In his new book United States of Oligarchy: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy [Bookshop, Amazon] journalist and author Casey Michel argues that the U.S. is now so, so far beyond the Gilded Age in terms of wealth inequality or political capture that comparing today to that era obscures more than it reveals. “Modern oligarchs,” Casey told me, “control at least twice as much of the national wealth as their Gilded Age predecessors, with individual fortunes that tower over anything we’ve ever seen before. We’re in a brand new world.”

I was curious for Casey’s assessment of the current state of oligarchic capture of American politics (bad) and how it compares with historical precedents (also bad), but also how someone researches and writes a book about a sprawling, complex, actively-evolving topic like the modern American oligarchy. I wanted to better understand why beat political reporters often struggle to cover these issues, how oligarchic capture of corporate media impacts news coverage, and why figures like Elon Musk and Jared Kushner (arguably Casey’s main character) prove so slippery for journalists to cover.1

I was pleasantly surprised to come away from this book feeling optimistic about the future: once you understand the historical boom/bust cycles of American oligarchy, it’s easier to see possible paths out of our current mess; including what tools a future administration would have at their disposal to turn a surging tide of anti-oligarch public sentiment into actual policy.

And, delightfully, United States of Oligarchy is a rollicking read— episodes like secret Gulf sovereign wealth fund meetings, the annexation of Hawaii by Sanford Dole, and Casey getting spectacularly drunk in a Moldovan wine cellar with a motley crew of Russian oligarchs and U.S. evangelicals would all be at home in an especially gossipy crime novel (compliment).

Subscribe now

Q: In your definition of “oligarchy,” you write “If you live in a nation ruled by the wealthiest, then you live in an oligarchy, full stop.” You also approvingly cite an academic study claiming that the U.S. was functionally an oligarchy by the mid-2010s. Those data points may unsettle people’s perceptions of the U.S. Why were they so important to level-set?

An oligarchy doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process: year in and year out, of trends and trajectories cleaving apart a democracy, with only those wealthiest rising to the top. We have moments like Trump’s 2025 inauguration, where all of us can see it, but these are realities that have been apparent for years.

It’s funny; I remember seeing that study you mentioned when it came out. And I remember scratching my head at it, almost in disbelief. There’s no way the U.S. was an oligarchy, right? That’s something that’s only in places like Russia. Not here. Surely not.

Boy, how wrong I was.

Q: Craft time: tell us a little bit about scoping, researching, and writing a book like this. How much did it evolve from pitch to final draft? And how do you know when you’re done when new stories of oligarchic excess spring up every day?

For years, I’ve been writing on how wealthy, autocratic regimes abroad have been using their wealth to influence American politics. It’s been fascinating, illuminating, rewarding, and dispiriting, all at the same time - and never dull. But in early 2025, when we were all watching Trump’s second inauguration, it was clear that something had shifted. No longer was it simply foreign autocracies and oligarchies who were using their wealth to demolish American democracy. Now, our own domestic oligarchs were doing the same - and with many of the same tools I’d been writing about.

Crafting any book, let alone one that’s trying to marry analysis and history and reportage and commentary, is never easy. But I was at least relatively lucky, in that Trump’s 2025 inauguration provided the perfect framing, and the perfect visual, for what a book about American oligarchy had to include. There was Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a few others all lined up there at Trump’s side, in a way we’d never seen before - and in a way that created a snapshot of oligarchy the likes of which we’d never quite had prior. That moment was the fulcrum of the book - how we got there, what that moment presented, and what that moment portended.

From there, everything flowed, both forward and backward. I knew there would have to be analysis on everything from the assault on America’s campaign finance regulations to the implosion of America’s anti-corruption policies, and stories of how oligarchies had decimated struggling democracies elsewhere. I knew there would have to be tales and lessons from previous periods of American oligarchy, and the intersection of American oligarchy and American imperialism. I was fortunate to already be quite familiar with the history of the American overthrow and seizure of the nation of Hawaii, and the role of American oligarchs therein, which made that an easy saga to include - especially once it became clear that the same model was rearing its head in Greenland.

I also knew that there would need to be a narrative spine to the book - which is how not just Musk, but especially Jared Kushner, entered the picture. The rise of Kushner is illustrative of so many of the themes the book explores: stories of failing up, of family and political connections making up for the lack of any apparent skills, how foreign regimes can capitalize on the kind of thirst for both wealth and recognition propelling so many of these oligarchs - and how all that can lead to devastation for democracies at home and abroad. Kushner was the perfect foil for all of this.

Plus, amidst all of this, I had to finally find space in a book for that time I got blackout drunk with a bunch of Christian fundamentalists in a wine cellar in Moldova - all of whom were representing the clearest connection between Russian and American oligarchs. What a world.

Q: I was surprised to learn from your book just how little research and writing there actually is on oligarchies. It’s basically you and Northwestern political science professor Jeffrey Winters, who wrote the 2011 book Oligarchy (which you cite as the single best book on the topic). Why do you think that is? Why are oligarchies more difficult to cover than, say, dictatorships, democracies, or other political science-y topics?

Going into the book, I had no idea just how little work had been done on oligarchies. Much is that is for one reason, and because of one man: Aristotle. The ancient Greek philosopher first popularized the term - but instead of saying an oligarchy was simply the rule of the few, he pointed out that it was also the rule of the wealthy. You had to have those two components - which, for political scientists, proved a surprisingly slippery combination. Winters has thankfully devoted much of his career to the topic, as have a few others, and it’s very much their work that I’m leaning on here. But for a topic as relevant, and as all-encompassing, as oligarchy, I’m still shocked that so little work has been done on it.

Q: One of the great ironies of the Trump years is that he ran on “draining the swamp” but instead ushered in what you’ve called “the golden age of white collar crime.” How has Trump managed this dichotomy for so long? And why does it keep working (for some audiences, at least)?

Part of Trump’s success is something that he’s said previously. All sides are corrupt, so why not go with the guy who’s at least open about his corruption? And he’s perfectly right on this. Because of how America’s campaign finance regulations have collapsed, especially since the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United ruling in 2010, American politics have long been on a downward trajectory, sold to the highest bidder.

Still, even with those dynamics, we’ve never seen anything like Trump. Trump is both corruption and oligarchy made flesh. He’s sought out any way that he - and his kids especially - can monetize the presidency. Insider deals. Crypto payments. Real estate deals. Turning everything from pardons to sanctions to prosecutions into open-air bribery rackets. It’s more corruption than we’ve ever seen before. There’s nothing to compare it to.

Q: What most distinguishes contemporary U.S. oligarchs from their predecessors? Where do you see them evolving to next?

We talked about the scale above - just how much wealthier modern oligarchs are, and just how much more total American wealth they control compared to the rest of society. And that’s perfectly true.

But one other key difference is that these modern oligarchs exist in these kinds of trans-national networks - and set up alliances with foreign regimes - that previous oligarchs never did. Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller - they were all linked to horrible labor and environmental crimes. But at least those guys never openly allied with the Spanish Empire during the Spanish-American War, or the Kaiser’s regime in Germany during World War I. They at least had a sense of patriotism about all of this. They at least had a sense that they owed the U.S. something.

The new crop of oligarchs, though - there’s nothing like that. No patriotism. No sense of America’s interest. No hesitation in allying with America’s adversaries, if given the chance. You see it in how figures like Musk gleefully did Russia’s bidding in the first year of the expanded Ukraine invasion. You see it in how figures like Zuckerberg and others did everything they could to get in the good graces of Beijing. You see it in how all these figures genuflect in front of regimes in places like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. And you see it in how figures like Jared Kushner have done everything they can to push Israel’s interests, rather than America’s. This is the key difference.

Q: You set up the first third of the book as a wax/wane of oligarchic cycles in American history, including lesser-known Gilded Age examples like Sanford Dole and the annexation of Hawaii (to which Grover Cleveland’s tepid, distracted response uncomfortably rhymed with some recent U.S. presidents’ lack of urgency on reining in contemporary oligarchs). Where are we in that historical cycle right now? What do you make of comparisons of our present day to the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century?

We’re at the nadir - or if not, we’ll be there soon. Oligarchs in America now have more control not only than at any point in recent American history, but arguably ever. The pendulum has swung so far in their favor, it’s difficult to see how things could end up more favorably for them.

All those dynamics propelling oligarchs - they can’t last forever. There’s always going to be a response, forcing these figures and forces to pay their fair share. They’ve shattered the social contract we had previously, where the wealthy pay their fair share and give back to a country that’s given them so much. But once they stopped doing that they created the ingredients for the kind of anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption momentum we’re seeing now.

Q: You describe the Biden administration as well-intentioned on fighting corruption - establishing Task Force KleptoCapture in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, investing in the IRS to combat white collar crime, even Biden warning of the dangers of oligarchy in his farewell address, among other steps. But most of these were immediately steamrolled by the second Trump administration (most recently rolling back FinCEN beneficial ownership reporting requirements and destroying all the data that has been collected). What should a new Democratic administration prioritize restoring, recreating, making permanent to fight corruption, and how do we break this cycle of Democratic reforms/Republican backtracking?

The Biden administration actually did some fantastic anti-corruption work - arguably more than any administration previously, at least since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. But Biden himself couldn’t effectively communicate any of this, even when he tried to - and so all of that progress never gained any public traction, resulting in the disaster we’re now watching unfurl.

The good news is that all of these policy disasters can be undone. Those task forces that Trump demolished can be rebuilt. That funding for things like the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats can be restarted. Legislation like the Corporate Transparency Act and Foreign Corruption Practices Act can finally be enforced - and can especially go after those crooks and criminals who tried to get away with it during the Trump era.

Q: Your book is extremely readable and sometimes flows like a crime novel. It’s full of memorable characters and stories, like your getting drunk in a Moldovan wine cellar with a bunch of hard-right Evangelicals and the Russians trying to financially woo them, to MBZ snubbing President Obama to meet with Jared Kushner in Trump Tower. So given all these compelling characters and stories: why are oligarchs and oligarchy seemingly so difficult for reporters to cover?

It’s a great question. Part of it is structural. For years, these kinds of oligarchic figures and forces had preferred to operate in the shadows. Out of sight, they could avoid the kind of scrutiny and public pressure needed to keep them in check. They could operate in the back-rooms and back-channels, use their finance for what they needed, without generating any kind of blowback.

That’s now changed. Thanks to figures like Trump, Musk, Kushner, and others, those days of oligarchs playing down their influence, and even their wealth, are behind us. Everyone can see them for what they are and what they’ve used their wealth for, to all of our detriment.

But it’s also about all the ways they can intimidate any critical voices. It’s about hiring the most aggressive lawyers to silence journalists and investigators. It’s about recruiting politicians who could oversee investigations, or even prosecutions, of those trying to unearth oligarchs’ finances. It’s about using any and every tool - including tools that oligarchs and dictators around the world have used - to intimidate opponents into silence, or worse.

With all of these forces arrayed against investigating oligarchs, why would anyone bother?

Q: Jared Kushner is arguably the main character of your book - you spend several chapters exploring his de facto foreign policy lead role in the first Trump administration, how his relationship with MBS led to Saudi funding for Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and how he continues to profit off of the second Trump administration. I’m curious why you think political reporters seem to find his dealings so slippery to cover - why isn’t “one of the most breathtaking pay-to-play schemes America had ever seen,” as you put it, better known?

It’s a great question - and one that I don’t have a great answer to. It’s possible that it’s because Kushner is perceived as less crass, and perhaps even less craven, than others in the Trump world. It’s possible that it’s because Kushner has deep relationships with leading reporters, who don’t want to jeopardize that relationship, which is also something I was told. It’s possible there’s just so much corruption elsewhere that focusing on Kushner is difficult. Maybe it’s all of that.

But here’s what we do know: Jared Kushner is responsible for far and away the biggest conflict-of-interest story we’ve ever seen in American diplomatic history. He is a man who rose to the White House on the back of nothing but failure in the private sector - and is now front and center on failed American policies from Israel and Gaza to Russia and Ukraine to Iran. And he’s doing all of this while taking in billions of dollars from American adversaries and dictators around the world.

And in the process, he’s placing himself front and center for potential investigations if and when Democrats retake Congress - and made himself the perfect target for all the anti-corruption energy building and building.

Q: Oligarchic capture of journalism and media is a key theme of your book. We’re living through the Ellison capture of Paramount/CBS/CNN, and AI companies scraping up journalism at breathtaking scale and speed. What’s most getting your attention about the intersection of American oligarchy and media, and where do you think things are heading?

That consolidation is absolutely getting the most attention in terms of oligarchy. The Ellison deal is the perfect case study in how oligarchs purchase major outlets that were previously doing great investigative work - and how they become mouthpieces for the oligarchs in question.

Just look at what happened to the Washington Post after Jeff Bezos purchased it. It can still do good work, but the entire Washington Post editorial page is now dedicated to how terrible increased taxation on the wealthy is. Bezos couldn’t have said it better.

But it’s not just that these outlets start spouting pro-oligarch rhetoric. It’s that they then become tools of a corrupt administration as well. It’s the administration that always holds the tools - licenses, investigations, potential prosecutions - that these media outlets are concerned about. And what better way to get into the administration’s good graces than publishing fluff about how great the White House is, and how they’re actually not corrupt at all, and how everyone should just support the President?

That’s the reality of oligarchic consolidation - and that’s what’s coming if we’re not able to stop it.

Q: At this point, is there anything that can stop the oligarchs? What if anything gives you hope?

It’s a simple formula. Which is why you have to do everything you can to lessen wealth inequality - almost entirely by forcing those oligarchic figures and forces to pay higher taxes. Decades ago, things like the inheritance and income taxes took massive chunks of the wealthiest individuals’ and families’ wealth. No more. Because of the explosion of offshore and financial secrecy tools, because of the rise of the so-called Wealth Defense Industry - and because America’s campaign finance regulations have collapsed, allowing those with the deepest pockets to effectively purchase whichever politicians they wanted - you have a downward spiral of American democracy into outright oligarchy.

But that spiral doesn’t have to be permanent. Just as we saw at the end of the Gilded Age, you need a multi-pronged approach. You need the introduction of new types of taxes - in this case, a wealth tax - specifically targeting the wealthiest among us. You need a new prohibition on corporate financing of American politics. You need new transparency in election financing. You need high-level prosecutions, targeting those wealthiest tax cheats. And you need a full-scale assault on anonymous financial tools: shell companies, trusts, you name it. All of these tools have only helped create a new aristocracy - and all of them have to be undone.

Will it be easy? Of course not. But is it needed to save America from this rising aristocracy, this oligarchy bent only on self-enrichment, regardless of what it means for the rest of us? Absolutely.

Q: What did we not talk about here that we should be talking about?

The thing I want to emphasize is simple: there’s so, so much reason to be optimistic! Americans have been through similar periods in our past. The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era. The Watergate era gave birth to more anti-corruption reforms than we’ve ever seen before. These oligarchs all rose on the backs of different policies - but those policies can all be changed. We know what it takes - we just have to get there.

As a wise man once said, the night is darkest just before the dawn. And if American history - or even stories of oligarchy elsewhere - are anything to go by, the dawn is coming. When and where, how it happens and who it involves - those are all unknowns. But I know that this Age of Oligarchy won’t last. Americans won’t have it.

Update 8/17/26: Prism News’ websites are all down and displaying this message: “We have currently completed our initial experiment. A big thank you to all who participated and gave their feedback. All activity is suspended for the foreseeable future.”

If you haven’t read Part 1 of our investigation into Prism News — the VC-backed Israeli pink slime start-up — you’ll want to start there. You’ll learn about how Prism’s AI scrapes real journalism, Frankensteins it, and republishes it bylined by AI “reporters,” how Prism pitched a reporter’s own work back to him, and how they published the name of an underage abuse victim:

And please consider becoming a paid Spin Class subscriber to support research and reporting like this series (or you can buy me a coffee):

Subscribe now

Note: As this article was being finalized on August 13, Prism Media’s websites went down “for maintenance.” As of publication, Prism outlets have been down for over nine hours. I’ll update with any further information.

What most intrigued me when I first started looking into Prism News was not the quality of its content (pink slime has been around for years), the AI of it all (inevitable), or even that it’s an Israeli company producing US local news (definitely noteworthy, but given the AI of it all of course non-US actors would eventually get into the space).

What most surprised me was that a reputable VC firm had decided to go into the pink slime news business. That’s what we’re going to unpack here.

But first: since Part 1, some readers flagged new reporting about how Prism spread misinformation about crime and natural disasters in New Mexico:

Local officials said in addition to grappling with natural disasters, they were also responding to a new AI news outlet named Prism McKinley County that they say has regularly published false and misleading information in a time of crisis.

For instance, within the last week, Prism published a story about a woman drowning in floods, but the death occurred last year, according to Matt Robinson, Gallup’s tourism and marketing manager. The misleading story caused people to believe the recent floods caused her death, he said. The recent flooding has not caused any deaths or injuries, according to city officials.

“They’re taking things that happened years ago that are negative, bringing them to light, scaring people, and sharing false information,” Robinson said. “It’s really not a good thing.”

Other misleading or false stories include one July 18 that reported that two women were robbed and beaten at a Walmart. The article goes on to say that the robbery actually occurred March 3, 2020, and Police Chief Erin Toadlena-Pablo told Source NM she does not know where the outlet got its information.

Still, the article received roughly 250 shares and dozens of comments, most of which decried security concerns at the Walmart, which is one of the main grocery stores in town.

The misleading posts prompted a Facebook post by the Gallup Police Department advising residents to use “verified sources and/or official government channels to obtain the most dependable information.”

With 200+ Prism News sites pumping out AI-generated and bylined articles daily, there are surely more examples like this floating around. But we’re going to pivot to talk about structure: where did Prism come from, the money behind it, and why this all matters — with a special guest appearance by one of the more notorious tech and media figures in recent memory.

“We will either crash or become Amazon”

Prism would not answer my questions about why its Israeli founders got into the U.S. local news business. However, it doesn’t appear that any of their four employees have ever worked in media. Instead, per their LinkedIn profiles, they appear to come from tech start-up backgrounds.

Prism Media (Prism’s News’s parent company; we’ll use Prism Media from here on out since we’re talking about its business side) CEO Dekel Valtzer, a former professional tennis player, is a tech entrepreneur and investor. Prior to funding Prism Media, Valtzer founded an e-commerce platform called Avo, whose business model he described in a 2021 interview as “we will either crash or become Amazon.” Avo shut down most of its operations just a year later, citing market changes and operational challenges. By then, Avo had raised over $90 million from Insight Partners, IBI Tech, Kleiner Perkins, F2 Capital and others. Meanwhile, Valtzer’s co-founder Nadav Klinger was previously a software engineer at several small Israeli tech companies, including two now-defunct dating apps.

