones who sand off the sharper edges to make it easier for themselves to claim the legacy of Martin Luther King as their heritage.

Martin Luther King was an idealist, yes. But he was also a strategist.

The nonviolent protests by Martin Luther King were razor-focused on the task of making it harder for Jim Crow to exist. Martin Luther King organized marches, yes, one of which famously ended on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, with a mob of deputized white citizens lead by the Alabama Highway Patrol falling on 600 nonviolent marchers and beating many of them unconscious, leaving future Representative John Lewis with a fractured skull and scars he would bear for the rest of his life. But these marches were not symbolically meaningful commutes; they were targeted attacks at a specific part of the functioning of Jim Crow.

The easiest way to prevent black people from voting was to prevent them from registering to vote. Therefore Jim Crow worked in part by making it as hard as possible to register to vote; registration paperwork had to be done in-person at the town courthouse, which was open for registration only two days out of every month. Clerks at that courthouse understood perfectly well that their job was to use ostensibly neutral laws to prevent black people from successfully registering to vote and neglect to enforce those laws when white people showed up. They would use “literacy tests” that included questions with more than one correct answer, then tell the black registrant that they failed the test because they were required to give the other answer. They would refuse to give black citizens paperwork or throw it away once it was filled out. They would arrest white people who attempted to turn in a black person’s registration paperwork. All of these things - poll taxes, literacy tests, inconvenient registration procedures - made voting slightly harder for white people and voting massively harder for black people, because the people enforcing the laws understood that they were intended to only be actually enforced on black people.

Martin Luther King’s marches were designed to organize hundreds of people with the media watching and have them all arrive at the courthouses where they were supposed to be allowed to register to vote. The forces of Jim Crow would have three choices. They could permit the marchers to register to vote, thereby surrendering to their demands. They could deploy the exact same set of spurious regulations to prevent anyone from registering to vote, thereby allowing the media to exhaustively record government employees refusing to do the jobs that they claim to have.

Or they could respond with violence. Legal or extralegal violence, whether it’s arresting all of the marchers when they arrive at the courthouse or putting a call out to every single white citizen above the age of twenty-one to arm themselves and ambush the marchers on a bridge before they even get close to the courthouse. But so long as the media is documenting the march, and the people at the march refuse to act to defend themselves, there is clearly no justification beyond the naked admission that “we do not want these black people to be allowed to vote, and will beat them into the hospital if they stand in front of us and peacefully ask for the ballot.”

The government is caught in a fork. They can surrender to the protest’s demands by allowing voter registration, they can make it harder to rule through fear by creating legal records of their refusal to work, or they can make it harder to rule through love by responding with clearly and completely unprovoked violence.

Modern protest culture completely ignores the tactical aspects of the protests in favor of the aesthetic of protest. Marches travel from symbolic location to symbolic location chanting slogans. Activists for a group calling themselves Just Stop Oil enter museums and spill soup and mashed potatoes on historical paintings, provoking a wave of copycats. A rowdy street protestor in Minneapolis attempts to light a dumpster on fire, and when a local civil rights lawyer asks him to stop, the protestor punches the lawyer in the face. None of these protests target anything vital or even relevant to the injustices they are meant to protest. All of them can be safely ignored by the powers that be; thus, they will be ignored by the powers that be.

When confronted on this, the activists in question fall back on several rote defenses. They point out that Martin Luther King’s protests were widely unpopular with the white community in America; therefore it should be no surprise that their protests are similarly considered to be bad ideas. This assumes the inevitability of what Martin Luther King fought hardest to overcome; it is the equivalent of saying that since in 2016 the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl after being down 28-3 midway through the third quarter of the game, you intend to allow the opponent to score four touchdowns and then see what happens.

They point out that Martin Luther King used the fact that his followers were arrested unjustly to fill the prisons to the point where the sheriffs of the South had no choice but to release the protestors so they still had room to put away thieves and murderers; they propose that breaking the law and being arrested for it should be seen not as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of opposing an unjust system but as a useful goal to be pursued in itself. This is no different from saying that your plan in a war is to have as many soldiers surrender to the enemy as possible, so that once they are in the prisoner of war camps they can eat all of the food available for the enemy’s army.

Lastly, they say that the cause they are advocating for is so righteous that their tactics should be immune to criticism. Surely the more important the cause, the more important the choice of tactics is. Only a selfish narcissist would care more about whether they are seen opposing injustice than stopping that injustice. Only the arrogantly vain would imagine that the most effective way they could advocate for a cause would be to let everyone know that they support it. The higher the stakes, the greater the danger posed by doing things that make us feel good instead of working.

Doing the things that feel good and ignoring why they were done in the first place has transformed modern protest from a way to change the world into an outdoor block party designed to celebrate the people who previously changed it, a secular version of one of those ogre-slaying festivals portrayed in anime where the entire rustic Japanese village gets together to re-enact the time centuries ago that the hero slew the demon. Come to Kitakami Village and remember when the Loyal Three heroically mugged Ogerpon; and once you’ve had your fill of popping balloons and stalls offering commemorative mochi, perhaps you’d like to abolish the police?

Any analysis of a specific tactic must include an assessment of when the tactic is likely to work, and when the tactic is likely to fail. Nonviolence - when considered as a tactic, rather than as a moral principle - relies on exploiting the tension between a government that wants to use the threat of unprovoked violence in order to keep part of the population subdued and simultaneously wants to haughtily deny that it would ever use violence except when it was strictly necessary. A government that does not seek to disguise the fact that it rules by fear or a government that seeks to avoid ruling by fear where possible would not be vulnerable to this tactic.

Gandhi, when interviewed in 1946, said that the Holocaust was “the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” Horrifying as this sounds, Gandhi does have a theory of how the tactic might have worked. “It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany”, forcing them to admit that the Jews were dying en masse. He points out that the people killed by the Nazis were dead anyway. “As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

I disagree with the great-souled one on this point. Firmly. The Holocaust was a secret in the way that the uncle serving ten years in federal prison for bank robbery is a family secret, not in the way that the spare key inside a rock in the garden outside is a family secret. It was protected not by being hidden from view but by being too shameful to talk about. The Nazis did not publicly state their intent to carry out a “final solution to the Jewish problem”, but they did not do anything to hide the fact that they were loading as many Jewish people as possible into train cars, driving those trains to prison camps with crematoriums that ran night and day, and that none of those Jewish people were ever seen again. Plenty of German citizens at the time would make dark jokes to each other that missing things “must have ended up where all of the Jews did”; the Allied forces were perfectly aware of what Germany was doing in its concentration camps but scrupulously pretended not to be, because if they were aware of it they might become morally obligated to stop ignoring it. Drawing attention to the Holocaust by voluntarily dying in public would have just saved the Nazis some time; everyone already knew it, they just preferred to pretend that they didn’t.

So a government that uses a great deal of violence to rule almost exclusively by fear will not be vulnerable to nonviolence. A government that uses as little fear as possible will similarly be protected.

Occupy Wall Street was a protest started in 2011 after seeing a similar movement in Egypt called Occupy Tahrir Square bring down the Egyptian government; the Occupy Tahrir Square model would also work in 2014 to bring down the Russia-backed Ukrainian government in what was known as the Euromaidan or the “Revolution of Dignity”. Occupy Wall Street’s theory of change was that protests force governments to surrender to their demands by being too large to violently suppress and too disruptive to tolerate; therefore, by simply gathering a large enough number of rowdy enough people in one place who demanded that the government change, the government would be changed.

Occupy Tahrir Square and Euromaidan succeeded and Occupy Wall Street failed because the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, ruled by fear in ways that the American government simply did not. When you rely on intimidation to keep people from changing your government, a huge number of people in the streets chanting “We will not be intimidated” poses a huge threat to your government. When you regularly have free and fair elections to change your government, a huge number of people in the streets chanting “We will not be intimidated” does not pose a huge threat to your government, because the government seeks to beat them at the ballot box, not to intimidate them. If they truly represented a massive silent majority, they would have won the election in the first place.

Hosni Mubarak and Victor Yanukovych had to order their militaries to open fire on the Tahrir Square protestors and Independence Square protestors because if people thought that they were allowed to protest the government without being intimidated, it would signal a death knell for the system’s power to intimidate. Occupy Wall Street could be safely ignored because America, for large part, did not need to resort to intimidation in order to get most people to obey the government. Even in 2020, when activists in Seattle seized Cal Anderson Park, barred the police from entering, and declared it the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”, the city was able to wait out the protestors like a parent whose child announces that they are running away from home patiently sits on the porch waiting for them to realize that they have no other source of food or shelter and return home. Most reenactions of My Side of the Mountain end before six people are shot and one murdered by heavily armed anarchists there to provide ‘protection for the community’, but CHAZ was not so lucky.

With that in mind, are we currently in the sweet spot where nonviolence makes sense as a tactical measure? Is the government seeking to intimidate the citizens of Minneapolis, and simultaneously deny that it would ever intimidate the citizens of Minneapolis? Absolutely.

The tactics of the government and the tactics of the protestors are constantly changing. Originally, DHS sought to organize large raids that would capture as many people they saw as racially undesirable as possible; in Chicago, the city’s residents got whistles and blew them whenever they saw DHS approach, warning people who were at risk of abduction that they needed to hide or otherwise escape the incoming kidnappers. In Minneapolis, DHS switched to a new tactic of lightning abductions, driving around the city, waiting until they saw one or two racially undesirable people alone and vulnerable, and piling out of their car to quickly snatch them up and take them to prison within minutes, without having any idea who the person they targeted for kidnapping was.

Protestors responded by following DHS cars around Minneapolis, constantly recording them, and shouting for people who were being abducted by DHS to tell the observers their names and other identifying information so that lawyers could be informed who had been taken and families could be notified why one of their members disappeared one day, as DHS refuses to either provide its prisoners with legal representation or inform their family members about what happened to the people they disappear. DHS adapted by threatening the protesting observers, adding their names to databases, showing them that DHS knew where the observers lived, and murdering two of them in Alex Pretti and Renée Good.

DHS closed ranks around the killers in both cases, using force to prevent the state police from securing the crime scene, sending the people guilty of the murder out of the state to put them beyond the bounds of justice, and announcing that there would be no investigation into the murderers because both Pretti and Good deserved what they got. With that in mind, and with how unprovoked the killings were in the first place, it’s easy to assume that DHS wanted Pretti and Good to be shot dead in order to intimidate the rest of the observers. Of course the DHS didn’t want to investigate the killings; that would be like the Seattle Seahawks defensive line announcing that they were hiring independent investigators to find out how opposing quarterback Drake Maye could possibly have been sacked six times during the Super Bowl. The people who did it were doing exactly the jobs they were sent there to do.

It would be easy to assume that, but it would still be wrong.

DHS wanted Pretti and Good to be murdered, yes. But more than that, DHS didn’t want to be held responsible for the murder. It wanted them deniably dead. Because there was so much video of Pretti and Good’s murders, and it clearly showed how they remained nonviolent, there was no room to make any sort of plausible denial.

This does not stop them, obviously, from making implausible denials. They will still seek to impede in every way anyone’s attempt to get justice on behalf of Pretti or Good by punishing their murderers. But they stand in the way of justice not just because they want to protect their own employee and tell their employees that DHS will have your back even when you murder American citizens for no reason, but because the workings of justice in the courts and media pose a greater threat to them than any benefit they would derive from killing Pretti and Good in the first place.

One of the bystanders recording the DHS officers surrounding Renée Good as she slowly died shouted “You can’t kill us all, Nazis!” Purely as a matter of counting bullets in guns and heads in the crowd, it’s worth remembering that they could have. If DHS chose to escalate the situation to mass violence and simply opened fire aiming to kill as many protestors as possible, it is very likely that they would murder at least thirty to forty people before the protestors were able to flee the scene. A single gunman at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was able to fire 200 shots, killing 49 people and wounding 58 more; it’s likely that a group of DHS agents with AR-15s making a premeditated attack on unarmed protestors would get as many if not more.

DHS does not do that. Not because they want the protestors to live, or because they are unwilling to commit murder, but because they know that if they escalated the situation like that, if they started killing people in the street, people would get off the street and arm themselves. And then DHS’s strategy of ambushing brown people in ones and twos to abduct them would be met with people ambushing DHS agents in ones and twos to kill them.

If the situation deteriorates into mass violence, nothing anyone says on Substack is going to matter. It stops being about words and starts being about guns. But as long as Minneapolis has not become a total war of all against all yet, nonviolence puts pressure on DHS that violence would alleviate.

If Minneapolis violently resisted DHS, they would be giving DHS permission to destroy them. DHS is already murdering them one at a time; but each death is so clearly unnecessary that it causes a backlash, forcing DHS to pretend to retreat so they can adjust their tactics. If someone approaches the DHS with guns and is clearly going to use them, then DHS would successfully get away with killing them.

Yes. People who remained nonviolent have died in the streets of Minneapolis. More people will likely die in the future, so long as DHS remains in Minneapolis to conquer the people of that state. It’s a natural consequence of having an occupying army; soldiers get jumpy and kill civilians from time to time even when not given a reason.

But it is not as though making the resistance against DHS a violent resistance instead of a nonviolent one would decrease the number of innocent people killed.

This isn’t a video game or a movie or a TV series or an American don’t-call-it-a-war, where attractive protagonists blast through faceless minions, shooting dead hundreds without ever being injured themselves. Two people died in the process of nonviolently resisting DHS. Hundreds would die in the process of violently resisting DHS.

As a purely moral matter, I regard DHS as an army that has invaded the streets of an American state, and I am enough of a patriot that I know that any army invading our country ought to be made to leave it feet first; even if that army was technically raised from other parts of our own country. If anyone in Minneapolis does kill anyone from DHS, it is quite likely that they will have acted consistently with the American principles that underlie the founding of our country.

But that person in Minneapolis who does kill someone from DHS will be letting the rest of DHS off easily by giving DHS an excuse to kill other innocent Minneapolis citizens. Nonviolence puts pressure on DHS by making it clear that they have no reason to defend themselves. Violence would give them the excuse to do what they want, then blame the people of Minneapolis for giving them no choice but to do it.

It is hard to think about how the people who murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti are probably going to get away without ever being punished. They certainly have a sympathetic President who is likely to issue them federal pardons, and might be able to escape state justice by fleeing to a more sympathetic state like Texas. If vigilante violence from the citizens they oppress is the only way to punish them, then it is easy to justify vigilante violence on an emotional level, on a moral level, on a societal level.

But this article is about tactics. And tactically, vigilante violence would be a mistake.

At the moment, we engage DHS on terrain extremely favorable to ourselves. There is no reason that we should abandon that terrain just because it would feel very, very good to do something very, very bad to the people who shoot unarmed women and send text messages to their friends bragging about the number of holes she has now.

It is more important that we prevent unarmed women from being shot than that we feel good about what we did to someone who shot them.

Nonviolence is a tactic. Tactics don’t care whether or not they’re honorable or dishonorable, satisfying or unsatisfying, good or evil. They are simply either useful for accomplishing your strategy, or useless in the situation you find yourself in.

For the moment, nonviolence is useful. If you wish to arm yourself in preparation for a time when nonviolence is no longer useful, feel free. That day may come. But that day has not come yet, and those arms should be left at home for now.

This fight is too important. We cannot risk allowing our enemies a chance to defeat us.

Sometimes, the most useful weapon is no weapon at all.

Suppose that there is a die with 100 sides on it in Washington D.C. (Yes, they exist.) Every morning, at 6 A.M. Eastern Standard time, the die is rolled. If the die comes up with any number between 1 and 99, nothing happens. If the die comes up 100, nothing happens… today. Nothing even happens if 100 is rolled two days in a row.

If 100 is rolled on the die three days in a row, the Earth explodes.

Earth-shattering kaboom. “Continue with the operation; you may fire when ready.” The sun loses its third planet and gains a brand-new asteroid belt. We’ll meet again; don’t know where, don’t know when. Don’t panic.

You blew it up, you maniacs. God damn you all to hell.

Share

In this hypothetical, what incentives would this state of affairs create for the media?

It would be great, right?

Everyone would want to be reassured every morning that the Earth had at least another seventy-two hours left in it. They would have to turn the TV on long enough to check the chyron to assure themselves that it had been a number between 1 and 99, and only then would they be able to go about their day.

To say nothing of the slightly-more-than-three-times-a-year event when the die comes up 100. If you’re just joining us, we’re with MIT statistician Dr. Boffin. Dr. Boffin, yesterday you said that we should expect to go more than 2,737 years before the earth exploded; today we misinterpreted what you said to lower it to 27 years. What happened? Sorry, breaking news, we go live to our image enhancement lab; they may have detected a tiny imperfection in the die that resulted in it rolling a 100, or maybe that’s just a bit of dust on the lens. And after the commercial break, we have a live interview with backup die-roller Jason Understudy to discuss whether or not someone else should roll the die tomorrow morning.

God help us all if we ever roll two 100s in a row. (Which will happen every 27 years on average.) We’d have a sponsored live countdown.

With everyone paying more attention to the news (or at least one specific part of it), it’s easy to see how the media companies would respond with pride to their newly important position. “Thanks to our fearless reporting, thousands of people spent the next several hours rocking back and forth in the fetal position while occasionally calling family members to tell them they were loved. Our journalism really brings people together,” one executive stated as he unveiled his company’s new official motto, “The Planet Explodes in Darkness”.

Having gained a position of influence and power due to the existence of the potentially planet-destroying die, the media would hardly want the die to go away.

“We see whether or not someone finds a way to stop rolling the die that might destroy the Earth as only one of the issues that faces the country in the next election,” the same executive says. “We think that the suggestion to replace the single 100-sided die with two 10-sided dice is a form of bold and muscular leadership that might excite young voters, and those are the customers we most want to reach. Sure, one political party says that rolling the die more often is bad and that reducing the number of sides on it is really bad, but the other party says that this is exactly the same as rolling the 100-sided die and is much easier to read. We’ll host a town hall debate between both sides so that average people can bring their insights into what dice we should roll.”

“We need to work harder to regain the trust of our customers,” the executive continued as he hectored his employees. “When polled, over ninety-nine percent of our employees agreed that they would ‘personally prefer it if the Earth did not explode’ - a clear sign of bias. To make sure we can bring our customers a diverse range of views, we’ve hired Ross Douthat and Tom Cotton to write several columns with fresh perspectives on blowing up the Earth.”

“Some people have said we buried news about ways that we could prevent the die from being rolled on page A21 while making FBI probes into anti-die politicians front-page stories for weeks on end. To these people, I say, if you want a soft-focus partisan outlet that is only going to tell you propaganda that flatters politicians who want to keep the planet from exploding, subscribe to Mother Jones or Mugged by Reality.”

“We focus on objective, neutral fact-finding here. When we made our motto ‘The Planet Explodes in Darkness’, it was only ever meant to remind you that you had a duty to subscribe to our newspaper and watch us on TV; it wasn’t ever supposed to come with a responsibility on our part to do anything that might prevent the planet from exploding. That’s why I’m revealing our new new motto, ‘Riveting Storytelling Exploding All of the Planet’, and firing anyone from our editorial board unwilling to renew their commitment to personal liberties, free markets, and games of chance.”

And they all lived happily ever after; 999,999 times out of 1,000,000 at least.

So on a related note, Donald Trump gave a speech this week. It was covered live by the major news networks, which lead to a great deal of complaining from liberal commentators about how similar speeches from Barack Obama and Joe Biden had been ignored by the major networks, while this was allowed to preempt the season finale of Survivor.

