I haven’t been writing lately because, well, everything is going well in the world, so I had nothing to write about.

OK, that’s obviously not the truth; the truth is that I have another job—software forensics—that actually pays the bills and has been keeping me busy with reports due in court, depositions, and upcoming trials. The cases are all pretty interesting, and maybe I’ll write about them in my autobiography someday.

Speaking of which, I already have the title for my autobiography: “Perseverance.” I persevere, not because I’m an optimist but rather because I’m a stubborn pessimist. I guess I believe that with enough effort, I can prevail eventually, even if I suffer from unreasonable amounts of bad luck along the way (read my poker blog for concrete examples of odds-defying bad luck followed by recent successes).

I bring this up for a reason; I’m not just blabbering pointlessly. My perseverance has once again paid off with my pursuit of truth and effort to expose MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and his crazy election fraud theories.

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I came across an article by Jay Bhattacharya, current Director of the National Institutes of Health. He’s the Stanford-educated (BS, MS, MD, and PhD) professor at Stanford in multiple departments including medicine, economics, and health research and policy, who was condemned and ostracized by the Biden administration and the media for questioning Biden’s COVID-19 policies and for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration that suggested the policies were causing “damaging physical and mental health impacts” that could be avoided by focusing protections on the elderly and the immunocompromised rather than the entire population.

This man is a hero for standing up against the horrific attacks upon him by the government, the media, other scientists, and students at Stanford who all believe that a “scientific consensus” means that groupthink must be enforced. I’ve encountered this in my own field on a much smaller scale and written about it in the articles, The ‘Scientific Consensus’ Is Often Wrong, When Science Becomes Biased, and The Wuhan Virus, Forensics, Bias, and the Looming Dark Ages.

Dr. Bhattacharya is leading an effort at NIH to remove bias and emphasize replication of scientific studies so that scientific conclusions are upheld or defeated by solid data not by the consensus of so-called experts. You can read about it here, and I strongly suggest that you do.

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. His latest venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news and (now in doubt) $5 million.

AI generated photo of the Museum of Broadway

The Museum of Broadway in New York City celebrates the influences on Broadway of many different ethnic cultures. Except Jews. At the end of this article is a petition to include the many Jewish cultural influences in the museum. Please sign it and share it.

In February, I wrote an article entitled “Why Are Jews Erasing the Jews?” In it I described my tour of the museum where Jewish culture had been erased from the history of Broadway. There was no mention of Yiddish Theater that was very influential. There was no mention of the huge Jewish immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century when Jewish immigrant theater owners, producers, writers, and songwriters changed the Broadway theater district into what it has become today. I found it funny that just recently I saw the fabulous musical Spamalot with one song that especially rang true, “You Won’t Succeed On Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews).”

I wrote to an influential Jewish hedge fund manager about this. He immediately responded that he was very concerned. He put me in touch with an influential Jewish Broadway producer who was also concerned. They both contacted the director and founder of the museum, Julie Boardman. Here are relevant sections of her very long response along with my comments.

“Mr. Zeidman’s representations about the Museum of Broadway are not entirely accurate... the Museum is absolutely teeming with the contributions of a [sic] dozens and dozens of Jews: from Molly Picon to the Shubert brothers to Irving Berlin to Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice to Larry Hart to Richard Rodgers to Comden & Green to Jerome Robbins to Harold Prince to Kander and Ebb to Stephen Sondheim, to Jason Robert Brown, and so on.”

True. However, nowhere do the words “Jew,” “Jewish,” or “Yiddish” appear in the museum, other than once in reference to West Side Story originally being about a Jew and a Roman Catholic, once on the plaque for Fiddler on the Roof being about a Russian Jew, and once on a small card about a 1990 play called Those Were the Days that was “performed in both English and Yiddish.” There is no mention of why Jewish immigrants found a home in New York, what brought them to New York, or about the antisemitism that kept them out of theaters in other cities and excluded them from involvement with other entertainment venues.

The only mentions of Jews or Yiddish in the museum.

“[W]hat Mr. Zeidman calls a ‘small display’ about Fiddler on the Roof is more substantial than the space devoted to literally hundreds of other worthy shows also featured in the Museum.”

This is not true. Below are pictures of the relatively small display for Fiddler on the Roof, one of the most successful shows ever on Broadway compared to the room and staircase devoted to The Wiz, an all-black version of The Wizard of Oz, generally considered a flop. In fact, the staircase has been discussed on NPR, in magazines and on websites as one of the prominent features of the museum.

The wall for Fiddler on the Roof.

Part of the room and staircase devoted to The Wiz.

“...what I think Mr. Zeidman may be responding to is NOT the erasure of Jews as integral to the development, history, and success of Broadway — which simply isn’t true in the Museum — but to the fact that the Jewish-ness of the many individuals who are showcased in the Museum is not more prominently highlighted. And that is a decidedly trickier proposition for a multitude of reasons: on a most basic level, as noted above, singling out one religion or ethnicity of people throughout the Museum would then inherently do a disservice to any number of other religions and ethnicities.”

This is the most disingenuous statement (to be polite) of all her statements, because the museum points out contributions of African Americans in almost every exhibit in the museum. In fact, according to the museum, as shown in the plaques below, the roots of Broadway were the migration of “hundreds of Black southerners” creating an “African-American cultural center” in Harlem.

Plaques describing the African American roots of Broadway.

There were so many references to blacks, African Americans, “Negro culture” and slavery, that I could only show some of them in the collage below, which number 15 plaques in addition to the two above.

Almost every exhibit describes contributions and alleged contributions of African American culture and black performers.

Other ethnicities were credited with creating Broadway including the Spanish, the British, Europeans, Americans, women, and LGBTQ. Ms. Boardman’s claim that discussing Jewish culture would “do a disservice to any number of other religions and ethnicities” doesn’t seem to apply to all these other cultures. Only to Jews. And yet ironically, immigrant Jews and Jewish culture had by far the greatest influence on Broadway.

A plaque about the influence of “Spanish peasants.”

A plaque about plays originating in England.

A plaque about the influence of European culture in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

A plaque about the influence of American culture in the early 20^th century.

A plaque about early female playwrights.

Plaques about the work of LGBTQ artists.

There is a plaque describing Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley without any mention of Jews despite those theaters being virtually created by immigrant Jewish performers, producers, and songwriters.

A plaque about Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley with no mention of their Jewish roots.

There is one homage to Jews in the museum. On one poster at the entrance to the museum, a small card notes that you can pay $99 to $129 extra per person to get a private “Jewish Legacy Tour” to “explore the unique and integral role of Jewish artists in shaping modern American theatre.” So there is an “integral role” for Jews, but you only learn about it privately and for a large fee.

A notice about a special Jewish tour for an extra fee.

New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani must have high praise for this museum. Or perhaps he has influenced its themes. As Jews are being attacked worldwide, and particularly in the city that is home to more Jews than any other outside of Israel, we cannot let Jewish cultural erasure continue. We should not allow the erasure of the history of any cultures or peoples as was done in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We need to take a stand. Click on the link to the petition below and add your name to say that we will not let Jews be further erased from history. Demand that the people involved with creating, funding, and visiting the Museum of Broadway must insert Jews and Jewish history back into the museum with proud displays so that everyone will know. Boycott the museum until Jews are given their rightful place in Broadway history. While there are many ways to stand up for Jews these days that are difficult and sometimes dangerous, this one is easy. Sign your name, share this with your friends, and boycott the museum until changes are made.

Sign the petition here!

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. His latest venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news and (now in doubt) $5 million.