Most startups fail (up to 90%, depending on who you ask). And sure, good ideas can come from anywhere. But local news is already a notoriously unprofitable industry. There’s an entire sub-industry dedicated to trying to hack this: through subscriptions, events, philanthropy, digital ads, etc. No one has figured this out, much less two co-founders with track records like theirs.

I haven’t seen Prism’s pitch deck. But based on publicly available information, it’s feels hard to look at Prism’s Media’s founders and believe “yes, these are the people who have figured out how to make the first-ever profitable U.S. local news startup.” The real question is why anyone else would buy Prism’s pitch, especially given its cofounders’ lack of experience in either journalism or successfully scaling a U.S. tech company.

So: how did these founders convince a successful VC fund that they were the first people ever to figure out how to make local news profitable? “I try to assume stupidity instead of malice,” Mahadevan said. Wise counsel.

But if it’s not about making local news profitable, then what else is going on here?

The VC Backers

Per Crunchbase, Prism’s lead investor is the VC fund Flex Capital.1 Flex’s portfolio companies are tech startups: AI, fintech, enterprise SaaS, healthcare, and consumer (where Prism is listed). As best I can tell, they have no other journalism investments, making their investment in Prism Media an outlier. Flex has, however, invested in Threads, Rumble, and a number of start-ups focused on content creator and influencer tools. Flex included its investment in Prism Media in its new investments section of Flex’s Q4 2025 roundup, as “Prism Media: Local media reimagined for the AI era.”

Flex Capital’s partners have successful track records as founders who turned massive amounts of user data into huge profits, including LiveRamp (whose “data collaboration network connects every signal, agent, and platform to fuel and measure intelligent marketing”), digital advertising company BrightRoll, and SafeGraph (“We Strive to Be the Source of Truth About the Physical World”). These founders are experts at building the connective tissue of disparate digital and real-world data signals: everything from the cookies on websites you visit, to how long you linger on a served digital ad, to whether you still have a tangible loyalty card to a particular brick-and-mortar store.

Flex Capital’s track record and portfolio begs the question of what they are actually investing in: is it Prism’s AI news sites and the ad revenue they may someday generate? Or, alternatively, is it the user data that a large AI-powered pink slime network could generate and hoover up? Which was pitched to investors as the real investment opportunity?

When I emailed Flex Capital partner Auren Hoffman a list of questions about Flex’s investment in Prism Media, he initially responded that he hadn’t heard of Prism. I sent him a screengrab of Prism’s listing on Flex Capital’s website, adding that he appeared to be connected with Prism’s co-founders on LinkedIn. He replied that he was on vacation and could look at my questions later in the week “if urgent.” I extended my initial deadline, but never received a reply.

I wasn’t surprised that Flex Capital didn’t answer my questions. But I was taken aback that one of its founders initially professed to have never heard of it. Assuming that’s true, it says a lot about the money and power they wield, and how disconnected an investor can be from the impact one of their portfolio companies is already having in the real world. Given everything that we covered in Part 1 — Prism’s AI hallucinations, the real-world harms, the challenges of Prism’s business model and its impact on real journalists — I was curious whether Flex still had confidence in their investment.

I was also curious to learn more about the due diligence Flex had done on Prism: not just about the possible financial ROI, but whether or how they had quantified legal risk and factored that into their investment. Typically, a VC exploring a seed investment would do analyze the likelihood of lawsuits against the company and an expected settlement value range. The business model that Prism’s head of partnerships described in Part 1 felt like it would invite significant exposure, especially given the flood of publishers and media outlets suing AI companies over IP and copyright issues.2

​”The Prism representative’s explanation could be more damaging than a simple ‘we copy articles’ admission would be,” media and technology attorney David Hoppe of Gamma Law told me in an email. “It essentially describes the fact pattern that sank the fair use defense in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence: building a product on someone else’s content that then competes with them for the same readers and ad dollars.”

Hoppe was more circumspect on whether this potential risk could extend to Prism’s VC backers. “Courts are reluctant to pierce the corporate form just because a fund wrote a check,” he noted. In other words, it’s not so much about whether the VC itself is exposed to legal risk, but whether the startup can absorb the costs of its own legal exposure on the path to profitability. However, Hoppe continued, “that changes if a VC has a board seat and keeps funding after actual knowledge of the pattern.”

It’s also worth noting here that, while we don’t know the size of Flex Capital’s investment in Prism Media, it’s possible that it’s quite small (in VC terms). Flex’s pre-seed and seed investments are generally between $500,000-$2M, per its website. But that small stake actually makes their Prism investment even worthier of scrutiny: given the ease with which a tiny team can quickly vibe-code hundreds of “news” websites, a relatively small amount of money for a pink slime network in 2026 has an outsize real-world impact.

In VC terms, this outsize impact could read on a pitch deck as great ROI. In real world terms, it means an entire new local “newsroom” appearing as a competitor from out of the blue, after just a tiny influx of cash. And it means AI hallucinations about real people causing real impact, sometimes harmful, with no recourse other than emailing an anonymous help desk at a four-person start-up.

Because it’s not just the fair use/IP theft cases. Remember from Part 1 how Prism’s AI correctly identified and published the name of an underage abuse victim? Attorney David Hoppe told me, “Publishing a minor abuse victim’s identity that the original reporter deliberately withheld fits the privacy tort of public disclosure of private facts, plus a straightforward negligence claim, since no reasonable editorial safeguard caught it before publication.” “Since the original story omitted the name entirely,” Hoppe continued, “the key question is where Prism’s system got it. If the name came from an inferred or scraped source never meant for publication, that would seem to increase the liability risk.”

There seem to be several different vectors through which a company like Prism Media could be legally vulnerable, that a reputable VC firm would probably surface during due diligence. VCs accept legal risk in their investment bets all the time: think of Uber, Airbnb, and other mega-startups that are regularly exposed to significant legal risk while still not yet turning a profit. The bet for companies like those is that they will eventually garner enough users that the legal and financial risks can be absorbed along the company’s path to profitability.

But journalism’s business model is fundamentally different— arguably incompatible— with a VC fund’s need to turn the kind of profits that make the legal or regulatory risks worth the bet. Local news is notoriously impossible to make profitable, even without all these additional legal vulnerabilities. So what convinced Flex that their investment was worth the risk?

It’s possible that Flex assessed the risks but determined they were sufficiently mitigated by other factors (say, for instance, the challenges of a U.S. plaintiff suing a foreign-headquartered company). Also possible: they didn’t particularly care. Flex Capital is a $200 million fund; from their perspective, a small investment in a tiny AI news start-up that flames out is just another day at the office. There are lots of reasons VCs make relatively small pre-seed investments, not just because they truly believe in the business model.

There’s another reason, which would be germane for a VC fund with such a strong track record in data companies. As the cliché goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product: something that the founders of successful data companies would keenly understand. It’s not hard to see how an AI-powered pink slime news network could cheaply generate a trove of valuable data: audience intelligence, what narratives resonate at a hyper-local level, etc.

Does Flex Capital’s background in scaling massive data companies have anything to do with why they’ve invested in a pink slime news start-up? I still don’t know. But I remain curious.

Peter Thiel Enters The Chat

Flex Capital cofounder and SafeGraph CEO Auren Hoffman’s name may sound familiar: he was recently in the news for his role as the co-founder, with Peter Thiel, of an elite members-only gathering called Dialog.3 Thiel has made his own investment forays into local journalism recently, notably backing a local government news start-up called State Affairs. Hoffman did not answer my questions about whether he and Thiel have discussed their respective local journalism investments, and whether the timing was simply a coincidence.

There are important differences between Prism Media and State Affairs, particularly that State Affairs is not traditional pink slime. It employs actual human journalists to produce actual reporting on local statehouses and legislatures. Still, both Prism and State Affairs have business models that center AI, not journalism, even as they make big claims about bolstering the struggling local news industry. Per the Washington Post:

This venture puts a twist on local reporting. The stories produced — without AI — will then be fed into a large language model, with the goal of organizing the information for high-paying subscribers from companies, nonprofits, and governments.

I debated whether to include this element, knowing that invoking a name like Peter Thiel unlocks a whole other level of galaxy brain for many people. And it’s important to be clear that I have far more questions that answers here.

But it’s worth bringing Peter Thiel’s foray into local political news into this discussion because of Thiel’s ties to Flex Capital’s leadership, his history of waging lawfare against journalism, and the broader track record of right-wing millionaires mucking around in the U.S. local news ecosystem. When someone like Thiel, who infamously claimed democracy and freedom were incompatible, who bankrolled the legal fight that eventually killed Gawker, starts investing in local journalism outlets, it’s a big deal.

And: When someone close to Peter Thiel is involved, even tangentially, in financing a foreign-headquartered, AI-supercharged pink slime news network, it’s worth asking questions about what exactly is going on — even if we can’t always find the answers.

This is especially important to probe given the recent history of U.S. pink slime journalism: overwhelmingly politically conservative, backed by right-wing dark money groups, astro-turfing the look and feel of local news to secretly advance a political agenda. Prism’s content to date lacks the sensationalist, hyper-conservative slant that animates older networks like Metric Media or the network of six Republican dark money-backed pink slime sites that independent journalist recently uncovered. But that’s the thing about AI-powered journalism: a few tweaks, and suddenly the tone and cadence of the network you’ve built and scaled, crowding out actual local journalism, could easily flip overnight. Thiel would obviously know all this. It’s anyone’s guess how much he’s discussing this with his known associates.

It’s also not difficult to imagine that the kind of data a pink slime company generates could be extraordinarily valuable for political (or geopolitical) purposes. Prism’s spokesperson insisted that Prism has never “been approached by any government or political organization regarding content distribution.” But, of course, there’s no promise that would never happen — or way to tell how Prism Media would respond should its investors press Prism to broadcast a certain type of content, or to use its data for certain purposes.

It's frustrating to be left with more questions than answers. It’s also hard to write about this stuff without feeling like you’re dancing around the edge of a conspiratorial rabbit hole, especially when names like Peter Thiel start emerging in your research.

But it’s still worth publicly discussing the many unresolved data points in Prism Media’s story and asking whether/how they could be related, especially whether there’s a hidden intent behind the public-facing marketing materials. There are very few ways to map the networks of a small, powerful cohort of people who increasingly fund and control so much of what the average person sees in their local news— and it’s often in their interest to keep their dealings and intentions opaque.

Meanwhile, Prism’s real world impacts are already here and likely to only grow with the company. If Flex Capital loses its bet on Prism, it would be a small blip in their overall portfolio. But even a failed Prism Media could inflict real harms on individuals and communities encountering its misinformation along the way.

It matters to the journalists whose careful reporting is being scraped, Frankenstein-ed, and fed by AI back to the same audiences they’re struggling to reach.

It matters because local media publishers and niche journalists, already competing with right-wing millionaires increasingly taking over broadcast and print outlets, now have to fight them on a new AI-powered digital front.

It matters to local audiences, unaware that the news they’re seeing on Facebook or Nextdoor is AI-generated, backed by investors who typically anticipate a huge fail rate for their portfolios — but who have also successfully backed unicorns that traffic in massive amounts of online and offline user data.

And it matters to everyone sick of fighting whether truth is even knowable anymore, but still being force-fed the slop because a small group of very smart, very wealthy people figured out how to serve ads against and harvest the data on how we react to it.

It’s entirely possible that this is a yet another story of overconfident investors who made an ill-informed bet, and nothing more. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a some dudes convinced some other dudes to give them a lot of money to revolutionize (™) a struggling industry they don’t really understand. Though, of course, that’s troubling in its own ways: it raises important questions about who does and doesn’t get access to start-up capital, who gets to fail big but keep making big swings, and who gets to decide how much real-world risk gets inflicted on an unsuspecting public along the way.

But the danger in settling for the simple stupidity over malice explanation is that it overlooks a long track record of pink slime as a vector for right-wing astroturfing, which has helped accelerate the public’s collapsing trust in journalism. And that’s to say nothing of Prism’s unique, worrying combination of foreign headquarters + VC funding + a stated goal to disrupt local news.

The people who invested in Prism Media know how to build valuable companies from the data we all unknowingly generate just going about our lives. If Prism’s backers are really betting on fixing local journalism, as they say, it’s a strange bet. But if they’re betting on what a journalism-shaped data network can harvest about local audiences, human anxieties, and what narratives spread where and why— well, we’ve seen that play before. Adding what we know of how that turned out with how pink slime has operated to date in U.S. politics and media…

Yeah, that’s something to keep questioning.

Subscribe now

Update 8/14/26: Part 2 of Spin Class’ investigation into Prism News is live here. Shortly after we reached out to Flex Capital, Prism’s main VC backer, for comment, all of Prism’s website content went offline, with individual Prism homepages displaying the message “Under Maintenance.”

In July, Interlochen Public Radio reporter Maxwell Howard ran a story on a mysterious Northern Michigan newsroom that seemingly popped up overnight. What it uncovered was a digital news Westworld: where AI “journalists” produce real-sounding local news, scraped from actual reporting, and repackage it as a shiny new product— but laden with clunky Frankenstein-ed text, dangerous hallucinations, and what one journalist described to Spin Class as “a theft of our work.”

IPR had stumbled on a single node of a network: around 200 AI-powered websites, powered by a four-person Israeli tech start-up called Prism News. A new flavor of classic pink slime journalism.

Launched in May 2026, Prism News is a private digital media company headquartered in Tel Aviv. Its co-founders are tech entrepreneurs, not journalists, and the quality of Prism’s output reflects that origin. More on them in Part 2 next week: for now, Part 1 explores how Prism is evolving the pink slime model, how it works in practice, and the impacts Prism is already having across some communities.

“I don’t really see a compelling product”

Prism’s arrival signals a new chapter in pink slime journalism across the U.S.1 The experts I interviewed agreed Prism seems to be the first major example of a foreign tech startup running a U.S. local news network at scale — itself potentially a huge new development, even minus the AI aspects. Prism’s pink slime is backed by VC funding, which presumably means Prism’s leadership convinced somebody that this tiny Israeli start-up is the first company to ever crack making local news profitable. And, at least so far, Prism content generally eschews the hyper-partisan, right-wing sensationalism that animates most U.S. pink slime.

Perhaps most interestingly, Prism openly touts that the whole endeavor is AI-powered (at least in its marketing materials, though not so much on individual stories; more on that later). We’re in a moment where publishers are suing AI giants for using news reporting as unlicensed training data, major movie studios are suing AI-image companies for IP theft, and seemingly every writer is ferociously debating what constitutes appropriate uses of AI in journalism. Yet Prism and its backers decided now was the right moment to build a massive AI-powered network of virtual local newsrooms.

“The idea of AI-powered news is generally attractive to the Silicon Valley types” MediaWise director and Poynter Institute faculty member Alex Mahadevan told me in an interview. “If you've been to any journalism conference in the past two years, you’ve heard about the idea of news reporting and investigative reporting as basically the first layer of the news experience, which then is outsourced to AI: repackaging things as chatbots, as articles, as videos, etc.”

However, “when I look at Prism, I don’t really see a compelling product,” Mahadevan continued. “I see a defective product that, for the most part, is duplicating efforts from actual reporting that already exists. The images are poor. The layout is really poor. It’s not a very inviting user experience.”

“When I hear that there’s VC money flowing into this,” he added, “it’s insane to me to put money into [this] and expect any sort of ROI.”

“The U.S. has lost nearly 3,500 local newspapers since 2005 - almost 40% of the country’s total,” declared the May 2026 press release announcing Prism News. “Roughly 50 million Americans live in what researchers call a news desert. Prism Media was built to address that gap.”

Prism got the diagnosis right: the collapse of local news outlets is a real crisis for U.S. journalism (and democracy). But is Prism’s model really the right way to fill this void?

How will audiences react to realizing that the “reporter” behind the news they see on Facebook or Nextdoor is actually a foreign-owned chatbot? How does more AI slop help rebuild audience trust in journalism, when all evidence seems to signal the opposite effect? And how will real, struggling news outlets compete with floods of AI pink slime? If a local newsroom loses clicks and ad revenue to an AI company that scraped and repurposed its journalism, how does that impact their community?

I sent Prism a long list of these and other questions, most of which they did not answer. But a Prism spokesman provided a number of statements defending their operations, which I’ve included throughout. As best I can tell, these are by far the most detailed comments Prism has given on the record.

The Fake AI Reporter Telling You How to Avoid a Measles Outbreak

“Several of your questions appear to assume that we copy and republish articles,” Prism’s Head of Growth Partnerships Daniel Koren told me in an email. “That is not how our system works. Instead, we use licensed AI search tools together with publicly available facts and data to gather factual information about stories from multiple independent sources. Our system then synthesizes and transforms those facts into a completely new article, written from scratch, often with additional context, a different structure, and a different editorial angle based on what the system determines would be most useful for readers.”

What’s missing in Prism’s explanation: any mention of licensing content, seeking publisher or journalist permission, or sharing ad revenue or other compensation with the reporters whose work Prism acknowledges it pulls from.

Those “different editorial angles” are bylined by one of around 40 AI Prism “reporters” who supposedly cover everything from local politics to jewelry (two reporters on that last beat - who says journalism is dying?). One “reporter,” Dr. Elena Rodriguez, bylines her articles with her PhD title:

“Dr. Rodriguez,” of course, is not real. None of Prism’s reporters are real. I asked Prism what they were trying to achieve with these AI journalists: why give an AI-written article a byline, fake credentials, and a made-up backstory rather than simply disclosing that content is AI-generated? Were they worried that audiences might feel misled by fake biographies of people who aren’t actually real?

Take “Dr. Rodriguez” and her recent “report” about a measles outbreak among Arizona farmworkers. Prism’s article notes what CDC and local public health websites say, lists symptoms to watch for, and describes how measles may have been transmitted among farm workers. But just because something looks and feels real doesn’t mean it is real: there are no quotes, no links, no actual citations, no interviews, no original reporting in Prism’s story on the outbreak. And the whole thing is “authored” by a foreign tech company cosplaying as an American local reporter/doctor, delivering public health advice.

If Prism’s AI were to misrepresent real public health information, or to hallucinate something entirely, and publish the result under a byline with “Dr.” in it, how would readers know to be skeptical? And who would be responsible for any real-world harm caused? What if any recourse would audiences have?

Prism did not answer those questions directly, but insisted, “Next to each name/profile there is an ‘AI’ mark that is clickable that links directly to additional and specific information explaining that they are AI personas and how they are used on the platform etc.”

The above screen grabs do have these small “AI” badges that link to Prism’s AI disclosure page. But there don’t appear to be any such AI disclosures on Prism’s social media accounts, even though social media is a key driver for local news traffic:

The articles these fake journalists supposedly byline aren’t original reporting: they are AI-scrapes of real journalists’ work, among other online sources. And the quality of the repurposed news stories Prism pumps out leaves a lot to be desired.