Well, that’s because rolling a 100-sided die isn’t news, but rolling a 100-sided die that might destroy the planet is absolutely news.

With Barack Obama and Joe Biden, a news organization would know what the speech was about ahead of time. The networks understood what was going to happen. There was no reason to alter their schedules for this sort of thing, because no new information would actually be contained in that speech. It wasn’t news. It was these politicians saying what they said the day before and will say the day afterward.

With Donald Trump, it’s impossible to predict what he’s going to do on live TV, the same way it’s impossible to predict a drunk driver with a blood alcohol content of 0.45 or 0.47%. He could declare that it was ‘liberation day’ and he was unilaterally raising taxes by over 100%; he could demand that the cast of Saturday Night Live be drawn and quartered; he could see someone in the crowd eating a hamburger, decide that he wanted their hamburger, and descend into the crowd to demand that hamburger from them at gunpoint. There’s no way to tell.

Tucker Carlson reported that the President was going to announce that “war is coming” with Venezeula. Now, I don’t trust Tucker Carlson to do anything but lie, but he’s shown a pretty impressive ability to skate to where the puck is going on the desires of the MAGA base, properly getting out ahead of them by ‘rooting for’ Russia to invade and destroy the sovereign nation of Ukraine and supporting the January 6th insurrectionists long before the average Republican politician realized that the base would demand that they support both of those things.

And let’s not forget the antisemitism. He was way out in front of the rest of the Republican Party on antisemitism.

The idea that Barack Obama or Joe Biden would announce that they were taking the country into a shooting war with no congressional authorization and unveil it as a surprise was ridiculous. But doing that would be one of the more Presidential things that Donald Trump has done in the Oval Office. Because it was completely plausible, all of the news organizations had to respect the possibility that he would.

What actually happened was that Donald Trump cleared a slot for a two-hour speech and then rambled in front of a confused audience for twenty minutes about what a great job he was doing and the upcoming ‘Patriot Games’ before the wakey-time drugs wore off and the sleepy-time drugs kicked in. But the threat that he was going to say that we were now bombing Venezeula was very, very real.

The threat is stronger than the execution.

Yes, the news covered Trump’s speech live. Trump’s speech was newsworthy; the same way a group of heavily armed Mad Max marauders driving around the country killing everyone they encountered to steal their water and gasoline would be newsworthy. We can’t fault their judgment for deciding that this is worth reporting on.

We can, however, notice that the media seems to be hoping that we’ll be forced to watch them in order to make sure we have time to lock our doors, board our windows, and count our daughters.

If we want someone to actually stop these marauders rather than profit off them, we’ll have to make other arrangements.

Share

“If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” Mitch McConnell said, and then he voted against the impeachment of Donald Trump. We should take him at his word. Nothing, from surrendering to defeated traitors to ordering a mob to storm Congress and kill your vice president is impeachable. If we don’t talk about what that means for our government going forward, we’re no longer a serious people.

Yes, it is possible to impeach a President of the United States of America; Article 1, Section 3, Clauses 6 and 7 lay it out. Procedures are specified for how it can happen. It is also possible to win a NFL football game 700-0; all that requires is that you score a touchdown every 36 seconds for the duration of the entire game, which is possible, should the opposing team obediently hand one of your players the ball every time you kick it off to them then stand aside to allow whoever they gave the ball to run into their own end zone for the touchdown.

In any circumstance where the losing team has any desire whatsoever to impede the winning team, it will not happen. In any circumstance where the winning team values keeping their players uninjured and safe so they can win future games more than the idea that they can run up the score of this one to set an arbitrary and meaningless record, it will not happen.

Mitt Romney was the first ever Senator in February 2020 to vote for the impeachment of a President of his own party. In February 2021 seven Republicans total voted to impeach someone who had sent a mob armed with guns to kill most of those Republicans so that he could remain President despite losing the 2020 election. Doing that would have politically cost them nothing, as the person with the mob was no longer president, and it would have prevented the person who tried to kill them from becoming President again in 2024, which polling indicated he was reasonably likely to do. Forty-three Republican Senators voted to acquit the person who had just tried to kill many of them.

It would have taken seventeen Republican votes to successfully impeach Donald Trump. Under these circumstances, voting in the building that had been sacked under Donald Trump’s explicit orders, which had been abandoned the moment Donald Trump gave the order for his soldiers to retreat, an order he refused to give until they had been in the building for multiple hours and it was clear that the raiders could not reach the Senators in order to kill them - a Senate split evenly between the two parties could muster only 57 votes for impeachment. If twice as many Republicans had decided that some kind of consequence was appropriate for the person who tried to have them killed, it would still have fallen three votes short.

There will always be an excuse not to convict. Like Mitch McConnell, you can swear that the President is “morally and practically responsible” for attempting to overthrow the government - but you delayed the trial until he was out of office so now you have no choice but to find him innocent as you could only impeach him while he was in office. Like Susan Collins, you can suddenly demonstrate the patience and forgiveness of a saint, saying that you think that the President “has learned his lesson”. Of course, when he does it again, it’d be hard to use the same excuse, because otherwise you’d be admitting that the lesson you taught him is that he can get away with anything.

Which he can.

Leave pretending that these excuses not to convict are anything other than excuses to the feeble-minded stenographers who publish daily that one man says that he is the county wallet inspector and that five other people insist that he has stolen their wallets, and that you will have to decide for yourself who to believe. We all know that Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins would have taken less than a second to impeach and convict a Democrat accused of the crimes that Donald Trump was; we all know that if you asked them if they would support the impeachment of a President who committed those crimes, even if they were a Republican, they would have sternly told you that of course they would have; so long as you made sure to ask them this hypothetical question before they realized that Donald Trump was about to do them.

Mitch McConnell said that nothing was impeachable, and he also said why: “the Democrats will take care of this son of a bitch for us.” No matter how depraved, authoritarian, or corrupt the action is, if your political enemies want a person who is dangerous to America out of office, they will spend more time, more energy, more political capital to do that if you refuse to help them than if you get out of their way. And the more resources they spend on protecting the country, the less resources they have to use against you. There will always be an excuse for why you can say that you’re doing it; everyone will understand why you are really doing it; no one will have the courage to say that you are doing it for the reason they all know you’re doing it for; and certainly no one will ever treat you at your favorite restaurant as though you did it for the reason they know you did it for. (At least, no one who disapproves of it will treat you that way.)

For the exact same reason, a smaller, 50-vote impeachment process would be even worse for American democracy; if we had that, as soon as the party that didn’t control the White House had 51 votes in the Senate, they could immediately begin impeachment procedures for the President on the grounds that the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” includes insufficiently doctrinaire opinions about The Last Jedi. Again, it’s a completely free means of making your opponents spend political capital. Republicans unanimously voted in favor of an inquiry into impeaching Biden even though they admitted that they had no evidence that he had committed any crimes; if they had actually had the votes to impeach and convict, I have no doubt that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson would have explained to the media that the lack of evidence is the most damning evidence of all, shortly before being administered the Presidential Oath of Office by a chuckling Chief Justice Roberts after the simultaneous impeachment of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Impeaching a President of your party will always be a political cost. Impeaching a President of the opposing party will always have a political benefit. The only reason that someone would cross party lines to impeach was because they thought that their country (or, more prosaically, their political careers) would benefit more from the impeachment succeeding than from their political party being strengthened.

We have seen the effect on the political careers of the people who crossed party lines to impeach a President - again, impeaching him for an act of violent insurrection that left five people dead and Confederate flags waving through the Capitol Building as their holders hunted for Congressmen to slay, a feat not managed by the actual Confederates - and Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Adam Kinzinger were all ejected from the party at the earliest opportunity.

And they weren’t ejected from the party by shadowy elite leaders in a smoke-filled room looking to make an example of some insufficiently loyal foot soldiers. They were rejected by their own primary voters. The demand that Republican politicians put party over country is coming from Republican voters. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” wrote James Madison. Not necessary, maybe, but certainly desired, especially in the Republican party these days. In the primary election between the angel who asks you to give up some of what you want because it’s the right thing to do and the demon who urges you to give in to every base desire and take everything you’ve ever wanted, very few people end up walking with the Lord.

As a practical matter, impeachment is impossible. Were impeachment possible, the politicians who participated in the impeachment would be replaced, and quickly, by politicians who would refuse to participate in the impeachment. Barring a primary electorate that is more interested in their country functioning well than their party having political power - and the primary electorate, by definition, believes that their country functioning well requires their party to hold political power - impeachment can only ever be a one-time event, something that will encourage political parties to build entire television channels in order to keep it from ever happening again.

The 67-vote threshold means that so long as a president has the support of a subset of his political party, the bar for impeaching him simply cannot be met; a president who was broadly opposed by his own party would not need to be impeached, because if the president does not have the support of his own party in carrying out impeachable acts he would just be an old man sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. If the President no longer had the support of his party, the opposing party would probably not even want to impeach him; best to hang that albatross around the neck of the other party for as long as possible.

The fundamental flaw in impeachment is that it requires people who have been sent to Washington D.C. explicitly for the purpose of arguing with each other to broadly agree on something.

There is no way to square this circle.

This is a problem because impeachment is the remedy our Constitution assumes for abuse of the executive branch’s powers. When liberal members of the Supreme Court ask what exists to stop a president from ordering members of the military to assassinate his political opponents, the conservative members act appalled that someone would even ask that. “Why, that’s a ridiculous hypothetical that could never possibly happen,” they reply, “and obviously Congress would impeach him if he ever dared to do such a thing.”

While this does immediately bring to mind the image of a farcical game of South Korean freeze tag where elected Senators rush to dodge sniper fire in order to make their way to the halls of Congress in order to organize an impeachment trial before enough of them are murdered that they can no longer reach quorum, I will admit that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court does not have a good answer here. If the military is shooting members of the political opposition, that is called a coup d’etat, and the response to a coup d’etat is a civil war, not an impeachment trial. Yet no legal system can ever admit that there is a point at which it ceases to exist and the next form of government is decided by men with guns as opposed to men with laws; it must pretend the self-destruction of the system can still be handled within the system.

So they can’t say “if that happens, you will have to shoot the people trying to shoot you.” I understand that. But I think it would help if the Supreme Court had a response to “what happens if the President tries to have me murdered?” other than “This thing that has never happened, will never happen, and can never happen will happen, after which the President will lose the legal power to murder you if you are still alive.”

It might give people ideas.

Much was made of the fact that the decision made by the Roberts Court in Trump vs. United States only made one man, the current President of the United States, above the law; this would be less concerning if not for the fact that this specific man has the ability to pardon other people for violating the law.

The theory was that you could give the President the ability to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without fear, because he’d still need a Secret Service agent to drive him there, a Secretary of State to pick up his dinner from McDonalds, and a book-writing fabulist to give him the gun to do it with, and all of those people could be tried as accomplices to the murder.

The problem is that Donald Trump has the unreviewable power to pardon all violations of federal law before they are even prosecuted. This is even Constitutional, unlike the reasoning of the majority in Trump vs. United States; Article 2’s language about the pardon authority is quite broad. Lame-duck presidents have, in the final days of possessing it, abused this authority on a number of occasions; Donald Trump is one of the first to abuse it in the first days of possessing it, when he issued full pardons for every single person who followed his orders to attempt to overthrow the government on January 6th.

No matter what someone did on that day - from impersonating the individuals elected to cast a state’s Electoral College votes so that they could transfer them from Biden to Trump - to taking a “Blue Lives Matter” flag and beating a policeman with it until his heart stopped - Trump has been there for them. He even issued an additional pardon for someone who was not legally allowed to own guns who had been found with an arsenal while he was arrested.

The message is clear; if you do violence on behalf of Trump, no law should be allowed to apply to you. If you refuse to do violence on behalf of Trump, laws should be made up so that they can be applied to you. No one capable of putting on their pants in the morning could possibly be confused by the message sent by pardoning Daniel Edwin Wilson and prosecuting James Comey; however, since admitting that Wilhoit’s Law is the only law in America is something only Donald Trump is willing to do in public, many people will pretend that there must be some completely reasonable explanation for firing anyone who worked on prosecuting the January 6th insurrectionists.

And there is a completely reasonable explanation. That explanation is that Donald Trump wants to break the law with impunity, and he wants to extend that impunity to his followers. Everyone understands this instinctively, but most refuse to admit it.

The Presidential pardon power is practically unlimited - the same way that impeachment is practically impossible. The President cannot pardon violations of an individual state’s law, for example. However, other people can; the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, preemptively promises and quickly delivers pardons for people who are found by a jury of their peers to have shot and killed Black Lives Matter protestors.

The President also cannot pardon someone for future offenses, which could be used to create a class of people with official license to kill anyone they want. However, they can still end the careers of anyone who prosecutes someone they’ve granted an unofficial license to kill and count on the Department of Justice to get the memo; if you participate in any way in applying the law to them, you will be fired the second a Republican gets into a position of authority over you.

So long as someone is willing to live for the rest of their life in Texas - which is a fairly small ask, according to most Texans I’ve asked about that - and they either finish their crime spree while a President who approves of it is still in the Oval Office or successfully intimidate prosecutors into deciding that discretion is the better part of keeping their jobs - the President possesses the power to make not just himself but any person he designates as his representative above the law.

The theoretical remedy - the remedy that would have been proposed before 2020 - of a President and state Governor issuing pardons for criminal activity because the President and Governor’s political goals consisted of criminal activity - would have been for the relevant legislative bodies to impeach the people abusing the pardon power in this way. This wouldn’t nullify any pardons already cast by the President and Governor, of course; just stop them from issuing more.

As such, we enter the world of the Senate as it currently stands. In order to make a federal law, you need a total of 60 votes out of 100 to end a filibuster.

In order to break a federal law, you need a get-out-of-jail-free card from the President and 34 votes out of 100 for him to win a hypothetical impeachment trial.

Any system that works this way is going to quickly reduce the Senate to a vestigial appendage of government. The only possible way that the Senate could remain a relevant and important center of power under this system would be for the Senators to band together in a temporary alliance. They would need to decide that while not every one of them agreed with whatever law had just been passed, it only getting 60 votes, they needed to always have 67 votes in favor of the proposition that their laws should be obeyed. Enough Senators must be willing to impeach a President for breaking laws even if those Senators thought the laws the President broke shouldn’t exist. If there weren’t enough Senators willing to do that, the Senate would wither and die.

This theory of government rests on two assumptions. The first assumption is that the median Senator, elected by the people, would prefer someone of the opposing political party who follows the law to someone of their own political party who broke the law. This assumption is already on unsteady ground from the start. But it’s the second assumption - the assumption that the Senate wants to hold power rather than relinquish it - that completely ruins this.

Impeachment is a dead button. It is impossible for the Senate to do anything to restrain the power of the executive branch. The Senate went to a lot of trouble to disconnect all of the wires they could use to do it. Why would they want them to be plugged back in?

Then it would be their job to press it.

Share

In 2015, President Barack Obama requested that Congress authorize military strikes against ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. He had already been bombing them since 2014, of course; ISIS claimed to be the successors to Al-Qaeda, and were engaging in a festival of murder, rape, and looting throughout northern Iraq so successful that they decided to declare themselves the government, a self-proclaimed worldwide caliphate to which everyone had to either submit to or be executed.

President Obama said that, since ISIS claimed to be Al-Qaeda’s bigger-budget sequel, the 2001 Authorization of Military Force originally passed to allow President George W. Bush to bomb Al-Qaeda should also allow him to bomb ISIS. However, insofar as ISIS’ campaign against the government was so successful that significant numbers of reporters were starting to draw maps of the Middle East that listed ISIS as a state stretching across territory they used to attribute to Iraq and Syria, it would be very nice if, pretty-please, you could do your job and give me explicit permission. He wasn’t asking them to do anything crazy, like fulfill their Constitutionally mandated duty “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water”. He simply wanted a new Authorization of Military Force clarifying that the United States military was officially allowed to shoot at the people the Air Force is going to drop 65,000 munitions on.

The Republican-controlled Congress had been spending every single minute since 9/11 denouncing Democrats for refusing to do what was necessary to fight the scourge of ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’, going so far as to release ads with the face of a Vietnam Veteran triple amputee morphing into Osama Bin Laden’s to remind the audience that procedurally voting against the formation of the Department of Homeland Security was basically the same thing as orchestrating the murder of 2,977 people. They had nodded along to the party base’s insinuations that Barack Obama was a Muslim sleeper agent, and their previous presidential candidate eagerly sought the endorsement of a supporting actor in Home Alone 2 who had achieved political prominence by asserting the existence of a 50 year conspiracy to fabricate evidence hiding that Barack Obama was secretly a Kenyan ineligible to be elected President. (This was in contrast to the presidential candidate before him, who struck the relatively moderate tone of taking the microphone away from one of his supporters who screamed out that Barack Obama was an Arab, reassuring her and the crowd that Barack Obama was a decent family man. For this, he was broadly booed.)

With that in mind, the Republican congress rose up as one in response to Barack Obama’s request that they authorize Obama to fight the terrorists they had been warning Barack Obama was a witting or unwitting agent of for years; no, absolutely not, we will not authorize you to bomb them. Obviously you should bomb them, and in fact, we are holding you responsible right now for not bombing them more and faster; but we categorically refuse to issue you an official authorization to bomb them.

The truly hilarious thing about that is that Barack Obama had no one to blame for this but himself.

Barack Obama had a meteoric rise to power, going from a state senator in Illinois who gave an unexpectedly popular keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to being elected President in 2008. In order to do this, he had to overcome Hillary Clinton, the woman who was expected to be the 2008 Democratic candidate for President ever since Al Gore conceded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. Barack Obama’s argument was simple and effective, designed to target Hillary Clinton by turning what she wanted to be her greatest strength into her greatest weakness. Hillary Clinton’s argument was that she could be counted on in crisis situations thanks to her experience in government, especially in foreign policy. However, because Hillary Clinton had voted to issue George W. Bush an Authorization of Military Force to go to war with Iraq, Barack Obama argued that she had plenty of experience; experience at making the wrong decision.

The irony of Barack Obama saddling Hillary Clinton with responsibility for the then-unpopular war with Iraq in 2008 was that Hillary Clinton was widely believed to have voted on the war with the 2008 election firmly in mind. In 2002, it was seen as dangerous to not support the war in Iraq for a candidate with future presidential ambitions; in 2008, it had become disqualifying to support the war in Iraq. Barack Obama, a state senator at the time of the Iraq authorization of military force, had no political ambitions beyond the state of Illinois in 2002 and thus could safely oppose the use of military force; Hillary Clinton, an actual Senator whose every breath was scrutinized for the implications it would have on the 2008 election, had to take a specific stance; for or against. She chose for. By 2008, enough Democratic voters wished that she had chosen against that she lost the primary campaign to someone who hadn’t been pinned down in that specific way at that specific time.

What Barack Obama would have voted for in 2002 were he the Senator of Illinois at the time with national political ambitions can never be known. But in 2008, he was able to expertly use the fact that he wasn’t the Senator of Illinois in 2002 to position himself as against the war in Iraq and for the slightly less unpopular war in Afghanistan.

With the political rise of Barack Obama to President firmly in the mind of every senator asked to vote on whether or not President Obama should be authorized to bomb ISIS, it was obvious that there was no reason for any of them to risk giving him that authorization when they could just pretend he already had that authorization. Voting in 2015 to attack ISIS may have seemed perfectly safe, but in six short years, we had gone from overthrowing a government in large part because the last name of the dictator at the top of it was “Hussein” to electing someone with the middle name of “Hussein” president. It’s impossible to know what the future holds.

