Political News

The U.S. lifted its naval blockade over the Strait of Hormuz last week, but the returning commercial trade has not been a return to normal—and Americans are still feeling it at the gas pump.

In a Truth Social post addressing the discrepancy, Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he had directed the Department of Justice to investigate oil companies, accusing them of “gouging” customers based on the persisting inflated prices.

“The big Oil Companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they are paying for Oil,” Trump posted just after midnight. “Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words, customers are being ‘gouged.’”

“I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!” he added.

While crude oil and gas prices have both fallen since Iran and the U.S. signed a tentative peace deal last week, the drop in gas prices has been relatively minimal. Crude was down over 5 percent between June 18 and 24, but gas was down by half of that—2.5 percent—in the same period, according to data from the AAA gasoline price tracker.

Trump had promised throughout the war that gas prices would plummet “like a rock” once the violence concluded, but that has clearly not been the case, much to the chagrin of his vulnerable Republican allies in Congress who will have to rationalize the dampened economy to voters come November. Trump and his team have also promised that Americans could expect lower gas prices than the average from even before the war began—around $2.98 per gallon. At the time of publication, the cost of gas is $3.92 per gallon across the country, though some areas in California such as San Luis Obispo are still seeing prices around $5.78 per gallon, according to the AAA tracker.

Over the last month, crude oil prices have dropped by 27 percent while gas prices were down by just 13 percent, reported Yahoo Finance.

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The tech zillionaires want you to believe their power is permanent and their math is real. In this week’s episode of the Nerd Reich podcast—recorded live on Zoom with our subscribers—Dave Karpf and I take apart these stories: Musk’s trillionaire mirage, Thiel’s Argentina exit plan, Palantir’s pitch for defense contractor fascism.

Karpf is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and author of the forthcoming book Vaporware Inc: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present.

Click below to watch our conversation (audio links and full transcript below)

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Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

R.R. Robbins Coming up on a special edition of the Nerd Reich podcast.

Gil Duran There's eight point five billion people on the planet. Only around three thousand of them are billionaires. This is the easiest trolley problem ever.

R.R. Robbins Welcome to the Nerd Reich, I'm producer R.R. Robbins. Quick heads up, this one's a little different.

Not long ago we had a special event for our newsletter subscribers, a private Zoom with Dave Karpf, returning guest and associate professor at George Washington University, also author of the upcoming book Vaporware Inc., and the voice behind the fantastic newsletter, The Future, Now and Then on Beehiiv. He took questions and had a conversation with Gil that covered a lot of ground, from the recent Palantir Manifesto to crypto billionaires in politics to Peter Thiel's escape to Argentina. And we're sharing it as a bonus podcast now.

Quick heads up though, it's Zoom quality audio. Even cleaned up, it gets a little funky. But it's such a great convo, we want to share it. Now we start off with a question about Elon Musk. Take it away, Gil.

Gil Duran Elon Musk has now become the world's first trillionaire on paper after SpaceX had the largest initial public offering ever. There seems something so strange about the fact that this guy gets to become a trillionaire at the very moment that he is spreading election lies on Twitter, which he now owns, of course, and is called X, and has been stoking racial hatred and violence in Ireland. And in the midst of all this, he becomes a trillionaire.

And of course, it was almost a year ago exactly that he left the Trump administration on a huff, pointing the finger at Donald Trump for being in the Epstein files. And it seems like on a day like this, the world is upside down. Why is this guy getting rewarded for being what Ed Luce of the Financial Times has called a Bond villain? So what's this SpaceX IPO all about? What does it mean that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire on paper?

Dave Karpf Money is kind of fake. It's not only is he the world's first trillionaire while being the world's worst human being, he's also the world's worst worst trillionaire, and SpaceX is worth something like 2.2 trillion dollars according to the markets right now, even though it does not turn a profit. He already had a meme stock in Tesla, and now he just went and created another meme stock. The thing that makes it is so crazy making to me about this.