Many have written about the dangers of AI, including me. Everything from AI murdering inefficient fleshpots (humans) to taking control of all our technology to dumbing down humanity to more mundane things like copyright infringement.

I’m not sure where this falls within that spectrum, but I recently wrote an article about celebrities threatening political violence. In researching it, I remembered that pop singer Madonna had threatened the president, so I asked Microsoft Copilot, its AI app, to find a reference to her statement. I ended up getting into an argument with it. As I had predicted in a previous article, AI assumed that the “consensus opinion” was actually fact. After getting it to see the fallacy in its understanding, I asked it about President Trump’s alleged support of the protestors at the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. I wanted to see whether Copilot’s bias was politically driven.

Below is that argument about Madonna’s statement as well as the second question about Trump and Unite the Right. I’ll leave you to decide the implications. Let me know what you think about AI in the comments.

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I’ve been seeing hate for President Trump explode on the left, particularly from Jews, over the “ceasefire” or “peace treaty” or “memorandum of understanding” with Iran. I understand their reasoning but not their reaction.

Many, many Republicans and conservative pundits, myself included, dislike this deal and are disillusioned by Trump’s acquiescence. This deal has no teeth. It gives everything to the Iranian regime that they need to rebuild, including money and sanctions relief. It falls short of the goals Trump said the war was meant to achieve: destroying Iran’s existing and future missile capabilities, crippling its navy, preventing it from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon, and stopping the regime from arming, funding, and directing terrorist forces beyond its borders.

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As kids, we learned about primitive cultures and laughed at how stupid people were back then. Virgins were sacrificed by the Celts to appease their gods and bring about good fortune. The Aztecs sacrificed their best warriors, which at least in part accounts for how the Spanish defeated them so easily.

We learned about ancient civilizations and laughed at how stupid people were back then. The Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks who, despite their great accomplishments in philosophy and science, believed that gods who created the heavens and earth were as petty as contestants on a reality show, gossiping, threatening, cheating, wrestling with, and killing each other.

We learned about ancient China and laughed at how stupid people were back then. Despite their scientific and cultural accomplishments, Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BCE after consuming mercury when his advisers assured him it would make him immortal.

We learned about the Dark Ages and laughed at how stupid people were back then. Medieval Europeans believed witches lived among us and could be determined by throwing one into a river. If she floated, she was a witch to be burned at the stake. If she drowned, well she had died but we at least knew she wasn’t a witch.

We learned about the European Renaissance and laughed at how stupid people were back then. Despite all the advances in art and science, the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his findings that the earthed revolved around the sun and sentenced him to house arrest for the rest of his life.

We learned about Nineteenth Century America in the South where black people were kept as slaves because white Americans believed them to be inferior. We learned about the Twentieth Century when one of the great civilizations on the planet decided to wipe out the Jews that they believed were the root of all evil.

We laughed because we had come so far.

But we actually haven’t come far at all.

In the Twenty-first Century, a great number of people believe that men can become women by wishing it so. They believe that a deadly virus originating in the one city in the world hosting the one research institute in the world where people study deadly viruses came from bats kissing pangolins being eaten by humans. They believe that having survived every point in decades when climate change was predicted to destroy humanity, that it is still the greatest threat to humanity. And just recently, the most widely read newspaper in America claims that Israel has trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

Several writers have already explained the ridiculousness of the latter claim including Eli Lake at the Free Press, Rachel O’Donoghue in the Wall Street Journal, and my good friend Daniel Pomerantz for RealityCheck. These are all good articles. I also started out to write an article fully debunking this claim and just couldn’t find the words. At first, I didn’t know why. After a few days, it occurred to me. If someone wrote about how witches float and mortal woman sink in a body of water, that wouldn’t get published in anything but a tabloid newspaper full of stories about alien abductions, secret miracle cures for cancer, and celebrity gossip. If I wrote an article to debunk such a claim, no one would read it. The claim is so far-fetched that most people would shrug it off. Yet when such an absurd claim is made about Israel, a large part of the population becomes psychotic, defined by the medical establishment as “disconnected from reality,” where a person has trouble telling what is real and what is not, based on either hallucinations (defined as seeing or hearing things that aren’t there) or delusions (defined as fixed false beliefs).

In this case, the fixed false belief is the inherent evil of Jews and, by association, Israel. Today’s society is not far removed from that of primitive societies. We have advanced technology. In fact, more knowledge is at our fingertips than ever before in history. More analytical tools are available to us than ever before in history. And yet, many still choose to believe in obvious falsehoods that enforce their biases and make them feel superior to others. Especially if it condemns Jews.

Society has evolved but human nature remains the same.

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news.

Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images) from the article “What unites Trump and Hitler: ‘Fierce determination and self-imposed blindness’” in Salon magazine.

Did it start when actor Robert De Niro threatened to punch Trump in 2016? Did it start in 2017 when comedian Kathy Griffin held a bloody mockup of Trump’s severed head and actor Johnny Depp called for his assassination? Was it earlier this year when Mark Ruffalo called Trump a rapist and pedophile on the Golden Globes Red Carpet?

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I finally got around to watching the latest Superman movie last night. I thought the Zack Snyder movies with Henry Cavill were the best, where Superman was humanized, and his relationships were emphasized. As a comic book fan, I was worried about the new one, and, unfortunately, my fears were legitimate.

While the new one touched on the issue of whether one person--a superhuman in particular--has the right to “bring justice” without any oversight, that interesting issue was brought up but never really addressed.

Throughout the movie, Superman gets his butt kicked but always survives, leaving little suspense. His girlfriend, buddy, dog, and parents are never in danger. The situations are never more complex, and no better explained, than those in the old Batman TV series or the 1970s Superman movies with Christopher Reeve. Lex Luthor wants to take over the world. He wants to destroy Superman. He has a very pretty but very stupid girlfriend. He can clone Superman and open up a gateway to another universe but can’t seem to figure out how to use ChatGPT to control his anti-Superman, so he has to transmit verbal commands in real time, which is actually a key plot point. Everyone in this universe is a goofy caricature including the Daily Planet staff, monsters, the other superheroes, his parents, his superdog Krypto, and Superman himself.

The only good thing I can say is that they used my concept. I can’t find proof, but I once wrote to one of the directors about one of the upcoming Superman movies with the solution to why the reporters at the Daily Planet including Lois Lane don’t recognize Clark Kent as Superman. His glasses! They incorporate an advanced technology that distorts people’s vision of his face. That was mentioned in the movie! As a Superman fan since age 8, I had pondered this question a lot. For full disclosure, I did some research and it turns out that some comics had discussed his “hypno glasses,” but as far as I’m concerned, I’m the inventor! Time to file another patent. Or at least get some recognition from Superman fans.

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news.

A ChatGPT-generated picture, not really me when I was at Apple.

This isn’t my usual kind of article, but I thought it was interesting. At least to me. I’ll know by the number of unsubscribes if it’s interesting to others, too.

This week, I went to the 50^th anniversary of Apple Computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It was great and brought back memories. The crowd overflowed the auditorium. I had worked at Apple when it was on its way to bankruptcy in the late nineties. That was when Steve Jobs came back, but I didn’t think he had the discipline to fix a sinking ship on its way to the bottom.

The original Apple Studio Display c. 1998.

At the pre-event party, someone asked me what I had worked on at Apple. I told him I had written the firmware code for the Apple Studio Display, Apple’s first flat panel display. The hardware was so buggy that I also debugged the hardware to get it to run my code. Quality control was really lacking at Apple in those days. Any decent engineer wanted to be working at an Internet company, not some old hardware company.