AI-powered pink slime isn’t just a bad user experience (though it’s also that). Prism’s AI makes significant mistakes. As IPR reported, Prism has hallucinated fake images of real people, including making them the wrong race:

Prism also de-contextualizes facts to the point of misinformation (more on that in a bit). And it makes serious errors in judgement that a real reporter would never make— including, I was alarmed to learn, naming a real underage abuse victim in an article it scraped from a legitimate local news outlet.

Fake Reporter, Real Victim’s Real Name

Earlier this summer, Prism scraped an IPR story featuring an interview with a parent whose teenage child was sent to a residential facility beset by over a decade’s-worth of sexual and physical abuse allegations. While at the facility, her child was attacked by another resident, said he was verbally threatened by staff, and given marijuana by another staff member.

IPR ran all this in their story, while withholding the minor’s name. But, IPR told me, the AI-generated Prism article somehow published with the real, unredacted name of the underage victim. It was only after IPR contacted Prism that the minor’s name was removed from the Prism story, without any further acknowledgement or explanation.

Howard told me his best guess was that Prism’s AI tool was able to correctly ID the minor from other public sources like local government records, but that there was no way to know for sure. Prism declined to answer questions about how the minor’s name was initially included, who was responsible, and what steps, if any, Prism took to keep it from happening again.

“Like every business, we occasionally make mistakes,” Prism’s Koren wrote, “and when we become aware of them, we correct them.” But Prism wouldn’t say how it becomes aware of mistakes, or how either its AI or human staff verifies the accuracy of its content. I asked Prism whether it was the responsibility of the outlets whose content Prism scrapes to contact them with any errors, even serious ones like naming an underage abuse victim, but Prism did not respond.

“The advantage of an AI-native workflow,” Koren continued, “is that every solution for an issue can immediately become a permanent improvement to the system. Rather than relying solely on individual judgment, we continuously add validation layers and quality checks that reduce the likelihood of similar issues happening again.”

Part of the trouble with this argument is that Prism isn’t removing individual judgment: it’s removing human judgment. Anyone can configure an AI agent to follow a code of conduct, or change steps to its workflow (though there’s no promise that the AI would actually follow those directions). But Prism seems to be betting that enough workflow adjustments can match an experienced journalist’s judgement, even around the kind of sensitive stories that would never be featured in a press release.

Alas, even the most sophisticated AI can’t build genuine trust with a source who has never told their story and fears speaking up. AI doesn’t live in the same community as its subjects, facing them in the grocery store or at school pick-up. AI can’t feel a reporter’s determination to cover their stories with care, honesty, and fairness because AI, by definition, doesn’t feel.

“The flaws here are beyond factuality and AI slop,” IPR’s Howard told me. “AI doesn’t have the heart of a person thinking about how a story is told, and what their responsibility is to the people in it.”

If anything, an AI company headquartered overseas but purporting to cover local U.S. communities is whole other level of disconnected from the people in its “articles.” How can a four-person tech start-up in Tel Aviv credibly claim to vouch for what is happening on the ground in Traverse City, or Baltimore, or Albuquerque (all areas with solid local media environments, for what it’s worth)? How can tech workers who have never worked as journalists, reported a story from start to finish, or even interviewed a source, be trusted to oversee AI that purports to be genuine U.S. local news, and pumps out hundreds of articles daily about real people, places, and controversies?

I asked Prism all these questions. They did not provide any answers.

Prism Pitched A Journalist His Own AI-Rewritten Reporting

Allan Leibowitz is an award-winning Australian journalist who has run an electronic percussion news site called digitalDrummer since 2010. Leibowitz wrote on Substack that he first became aware of Prism when he received an email from Daniel Koren pitching Leibowitz back his own repurposed content. Leibowitz later shared that email with me:

“The irony,” Leibowitz later told me, “was that I was being asked to promote to my own readers an AI-generated reworking of my own article.”

When Leibowitz started investigating Prism, he was alarmed to find that this was not an isolated incident. “Our review,” he later wrote, “found that Prism News published corresponding articles for eight of the 10 stories digitalDrummer published between June 10 and July 15, 2026. Those articles included not only routine product announcements, but also original interviews, contributed articles and proprietary testing that originated with digitalDrummer.”

This pattern of regularly appropriating another journalist’s work is concerning enough. But Leibowitz also noted that Prism articles drawing on his work frequently distorted his original reporting. The article Prism pitched back to Leibowitz was one of these. “It reached conclusions we had not made,” Leibowitz told me, “and used latency measurements from an outdated version of our results table to identify the fastest and slowest drum modules. Those rankings were no longer accurate.”

“More fundamentally,” he added, “‘the author’ did not appear to understand the significance or limitations of the testing. digitalDrummer has been independently measuring drum-module latency for well over a decade, and these are figures manufacturers generally don’t publish.”

You don’t have to be an electronic drumming expert, or publish a niche hobbyist outlet, to see the implications of AI scraping and regurgitating material, distorting it to the point of inaccuracy, and then pushing it out at a scale and speed that no human-run media operation can match.

“The potential impact for a small specialist publisher is obvious,” Leibowitz told me. “We invest the time and money in finding stories, interviewing people, testing products and building expertise; another site can then generate competing content almost immediately, potentially competing for the same search traffic, readers and advertising without making that investment.”

“I welcome additional coverage of electronic percussion,” Leibowitz added. “But there’s an enormous difference between another journalist independently covering the same subject and an automated publishing system using our output as the raw material for its own coverage.”

Writers have always competed for scoops. And yes, sometimes they borrow ideas, words, even wholesale texts from each other without giving proper credit. What makes Prism different is the speed, scale, and automation of that borrowing— and that systematic scraping and AI repackaging of human journalists’ work is now a VC-backed business model.

“All I can say,” Leibowitz ruefully concluded, “is thank goodness this is happening at the end of my career rather than at the start.”

“Employee and Workplace News”

Prism’s third vertical, “Employee and Workplace News,” features around 20 individual large multinational companies, including Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Goldman Sachs (also, confusingly, “Restaurants”). Like its other content, Prism Employee news sites largely feature AI scrapes of open-source material like press releases, marketing assets, and other legitimate (or at least human) reporting.

Prism’s description for each workplace page describes it as “a tailored magazine for [company] employees and alumni,” implying that these sites are related to the company in question. However, a KPMG spokesperson told me that there is “no commercial relationship” between KPMG US and Prism News. They were unaware of the site and Prism News generally, he added, before Spin Class contacted them.

As with its “local news” and hobbyist content, Prism’s workplace articles are bylined by AI reporters, not real people. And, as with other Prism articles, the AI-generated workplace content is an unpleasant and often confusing reading experience.

Take this article about pay transparency in restaurants, seemingly cobbled from several different sources: I’ve read it three times, yet truly cannot tell you what it says. Names appear with no explanation of who the person is, or why they are in the story. There are no links to any of the supposed studies or sources cited. One of the sections is headed “Pay transparency is no longer just an HR slogan–” which, tell me you’ve never worked in a restaurant without telling me you’ve never worked in a restaurant.

“Some of our publications are created by users around communities or interests they care about,” Prism’s Koren told me via email. “For example, a Monday.com alumnus can create a publication focused on topics that may be relevant to other alumni.” Prism CEO Dekel Valtzer previously worked at both Monday.com and KPMG, according to his LinkedIn.

Prism News declined to answer whether any of the other companies listed in its Employee and Workplace News section have partnership agreements or other contractual arrangements with Prism. It also declined to comment on how its partnership model works.

The experts I talked to were cautious about whether Prism’s use of these companies’ IP might be a legal vulnerability for the company. Moreover, the question might be less about legality and more about resources and priorities for those companies. “It takes time and resources to send the takedown request, or file lawsuits for copyright infringement,” Mahadevan told me, also adding that a multinational company would likely be better positioned to take on such a fight than a struggling local newsroom.

“A complete reinvention of how humanity stays informed.”

I’ve had plenty of frustration with AI slop content, how AI companies’ PR and policy mistakes have inadvertently deepened many audiences’ trust in AI, and platforms struggling to adopt coherent AI policies. That said, I don’t find blanket screeds against AI, or even AI in journalism, especially useful or interesting. These technologies aren’t going anywhere, nor is the money behind them: genie, bottle, etc.

Instead, I’m much more interested in messy questions about how we’re all adapting to this brave new world, like how struggling newsrooms are grappling with AI-powered competition. How AI disclosures impact audience trust. How AI companies frame the challenges they say they’re addressing, and whether/how they actually deliver on them. And, as always, the big Spin Class questions: who wants me to see this? Why? Why now? What are we not talking about that we should be talking about?

Prism has a tiny footprint today. “In reality,” Koren wrote, “the vast majority [of our sites] receive very little traffic and many have virtually no readers at all because they haven’t even been indexed by Google yet. Again, this reflects the stage we’re currently at as a very young startup.”

Still, Prism’s marketing materials tout big ambitions. From their homepage:

Start-up culture is littered with the tombstones of companies that promised investors they’d change humanity, only to burn through their start-up capital and flame out. But it’s worth taking Prism’s intentions seriously, especially given the ease with which a small start-up can vibe-code a digital news empire. When I asked Alex Mahadevan at Poynter how long it would take him to build a Prism-size pink slime network he paused, and mused, “maybe a day?”

Still, it’s hard to imagine a Prism-like AI news network actually replacing real journalism entirely, if for no other reason than it needs content to scrape. AI, as Allan Leibowitz wrote, “can’t discover something that isn’t already on the web.”

Yet Prism’s stated vision forces us to ask: “what the world would look like if humans were cut out of journalism entirely?” Because that seems to be the future that Prism and its backers are betting on.

More of that next week in Part 2.

Huge thank you to Maxwell Howard at Interlochen Public Radio, whose intrepid reporting sparked this story. You can support IPR here, and become a paid Spin Class subscriber here - these kinds of stories take a long time to report, and your subscriptions make a huge difference!

Most of the headlines from that interview were framed around Trump’s threats to bomb Iranian power plants, bridges, desalination plants, and other civilian infrastructure:

But, as we’ve talked about a lot, daily political press coverage of Trump’s comments often fails to provide necessary context and analysis. Coverage that focuses solely on what he said (“their bridges would literally be gone… in less than two hours, and the power plants in one day”) is missing three key elements that audiences need to know from this interview:

The Boy Who Cried Bombing Power Plants

Missing from much of yesterday’s coverage was the context that Trump has been threatening to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges for MONTHS. Per a New York Times timeline:

March 21: In a post on social media, Mr. Trump declared that if Iran did not “FULLY OPEN” the strait within 48 hours, the United States would “obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”

Trump made similar threats on June 10:

President Trump said he is readying new strikes on Iranian infrastructure — after warning that the Islamic Republic will “have to pay the price” for taking “too long” to negotiate a peace deal.

The commander-in-chief said he is “getting close to ordering new strikes against Iranian power plants and bridges” in a phone call with Fox News’ chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on Wednesday.

And again, just a week ago:

These are only a few of many more examples of from the last five months of Trump threatening to bomb Iranian civilian infrastructure and not following through on his empty threats. What’s Farsi for “TACO?”

To be clear: I’m not saying Trump should follow through on his threats. That would lead to a catastrophic humanitarian disaster, and there’s no evidence that it would change the IRGC’s strategy when five months of brutal bombing has only dug them in further. But anyone who has ever negotiated with a toddler, much less the IRGC, knows that you don’t make threats you can’t keep. You inevitably come across feckless and only strengthen your opponent. One doesn’t have to be a foreign policy expert to see how repeatedly issuing empty only tells your adversary (and the rest of the world) that you’re not serious. Bluster not backed up by action only increases Iran’s (already considerable) leverage.

Is it about the nukes? The Strait? The talks? Who knows?

What most stood out in Trump’s July 28 interview was how over it he sounds. He vamped about Lindsay Graham’s funeral and their strange relationship for the first third of the conversation before turning to his meeting with Netanyahu, about whom he dismissively sneered “I don't need Bibi to tell me that [about alleged Iranian nuclear activity at Pickaxe Mountain]. Bibi is telling me that because he wants me to stay involved.”

But his tired voice is saying something new: Trump seems to be changing the threshold for what would spark a massive US assault on Iranian power plants, etc. There’s no mention of Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz, re-starting diplomatic talks, or stopping attacks on maritime transit or regional Gulf partners— all things he has previously mentioned as triggers for a massive U.S. assault on Iranian civilian infrastructure.

Instead, he’s being squishy about what would actually spark such an attack - but in his rambling interview, he jumps directly from his description of his big bombs and their impact to saying “Iran can never get a nuclear weapon. We’re not gonna let than happen.” If you read this literally and look at what’s not being said, it sure sounds like the goalposts are getting moved yet again.

Granted, this administration has never figured out its Iran talking points, so it’s not surprising there’s still not a clear strategy or theory of victory. But it’s becoming harder for the Trump Administration to deny reality: Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Iran still has a nuclear program because Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. It’s willing to take the war regional. This war is existential for the IRGC, who can see full-well how much the American people don’t want this war. And the IRGC are willing to let their own people keep suffering as the war drags on.

We should be cautious about reading too much into any one conversation with Trump. He rambles and free-associates so much that it’s often hard to differentiate between a deliberately telegraphed policy shift and one of his famous “weaves” about chandeliers, sharks, or Dylan Mulvaney. Sussing out when to take Trump literally and seriously is one of the tougher parts of the beat.1

But when there’s this much reasonable doubt as to what the hell the Commander in Chief is actually communicating, and when the goalposts keep shifting this much, the only logical conclusion is it’s yet another sign that Trump has no strategy for how to get out of the mess he’s made in the Middle East.

So how do you cover the lack of a strategy?

So what’s actually going on here? Something new, that our press corps is struggling to cover.

We’ve all been conditioned that when the White House says something new, it’s a deliberate choice. That because a President’s words have the power to start wars and move markets, they are always carefully considered. That the President’s words, even (especially?) his unrehearsed musings, are inherently newsworthy because of the weight of the office and its power.

But with Trump we’re in uncharted territory, and that’s not really being conveyed. He’s flailing rhetorically because he’s flailing strategically. The best way to understand Trump’s latest threats is not that they represent any meaningful policy change, but that he’s casting about for new ideas, in hopes he’ll land the magical combination of words that will change the IRGC’s calculations. Of course, no such combination of words exists.

Trump hasn’t faced an adversary like Iran before, and his frustration is showing. The IRGC has spent decades figuring out how to structure their entire government and security structure around resisting a war exactly like the one Trump started. Iran is ruthlessly motivated by hard realpolitik and completely unmoved by rhetoric.

This is a really big honking deal. Presidents don’t bluff. Or, if they must, then they make damn clear that they’re capable of following through on their threats. But Trump is a notorious bluffer, and folder. Somehow, the press who cover him still haven’t figured out how to cover this aspect of his presidency, which is especially crucial at junctures like this.

Another tricky thing about covering Trump is that multiple things are usually true at the same time, sometimes conflicting in ways that make storytelling tricky. It’s true that he has repeatedly bluffed and blustered about bombing Iran’s civilian infrastructure and not followed through: so much so that reasonable people could assume this is always an empty threat.

But it’s also true that Trump is cornered with no strategy and no exit plan. Those are the kinds of circumstances that drive irrational actors, which is is, to make extremely irrational, dangerous mistakes. Refusing to include that context in your reporting doesn’t make it not be true.

I personally think the likelihood that Trump mass bombs Iranian civilian infrastructure, at the scale he’s threatening, is low. But I can’t rule it out. Especially as the IRGC continues its strategy (successful to date) of simply waiting him out, not caring about the suffering their own people are enduring along the way, and his options become more limited.

None of this is to absolve the IRGC for that suffering, or to excuse Iran’s own strikes on Gulf neighbor critical infrastructure like Kuwaiti desalinization plants or Dubai’s airport. Again, multiple things can be true: Iran’s attacks on civilian infrastructure are intolerable, and so is the President casually musing about committing retaliatory war crimes against Iran.

To state the obvious: an American president should not be casually tossing around the idea of committing mass war crimes. Even if Trump presents his threat as evidence of restraint (in his mob boss-coded way), he’s still acknowledging exactly what he is threatening: a humanitarian catastrophe affecting tens of millions of civilians. We shouldn’t dismiss it by treating it as more of his bluster. That only —to beat the tiredest, deadest horse in all of the second Trump administration—normalizes dangerous rhetoric.

This is the new normal. And it sucks.

Trump’s Iran war has already cost taxpayers more than $100 billion, driven up energy prices, and disrupted global shipping. Last week the Trump Administration asked Congress to approve another $350 billion to keep it going. And what are we getting out of it? Higher gas prices!

The best case scenario once would have been is a return to the pre-February status quo. But at this point, even that is impossible. Whatever eventual deal gets cooked up will involve Iran 1) being paid off massively, and 2) retaining at least some control of the Strait of Hormuz for the foreseeable future. That’s a bell no bomb can un-ring. And again, that context is missing from Trump comment-driven daily press coverage.

What does that leave us with? In all likelihood: more bombs, more threats, more improvisation. But air power alone is not going to force Iran to give up its nuclear program or surrender control of the Strait.

Bright side: if there’s one upside to the events of the last five months, it’s that we can clearly say to the “bomb Iran” crowd that hey, we tried it your way, and it went worse than even the loudest Cassandras predicted (and can get worse still!). So now you can go back to your dark money-funded think tank and play with your toys there, because the rest of us have to deal with the mess you helped make.2

Which leaves the same basic conclusion we should have learned years ago: if there is a durable off-ramp here (increasingly a big “if”), it’s diplomacy that leads to a deal with international inspections, monitoring, and enforcement. Because the only alternative to capitulation is a ground war that even the shoutiest Iran hawk appears unwilling to fight.

Subscribe now

“He was leg, I was comms!” Savage (compliment).

Maria has built an audience of millions across both Instagram and TikTok because her videos take the Serious Issues Seriously, while casting a gimlet eye on the absurdities of life in political/policy circles. Satire must understand something deeply in order to mock it effectively, and Maria clearly knows her stuff. I’m also a big fan of how vocal she’s been about how the far right’s creator investments have paid massive dividends to terrible people. She regularly calls out the disparities in everything from commissions to systemic support mechanisms (which she rightly pushed me on in our conversation).

But I was especially excited to chat with Maria after reading about her experience covering the recent NATO Summit:

PREACH, WOMAN. More of this energy! I learned so much from my conversation with Maria, and think you will too. But if you can’t read the whole thing, then sit with this key point on your Metro ride to work (and maybe send it to your boss and/or funders):

First: what’s your preferred title? Content creator, influencer, independent media, etc. (this feels like asking someone for their pronouns). What’s the tl;dr on how you got into this line of work?