We have this story of the public markets that when you buy a share of a company, you are then entitled to a share of its revenues. And therefore the value of a company in the stock market is related to some mass wisdom from the investor class about how much that company is how much money that company's gonna make. And that's certainly in the past couple of decades only been a little bit true. Because the other thing that you get when you buy a stock in a company is the right to sell that stock, hopefully for more money later on.

Right. So it's also just a betting market. What we've been seeing for the past several years with Tesla doesn't matter that Tesla sells fewer and fewer cars. The stock ends up being worth more and more because people are just betting that some other greater fool will come along and buy it. And then with SpaceX, that that bet just went forward again. Right. There's a bunch of institutional investors who said, Well, I don't know that this company is ever going to be worth that price, but I do think that somebody else will buy this stock for more than I'm buying it today. Ergo, I'll just do that.

It's kind of like he now has the gravitational force of his money is now strong that he no longer has to obey the sort of the the gravitational laws of the market otherwise. SpaceX is worth that because a bunch of people figured that's it'll just be worth it 'cause Elon could never be wrong. And that meant that he could never be wrong, at least in the short term. On the long term, that all probably falls apart and, I don't know, then we have a great financial crisis because it's within the next six months or so, everybody who has just invested the Nasdaq or other index funds is gonna own a piece of SpaceX of this insanely invalid inflated value. And that means that if it ever crashes because people realize, wait, this thing doesn't actually make money. And it's its investor portfolio is, well, we'll just make ninety percent of the money that exists on Earth. There's nothing to that, but it's gonna get so big that they'll just bail it out or something else ridiculous will happen.

The striking thing is it just really means when somebody is worth that much money, all the other institutional wealth just says, if Elon says it, it'll probably be true. And that has a self-reinforcing quality, such that we no longer have any there there's no check on SpaceX, not even it being a shitty company. Which means there's also, at least in the short term, very little check on Elon, even though he's a shitty person whose companies are also shit. He's a trillionaire now. Okay, I guess by the metrics they count by, he kinda won.

Gil Duran Yeah, and it comes at a moment when the USAID cuts that he celebrated with a chainsaw are killing people, some of the poorest people on earth. Got Ebola resurging, you've got the screwworm. He really screwed up government from the inside, and that's one of the disheartening things about his continued economic inflation is that it seems like people who should know better, many of them, are continuing to just bet on Elon to win.

It's not really an economic choice people are making. It's a moral choice. It's a political bet, right? It's it's about this sort of selfishness they believe that somehow he will scam enough people that'll all be worthwhile. And I think that's what's so disconcerting about it. At the same time I would say, because I don't want to dishearten people, it's sort of like a Greek myth. How far is this gonna go? before it all comes crashing down, right, in the most horrible way possible. Because really the arrogance and the villainy of Elon Musk is sort of begging for a cosmic justice of some kind. And either the Greeks were wrong or the Silicon Valley oligarchs are in for a rude awakening.

Dave Karpf The bit that always comes to mind for me is John Maynard Keynes either said this or every everyone says that he said it. But the line is that the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Everything that we can say about Musk and SpaceX today, we could say about Musk and Tesla a month ago. I drove by a cyber truck earlier today. That car was a failure by any objective measure. And if you actually just look at, is Tesla selling more or less cars now?

It's becoming a shittier and shittier company. And yet there's a set of investors who narrowly say, The only thing I care about is do I think that this number will go up tomorrow or not? And they keep on betting, well, I think the number will go up tomorrow. And it does. And so they get rewarded for that. There's absolutely a cosmic injustice in in that, and it can't last for forever. But Elon Musk has been driving me insane for several years now. And I've been working on a book and every time I go through the manuscript, I've got a line about how much he's worth. And I have to update that. I'm not to update it to say he's now worth a trillion. I mentioned this in a a review last week of a book called Muskism, which is a very good book. One thing that we also have to keep in mind here, Elon Musk at the start of the twenty twenties, his net worth was like twenty four billion dollars, which is two point four percent of a trillion.