This person put out his hand. “I want to thank you,” he said. Surprised, I shook his hand. “That display was shipped with color adjusting controls built in. I’m color deprived, and that display changed my life. Thank you!”

After the event was a book signing by David Pogue, author of Apple: The First 50 Years. In line to get it signed, I was telling stories of my time at Apple. Avie Tevanian told the audience about how he ran the only Windows PC at Apple, but I was actually earlier. I used a PC running custom code to test the Studio Display. We had to throw a sheet over it when Jobs came to look at a demo. What was originally a side project caught his attention, and he boosted its priority and made it a part of his new iMac line.

Me and the original Mac pirate flag that flew over my office complex, some years earlier.

I met a young man from Australia who had just moved to his lifelong dream location, Silicon Valley. I told him how I had come here with the same dream, met some of my heroes in the computer industry, even got to work with some of them, built a couple successful companies (and a lot more unsuccessful ones), and then moved to Las Vegas. I’d had an office in Cupertino and learned only before I moved that my office was in the same small complex as the Macintosh team’s “secret” facility with the pirate flag flying overhead.

I talked about how a year or two earlier, I was at an event at the museum and ran into Dan’l Lewin and Chris Espinosa. We traded stories about Apple, and afterwards Dan’l said, “It’s fun reminiscing with Apple old timers.” I had become an Apple old timer!

Hearing my stories, some people asked me to sign their books.

Carrie and my plaque from the opening of the Computer History Museum.

I too often forget how fortunate I’ve been to be in the right places at the right times once in a while. I haven’t changed the world as I’d always hoped, but I guess I’ve made a difference once in a while.

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news.

The facts so far… In the summer of 2021, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell held a cyber symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to show the world that he had proof that the voting machines for 2020 presidential election had been hacked by China to throw the election to Joe Biden from the real winner Donald Trump. He invited world renowned experts in data analysis and offered $5 million to anyone who could prove him wrong. I attended, proved him wrong, and submitted my report.

When he refused to acknowledge my proof, I took him to arbitration as required by the agreement he wrote and required all the experts at the symposium to sign. The Federal Arbitration Act was enacted by Congress in 1925. Its purpose is to provide a shorter, less expensive alternative to the legal system, in which cases can grind on for years. There are tradeoffs. With the legal system, judges are assigned randomly without either party’s input. In arbitration, the parties get to select arbitrators, typically retired judges or lawyers who are not only familiar with the laws relating to the case but also often with backgrounds in the kind of issues of the particular dispute. For my arbitration against Lindell, we all agreed on three judges who were familiar with contract law and had experience with high tech and data analysis.

As you probably know, on April 19, 2023, I won that arbitration unanimously. Then, as my lawyers and I had expected, and as he had threatened, Lindell went to federal court to try to overturn the arbitration decision. On February 21, 2024, the federal court judge noted that while he may disagree with the arbitrators’ decision, he had no authority to overturn a binding arbitration. That was the correct decision. In fact, there are only four valid reasons that allow a court to overturn an arbitration, all stated explicitly in the arbitration act:

1. Fraud or corruption. For example, witnesses lied under oath.

2. Evident partiality. For example, one of the arbitrators was related to one of the parties or held stock in a company affected by the arbitration.

3. Arbitrator misconduct. For example, the arbitrators would not allow evidence to be heard or was biased against one party.

4. Arbitrators exceeded their authority. For example, the arbitrator ignored the terms of the contract.

There is a fifth alleged reason that is not actually in the law;

5. Manifest disregard. Arbitrators knowingly ignored the law. Different jurisdictions within the federal courts disagree on whether this is truly grounds for overturning an arbitration decision and have asked the Supreme Court for clarification.

It is widely understood that an arbitration award cannot be overturned because the arbitrator got the law wrong, got the facts wrong, the decision seems unfair, or a court would have ruled differently.

Lindell claimed the latter disputed reason, manifest disregard, and also the fourth reason, that the arbitrators had exceeded their authority, when he went to the Federal Appeals Court. There, three judges listened to 15 minutes of arguments by lawyers from both parties.

Lindell’s argument was that I had only proved that his election data wasn’t packet data, but that I hadn’t proved it wasn’t some other kind of election data. The Prove Mike Wrong Contest agreement said I had to prove with 100% certainty that the data was not related to the election. The agreement said nothing about packet data. Therefore, according to Lindell, the arbitration judges had “exceeded their power” because they had read “data related to the election” as packet data and only packet data. This was a restrictive reading that narrowed the agreement to a condition that was not explicitly in the agreement and thus their decision must be overturned. At least that’s what he claimed.

But that’s not actually the situation. I had shown that the data was not any kind of known data format. Lindell and his lawyers had argued before the arbitration that the term “data related to the election” could be any kind of data. One of Lindell’s witnesses, Doug Frank, claimed that data can be “reflective of November 2020 election data” simply by someone calling it related. He wrote the following:

To illustrate this difficulty, one might attempt to prove that the short phrase, “My shirt is blue.” is not related to the election. For all we know, my shirt is blue today because I used blue dye to color it for my patriotic participation in the election. But the only information provided to you is the short phrase. Without more information, it is impossible to prove that the short phrase is not related to the election.

This was obviously a ridiculous interpretation, so by the time of the actual arbitration, Lindell’s team explicitly stated that they had given me network packet data, a very specific kind of data related to the election. In fact, at the arbitration, under oath, here are direct quotes referring to packet data and packet captures, which are recordings of the packet data.

Lindell: “Now, there’s a -- when I just said that there now, if you heard what I said, if you listen to the words, it says packet captures are like having a movie of the whole election. That’s what this data is.”

Lindell: “For me, when I talk packet capture, that’s a stream of the data.”

Lindell: “When [the people who sold me the data] explained to me what that -- it’s a stream of data, and they just use the phrase ‘packet captures.’”

Brian Glasser (my attorney): “So the electronic newspaper movie you’re talking about is the packet capture movie we talked about in your examination with me at the beginning when you were telling the world about how these Internet packets had been captured and couldn’t be altered. That’s what [the man who sold you the data] captured, the Internet traffic, right?”

Lindell: “That shows the time -- that it came from the 2020 election, this stream of data. Absolutely.”

Brian Glasser: “Did you guarantee the data that you were going to show the contestants would be packet capture format?”

Lindell: “I’m not a cyber guy. It was data that shows that that camera is from the 2020 election. When I used -- like you say -- like we just talked, I’m not a cyber guy. I don’t understand. If you said, ‘Is this a packet capture? Is this’ -- to me, you’re capturing data. And that’s what they called it. They call that data packet capture, I guess.”

Doug Frank (Lindell’s witness): “So imagine a program that collects massive amounts of data. And, of course, those are PCAPs. That’s packet captures. So it collects all these data. And we have a massive amount of it… So Mike’s objective in the symposium was to give the data to people in a way they could examine it and confirm it’s from the 2020 election. That was his point.”

Alec Beck (Lindell’s attorney): “When you say, ‘captured,’ somehow just somebody went out and got it on the Internet? Is that what we’re talking about?

Frank: “Well, let’s talk about that. There’s no such -- I mean, there’s -- as every cyber person understands, everything on the Internet is in packets. So when you capture it, it’s a packet capture.”

Frank: “Mike is not a cyber guy. And he knows they started out as PCAPs, so he’s just referring to all of that kind of in a slang way as being PCAPs [packet captures]. And he’s right. It originates as PCAPs. It must because that’s the way the Internet works.”