There will always be an excuse to not vote for the authorization of military force, just as there will always be an excuse to not vote to impeach a President. You can, like then-Speaker of the House John Boehner, insist that passing this AUMF would give the president less power to pursue the war than the one that he already has, and that you couldn’t possibly give the president less power just because the president asked to have less power. You could also pretend to be temporarily possessed by the spirit of Mahātmā Gandhi and denounce violence in all of its forms. But the real reason is the advice of a different Mahātmā - “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink, never wink if you can do nothing.”

Doing nothing isn’t always safer than doing something. But it’s a lot easier to get out of responsibility for any danger that results from doing nothing than danger that results from doing something.

Share

A children’s story tells us that with great power comes great responsibility.

By similar logic, with no power comes no responsibility at all. If impeaching the President required the Senate to fulfill a list of impossible requests, like taking a room-temperature superconductor woven from the fur of the fire rat and launching it faster than the speed of light, there would be no point in bothering to even schedule impeachment hearings. It is only because the ostensible goal of an impeachment trial - to get 67 people in a room of 100 to agree that criminal behavior is, in fact, criminal - seems like it should be possible that impeachment is even discussed.

Yet so long as the President retains the loyalty of 34 Senators, the remaining 66 can do nothing, allowing them to do nothing. An impeachment trial would be doomed to failure, and thus an expensive distraction from “kitchen table issues” and “affordability”. Most politicians are good at making excuses. It’s one of the core talents of the job, and a good way to exercise their law degrees. This applies equally well when it comes to making excuses not to impeach a clearly criminal act by the President, or when it comes to making excuses not to launch an impeachment trial that is already inevitably doomed to failure.

Having seen how well surrendering the power to restrain the executive branch has worked out for them, the legislative branch has proceeded to give up as much of the power to legislate as possible, for exactly the same reasons. The filibuster can only make sense within this framework. Needlessly making the threshold for legislation to pass 60 votes when it legally could be done with only 50 votes issues 9 ‘golden tickets’. These lucky nine get to eat their cake and have it too - they can publicly support any given piece of legislation, while remaining privately reassured that it will never actually be passed.

Much is made in political science of the fact that despite the fact that public disapproval of Congress as a whole is overwhelming, the rate at which incumbent Representatives and Senators are re-elected hovers between 90 and 98%. The median voter likes the person they personally send to Congress, but hates Congress as a body, usually because when they think of Congress they think of all the people who are standing in the way of the person they actually like there.

This set of incentives rewards a ritualized failure to change the status quo, a sort of perverse combination of the apocryphal crabs in a bucket that will yank down any of their number that might be able to escape being eaten and professional wrestling matches where oiled and glistening bodybuilders sequentially attempt to climb out of a steel cage before being grabbed by the ankles by their rivals and yanked back down to the mat. The ideal outcome would be for every single Senator in Congress to be seen trying their hardest to bring about the changes that their specific constituency wants, be stopped from actually doing it by the other ninety-nine senators, then patiently wait their turn to try to change the status quo again while yanking down everyone else.

The constituents of any given Senator may eventually notice that their Senator is a hard fighter for the things that they want while the Senator is climbing out of the cage, but their Senator also happens to try to stop a bunch of things that those voters would actually like to happen when that Senator is serving their turn as part of the ninety-nine other crabs in the bucket. From the voter’s perspective, the answer to this is the formation of the political party. Voters with roughly similar preferences will sort themselves into coalitions of politicians; in a first-past-the-post system such as the one America uses, a total of two coalitions will form. The politicians in each coalition will be expected to cooperate with each other to achieve their goals. Republicans should not be seen to backstab other Republicans in public, and Democrats should not be seen to backstab other Democrats in private.

From the politician’s perspective, who could get in trouble if they change things but who will not get in trouble if they try as hard as they can to change things but fail, the answer to this is the super-majority requirement. If change is hard enough to create that Republicans and Democrats can still stop the other even when they’re ‘out of power’, then the status quo becomes impenetrable. The individual voter can elect Democrats or Republicans, if they want Democratic or Republican goals; but they can’t elect enough Democrats or Republicans to allow Democrat or Republican laws to actually pass.

What is the individual voter supposed to do? Vote the bums out? The bums you’re able to vote out or in already support the things you want. What’s stopping you is all the bums in the elections that you can’t vote in. And the more prominent the bum, the harder they are to remove. Gadflies, bomb-throwers, and party leadership traditionally stay in safe districts and states that vote for their party by 15 to 20 points rather than front-line districts where they might possibly be held responsible for saying something stupid, inflammatory, or irresponsible. If ten to fifteen percent of voters decide to write in Edmund Burke instead of affirmatively vote for or against an obviously corrupt person whose primary campaign promise is that they will commit crimes on behalf of their party, that obviously corrupt person can still walk to victory so long as the electorate they serve is sufficiently partisan.

People can finance quixotic campaigns to dislodge particularly hated political figures such as Nancy Pelosi, Laura Loomer, or Marjorie Taylor Greene. (It is not coincidental that many of these figures are female; it is always easier to hate a woman than a man, especially one in prominence or power.) This will generally accomplish nothing except purchase boats for campaign consultants. Nationalizing a race this way makes it harder to remove the irritant for two reasons; one, the people local to the district will resent a bunch of interlopers from other parts of the country trying to get rid of the person who, after all, represents the values of their district. Two, the local competitor will be incentivized to play to a distant crowd of people who donate money rather than the people in the district who actually vote in the election.

The supermajority requirement has been so effective in preventing Congress from passing laws that Congress has also found itself unable to pass budgets. The two longest shutdowns in American history - where entire sections of the government stop receiving paychecks because Congress has not agreed on a budget that pays them - both happened under Donald Trump, with firm Republican control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In 2018, the House of Representatives, holder of the ‘power of the purse’, consisted of 241 Republicans and 194 Democrats - yet the Republicans could not produce a budget bill that Donald Trump would vote for, shutting the government down for 35 days until a bill was created with Democratic support that Donald Trump was willing to sign.

It is commonly believed that Republicans do whatever Donald Trump wants - whether it be a Senator who was sexually assaulted in the military voting to put an accused rapist as Secretary of Defense, a Senator with a medical degree voting to put a bloodletter who refuses to believe in the germ theory of disease as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, or the aforementioned sight of an impeachment trial in which Donald Trump was dutifully acquitted of attempting to murder the jury. And surely the Republicans are intimidated by Donald Trump. Marjorie Taylor Greene was the bete noire of liberals since before she was even sworn in on January 20th, 2021 - then she crossed Donald Trump on the matter of the Epstein files and in less than a week she hired private security for herself and resigned from Congress. She knows which political fandom pardons the people who bomb a Walmart and which political fandom just posts about it.

But if Senators are intimidated by Donald Trump, they’re intimidated by the prospect of actually doing their jobs and being held responsible for it more.

During the latest government shutdown, in which Democrats were willing to filibuster a government appropriations bill, Donald Trump’s demand was clear - Senate Republicans, who outnumbered Democrats 53 to 47, should simply abolish the filibuster so they could pass a bill funding the government. Republicans, who had been willing to do so in order to allow Supreme Court justices to be confirmed, refused to do so merely in order to pay air traffic controllers and members of the military. Passing a budget would mean that they could be held responsible for what was in that budget; even worse, if they demonstrated that they could pass a budget, in the future they might be held responsible for not passing a budget.

The Senate was willing to give Donald Trump a pass for sending people armed with guns to kill insufficiently insurrectionist Senators by finding neither that nor issuing a blanket pardon for the people with guns to be an impeachable act. They were not willing to give Donald Trump a budget to pay federal employees on time.

This says something about exactly what frightens them.

It is said that we are a nation of laws, and not men. But the Senate has made it impossible to pass laws. So now we have no choice but to be ruled by men.

We have to be ruled by something, after all.

Plenty of people see the truth; that the Senate and the House of Representatives are no longer bodies capable of passing laws, because they have already decided, collectively, that it would be better if they not pass laws. As such, people looking to change the government have looked to other, more personalist forms of rule. A group of nine politicians in robes with life terms, or a president who promises them that “I alone can fix it”.

Many people have written about the increasing power of the Presidency and the diminishing power of Congress. But these articles are usually written on the assumption that Congress was somehow conquered by the President, that the President sent people by force to take Congress’ power away from them.

Not even Donald Trump succeeded in taking away Congress’ power by force; when the mob stormed the Capitol, the Congresspeople there were rushed away to a secure bunker in the building, despite the livetweeting of pro-insurrection Congresspeople attempting to alert the rioters as to where they needed to go in order to find and kill the Congresspeople they were hunting. The rioters were left to shamble around aimlessly brandishing the zip-tie handcuffs they wished to use, steal letters off of Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and defecate in the People’s House because they didn’t have the coordination to actually put any of the Congresspeople they wanted to catch in the gallows that they built outside the Capitol for use on Mike Pence.

And then, after all of that, when given the opportunity to legally punish Donald Trump for these acts, Congress collectively refused to, choosing instead to verbally censure him rather than do anything to prevent him from being declared President again later.

Congress surrendered their power willingly, eagerly, because they realized that exercising power was something they could permit other people to do for them. They could set up the rules in order to stop anything from being done, and therefore, they could not be held responsible for doing anything. The President and the Supreme Court began to fill the gap left by them.

And the Supreme Court, seeing how well giving up power has gone for the Senate, eagerly attempts to turn itself into an authoritarian rubber-stamp for the executive, using the shadow docket to stop any lower court rulings that might impede a Republican president and doing everything in their power to impede a Democratic president.

Could Congress take back the power that it is granted by the Constitution and become a co-equal branch of government again, where “All Legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives”? They could. For the moment, they do not want to. Shaming them, urging them to do so, is not going to work, because they have made the rational decision that given the incentives they face, the risks of exercising power are much greater than the risks of pretending they have no power at all.

Unless we have some way of changing those incentives facing them, it’s unlikely that the Senate will ever be politically relevant ever again. Finding some way to do that is our first task. We must hold the Senate responsible for what it refuses to do, because if we do not, they will refuse to do anything.

Aron Nimzowitsch was born in 1886 and died in 1935. He was Jewish, stateless, fastidious to a fault, and one of the greatest chess players of all time. Famously, he hated the smell of tobacco smoke, regarding it as an intolerable distraction from focusing on chess. An apocryphal story says that while Nimzowitsch was at a tournament, his opponent drew a silver cigarette case from his pocket and began to fiddle with it nervously as he tried to find a way to crack Nimzowitsch’s defense. Nimsowitch leapt up and shouted out to the tournament director, pointing to his opponent and saying that cigarette smoking was banned at this tournament and insisting that his opponent be thrown out.

“But Monsieur Nimzowitsch,” the nameless tournament director objects, “he has not yet begun to smoke.”

“He is threatening to smoke!” thunderously declared Aron Nimzowitsch. “Surely, as an old player, you understand that the threat is more powerful than its execution!”

It is common in chess for a player to line up as many of their pieces as possible pointed directly at the weakest part of the opponent’s position, and then, not attempt to capture it. Instead, the attacking player uses the fact that the defender needs to move all of their pieces into defensive positions to defend their weak point to saddle them with that weakness - and then move their pieces away from the weakest part of the opponent’s position in order to begin attacking the second-weakest part of the opponent’s position, using the fact that the defending player has been forced to take passive, defensive positions that are hard to quickly move out of to get the attacker’s pieces towards the new vulnerability before the defender’s pieces can get out of each other’s way in order to similarly protect the new target.

If you launch an attack, your opponent must respond to it. If you threaten to launch an attack, your opponent must prepare to respond to it, while also dealing with whatever else you can do with the resources that you do not use to attack them. Thus - “the threat is stronger than the execution”, because implicit in the threat is the opportunity to do something other than the threat in addition to the threat.

The Senate’s power works the same way. If the Senators admitted that they had no intention of ever passing laws, rejecting nominees, or impeaching Presidents, they would be treated as ordinary people would. It is because our system gives them the power to threaten to pass laws that we have to pay more attention to them than we would someone idly ranting in a diner about the lazy immigrants who don’t want to work who are stealing all of our jobs while collecting unemployment pay.

The Senate threatens to leap out of its stupor and pass laws, set budgets, and fulfill its Constitutional role as the most powerful branch in our three-branch government. But you can only threaten someone with the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz so long as they pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Before January 6th, 2021, if someone stood up in a high school American Government class and asked “Hypothetically, what would happen if the President refused to accept the outcome of an election he lost, told his supporters to storm the Capitol Building, and nodded along as the police and National Guard did nothing to stop his supporters from searching the building for insufficiently loyal members of Congress to kill?” the teacher would have had an immediate answer; “Congress would impeach the President and he would be removed from office, and the winner of the election would take power as normal.” Then the failure to impeach Donald Trump for the acts of January 6th showed exactly what ‘normal’ really was - ‘normal’ was the Senate finding whatever excuses they needed in order to refuse to hold the President accountable.

So long as no President ever did anything as nakedly unconstitutional and as contradictory to the American experiment as January 6th, the threat of impeachment remained. January 6th showed that an impeachment’s execution would inevitably fail.

This is not a good thing. It was better when people operated in Washington under the belief that there was something the President could do that was so criminal that Congress would be forced to act to remove him from office. Now we have proof. “If this isn’t impeachable, nothing is,” Mitch McConnell said. Then he voted not to impeach. The only conclusion we can draw is that nothing is impeachable.

This is not a good thing. However, it would be much worse if we deluded ourselves into believing that impeachment was still a possibility while other people saw the truth with clear eyes.

So impeachment is impossible. What else will become impossible? Passing a budget seems difficult, certainly not possible without undergoing a long shutdown phase while everyone argues over whether to spend money to pay people for jobs that they’re expected to keep doing. Passing laws is right out; therefore everyone must rely on the Supreme Court to interpret existing laws as giving them what they already want.

If the Senate has demonstrated that it will never pass a law, will never reject a nominee, and will never impeach the President, we should take them at their word. The Senate must either stand up and do something to prove itself politically relevant, or it must be ignored.

Stop paying attention to what they say. Give their seats on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to celebrities. After all, it’s possible for the celebrity to do something, or be held accountable for what they do. If the Senate can’t meet the high bar set by livestreamers and TikTok influencers, why should we grant them any more respect?

The good news is if I can't see the outcome of this, there’s no way the mainstream media can, so they have to keep reporting on it. Democrats would frequently wonder why they wouldn’t get the media to report breathlessly on their procedural stunts the way the media stayed glued to the exact same stunts performed by Republicans, when Democrats had already communicated to the media that no one should worry because they were going to back down before anyone got actually hurt like the responsible adults in the room that they were. The whole reason the media had to report breathlessly on the procedural stunts of Republicans was because you had no idea whether or not the Republicans were actually crazy enough to default on the national debt, make Donald Trump the Speaker of the House in the middle of his felony trials, or rewrite the First Amendment to say ‘Congress shall make no law, except about flag burning, obviously we don’t allow flag burning’. It’s like if the San Francisco 49ers had agreed in advance with the Kansas City Chiefs to lose by three points in overtime, then wondered why the TV ratings for Super Bowl LVIII went down.

If you know what’s going to happen, all you need to do is read a summary once and move on with your life. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, you have to stay pinned to every update. And keeping you “informed” with wild speculation every day for two weeks is a much more sustainable financial model for the media than just selling someone the box score once.

Whenever I’m stuck on a mystery, I find it best to look back to what I know for sure. Throw out all my speculation, break down all the facts that I do have, build a model out of what I already understand, and see if that leads me to draw any conclusions that I had missed the first time.

And strangely, when I do that with the Epstein conspiracy theory and how it’s circulating, the conclusion that I’m drawing is that the MAGA movement seems like they’re mentally preparing to move on from Trump.

This is a big swing. People desperate to go back to ‘normal’ politics from the Biden administration to the New York Times to the National Review have all hallucinated the idea of a post-Trump future since the 2016 Republican primary the way a man dying in the desert sees the sand in front of him as an oasis full of fresh water. The Access Hollywood tape, January 6th, Trump’s various felony convictions - every single one of these straws has been grasped at by people insisting that this time, Donny Trump wouldn’t wriggle his way out of this jam, and we would never again have to live in a world where the unilateral right to destroy human civilization was held in the hands of a man who believes that F-35s have a Romulan Cloaking Device and that tariffs are a way to let you collect taxes from the rest of the world in a way that has no further economic consequences whatsoever.

I’m not saying that MAGA will leave Trump. But I am saying that the mere fact that they’re considering the Epstein conspiracy theory seems to imply to me that they’re starting to consider it as something they might have to or even want to do.

Let’s break down the anatomy of a conspiracy theory.

For me, the easiest conspiracy theory to understand has always been the Procter and Gamble Satanism conspiracy theory. It has a number of qualities that make it very easy to dissect, like a frog that you’d give to a middle schooler. It is obviously, blatantly, self-evidently untrue, so no mental effort needs to be spent on investigating the factual claims made by the conspiracy theory or even really concering ourselves with whether or not people capable of dressing themselves could be genuinely tricked into believing it. The things that the people spreading the conspiracy theory get out of sharing it are easily understandable and very obvious once you read the text in context. And the conspiracy theory has a number of natural defense mechanisms that encourage the people who are too respectable to actually spread it themselves to take an anti-anti-conspiracy theory view, saying that the people who do believe it and do spread it must be innocent dupes rather than malicious liars. Let’s break these things down step-by-step.

The Procter and Gamble conspiracy theory is ‘simple’. It is also staggeringly stupid and impossible, but that doesn’t matter.

The chain email, as reproduced by Snopes, follows: all errors are as they were in the original.

PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE

 

The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, "THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE." 

Yes. This sounds ridiculous to you.

“Why is the President of Procter & Gamble appearing on a daytime talk show? They’re really boring guests. Couldn’t they have gotten someone more interesting?” “He’s donating a large portion of the company’s profits to the Church of Satan? Did the board of directors approve this? Is it charity or a business expense? Which Church of Satan is he donating to?” “Does the Chief Financial Officer make these decisions about which cults of Satanists to support, or the Chief Executive Officer?” “Why would Phil Donahue try to get him to stop saying this? It’s great TV. Why isn’t he promoting his show with ‘We have corporate presidents admitting to being Satanists on-air!’”

Do not think for a moment that it doesn’t sound equally ridiculous to the people who are spreading it.

I have never liked Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark’s “Cletus voice” that he uses in order to mock low-information voters that he thinks are particularly stupid. This is because I do not think they’re stupid. I think they’re malicious and pretending to be stupid, because we, as a society, are not supposed to hold being stupid against people.

Let’s dissect it piece by piece.

The conspiracy theory about Procter & Gamble was originally started by Amway distributors. Amway is a multi-level marketing organization that sells the fantasy of becoming a self-sufficient salesperson of household cleaning products, primarily to Christian housewives. Procter & Gamble makes a number of cleaning products that directly compete with Amway’s knockoff versions of the same product. Saying that Procter & Gamble was financially entangled with El Diablo is the same thing as the Bush Administration saying that marijuana smokers helped fund Bin Laden; if you want to discourage the consumption of a product, just say that anyone buying the product is funding the most evil thing you can think of.