Something like 97.6% of his personal wealth was made in the 2020s when his public image was the guy who is destroying USAID, doing DOGE, ruining Tesla, ruining Twitter. He hasn't done business genius stuff for quite a while. The the public image that he had in the 2010s, that's long gone. And yet the sort of pure insanity from him of the past what, six years, has been when the vast majority of his wealth has come together. None of that makes sense. And all of that is consequently unjust. And I'm pretty confident that it can't last for forever. But one of the things that I constantly find myself asking is, how much longer can this thing go? And the disappointing answer is clearly a little long I don't know how, but somehow a little longer. It definitely won't last for forever. And when it does fall apart, everyone's gonna look back and say, well that, that was bound to happen. We could all see the signs. But somehow he now has enough power and and money that the other anchors of money and power just decide to reward him, which leaves him immune from the forces of the marketplace and everything else, at least until it doesn't.

Gil Duran One of our commenters says part of the issue is that he's so embedded in our federal government and national security apparatus. So he's being backed by the state. It's that old Republican dream of privatization. Now we understand why it was so important to them. Because instead of having publicly owned infrastructure and technology, it can enrich these corrupt oligarchs who then use their wealth and power. To push right-wing politics. It's all about offloading public money and power to private hands, which is a recurring theme with these Silicon Valley guys. And so it it's very strange that we have a foreign-born trillionaire who is simultaneously raking government contracts, making sure that our economy is increasingly dependent on him and his products, and also stoking chaos and anti-democratic movements around the country. It's all in one package here. So it's pretty A pretty dark day, I'd say, for the world and for the United States, though I have hope that this is all part of our waking up to the dangers of this sort of unchecked anarcho-capitalist clown car derby that we've got going on here.

Dave Karpf Folks probably don't know. I'm a political scientist by trend. Part of what that means is in the late aughts and the teens, one of the literatures that I contributed to was some of the conversations I was in was the money in politics and campaign finance reform conversation. And back that, if you go back to the George W. Bush era era, the problem of money in politics was very rich people can bundle together $10,000 donations to get up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that has a corrupting influence on politics. We gotta do something about it. And then we had Citizens United.

Part of the calculus, part of what fits into this billionaire poisoning, is we now have Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and folks saying, I'll I'll just spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the government outright. Cause once I buy it, I can then have the government re reward me with billions of dollars of contracts. I can have the, if the SEC or the FTC or anyone else is investigating my companies or my portfolio, I can just tell them to knock it off and they'll do it.

It's a it's a really good deal financially for Elon Musk as a trillionaire to just go and buy the US government. And if we go back twenty years ago, he couldn't do that. But then we had a Supreme Court that decided, we'll allow it now. So, not only are we facing a situation that can't go on forever with Elon Musk, but it's a situation that that's sustaining itself because of the way that we've self sabotaged our political system. We're gonna have to rebuild that too. This is nuts. It can't go on for forever.

But if you look narrowly at what the tech billionaires are doing, it's a great deal for them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. If he almost decides I'm gonna spend a billion dollars on on the midterms, that's a pittance for him. And it could have a real financial payoff for his companies. So narrowly, why wouldn't he do it? That's the thing he's gonna do until there's a cost to it.

Gil Duran the most efficient thing. What they've realized is that you can just buy the whole system and break it.

Got a massive liability here that has to be fixed. And I think that, like I said earlier, it's part of our awakening. It's gonna be painful and scary, but this is how people are gonna have to wake up to what's actually going on and what the real risk is of having these billionaires roaming around doing as they please. Speaking of dangerous billionaire interests that have gone a bit off the rails. Back in April, Palantir listed On its Twitter account, some of the major points, I believe it was twenty-two points, the Palantir Manifesto from the Technological Republic. And it was really almost a color by numbers fascist manifesto. You could literally take any of the list of the fascist characteristics and sort of match it. I think it was Umberto Eco who said, you don't have to have every characteristic of fascism to be fascist.