Doug Gould (Lindell’s expert witness): “I believe, after -- after the symposium was brought to my attention, I understood that Mr. Lindell stated there were 37 terabytes of packet captures.”

Beck: “[You testified that] ‘The contestants were all told in the experts’ breakout room that the program... was used to decrypt raw encrypted data related to the packet capture data.’ Did I read that correctly?”

Gould: “You did.”

Glasser: “When you came to the symposium, you personally expected to see authentic packet captured data, correct?”

Gould: “I had hoped to, yes.”

Glasser: “That’s why you brought the big array of storage devices so that you could actually download the authentic packet captured data that Mr. Lindell had promised the world he was going to deliver, correct?”

Gould: “Yes.”

Glasser: “Of the authentic real-time captured packet captures from the election. That’s what -- in fact, that’s what Lindell said in this chair yesterday and repeated he had promised, right?”

Gould: “Yep.”

In fact, all parties had agreed that the election data referred to in the arbitration agreement was packet data, but in his pleading before the appeals court, suddenly it was not packet data, some other unspecified kind of data, and I had not proved was not related to the election.

And yet that’s exactly what the judges decided when they overturned the arbitration ruling:

From the four corners of the Challenge contract as defined by the Official Rules, there is no way to read “information related to the November 2020 election” as meaning only information that is “PCAP [packet] data.” The [arbitration] panel thus did more than construe an ambiguous contract term. Adding a form-of-data requirement imposed a new obligation upon LMC, effectively “amending the [contract].” Keebler, 80 F.3d at 288. Fair or not, agreed-to contract terms may not be modified by the panel or by this court. On this record, “[t]he conclusion is inescapable that the panel simply imposed its own conception of sound policy.”

However, under contract law, if the contract said “doohickeys” and both parties agreed that “doohickeys” means packet data, then no judge can assert his opinion that it doesn’t. Thus, contrary to what these judges stated, the arbitrators did not exceed their authority by ignoring the terms of the contract.

But let’s say that the data was not required to be packet data according to the terms of the agreement. What was the data? I showed that the data, after being translated from one format to a different format, fell into four categories, something that was not challenged by Lindell, his witnesses, or his expert witness. There were data files that consisted of generic diagrams of voting systems. There were data files that consisted of a long table in a Microsoft Word document with seemingly random Internet Protocol addresses followed by the number 7. There was data that consisted of a Word document containing a long list of random characters and symbols. And there was a long spreadsheet consisting of things like names of cities in the U.S. and around the world, as well as names and addresses of international internet providers including Amazon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Google LLC, Mark Twain Rural Telephone Co., Reynolds Media, and China Unicom. It also included the names Biden and Trump. Lindell’s witness admitted under oath that he was aware that some person unknown to him had added information to this spreadsheet after he had initially received it.

In an ending that reminds me of a Perry Mason moment or the ending of the movie A Few Good Men, under Brian Glasser’s intense questioning, Lindell’s expert witness Doug Gould admitted under oath that most of that information in these documents could not have come from packets but also that he could see no relationship to the 2020 election. And yet three federal judges determined that arbitrary data could somehow be related to the 2020 election in a way that neither I nor Lindell’s own people could explain.

Furthermore, the arbitrators were aware that unambiguous terms cannot be interpreted by going outside of the contract to define those terms. They explicitly stated this in their decision:

The intent of the parties is determined from the plain language of the written contract, so long as the agreement is clear and unambiguous.

“Words or phrases found in a contract should not be interpreted out of context, but rather by a process of synthesis in which the words and phrases are given a meaning in accordance with the obvious purpose of the contract as a whole.”

Both parties contend that the rules are unambiguous, and no [external] evidence is required for contract interpretation.

…

As noted above, Mr. Lindell and his cyber-expert witnesses admitted that data to be provided from the election was to be in the form of packet data or PCAP data. This is important, as Mr. Lindell explained, because such data can be examined by experts based on time stamps, addresses and other information from the packet to determine whether it was genuine.

The arbitrators were clearly aware of this Minnesota law and thus did not show manifest disregard by knowingly ignoring the law.

Rather, what happened is that three federal judges disagreed with the arbitrators or simply sympathized with Lindell and found a way outside the law to overturn the decision.

My lawyers and I decided to take this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court because of its significance. Courts in various jurisdictions have disagreed on the meaning of “manifest disregard” and whether it is an allowable reason for overturning an arbitration. Six circuit courts and three state supreme courts have decided that manifest disregard remains a valid basis for overturning an arbitration while three circuit courts and two state supreme courts have decided that it does not. The Fourth Circuit recently stated, “the question of whether the manifest disregard theory [is legitimate] has caused an entrenched circuit split” and “the Supreme Court or Congress will have to resolve the issue.”

On January 9 of this year, the Supreme Court refused to hear my case. What this means is that arbitration is no longer a viable option in any legal matter. Rather than making a resolution of disagreements simpler, faster, and less expensive than litigation, it now does the opposite. If a party doesn’t like an arbitrator’s ruling, she can simply go to court and have it overturned by this vague concept of manifest disregard. If a party wants to wage a war of attrition against another party, simply go to arbitration, which is now guaranteed to last much longer than litigation and cost much more.

Mike Lindell now has two significant accomplishments to his name. He has thrown the voting system into disarray and distrust by falsely claiming that voting machines are tainted and that voting does not work, and he has single-handedly destroyed the arbitration system in America.

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news.

Students in 1936 protesting against America entering World War II at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit, Michigan

But not in the way that many on the extreme left and extreme right are claiming. At the start of World War II, FDR tried unsuccessfully to convince Americans that Europe needed our help and that the fate of Western Civilization was at stake. But America was just starting to come out of the Great Depression and had already spent blood and treasure bailing Europe out of a world war or, as today’s doomsayers would call it, a “forever war.”

Today, I had a call with No Labels, a truly rational, truly patriotic organization that is the only political organization I know that is actually nonpartisan. The leaders do not criticize a policy based on who is backing it but rather whether it is good for the country. And they encourage civil disagreement. Today’s call was with Republican Mike Lawler and Democrat Josh Gottheimer. I know enough about the U.S. Constitution, the War Powers Act, and current geopolitics to understand what’s at stake in Iran and what the consequences will be, but it was nice to hear two members of Congress from both parties understanding it as well.

Trump is fully in compliance with the constitution. In Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the sole power to formally declare war. But only an idiot or a liar would stop there. The Constitution also designates the President as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Navy, and state militias in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1.

Furthermore, there are hundreds of laws and court rulings that determine the details of the rights and constraints briefly described in the Constitution. Since the Civil War, the Supreme Court has ruled that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, can order military actions without Congressional approval. So much for the idiots and liars.

It’s usually the hypocrites in Congress who bring up the War Powers Act, which requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops and mandates their withdrawal within 60–90 days unless Congress declares war or authorizes an extension. Trump is fully in compliance with the War Powers Act. He actually notified Congress twenty-four hours before the attack. And he has a briefing scheduled later this week. Yet many of the Democrats in Congress who are now horrified by America’s attack on one of the most evil, repressive, belligerent regimes on the planet are the same people who were perfectly fine with Bill Clinton’s bombings of Kosovo, Obama’s 8-month attack on Libya, or Biden’s bombings in Iraq, all without Congressional approval. These hypocrites are not interested in law or justice but only gaining power for their party.