But that explains why a small number of people in the Evangelical community would start the rumor; to either defame the company or to just create the sense that Procter & Gamble was somehow controversial, counting on people to assume that where there’s smoke, there’s probably some sort of fire. In order to go viral - so viral that Procter & Gamble had to create a dossier they distributed to churches where they got Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell to state that Procter & Gamble was not now and never was a member of the Satanist party - people who aren’t actually getting direct financial benefit out of the conspiracy theory need to want to spread it. And this conspiracy theory has a number of elements that give them a reason to.

The distant President of Procter & Gamble (a company that the person hearing this rumor knows almost nothing about the job of) appears on a daytime talk show (the hated liberal media - further revisions of this chain email would change the host the President hails Satan to to Oprah, allowing for an added spice of racism to be added to the mix) to publicly announce that, “due to the openness of our society”, he was “coming out of the closet” as a Satanist (implying that since our society occasionally accepts that two men might love each other, they’d be equally fine with Satanists going around kidnapping babies to sacrifice them, because both of those things are wrong mainly because God tells you not to do them), dismissing any possible brand threat to the company he manages by saying that there “aren’t enough Christians in the country to make a difference.”

It has always amazed me just how white Protestant Christians in this country can say with a straight face that they’re being persecuted. I remember telling someone once during the Obama administration that, god willing, the next President of the United States might be a Christian; or maybe even the forty-fifth Christian to hold the office in a row. (Turns out I was wrong! Mugged by Reality regrets the error.)

This conspiracy theory asks very little of its target audience and gives them a lot in return. They are asked to stop using Procter & Gamble products and tell blatant, hateful lies about the company. In exchange, they get the ability to demonstrate their loyalty to Christianity by refusing to allow Procter & Gamble products in their home and ostentatiously using Amway products instead. (More importantly, they get to reassure themselves and others that they are much better Christians than all of the other Christians who do still buy Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste.)

They also get to outrageously lie that the liberal media - with a female black celebrity in a prominent role - saw nothing wrong with broadcasting to the country that a huge multinational corporation was giving away stockholder money to Satan, because the liberal media had already had plenty of people say that they were fine with gay people, and gay people are equally as bad as a criminal conspiracy that existed to kidnap and sacrifice Christian babies. It’s fun to lie about how awful the people you hate are. It’s even more fun to lie about how they lie, pretending that they found out too late that there was going to be a backlash and they all worked together to cover it up after broadcasting it to the entire nation. After all, your fellow churchgoers when they lie to you are far more trustworthy than the liberal media when it tells you the truth.

Some people; either people with a broad reach like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham (who might want to keep collecting donations from people who work at Procter & Gamble - Satanists buy sneakers too, but you shouldn’t be seen taking their money) or people who have too much self-respect and value their own credibility too much to lower themselves to telling such obvious, blatant lies will refuse to repeat the claims about Procter & Gamble, but they certainly won’t go out of their way in order to go to bat for Procter & Gamble. A church is a community, and communities that kick out their members by imposing standards on them is a community that shrinks.

Plus, if confronted with the truth, the person telling these hateful, obvious falsehoods can just pretend that they were so overwhelmed by how evil the worldly world is once you leave the confines of their church that they naturally thought that anyone as successful as a multinational CEO had to owe their good fortune in secular life to a pact with the Devil. And besides, the chain letter said at the end of it “THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.” They just wanted to be a Christian and make a difference! Shouldn’t you forgive them for that?

The thing that infuriates me the most about the world is that when someone does something that hurts other people and benefits themselves, like lying about their enemies in order to humiliate them, they can just say “No, no, I wasn’t being evil! I’m just too stupid to understand basic cause and effect!” And society expects us to believe that. Even though, mysteriously, every time they fail to understand basic cause and effect, they fail to understand it in a way that benefits them. They never, ever make one of these ‘mistakes’ that hurts their friends; only ever their enemies.

So. With that frog thoroughly dissected, what are the primary elements of a good conspiracy theory?

1. The conspiracy theory should have an extremely low buy-in. People should not need to inconvenience themselves as a result of the theory, and it is good if the actions they take as a result of the theory are either public signals of group loyalty (buying Amway products from your fellow churchgoers) or fun to do (‘decoding’ Q ‘drops’ by engaging in creative writing exercises to show how recent events were foretold by Q).

2. The conspiracy theory should implicate people that you already hate as both deeply malicious and fundamentally incompetent. (The President of Procter & Gamble declared his loyalty to a criminal conspiracy on air, because he thought no one would object.) By saying that your enemies are so powerful that they currently control the world but are also so stupid that their downfall is assured, you both forgive all previous failures by your in-group (our enemies are so powerful, it’s only natural that they’d defeat us) but you assure everyone that your group is destined to eventually succeed (our enemies are so stupid, it’s impossible for them to win forever.)

3. The conspiracy theory should involve a layer of ablative armor insulating the people who spread it from social consequence for knowingly spreading lies, usually taking some form of saying “Well, our enemies are so evil, it’s only natural that I’d think something like this could happen”, or a motte-and-bailey argument where “George W. Bush sent teams of demolitionists to spend six months wiring the World Trade Center to blow before 9/11” becomes “George W. Bush was not fully honest with the country when invading Iraq”, so that you can say that anyone who calls you on the first point obviously is so deluded that they agree with the second.

It should go without saying that the actual truth or falsity of a conspiracy theory very little to do with whether or not it spreads. (In fact, if a conspiracy theory is required to remain plausible due to the incentives of the people who are spreading it, that’s another restriction on it that prevents it from evolving into a possibly less plausible but more viral version of the conspiracy theory.) For the purposes of this article, I am completely agnostic as to where Donald Trump falls on the spectrum of “someone who hardly knew Jeffrey Epstein and was used by him to make Epstein seem more famous, expanding Epstein’s social circle” to “was fully aware of everything that Epstein was doing and shared a couple of ‘enigmas’ with him”. It is an important question, but for the purposes of this article, which focuses entirely on why and how conspiracy theories spread, it is almost completely irrelevant.

The conspiracy theory needs to not demand much of either the people spreading it or for society. Talking about how awful your enemies are is good for you, but actually doing something is extremely bad. Saying that every single Democratic staffer in Washington D.C. knows that there are children tied up in the basement of Comet Ping Pong and delivers them to Hillary Clinton so she can frazzledrip them is good; actually responding the way someone would to knowing that children are being regularly, ritually murdered by the ex-First Lady at a public restaraunt and showing up with a rifle to try to break them out is very, very bad.

This is another reason that implausible conspiracy theories are more likely to spread than plausible ones; the more obviously untrue they are, the less likely someone is to act on them. No one is going to actually arrest Ted Cruz for being the Zodiac Killer, because the last confirmed Zodiac Killer murder happened before Ted Cruz was born. It’s completely costless to jokingly say that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac; no one is going to take it too seriously and show up at his house with a gun, unless they were already so seriously disturbed that nearly anything might have set them off. Everyone talking about Ted Cruz as the Zodiac understands that it’s all kayfabe, a gimmick, a joke - a good conspiracy theory should communicate the same thing to the people who care about it the most.

The juice of the matter - the reason for spreading the conspiracy in the first place - is to talk about how horrible the subject of the conspiracy theory is. This is good for a bunch of reasons. One, if you want to look thin, hang out with fat people; by saying that people outside your in-group are a bunch of depraved monsters, you look better by comparison. Two, it’s just plain fun to lie about how awful the people you hate are. Lastly, and most importantly, the people who read and study the rumors will understand that these conspiracies don’t actually exist and that they aren’t supposed to actually do anything about them. The people who just vaguely overhear the conspiracies will assume that there’s something weird and suspicious about the target of those conspiracy theories and assume that they’re distasteful and not something they should be associated with.

Did the Clintons have Epstein killed? Well, if Hillary Clinton kills people for interfering with her political ambitions, why on earth is Carlos Danger still alive? But if you turn “Epstein didn’t kill himself” into a joke and repeatedly flash around a fake tweet saying that Epstein was about to reveal secrets about Hillary Clinton, then the idea that there’s something suspicious about Epstein’s death will soak into the cultural lexicon, and Hillary Clinton will be assumed to be responsible for it in some way, even though Epstein dies under Trump’s Department of Justice and Trump made the prosecutor who cut the corrupt plea bargain with Epstein in the first place Secretary of Labor.

A conspiracy theory without a villain is going to be a conspiracy theory without an audience. Bonar Menninger wrote a book called Mortal Error about the JFK assassination, the subject of which was a theory that JFK had accidentally been shot in the head by his own Secret Service agent who was attempting to return fire at Lee Harvey Oswald. This would explain (though not justify) a government coverup, and there seems to be at least some evidence suggesting it’s a plausible theory. No one hates it more than conspiracy theorists. The entire point of JFK conspiracism is to retroactively put your preferred policies in the hands of a young, physically attractive, and popular President, and then say that shadowy enemies killed him in order to prevent utopia from being born. JFK dying as the result of a tragic accident is literally the only outcome worse for the conspiracy theorists than Oswald acting alone.

Lastly, the conspiracy theory must be either justifiable or deniable; when you are, in the manner of someone finally forced to choose in a liferaft between cannibalism and starvation, pinned down and required to tell the truth (usually in a court of law), you must either claim that you genuinely believed in the obvious nonsense you were saying, or that you were never making grandiose claims in the first place but were just rhetorically exaggerating a legitimate argument or were joking around for the purposes of satire.

The inherent tension between these points is why successful conspiracy theories have so many safety valves. Yes, Democrats and celebrities are kidnapping children in order to harvest the glands inside their brains; but Donald Trump is doing something about it, the people responsible have already been secretly arrested and are only appearing in public with conveniently hidden leg bracelets, and they will be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay any moment now. Yes, Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election due to widespread ballot fraud brought about by a hundred thousand mules; but there’s no reason to investigate any of the other elections on the same ballot, because those mules only bothered to fix the election in favor of Joe Biden, and there’s certainly no need to actually find any of these mules or figure out how to prevent them from fixing future elections. Yes, Q predicted a number of very specific things that very evidently didn’t come true; but that’s just because Q needed to trick the people watching him share this vital information with us, random Trump supporters on the internet, about a conspiracy of Democratic pedophiles on a message board that split off from 4chan because 4chan’s rules didn’t allow for child pornography, and the people who have secret, hidden insight into the true nature of the unseen world can ‘decode’ the Q drops so that their true meaning is derived.

Trust The Plan.

Patriots Are In Control.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Actually Shoot Up Comet Ping Pong. The optics would be bad.

So with this basic structure of a conspiracy theory in place - it doesn’t demand anything of its adherents, it implicates the enemies of those adherents, and it can be stated without embarrassment; why did the Epstein conspiracy theory take off? And why did it take off, right now, among MAGA?

Donald Trump’s links to Epstein were well known all throughout the first Trump administration. Acosta would resign as Secretary of Labor due to his involvement in the Epstein plea bargain. Trump’s 2002 statement to Vanity Fair that Jeffrey Epstein likes young ladies was a matter of public record, as was the Access Hollywood tape and numerous accounts of him barging in on the locker room of underage beauty pageant contestants - no word as to whether or not he shared any subsequent “locker room talk” with them while he was there. After divorcing his second wife, Donald Trump dated a nineteen-year-old. It was known that Donald Trump’s name and phone number appeared in Epstein’s address book, that he flew on Epstein’s plane seven times, and the picture of Trump and Epstein mugging for the camera together were all known before Donald Trump had even come down the escalator to announce his 2016 Presidential run.

There were a few new details; mostly the ‘bawdy letter’ featuring a naked woman hand-drawn by Donald Trump and wrapped around a typewritten imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein sent for a 50th birthday party. (Without commenting on whether or not the imagined conversation is inherently incriminating, I will note that while Donald Trump has an absolute 1st Amendment right to write real person chatfic, I do still regard it as an impeachable offense.) These raise interesting questions about who Donald Trump has recently lost at the Wall Street Journal and exactly how long they’ve been keeping a folder around saying “If Donald Trump threatens the Federal Reserve, break glass”, but even if we naturally assume that Rupert Murdoch is doing this because pedophilia is one thing but firing Jerome Powell is quite another, we can’t extract from that why the MAGA base is willing to go along with this conspiracy theory now.

All of the elements they needed to accuse Donald Trump of being involved with Jeffrey Epstein existed a decade ago. Why would the MAGA base suddenly be open to talking about it now, just because the Wall Street Journal threw one additional piece of admittedly juicy chum into the ocean? The ocean was already full of chum.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I said to myself, “because the core of a conspiracy theory is that it costs the believer almost nothing to participate in, but rewards them by accusing their enemies.” I tried to work it out in my head a second time. “There was already more evidence that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were accomplices than there was that Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein were accomplices; but MAGA believed that Bill Clinton was involved with Epstein because they wanted Clinton to be involved with Epstein, and they refused to believe that Trump might be involved with Epstein because they didn’t want Trump to be involved with Epstein.” Everything I knew about conspiracy theories told me that this shouldn’t be happening, but e pur si muove - MAGA influencers were defying Trump in order to continue to spread the Epstein rumors. “This only makes sense if MAGA thinks that they’re not going to pay a price anymore for abandoning Donald Trump, and somehow thinks they’re going to get more of what they want if they ostentatiously abandon Trump and make a show of no longer supporting him.”

The truth hit me like a lightning bolt.

What does Donald Trump offer his voters? Why were they so loyal to him in the first place? What did he offer that a dozen other candidates did not?

Some people said that it was star power; that he was a celebrity who was easily recognized and that allowed him to luck out a win in a divided Republican primary field; then he won elections in heads-up races against Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, then lost it to the anonymous Vice President of Barack Obama’s term. Other people said that he was rejecting the failed Republican orthodoxy of more wars and more upper-class tax cuts, and that people were supporting him ‘in spite of the tweets, not because of the tweets’; then he bombed Iran and cut Medicaid while cutting taxes to explode the deficit by several trillion dollars, but that didn’t seem to bother his defenders all that much. There were plenty of people who offered in the 2024 Republican Primary the exact same thing as Donald Trump; Ron DeSantis tried to stake out positions to the right of Donald Trump on policy but refused to follow him into the authoritarian territory of making explicit calls for violence against his political enemies, on the assumption that Trump’s voters were here for the policy, not for the violence. They were not.

What does Donald Trump offer his voters? We have the answer. He offers them cruelty, humiliation, revenge, and violence.

His voters affirmatively rejected every opportunity to get what they claimed to want without cruelty, humiliation, revenge, or violence. If someone misses ten off-ramps in a row, you have to draw the conclusion that they want to be on this highway.

But now that he’s been elected for a second time… hasn’t Donald Trump outlived his usefulness to the MAGA Movement?

He could run for President a fourth time, obviously. Sure, the Constitution clearly says that no President can be elected to a third term, but it also says that wars must be declared by Congress and insurrectionists against the United States are barred from holding office. A Constitution is just words on a paper, and if people declare their intent to violate it, there’s not really anything the paper can do to stop them. Certainly our current Supreme Court won’t be leaping out of bed in order to tell Donald Trump he’s not allowed to do anything he wants to do.

But could he win a third term? And even if he did win a third term, even by stationing masked ICE agents at every ballot box in America with orders to deport any ballots that were insufficiently Republican, what would him winning a third term give his MAGA followers?

Trump is seventy-eight years old. He refuses to exercise, eats fast food religiously, and has been showing up in public with mysterious bruises and recently admitted to “chronic venous insufficiency”. His medical records are like his tax records - secret from the public, and only ever mentioned by him in order to tell outrageously obvious lies about them.

If Donald Trump runs for President in the year 2028, which he insisted that he might, and subsequently wins, through fair means or foul, he would be over 81 when he takes office and over 85 when he sends an armed mob in 2032 to kill the holders of California’s electoral college votes. MAGA is aware of this. They pretend not to be, the same way Democrats pretended not to be aware that Joe Biden was old, and dismissed it as much as possible. But they were very, very aware of it.

MAGA knows that there isn’t really that much juice left in the fruit to squeeze. They were happy to put him back in the Oval Office in 2024, because when he was in the Oval Office, he quickly started putting a guy who wrote a children’s book with an enemies list in the back in charge of the FBI, a recovering drug addict with a literal brainworm who blames measles vaccines for causing measles as the Secretary of Health, an alcoholic rapist with tattoos that aren’t technically Nazi symbols at Secretary of Defense, and, of course, a Russian agent as Director of National Intelligence.

All of these things were great for MAGA; they really showed that deep state full of people who actually care about whether or not the government functions who was in charge. They got a lot of cruelty, humiliation, revenge, and violence and can laugh themselves to bed thinking about how USAID’s closure is going to result in the deaths of probably twenty million Africans, because they’d rather pay money to burn food than give it away for free.

But now that Trump has done all those things, what more does he have to offer MAGA?

Is he supposed to replace Hegseth with someone more unqualified and more eager to commit war crimes? Where would he even find such a person?

Now that Donald Trump has scaled the mountain and started a program of purging everyone that MAGA wants out of the government, why would MAGA need to continue supporting him?

Cutting Trump loose gives MAGA everything they want. By putting him in office on a platform of deporting twenty million people, destroying the global trade system with a series of tariffs thought up by ChatGPT, and abandoning Taiwan and Ukraine to conquest by their authoritarian neighbors in order to bomb the rubble in Yemen and Iran a few more times, MAGA destroys the system that liberals value, and gets to enjoy their tears as they watch American society crumble.

And then, by saying that they don’t support what Trump is doing in order to destroy it, MAGA gets to disclaim all responsibility for anything that Trump damages in order to make those liberals cry.

MAGA is aware that plenty of responsible people are saying that tariffs are a bad idea, that firing the chair of the Federal Reserve will have awful long-term effects, and that Donald Trump is destroying everything that makes America actually great. And by stopping their support of him the second it’s too late to prevent him from destroying everything, they get to say that they don’t approve of the destruction even as they get to enjoy watching it happen.

This is why MAGA is willing to entertain the idea that Epstein and Donald Trump were involved in a conspiracy together now; because there’s nothing more that Donald Trump can give them that he hasn’t already given them. Before Donald Trump was given the power to destroy the world, he had to be protected. Now that he’s in power, anything he does with that power is a liability, one that can be easily disclaimed.

I don’t know whether or not they’re consciously aware of all of this. Everyone exists in a quantum kayfabe superposition of mark and smart. People are good at doing two things; they’re very good at seeing what’s in their selfish, self-centered interest to do and doing it, and then they’re very, very good at finding ways to justify why doing the thing that they just did was actually a laudable moral act completely unrelated to whatever benefit they happened to extract from it.

But as I’ve said; assuming that these people are stupid is the wrong assumption. We allow them to pretend to be stupid, because the alternative is admitting that they’re evil. Even the people who get involved in Amway aren’t actually as stupid as they claim to be. If we want to predict their behavior, we need to remember that.

These people may be fools, but they’re not stupid.

Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark has a controversial take/modest proposal in the pages of the Bulwark today: let students cheat with ChatGPT.

The Bulwark

Unpopular Opinion: Let College Students Cheat with ChatGPT

Sarah and I talked about this ChatGPT stuff on the Secret pod, in addition to talking about Harvard, LaMonica McIver, and Trump’s South Africa meeting…

Read more

a year ago · 90 likes · 125 comments · Jonathan V. Last

The point of assigning papers isn’t to teach kids how to write—it’s to test to see if kids have done the reading. And the reading is the most important part of the educational process, followed closely by the absorption of whatever insights the professors can impart.

Writing papers is just a way of spot checking that process in order to assign grades to it. Which is another way of saying: busy work.