You have to have a familial resemblance. What was your take on the the Palantir Manifesto? And one of the main points was that Silicon Valley had a moral responsibility to take an interest in the affairs of the country and and participate in the defense of the nation. Even went so far as to call for mandatory national service. It's a universal duty. Kind of framed it up an existential threat. We have to create AI weapons or someone else will do it. Basically framing that they have a moral duty to make the military as good as possible and play a an important role in that. But they also basically said that some cultures are better than others and we have to just accept that and understand it. That Silicon Valley has to play a role in addressing violent crime, basically taking a role in in law enforcement around the country...That it was wrong that wealthier, powerful people have their privacy invaded by the media and others, and this should not be allowed. Down the list, it was an argument basically for elite power and for private companies taking a bigger position in national militaristic defense and law enforcement. Pretty scary stuff. What was your take on the Palantir Manifesto? Why do you think they put that out?

Dave Karpf Folks who don't know me would would not know about this habit that I have on Bluesky. I hate read book reviews on Bluesky. I'll do long threads where I tear it into a book. And I I read the Alex Karp book and I did one of my hate read threads. When I read that, which was a little over a year ago, the book is so bad, y'all. The the book should have been a tweet. And then a year later, they turned the book into a series of tweets. And I read that and I was, this tweet just should have been a MAGA hat. That stands out because part of what really hit me in that manifesto, which again,

It's not even really a manifesto. It's a it's a summary of a shitty book. And it is mostly Palantir doing the pick me pick me dance for the Department of War and for Donald Trump. Alex Karp is the CEO of Palantir, the defense tech giant. Also importantly, because the F in my last name is silent. No relationship, but I write good books. He writes a terrible book with the same

Pronounce last name is mine, different guys, different guys. I did a book club once with a bunch of academics where we trashed that book and it was just a solid hour of people being, Yeah, Karp's the worst writer. And I cringed the entire time. It it it it has plenty of fascism in there. But also a lot of what they're saying in there. It's maybe half of the bullet points are them saying, Hey, the future of defense tech is AI and you should spend a lot of money on that and you should spend it with us. Right? That is them.

Just them saying the defense contracting business is good and we would like some more of that. And then they throw in these almost random asides you're going through the bullet points and then out of nowhere they go from the future of the battlefield as AI to saying, and it it's terrible when political elites get canceled. Right. And all they're doing there is saying, hey, what are the things that Pete Hegseth needs to hear so that he gives us all the money? And I do think we gotta read this. When that came out, was I think about a month.

After Anthropic had their defense contract canceled, they they said, Anthropic, you're dead to us because we think you're too woke. So Palantir is coming into that mix and saying, Hey, if if you're gonna give defense money to a tech giant, it should be us. And we have all the same values as you guys, which on on the one hand is disgusting and is definitely a major step on the road to fascism. I don't wanna doubt that. That's true. It's also just vaguely pathetic because there's no if you read the bullet points in order.

There is no through line. They're just saying all the stuff that they think Hegseth and Trump want to hear. And I'm sure if Democrats win in twenty twenty six, I am sure they will then just pretend that they didn't say some of that stuff because they will quickly pivot to whatever they think needs to be heard today, so long as it keeps the defense contract dollars flowing in.

Gil Duran Palantir's had plenty of defense money under Democrats and Republicans alike. I mean, they're getting a lot more now, right? I think it was a recent story about everybody who's giving money to Trump is also getting government contracts in return. So it's this massive towering flywheel of corruption that we're seeing. One of the things I focus on in my book is the degree to which this interconnected group of oligarchs and venture capitalists are cornering investments on AI, crypto, surveillance and defense technology at the same time that they're cornering government power and even trying to create their own religion. And if you look at Mussolini or Ruth Ben-Ghiat or Robert Paxton or Jason Stanley, that that bundle, fascism.