Content creator! When I was 16 I found out my dad was a spy. At 18, I got my first smart phone, and by 19, I had gained a million followers posting interviews with my dad on TikTok. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in Political Science and specialization in American Politics, I moved to Washington, DC and began a career in politics. Today, I have my own firm while maintaining my spy interview channels (Instagram, TikTok). I also do political satire and advocacy videos (Instagram, TikTok).

I started my interview channel as a complete joke - the first interview with my dad was recorded on a shaky Google Pixel, to my audience of 19 followers, and I asked him if birds were real. That first clip got maybe 30 views, but on a whim, I did a second interview, which hit a million views overnight. When Covid hit, we did a video encouraging our audience to get vaccinated, the response was so positive, with comments like “I wasn’t going to, but if your father did, I will too,” that it made me switch my major from Applied Mathematics to Political Science, to study the impact the digital world has on political persuasion.

Your dad is such a great character and I love his videos. How important is having a character or persona like him in creator work? Is that part of the secret sauce national security nerds are missing?

Well I love my dad too!! I think his personality and endearing Texas accent definitely adds a lot to the channel. He is incredibly outgoing, good humored, and kind, which makes him likeable online. It’s more than just his past; our audience has a real genuine connection with his personality (you should have seen the commotion around him growing a man bun LOL).

How did the invite to cover NATO come about? What was the experience like? How did you see your role compared to legacy media reporters there?

When I got the invite from NATO the first time, I honestly thought it was a scam! I couldn’t even fathom the honor of being invited to any NATO activation. After double checking and verifying the email addresses it came from, I timidly responded with my interest to be involved.

The first engagement I went to was in Tallin, Estonia - the yearly Cyber Security activation. They flew me and eight other creators from around NATO-allied countries out to Estonia for about three days, and we got to hear from top NATO and Estonian officials, see behind the scenes of the-red teaming, and even participate in a mock simulation ourselves. (Interview 1, Interview 2, Post recap).

I was even more awestruck when I got an email for the second time inviting me to be a creator at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Türkiye. This time, it was 28 creators… oh and every leader of every NATO country. [Note: Maria has great write-ups of pre-post, Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 over on LinkedIn that anyone who wants more on setting creators up for success at these kinds of events should study]

Overall, the experience was phenomenal. We were treated similarly to traditional media, and at some points had even more individualized access than some major outlets. The content I produced across channels gathered millions of views, and more than just a big number, it hit younger audiences that would normally not engage with NATO activity.

What does success look like for creators at gatherings like this? Is it just about the clicks and engagement rate?

It is much deeper than just the analytics. Yes, views and engagement matter, but also we are there to break the echo chamber. Our audiences are the people who may have tuned out of traditional media, people who are tired of being lectured to from a podium, and instead want to see news translated into terms they understand from people who look like them. Success for every creator was different, some of us did interviews, some did games, some just did recaps. All are valuable and hit different niches.

What should future national security and government gatherings do differently next time to set you for even more success?

NATO actually does a phenomenal job already: they set aside content time, had great backdrops, and set us up with 1-on-1 interviews with important people. The biggest pro here is that NATO believes in a truly free press, so there were no scripts or talking points, just the freedom and time to create content based on the activities of the day.

When you’re at an event like NATO as a creator, how do you balance what the algorithm wants with what the host invited you there to do? How do you think about meshing your own brand with what’s expected of you in a setting like that?

I think the whole point of inviting content creators as free press is to not balance that, it’s to let the creators be free to communicate however they normally do. If NATO had a script, they would buy an ad. Instead, they wanted storytellers: so each creator produced wildly different content, and that’s the whole point. No matter where you put me, I will always be Maria Comstock.

Shifting to your audience: why makes someone want to learn about NATO, or Iran policy, or Venezuela, through a content creator vice traditional journalism?

There are a couple of points here: 1, medium; 2, messenger. For the first point, social media is a lot more approachable and interactive than traditional journalism. A viewer can have conversations in the comment section, directly message me a question or thought, or reshare the content directly with their friends/family. This interaction produces a feeling of agency old media sources can never replicate: no more yelling at the TV when you don’t like what a news anchor is saying. Instead, yell in the comment section!

As for 2, the messenger: content creators use their platform in many versatile ways that produce a more encompassing picture of who we are. In between interviews, I am also posting pictures of my cats on my story. While at NATO, you also saw the Turkish food I was consuming. This makes the “news” content even more immersive. Yes, I’m talking to the Secretary General of NATO, and also, I had Turkish ice cream earlier. It makes the news a part of a bigger narrative about the creator, a viewer can understand the perspective of the creator, and why they are communicating the way they are.

Where do you think your work fits into someone’s information diet? What do your audiences get from you that they can’t get elsewhere?

Each of my channels provide something unique. For my spy channel, honestly, it’s relatively difficult to get some of those interviews, so the content alone is unique.

On my political comedy channel, I like to think that the satire behind each of my skits is really just a clever disguise for education. Yes, my character is funny, and then BOOM now you know a stat about income inequality.

You’ve been vocal about how many more resources the political right is investing in creators than the left. Why is the left still so bad at this, despite months (years, now!) of creators screaming that the right is eating our lunch on creator engagement? Is anyone doing this well?

My theory behind it all is that the right is about a decade ahead of us on new media investment. When the left began dominating a lot of the traditional news media, the right moved resources to the digital world. They have done honestly an amazing job at not only shifting messaging, but also shifting culture. They invest in lifestyle, not just news.

The issue on the left is, plainly, the consulting class. The old men running the big political consulting firms in DC who have a foot in every big race across the country haven’t figured out how to make a commission off of social media, so they keep lighting money on fire by buying TV and radio spots for 10x the price.

How should progressives and pro-democracy legacy organizations better support creators and influencers - is it as simple as “we need more money,” or are there other things we’re missing? What would make the biggest difference in correcting this imbalance?

Funding is definitely a big part, but also, it needs to be a coordinated shift. Begin incorporating creators into the programs we already have, as strategists, as speakers, as organizers, as reporters. Access is paramount.

But, to reiterate, many creators get more views than CNN and FOX. So paying them for their time and channel is the bare minimum when you are almost guaranteed a better ROI than a TV ad slot.

Spin Class’ audience has a lot of national security nerds and legacy media fans (love you guys!), and occasionally I’ll hear pushback from readers is that national security is an exception to the content creator boom because the issues are too complicated, too weighty, that doing a short-form video on a complex policy/history issue is unserious (paraphrasing here, but that’s clearly the subtext). I disagree, for a slew of reasons, but am curious how that sits with you. What’s your argument to the natsec audience for why they need to get on the creator train? And how can national security types think about supporting the next generation of creators without slipping into “how do you do, fellow kids” narc energy?

Love the “too serious for TikTok” crowd. But that argument has it exactly backwards.

The premise is that national security is uniquely too complex, too weighty, too important to compress into 60 seconds. And sure, it’s complex. But “this is too important to be popular” isn’t a serious position. The nightly news compressed the Cold War into six minutes between detergent ads. An op-ed compresses a foreign policy into 800 words. Every format is a compression problem, short-form is just the newest one, and a lot of the people sneering at it are the ones who haven’t figured out how to do it.

The information environment isn’t a sideshow to national security anymore. Our adversaries figured this out a decade ago. Russia doesn’t publish 8,000-word think-tank reports to move Americans, it makes content. Some of the most effective propaganda operations running right now are native to exactly these platforms and frighteningly good at the format. So when the serious, sourced, credible people decide the venue is beneath them, they forfeit the field to whoever has no such scruples. You don’t get to opt out of an information war because you find the battlefield undignified.

A good 45-second video isn’t a replacement for the deep report, it’s the front door to it. It’s the thing that makes someone who’d never open a CFR paper suddenly want to. The choice was never “great video vs. great essay.” It’s “decent video vs. that person never encountering the topic at all.”

As for supporting the next generation, that specific cringe comes from one move: trying to become a creator when that’s not you. So don’t.

What we need is for you to say yes to the interview. Be the source. Be the fact-check. Lend the credibility you spent thirty years earning and let someone else handle the editing. The best thing an establishment expert can do is treat creators as colleagues doing translation work rather than a youth-outreach box to tick.

What is the “supporting creators” conversation missing? What are we not talking about that we should be talking about?

What it actually costs to be the person standing where an institution used to stand.

This whole conversation, including about half of this interview, is about how to get more creators into the room. More funding, more access, more people translating this stuff for audiences who have tuned out. But nobody wants to talk about the other side of the ledger: when you replace an institution with a person, you inherit every fragility a person has and lose every protection an institution offered.

When a legacy reporter publishes a Russia scoop, there’s a newsroom behind them: an editor, a legal team, a security protocol, a brand that absorbs the backlash. When I post something that lands wrong (or right), it’s me, my phone, and my DMs. There’s no comms department standing between me and the guy who decides he wants to find out where I live. I’m a private citizen doing work that brushes up against state-level stuff, with none of the institutional armor that used to come standard with the job.

And the fragility is structural, not just personal. My entire reach lives on platforms I don’t own and can’t appeal to. One algorithm change, one policy shift, one geopolitically-motivated ban, and the audience I spent years building is gone overnight. The whole model rests on a single human face staying healthy, safe, funded, and un-deplatformed indefinitely. That’s a lot of single points of failure for something people increasingly treat as news.

So when people ask how to build the next generation of creators, I wish the question were less “how do we get more of them” and more “how do we make this survivable for longer than eighteen months before someone burns out, gets scared off, or gets their account banned.” Fund the work, of course. But also build the scaffolding, legal, security, financial, that lets a person do an institution’s job without being quite so alone at it.

This is such an important point: supporting creators isn’t just about access, but respecting and creating the infrastructure around this as a viable, sustainable career path. Marrying this with the earlier question about why the right is further along: what about how they support their stable of creators should we be stealing for our own playbook (not in a “Joe Rogan of the left” way, but delivering on practical supports like legal support, security, etc.)?

Honestly, quite a bit of it - top tier conservative creators get actual retainers, not just exposure. The business behind the deal is structured and part of a wider infrastructure. On the left, we basically treat creators like volunteers with a ring light. We’ll fly someone out for a panel, thank them for their “important voice,” beg them to post a video for free, and then leave them out of the rest of the conversation.

What we need to do is something like a shared legal fund that creators can tap into when something they post suddenly gets them death threats. There need to be trainings on account security, comment moderation, and best practices. And, of course, funding that makes the content produced worth it (and feasible) for everyone involved.

Subscribe now

But I’m going to make a bold call: after a pretty crap year and a half, the vibes are shifting.

Doesn’t mean things are perfect. Doesn’t even mean the bad stuff is going away any time soon. But it feels like that instead of talking about finding joy, we’re actually just… being joyful.

We’re planning for an IRL Summer or a 90s Summer. We’re showing up to community events, bandwagoning the Knicks, and developing a passionate interest in football teams we’ve never heard of before.1 We’re dancing in the streets during Pride and booing commencement speakers who tell us to get on board with AI or get left behind. We’re doing Grandma hobbies and refusing to monetize them.

Joy is a collective act. It’s about a sense of belonging, of being recognized and welcomed. And this past weekend reminded me that a movement built on resentment and grievance can imitate joy, but it can’t create it.

The obvious vibe differences between the rancid, sweaty UFC events in DC this past weekend and the giddy, spontaneous celebrations in New York and in World Cup host cities is wild. It’s like the difference between porn and sex: you can’t always describe it perfectly, but immediately know it when you see it.

Real joy is genuine, contagious, and spontaneous. It doesn’t care about looking silly, because it’s too happy and the party is too fun. Joy is unforced laughter, not unsettling rictus grins that evoke nothing so much as hostage videos:

Yikes. That’s basically the exact opposite of my algorithm these days, which is an utter delight of Knicks celebration videos. Sure, it’s all algorithmically curated. But the fodder is profoundly messy, human, and analog:

I’ve watched this approximately 713 times in the last two days, and grin like a total goober every time. The drums! The rainbow crowd of strangers, all cheering and dancing in the street! The joy at being together: in celebration of the Knicks, sure, but also everyone celebrating being a part of a bit (My mayor Muslim! My bagel Jewish! My Christian Dior! Knicks in FOUR!) that didn’t even exist a week ago but is now firmly a part of New York City lore.

Knicks celebration videos are kids and dogs and bus drivers and celebrities all smushed in the same small spaces, delighting not just in the fact of victory but in sharing it with each other. It’s Jalen Brunson hugging his dad and crying, and now we’re thinking about hugging our dads and we’re crying. It’s street parties where thousands of strangers are singing together and Spike Lee is being driven around like the Pope. Where everyone is welcome because we’re all celebrating a shared reality as much as the sense of victory: because joy is collective, and joy is definitely IRL, not from an LLM.

Also, this:

Read more

Beyond constantly forgetting whether it’s Wacky Sock Day or Dress Like Your Favorite Superhero But Also It’s Pajamas Day at my kids’ school (Maycember is real and I am over it), we’ve also had several recent fun interviews:

• On The Daily Blast, Greg Sargent and I discussed Trump’s inner circle leaks about Iran, and how Trump’s jealousy of Obama’s Iran deal is a much bigger motivator for him than Serious DC People want to admit out loud.

• Speaking of blasts: I loved chatting with about why John Oliver is one of my favorite policy journalists, pressing the donor class to embrace influencers, and dumb national security memes. If you like Spin Class, you’ll adore Hot Tip:

  Hot Tip

  Emily Horne knows spin when she sees it

  Too long for your inbox? Read the full interview here…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 31 likes · 10 comments · Alex Friedman and Emily Horne

• I was honored to have join the first-ever Spin Class Live to talk AI populist backlash, midterms, and why we’re going to be dragged kicking and screaming into giving our kids phones. Amanda’s book When We’re In Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership is a must-read for anyone who wants to lead authentically (but needs help figuring out what that means in practice), change the toxic work systems in which we came up, and to build better, sustainable, healthier workplaces.

  ---

Earlier this week POLITICO ran a gut-punch of story about a New Jersey Democratic staffer named Rob Field, who was catfished by a MAGA activist posing as a progressive nurse on a dating app. The activist (a married Florida mom named Alysia Gamble, who previously organized a 2019 Q-Anon DC rally) secretly taped their dates and calls, which were then heavily edited into a series of web videos released by conservative influencer Steven Crowder. Their intent seems to be embarrassing New Jersey Democrats and trying to shape the 2025 New Jersey Republican gubernatorial primary.

But Field wasn’t the only one:

Gamble’s five-month pursuit of Field wasn’t an isolated project: We have identified at least three other instances in which the Florida woman went undercover to court men in an attempt to capture a few moments of viral content later published online by Crowder or conservative activist James O’Keefe.

James O’Keefe, you may remember, is the former leader of Project Veritas and the right-wing troll who pioneered the schtick of capturing hidden footage and deceptively editing it into sensationalist, gotcha videos. His Wikipedia page is a RIDE. But for our purposes, what you need to know is his signature tactic of the long-con catfish: hiring operatives, often young women, to seek out men on the apps, date them under false pretenses, and secretly record their conversations.

Beyond Democratic politicians, O’Keefe and his copycats have targeted social services organizations, colleges, tech companies, news outlets, and other right-wing targets for years. But recently, their target base has expanded to include explicitly nonpartisan and even conservative-coded workplaces.

On May 29, the Washington Nationals fired a community relations staffer who was caught in a Project Veritas-type attack. And a few weeks before that, O’Keefe released videos of OMB and Domestic Policy Council officials — at least one of whom was a Trump political appointee— appearing to criticize aspects of the way the administration runs. Both those employees were placed on leave. And all of them were viciously hounded online.

To state up front: these videos are reprehensible and unethical. And they are definitely not real journalism. Journalists are taught to only use undercover methods as a last resort, not a first and best practice. Journalists are supposed to be objective. And most importantly, journalists don’t selectively edit their work to fit a pre-existing political agenda. That’s activism, not journalism. Project Veritas and its knockoffs only exist to weaponize people’s trust, lie and distort the truth, and manipulate audiences for partisan purposes.

In previous jobs, including at Twitter, I dealt with fallout from Project Veritas attacks. I saw up close how these videos inflict terrible damage on their targets. Their effects last far longer than any news cycle. Some of the targets dated these agents for months. Can you imagine finding out that someone you thought was your girlfriend - who you introduced to your family, friends, coworkers - was secretly trying to trap you and publicly humiliate you? To get you fired? To sic thousands of the worst people on the Internet on you? What a profound violation. It’s revolting.

But my ethical objections to Project Veritas and its wannabes aren’t the point here. Criticizing these tactics doesn’t make them go away. These types of undercover videos are now part of our information ecosystem, and we need to understand how they work. Undercover sting videos incite social media chatter, which brings more right-wing press coverage, which can break into more traditional media outlets. If you’re not prepared, something that starts in the ugliest corners of X can easily become mainstream news before the team is even aware of the inciting video. And how organizations respond in the first few hours can determine whether a Project Veritas-type attack stays contained or metastisizes into a genuine reputational crisis.

These tactics are spreading, and the target base is broadening. Yet most companies and organizations are not prepared for the increasing likelihood that their workers could be the subject of a right-wing undercover video attack.

So: how can organizations protect themselves from a sting video attack? How should they prepare? We’re going to paywall some of these, because, well, this is part of how I make a living. But some free advice to keep in mind:

Recognize the threat

The recent operations on both Trump administration officials and the Washington Nationals represent a clear escalation. No company, organization, or team should assume that they are safe from being targeted by O’Keefe or any of his copycats.

A lot of comms folks subscribe to Spin Class, so please take this to your bosses as needed: consider this your wake-up call that deceptively edited right-wing sting videos are a significant reputational and operational risk. Everyone needs a plan.

Culture change: Anticipate, Plan, Educate

Anticipate. If you’re a leader, set the example from the top that is a When, Not If. Send this newsletter or another round-up to your leadership team and ask them to generate a plan for how your organization would handle a Project Veritas-type attacks.

Plan. Build a clear system for reporting suspicious activity. ID your biggest vulnerabilities (trickiest subjects you get regularly asked about, likely targets, etc.). Design scenarios that the team can stress test in a tabletop exercise (more on that later).

Educate your team, both leadership and staff level. Even something as simple as sharing articles about these attacks in Slack or Teams, with a reminder on how to report suspicious behavior, helps people be on alert. Remind your team that they are always representing the company or the organization, even outside of work. A good rule of thumb: if you don’t want to read it on the front page of the Washington Post, then don’t say it in public.

Read more

• how we’d “yes, and” ’s definition of “AI Populism”

• why the AI populist backlash doesn’t map neatly onto most political frameworks

• how data centers became flash points for a huge range of voter anxieties

• how campaigns both can smartly use AI as a tool while meeting voter concerns

• who in the 2026 Dem candidate class “gets it”

• and how, as moms to young kids, we’re both thinking about how to teach our kids about AI.