So who cares if kids use ChatGPT to break that paradigm?

If kids want to skip the reading and not learn anything from a course, that’s on them. They will either be the poorer for it later on. Or they won’t.

I believe this is a complete reversal of what we need to be worried about. I’m not at all worried about ChatGPT’s effect on the students, because it’s very easy to fulminate about the students. They don’t have power yet. That’s why they’re students.

I’m terrified about ChatGPT’s effect on the graders.

Historically, we've debated what 'artificial intelligence' would consist of since Rossum's Universal Robots. We've known that the answer has always been 'something it can't do yet' - what exactly that something is and how we should measure it varies. In Star Trek: The Original Series and 2001, the intimidating thing the computer does to prove that it is smarter than any of the human John Henries arrayed before it is play chess well; computers couldn't play chess well at the time, and therefore perhaps a sign that we had finally reached artificial intelligence was a computerized chess champion. Then fellow Substacker Garry Kasparov was annihilated in the 1990s by Deep Blue - but we clearly still weren't at artificial intelligence yet. So, whatever the boundary was, it wasn't chess.

When chess failed, some of us briefly retreated to Go (which would fall in the 2010s), but most people fell back on WWII hero Alan Turing's idea. Alan Turing quite logically pointed out that you couldn't tell if another human being you were talking to was intelligent; but since you're capable of talking to them, you extend to them the 'polite convention' that they are intelligent beings. Therefore, an AI that was capable of successfully posing as a human being when being interviewed by a trained interlocutor and having the interlocutor be no more successful than random chance for determining whether they were talking to a human or not would 'pass the Turing test', and therefore probably be artificially intelligent.

ChatGPT has destroyed the Turing test the way that Deep Blue destroyed chess as a marker of intelligence. We're there. And finding ourselves there, we still find that we're not at 'artificial intelligence', whatever that is.

But the problem is where we find ourselves. You see, being a supervisor of anyone technical or scientific requires you to not understand what they're doing, but be able to judge whether or not they're doing it well while still not understanding it.

"The buck stops here", on the president or the CEO's desk, but you can't actually seriously expect the President or CEO to understand nuclear physics. People spend their whole lives working to understanding nuclear physics. And the President or CEO would also have to understand the economy, structural engineering, everything else that comes across their desk.

As such, and this is something that has gotten me fired from so many jobs, CEOs and Presidents, leaders, *graders*, have used confidence as a proxy for accuracy. They cannot tell which of two disagreeing nuclear physicists is correct - they can easily tell which is more confident. This has always gotten me fired, because my first answer to any question is 'it's complicated', and 'it's never either/or, it's always both/and' is equally quick to come to my mouth. Look how much I've written so far, for God's sake, in an article that could have been a comment that could have been a like.

ChatGPT produces a confident answer for whatever you ask it to. Sometimes this results in hilarity, as with Elon's recent jury-rigging of Grok's system to demand that it respect his South African conspiracy theories. But as a general rule, ChatGPT can confidently argue for absolute bullshit, because ChatGPT is a machine designed to generate confident answers for things, not true answers for things.

I believe we will ultimately find this as destructive on intellectual life as the Maxim gun was on the battlefields of Europe.

Granted, I don't believe that the answer is some sort of Butlerian Jihad against all computer research. The only thing worse than a battlefield where both sides have the Maxim gun is a battlefield where only one side has the Maxim gun. It's inevitable, and unilateral disarmament is not how you leave an arms race. We just need to start training our graders to stop using confidence as a proxy for accuracy.

Considering that these 'masters of the universe' react badly to being told they're wrong, though, this is going to be a very painful and very long process.

(This is part of a three-part series on how the threat that Donald Trump poses to America coincides with the failures of all three branches of our government; legislative, executive, and judicial. Think of it as the Behind The Music documentary about Schoolhouse Rock’s heroin overdose suicide.)

As the Trump administration and the judiciary come closer and closer to open conflict, it’s worth revisiting a question; “Is John Roberts delusional, scared, or clever?” Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark asked a month ago. He acknowledged that the answer was all three; John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is obviously clever enough to delude himself that his cowardice is actually a cunning plan.

John Roberts is aware that his recent rulings have no basis in the Constitution. His expansive read of executive immunity in Trump v. United States makes it clear that the President is above the law. By rendering any “official act” of the President outside the realm of prosecution or judicial review, were the President to send Seal Team Six to execute his opponent for re-election, he would be immune from all legal consequences for ordering that action.

Let’s not waste any time with the fiction that John Roberts doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows exactly how hot the fire he’s playing with is. If he thought there was a chance that Joseph Biden would order the CIA to “official act” Donald Trump - or that there was a chance that the CIA would obey that order - he would never even consider justifying such lawlessness. It is a loaded gun he leaves pointed at the head of American democracy specifically because he knows no Democrat would be willing or able to pull the trigger.

Chief Justice Roberts is forced to make such a comically lawless ruling because Donald Trump is so comically lawless himself. A Bush, a Reagan, probably even a Nixon, could have at least left John Roberts with some fig leaf of justification that he could have used as an excuse to pretend that he was saying something other than what he was saying; “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” But Donald Trump’s crimes on the way to January 6th were so outrageous and so contrary to the way that the American government has worked for the last hundred and fifty years that the only way to prevent him from experiencing legal consequences was to immunize him from law entirely.

Again and again, we see this. Republican or Republican-sympathetic forces in the legal system beg Donald Trump to do the bare minimum to justify his outrageous behavior. He refuses. The National Archives politely asks Donald Trump to return classified documents from Mar-A-Lago after they hear about him playing show-and-tell with Iranian invasion plans and French nuclear weapons. Donald Trump refuses to return them and sends his pool boy to hide them in the bathroom after turning off the security cameras. After months of this, the FBI shows up to repossess the documents; unlike Hillary Clinton, whose email practices were obediently leaked to the front page of the New York Times, the FBI wanted to keep the crimes of Donald Trump secret. It was Trump who angrily posted about the FBI raid to Truth Social, complaining that, while they recovered nuclear secrets from his bedroom, the FBI didn’t even take off their shoes.

While I do think this is purposeful on Donald Trump’s part, I don’t think it’s part of a greater plan to intentionally degrade the rule of law by forcing everyone to sort themselves into two buckets; either the lifelong Republican prosecutor Danielle Sassoon, former clerk for Antonin Scalia, who resigned rather than agree to drop a case against a mayor who had sworn loyalty to Trump, or Judge Aileen Cannon, whose rulings in the documents case were so contrary to controlling precedent in Trump’s favor that she’s assumed to top the short list for the next Supreme Court vacancy. That’s likely to be a long-term effect of these actions, but I don’t think there’s some evil plan in Donald Trump’s head telling him “If I break the law as blatantly as possible, I can find out who’s willing to go along with blatant criminality!” That would require understanding that actions have consequences and that other people have minds, a bar Donald Trump does not meet.

I think it’s coming because of a fundamental disagreement between Donald Trump and the legal system on where power comes from.

I’m going to go off on telling a story here, and I swear it’s not to brag. There is nothing worth bragging about on the subject of my trip to law school. I placed 147th of 151 in two out of three classes in my first semester, and paid $140,000 for the privilege. No human being should even consider following my example.

My first class in law school was Civil Procedure. The professor, rather than a syllabi for the class, handed out a hypothetical situation.

“Let’s say there are too many lawsuits and we don’t have time to judge all of them anymore,” the professor says. “Hundreds of thousands of people suing each other, only a couple hundred judges, can’t have that. So since we’re so busy, we come up with a new procedure to resolve all of our cases.” He brought out a coin. “Call it in the air. You win the flip, you win the case.” He flipped it and looked at the table. “In the case of Heads v. Tails, I rule for Tails. Next case.” He looked at us. “Now. Why couldn’t we do that?”

Someone who I’m absolutely sure had to be either a shill, a jokester, or 148 out of 151 in the class - because I refuse to accept that someone who could miss the question being asked of him so badly somehow did better at law school than I did - didn’t even bother to wait to be called on before shooting out his response. “Because it wouldn’t be fair?” he said.

The professor regarded the person who interrupted him with the same withering contempt that I did. “Fair? What’s unfair about it? I let you call it.” He flips the coin twice again. “Heads. Tails. You think this is a rigged coin? Then pick the rigged side.” I raised my hand, and he pointed to me. “William,” he said, after checking on the list of names in front of him to see who I was.

I did my best. I got up there and I talked about how ‘unfair’ is a thing that a six-year old calls their bedtime, but that we structure our legal system around laws and rules. And if we base who wins a case not on who followed the laws and followed the rules, but on blind chance, there is no incentive for anyone to follow any rules at all. I added that making case law dependent on a coin flip completely removed any ability by people to predict what sort of behavior was legal or illegal. If someone wasn’t sure whether what they were doing was on one side of the line or another, you didn’t look at ‘what is the specific thing they’re doing?’ but rather ‘did they win the coin flip?’ to see if they got away with it. Lastly, I pointed out that, in large part, people submit to the rulings of a court of law rather than take the law into their own hands through acts of vigilantism because they think that the rulings of a court of law will ultimately at least somewhat align with their own moral intuition, and that we toy with that at our own peril, especially if we say out loud that we’re changing it so as to make our own jobs easier.

“Good speech,” the professor said, clearly bored. “Wrong answer.” He pointed to someone else across the room that I don’t remember the name of. “What do you think?”

“It won’t do what you want,” the third student said, regarding me as the same sort of hopelessly naive rube that I regarded the first student as. “You said you were doing it to cut down on your caseload, right? Well, if I win half of my cases no matter what, I’m going to sue anyone I can find for any reason I can make up. You’ll get even more.”

“That’s the right answer,” the professor said proudly. “Watch out for that guy.”

Ah, crap, I thought to myself. I’m not the smartest and most cynical person in the room anymore.

Law school had a very specific theory about where power comes from and how it should be exercised. As expected given the kind of people who go to law school, this was a definition that favored the smartest little boys in the room. To lawyers and the legal system in general, power is exercised according to a set of rules; if you’re very good and very lucky, you can become one of the people who change how the rules are interpreted, and maybe even set one or two of those rules yourself. If you want to change the system so that your friends are rewarded and your enemies are punished, you can do that, but you have to be a very clever little boy who knows how to structure neutral-seeming rules so that you benefit and your enemies suffer.

Donald Trump has no use for rules.

Donald Trump has a very different theory about where power comes from. It comes from guns, and people who are willing to point them at Donald Trump’s enemies.

A lot of conspiracy theories are spread about the ICE agents going around wearing masks and refusing to show their badges as they hustle people like Rümeysa Öztürk into unmarked vans and kidnap them. People say that it’s because these masked ICE agents are trying to hide that they aren’t actually ICE agents, that they’re just a bunch of deputized bounty hunters or Proud Boys grabbed off the street and brought onboard as muscle. I don’t think that’s why they’re refusing to show badges. I think they’re refusing to show badges because they think that the gun they carry should be the only symbol of power they need.

Observers from the legal system - even the most anti-immigration, staunchly Republican observers - talked a lot about how what the ICE agents are doing is ‘improper’. How they need to follow procedure so that people can be sure that they’re actual federal agents doing an actual federal job rather than just a band of criminals.

But the entire point of grabbing Rümeysa Öztürk off the street was to create an image and show it to America; an image of a peaceful student whose only crime was writing an op-ed being kidnapped at gunpoint by masked men claiming the authority of the federal government, and the federal government nodding along and saying “yes, that’s perfectly right.” If they went after actual criminals - assuming the government could even find any - then the criminals might have guns and shoot back, but everyone involved in the kidnapping knew that their victim was harmless. That was the point of changing her immigration status without telling her so that she was made a criminal, and then arresting her as a criminal - to show that the men with guns are in control of the country now, and no lawyer can stop them.

And I assure you, all lawyers understand this message. We pretend that we don’t, because pretending that we don’t allows us to keep some of our power. We all knew that if the men with guns decided to start ignoring the rules that we set, our knowledge of those rules was as useful as Star Wars trivia.

Chief Justice John Roberts knows this. He knows that Donald Trump has no use for him except as someone who makes it harder for people who follow the rules to oppose Donald Trump.

And he’s scared of it. He’s so scared that he’s deluded himself into thinking that it’s cunning for him to say that Donald Trump can do whatever he wants; trying to buy time for Donald Trump to become less popular and thus less powerful, so that at some point in the future he can ask the men with guns to follow the rules, and thus they’re more likely to listen to him.

It’s not going to work. Because the men with guns also understand the message that John Roberts is sending them by letting them go to work unmolested for now. And that message is “I can’t stop you.”

I don’t know whether or not John Roberts realizes this. I didn’t do nearly as well in law school as he did, after all. But I realize it.

Like I said; law school selects for the cleverest little boys in the room. And the thing about the cleverest little boys in the room is that they tend not to notice exactly how clever everyone else can be, too.

Let's go back to history to another time when it was physically dangerous to be a protestor in America. Let's go back to the Jim Crow era and read an article from the early National Review, “Why the South Must Prevail”. I'm not bringing this up to make cheap points at the expense of conservatism or to pretend that this article is some sort of Rosetta stone that unlocks the true motivations of a 31-year-old Bill Buckley, the National Review, or conservatives in general. The National Review can be rather mercurial; just ask anyone who wrote for their January 2016 “Against Trump” issue, assuming they don't run away from you when you bring up the topic. I'm bringing this up because I think that the article reveals a crucial weakness in the Jim Crow coalition, eventually leading to its downfall, that the elevation of Donald Trump was meant to rectify.

The article, three columns long and written without a byline, is stark, not just to modern eyes but to what must have been eyes at the time. The writer says that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not dominate numerically”. The writer dismisses the Fourteenth Amendment's commitment to universal suffrage as “demagogy”, and states that the “consequences might be violent and anarchistic” if the “Negro vote” is counted. He concludes the article by saying that “sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.”

The writer clearly enjoys the idea of liberals reading his article and getting offended; he sees himself as a brave truth-teller who can face harsh facts that liberals shy from. Nowhere does he have the courage to mention or even gesture towards what we now accept as the true motivations of Jim Crow. The best schools and jobs, seats at ball games, restaurants, theaters, and buses, and even bathrooms were all exclusively reserved for white people. And they didn't want to share. When they were finally forced to, they filled pools in with concrete rather than desegregate them; again, proving that populists are motivated by denying their enemies things rather than having good things themselves.

The writer of the article endorsed violence, as long as it remained abstract violence. When unarmed marchers walk over the Edmund Pettis Bridge and passively allow the police to beat them unconscious while television cameras broadcast it to the nation, onlookers might decide they agree with the writer of the article about this being a choice “dramatically one between civilization and barbarism” but disagree about which side represents barbarism. When the “terrible price of violence” is paid by four 14 and 11-year-old young girls at a bombed church, the National Review was forced to the last refuge of mountebanks; anti-anti-segregation, speculating that the murder was likely the work of a “communist, or a crazed Negro”.

We talk about anti-anti-Trumpism as being just a permission structure for Trumpism, but there are differences between someone who would gleefully light you on fire and someone who would merely throw away all the fire extinguishers and lie down in front of the fire truck. People will not storm the Capitol and beat policemen to death with thin blue line flags based on a Ross Douthat column about how actually the Democrats are the real insurrectionists. Ross Douthat columns are good for getting people to ignore the danger posed by right-wing insurrectionists or to refuse to prosecute those insurrectionists when you catch them, but no one is seriously radicalized by them. And if Trumpism keeps getting more and more embarrassing to the anti-anti-Trumpists, even Ross Douthat might change the subject and decide that now is a good time to write about obscure pieces of Catholic theology. I doubt even he will manage to successfully convince himself that these eternal spiritual matters are a far better use of column space on the New York Times editorial page than temporary material struggles, but he'll probably pretend that he did.

Lying that you are looking to protect civilization or create a better world for everyone opens you up to a crucial weakness; if it can be shown that you are not protecting civilization or creating a better world, you are expected to stop doing whatever it is you're doing. If you justify Jim Crow by saying that segregation is vital to prevent mob rule from overthrowing civilization, you're expected to not subsequently approve of sending mobs to beat and kill peaceful protestors. If you say that you don't want the government to acknowledge the existence of gay relationships by saying that marriage has a specific religious definition that you must abide by, people can point out that your religion has a lot of specific definitions of marriage that you're not also demanding be enforced and written into law; only the ones that hurt gay people. Any justification someone uses for a policy that they are actually picking for another reason opens them up to no longer getting what they want once the justification fails.

If “compassionate conservatism” cannot give conservatives what they want, there's always “compassionless conservatism.” This is what Donald Trump offers his followers. Conservatism stripped of all pretense, simply pared down to pain and suffering inflicted on the people that conservatives hate. The Iraq war? Of course Trump opposed it; not because it's bad to bomb other countries into anarchy and death but because the “Pottery Barn rule” implied that we had some sort of obligation to the people there. We should have gone in there, killed as many people as we could, and taken the oil. Allowing the transes, the gays, and the women to serve in the military? Of course not. Not because it would harm our military readiness or somehow damage unit cohesion, but because all those people are lesser than straight white men, and our military shouldn't lower itself by permitting them inside.

"Compassionless conservatism" wasn't on offer through major organs the size of the National Review because of how many people needed to be involved in producing, distributing, and supporting something the size of the National Review using the technology at the time. Bill Buckley wanted to be known as an Important Philosophical Thinker, yes, and "Republicans should triumph over Democrats because we are Republicans and they are Democrats, and we should do that even if we need to kill those Democrats in order to do that" isn't a terribly Important Philosophical Thought. If your newsstand sells magazines that talk about how we might have to, regrettably, Do A Violence to people in order to defend civilization and society against anarchy and mob rule, that can be justified as an abiding commitment to the values of free speech and open debate. If you sell a magazine that says that we should affirmatively Do A Violence to people because they'd vote in ways that prevent us from taking their tax money and refusing to let them use anything we build with it, you seem less like you're hosting a debate on controversial topics and more like you're being an accomplice to a crime. It's not that we became worse or better people. It's that the attack surfaces are different. It's very hard to publish a magazine calling to kill people so we can rob them that gets sold outside gun stores and John Birch Society meetings in this era.

But as technology changes, the attack surfaces change. First there's the creation of talk radio, an ephemeral medium where someone gives unedited opinion commentary for three hours a day. The National Review has to account for every word published by it and it's assumed that their editors approved of every sentence that goes out under their masthead; or at the very least, they can be held responsible for it. Rush Limbaugh only has to answer for what he's said if someone records him and listens to the entire thing in order to look for something to complain about; much harder than clipping an article out of National Review. Then there's cable news, where you can have dozens of correspondents brought on for three-to-four-minute quick media hits, and if one of them says something that generates the wrong kind of heat, that correspondent can be cut loose. Social media is only the latest technology that makes opinion coverage cheaper to produce and more readily accessible. To generate opinion coverage, you just need a megaphone to broadcast your thoughts to the world, and they'll let anyone get a megaphone these days.

In a world of infinite megaphones and infinite opinion commentators, someone will be there to make every single potential argument holding every single potential position. You might be able to inflict social consequences on some of them; suing larger organizations like Fox News for defamation or revealing the identities of particularly prominent and odious anonymous commentators like LibsOfTikTok. But it's like trying to prevent drug addiction by arresting individual drug dealers. This is fundamentally a demand-side problem, not a supply-side problem. So long as people want compassionless conservatism more than compassionate conservatism, there will always be someone ready to tell them who their enemies are and what should be done to them.