The word fascism comes from the Latin fasces, which was this bundle of rods in ancient Rome with an axe sticking off the side that was a totem of power in ancient Rome. What they are doing is bundling technology and power together in one bundle. And I use that metaphor to kind of explain because whenever you s call something fascist, the right wing excels at saying, that word doesn't mean anything. You're a fascist. Every you say everything is fascism. So it's really important to understand the degree to which they think that.

By cornering government and these technologies and controlling the money with crypto, they just make something up and then billions of dollars flow and they can parcel that out. The Trump family is now crypto billionaires. And that's the the main mechanism of crypto these days, I think, is as a towering mechanism of corruption in politics. That's been true forever. But they are now directly using it to just bribe and pay off politicians, starting with the Trumps, right?

Yeah. And I think we gotta realize that's where we are. But it it's really about this concentration of power all at once that they are doing. And yeah, I think you're right. Palantir's auditioning for a role, right? Everyone's very aggressively right wing now and all about this return to

Some glorious past that is also the future. So pretty scary stuff. And what bothers me, and I've said this before, is that if Democrats do win power again, we have to make sure that they hold these people accountable for their actions now. It'll be very important to remember what it felt like at this moment, because they'll all put on their smiley faces and pretend like they didn't mean it or they didn't really want to go along with Trump. They just had to. But we have to remember what it looked like in this moment. I think maybe we should have a museum. of American fascism that's dedicated to remembering who did what and how it looked and how it worked. Because if we survive this, we'll have to teach children in the future how close we came to really just losing it all, with very little resistance from the main establishment. Again

Dave Karpf I and what strikes me, similar to Musk becoming a trillionaire, is sort of the time horizon. If you look just in the very narrow short term, that Palantir Manifesto makes financial sense. Palantir is valued as a meme stock. The amount of money that they bring in in government contracts and any other contracts is a tiny fraction of what they're valued on the markets. When you're a meme stock, you just need to do a bunch of noisy shit to convince investors to keep handing you their money, to just continue being the greater fool.

If they're thinking just in the what do we do in the next six months to get attention that's going to keep our stock value high, then I can understand how they back themselves into saying, let's go full fascism, let's do a manifesto, we're gonna be as brashly MAGA as possible. If you look in the medium term, that shit doesn't work. Right. If you look in the in the medium term and the long term and you actually analyze how is SpaceX supposed to turn a profit, it it basically isn't.

They just need to break the laws of physics while no one else breaks the laws of physics and then make all of the money that exists. It's similar to how the plan for Tesla to make money now is we're gonna invent robo servants and then everyone in the world will buy several of them for thirty thousand dollars, even though most of the world doesn't have thirty thousand dollars. None of that makes sense. But that's a problem for later. It it cannot last. And also they're not in the business of making plans that last 10, 20, 30 years. The logic of the of the moment we're in is that this people in power just trying to get through the next quarter, figuring it'll be somebody else's problem later, is what governs us. That can't go on for forever, but it is so frustrating now.

Gil Duran Well, as long as they make their exit in time, I guess they figure they'll be okay. I think I saw a story too from Reuters about how the Trump family's wealth corresponds to the amount of money that was lost by all these people. It reminds me, I was in Rome a couple of weeks ago and every time you go to a European city, you see the scammers doing that little three cups game where there's a ball hidden in one of the cups, and you see all of these tourists around ready to get ripped off. It's how do you not know? That you're gonna lose your money to these people, right? Works that way in a lot of places, including with things like crypto or these meme stocks where someone's getting the money. The money that they're gaining is from other people losing it.