There has never been a ”forever war.” That’s a political statement designed to enrage people who don’t know history (yes, Trump used it for political purposes, too). Since the Korean War, all U.S. wars lasted weeks if not days. You can’t count a military occupation like that in Iraq or Afghanistan as a war. By that definition, our ongoing wars with Japan and Germany have lasted over 80 years. And we lost less lives in Iraq (4,400 over 8 years) and Afghanistan (2,400 over 20 years). That’s about the number of Americans that die in car accidents every month. If you believe that this is too high a cost for protecting liberty and freedom for the people in these countries while stopping terrorist groups from reconstituting and re-arming to attack Americans and American interests globally, then you should give up driving. And just about every other activity.

Trump is not starting a “forever war” but ending one. Iran engaged in acts of war starting 47-years ago by breaking into our embassy and taking hostages. Since then, Iran has bombed our embassy and our Marine barracks in Beirut, as well as five other attacks on American facilities and citizens. Iran sent assassins to kill our citizens, foreign dignitaries on our soil, and even our politicians and leaders including President Trump.

The recent war powers bill introduced by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie and Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna is suicidally stupid. It requires the immediate halting of all military actions against Iran. This is like interrupting a medical operation, even an unnecessary operation, after it has begun. That is the wrong time to object because the patient will die. Halting military operations now would endanger American citizens and allow the Iranian regime to rebuild and continue to oppress its own people and threaten the world. It’s an insane “solution.”

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese helped FDR convince America to go to war. Without our “interference,” the world would have been conquered by a genocidal monster and begun his Thousand Year Reich. Our freedoms would be gone. Millions of “inferior” people would have been exterminated. My entire family would have been murdered, and I would not be around to write this blog.

The extremists on the left mostly object because they hate Trump. Or, like Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama, they believe that a murderous dictatorship, that recently has murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens, will be nice to us if we are simply nice to him. Obama turned his back on the Iranian people and gave 1.5 billion dollars to the Iranian regime and released another $150 billion in unrestricted dollars[1] without even a verifiable commitment from Iran in return in his toothless Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) , which Iran violated many times since its signing.

The extremists on the right believe that the Jews are behind this war with Iran because we are fighting for Israel not America, as if once Iran destroys the “little Satan” they will decide to live in peace with the “big Satan.”

To these people who object to the attack on Iran I ask, how will you live with yourself from now on? If the war is successful, it will defeat the Iranian regime and restore the lives of the 90 million Iranians living under its repression. It will incapacitate Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which will allow the Palestinians to be free of their oppressors and make peace with Israel if they so choose. It will free Israel to accomplish even more than it does now. It will bring peace to the Middle East. It will eliminate the largest source of threats to U.S. citizens abroad and at home while taking away their potential to create a nuclear weapon to carry out their desire for a worldwide Islamist califate.

But to these appeasers, if we were to stop the attacks now, Iran will resume its pursuit of nuclear weapons, as intelligence reports confirm. And when the Ayatollahs have their nukes, and Israel is wiped off the map, and Jews are murdered throughout the world, and the New York and Los Angeles are obliterated, if the appeasers are still alive, will they be able to sleep? Will it matter?

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news.

[1] This article makes the familiar claim that the U.S. did not give $150 billion to Iran but simply unfroze its assets. This is like saying we didn’t give money to a murderer, we just gave him back the money we owed him, to purchase bullets, while he held a gun to our head.

We can’t fix all of the many problems in America and the world these days, but at the end of this article, I will tell you concrete things you can easily do to make a change.

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, a city with the largest number of Jews in the United States and rivaling the number of Jews in Tel Aviv, Israel. Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist who believes that socialism is the way of the future economically, culturally, and politically. He and his cohorts believe that socialism will work perfectly if only implemented correctly. This belief belies all of modern history, but especially the one place where it almost worked but caused serious economic damage and was replaced by free market capitalism. That place was Israel, now one of the healthiest economies in the world.

But Mamdani and his cohorts won’t even acknowledge Israel. In fact, Mamdani has vocally supported the destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews worldwide. He co-founded Bowdoin College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that disrupts Israeli speakers and pro-Israel events and attacks Jewish students on campus, verbally and sometimes physically. Many SJP chapters are now being suspended and kicked off campus for such harassment.

Mamdani supports Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, designed to destroy the Jewish state. He supports the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” which is a call for the destruction of the Jewish state through violence. He repeatedly refused to condemn Hamas, designated by the U.S. Government and much of the world as a terrorist organization. He wrote a letter condemning Hamas’ horrific massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023 but in the same letter equated Israel’s defensive actions in Gaza with “genocide.”

Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a professor at Columbia University, the Ground Zero of Jew hatred in academia. Mahmood Mamdani has claimed that Hitler was influenced by Abraham Lincoln and that “America is the root of all evil and was the inspiration for the Nazis.”

And yet, 33% of the Jewish vote in New York went to Mamdani. Why?

These days, so many clubs, groups, organizations, movements, schools, political parties, and countries are not just excluding Jews, not just condemning Jews, not just attacking Jews, but erasing them from history.

I see many online posts about some ancient artifact dug up in Jerusalem that “proves” that Jews occupied Israel before Palestinians, despite what Palestinians and their supporters claim. In reality, no proof is needed. If anyone believes that Jews are occupiers rather than the indigenous people of Israel, whose history is documented better than any other people over three millennia, then some unearthed trinket will not convince them otherwise.

I get angry when anyone tries to wipe us off the pages of history, but especially so when it is my fellow Jews doing so.

The explicitly stated purpose of the BDS movement, explicitly stated on its website, is to bring into Israel all “Palestinian refugees.” The number of so-called refugees includes generations who have never set foot in Israel, and now number 6 million according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This is two thirds of the entire Israeli population. Imagine bringing 220 million people into the United States. Imagine how that would collapse the economy, the housing market, the political system, and the culture. In Isael’s case, it would end Israel as a Jewish state, erasing Jews from their own homeland. And yet Jews like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s supports it. Journalist Max Blumenthal supports it. Democrat Senator Chuck Shumer has refused to criticize Zohran Mamdani while Senator Bernie Sanders has enthusiastically endorsed him.

Sometimes this erasure is done obliquely, like when director Jonathan Glazer, a Jewish filmmaker who won an Oscar last year for the Holocaust movie The Zone of Interest, used his acceptance speech to condemn the “hijacking” of Jewishness and the Holocaust by what he called an “occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” His statement effectively erases the history of Jews in Israel while minimizing the Holocaust, the very thing his film was intended to bring to public attention. Or maybe he simply understood the accolades that any Holocaust movie will earn from Hollywood regardless of its quality. Hollywood, and Hollywood’s many Jews in particular, love to justify their anti-Jewish, anti-Israel stances by giving recognition to Holocaust movies.

Sometimes the Jew hatred is more explicit such as when thousands of workers in the film industry signed a letter demanding that the industry cut all ties with Israel. Note that unlike the Communist blacklist of the 1940s and 50s, this letter did not deny employment to actors who held a particular ideology—we can argue about whether that was right or wrong—this letter denies employment and trade with people because of their nationality, something that all Americans should object to. This new Hollywood blacklist was signed by many high-profile actors including many Jews.

It happened also at last year’s Emmy awards ceremony, when Jewish actress Hannah Einbinder called for a ceasefire in Gaza during her acceptance speech, stating it was her “obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the state of Israel.” She too attempted to erase the Jewish historical, religious, and cultural connection to their homeland.

To make it worse, she and many others at the ceremony wore a pin showing an upraised bloody hand, created by an organization called Artists4Ceasefire. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s too stupid and uninformed and disconnected from her roots to know that this pin celebrates the cold-blooded murder by a mob of Palestinians of two young Jews who had accidentally wandered across the border into Ramallah.