Get more from Emily Horne in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

The Kobeissi Letter, a well-respected capital markets industry newsletter, published an analysis of the trade a few hours later:

According to our analysis, ~$920 million worth of crude oil shorts were taken 70 minutes before an Axios report claimed the US and Iran were near a "14-point" deal to end the war.

At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news.

This is equivalent to ~$920 million in notional value, an unusually large trade for 3:40 AM ET.

At 4:50 AM ET, just 70 minutes later, Axios reported that the US is "close" to a "memorandum of understanding" to end the Iran War.

By 7:00 AM ET, oil prices had fallen over -12% with these crude oil shorts gaining approximately +$125 million.

Minutes later, Iran launched the "Persian Gulf Strait Authority" and oil prices surged +8%.

And yes: this was literally the inciting plot of Casino Royale.

To their credit, financial journalists and independent political analysts largely identified this trade as part of a larger pattern of suspiciously-timed big bets on both traditional oil markets (which would fall under CFTC and SEC regulations) and unregulated “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket.1 Some other notable examples from the first (clearly regulated) category:

• NY Post: “At 6:50 a.m. on March 23, traders executed a massive volume in oil futures trades, about $580 million, 15 minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social about productive talks with Iran to de-escalate, sending oil prices tumbling and delivering quick profits to the traders.”

• Reuters, April 8: “Traders place large $950 million bet on oil price falling hours ahead of ceasefire.”

• Reuters, April 17: “Investors placed a bet worth about $760 million on a falling oil price around 20 minutes before Iran’s foreign minister announced on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was open, another sizeable wager on the world’s most traded commodity ahead of major announcements in the course of the Middle East war.”2

Several outlets have reported that the Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are investigating these and potentially other suspicious trades totalling at least $2.6 billion in trader profits. Paul Krugman’s excellent analysis is a must-read for anyone who cares about the broader pattern and why it matters:

As the BBC among others has documented, this isn’t the first time, or the second time, that this has happened. Again and again, just before Trump makes announcements that raise hopes about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, one or more “whales,” very large traders, sell large quantities of oil futures, almost instantly reaping big profits as prices fall.

What’s truly remarkable is that this keeps happening even though the pattern has become familiar. This tells us two things: The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it.

With respect to Mr. Krugman (and h/t to ), there’s a third important takeaway: corruption at this scale is a massive national security vulnerability. America’s adversaries are absolutely tracking all of this financial malfeasance, which gives them potential leverage over whoever is profiting. And of course, there’s the massive damage that this kind of corruption and impunity does to the rule of law and American credibility around the world.

This is a massive story. Yet press coverage lives almost entirely in the business and markets section. Even as Congressional Democrat oversight has started to ramp up and even as more examples of the pattern have trickled in, it’s felt buried.

But why?

As we’ve talked about before, it’s much harder to cover something that isn’t happening than something that is happening. So: how does one document that a story isn’t getting the attention it deserves?

There are lots of ways journalists can cover the White House and get official comments. But I can’t tell you how many White House reporters have insisted to me that Trump is so much more accessible than Obama and Biden ever were. “He talks to us all the time on the plane” they say. “He takes all sorts of our questions at random Oval events!” “He’ll just pick up the phone and call reporters!”

I wanted to test that proposition. If accessibility is good because it allows journalists to ask President Trump questions directly, are they using that access to ask him about this particular tough topic?

Read more

Subscribe now

No one thinks that doing their own taxes makes them a CPA, or that they magically become a lawyer after bingeing Law and Order reruns. But so many people consider themselves good communicators simply because they watch cable news, have a Facebook or Instagram profile, or (awww, sweetie!) still subscribe to a newspaper. The same way everyone believes they’re an above-average driver, or has a great sense of humor, they believe “the general public” needs to know about whatever they personally care about.1

As a comms pro, I start every communications plan with three simple questions:

• Who is your audience?

• Where is your audience?

• What’s the impact you want to have on your audience?

It sounds like such obvious advice. But it’s amazing how many smart people jump immediately to tactics, without first thinking through basic strategic questions of who they’re trying to reach and why. We need a press release! We need a front-page New York Times story! Or (my favorite), we need to go viral!

Ok… but why? To what end?

Actual comms people should have ready answers: we’re trying to reach Congressional appropriators to get more funding for our defense priorities. We need to turn out the base in central New Jersey for a special election. We’re trying to get Millennial dads to actually take the parental leave available to them, in the hopes of normalizing paid parental leave for everyone.

These are all solid foundations for comms plans: clear, specific, action-oriented. They’re focused, because comms pros know you can’t be all things to all people. Trying to reach everyone means you’re not reaching your actual audience in a meaningful way.

Comms pros also know that comms for the sake of comms is nearly always a bad idea. If you’re going to ask audiences to pay attention to you, you need to make it worth their while and meet them where they are, not where you think they should be.

As a comms consultant, I’m often paid to ask the direct (re: impolite) questions that my clients’ internal teams can’t be so blunt about: Why does this matter? Why should your audiences care? You’re invested in this announcement, hire, brand, etc., because this is what you do all day— but why should other people pay attention to it?

Comms is about advocating for the audience experience. They’re the only ones within the organization who center what the audience needs.2 It’s the comms team’s job to remind leaders that most people are busy, tired, stressed, and maxxed out on info and content competing for their limited attention across a relentless swirl of pinging platforms. Unless you can clearly articulate why they specifically should care, loading them up with information they didn’t ask for can feel like wasting their time, or even gaslighting them.

Comms that centers the audience can build trust and credibility. But comms that centers the messenger, not the audience, can quickly turn rancid. Consider:

• Lauren Sánchez Bezos. Jeff Bezos is focused on an audience of one: Trump. You may not like his comms moves, but they make clear sense for his audience: leaking reports about rebooting “The Apprentice,” the Melania documentary, the ballroom sponsorship, etc.

  But his wife seems to sincerely believe that the right PR can buy her class and mass popularity, which is simply not possible. It’s classic comms centered around what the client wants, not what the audience needs. A gown that shouts its references to John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X but fails on execution. A $10M sponsorship of the most elite event in fashion, but surrounded by anti-Amazon protests and on the heels of its cross-promotional movie where (spoiler alert), the Bezos avatars are the villains. And that strange Times profile last month, whose chief impact was to send readers on a Talmudic deep read looking for signs that Amy Chozick was secretly shading her subject. It’s all proof that money can buy you PR, but not love: especially if you’re attempting your Amazon-funded comms coup at a moment of rising economic populism and anti-tech backlash.

  Who is this all for? LSB’s ego and no one else, apparently.

  

• WHCD discourse, even before the shooting. I know. I’m sick of it, too. I was just in New Mexico for work and it was lovely for many reasons, but chief among them was the relief of knowing that not a single person there gave a blessed toot about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

  The whole week, the vibes were rancid even before the shooting. We would all be better off if this winds up resetting the whole multi-day Democracy x The First Amendment, sponsored by Titos’s Vodka and [European Embassy TBD] circus back to its one-night rubber chicken dinner factory settings. Yet two weeks out, and mainstream outlets are still running stories like this:

  

  Say it with me: who is this for? Not for the average American worried about gun violence in their communities, or gas prices, the opioid crisis, or AI job displacement, that’s for sure. Not for the person who still insists on the value of tough political journalism, but can’t defend a second attempt at its black-tie ritual humiliation at the hands of a President whose only visible joy comes from berating the reporters who cover him. And definitely not for people whose trust in legacy media was cratering even before this story dominated DC press for far too long relative to its impact on the rest of the country.3

• The report from the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. ICYMI, in April a ten-professor Yale panel issued a public report criticizing elite universities for having lost public trust in institutions. Tellingly, the report spends more time on Halloween costume-related emails from Yale staff than on the Trump administration’s weaponizing of research funding, arresting and attempting to deport foreign students for exercising their free speech rights, or pressuring colleges to eliminate entire academic departments.

  In the 58-page report, there’s no mention of the entire right-wing media apparatus that spent decades attacking higher education. No mention of how TPUSA built an entire for-profit industry around activating campus conservatives in bad-faith debates. And no acknowledgement that perhaps Yale is not representative of higher ed writ large.

  In academic terms, this report sucks. Hard.

  

  Again: who is this report for? Not for professional cancel culture pushers, whose whole incentive is to keep manufacturing outrage and moral panics about picayune campus dramas. Not the Trump administration itself, which would never be mollified by a simple report when they’ve already been so successful in humiliating academia into submission. And certainly not for students, faculty, and alumni who want to defend their universities specifically and academic freedom as a principle. It’s unconvincing at best to critics and negatively activates would-be supporters.

  Subscribe now

The trust deficit in American media, institutions, and expertise didn’t come from nowhere. It was artificially accelerated by bad-faith actors and algorithm-driven outrage. But the Yale report did get one thing right, sort of: bad comms from elites have contributed to public distrust. An indulgent press release or tone-deaf profile here, an insider dinner or unsolicited white paper there— a steady trickle of insisting that they know best what the audience needs, even as the audiences are clearly rejecting what they’re pushing.

A lot of it was well-intentioned, or at least started out that way. Some of it was even objectively newsworthy (at least for a while). But all of it curdled because the communicator forgot that they weren’t the audience. The audience is the audience. Their vote matters most. And to reach them, you have to be ruthless about meeting them where they actually are, not where you think they should be.

“Why would anyone else care about this?” may sound harsh. But until that question becomes your North Star, the answer will likely remain “nobody, that’s who.”

Subscribe now

Not five minutes after Greg Sargent and I finished taping a podcast on the White House’s childish, idiotic Iran war spin, Greg texted: Trump had declared an extended ceasefire. Should we hop back on the Zoom for quick reactions?

Oh, brother:

This is TACO Tuesday, with all the toppings. This is the diplomatic equivalent of forgetting to write your term paper despite the teacher repeatedly reminding you about the deadline, so you make up a story about a dead grandparent to buy an extra few days to ChatGPT it. This is a tacit admission of what’s been obvious for weeks: that Trump’s stupid war of choice has, in fact, given Iran most of the leverage to control whatever happens next.

Reacting to breaking news with your Serious Pundit Persona is always a challenge, especially in the second Trump administration. The news from this White House is both so rapid-fire and so stupid that there’s a real temptation to second guess your gut reaction as you try to make sense of what the hell just happened. “Wait, they said… what?” is a valid reaction to a lot of what the Trump administration says and does! But alas, amused befuddlement with a side of genuine panic doesn’t play well in the take economy.1

Having 17 seconds or so to digest Trump’s ceasefire announcement before we started recording again, I was more or less able to articulate what a spectacular cop-out this statement is (listen and tell me what you think2). But here’s what I wish I’d said more clearly:

Read more

• The AI backlash is firmly here;

• Industry is mostly refusing to meaningfully engage with key criticisms (fair and unfair);

• Washington is paralyzed and unable to respond;

• These disconnects are rapidly widening the dissonance between AI marketing and audience trust.

  

As journalist Jasmine Sun recently wrote, recent attacks on Sam Altman are only the latest example of how AI’s populist backlash is officially here:

I define AI populism as a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted. They regard AI as a thing manufactured by out-of-touch billionaires and pushed onto an unwilling public to achieve sinister aims like “capitalist efficiency” (layoffs) and “population management” (surveillance). AI populists don’t really care whether ChatGPT is personally useful, or if Waymos eke out some safety gains: AI’s utility as a tool is immaterial relative to the unwelcome societal change it represents.

Arguably, this framing isn’t just restricted to populists: AI skepticism has become the median voter stance, and its manifestation is increasingly populist. As voters have limited leverage, their skepticism and anger around AI is emerging in the form of data center NIMBYism, state and local regulation based on backlash, and yes, at the extreme end, violent attacks on AI executives.

I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that the impacts of AI technology are uniformly bad, or that AI companies are evil. I consult with several AI companies. I use ChatGPT and Claude in my work and personal life. My husband is a data scientist. AI has changed my own life for the better in many ways. Like any game-changing technology, there’s a massive spectrum of AI applications, many of them positive. And as a national security pro, you don’t need to sell me on the potential risks of adversaries dominating AI supply chains and applications.

But brand is about trust. And the numbers are clear: huge swaths of the American public don't trust the technology, the companies, the applications, or the politicians promising to manage it responsibly.

From what I’m seeing, most AI companies are not prioritizing building trust with skeptical audiences. Their thinking, it seems, is that this is a liminal period to be ridden out. That the applications of their technology will become so ubiquitous and positive that they will sell themselves. That the priority is winning the AI race, and anything else is a distraction.

Some of this may turn out to be true. But none of it builds the trust and brand resiliency that any company, especially frontier technology, needs to succeed in a representative democracy.

It’s not a shock that AI policy events, full as they were of official Washington types and those trying to sell tech to them, almost all avoided the obvious, impolite questions: about negative public perceptions of AI technology, about how AI may supercharge abuses of power under Trump and his fellow global authoritarians, how different the vibes are now than during Big Tech’s glory days a decade ago. But the absence of those conversations, even on the sidelines, was striking to me. There was a big ol’ naked emperor crashing into the buffet table, yet we were all assiduously pretending he didn’t exist.

You don’t need to be a comms professional to see the backlash to AI is here. The question now is: can it be arrested?

Subscribe now

Read more

This is Trump’s Iran Hostage Crisis: only instead of Iran holding American diplomats, the IRGC is holding the global economy hostage.

And Trump has no plan for how to get us out of the crisis he made.

Subscribe now

Trump Primetime Address = Admission Things Aren’t Going Well

The primetime Presidential address is not a format where Donald Trump shines. There’s no crowd energy for him to feed from, no foes to dominate, no shouted questions and improvised answers to that send reporters scrambling over each other. He can’t really shout, dance, or make jokey asides, and his trademark “weaves” appear much weirder and out-of-place than they do in a back-and-forth with another person.

Trump much prefers Truth Social posts, impromptu Air Force One gaggles with a captive press pool, and answering the phone when random political reporters call him out of the blue. He’s an old man who doesn’t like staying up late, using a teleprompter, or situations where he’s alone in a spotlight, sans someone to spar with or deflect blame onto.

So when Trump accedes to the formality of making a primetime address to the nation, he’s not doing it because he has a great story to tell or product to sell. Someone has convinced him that his usual tools aren’t enough, or aren’t working. Just the scheduling of a Trump primetime address is a tacit admission that things are not going as planned.

But even by those lowered expectations, last night’s 19-minute Trump speech was a messaging disaster.

His team sold this as the big speech where he’d claim to have met all his Iran military objectives. Administration validators previewed a different speech than he wound up delivering, including heavily hinting that Trump would use the speech to put NATO on blast (he didn’t) or even threaten to leave the alliance (he didn’t).1

Instead, the obvious distance between his vague boasts and messy reality exposed Trump’s total lack of a strategy, cratering markets and sending even his most ardent defenders scrambling for other subjects to praise him over. There was nowhere left to hide, no other plan to preview, no secret briefing to roll out the next phase of operations. This was it. And it flopped.

Trump was low-energy, mumbling, face drooping, awkwardly reading the teleprompter without his usual bluster or swagger. For some reason, he didn’t even take the easy layup of starting with the historic Artemis II mission that had successfully lifted off mere hours before, whiffing the one recent, uncomplicated win for which he could plausibly claim credit.

If you’re confident in your message, you use the power of the Presidential bully pulpit. You get your team out to flood the zone. But Trump has no public events today. The White House isn’t briefing today. No one from his national security team is out today to have their boss’ back. After a brief press conference Tuesday morning (his first in over 10 days) Secretary Hegseth has again gone silent and there are no scheduled Pentagon press briefings. No Trump national security leaders went out on TV today to double-tap his message.

This is it: the big case to the American people. Yet there’s silence the day after his address.

Because, on some level, they know we’re not buying what they’re selling.

The Strait of Hormuz is Trump’s Iran Hostage Crisis

You don’t have to be military strategist to understand the fundamentals: the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump’s war, it’s closed now because of that war, and Iran has all the leverage for whatever comes next.

There is no U.S. plan for re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump admitted as much last night in his primetime address:

And in any event, when this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally. It will just open up naturally. They’re going to want to be able to sell oil because that’s all they have to try and rebuild. It will resume the flowing, and the gas prices will rapidly come back down. Stock prices will rapidly go back up.

This the President, speaking to the American people in primetime, pre-empting the evening’s programming to make his big pitch: it will just… happen.

That’s it. That’s the only plan. “It will just open up naturally.”

Here’s what’s really happening: Iran has learned it can turn the Strait of Hormuz into a global energy chokepoint (or “a controlled, permission-based maritime corridor” if you prefer a more technical term) and the world will adjust accordingly. The IRGC can’t unlearn knowledge of that leverage. U.S. allies have been clear that they will not commit their own forces to re-open the Strait by force, no matter how much Trump harangues them. So that’s it: this is the world we live in now.

The most charitable interpretation of Trump’s vagueness is that he’s deliberately leaving ambiguity around whether he’ll deploy U.S. troops to take Kharg Island or other Iranian territory in an effort to change the IRGC’s calculus. While CENTCOM planners are clearly readying that option, I didn’t hear any attempt last night to make the case for why such a hypothetical deployment could change the status quo — which, if this were a real consideration, you’d expect them to be laying the groundwork for. It’s the big Presidential primetime address on the war. When the hell else is he going to make that case, especially when the prospect of U.S. boots on the ground is already so unpopular?

Markets Finally Respond to Reality, Not Trump “Weaves”

Until last night, financial markets have generally responded like puppets on a string to Trump’s vague happy talk about a quick resolution to the war. But the market response to Trump’s primetime speech was… well:

Throughout Trump’s second term, markets have shown a remarkable willingness to take Trump at his unproven word. Until Trump, financial experts could generally expect that when a U.S. President spoke about market-moving events, he was doing so 1) in good faith (more or less), 2) with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and 3) not to deliberately manipulate markets to personally enrich himself and his inner circle. None of those benefits of the doubt actually apply to Trump, but he has benefitted hugely from them.

Until last night, markets have generally greeted Trump’s “two weeks or whatever” approach to everything from fixing health care costs to ending wars as if they were a seriously-considered policy announcements, not off-the-cuff riffs from a cognitively decompensating egomaniac. But the immediate spike in crude oil futures and Thursday morning market plunges did not follow this pattern.

Is this the beginning of the end of that trend? I’m personally skeptical: there is too much motivated reasoning at play. The market implications of essentially admitting that the emperor is buck naked and we’re stuck with him for another 2.5 years are too scary for most financial analysts to confront. But (rising gas prices at home + global energy shocks)no actual plan for ending it all is an equation even the most willfully obtuse analysts can’t ignore.