When conservatives lied to everyone, including themselves, and said that they opposed gay marriage, the welfare state, and civil rights legislation not because stopping those things would hurt their enemies but because they were genuinely devoted to different positive outcomes like religious freedom, free markets, and the prevention of mob rule, they opened themselves to a critical weakness; that if we showed that religious freedom, free markets, and freedom from tyranny were on our side instead of theirs, or that the parade of horrible outcomes they said would happen if we got our way did not happen, they were supposed to stop opposing those things. But they still wanted to hurt their enemies. We could see them straining at the leash, desperately looking for a convenient excuse to lash out at us again in a way that they could deny doing. But we accepted their lies. It was easier than fighting.

They pretended they didn’t want to hurt us, and we pretended to believe them.

Donald Trump came along, and he didn’t even bother with promising good outcomes; he promised bad outcomes for everyone that his followers hated, completely freeing himself from that weakness. Jesus Christ only forgives your sins; Donald Trump commits them on your behalf. No surprise the Christian church prefers the latter.

When he first came down the elevator, all the way back in January 2016, as his win in the Republican primary became a fait accompli, a flighty friend of mine on the left side of the aisle said that he couldn’t possibly win even the Republican nomination. “People aren’t that hateful,” she said dismissively to me. “No political party anywhere would support someone to hurt their enemies instead of helping themselves.”

She was lying to herself, even if it was by accepting the lies of others.

All lies incur a debt to the truth. And all debts have to be paid.

One week ago, on Thursday, April 3rd, the CEO of Newsmax, Chris Ruddy, rang the stock market bell to open the New York Stock Exchange. After launching an Initial Public Offering on Monday of that week, their stock started at $10 per share and jumped to $82 per share by the time trading had closed. On Tuesday, the stock shot up even further to $235 per share, giving them roughly half the total market cap of General Motors. On Wednesday, the day before, the stock market had mostly corrected, closing at $52 dollars a share, and over the course of the next week slowly declined to $25 dollars a share.

The people who bought Newsmax stock at $235 per share were clearly wrong, but they were, to quote conservative author P.J. O’Rourke, “wrong within normal parameters.” Newsmax is a third-tier cable network and loses money every quarter, having very little revenue - and there’s the matter of their ongoing legal exposure - but there is a possibility there. A case can be made.

During the runup to the January 6th insurrection in 2021, Newsmax was better positioned than Fox News because they didn’t have the larger Fox organization that would be rendered liable for defamation if they repeated out loud the things the President of the United States was saying. Smaller, judgment-proof organizations like Newsmax and OANN were taking market share from Fox, and it was reasonable to think that Fox News could be displaced by them. You could take a chance to get in on the ground floor of the new place to sell commercials for Medicare-funded scooters, funeral insurance, and gold coins stamped with the American flag. It was wrong to pay $235 per share for that chance, but it was wrong within normal parameters.

Wrong way, way outside of normal parameters was what caused the markets to plummet sixteen feet through an announcer’s table the second Newsmax’s CEO rang that bell, though.

The day before, after the markets had closed, Donald Trump said that he had an announcement so important that this day would be remembered as “Liberation Day”. From the White House lawn, he declared that he was liberating Americans from the existence of foreign trade; he was using his power to declare a 10% blanket tariff on the entire world; except for Russia, Belarus, and North Korea, which were exempt from his decree for reasons I couldn’t possibly speculate about. Additional tariffs would be imposed on any country that exported more than it imported from the United States, according to a formula concocted by notorious crank Peter Navarro.

Multiple contradictory explanations for these tariffs were immediately rolled out. They were intended to return manufacturing to America, Trump himself proudly declared, even as factories announced closure and layoffs due to the fact that the tariffs fell hardest on imported raw materials (since countries that export raw materials import very little from America.) Under the impression that America was full to bursting with people who wanted to get manufacturing jobs and that companies were eager to make massive capital investments based on tariffs that had been placed and could be removed at a whim, gamers hearing about the cancellation of Switch 2 preorders eagerly awaited news that Nintendo factories were coming to their country.

Trump’s children, meanwhile, insisted that this was all just a negotiating tactic by their father, who was just pretending to be a madman unilaterally raising taxes on Americans and starting trade wars with every country in the world (with three exceptions) in the hopes of getting ‘a better deal’ from other countries. “Do not retaliate!” they urged. “The first person to the table with our father always gets the best deal!” This contradicted the insistence that the tariffs were permanent and going to bring manufacturing back to the United States, so the Trump administration settled on a compromise position; if you were going to make investments in capital infrastructure, the tariffs were absolutely here to stay and would still be in place seven years from now when your factory got online, but if you were selling stock or otherwise pulling out of America, this was just the art of the deal and they would be gone in days. While offering abortions for some and miniature American flags for others is a longstanding political tradition, usually it’s done through the medium of campaign speeches, not the American tax code.

As of this moment, many of the tariffs have been announced as paused. But Trump’s declaration that he had paused tariffs was on social media, not legally binding documents; there was a great deal of confusion as to what exactly had been paused and what was still in effect. Were the tariffs on Canada 10%, 25%, or 35%? Ask three different White House staffers and you’d get three different answers. There were even reports that no one was ready at ports to actually collect the tariffs, no matter what they were. No one knew what the law was at the moment, much less what the law would be tomorrow; an intolerable state of affairs for anyone trying to make long-term planning decisions that conformed to the American tax code. No wonder that we started to see capital flight from the country with the bond market crashing.

Plenty of people have speculated about what the Trump administration was really planning by frequently and frantically changing the tax code for all of America. His enemies speculated that he was opening opportunities for insider trading. His allies insisted that this was all evidence of a brilliant plan that none of them could agree on the details of; it was an attempt at forging a new “Mar-A-Lago Accord” that would make the dollar no longer the world’s reserve currency; it was an attempt at uniting countries against China in a trade war, somehow accomplished by starting trade wars with (nearly) every country on earth; it was a masterful gambit to extract trade concessions from countries like Madagascar and Vietnam, which would have done nearly anything we asked had we just asked them.

This doesn’t stand up to Occam’s Razor. While someone probably traded on advance knowledge of the tariff pause, I doubt it was Trump, as insider trading based on the actions you’ve taken requires you to understand that your actions have consequences, a bar he does not meet. And if any of the people asserting that this is some act of 1776-dimensional chess were correct as opposed to randomly thrashing about in response to stimuli, they’d be able to predict what he’d do next; so far, they have not. There’s a much simpler explanation.

Donald Trump has only ever succeeded in three things: professional wrestling, reality TV, and American presidential elections. In all three of those endeavors, nothing is truly real.

The WWE has no rulebook for the same reason the Starship Enterprise has no blueprints. It’s not necessary to create them because the sport of professional wrestling does not exist, just like the Starship Enterprise does not exist. In the universe that is portrayed on television, surely someone, somewhere, must have a rulebook explaining to the referees exactly what kinds of hold an undead cowboy is and is not allowed to use on his masked brother. But it’s not necessary for the show to be filmed for that rulebook to actually exist, so long as we don’t contradict ourselves about what it says often enough to damage the suspension of disbelief.

Donald Trump tried to treat every field of business the same way he treated professional wrestling. He said that his 11,000 square foot apartment was 30,000 square feet, the same way that the WWE says that the Big Show is 7 feet and 2 inches tall and weighs 500 pounds. When you do that in boxing or in real estate, that’s called fraud. When you do it in WWE that’s just your gimmick.

Donald Trump sets America’s tax policy via tweet because he does not understand that there are businesses that need to follow rules rather than simply communicating vibes to their customers. He simply says from on high that manufacturing needs to come back to America and he’s implementing absurdly high tariffs; the companies say that in recognition of his strength and leadership they’re going to build new factories; and that’s all that needs to happen. There doesn’t need to be years-long processes of capital expenditure and training employees to actually work in these factories for the same reason the briefcase the professional wrestlers are fighting over doesn’t need to actually be filled with money. If everyone agrees to pretend that it’s true, it might as well be true.

Donald Trump tried to run his first presidency by these WWE principles, which tricked people into thinking that he would act like a normal Republican. He would talk about how we should put alligators in a moat between the U.S. and Mexico. The people around him understood that this was just vibes, and that he had no actual interest in paying an army of alligator handlers to feed and raise them. It was just like saying that you thought that the wrestler who loses a match should be put in a coffin. This results in a presidency where the president doesn’t actually care whether or not his policies are implemented so long as people respect the vibes he’s trying to communicate. Stealing a letter off Trump’s desk so that he forgets about the policy he was going to implement is only important because it disrespects Trump, not because it stops the policy.

But that detente between the Republican Party and Donald Trump broke down on January 6th. The party was willing to think “What’s the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” because they thought that his insistence that he actually won the election and was willing to overthrow American democracy in order to stay in power was just another fanciful promise to rile up the base, the same as promising to build the wall or pull the US out of NAFTA. They found out too late that he was deadly serious.

Donald Trump’s working relationship with Mike Pence started with asking Pence “How’d you like to be the most powerful Vice President in history?” Donald Trump’s working relationship with Mike Pence ended with Donald Trump sending a mob he knew was armed with guns to kill his Vice President.

Because Trump found out that the party was just humoring him. And so Donald Trump spent the next four years destroying anyone who would ever refuse to follow him off of a cliff. He got rid of everyone in the Republican Party who would refuse to do something he ordered them to because it was stupid, counterproductive, and terrible. There are only two kinds of Republican left in Washington; those who are just as insane as Donald Trump, like Peter Navarro, and those who are so craven and cowardly that they’d go along with his insanity, like Rubio and JD Vance.

Now there’s no one left to take the paper off Trump’s desk when he says that he’d like to raise taxes on Americans by 46% starting next week, unilaterally. There are only people who say “yes sir, Mr. President, what a bold idea, I’ll ask ChatGPT how to do that.”

The tariffs will keep changing. There will be no way to predict what they will be tomorrow, or a week from now, or a month from now. This is because the only businesses that Donald Trump succeeded in are businesses where the rules don’t matter. He cannot comprehend that you might need a stable environment to make investments in; he never did. A stable environment is the worst possible thing for him. He needs to constantly be introducing new twists, new heel turns, new gimmicks in order to keep the fans invested and never missing an episode.

As he declares tariffs in excess of 100% on China, he never even considers taking TikTok off the Apple store even though it’s been legally mandated by Congress. Because Donald Trump recognizes in TikTok another organization built around pumping reality-free vibes to consumers. He understands that he and TikTok are kindred spirits tragically separated by the Pacific Ocean.

As Donald Trump reorients the economy to work like professional wrestling, you have two choices. You can either get rid of him, or you can accept that you no longer live in a world where businesses make deals and investments based on stable rules, instead of based on handshake guidelines that could change at a moment’s notice based on who falls into or out of favor with our president, an executive branch Vince McMahon.

If you want to survive in the Trump economy, I suggest getting ready to take a chair shot. And maybe think about learning how to blade.

Red means green, after all.

It’s the most stable investment you’ll be allowed to make in America.

Among the sane libertarians who have read an economic textbook once in their lives, there’s a live debate going on. Is Donald Trump’s unilateral tariff increase Maoism? Or, given how much the Trump administration hates college students, is it more similar to Pol Pot’s economic program? My own personal point of comparison is Juche, the state ideology of North Korea. Either way, there’s no precedent for the Road to Serfdom Torment Nexus eagerly announced from the White House lawn last Wednesday; at least, no precedent outside of economic systems where several scholarly arguments occur over how many of the fatalities should be attributed to the famine and how many of them should be attributed to the death squads.

I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to talk about any of this. I don’t even want to talk about what I’m about to talk about so I don’t have to talk about this.

You know what I don’t want to talk about right now? Disco Elysium. It’s a good game. You should play it, probably.

For those who aren’t familiar, Disco Elysium is a game in which you play an amnesiac police officer in a clear allegory for a post-Soviet Eastern European state, whose brain has been damaged by severe drug use, likely brought on by an acrimonious divorce with a wife he can no longer remember the name of. You are startled out of your attempt at killing yourself by news that you are required to solve a murder, despite knowing absolutely nothing about who you are or the universe that you inhabit. Assisting you on this mission is the extremely helpful Kim Katsuragi, apparently your assistant, and a set of extremely unhelpful voices in your head representing different parts of your biology and personality, each of which suggests courses of action that are ruinous, self-harming, or obviously contradictory to your goal of accomplishing whatever you tried to accomplish.

Your sense of authority can tell you to angrily dress down a depressed woman on an ice floe who said “fuck the hat” when you told her that she should wear a hat in order to be warmer, demanding that she apologize for telling you, a police officer, to have sex with a hat, and interrogating her as to why she wanted to see you disrobe and have intercourse with a hat in the first place. You can also attempt to cheer her up after she shows you a contact microphone listening to things under the ice by giving her a disjointed pep talk about Contact Mike, a brain-damaged boxer who inspires you to go on and win fights in your life. It’s very funny.

I think so, anyway. I doubt I’m personally ever going to play it, despite the fact that I like humor, I like detective stories, I like political satire, but I am almost positive that this game is going to drive me insane for a very specific reason that the writers of the game have far more cause to complain about than I do.

The reason is that I’ve read a lot of the dialogue in the game and I can never get away from the sense that it regards the millions killed by the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century as an annoying distraction from the interesting discussions you can have about the various failed attempts by human beings to create utopia, rather than something that renders every single one of them meaningless.

I know it’s the least cool thing in the universe to care about something that happens to other people. I know that the people writing the game Disco Elysium were actually from the part of the world where all of these things happened and know more about it than I do. (In a wonderfully communist twist, the studio has fractured into three separate organizations, each swearing to be the true successor and writing their own sequel.) I know that I am lucky and blessed to have lived in a country where, for the first two and a half decades of my life, I never seriously worried about being sent to jail for what I believe or worried about starving in the street with absolutely nothing I could do because of choices made by the people in power of my government.

But I also know what it looks like when a human being starves to death. I’ve seen those pictures. I will never unsee the eight-year-old with a swollen belly, his liver and - I won’t link it, I won’t show you the picture, because that picture, for seventeen long years, has never left me.

There are a couple of clear-analogy-for-Lysenkoist university students in the game and I have no idea how I would get through the game without punching my monitor and screaming with fury over my inability to get Harry DuBois to gun them down on the spot.

Let’s talk about the Great Leap Forward. I also don’t want to talk about that, but it’s much more important that I talk about that than Disco Elysium.

So, Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, was having a political struggle with the rest of the party in 1956. In an attempt to outflank an increasingly powerful party bureaucracy, he urged intellectuals to criticize the Communist Party in what would sometimes be translated as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign.”

The primary point of disagreement between historians is on whether or not this was a trap from the beginning or whether it became a trap once Mao realized that the intellectuals were criticizing him as well and not just the members of the Communist Party that Mao didn’t like.

Whichever it was, it led to the less euphemistically named “Anti-Rightist Campaign”, where a minimum of 550,000 people (the number currently acknowledged by the Chinese government) to 2 million (the top end of the estimates made by modern China scholars) were ‘subject to political persecution’. It is hard to know what exactly happened to the people who were ‘persecuted’; some were sentenced to execution, hard labor, or execution via hard labor. One labor camp, Jiabiangou, for which we have records, indicates that 3,000 people were sent there as political prisoners, of which approximately 2,500 died of starvation. We don’t know how many were killed during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, but we do know that Mao Zedong sent a letter to Deng Xiaoping urging him to slow down, saying “If we kill too many, we will forfeit public sympathy and a shortage of labor power will arise.”

Once the Anti-Rightist Campaign was finished, Mao went on to start the Great Leap Forward, reliable estimates for which indicate between 30 and 55 million people died as a result of, roughly half the total death toll of World War Two.

Mao, deciding from the top that large steelworks in the middle of cities were insufficiently socialist, ordered the steelworks destroyed so that the people could socialistically create steel in their backyards. Mao promised that these “backyard furnaces” would cause China’s steel production to surpass England’s in fifteen years and America’s in thirty. However, it was physically impossible to build construction-quality steel in backyard furnaces; modern steel foundries even treat the air the iron is exposed to during the process to remove nitrogen from it and reduce impurities. The backyard furnaces were worse than a waste of time; people melted down their own cooking pots, knives, and gardening implements in an attempt to make and supply backyard furnaces, turning most worked metal in China into lumps of iron ore, useless even for making tools, that were abandoned on hillsides. Mao liked it, however, seeing the backyard furnaces as part of the inevitable triumph of socialism; “tens of millions of people who could not even recognize iron ore ten years ago are now making steel in their own backyard.”

Meanwhile, farming in the country was similarly reworked. Extremely successful co-ops, socialist organizations where expensive farming equipment was collectively bought for each member of the co-op to use when they needed it, were replaced with communist communes, where everything, including land and meals, was owned collectively; children were raised communally and everyone had to travel to the same part of the village in order to eat every meal. Most of the expensive farming equipment was melted down to make more “steel” in the “backyard furnaces”.

The communes operated according to the crank theories of Trofim Lysenko, an agriculture scientist who had already been discredited in the Soviet Union. His “theory” was that because of communism, seeds of “the same class” couldn’t possibly compete for limited resources like sunlight and water in a field, but would instead socialistically cooperate, thus growing even stronger than they would if they were planted more densely than capitalist agriculture scientists recommended. While Stalin and Mao quite liked his theory and did a good job of imprisoning, torturing, and executing the insufficiently politically minded scientists who said that it wouldn’t work, the plants ultimately failed to share Lysenko’s revolutionary fervor and died as physical laws predicted that they would.

Meanwhile, Mao, having seen a sparrow eat seeds that had been dropped on the ground once, decided that sparrows eating seeds were a huge threat to Chinese grain crops. He ordered citizens to eradicate the sparrows, saying that “man must triumph over nature”; they would shoot them down with slings, smash their nests, and beat what few pots and pans remained at all hours in order to keep the sparrows from sleeping in the hopes that they would die of exhaustion. The sparrows were the only thing that preyed upon the locusts and other insects endemic to China; surging locusts ate what crops survived the Lysenkoist planting practices.

There were plenty of people who knew that Mao’s plans were foolish and would not work. Those people had all seen what happened to everyone who told Mao that he was wrong before. People were regularly beaten for lack of revolutionary fervor as the spiraling disaster of the Great Leap Forward became increasingly obvious; many of them, already starving, died, but the politicians knew that it was far safer to blame the children of the hated landlord class for engaging in physically impossible plots to sabotage the country than suggest that perhaps Mao was mistaken about one tiny little thing. As parents ate their children and children ate their parents, as trees were stripped of bark for food, as one person recounts learning that he could eat a lump of coal to “silence the demon in my belly for a few hours” - bureaucrats reported record grain harvests, and China exported what little food it had for foreign capital.

I cannot see the pair of “inframaterialist” university students in Disco Elysium, who recount the time that they expelled someone from their book group for denying that crops grown by people thinking communist thoughts were physically different than crops grown by people thinking capitalist thoughts, as morally distinct from the January 6th insurrectionists in “Camp Auschwitz” and “Six Million Wasn’t Enough” hoodies. I am told by Aaron Ross Powell, who I respect very deeply, a “radical liberal” Buddhist who describes himself as “close to but not quite an anarchist” that the great strength of the game’s writing is in how it treats everyone, no matter how bizarre or radical their political beliefs, as fundamentally human characters with their own foibles. I regret to say that I am simply not strong enough to treat someone advocating for this with the sort of dignity and respect that they, as a human being, ultimately deserve. And believing that I was being told by the decisions made by the author of the text that I should treat this person as a misguided idealist with the potential for good would drive me into an apocalyptic, days-long fury. I’m sorry. I’m simply not strong enough.