Dave Karpf Polymarket billions and billions are getting spent on Polymarket, pretty much all by suckers who are losing their money to people who are doing scams and investment fraud, right? It's insider trading. They just don't bother with that stuff. And yet people keep on spending more and more money on Polymarket and Kalshi. In the medium term, there's no way that that works. We can all see what that is and that it is ruining all of society, right?

This is me being as conservative as I can be. Unregulated gambling, getting advertised everywhere is that. That's a thing that conservatives are supposed to believe. And here I as a progressive am saying it. All of that is sort of the current moment. We know it can't last, but there's so much profit in it for the billionaire class that they're gonna keep on doing it now and just worry about later later.

Gil Duran We'll have to do a whole show on prediction markets at some point. Degree to which prediction markets are being used as propaganda. For example, in the California governor's race, which I watch closely, the tech bros ran this guy named Matt Mahan. They thought he could win. He ended up sputtering out with like three percent or something like that. It didn't work out. They put in millions and millions of dollars behind him and just they couldn't make fetch happen.

When he entered the race, suddenly he surged to forty percent on Polymarket. Media outlets ran with the story like wow, Mahan is surging. And so it created this whole false narrative that made it seem like he was surging, which people try to do that to convince undecided people to, wow, that guy seems popular. Let me maybe vote for him.

It didn't work, but if you watched it all throughout the race, it was right in the end, but only after having been wrong at every step of the way. And all it did in the end was simply reflect what most people thought based on the polls. So there's this weird thing going on where all that people are really doing is A, losing money, and B, certain people seem to be using it to create temporary propaganda narratives based on probabilities that are actually not probable at all. If you have a thousand dollars to bet and no one else is betting, you can suddenly make it seem like Wow, the odds are way up on this and that's really something easy for people to do. Anyway, we'll do that another time.

R.R. Robbins And speaking of time, right now it's time for the plugs. Dave Karpf, a returning favorite and amazing voice on tech today. Subscribe to his newsletter, The Future Now and Then, at Dave Karpf with an F at the end, beehiiv.com. And his new book, Vaporware Inc., How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present, drops January 2027. Set your reminder now. Speaking of new books, get ready for the Nerd Reich. Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Pre-order it at bookshop.org and check the show notes for links. Pre-orders really make a difference for us, so please do your part and put in one today. And if you want to be part of the next exclusive event like this, where we recorded this episode, sign up for the newsletter and become a paid subscriber today at thenerdreich.com. Now back to the conversation with Gil and Dave.

Gil Duran Speaking of exiting from things at the proper moment when it's the most lucrative or profitable, Elon Musk headed toward becoming a trillionaire and as Palantir issued its Technological Republic Manifesto, Peter Thiel up and moved his family, temporarily at least, to a twelve million dollar mansion in Argentina. And this has raised a lot of questions about what's going on with him. Curtis Yarvin, who was largely funded by Peter Thiel, has been crying, literally weeping in Interview saying that everyone needs to escape because Trump is failing. He's not gonna go all the way with a dictatorship and there's gonna be accountability when Democrats retake power. So on one level, is Thiel heeding this advice and fleeing in terror, trying to set up a a home base somewhere else? Is there something else going on? And I think it's a it's a mix of things. Javier Milei, the president, the anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina, announced new legislation that would ban AI regulation. Lower taxes for tech companies and allow for the creation of non-human corporations. So basically a whole corporation that's just AI has to pose and AI agents. So that seemed like the kind of thing that would be appealing to Thiel. And and Milei made it clear in a Financial Times up it that this was an invitation to billionaires and tech companies to relocate to Argentina, where basically they can just write their own ticket and do as they please. What do you make of Thiel's spreading roots? Temporarily at least, in Argentina.

Dave Karpf So I had a serious answer and a joke answer. Can we st let me start with a joke answer? Peter Thiel has always struck me as a guy who eventually flees to Argentina, right? He does seem like the type. So do it a little earlier than I thought. Anyway, though it's a joke, Peter Thiel. Please don't suit me out of existence. I know you like to do that to people. The serious answer is an important concept to keep in mind is optionality. You take a strategic action, but you leave yourself room to do other stuff still.