Claiming a Bunch of Little Wins and Hoping No One Notices

A classic comms tell that things aren’t going well: when someone can’t plausibly claim victory, they try to claim a lot of smaller wins and hope their audience can’t tell the difference.

Trump tried to talk around the reality of his Strait of Hormuz self-own by claiming other victories:

“In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before. Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them, terrorist regime they led, are now dead. Their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak. Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed, and their weapons, factories and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces. Very few of them left.”

This is all either false, irrelevant, or a combination of the two. Let’s take these one by one:

1. Trump took out the wrong Navy. It’s true that the U.S. has struck significant elements of the Iranian Navy. But it’s the IRCG, not the Iranian navy, that actually controls the Strait of Hormuz.

2. The Iranian Air Force has been strategically irrelevant for decades. Post-1979 sanctions turned Iran’s Air Force into a “flying museum,” and were actually a significant part of why the IRGC has invested so much into its ballistic missile program in the first place.

3. What’s worse than the old regime? The new regime. By every account, Iran’s new IRGC-backed leadership is even more hard-line and radicalized than their predecessors. Ayatollah Khamenei was 86 years old and ill when he was killed last month. His successor is decades younger, healthy, and emboldened by Trump and Netanyahu turning a simmering regional proxy conflict into an all-out existential war. The IRGC couldn’t dream of better propaganda than Trump using his big primetime address to say he will bomb Iran back to the Stone Age in the next 2-3 weeks. Trump is only bolstering the IRGC’s message to the Iranian people that they are defending their homeland, that the U.S. and Israel are the invaders.

   Meanwhile, some of those airstrikes Trump wants credit for are actually hitting Iranian officials trying to find diplomatic off-ramps. You don’t have to be an Iran expert or military strategist to see how this harms prospects for a diplomatic resolution.

4. Straight-up lies about decimating other Iranian capabilities. Without any evidence, there is no reason we should believe Trump’s claims that he has degraded the IRGC’s ability to launch drone and missile attacks. Not when Iran continues to attack Gulf infrastructure, target U.S. forces, and functionally paralyze neighbors’ airspace and economies. Even the extremely pro-Iran War Foundation for the Defense of Democracies admitted today that Iran is continuing to wreak havoc with missiles and drones, and is even becoming more effective:

   “Unlike the opening phase of the war, which began on February 28, when larger numbers of systems were often launched but with more uneven results, the strikes over the past few days demonstrated greater accuracy, repeatedly hitting airports, energy infrastructure, ports, and telecommunications hubs. The effectiveness of these attacks also increased, with more frequent infrastructure disruption, casualties, and damaging secondary effects from intercepted projectiles.”

Trying to Change the Story

Trump loves a good “you’re fired” moment: it’s not just a familiar reminder of a simpler time, it’s a reliable way to change unflattering headlines and make the DC political press pack chase a whole new story.

So, it’s not an accident that even before Trump’s primetime address, the White House leaked to CNN and the NYT that he was considering replacing Attorney General Pam Bondi with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, over her “mis-handling” the Epstein Files - and then, after oil futures started tanking during the speech, confirmed it to POLITICO Playbook, ensuring that all of Washington woke up to this headline instead of a review of his Iran speech:

Remember the last time the Trump White House tried to distract people with stories about DOJ and the Epstein files?

Yeah: things are so bad they’re trying to run that play again.

Avoiding the Base

A major theme last weekend’s CPAC annual conference was the generational MAGA split over Iran. Polling shows that fewer than half of self-identified MAGA voters under 35 believe Trump has a plan for Iran (compared to 70% over 35).

CPAC is a gathering of the most faithful, loyal MAGA base voters. Ground zero for Trump fandom. But this year, Trump skipped it. For the first time in over a decade. So did JD Vance, and Trump’s entire national security team.

They know how unpopular this war is with key elements of their base. But rather than face that criticism head-on and make their case for why this war, why now, they duck and hide from their own most fervent MAGA faithful.

The press hype over pro-Trump media figures like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly criticizing Trump’s Iran war has gotten a lot of attention, but is generally 1) overblown (reporters love to cover other “reporters”), and 2) mixes up the signal and the noise. These grifters don’t have a principled objection to Trump’s lack of strategy in Iran, or even to the possible deployment of US forces in another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict.

But what they do have is an understanding of where the populist, isolationist right-wing base lies on those issues, and how that base can be activated for clicks and profit. They see which way the wind is blowing, and are pivoting accordingly. Trump can see it, too— but has no one left to blame but himself.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Last night’s speech to the American people was a muddled mess, but the takeaway couldn’t be clearer: Donald Trump has no plan, beyond insisting his will be done, for what comes next in Iran. Gas is over $4 a gallon and Trump has no plan to bring it back down. The IRGC controls the Strait of Hormuz and has learned how to use that power. Trump voluntarily surrendered much of the leverage he started this war with, and has fundamentally altered the security calculus of the Middle East for the worse. He’s further trashed our alliances with European and Gulf allies. At least 13 American troops have been killed to date, and hundreds more injured.

Iran still has highly enriched uranium, and will take the lesson from this war that the only way to prevent a US-Israeli attack every 6-12 months is to build a nuclear weapon, stat.

Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. troops remain ready to deploy into an open-ended occupation of Kharg Island or other Iranian territory, even as Trump has declared victory is at hand. The U.S. will feel the mission readiness implications of these deployments for years, especially in the Indo-Pacific. Xi and Putin could not be happier.

If this Trump’s definition of victory, I’d hate to know what he thinks defeat looks like.

I can hear the groans from all my male and national security nerd subscribers. Hi, guys! How’s that patriarchy thing working out for you? Have you placed your bets— ahem, “prediction market investments” —on when Trump will nuke Iran? No? Well, buckle up; we’re talking about high control religions! Also, coffee enemas!

Occasionally, I encounter a piece of culture that all the smarty-pants folks in my life dismiss but that I receive as a Rosetta Stone. I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of these are about and marketed towards women. As a national security professional, I’ve been professionally socialized to prioritize male-coded tropes as my baseline. To shun anything coded as unserious or frivolous.

But lately, I’ve been struggling with well-intentioned smarty-pants types trying to understand Trump’s strategy vis-à-vis… well, anything. Iran, for example. Greenland. Cuba. Russia. Bringing down the cost of living.

Why would you presume there’s a strategy at play? I ask them. Where’s the evidence for that? Why grant that premise when he’s making it all up as he goes along, responding primarily to flattery and personal gain?

These are stupid times. We need a stupid framework to understand them. Why would we presume that Clausewitz explains how Trump operates better than a Hulu reality TV show?

Trump is an ex-reality TV star who, as many others have already noted, governs like an ex-reality TV star. Despite his obvious cognitive decline, Trump still has a razor-sharp ability to craft a soundbite, dominate news cycles, and bend traditional media to his will. American politics and policymaking in 2026 are therefore driven not by institutions, data, or consensus, but by personal whims, loyalty tests, outrage-bait, and viral made-for-TV moments.

Watching MAGA tear itself apart over loyalty tests, accusations of antisemitism, and in-group gossip that’s for some reason being treated as legitimate news, it feels like the world has become one gigantic reality TV franchise, forcing us all to care about the petty squabbles of terrible people— the only difference being, there are actually real-world stakes to this drama.

This is all deeply reality TV-coded, right down to the obvious Mar-a-Lago face:

Reality TV is the art form that most defines 21st-century America. And The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is its apotheosis.

The show famously rose out of the TikTok sensation #MomTok, the group of attractive, mostly white, young Mormon moms in suburban Utah who started making dancing videos in 2020. An eventual “soft-swinging scandal” (don’t worry, you don’t need to know about it) and its fallout made a reality show the inevitable next step: who doesn’t want to see young women grinding all over every virgin/whore trope in American culture? And there’s a chance someone’s weave will get pulled out during a catfight? Sign us up!

Like most popular art marketed to women, TSLOMW is generally sneered at by serious tastemakers. And to be clear, this show is not trying to be high art. Like most reality TV, it’s campy, over-produced, and uncreatively filmed. The audience is invited to mock the cast: their Botox-frozen faces, their failed relationships with mediocre men, the high-pitched “OMIGOD, you look so cuuute!” that accompanies any time two or more of them meet in public.

Bro culture is seemingly ascendant, from the White House X feed to Twitch streams, and pulls serious media coverage analyzing its role in our current political culture. Sports gambling gets the Atlantic longform treatment. Joe Rogan’s criticisms of Trump’s Iran war are discussed alongside those from actual heads of state. We have ample female-coded terms for body dysmorphia, plastic surgery addiction, etc. but for bros it gets rebranded as “looksmaxxing.”

Yet it’s actually TSLOMW that’s key to understanding much of contemporary American culture: our inherent contradictions, our go-to tropes, our heroes, villains, and enforcers. What happens when high-control religion, misogyny, and late-stage capitalism meet in a potent (but virgin) cocktail. What happens when our social media personalities become such strong brands that they shape our real lives. And what happens when the cost of balancing all those contradictions becomes too great to bear.

Seriously: show me another piece of popular American culture today that explicitly talks about smashing the patriarchy (while also throwing a party for a line of hair extensions). Show me contemporary art where groups of women are having (messy, imperfect) conversations with one another about their mental health, their faith, and having higher standards for their partners. Show me art that grapples with what it means to challenge the institutions that shaped you, but still care deeply about whether they recognize the work you do to uphold them.

The NFL could never.1 Just saying.

TSLOMW is about a highly individualistic, uniquely American subculture. Its cast regularly customize their sodas, their religion, and their bodies, but are viciously punished for violating all sorts of unspoken, ever-changing rules. It’s a place where increased awareness of mental health issues morphs into TikTok therapy-speak, and what happens when truly terrible men learn to weaponize that.2 Where fathers, husbands, and boyfriends try to control the women in their lives — and when they fail, how they shame and humiliate them.

It’s about race: how majority-white cultural institutions are built to otherize their nonwhite members, never fully welcoming them even as they perform inclusivity. It’s about purity culture, an approach to adult sexuality that’s simultaneously prudish and weirdly titilated, and how that screws up both women and men.

Like all reality shows, TSLOMW is exploitative and messy. It also has moments of pathos and humanity. This is a reality TV show that features a heavily pregnant young woman tearfully reckoning with surviving childhood sexual abuse, while also inviting the audience to make fun of her obvious lip fillers. It’s grotesque. It’s blunt. It’s America.

And, of course, it’s a show about how women’s invisible labor holds the whole shebang together. How women, especially white women, participate in their own oppression. How they compete with one another in artificially scarce environments, blocked from meaningful structural changes that would help them (unions, paid parental leave, reliable child care, unrestrained access to reproductive health care). How women still manage to find community and fellowship despite those constraints. And, inevitably, how that community becomes commodified.

You don’t have to like reality TV to appreciate TSLOMW as a mirror of American culture. You can be grossed out by the obvious producer manipulation, casual misogyny, and eerily similar barrel curls. If you watch this show, you will inevitably yell at your television over things both little3 and huge4. I’m on the fourth season, but still can’t tell Demi and Jessi apart without chyrons.

And yeah, do I still feel gross and shallow binging a reality show about women being set up to yell at one another when ICE is still rampaging across American cities, Trump’s inner circle is blatantly making bank off crypto scams, and mothers across the Middle East are huddling in bomb shelters with their children? You betcha!

But I also remind myself that pop culture makes space for the sacred and profane in the same art. I ask how much of my knee-jerk reaction is my own internalized misogyny. I ask how many of the men frittering away hours and incomes on other men chasing a ball around a field feel similar embarrassment. And I note how little mass culture we actually have that openly interrogates the patriarchy, capitalism, purity culture, and religion: the systems that shape so much of modern American life.

Mormon Culture and the Rise of Independent Media/Creator Class

There’s a fascinating parallel in how the Wives came up through TikTok and MAGA/Trump’s embrace of direct-to-consumer media helped both phenomena build their own media ecosystems, eventually shaping traditional U.S. media around them. Both Trump and the Wives built their core audiences by communicating directly with them, allowing audiences to build parasocial relationships with them and their brands outside of mainstream media as a filter.

Their approach to brand-building can be viewed as part of a larger tradition of Christian (both evangelical and LDS) publishing and direct-to-consumer media. Mainstream media typically ignores the lucrative Christian media market, even though 60% of American adults engage with Christian content at least once a week. Midcentury evangelical figures like James Dobson, Marabel Morgan (author of The Total Woman, over 10 million copies sold), and Bill Gothard all began their careers pushing DTC seminars, tapes, and pamphlets: the 20th century equivalent of building a TikTok following from the ground up. Donald Trump similarly built a brand of DTC seminars, branded products (steaks, universities, etc.), and books, which helped him establish brand resiliency and a core audience outside of mainstream media coverage.

The mainstream media reaction to Trump coming down that infamous escalator - where’d THAT come from? - rhymes with the disgust that many media tastemakers have for popular social media influencers in 2026. And in both cases, tastemakers who denied that disruptive, outsider power only rendered themselves obsolete.

The second Trump administration feels like a reality show because that’s what the people running it know. Cabinet meetings resemble the Wives coming together for a filmed party, everyone obediently fawning over one another for the cameras, even as we all know these bitches can’t stand each other. Meetings with world leaders become viral moments of confrontation. Watching JD Vance berate Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last spring, I was uncomfortably reminded of Taylor Frankie Paul’s terrible stepdad slut-shaming her at a family BBQ:

@doseofmorningchismeThis scene with #TaylorFrankiePaul and her family… HAD ME FLOORED 🚨#taylorfrankiepauldrama #SecretLivesOfMormonWives #slomw #secretlivesofmormonwiveshulu #secretlivesofmormonwivesseasontwo #slomwseason2

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

But even beyond these obvious parallels, TSLOMW is capturing deeper truths about American culture in 2026.

Double Consciousness and “Authenticity”

Season 3 was largely about the cast’s evolving relationship to their fame: openly talking about how their lives have changed because of the show, and showing the business side of filming and promoting a cultural phenomenon. These are regular people, making catty comments at a baby shower! the show promises. But look, they’re also on Kimmel!

TSLOMW is an extreme version of the public self/private self dichotomy that any person with an online presence experiences in 2026. Theirs is a modern double consciousness, a 21st-century echo of W.E.B. DuBois’ famous definition:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

DuBois, of course, was writing about the particular double-consciousness of Black Americans, “always looking at one’s self through the eyes” of the racist white society around them, and “measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt.” But it’s also a useful lens for thinking about how social media changes our expectations of ourselves and our communities.

After all, the Wives were TikTok stars first, crafting online avatars that played with tropes like “relatable” and “MILF” for likes and sponsorships. Taylor Frankie Paul is both a real person and played a character called “Taylor Frankie Paul” long before she signed a Hulu contract or became the next Bachelorette.

TSLOMW is now an Ouroboros of social media performance and fame: these women are now forever trapped in reaction to their own online avatars, and how their lives have been upended. One of the inherent tensions of the show is how long they’ll be able to stay on certain pedestals (wife, mother, Mormon, virgin/whore) before inevitably getting knocked down through hubris, divorce, infidelity, visible aging, or other violations.

If there’s one consistent throughline in 2024 postmortems and midterm/2028 lookaheads, it’s the quest for authenticity. “Authenticity” means not actually being real (whatever that means), but performing reality, across multiple platforms, with a wink at the inherent artifice of it all. You have to show the construction and the artifice of the whole thing even as you’re benefiting from it.

It’s Schrodinger’s Authenticity: you have to operate within the system, whether it’s reality television or electoral politics, while also somehow transcending it.

If this sounds confusing and impossible… well, yeah! That’s kind of the point. Making it impossible to be “authentic” is a great way to keep out people who could challenge or upend the status quo.

Because who gets to be “authentic?” Donald Trump? Graham Platner? It’s a hell of a lot harder for women, for people of color, for LGBT+ people, for disabled or neurodivergent people. And it’s hard for people, like the Wives, who still yearn to be validated by the systems and institutions they sprang from, even as they push against them.

A frequent SLOMW feud-starter is that a cast member is being fake or dishonest. These women regularly show up to conversations with one another armed with digital receipts and carefully collected HUMINT, laying verbal traps to expose minor fibs or face-saving white lies as if they were interrogating suspected sleeper agents. Cast meetings are convened for the cameras, where women go around the room making various accusations and demonstrating shifting alliances like an especially contentious NATO meeting (if members were all wearing going-out tops with cutouts in odd places and half the PermReps were visibly pregnant).

“I wanted to have my facts straight,” Jessi tells the camera before confronting Demi about the exact circumstances of her dalliance with and/or assault by Marciano.5 What, do you not also regularly make your girlfriends take lie detector tests?

But the joke for the audience, of course, is that all these women are incredibly fake. Their identical mermaid hair extensions, their acrylic nails, and their obvious Botox and fillers are frequently maintained on camera. Salt Lake City has more plastic surgeons per capita than Los Angeles. The whole thing is a reality show: so the audience knows it’s not real.

And yet, the accusation of fakeness stings because of this double consciousness. The women bristle when accused of fakery and celebrate “authenticity” because they know deep down it’s the ultimate prize they’ll never win. Their fame is conditional on this inherent tension between their public performance of self, of womanhood, of cultural Mormonism, and whatever their messy reality actually is.

This quest for the performance of authenticity, surrounded by so much blatant fakery, is modern America in a nutshell. What is politics if not the performance of authenticity, in blatantly inauthentic circumstances?

Women and The Ambition Trap

Read more

We also get into how both the Trump administration and the Iranian regime may be thinking about their next steps, and how this war could continue to unfold (spoiler: it could get so, so, so much worse).

Dr. Ariane Tabatabai is a Public Service Fellow at the Lawfare Institute. She served in the Biden administration at State and the Pentagon, including on the U.S. delegation negotiating a return to the Iran deal, and before that spent years in academia and think tanks. Dr. Tabatabai is the author and co-author of two books on Iran: No Conquest, No Defeat on the history of Iran’s security policies and Triple Axis — Iran’s Relations with Russia and China. She is on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and folks can read her current work on the Lawfare website and listen to their podcasts.

Q: As an Iran expert, how would you grade U.S. and global media coverage of Trump’s war? Coincidentally, you’re overseas right now in Asia: are you seeing global media covering this war differently than U.S. media?

Let’s say a B+. I will start with this: Covering Iran is always hard, and covering this conflict is even more challenging. Most of our media outlets don’t have a presence in Iran and have not had one in nearly half a century. So, they often have to rely on folks who may have family, friends, or connections there (Iranian-American journalists) or reporters based elsewhere in the region. This makes covering a country and really getting a feel for it very difficult.

In the current environment, the press has the added challenge of a disrupted flow of information: the regime in Iran has been shutting down the internet since the protests in January (and now with the conflict) to make sure the populace doesn’t receive information and that the world can’t get information about what’s going on there unless it is channeled through the regime.