Ultimately, the Great Leap Forward was a completely manmade catastrophe, a single leader taking a thriving country that had been in an incredibly great place considering what it had just survived and demanding that it reshape itself to fit his political ideal. When reality made it clear that the leader was mistaken about the way the world worked, the leader demanded that reality gave way and did away with anyone who dared to tell him that physical law outranked his law. It was the result of putting absolute power in the hands of a man who had successfully run a guerilla campaign with no cities for manufacturing things or intellectual support and who thought that the only reason anyone would think that running a country would find those things useful or maybe even required was that they were a traitor who needed to be executed immediately.

Comparisons to the current occupant of the Oval Office are so obvious as to go unmentioned.

There’s something that Justice Blackmun of the Supreme Court said once. Justice Blackmun wrote a dissenting opinion in 1972 against the Supreme Court outlawing the death penalty, and wrote a concurring opinion in 1976 when the Supreme Court reinstated it; but 20 years later, after seeing how the death penalty was used and abused in America, he disavowed it completely, stating “From this day forward, I will no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”

“From this day forward, I will no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”

His words echoed in my mind the entire time I read the firsthand accounts of the Great Leap Forward. I’ve spent the seventeen years of my life since then trying to figure out how to say something as cold, as insightful, as thunderously denouncing, as appropriate as what Justice Blackmun said. But it wasn’t until I wrote this article that I finally realized, or acknowledged to myself, that there is no improvement on it. “I will no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”

I will no longer tinker with central planning. I will no longer fantasize about a world where something other than the greed of individuals rules the world around me, because I understand that those individuals can be made subject to physical law, that they can be made to fight each other and we can survive in the spaces between them, that we can diffuse power to the point where one idiot doesn’t have the power to starve us all, just some of us. Because the fantasy of creating a world where one enlightened figure, one guided thought, simply does what’s best for everyone will inevitably run into the problem that the second that guided thought is replaced in an election by an idiot who promises the moon and the stars on a string and gets enough people to believe in him (I have yet to see it not be a him), he will be able to destroy the world and starve the people as he forces everyone to submit to his mad whims.

People will deny the truth as the country burns around their ears. People will silence themselves out of fear and lie about what they see in front of them. People will send ships full of grain out of China and out of Ireland as the country starves to death. The only way to avoid it is to make sure that no one person has the power needed to break the entire world at once, just his part.

Of course, breaking our part of the country is why Trump was elected in the first place.

Under the policy of “deliverism” Biden sought to reward red states for what they had done to bring American democracy to the brink of destruction. There may have been moral hazard in increasing payouts to states for threatening to put an insurrectionist back into office, but there was also political logic; maybe, just maybe, if the red states thought they’d be better paid under democracy rather than authoritarianism, they’d start to choose democracy again.

It didn’t work and it never would have worked. The Trump coalition’s complaint has never been that they were doing poorly. It’s that the people they hate are doing too well.

What was the ad that killed Kamala Harris in prime time? “Kamala is for they/them.” It identified people who the audience was primed to hate; transgender illegal immigrant criminals; and said that Kamala was so depraved that she wouldn’t even want to hurt those people. And it worked.

It worked very, very well.

Of course Trump was going to build Maoism, or Juche, or the Khmer Rouge’s program from first principles. He was put into office in order to ruin the people that his base hated. And the only thing more effective at destroying prosperity and ending lives than these failed ideologies is fascism, which he’d prefer, but this will do as a substitute if the courts keep resisting.

The people who vote for him are more than happy to take a little pain themselves as long as they know that we’re feeling a lot of pain.

After the Great Leap Forward, what did China do? They took Mao out of power for four years, rebuilt, and then they put him back in to kill even more people in the Cultural Revolution.

Comparisons to the current occupant of the Oval Office are so obvious as to go unmentioned.

Subscribe now

Well. Happy Stovemas to all who observe it.

You know, I really wanted to still be writing about Signal? I had five articles lined up about it. I could really talk a lot about Signal.

But then the Trump administration decided to send masked unidentified government agents to disappear people off the street for writing critical op-eds, and then the Trump Administration admitted to a judge that it was violating their orders, knew they were violating their orders, and wouldn’t do anything to fix it. And then I felt obligated to write about that. And while I was writing about that, then Trump decided to crash the global economy with a chart so absurdly false I actually couldn’t find a copy of the chart on any reputable news site, as none of them wanted to risk the reputational damage that would come from showing the President’s words uncensored.

It was a common refrain among The Resistance during the first Trump administration that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to “be distracted” by the outrage du jour, because it was clearly “a distraction” from his real plan, to do whatever the outrage du jour was two outrages ago. This is like saying that the incontinent six-year-old on PCP running through your house breaking your television is doing it to “distract you” from him vomiting and defecating on your sofa, which he did to “distract you” from the fire he set in the dining room. I understand that it’s reassuring to believe that these are being done as a “distraction”, because that implies that there’s a plan. But that’s a belief we can’t afford.

The truth is that we spent the last century accumulating an unfathomable amount of discretionary power that could be exercised based on the sole judgment of the person currently occupying the Oval Office, and then our voters chose to give it all to a man with the ethics of a mob boss, the impulse control of a toddler, and the self-assurance in his own crackpot beliefs of the Time Cube guy. And then the voters did it a second time, after they had already tried it once.

We need to accept that. Calling anything Donald Trump does “a distraction” implies a degree of intentionality or ability to understand consequences that he’s shown no evidence of possessing.

Donald Trump, after two abortive attempts at placing tariffs on Mexico and Canada that were both “delayed” for 30 days after less than a week of being in place, said that April 2nd would be remembered as “Liberation Day”, saying that he would announce a new set of tariffs that day, safely after the market had closed and the special election for Wisconsin Supreme Court had ended. Because that’s what you do when you have good news. We were all expecting something mind-numbingly stupid. We weren’t expecting the possible end of American global economic dominance. That was a mistake on our part. A catastrophic one.

Donald Trump walked up to the podium of his outdoor press conference and produced a big chart, showing far more preparation for this announcement than his previous two tariff attempts. Far more preparation, but significantly less thought. Written at the top of the chart was the words “Reciprocal Tariffs”, above a spreadsheet with three columns; “Countries”, “Tariffs Charged To The U.S.A.” (Including Currency Manipulation And Trade Barriers listed in fine print), and “U.S.A Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs.”

Anyone looking at the chart whose knowledge of world geography reaches “has experienced some version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego at least once” or “glanced at the world map on the wall of their middle school humanities class for thirty seconds while bored out of their mind” immediately saw some problems with it. Is Taiwan, which is reliant on the American Security No-Money-Back-Guarantee for its continued existence, really charging us 64% tariffs? Japan and South Korea, big-time trade partners, are somehow engaging in more “Including Currency Manipulation And Trade Barriers” than the European Union? Is Madagascar such a terrifying economic threat to the United States that they need to be slapped down with a ‘discounted’ 45% tariff rate?

How is Ecuador, whose currency is the US dollar, manipulating their currency?

No country on the board was listed as charging the U.S. a less than 10% tariff rate. This included foreign military bases operated by the US, such as the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is only inhabited by 3,000 military contractors employed by the US and UK, and the Heard and McDonald Islands, two islands between Australia and Antarctica that no human is believed to have set foot on in eight years. In total, every country in the CIA World Factbook other than Russia and North Korea were listed on the chart as having at least 10% “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” The “U.S.A. Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs” were all exactly half the value of the alleged tariffs already being charged to us “because the president is lenient and wants to be kind to the world,” according to a Trump aide, except where that would make them less than 10%, in which case the tariff rate was set to 10%.

Confused by the facts that everyone knew to be unambiguously false, economists attempted to put their heads together and figure out how the Trump administration defined “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers” in order to get these numbers. After some initial speculation, a formula was determined; the value of the column labeled “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” was determined by taking the value of goods the United States had imported from that country, subtracting the value of goods that country imported from the United States, and then dividing that result by the value of goods that country had imported from the United States. This has absolutely nothing to do with tariffs, but it matched the numbers on Trump’s charts exactly, except where they were less than 10%, in which case they were set to 10%.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative angrily sent out a press release saying that they did not calculate tariffs on the chart that way; they calculated the tariffs on the chart by doing that, then dividing it by four multiplied by a quarter. They also said that the only reason there would be a trade imbalance between two nations in the first place is because that country was somehow sneakily manipulating their currency and taxation in order to disadvantage American businesses, and as such, any trade imbalance should be considered a tariff. If there was no trade imbalance or actually an imbalance favoring the United States, a 10% tariff would still be charged in order to make sure that other countries didn’t disguise their products as actually coming from tariff-free countries in order to evade the taxes.

Calling this a lie is a disservice to lies. Calling this batshit insane is a disservice to batshit. This is the equivalent of saying that you need a HBO Prime subscription in order to live, so your HBO Prime subscription is really a tax on living. And then, because you’ve already paid a lot of money in taxes to HBO, you’re going to rob the IRS to get the tax refund that you deserve. And you can’t be sure that the money you’re taking isn’t counterfeit, so you’re going to take some extra money, just in case.

Madagascar, where the average yearly income in 2018 was 510 US dollars, is not going to be buying a lot of American manufactured goods. The makers of American manufactured goods, however, are going to be buying a lot from Madagascar; cobalt and titanium, mostly. By putting a 45% tariff rate on those imports, Donald Trump is imposing a 45% tax paid by any American manufacturer who buys from Madagascar, with the justification that Madagascar is somehow secretly cheating Americans by being unable to afford American products in the first place.

“It is hard to express, without resorting to expletives, how utterly stupid it is to suggest that the United States, world's richest economy with a population of 334 million, should have a bilateral trade balance of zero (no trade surplus, no trade deficit) with every country in the world.” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Yet that is the stated goal of Donald Trump.

We were worried about him wanting to turn the United States of America into Russia, but from this it seems more likely that his end goal is something closer to the only other country he declined to issue a tariff on; North Korea. His idea is that we should buy nothing from any other country and probably shouldn’t even try to sell anything to them either. No one should be allowed to enter the country; and there’s probably going to be restrictions on them leaving it, too.

Seeing this, most Republicans with at least some knowledge of how economies work have responded by following the advice of Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock and freaking the geek out. Casual eugenicist, Turner Diaries superfan, and fellow substacker Richard Hanania said he was wrong to vote for Donald Trump, and that his mistake was just not trusting his own big brain enough - “I just thought that the basic ideological basis of conservatism – free markets, individual rights, tough on crime and foreign adversaries – was sound and enough of it was left over to make even a Republican president this personally flawed a better option.” The Discord chat for Wall Street Bets, a reddit fandom for the stock market, responded a bit more crudely - “PUT THE PRONOUNS BACK IN PEOPLES BIOS FUCK THIS MARKET”, one person posted, to which they were replied to with “we need everyone here to do at least one land acknowledgment.”

To all of the people who voted for Republicans because they were good for business, who gladly ignored all of times Donald Trump repeatedly said that he was going to put tariffs onto everyone and destroy the global economy on the campaign trail because they thought he was going to be surrounded by reasonable adults who would take the toys away from him before he did anything dangerous; what did you expect?

Character is destiny.

Donald Trump’s character is that of a cheat and a con man. He filed for bankruptcy six times. He bankrupted a casino - a casino! A casino is a garbage bag that people fill up with money for you! He refuses to pay carpenters, dishwashers, painters, and his own lawyers for their work, forcing them to sue him on sixty separate occasions, resulting in hundreds of liens on his properties. No matter what he’s selling; Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump the board Game, Trump Coin, Trump properties, or the Trump Administration, his strategy is always the same; promise everything and deliver nothing. He claims that his apartments are three times the size that they actually are and that his buildings have ten extra stories. When he files for loans or for bankruptcy, he states he adjusts his net worth by several billion dollars based on “how I feel” - how he feels, coincidentally, happens to correlate with numbers that make him pay out less interest when taking out loans and less payments when going bankrupt due to taking out loans.

Of course Donald Trump would crash the global economy and try to stop America from engaging in any sort of trade at all. Donald Trump is incapable of seeing a world where two people are somehow better off by making a trade because he’s never produced anything of value. The only thing he’s ever done is stamp his name on junk, take money for it, and run away.

Of course that’s how he’d see global trade. Of course that’s how he’d think everyone else works.

Character. Is. Destiny.

If Donald Trump was actually a brilliant dealmaker who just happened to be monomaniacally focused on goods instead of services, he’d see America’s trade imbalances as a good thing. After all, we’re importing a lot and exporting very little. That means that people are lining up around the block just to give us something for nothing. We must be doing something right.

The reason Donald Trump thinks that’s a bad thing is because, having never made or possessed anything worth exchanging for money in his life, he assumes that everyone else on the planet is doing exactly the same thing. There’s no reason to pay for raw materials from other countries. Just guarantee that your product is one thousand and fifty percent pure titanium steel. They’d probably try to cheat you if you tried to buy actual metal from them, so don’t even bother buying actual metal from them.

Don’t actually bother making anything at all. Just say that you’re going to make things. Big, beautiful things. And take money for those things and disappear into the night behind an army of lawyers.

That’s what Donald Trump does. Major companies know this.

They never would have let him take a position at their company, because they know what kind of character he has. But they put him as the leader of the free world, with the power to destroy their company and every other company, because gosh darn it, Republicans good and Democrats bad.

If anyone genuinely, seriously thinks that Donald Trump would have been good for the economy, they’re too stupid to be trusted with your money. Find someone else. This is financial advice.

Let’s start with the facts that aren’t contested by the Trump administration.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in El Salvador. At the age of 16, gangs in El Salvador sought to kidnap him in order to extract a ransom from his parents. Alone, he fled the country, moving to the United States of America. Eight years later in 2019, under the Trump Administration, he appeared before an immigration judge and that judge ruled that he was more likely than not to be harmed by those gangs in revenge if he ever returned to El Salvador, granting him a protected status and ordering the government to, should they choose to remove him from the country, pick a country other than El Salvador to deport him to.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia has no criminal record. His meeting with an immigration judge came in 2019, after he was detained by police along with three other people in a parking lot. One of those three other people said that he was a gang member, but the police filed reports indicating that they believed that person was lying and that Garcia was not a gang member. There are no records of any further contact with the legal system other than traffic offenses. He married a U.S. citizen and is raising both a five-year-old boy with nonverbal autism and hearing issues - his biological child - and is the stepfather of two additional children from that U.S. citizen’s previous marriage.

ICE officers encountered Garcia at his grandmother’s house and said that his protected status had changed. Internal ICE paperwork reveals that ICE was fully aware that his protected status had not changed, and that it was illegal to deport him to El Salvador. He was loaded onto a plane anyways and flown to El Salvador’s “Terrorism Confinement Center”, where he was subsequently identified in a video posted by El Salvador’s president to X. Because Garcia’s head was being forcibly pointed at the ground by the masked guards while he was dragged by his head and neck, he had to be identified by a distinctive set of scars on his arm and a tattoo.

ICE blames an “administrative error” for sending him to the one country on earth they were legally forbidden from sending him to, and says they are powerless to correct it because he is now in El Salvadoran custody. Currently, the United States is paying El Salvador $6 million dollars a year to hold prisoners for them; ICE also argues that it is unable to stop paying them money to hold him. While the president and vice president insist that America needs to control Greenland for unspecified national security reasons and say that Denmark should transfer control of it lest America annex it by force, ICE insists that it has absolutely no ability to compel, coerce, or cajole El Salvador into sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a different country.

That’s one set of facts that the Trump Administration agrees to. Here’s another.

Andrew Tate was born in Chicago. He was a kickboxer, but became famous in 2016 for appearing on the British reality television show Big Brother, and got a following on social media, mostly because he described himself as a misogynist who supported Trump because of the Access Hollywood tape; “He’s grabbing bitches by the pussy. I like that guy. I was, like, ah, fuck it, he talks like a man.” He and his brother, Tristan, left Britain in 2017 for Romania; when asked why he moved, he replied “I like living in countries where corruption is accessible to everybody.” Andrew Tate is currently being sued by his girlfriend, who was hospitalized with multiple concussions and damage caused by strangulation, which she claims was the result of being attacked by him; text messages from him to her read “Whats the point in having you if i don’t beat you and impregnate you”.

Andrew Tate described himself in interviews as a “pimp”, whose money came from getting lingerie-clad models to tell fictional “sob stories” to lonely men over webcams, saying that they needed money to take care of sick dogs or grandparents. He claims to have become the world’s first trillionaire by doing this. This seems unlikely, but he does own a number of very expensive cars that were not paid for by any income stream that he reported to the Romanian government. The Romanian government has a different theory; they allege that he was part of an organized crime ring engaged in prostitution, the trafficking of minors for sexual purposes, tax evasion, and money laundering.

The compound that Andrew Tate lived on was raided by the Romanian government, and he was arrested. Several women were found who said that they were lured to the compound and were repeatedly raped by Andrew Tate, forced to participate in pornography and attacked when they did not comply. Andrew Tate, for the record, has said that men should respond to women accusing them of cheating with violence that leads to sex; “That’s how it goes, you go slap, slap, grab, choke, ‘shut up bitch,’ sex.’” This advice is available in a series of videos that he charges either fifty dollars a month for or eight thousand dollars annually, depending on which tier of subscriber his customer wants to be. Andrew Tate was released pending trial, with the Romanian government taking his passports and telling him to not leave the country.

At some point within the first two months of the Trump administration, Andrew Tate’s passport was returned to him and he returned to America on a flight to Florida. The Trump administration and the Romanian government have both denied that any sort of secret deal was made between them to allow for the return of the Tates. Upon their arrival, the Tampa Bay Young Republicans posted this: “TBYR formally welcomes @Cobratate & @TateTheTalisman to Florida. As free speech absolutists, the Tate's [sic] haven't been formally convicted of any crimes and are welcome to speak to our group. We're old enough to remember when a ‘Convicted Felon.’ won the Presidency.” Andrew Tate would also hug longtime Trump ally Dana White, who gave him a ringside seat at a UFC event in Las Vegas.

These are the facts. They are not contested.

These facts lead us to an obvious conclusion; the Donald Trump administration wants people like Andrew Tate in America, and it wants people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia out of America.

It is a mistake; a category error; to believe that Andrew Tate was brought to America “in spite of” his numerous crimes, most of which are self-admitted. It is a similar category error to believe that Garcia was sent to El Salvador “in spite of” the fact that his behavior in America was by all accounts unobjectionable. Andrew Tate was released from Romania because he is a loathsome rapist. Abrego Garcia was sent back to El Salvador because he was a laudable family man.

What purer statement of hierarchy could there be?

During 2023 and 2024, Democrats attempted to reach another ‘grand bipartisan compromise’ on immigration with Republicans. They communicated to Republicans that they thought that immigration was a losing issue for the Democrats and they would accept any terms that the Republicans offered so that they could say that they were taking the problem of illegal immigration seriously. Republicans refused to offer any terms, and no bill was passed. This ‘grand bipartisan compromise’ died in 2024, just as previous attempts at compromise bills failed in 2018, 2013, 2009, 2005, and 2001. The last time immigration policy was made by Congress as opposed to executive order was in 1986.