Gil Duran Sure, we could use some levity here.

Dave Karpf When Peter Thiel moves to Argentina, he doesn't really move to Argentina. He bought some land in Argentina. He also, I'm pretty sure, has a New Zealand passport and has some land there's with his wealth, he's got land in a bunch of places. So right now, there there's been this libertarian exit idea for quite a while. I know you've written a bunch on this. Quinn Slobodian has a great book on this topic, called Crack-Up Capitalism, about sort of tech billionaires and also through history other billionaires. Trying to crack up nation states so they can carve out zones where they don't get regulated. Right. So Milei has just said, sure, we'll do that for you. Please come here. El Salvador had done that a little while before that for, for for crypto. Honduras had done that. Often what happens is you'll have a right wing president say that. And then later on they lose election because it's terrible for the populace. And then the new government says, Yeah, we're we're not doing that anymore. And then they get sued by the tech billionaires who love to sue everybody.

That could work, right? That could be Argentina decides from now on all the AI companies should be incorporated here and they'll pay us a few dollars in taxes. 'cause of course they don't they don't like paying their taxes. And we won't regulate them at all. And from there we will be the prosperous we're gonna turn our country into Galt's Gulch. If you're Thiel, then it's, Hey, I'm glad that you're saying that, I'll spend twelve million dollars, which is nothing for Peter Thiel, to buy property there and we'll get some headlines for quote unquote moving there.

He's going around the world giving weird speeches about the Antichrist. So if that goes south, it doesn't if it goes well, then he reaps the rewards. If it goes south, then he doesn't lose anything from it. He'll just he's still also in San Francisco. So I I think that that's the main thing is I think we should take it seriously, but also not treat it as a meaningful commitment. When he moves to Argentina, it's not like you or me moving to Argentina, or like when Jason Stanley moved to Canada, he actually moved to Canada. Right, like you Peter Thiel, he has the optionality to undo anything he's doing. So he's just kinda like trying it out.

Gil Duran Well one thing that comes to mind and I I get into this in the first chapter of my book, which is called The Sovereign Individual, Peter Thiel and the Politics of Apocalypse. Peter Thiel read this book, The Sovereign Individual, in the late nineties, and the sovereign individual I've talked about it before. The main thesis of it was that in the twenty first century technology would allow wealthy individuals to basically overcome and escape democracy and that nation states would collapse as all the revenue was sucked out because the wealthy elites could now find ways using technology to escape from the power of governments. And in that book, one of the things that these authors, who were these sort of kooky conspiracy theorists, recommended was obtaining multiple passports so that you could belong in any country, make a point of collecting passports. And two of the countries they singled out that would be good to have a passport for were New Zealand and Argentina.

And I believe Thiel became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 or something. He was able to get there and buy a piece of land and get a get a passport. And now he's doing Argentina. So in a weird way, he's still on that weird damn book. The thesis was that the technologies that would allow this collapse of democratic governments essentially were A, advanced automation, or AI. Which we would call that we'd call it AI today, and something called cybercurrency, a new kind of digital money that would allow people to evade government authority and power. Crypto. We are strangely on the mark for those prophecies. Although, of course, people knew that automation technologies and cybercurrency was a possibility before this damn book came out. They they they just kind of put it in this cheesy, scary format and and publish it as a book.

So that that's one part of it. It's amazing to me that this Argentina thing still fits his sovereign individual fixation. In his Antichrist speeches, which he's been giving all over the world, apparently he spoke about the Antichrist at length at a dinner in Argentina as well. One of the faces of Thiel's Antichrist is anybody who stands against technological acceleration or AI, any regulation of AI is the Antichrist. And so Milei. seems to be answering that with no regulation on AI and even you can have a non human company. So it's really about shopping for a jurisdiction that will allow him to do whatever he wants. And I'm sure having a house there will allow him to maybe get a passport at some point. And that's probably what the real play is there, just preparing for the future. But I doubt that at the height of his power, with JD Vance, his protege a heartbeat away from the presidency, that he's actually leaving the country. I doubt that.