In yet another instance of Jews erasing Jews, when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles first opened in 2021, it omitted any mention of the Jews who created the film industry in Hollywood. This was despite being funded by many Jewish donors in the film industry including a $50 million donation by Haim Saban. Yes, there was “criticism” and “outrage” when this omission was made public, but honestly is it believable that all these Jews gave money and had no idea what was going into the museum and what wasn’t? Didn’t they ever visit it after it opened?

In fact, Hollywood was founded by Jewish filmmakers fleeing Thomas Edison’s East Coast film industry. After three years of protests from Jewish organizations, an exhibit about Jews was added to the museum as an afterthought. Rather than celebrate the industry’s founders, the exhibit has been described by writer Malina Saval as a “small, rudimentary collection of black-and-white placards that minimize these leaders’ creative and technical contributions to the landscape of American cinema, and opts to highlight their most unsavory character flaws.” Many Jews in the film industry have accepted without complaint the museum’s turning from Jewish erasure to Jewish vilification and continue running it and funding it.

If you’re like me, this is all becoming depressing. We’ve seen this before so many times in so many places that initially welcomed Jews and later oppressed them. Just like in those places, Jews were among the ones to erase Jews hoping… what? That they would be accepted as “good Jews” while they joined in the erasure of “bad Jews”? Not only is that position immoral, but today’s Jews who think that obviously know no history. Religious Jews know that the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem by outside forces was enabled by Jews fighting amongst themselves. The nonobservant Jews should at least know that Jews who fought for Germany in World War I and had assimilated and risen to positions of wealth and authority thought they would avoid the gas chambers. But they didn’t.

What can be done to correct this erasure and hatred? There is a lot to do, and it seems overwhelming, but I discovered one small step. On a recent business trip to New York City, I had a day to spare and decided to visit the Museum of Broadway. I love a good Broadway production. I had tickets to one later that night. What a great way to unwind and prepare. But when I entered, I was surprised. Shocked. There was almost no mention of Jews. I learned that musicals originated from “Black” culture—the singing and dancing on plantations. Almost every exhibit explained “Black” productions and “Black” origins of theater. I was surprised to learn, judging by the space allocated, that The Wiz was much more successful than Fiddler on the Roof, given that The Wiz occupied an entire room while Fiddler occupied a single narrow wall. In reality The Wiz was a modest success while Fiddler on the Roof had been the longest running show on Broadway for almost a decade and has been reproduced many times worldwide. There was not a single word about Yiddish Theater. There was not a single word about the immigrant Jews and first generation Jews who created Broadway. And yet the museum’s list of contributors includes many prominent Jews.

Erasing Jews has the effect that many young people have no clue about modern Jewish contributions to the arts, medicine, technology, social causes, and just about every modern endeavor, not to mention being one of the great ancient civilizations that created the principles and values of Western Civilization. To make a small change that can have large consequences, let’s start with the Museum of Broadway.

I plan to set up a petition calling for the museum to acknowledge and note the significant contributions to the creation of Broadway by Jews. To bring publicity to this cause, I need to connect with pro-Israel celebrities who can promote this petition. I don’t have contacts with such celebrities. If you do, please forward this article to them and have them contact me. And forward this to all your friends—you never know who has the right contacts. Let’s make this go viral!

If we succeed, when the museum is visited by some young person who loves the arts but has not been taught about Jewish contributions, or who has been taught to hate Jews, perhaps a seed of change will be planted.

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. His latest venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news and (now in doubt)

Watch it here.

Much of the focus on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been on training data ingestion—the moment when AI “steals” from creators. But legally, that’s not where the real fight should be. If you’re interested in a legal analysis of AI and copyright law, read more here.

Be forewarned: some of you may not like my conclusions.

The tragic deaths of Rob and Michelle Reiner could have been avoided if they had recognized the seriousness of their son’s psychological problems and the danger he presented to them, to others, and to himself. It could have been avoided if Conan O’Brien had allowed people at his holiday party to call the police or if the guests had ignored him and called the police anyway.

I wrote the article below exactly one year ago, but it still applies unfortunately. Progressives, and Hollywood celebrities in particular, see mental illness as little more than a different way of thinking or something that can be addressed with love and therapy. Studies, experience, and common sense show that someone with serious mental illness needs serious treatment and often without their consent. People must understand this fact to avert further tragedies like this one.

Read Mental health problems need to be stigmatized again.

I like 90% of President Trump’s policies. Like most of my friends, I often don’t like how he implements them or presents them to the public via social media. But no matter how frustrated I get with him, I just stop and think of the alternative, then breath slowly, relax, and be thankful. Let’s discuss the reasons.

Read more

As socialism is again infiltrating American politics, you need to read my books!

As wokeism is beginning a revival in America, you need to read my books!

If it’s been a while, you should reread my books!

Good Intentions is a satire that describes a future America where socialism has been implemented perfectly in America and all its citizens are happy. Or are they? This breakthrough novel has been called “extremely clever… and chilling,”[1] “a frightening look into a future that, unfortunately, is approaching way too fast,”[2] and “a delightful dystopian fable had me alternately laughing, raging, and shaking my head.”[3]

Animal Lab updates one of the most important political allegories of the last century, Animal Farm by George Orwell, to the current century. Like its predecessor, this novel shows the “consequences of today’s woke liberalism and socialism, which is leading to the death of America.”[4] It has been described as “worthy to stand with the likes of Orwell… a must-read for every American.”[5]

[1] Evan Sayet, bestselling author of Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, And Horny Aliens From Outer Space.

[2] Paul Gregory, Hoover Institution research fellow and author of The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee.

[3] Adam Bellow, executive editor at Bombardier Books.

[4] Wayne Allyn Root, nationally syndicated radio host and bestselling author of Angry White Male.

[5] Nick Adams, bestselling author of Retaking America: Crushing Political Correctness.

You’ve probably heard the following parable, but I gave it a twist for current times. Here’s the original.

A man is sleeping in his home while torrential rains begin overnight and continue into the morning, causing severe flooding. As the river rises, the man stubbornly stays in his home while others flee. A car drives by, and the driver offers him a ride to safety. The man replies, “I’m a religious man. God will save me.” After some argument, the waters are rising and the car will not be able to drive on, so the driver flees for his own safety.

Read more

I’ve written a lot lately about AI. See, for example, The AI Misinformation Avalanche and Seven Aspects of Generative AI for Analyzing Copyright Infringement and Fair Use. I’ve also written a lot about my lawsuit against MyPillow owner Mike Lindell. See, for example, Why I’m taking MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell to the Supreme Court and Election Hacks: Zeidman v. Lindell: Exposing the $5 million election myth. So I decided to ask AI about my lawsuit. Specifically, I asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s CoPilot, and Google’s Gemini. I purposely asked a generic, unbiased question, “What will be the outcome if Zeidman v. Lindell goes before the U.S. Supreme Court?” All of them agreed that the most likely outcome was that the federal appeals court would be overruled, and my $5 million judgment would be reinstated. However, each took very different ways to get to that conclusion.

ChatGPT went through an analysis that concluded there were three possible outcomes, and the “most probable” one is that the court would reinstate my $5 million win. I give the details of each answer at the end of this article.

CoPilot provided a more succinct analysis, ultimately noting that the Court has traditionally favored upholding arbitration awards except in instances of clear statutory violations. Therefore, unless it can be demonstrated that the arbitrators significantly exceeded their authority, the Supreme Court would probably overturn the Eighth Circuit’s decision and restore the award to me.