Compromise has always failed, even when, as in 2024, it takes the form of almost unconditional surrender, because what anti-immigration hawks want can’t be achieved through law. No set of legal rules, no matter how carefully it’s written in order to keep Abrego Garcia out and Elon Musk in, and no set of border enforcement measures, no matter how tall we make the wall or how much authority we give ICE - enough to bundle university students into unmarked vans while wearing masks and showing no badges - will give them the same thing that this does.

What immigration hawks want is a clear and unambiguous statement that America is a country for white people, where the best of the best is reserved for whites and everyone who isn’t white gets whatever white people deign to permit them to have. No legal compromise with Democrats could ever give them this. But bringing Andrew Tate to America at the same time you send Abrego Garcia to a prison you’re not legally allowed to will make the message loud and clear.

We understand this. We talk about how deporting people without giving them due process to find out if they’re citizens means that citizens could be deported; but there is a process. It’s “be white”. White people are not waking up having nightmares that ICE will grab them off the street and disappear them to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, because white people understand that ICE reserves their lawless treatment for nonwhites, and so long as ICE continues doing that, they will remain perfectly safe no matter how many corners ICE cuts and how many “administrative errors” result from their lack of processes.

I remember someone who was a sailor serving in the Navy. He was on an internet community that I ran, the details of which are wholly unimportant to the story but not quite salacious enough to get him into any serious trouble. He had severe undiagnosed depression, which I unsuccessfully urged him to get treated, and an alcohol problem, which he thought he hid from us. He was stone cold sober the night he decided to discuss the Donald Trump policy of family separation. His contribution to the discussion was to post a GIF of a vaudeville performer doing a happy dance, captioned with “Stop breaking the law.”

“But these people haven’t broken the law,” I objected. “They’re using a loophole in existing law by requesting an asylum hearing, which has a massive backlog - years at a time. Until we either change the law, clear the backlog, or reinterpret court rulings, they’re not actually criminals.”

“They’re illegal immigrants,” the sailor responded, “and they’re breaking the law.”

“The current interpretation of the law says it’s legal for them to be in the country until their asylum hearing,” I objected again. “We would need to change that somehow for them to be breaking the law.”

“They’re illegal immigrants.” the sailor said. “And they’re breaking the law. And I’m very happy that they’re experiencing consequences for breaking the law.”

“Are you happy that their children are experiencing consequences, too?” I asked.

“Yes, I am.” he said proudly. “They’re illegals too.”

“Even if they were born in America and have citizenship?” I asked.

“Especially if they were born in America.”

You don’t become an “illegal immigrant” by violating the legal rules of the country. You become an “illegal immigrant” by being the wrong sort of person, and you and your family will pay the price for being the wrong sort of person. Abrego Garcia and asylum seekers are “illegals” even if they follow every law; Elon Musk and Melania Trump aren’t “illegals” even if they violate it.

You can follow the rules, like Abrego Garcia did; and that makes you the worst possible kind of “illegal”. Because if you follow the rules and be a good person, someone might decide that they’d rather have you in the country than Andrew Tate.

That can’t be allowed. Not under any circumstances.

Anderson Cooper: “If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it.”

Signal. I don’t believe it should be called Signalghazi, Signalgate, or even Signal Dome. It is such an inherently Trump scandal that it defies all comparison to previous administration-defining scandals; an omnishambles of brain-poisoned imbeciles preening as they text random contacts about when American planes are taking off and dropping bombs. It is a decadent Roman orgy of national security policy, the acts of people so arrogant that they simultaneously think that there is no force on Earth that could possibly pose a threat to Americans so there’s no reason to follow any sort of security procedures such as not texting people in Moscow on civilian phone apps the names of American spies on the ground in Yemen, and that America’s foreign enemies are so weak and cowardly that they can be stopped with a few bombs, which their domestic political enemies were too stupid to ever bother trying to do.

It’s also the only thing that might ever hurt Trump, because the presence of Jeffrey Goldberg on the text chain prevents Donald Trump from engaging his defense against any media criticism; saying that what he did was based and awesome and getting the Republican Party to agree.

“What if Hillary did it” was a common refrain from Resistance Liberals during the first Trump administration, whenever Republicans insisted Donald Trump was a perfectly acceptable president.

What if, in order to consolidate their unprovoked 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russians had hacked into the computers of the 2016 Republican candidate for President, with Hillary Clinton not just eagerly using the information but calling on the Russians to continue hacking in a press conference? What if her first choices for Campaign Chairman and her National Security Adviser had both been forced to resign after it was revealed that they had been paid by the Russians? What if she fired the director of the FBI for refusing to swear loyalty to her? What if she tried to fire the special counsel who was investigating her ties to Russia? What if after doing all of this she invited the Russians into the Oval Office, revealed state secrets to them, and bragged about how much easier it was for her to get away with all of this now that she had fired the director of the FBI?

What if Hillary Clinton brought out her phone in the middle of a SCIF to live-tweet pictures from a set of spy satellites no one else knew that we had?

There wouldn’t have been an impeachment of Hillary Clinton; the Democrats saying “What if Hillary did it” would never have the chance to find out if they had the courage. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan would have been sworn in as President, and within a week of taking the oath of office, he would issue an unconditional pardon to the assassins that put him there.

I would consider this to be less of an abuse of the presidential pardon power than Donald Trump’s blanket pardon of the January 6th rioters.

Republicans are perfectly aware of how grievously unforgivable this sort of betrayal of American interests should be. They are just also aware that they can get away with it by pretending that they don’t see anything wrong with it. “Only Nixon could go to China” not because Nixon has credibility with the China hawks due to his lifelong anti-Communism, but because all of the “lifelong anti-Communists” understand that their real enemy is not Mao but McGovern. Thus they will eagerly support whatever Nixon does, even propping up Mao. After all, Nixon is better than McGovern, a commie shill that probably would like to prop up Mao if he ever got a chance.

Nonpartisan media, by definition, can never take a side between Republicans and Democrats. It can only report what Republicans say and what Democrats say, and then leave it to the reader to decide who they happen to believe. The nonpartisan media can imply, extremely strongly, by saying things like a politician “made statements without evidence” or “was inconsistent with his previous statements”, or otherwise use weasel-word adjectives to signal to their readers that they should believe one side and disbelieve the other. But they can’t ever use the word “lie”, or say that one side is right and the other is wrong. That would be biased and partisan.

Nonpartisan media was able to report on scandals, because previously, when a politician was caught in a scandal, they would either lie and say that the scandal didn’t happen, or apologize profusely and swear that they were a changed man who would never do anything like that again. Both saying that you would never do such a thing and saying that it was wrong that you did such a thing concedes to the media that doing that thing was bad. Thus, the nonpartisan media can say that the scandal is bad without disagreeing with Republicans or Democrats.

But what if instead, you said that the scandal was actually awesome? And you got your entire political party to agree with you that the scandal was awesome?

Then the media is forced to use their weasel-word adjectives and signals in their coverage in order to imply to the reader that, you know, the reader really ought to think that this sort of thing is bad. They can’t say that the reader should think that it’s bad; that would be taking sides.

Is it bad to spend a hundred and thirty thousand dollars of campaign money on having sex with a porn star? Is it bad to stop military aid to countries that are currently being annexed by Russia until they agree to announce sham investigations of your domestic political rivals? Is it bad to send a mob with firearms to murder your own vice president and give them blanket pardons?

Well, Democrats say that it is wrong, but Republicans say that it’s right, so we can only leave it to you, the reader, to decide for yourself. And since Republicans say that it’s happening and it’s good, there’s no new news to report about it. If the Republicans said it wasn’t happening, then not only would they agree that it was bad, but we could expose the lies slowly and generate new stories based on exposing the lies. It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, especially if you can get people to insist that the crime was awesome and cool, like an Ocean’s Eleven movie.

Some Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams tried similarly to brazen out their scandals, but they failed, because other Democrats denounced them for it; thus the nonpartisan media could agree with both Democrats and Republicans in saying that what Cuomo and Adams did was bad. The nonpartisan media is willing to side against a single politician, treating them as a bad apple who might spoil the barrel. Donald Trump, who commands the absolute loyalty of the Republican Party, cannot be sided against, because to side against him is to side against all Republicans. If the bad apple has already spoiled the barrel, why bother getting rid of it?

But here’s the funny thing. Donald Trump commands the absolute loyalty of the Republican Party because he hates Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.

Donald Trump can cause the party to do an about-face on Ukraine with the snap of his fingers and a single wrestling spot in the Oval Office. He understands that the voters of the Republican Party don’t really care about whether America sides with Russia or Ukraine. Some members of the Republican Party had insisted very strongly that the reason they were against the Democrats was because those Democrats hadn’t supported Ukraine enough; those members of the Republican Party will go along with his order to stop supporting Ukraine and start supporting Russia, because the important thing is opposing the Democrats.

Oceania can always be at war with Eastasia in one moment and always be at war with Eurasia in the next, because the people in the street understand perfectly well that their enemies in the war don’t matter, what matters is the state of blind obedience to the Party produced by war, and if carrying out that blind obedience requires denouncing your allies and embracing your enemies, so much the worse for your former allies and so much the better for your enemies. Winston Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth deleting the past is a 1948-era laptop job, a Keynesian make-work program that probably doesn’t even need to be done. The people understand that the chocolate ration has not gotten bigger when the Party increases it from 15 grams to 10 grams. They also understand perfectly that they should pretend it has gotten bigger.

But people’s real enemies? Their enemies at home? The Republican Party sides with Trump because he sticks a finger in the eye of all the superior, snooty, educated liberals who read magazines like The Atlantic and think they’re better than us Real Americans because of it. Donald Trump can’t side with The Elites against The People; the whole reason he’s in power is because he sides with The People against The Elites.

When Donald Trump asked the crowd to get the vaccine produced under a program run by his administration, they booed him. He understood. In his heat-seeking fashion of abandoning any principle that stands between him and the cheers of the crowd, he appointed a lifelong Democrat who said that climate change was the biggest issue facing the country to head Health and Human Services, and the crowd of Republican voters cheered, because that lifelong Democrat was an absolute crank who would ruin the lives of all the doctors who asked us to stay indoors, maybe think about eating less beef tallow, and get a shot.

Donald Trump can’t pretend that it was perfectly fine to loop Jeffrey Goldberg in on the text chain because his entire job is to make Jeffrey Goldberg angry and powerless.

This leads to hilarious two-faced lies that make perfect sense when you understand that. Nothing classified or important was discussed on the call, but the Atlantic was putting our national security at risk by publishing it. Jeffrey Goldberg must not be a very good journalist, because the strike went off without a hitch and he didn’t intentionally sabotage our national security by informing the Houthis about it. Jeffrey Goldberg must have somehow been able to hack his way into the Signal chat, which is a perfectly acceptable and secure way to coordinate military activity and share secrets among people who have absolutely no need-to-know.

Don’t worry; Elon Musk’s top people are on it.

Top. Men.

At the end of the day, the only person who’s seriously in trouble in this administration is Michael Waltz, who originally invited Jeffrey Goldberg into the group chat. Not because he invited Jeffrey Goldberg into the group chat, of course; because he had Jeffrey Goldberg in his list of phone contacts in the first place. Having someone who’s the enemy of the People like Jeffrey Goldberg on your phone in the first place is a sign that maybe you’re not on the side of the People after all. Maybe you’re on the side of Jeffrey Goldberg. That can’t be allowed in this administration.

But firing Michael Waltz based on something Jeffrey Goldberg reported would be admitting that Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting has the power to fire people. That can’t be allowed either.

There’s almost too much to say about the Signal chats read around the world. The scandal is fractally wrong; magnifying any part of it reveals another layer of catastrophically horrendous judgment on behalf of the Trump administration’s national security team.

A journalist was added to a Signal chat about impending military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen; magnifying any part of that reveals new horrifying implications. No one noticed Jeffrey Goldberg being added to the chat or removing himself from it, and remained unaware of what they had told him until he informed them; at which point, the person who added him to the chat was most concerned about doing damage control over the idea that he had Jeffrey Goldberg as one of his contacts.

The chats themselves contained need-to-know classified information that none of the participants had any real need to know; they were rubbernecking on American bombs being dropped and bragging about how much tougher they were than the weak Biden administration. The Treasury Secretary was looped in on these discussions; presumably he wanted to watch.

No one reacts to Signal being the messaging platform of choice for this, which is set to delete messages in four weeks in order to prevent it from leaving a record of the conversation and decisionmaking in government archives. By all appearances, text chains on the civilian phones of people visiting Moscow at the time is how the American military coordinates the movements of its soldiers, the dropping of its bombs, and the collecting of reports from spies in Yemen now.

And then there’s the emoji.

Always with the emoji.

But I’d like to focus on something that isn’t being dissected as much as I think it should be dissected; that is, thirty-six hours before the strike, the people on the text chain had absolutely no idea whether or not the President of the United States actually wanted the strike to happen or not, and never bothered to personally find out themselves.

Subscribe now

This seems like an important thing to know before you begin bombing a foreign country.

J.D. Vance responds to the text chain the morning before the strike, saying that he thinks that the group is making a mistake by carrying out the attack. He brings up that three percent of US Trade runs through the Suez Canal, and that forty percent of European trade runs through the Suez Canal; “I am not sure that the President is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.”

The Vice President is bringing up an entirely reasonable point; the administration has argued that Europe is free-loading on the American security umbrella, refusing to spend a dime on their own defense so long as Americans will do it for them. Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense, replies “I feel like now is as good a time as any [to launch the strike], given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes.” These are two conflicting directions both given by the President, and it is entirely reasonable to debate how the US military should proceed given them.

What’s truly unreasonable - downright insane - is how this debate is resolved.

Neither J.D. Vance nor Pete Hegseth know what the President wants. Both discuss possibly bringing it up to him, but neither do that. What resolves it is Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, saying “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light.” He doesn’t say “the President approved of these strikes.” He says “I think the President would be fine with it.” That settles the debate; the strike goes through and no one ever mentions the President again.

I disagreed with many of the decisions that George W. Bush made. But at least he was the decider. The President was making decisions. In the Trump Administration, go/no go decisions about dropping bombs on foreign countries are done based on the “as I heard it” speculations of palace goblins and consiglieres, the entrails of tweets read by oracles guessing as to what Donald Trump wants, and Antonin Scalia’s old originalist Ouija Board.

I’m not stupid. I’m not going to ask the President to give a hall pass to every single American soldier looking to wipe their ass in a foreign country. I also know that the reason the principals in this conversation didn’t bring this up with the President of the United States is that he has absolutely no interest in the finer details of national security policy beyond “projecting strength” wherever Biden “looked weak”; any time asking him to weigh the tradeoffs of different approaches is time he could be coming up with a whole list full of new insults to use on journalists, lawyers, and people who ask him to “weigh tradeoffs” instead of projecting strength.

We’re prepared to deal with a world with a President who doesn’t know what his military is up to. We’re not prepared to deal with a world with a President who doesn’t care. And we’re certainly not prepared to deal with a world where the military knows that the President neither knows nor cares, and just has to guess at what it is their Commander-in-Chief would want them to do.

No military in history has been run this way.

But there are organizations that do work this way. Mafias, street gangs, syndicates, and other organized crime rackets, mostly.

Contra Smedley Butler, there is a substantial difference between mafiosos and military men. While both organizations engage in violence in order to further their assigned political and economic goals, attempt to keep the details of their activity a secret to protect themselves from their enemies, and frequently only represent the interests of a small subset of elites while justifying themselves by claiming to protect the entire community, there is one key difference; a clear chain-of-command. The leaders of militaries like it if their orders were clearly interpreted and followed, while the leaders of criminal conspiracies would like it if there was an opaque shield of deniable ignorance keeping them from being linked to any specific orders at all.

This breaks down in some circumstances. A crime boss may want a specific politician intimidated and another untouched. And a military may seek to cover up an embarrassment; a specific friendly fire incident, a specific massacre, a specific violation of the laws of war. But a private who goes to the shooting range is required to sweep up their brass casings and weigh them to verify how much ammunition was used. A crime boss doesn’t want to know a single thing about how a witness has been ‘taken care of’; he just wants to know that it happened.

Militaries have a lot of accountability and paperwork in order to track their soldiers and ensure that they do what they’re supposed to when they’re supposed to. They are, after all, the law. Criminal organizations don’t track their soldiers and information about what someone is supposed to do is only ever available on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. They are, after all, against the law. If the higher-ups in the organization knew exactly which crimes their foot soldiers were committing, then they would be accessories to that crime, and they want a shield of deniability.

It is hardly an innovation to suggest that Donald Trump, New York real estate magnate and person who covers his buildings in gaudy gold copies of his name, is similar to a mafia don. He talks like one and acts like one; though most mafia bosses are more subtle when they make their threats and demands and do a better job of hiding their crimes from the media and police.

A successful mafia boss can also generally run a casino without it going bankrupt.

But suppose that Trump is a mafia boss. What’s the deeper meaning of this? Well, I happen to believe that it’s a successful political tactic that’s helping him greatly.

It was an article of faith among anti-anti-Trump conservatives, especially in 2016, that his popularity with the Republican base was happening “in spite of the tweets”, that the base supported Trump because Trump was the only person willing to break with the Republican ideology of more tax cuts and more wars, and they were willing to accept the tweets as the cost of getting that. If only he’d be “more responsible” and not go off on random asides threatening the lives of journalists and promising to break laws and destroy the system, he’d be even more popular. But the Republican party became thoroughly MAGA over the course of the administration, and it changed the party to match him.

Plenty of people who didn’t threaten random students in tweets, didn’t try and fail to overthrow the government by murdering their own vice president, and didn’t have felony charges against them ran in the Republican presidential primary. All of them promised the same policy changes and the same ideology as Trump; even moreso, with Ron DeSantis trying to run to Donald Trump’s right. But the base didn’t want him, they wanted Trump, because they wanted the baggage, they wanted the tweets, and they wanted the felonies.

They affirmatively wanted a mob boss to be President of the United States.

In the Signal chat, we see Stephen Miller say that America will “soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain in return.”

Trump’s followers had pretended that their big break with Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy was that ‘globalism’, and willingness to use American force to protect our allies, was dragging America into too many destructive and useless wars. If they were genuinely committed to peace, they wouldn’t be salivating over the idea of invading Mexico, Canada, and Greenland.

No, what they’re committed to is the idea that the President of the United States should use military force, but instead, we should use them to shake other nations down for money.

The United States of America built the most powerful military the world has ever seen. 1.3 million active-duty troops signed up for it, and swore an oath to protect their country from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Six hundred and forty billion dollars were spent in 2016 on defense. Some of the greatest minds in the country spend their lives researching at military contractors pushing the state of the art and advancing science to make our military more effective. The Republican base looked at that, and thought “Wow, that would make a really good baseball bat for me to break the windows of people who don’t pay us protection money.”

I didn’t like George W. Bush very much, and the left didn’t like the military very much. But let’s acknowledge the good. He never even considered using the unilateral nuclear authority, legally delegated to him to use as he saw fit, to destroy a city and then demand other countries buy Halliburton stock so as to keep it from happening again. He could have legally done that.

Remember, it can always get worse. And the Republican base demanded that it get worse.

“What a nice Denmark you got there,” the Republican base says, slapping the U.S. military against their upturned palm while they chew on a toothpick. “It’d sure be a real shame if somethin’ happened to it. And countries, they burn down all the time around here. It’s so tragic. You, uh, you ever thought about maybe buyin’ some… insurance? It’s a great deal. Trust me.”