The Iran problem-set can be a divisive political issue, and has been for the entirety of the Iranian regime’s existence. There are very strong (often emotionally-charged) views on different sides of the various pieces of it, including the nuclear program, domestic politics, etc. Considering the constraints I just laid out, I think a number of reporters do a solid job. But there are always shortfalls, and we’re seeing them now.

Finally, the obstacles are unfortunately not just limited to Iran: The administration has made it harder for reporters to do their jobs in Washington, as well. For example, the Pentagon is not doing press briefings as regularly as it used to under previous administrations. The credentialed reporters of the Pentagon press corps are now replaced by conspiracy theorists and right-wing influencers after refusing to sign onto the administration’s rules governing how they report on the Department. And the political leadership in the Pentagon is tightly controlling the flow of information from the uniformed side of the house.

First, there’s simply too much going on. In a normal world, the conflict in Iran and its regionalization are all we would be talking about. We’ve already had six U.S. Service members lose their lives, our embassies are getting hit by Iranian drones and missiles, and there are reports that we may have hit an Iranian primary school, killing dozens of kids. And, yes, it’s all being covered, but fighting for headlines with what’s going on at the Department of Homeland Security and dozens of other things. That means media outlets simply haven’t had the bandwidth to dig into what’s going on with Iran beyond the major events of the conflict.

Second, and this is true beyond Iran coverage: there’s too much framing around what administration officials say, versus what’s actually happening. I have a live example pulled up on my phone as we speak: “Hegseth Says America Has ‘No Shortage’ of Munitions.” This framing is never helpful, much more so when we know that the administration has gone back and forth in its claims and been far from forthcoming on what its stated objectives are, whether this is even a war, and what’s the plan from here.

This is true on the other side too: media outlets (I should be specific here, international media outlets, because I think it’s less a U.S. media problem than an international one) quote Iranian regime sources saying they hit X U.S. target. This is a regime with a proven track record of lies and propaganda. Reporters can certainly talk about what its officials think they are doing, but shouldn’t be framing stories around what that regime says, because that helps advance Iranian propaganda and disinformation— or, at a minimum, floods the information environment with misinformation. For example, Iran has now falsely claimed multiple times that it struck the USS Abraham Lincoln, yet that claim still gets reported in some places as fact despite CENTCOM’s denials.

Third: For the love of God, can we stop relying on folks with disastrous policy track records to provide expert commentary on issues because they held senior roles? Or perhaps we should have some indication of their prior positions on relevant issues? For example, if John Bolton is going to be on the nightly news all the time, can we have the anchor introduce, alongside his prestigious titles, that he advocated for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, which helped set us on the path to this moment? Or his role in the Iraq War?

Lastly, I’ll throw in one more item: I know our media is desperate for Iranian voices because it doesn’t have access to them. I’m glad reporters want to hear from the people impacted most and care to highlight their perspectives. But too often they just ask those of us who have Iranian heritage to serve as those voices, and that gets tricky. Using my own example: I am Iranian-American, but I wasn’t born there, I don’t live there, and I haven’t been to Iran in well over a decade (and that’s more recent than many). I am a national security nerd, so I can talk about specific security and defense issues. But I cannot speak for 92 million people in Iran.

When I have been asked those kinds of questions, I’ve tried to reflect the range of views that I think exist and caveated my response with “there are 92 million Iranians with very different views.” I think those caveats should always frame any quotes from one or a few individuals commenting on the situation in Iran, but they often don’t. Someone will be given the benefit of the doubt that they indeed can speak for 92 million people because they have a parent who was born there or an Iranian last name.

I’ve been in Singapore since the conflict started, where I have seen a lot of reporting from international media played on TV and radio (U.S., UK, and Australian). Since I sadly don’t speak any of the languages of Singapore, I can’t tell how they’re covering things internally (and Singapore does not have a particularly exemplary press freedom track record). But the UK reporting in particular has been quite good.

Q: What’s the biggest thing missing in the Iran press coverage you’re seeing? What are we not talking about that we should be talking about?

First, I wish folks covered the bureaucratic politics of it all: it is clear that there was no real plan for this conflict, and its execution has had glaring gaps (for example, that apparently no one considered whether we’d need to evacuate Americans from the region until the conflict was well underway). The Iranian response was predictable and had indeed been predicted for years. The things we needed to do to prepare the environment were knowable knowns. I trust the teams I worked with in government and the intelligence community to make those assessments and recommendations.

But the political team in this administration doesn’t appear to be seriously engaging the career workforce and many of the individuals in key roles in this administration are out of their depth.

At the Department of Defense, Hegseth rolled back Biden-era work to include civilian harm mitigation and response into its planning. This administration sees that as frivolous, but it’s strategically wise to minimize civilian harm (in addition to it being the right thing to do). When we inadvertently harm civilians, we give the Iranian regime (as well as other adversaries like Russia and China) talking points. I think it’s important the American people get those stories, so they know why a career workforce in government matters.

Second, and this may seem contradictory to what I just said, the media has been framing the conflict around the President too much—and this is, of course, true beyond the Iran issue where we have a personalist coverage of the President. That’s an important element, and as citizens and voters we need to know how our elected officials are thinking, what they say they’re doing, and what they are actually doing. But because Trump takes up so much room, there’s less space left for the stories of the people on the ground: the U.S. Service members and diplomats in the line of fire, the Iranian people who are seeing their schools and hospitals go up in smoke, and the millions of people in the rest of the region who are seeing missiles and drones destroy their infrastructure and damage their economy. The real human cost of this conflict is taking a bit of a backseat to the White House interest piece. As are the policy pieces of it all.

Third, Trump decided to launch these combined attacks with Israel just weeks after doing the same in Venezuela and after threatening to invade Greenland. There’s an unsettling picture that has emerged about what his foreign policy looks like in his second term, and I don’t think I’ve seen enough reporting connecting all these dots, and the costs of this erratic use of force.

Last but not least, what happens next? Reporters, especially in the White House press corps, are doing a good job grilling the administration on its plans for Iran, but there needs to be more reporting on that as well. The administration (and Congress) need to keep having to answer to American people so they feel the pressure to get this right (as much as it is possible now that we are here).

Q: You’re in a ton of group chats and policy discussions with other foreign policy and national security experts that the rest of the world isn’t privy to. Can you give us a sense of what those chats are like right now? What are the experts most worried about and where do they think this is all heading?

If I had to use one word to describe the general sentiment in most of my group chats it’d be “whiplash.” Just a few days ago, we were all talking about Greenland, before that it was Venezuela. Now it’s Iran and maybe Cuba. But also, there’s the continued fracturing of the transatlantic relationship, ongoing boat strikes in the Caribbean, etc. Many of us were trained to be deliberate and take our time to think things through, but everything is happening all the time, all at once.

Q: It’s obviously been impossible for U.S. journalists to report from Iran for several years, and the Iranian regime has blocked the Internet during both recent protests and now again during Trump’s war. How do you get trusted information from the ground in Iran in real-time? Who should people be reading, watching, following?

That’s right: it’s become extremely hard to get information on what’s going on in Iran, and that’s by design by the regime. I read a lot of international press even outside of following developments in Iran, and given that they often have more access to the country, I’ve found their reporting useful. For example, the BBC (which also has a Persian-language arm and a lot of in-house expertise) can be a helpful source. Many other European outlets that have English-language coverage (Deutschewelle in Germany and Le Monde and Le Figaro in France to name a few) offer perspectives that can be lacking in U.S. media. Some of the analysts who do open source work for example tracking ships, satellite imagery, etc also cover interesting pieces of the puzzle (NPR does a good job highlighting those). I also follow individual reporters on Bluesky (Laura Jedeed, Marisa Kabas, Geoff Brumfiel, Julian Borger, Sune Engel Rasmussen, Dan Lamothe, to name a few).

Q: This war is asymmetric in some key ways: 1) this is an existential issue for the Iranian regime, but not for the U.S., and 2) Iranian drones are far cheaper, more numerous, and prolific than U.S. defensive batteries. As a security expert, what does that tell you about how this war will evolve and how it could eventually be ended?

The Iranian regime has built out its whole national security strategy around asymmetry precisely because it lacks the conventional (and nuclear) capabilities to match the United States and its allies and partners.

The analogy or historical precedent I’ve used a lot is that of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War where Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution for what he thought would be a quick operation that would let him annex an oil-rich province of Iran where there is an Arab population. Iran was just fresh off a revolution that had toppled the monarchy, bringing to power a cohort of clerics and guérilla fighters with no experience in governance. The new regime was also in the middle of the hostage crisis with the United States.

Instead, what followed was an eight-year, brutal conflict, where hundreds of thousands died on both sides. And the Tanker Wars wreaked havoc on commercial shipping in the region. There are echoes of that in what we’re seeing today.

And while I am not suggesting we’ll be at war for eight years or that Saddam’s Iraq is comparable to the United States today, I can’t entirely rule out that this conflict won’t drag on for a while whether the Trump administration wants it or not. Once you start a conflict, the adversary also gets a vote, and so does chance - to make a quick Clausewitz reference.

We’re already seeing the first phase of the Iranian response to the conflict play out: the wave of missile and drone attacks, and the targeting of U.S. bases and embassies, Gulf energy and tourism infrastructure that are at the hearts of those countries’ economies, and Israel of course.

I can’t begin to imagine how this conflict may end, so I don’t know that I have a good answer to that question. In part because I don’t know what the administration wants to achieve. It changes the goalposts seemingly with each press briefing. I also don’t know what I don’t know in terms of what we might be picking up in the intel, how the situation might evolve on the ground, etc.

There’s a spectrum of possibilities, some better than others. Sure, we could see a democratic and free Iran—that’s one scenario. But we could also see total chaos and instability for a long time. And there’s a strong possibility of continuity: the institutions of the Islamic Republic remain in place (at least for now). If the deceased Supreme Leader’s son (Mojtaba Khamenei) replaces him as is reported, it’ll just be a variation of the same corrupt, brutal dictatorship. But President Trump has also indicated we’re going to keep hitting successors to these key posts. So it’s not clear to me where everyone will be when the music stops,or how many chairs will be left in the room.

Q: Presumably at some point there will be a diplomatic off-ramp so that Trump can declare victory. What do you think that could look like? And in what ways will Iran and the broader region be changed if/when there is a diplomatic end to this conflict?

Here, too, it all depends on what the administration’s objectives are. Those are not clear to me since we’ve heard them talk about using force initially to stop the mass murder of protesters in January, then to roll back the nuclear program (there was also discussion of the nuclear program), and then somehow it was connected to Iranian interference in the elections in 2020 and 2024. Trump also indicated he wants to create the environment for regime change or at least substantial changes within the regime.

If the goal is regime change, then I don’t see diplomatic off-ramps. But if it’s to change regime behavior, there could be a series of negotiations on different issues of concern: nuclear, proxies, human rights, etc. If we get to that point, the administration would need to closely consult with regional partners, as well as allies.

An added challenge is that the negotiating team led by Special Envoy Witkoff is simply not equipped to handle these complex issues. We have seen reporting that Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who led the negotiations for the United States, didn’t fully understand the issues on the table, which makes sense since these are complicated technical nuclear and sanctions-related issues.

Q: Given where all this is right now, what could success look like in Iran? And what’s your personal worst-case scenario?

My worst-case scenario is a civil conflict that not only throws the country into chaos, but also spills over into neighboring countries. There is reporting indicating that the U.S.and/or the Israelis might be using the Kurds as a proxy, and that Israel may be seeking the partition of Iran (versus creating the environment for regime change). The ripple effects here would be tremendous: economically, in terms of security, and of course from the perspective of human life.

Let’s end with the best possible outcome: we conclude these combat operations with relatively few casualties, and somehow secure a transitional government that holds free and fair elections (what that looks like is obviously the kind of work I hope our former colleagues in the interagency are doing). We’d need to work closely with like-minded nations to hold that transitional government accountable and on track. Next, leader(s) emerge from within who are committed to putting the country on a path toward freedom and democracy, ceasing hostilities with their neighbors, and resuming decent relations with the U.S. It’s what the Iranian people deserve, having fought for almost 50 years and lost many lives to reach that goal.

Subscribe now

But now that the hawks got their wish and Trump has started his war with Iran, it’s worth exploring how the messy, awkward, and frankly weird comms around its rollout deviated from the normal ways that a normal Presidential administration would explain to the American people why we’re going to war, what success looks like, and what we can all expect.

You likely missed it, but in the flurry of reporting over the weekend about how Trump decided to (illegally, without even the pretense of a justification) attack Iran, there’s a big story buried in the subtext: much of Trump’s own inner circle doesn’t support his Iran war.

Or, at the very least, they think it will end badly and are trying to protect themselves from the fallout.

Exhibit A: Immediate CYA in Mainstream Political Press

Less than 12 hours after the bombs started dropping, key members of the Trump national security team were making clear in The Atlantic that they tried to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran:

In the days leading up to the attacks, some of Trump’s most senior advisers, including Vice President Vance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, and the senior Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, expressed reservations about the operation. Caine in particular was unsure as to whether air strikes alone would be enough to undermine the regime, and he privately warned about how complicated any move against Iran would be, according to two U.S. officials who were among those who spoke with us, on the condition of anonymity, about Trump’s decision making and the debates within the administration.

This is Washington-Speak for I SWEAR I THOUGHT THIS WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA DON’T BLAME ME.

But wait, there’s more!

Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the architect of his political comeback in 2024, did not offer a personal position on the wisdom of the strikes, according to a person familiar with the conversations. But in an effort to make sure the president was fully informed, she did present him with concerns about the unpredictable consequences of an attack. She also organized a conversation about the importance of following through on the promises he’d made during his presidential campaign about avoiding new foreign wars. Republican midterm strategists, many of whom gathered in Florida for meetings this weekend, have grown anxious about Trump’s foreign military adventures turning off voters who want their leaders to focus on the economy.

As we’ve talked about before, if Susie Wiles’ personal opinion makes it into mainstream press 99% of the time it’s an authorized leak. This reads to me like a message from Wiles to Republican powerbrokers that she is mindful of their concerns about the economy, cost of living, and not starting foreign wars that will be at the forefront of midterm voters’ minds. The subtext: I, Susie Wiles, haven’t forgotten what really matters. Just let me manage this episode, and we’ll get back on track.

This Atlantic article understandably got buried in the flurry of reporting on Saturday, but it really bears footstomping: literally the same day that Trump started this war, his Vice President, Chief of Staff, Pentagon policy lead, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs were all trying to distance themselves from it.

Trump court politics require that they all eventually play their parts and publicly support his war, which they’re already doing. But these comments are a signal to their future clients, donors, think tank hosts, and fellow dinner party guests (i.e., people who read The Atlantic): I always thought this was fucked, but nobody could tell him no. What more could I have done?

Exhibit B: Sunday Show No-Show

Trump administration leaders were notably absent from the March 1 Sunday show circuit, more than 24 hours after Trump’s middle-of-the-night speech announcing the start of combat operations. Normally, when an administration has a big policy rollout or is trying to robustly defend itself against a bad PR cycle, it will send its best spokespeople out to make its case on the Sunday show circuit.

The purpose of Sunday shows in 2026 isn’t to drive ratings (which are low), break news (which this administration does on Truth Social and other owned platforms), or to reach their base audiences (who don’t tune in). You go on a Sunday show to set the agenda of what constitutes “normal” or “conventional wisdom” in U.S. politics, and to shape the Overton Window of respectable political conversation. The interviews are usually fairly safe and full of predictable questions.

And it’s not like the White House didn’t have the messengers ready. The White House held a press background briefing on Saturday, which a source familiar told me was headlined by Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff. So, if you’re the White House and you feel confident having these three officials speaking on background with the entire Washington press corps, then why not put them on the Sunday shows to make the case directly?

Answer: because those men didn’t want to defend this war on camera just then, and figured out a way to squirm out of it.

Exhibit C: Muted, Conflicting Responses from 2028 Contenders

Both Vance and Rubio understand how unpopular a war with Iran is with key elements of MAGA’s base. Vance is at heart an isolationist, and Rubio is a WestHem guy. As they both position themselves for 2028, neither of them wants to spend down political capital on an open-ended conflict with Iran, particularly when it’s likely to spiral in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

Days after operations against Iran started, Vance and Rubio’s X feeds have virtually no original content on Iran operations. Neither of them posted anything celebrating the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, as they did for Maduro’s capture (Vance, Rubio). Neither of them has commented on the loss of U.S. servicemembers, or attacks on U.S. military and diplomatic facilities.

When Vance and Rubio both finally did on camera, on-the-record interviews about Iran on Monday, they were not singing from the same sheet of music. Vance insisted to FOX News’ Jesse Waters in a softball interview that the timing was entirely about Iran’s nuclear capability. But earlier that afternoon, Rubio had told reporters at the Capitol that the timing was precipitated by Israel and the purpose was to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile capability. His topper mentioned nothing about Iran’s potential nuclear capabilities.

These conflicting responses tell us a lot. There’s no agreed-upon military objective. The administration can’t or won’t make a consistent case as to why it attacked Iran now, and what the specific threat to U.S. interests was. And that Trump’s most trusted advisors, the people who any President needs to be honest and forthright with him as he makes consequential national security decisions, are more focused on protecting their own political futures than giving him sound advice.

Exhibit D: Contrasting Messages from the Pentagon

On Sunday someone at the Pentagon briefed Congressional staff that, per CNN:

Iran was not planning to strike US forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked Iran first, undercutting the administration’s argument Saturday that Tehran was planning to potentially strike the US preemptively and posed an imminent threat…

The briefers pointed to Iran’s ballistic missile program and proxy forces as evidence that they posed a threat to US forces in the region, but sources noted that has been true for years and did not support the administration’s argument that the US needed to attack Iran first.

Spin Class Rule™: If you want something to be public with no fingerprints, brief it to Congress. It’ll get leaked faster than the toilets on an aircraft carrier that hasn’t been allowed to dock for maintenance in eight months.

The Hill brief was a clever way for Pentagon officials to get out a contrasting narrative that, they hope, may allow some of them to preserve a shred of dignity or credibility when all this is done. It was only necessary because the second Trump administration has ruthlessly purged dozens of admirals and generals for the supposed crime of disloyalty, or providing an unwelcome response when asked for assessments or advice.

This has created a chilling effect across the Pentagon, where it’s clear: to say no, or to be seen as saying no, will cost you your job. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been trained and invested in for decades, so that you can be ready to give an honest answer when the Commander-in-Chief asks for your best military advice. If anything, that’s likely more of a danger to you.

We should all be terrified that Trump has purged military leadership who can tell him even “this may not work” or “if you do X, then Y may happen.” It means that the only people he’s hearing from as he launches an open-ended war with Iran, without a clear justification, objective, or even a day-after plan, are yes-men and sycophants.