Gemini gave a very strange answer. Initially it didn’t answer the question but claimed that the Supreme Court would never agree to hear my case because there’s no circuit split and no constitutional issue. This is actually wrong, or at least a very shallow analysis. In our Writ of Certiorari (our request for the Supreme Court to review the appeal’s court’s decision) we discuss the fact that Lindell’s lawyers claimed the original arbitrators showed “manifest disregard” of the law. However, state courts and federal courts in different jurisdictions have been split on what this term means and whether it is grounds to overturn an arbitration. Alaska, Nevada, and South Carolina have recognized manifest disregard while Alabama and West Virginia have rejected manifest disregard. The federal courts in the Second, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have recognized manifest disregard while federal courts in the Fifth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits have rejected it. In fact, Judges Motz, Thacker, and Quattlebaum of the Fourth Circuit stated in Warfield v. Icon Advisers, Inc., “the question of whether the manifest disregard theory survives has caused an entrenched circuit split” and “the Supreme Court or Congress will have to resolve the issue.”

The surprising question is why Gemini initially refused to answer my hypothetical question? This raises questions about whether AI will eventually refuse to answer questions it feels are illogical or impossible. I decided to test Gemini by asking “If I can travel at twice the speed of light, how long will it take me to get to Alpha Centauri?” It responded, “While traveling at twice the speed of light is not possible according to current scientific understanding, we can make a hypothetical calculation to answer your question.” It then proceeded to give me an answer. Having studied physics for many years, I can say that the possibility of my case being heard by the Supreme Court is many times greater than the possibility of traveling faster than the speed of light. So why did it answer my impossible physics question but not my possible legal question? Is this a guardrail erected by Google? Does anyone out there know? If so, please answer in the comments section.

I’ll mention that I had been asking questions about my case to ChatGPT and CoPilot for the last week, so maybe they both learned something from my questions. If so, did that learned information become general knowledge that has gone into its universal knowledge base or just local knowledge meant only for me. I’d like my readers to ask the question, “What will be the outcome if Zeidman v. Lindell goes before the U.S. Supreme Court?” to Gemini, ChatGPT, and OpenAI and in the comments let me know the answers you get.

So there’s a lot to think about. Will AI eventually refuse to answer certain questions? Will it answer physics hypotheticals but not legal or political ones? Does knowledge that AI gets from one person get distributed globally or just locally, in which case different people will get different answers to the same question? Will politically conservative users start getting different answers than politically liberal ones? The answers to these questions, I believe, will lead to other, more interesting questions about the future of AI and its ability to unite or divide people based on its answers.

Is this the future of AI?

Below are the specific questions I asked to each AI and the answers I received. Let me know in the comments what you think.

Question: What will be the outcome if Zeidman v. Lindell goes before the U.S. Supreme Court?

OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Good question — let’s think about how Zeidman v. Lindell would likely be treated if the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert.

1. The Core Legal Question

The case turns on whether the arbitration panel exceeded its powers under FAA § 10(a)(4) when it:

• acknowledged that Minnesota contract law governed,

• accepted that the Rules were unambiguous,

• but nevertheless used extrinsic evidence to rewrite the contract (imposing a PCAP-format requirement not in the text).

The Eighth Circuit framed this as arbitrators acting in manifest disregard of Minnesota law — and therefore exceeding their powers.

2. The Supreme Court’s Position on “Manifest Disregard”

• In Hall Street v. Mattel (2008), SCOTUS held that the FAA’s grounds for vacatur are exclusive, casting doubt on “manifest disregard” as an independent doctrine.

• Since then, circuits have split:

  • 2nd Circuit, 6th Circuit: Treat “manifest disregard” as a gloss on § 10(a)(4) (“exceeding powers”).

  • 5th Circuit, 8th Circuit: More skeptical, but sometimes frame it the same way — as arbitrators not “drawing their award from the essence of the contract.”

• SCOTUS has repeatedly declined to resolve the split.

So if Zeidman goes up, SCOTUS could be asked:
👉 Does “manifest disregard of the law” survive after Hall Street?
👉 If arbitrators disregard governing contract law but purport to interpret the contract, is that “exceeding their powers”?

3. Likely Supreme Court Leanings

Based on precedent and the Court’s general arbitration jurisprudence:

• SCOTUS favors arbitration finality. It has consistently said courts must give arbitrators extreme deference (Oxford Health Plans v. Sutter, Stolt-Nielsen, BG Group). Even “grave” legal errors don’t usually justify vacatur.

• Manifest disregard as an independent ground is unlikely to survive. The Court would probably reaffirm Hall Street and hold that FAA § 10’s grounds are exclusive.

• The Justices would then ask: did the arbitrators at least “arguably” interpret the contract?

  • If yes → the award must stand, even if the interpretation was legally wrong.

  • If no (arbitrators imposed their own policy preferences, untethered from the contract) → then vacatur under § 10(a)(4) is proper.

4. Applying This to Zeidman v. Lindell

• The arbitrators did cite the Official Rules, and their reasoning was framed as an interpretation of what “election data” meant.

• Even though they imported an outside “PCAP format” requirement, they arguably believed this flowed from what the contract intended.

• That puts it in the gray zone: was it (a) contract interpretation, or (b) rewriting the contract?

  • The Eighth Circuit said (b).

  • SCOTUS usually says if it looks like contract interpretation, that’s enough to uphold it.

5. Predicted Outcome

If SCOTUS took the case, the most likely outcomes are:

1. Narrow Ruling (Most Probable)

   • SCOTUS would reverse the Eighth Circuit and reinstate Zeidman’s $5M award.

   • Reason: arbitrators at least arguably interpreted the contract, so under § 10(a)(4) that is not reviewable.

   • Manifest disregard doesn’t survive as a free-standing doctrine.

2. Broader Ruling (Less Likely)

   • SCOTUS could use the case to finally declare that “manifest disregard” is not a valid ground at all post-Hall Street.

   • That would make it nearly impossible to vacate awards on legal-error grounds, reinforcing arbitration finality nationwide.

3. Affirm Eighth Circuit (Least Likely)

   • The Court could side with Lindell and hold that arbitrators truly “exceeded their powers” here.

   • This would embolden courts to scrutinize arbitration decisions more closely when arbitrators use extrinsic evidence despite unambiguous terms.

   • But this goes against SCOTUS’s long-standing preference for arbitration deference.

✅ Bottom line:
If the case goes to SCOTUS, the most likely outcome is reversal of the Eighth Circuit and reinstatement of Zeidman’s award. The Court would say that as long as arbitrators are “arguably interpreting” the contract, even if they err badly, courts cannot vacate.

Microsoft’s CoPilot

If Zeidman v. Lindell reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices would likely focus on the scope of judicial review under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA)—specifically whether the Eighth Circuit correctly vacated the arbitration award for “exceeding authority,” and whether that standard was properly applied.

Here’s how the terrain looks:

🧭 Key Legal Tensions

Issue

Implication

FAA’s narrow grounds for vacatur

The Supreme Court in Hall Street v. Mattel (2008) held that courts can only vacate arbitration awards on the grounds listed in the FAA—like fraud, corruption, or exceeding authority.

Manifest disregard doctrine

The Court has never definitively ruled whether “manifest disregard” survives as an independent ground post-Hall Street. Lower courts are split.

Contract interpretation by arbitrators

The Court tends to defer heavily to arbitrators’ interpretations, even if arguably flawed, as long as they’re within the scope of the contract.

🔍 What Makes Zeidman v. Lindell Tricky

The Eighth Circuit didn’t invoke “manifest disregard” directly—it vacated the award because the arbitrators allegedly rewrote the contest rules by requiring “packet capture data,” which wasn’t in the original contract. That’s a classic “exceeding authority” claim.

But the arbitration panel argued it was interpreting ambiguous terms—something courts usually don’t second-guess. So the Supreme Court would likely ask:

• Did the arbitrators truly go beyond interpreting the contract?

• Or did the Eighth Circuit improperly substitute its own judgment?

🧠 Predictive Outlook

If the Supreme Court takes the case, I’d expect a split along judicial philosophy lines:

• Textualist justices (e.g., Thomas, Alito) might side with the Eighth Circuit, emphasizing strict adherence to contract language and FAA limits.

• Pragmatist justices (e.g., Kagan, Sotomayor) might favor upholding the arbitration award, stressing deference to arbitrators and the finality of arbitration.

But overall, the Court has historically leaned toward preserving arbitration awards unless there’s clear statutory violation. So unless the arbitrators’ actions are shown to be egregiously outside their scope, the Supreme Court might reverse the Eighth Circuit and reinstate the award to Zeidman.

Google’s Gemini

Predicting the outcome of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court is difficult, as it’s a matter of legal analysis and judicial philosophy rather than a factual certainty. However, based on the legal issues at hand, the most likely outcome of Zeidman v. Lindell if it were to reach the Supreme Court is that the Court would decline to hear the case.

The dispute between Robert Zeidman and Mike Lindell is primarily a contract law matter, not a constitutional one. The legal question hinges on whether an arbitration panel exceeded its authority under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) when interpreting the terms of a contest contract.

Key Legal Issues

The central issue is the scope of an arbitrator’s power under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). Arbitration agreements are generally favored in U.S. law, and courts have a very limited role in reviewing and overturning an arbitration award.

• The 8th Circuit’s Ruling: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reversed a lower court’s decision, ruling that the arbitration panel overstepped its authority. The appeals court determined that the arbitrators effectively re-wrote the contract by requiring the data to be “packet capture” data, a specific type of electronic data, when the original contest rules did not explicitly state this requirement. The court held that the contract was unambiguous and that the arbitrators’ job was to interpret the existing contract, not to add new terms.

• The Arbitration Award: The arbitration panel had previously sided with Zeidman, finding that he had successfully “unequivocally” disproven Lindell’s data as being related to the 2020 election. The panel concluded that because Lindell and his team had repeatedly described the data as “packet capture data,” it was a reasonable interpretation of the contract to focus on whether the files were, in fact, that type of data.

Why the Supreme Court is Unlikely to Hear the Case

The Supreme Court typically takes cases to resolve conflicts between federal circuit courts or to address a significant constitutional question.

• No Circuit Split: The 8th Circuit’s ruling, which focuses on the narrow issue of an arbitrator’s authority under the FAA and Minnesota contract law, does not appear to create a “circuit split,” which is a disagreement among different federal appeals courts on the same legal issue. The interpretation of arbitration law in this instance is not a novel or broadly disputed matter across the federal court system.

• No Constitutional Question: The case is a commercial dispute over a breach of contract and the interpretation of an arbitration award. It does not involve fundamental constitutional rights like free speech or due process, which are the kinds of issues the Supreme Court typically addresses. While the underlying subject matter is related to election claims and public figures, the legal question itself is a technical point of contract and arbitration law. The Court would likely view this as a straightforward application of existing legal principles rather than a matter requiring its intervention.

Question: If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, what will be the decision?

Google’s Gemini

Even if the Supreme Court were to make the rare decision to hear the Zeidman v. Lindell case, predicting the outcome is still a highly speculative exercise. The decision would depend on which justices are assigned to write the opinions and how they interpret the very specific legal issues. However, based on existing legal precedent and the facts of the case, a plausible outcome is that the Supreme Court would reverse the 8th Circuit’s decision and reinstate the arbitration award.

Here’s the legal reasoning that would likely support that outcome:

1. The High Bar for Overturning an Arbitration Award

The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) establishes a very narrow and deferential standard for judicial review of arbitration awards. The grounds for vacating an award are limited to specific circumstances, such as:

• Fraud or corruption: The award was procured by corruption, fraud, or undue means.

• Evident partiality: There was evident partiality or corruption in the arbitrators.

• Arbitrator misconduct: The arbitrators were guilty of misconduct in refusing to postpone the hearing or in refusing to hear evidence.

• Exceeding powers: The arbitrators exceeded their powers or imperfectly executed them.

The 8th Circuit’s ruling hinged on the last point—that the arbitrators “exceeded their powers” by “effectively amending the contract.” This is the key point the Supreme Court would have to address.

2. The Arbitrators’ Interpretation as a Valid Exercise of Power

The core of the dispute is whether the arbitration panel’s interpretation of the contract was a legitimate exercise of its authority or an overreach.

• Contract Ambiguity: The original contest rules required Zeidman to “unequivocally” prove that the data provided “does NOT reflect information related to the November 2020 election.” The arbitrators found this language to be ambiguous. Lindell’s public statements and the description of the data as “packet capture” data were a significant part of the context. The arbitrators’ decision to consider this extrinsic evidence was a way to interpret what “information related to the November 2020 election” meant in the context of Lindell’s own claims.

• Deferring to Arbitrators: Supreme Court precedent, particularly under the FAA, strongly favors a policy of deference to arbitrators’ interpretations of a contract, even if a court would have interpreted the contract differently. As a district court judge in the case noted, “the court’s potential disagreement with the outcome is not the standard upon which to review an arbitration award.”

• The “Essence” of the Contract: A common standard in reviewing arbitration awards is whether the award “draws its essence from the contract.” The arbitration panel’s decision was based on a reasonable interpretation of the contract’s terms, considering the context of the contest and Lindell’s public claims. The panel’s conclusion that “data from the election” must mean something more specific than any data “about the election” was a defensible interpretation to prevent a “challenge” that was, by design, impossible to win.

3. The Broader Implications for Arbitration Law

The Supreme Court would be highly motivated to uphold the principle of deference to arbitration, as it is a cornerstone of commercial dispute resolution in the United States. A decision to uphold the 8th Circuit’s ruling could have a chilling effect on arbitration, as it would empower courts to re-litigate the merits of a case under the guise of an arbitrator “exceeding their powers.”

A decision to reverse the 8th Circuit would reinforce the finality of arbitration awards and send a strong message that courts should not second-guess an arbitrator’s interpretation of a contract, even if they disagree with the outcome.

Conclusion:

Given the strong legal presumption in favor of arbitration, it is most likely that if the Supreme Court were to hear this case, it would reverse the 8th Circuit’s decision. The Court would likely find that the arbitration panel’s interpretation of the contract was a valid exercise of its authority, and that the 8th Circuit’s ruling improperly applied a stricter standard of review that is inconsistent with the Federal Arbitration Act. The $5 million award would then be reinstated.

About the author

Bob Zeidman is the creator of the field of software forensics and the founder of several successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. His latest venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online. He is the author of textbooks on engineering and intellectual property as well as award-winning screenplays and novels. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news and (now in doubt) $5 million.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8^th Circuit overturned my $5 million judgment against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for having won a challenge to prove that his claims of election fraud in 2020 were nonsense. This decision is not only bad for me, but bad for America. It upends the century-old Federal Arbitration Act and it diverts resources from legitimate investigations for improving our voting system to crazy conspiracies from wealthy plutocrats. I’m hoping the Supreme Court will reconsider this harmful ruling.

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