And still, at least some of them, if their Hill briefings are any indication, believe different things than they’re telling the President directly.

Also, just some fun gossip about the Pentagon’s Monday press conference with Hegseth and General Caine: a source familiar told Spin Class that the invite originally went out only to the new school of Pentagon “reporters” on Sunday. The actual Pentagon press corps requested to attend and were initially denied, until 1) the pool refused to send a camera to cover the event unless they joined, and 2) someone at the Pentagon realized that many of the new “reporters” were unable to attend given the late notice, meaning that Hegseth and Caine would be speaking to a mostly empty room.

Speaking of clowns:

Exhibit E: That Mar-a-Lago War Room Photo

Someone in the Trump White House photo office is secretly in the Resistance.

I’m semi-serious here. What other explanation is there for this being the official White House photograph documenting the start of Trump’s Iran war?

Why blur out the decals on the back of the phones but not the map of U.S. military assets? Why not crop it to hide the open top, conveniently letting any of the foreign intelligence assets who surely comprise every Mar-a-Lago staff position overhear real-time decision-making from the Commander-in-Chief? Why highlight the open drapes, with someone peeking in as if asking the attendant to retrieve a jacket from coat check? Good Lord.

I won’t even say anything about his makeup, because it’s not kind to be mean about sick old men.

Predictably, Trump is getting absolutely roasted for yet again conducting such sensitive national security operations from an unclassified soft target. Mar-a-Lago is so vulnerable that an armed lone gunman was able to break into its secure perimeter less than a week before Trump launched a war on Iran from his SCIF blanket fort.

Joking aside, this photo actually represents something important to understand about Trump’s inner circle. He clearly thought this photo was badass, and so his team released it. Yet another indicator that he has systematically weeded out anyone capable of telling him “that’s not a good idea.” Instead, Trump is surrounded by people who can’t or won’t tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. They will publicly defend things that they privately worry about. They will lie to all of us in order to protect their jobs from his wrath.

Look, every spokesperson, myself included, has had to go out and sell things we personally had doubts about. The difference is that in a normal administration, the inner circle typically has the opportunity to debate a course of action before the President decides what to do. When I was in the White House, I could go out and defend hard things publicly because I’d been part of good-faith debates among a team that didn’t always agree but shared a common purpose: bring the President stress-tested options that clearly outline the costs and risks for any proposed action.

That’s clearly not happening in Trump 2: it’s his way, or the highway. Which means he may not be getting relevant information, because people fear the professional consequences of delivering it to him.

That’s hard for journalists to cover, but important for audiences to understand. By reading the subtext of what’s not being said, what’s not being done, and how official spin contrasts with the undercurrent of ass-covering and conflicting narratives floating around Washington this week, we can see more clearly: there is no plan. There is no justification. There are only Trump’s whims, and the fallout that may hit the rest of us.

What I’m watching for next, after the paywall:

Read more

• Why aren’t Dems studying how Israel/Gaza impacted 2024 voters (+relevant given new reporting from Axios that the DNC buried their election postmortem over this)

• “You’re a Pirate who keeps trying to join the Navy”

• How to read political news like a comms pro

More personal Spin Class posts, including my reflections on being named on a Trump enemies list and having my security clearance yanked by the Director of National Intelligence, are paywalled. If you’re able to upgrade to a paid subscription, Spin Class is only $50/year and less than $5/month. Any way you’re here, I’m glad you’re here.

“No matter what happens, it’s not like you can get reparations on lost girlhood innocence.”

It’s been public for several years that Michigan’s Interlochen Arts Camp, where both my younger sister and I spent many summers, had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He went there as a teenage camper himself, studying bassoon in 1967. As reporting on Epstein’s crimes picked up after his first arrest, and more in the #MeToo era, details about his donations to Interlochen began to emerge.

Epstein donated more than $400,000 to Interlochen over a 13-year period that coincided with my time as a camper. Per NPR:

Epstein funded the construction of the on-campus lodge where he and Maxwell later stayed, established a scholarship fund, hosted alumni events and, on one occasion, even allowed the use of his private jet to bring renowned concert violinist Itzhak Perlman to Interlochen.

Epstein’s association with Interlochen has technically been in the public record for years. But the new reporting from NPR, and other citizen journalism based on released Epstein Files, goes into far greater detail than anything previously disclosed. It’s chilling.

Epstein spent years as an invited guest on Interlochen’s campus, where he hunted for underage victims. He and Ghislaine Maxwell groomed and eventually abused several Interlochen campers, including a 13-year-old scholarship student whose father had died several years prior.

Epstein paid to build a three-bedroom house on Interlochen’s campus and stayed there several times with Maxwell and, at least once, with his “masseuse.” Interlochen eventually renamed the cabin from Epstein Lodge to “Green Lake Heritage House.” But it’s still standing there on campus, available for anyone to rent.

As an Interlochen alum, this is personal for me. Epstein’s Interlochen visits included the summers of 1995 and 1996, when I was a camper in the Intermediate Girls division. More on that after the paywall. As a crisis communications pro, I think Interlochen’s response to date is worth examining because it includes some classic crisis comms mistakes that are useful to study.

Before diving in, I want to be clear: I’m not trying to sandbag Interlochen. In my professional opinion, their Epstein crisis response to date largely mirrors those of other institutions that took his money or regularly welcomed him in: which is to say, it’s insufficient in several ways. Interlochen’s response, like virtually every other Epstein-adjacent institutional response, focuses more on protecting the institution, not supporting the victims and broader community as they come to understand how close they came to a predator like Epstein.

Interlochen taught Teenage Emily important lessons about vulnerability, accountability, high standards, and integrity. I can offer criticism here in part because Interlochen taught me how to think critically.

Spin Class Crisis Comms Rule (™): Understand who the victim is.

Devey said that what occurred with Epstein is “heartbreaking” and “horrific” and belies Interlochen’s core mission, where “there’s really great work happening with young people that’s changing their lives for the better.”

“It’s a shame that there are people like Jeffrey Epstein that are manipulating systems and [that he] did it on such a pervasive basis and at so many institutions. We’ll learn from that — we’ll get better,” he said.

This response indicates Interlochen believes their Jeffrey Epstein story is about a predator taking advantage of openness. But it’s not. It’s about an institution failing to protect minors in its charge from a monster.

Again, NPR:

"In hindsight, mistakes may have been made, but it was just out of naivete," Russ McMahon, a former administrator, said of the ability Epstein had to access the campus. From 1994 to 2003, McMahon was the director of annual giving and later the director of major gifts at Interlochen.

Granted, Interlochen has limited control over what a former employee tells a reporter. But their Interlochen’s communications to date don’t own their role in facilitating a predator’s access to children. They don’t describe it as a failure. They make excuses and dodge accountability.

Interlochen has entirely new leadership since Epstein’s time. Having to be accountable for mistakes that other people made sucks. It’s not fair. But it’s an important part of leadership. And there’s an undertone of self-pity and grievance in much of Interlochen’s comments, especially for people just encountering this all for the first time.

Interlochen is not the perpetrator here, but it’s also not the victim. Its campers and community are the victims.

Spin Class Crisis Comms Rule (™): Understand who the audience is.

The main priority, obviously, is the girls who were abused. But they don’t need Interlochen to grieve for them, as the official response offers. Those girls, now women, deserve transparency and accountability. They were introduced by people they trusted to someone who horribly abused them. Epstein forever entwined their budding artistry with the experience of being preyed upon. It’s a profound violation, in so many ways.

There are reasons institutions don’t usually say “sorry” or use the word “apologize” in response to crises. Among other things, officially apologizing makes you vulnerable to future litigation and discovery. But you can still demonstrate that you understand the gravity of the harm caused, and importantly, center your audience’s understanding of those harms.

As an Interlochen alum it also concerns me that its leadership hasn’t acknowledged how these revelations impact those of us who escaped abuse, but were there and just as vulnerable. There but for the grace of God, etc. Revelations like these make you revisit other memories throughout your life and wonder what else you missed, or didn’t see fully. You wonder what other dangers lurked in the shadows of your girlhood. And now you’re imagining all the other near-misses and bullets dodged that you never even clocked at the time.

That’s a privileged position, relative to those who were abused. They are absolutely not the same experience. But it’s still a lot to process.

Expectancy Violation Theory tells us that when someone we trust harms us, then the harm feels even greater because of that initial trust. Our expectations were violated, and that compounds the damage and brand fallout. If a stranger insults you, it may bother you for a bit, but you probably move on quickly. If your partner or loved one insults you, it feels like a much deeper hurt. Maybe it even makes you rethink your relationship, or revisit its past in a new light.

The crisis comms lesson here is that power customers or users aren’t necessarily the ones who will stay with you during a crisis— because they value you, they hold you to higher standards. And if you fail to meet them where they are, they can quickly turn on your brand because of that sense of violation.

Spin Class Rule (™): Failure to internally coordinate makes a crisis worse.

Again, one of the revelations in the NPR story and video linked above was that one of Epstein’s victims was a 13-year-old girl whose father had died a few years prior, and thus her family had financial need.

Guess what was in a development mailing I got on Monday?

So, right as there’s a major national news story that Jeffrey Epstein abused a 13-year-old scholarship recipient whose father had died… the Interlochen development office sends out a donor solicitation featuring the story of a teenage scholarship recipient whose father had died. Oh, noooo. No, no, no.1

I’m not trying to be a jerk about this. But this isn’t just accidentally sending out a tone-deaf solicitation. It’s a sign that comms and dev aren’t coordinating. The NPR story was clearly in the works for at least days, if not weeks, prior to this mailing being sent out. Yet it seems no one said, “maybe we should pause donor solicitations while this story is hot? Or, at least, not feature camper stories that sound exactly like one of Epstein’s victims?”

A crisis like this means you don’t just do business as usual. You set up a war room with representatives from each department. You view anything or anyone going out externally through the lens of this new crisis. If your organizational culture is siloed, then you explicitly spell out new expectations for how the team will coordinate. The first rule is “No surprises.”

Making a preventable mistake like this challenges the integrity of your whole response. If the audience can’t trust that you can get the basics right, why should they trust you when you say you’ve investigated thoroughly and taken every possible step to ensure something like this can’t happen again?

Spin Class Rule (™): Don’t include irrelevant details. Be deliberate about tone. Avoid jargon.

In both its owned messaging and responses to press inquiries, Interlochen has emphasized its changes to campus safety culture:

Devey, the current Interlochen president, said campus security today is much tighter than it has ever been. Unlike in the 1990s, for example, the campus now has front gates, 24/7 safety patrols and surveillance cameras.

That’s nice, but irrelevant when the predator in question was an invited guest. It may be true, but in this context comes across as spin.

This is how an off-key response becomes a new part of the problem. It’s no longer just about current leadership having to explain decisions made before their time: now the story is also about the off-key response from current leadership, who seem to be dodging the actual problem.

When talking about process, it’s easy to sound institutional and robotic, even insensitive. Small language adjustments can change the whole tone of your response, even if the substance remains the same. We are aware of those reports. While we can’t verify them, we also can’t rule them out is a very different answer than those records no longer exist, and the people involved are dead or retired, so our investigation didn’t turn anything else up.

Spin Class Rule (™): When a contained crisis goes mainstream, you treat it as a whole new crisis.

Parts of the Epstein Interlochen story have been out in the open for years. But thanks to the NPR story and other reporting, many people are hearing about this for the first time.

When a PR team has spent time responding to trade or local press about something, a certain fatigue sets in. It’s easy for the people responding to indicate an air of irritation, because they’re irritated: they’ve been dealing with this for years, and you’re just now asking about it? Where were you?

But that body language doesn’t help you. When a story breaks beyond trade or local press and becomes a mainstream national news story, you can’t assume the audience is familiar with who you are and the nuances you need to convey. Your audience is suddenly much bigger, with a shorter attention span, and a whole new set of heuristics they’ll apply to your response. Adjust accordingly.

Much of Interlochen’s response to date has the air of “we’ve already addressed this” or “this has been handled.” All of the remediations and steps are things they did years ago. As a friend remarked, “Imagine if the Catholic church said that.”

Which leads to:

Spin Class Rule (™): Rapid response for new developments. Otherwise, you look evasive.

The biggest revelation in this new round of reporting, which is mentioned in the video but not the NPR story, is how a deposition by one of Epstein’s victims says that she asked staff about Epstein’s behavior.

If that’s true, that’s alarming evidence of institutional negligence. But Interlochen’s responses don’t acknowledge this new development. Instead, they emphasize their two previous investigations into Epstein, in 2008 and 2019:

Subsequent to Epstein’s second arrest in July 2019, we reopened our records regarding his involvement with Interlochen. Again, our research found no claim of him acting inappropriately on campus. We have issued public statements about Epstein’s connection to Interlochen, and cooperated with prosecutors and several investigations by the press into the time he was a donor.

Trouble is, this new evidence and other revelations in the Epstein Files call the thoroughness of those investigations into question. I was a teenage camper at Interlochen while Jeffrey Epstein was recruiting and grooming my peers. I likely knew, or at least knew of, at least some of his victims. Interlochen has supposedly conducted two separate outside investigations into allegations. But I was never contacted as a part of an investigation.

And they should have contacted me. Because these recent reports brought back a memory I didn’t even know I had.

I think I may have met Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell when I was a teenage girl.

Read more

But what I saw Tuesday morning was a sea of fury about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gretchen Whitmer’s event four days prior. It was seemingly everywhere, including in POLITICO Playbook and an exclusive New York Times interview with AOC on the “fallout” from her appearances in Germany, and what AOC and Whitmer’s comments say about Democrats and foreign policy.

Did I miss something? I’d half-listened to their event while folding laundry on Saturday and didn’t think much about it. If anything, it felt reassuring to hear AOC and Whitmer onstage with NATO PermRep Matthew Whittaker, who dutifully recited the necessary administration talking points but minus the vitriol and weirdness I brace for whenever a Trump foreign policy official speaks in public these days. It was downright soothing.

I had indeed missed something: over the long President’s Day weekend, a phalanx of right-wing actors launched a coordinated attack on AOC and Whitmer, driving inflammatory, often sexist social media content that was then amplified by more palatable MAGA and Republican voices until it broke into the mainstream.

And six days later, this narrative has calcified as conventional political wisdom:

We’re going to get into how that happened. But first, let’s talk about pink slime. I promise, this will matter later.

Subscribe now

What is Pink Slime?

Per Poynter:

“Pink slime” journalism is named after a meat byproduct and describes outlets that publish poor quality reports that appear to be local news.

• As local news sites have either gone out of business or are struggling to survive, and pink slime sites have replaced them.

• These outlets claim to cover local and hyperlocal news, sometimes taking advantage of news deserts.

• Pink slime sites are frequently produced via automation and templates. Look for text that’s more generic than expected, or articles that are pure information without context — that’s a giveaway you’re looking at a pink slime website.

• Often, they’re funded by outside companies with a partisan source of financing.

ProPublica, CJR, (then at the Post), Jane Mayer, and many others have written urgently about the dangers of pink slime, but it’s still not a widely-known term. I teach my students about pink slime in our unit on local news, and media-savvy undergrads are usually horrified to learn that there are more pink slime fake news websites in the U.S. than there are local news outlets.

Pink slime content overwhelmingly has a conservative partisan slant. Most of the known major pink slime networks are funded by right-wing dark money groups and billionaires. Around the early 2020s the biggest known node was Metric Media, owned by Brian Timpone, which as of 2022 owned around 1,300 pink slime websites pretending to be local news outlets (this excellent study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia goes into full detail).1 Those networks were supercharged around the 2020 and 2022 U.S. elections, with Metric Media websites alone reportedly pumping out five million articles a month in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

More recently, pink slime sites have started weaponizing FOIA requests and targeting colleges and universities. As the Tow Center wrote in September 2025:

Six years ago, when the Tow Center started its research into “pink slime” networks of local news sites, it seemed to many of us that these networks could not be real competitors to independent journalism because they were so ineffective and diffuse. We thought the marketing tools they produced for politicians would be limited by low quality and fail to get engagement. But pink slime networks have not withered. Instead, partisan news, whether directly funded by political interests or just indistinguishably aligned with those interests, has become not only acceptable, but actually a predominant force in political campaigning.

Pink Slime and The Post-Munich Narrative

So Tuesday morning, four days after the Munich session featuring AOC and Whitmer, I read this in POLITICO:

Those two hyperlinks direct to tweets from Eric Daughtery, a right-wing troll whose X bio reads in part “Charlie Kirk: ‘Men Must Vote.” Asking this gentleman what he thought of AOC’s foreign policy comments is like asking Harvey Weinstein what he thought of your daughter’s school play.

But it’s the second POLITICO hyperlink, which was also included in the New York Times’ post-Munich AOC story, that first confused and then alarmed me:

I’m a native Michigander and try to keep up with local news. I’d never heard of this outlet. Nor had any of my family or friends who live there. But that X handle looked sketchy. So I started researching.

The Midwesterner purports to be a Michigan local news outlet. Per the Wayback Machine, the Midwesterner first appeared on February 4, 2023. It appears to have appeared online fully formed, with no announcement or notice. There’s no masthead, About section, or way to contact reporters. There are no ads, paywalls, or paid subscription options.

Many of the links from that first Wayback appearance are now broken, but what remains intact appears to be scrapes of legit local news outlets, most with a sensationalist and/or right-wing headline.

In other words: classic pink slime.

Today, the model has evolved. We’ll get more into that in a future Spin Class. But there’s still no masthead, About section, or way to contact anyone who works there beyond a general info email address. There are still no ads, paywalls, or paid subscription options. Most of the articles are written by “The Midwesterner Staff” and there’s a suspiciously large volume of content across the site, the vast majority of it resembling AI-generated slop. Everything is still hyper-conservative and sensationalist.

It’s still pink slime, just an updated 2026 version.

But I didn’t know any of this when I saw the same tweet quoted in Playbook and the NYT. I just noticed a Michigan news outlet that I, a Michigander, had never heard of, being highlighted by two outlets I regularly read. And I wanted to understand more.

“Who Owns The Midwesterner News?”

I’m not a journalist, I’m just curious. So I simply Googled this question. And this was literally the first hit:

Tudor Dixon, you’ll recall, is the conservative media figure and Republican gubernatorial candidate who lost to Gretchen Whitmer in the 2022 Michigan blue wave. Dixon’s candidacy and that election could be a book unto themselves, including massive primary voter fraud shenanigans and Dixon blasting out her own party’s internal postmortem, which blamed her candidacy for dragging down the state ticket.

But what’s important for our purposes is that the Midwesterner, the pink slime website pumping out anti-Democrat content, was apparently created and owned by a known associate of the Republican candidate who lost to Gretchen Whitmer in 2022? That… seems relevant.

So I kept digging. And struck gold.

Read more