Dave Karpf And again, when you have that kind of money, you you have so much money that you can do that stuff on a lark and see if it goes anywhere. This comes up for me a lot when I end up writing about or studying a bunch of the right wing movements that are funded by Thiel and are manifestly ridiculous. And they often get covered because they got fifty million dollars of of money behind them. And to journalists and a lot of other people, it's, well, that's a lot of money. So there must be something serious here.

The thing you have to keep in mind is Peter Thiel giving fifty million dollars to something is like you or me giving fifty dollars to something. It it's not nothing, but if it sounds like a cool idea and I want to support it just to see where it goes, I I could probably come up with it, right? That's that's not huge grocery money, that's a little grocery money. He can do that with the 50 million. Elon Musk, my god, the dumb idea is that Elon Musk can now fund on a lark because of this concentration of wealth. You cannot have a functional civil society or democracy when this much money is in the hands of just a few utter goobers. And that's that's sort of been what's defined our politics for a decade.

Gil Duran Here's a question from one reader from the chat. What is the end game when large portions of the population are displaced and have no employable skills after AI is implemented full skill? Now there's a loaded and important question.

Dave Karpf First time you and I talked, it was about Balaji Srinivasan, because both of us would read his awful, awful book. Worst book I've ever read. And I've written a book review titled something like Tech Billionaires Have a Blueprint, it is written in crayon. Every time I read what they've actually written about this stuff, what is most striking is the degree to which they have not thought this through. So the practical end game is something like once they have all of the money and automated robo servants that can cater to all of their needs and in their minds those deterrence will work for it. Well, then they kind of don't need the rest of the populace. They can sort of oppress them or kill them off or whatever they need to do. They're not actively planning the genocides. But if the genocides happen, then, whoopsie, we saw with USAID, they're not even apologetic about that shit. People who read Ayn Rand and never got over it. And so they truly believe that

Well, once we have our tech written utopia where nobody can say no to us at all, since we're the maker class, the maker class will be made better through us. And if it's not, then I guess it's their fault somehow. None of that actually works because Ayn Rand wrote bad fiction that doesn't work in reality. These guys have so much wealth and power without having ever figured that out. They're not good at reading. The unintentional endgame is really bad for humanity, which then naturally leads to probably Those people with no power who are immiserated, probably taking up arms and fighting back against the small number of tech barons with all the wealth, all the power and all the resistance. It probably ends in in chaos and social instability. But again, they they haven't thought any of that through because these guys are very rich, but they are not very brighter.

Gil Duran It's not clear how they would be so wealthy without any kind of economy to sustain them. What would anything be worth with no rest of the world? In that book I mentioned The Sovereign Individual, the prophecy is that technology would hollow out the economy and would lead to chaos and violence and collapse as people no longer had work to do. Which is funny because that's what some of these AI companies are now pitching, is that work's gonna any day now all the white collar jobs are gonna be gone, all the law jobs are gonna be gone, even though AI will hallucinate cases that don't exist. I mean, there's still a lot of problems. And there is pushback on that narrative because people say that it's actually not gonna be capable of displacing as many jobs as they're saying. It's also turning out that a lot of this AI stuff is pretty darn expensive. I was just reading a story before the chat, Meta is limiting its workers' use of AI because it's too expensive. And this comes after they've been encouraging their workers to use AI. The idea is that. We're all just gonna pay a lot for AI tokens to use all day to do what exactly? And I guess their vision of the future would seem to be that they'll just have a bunch of machines all talking to each other and somehow generating fake value and that will be the world without without people in it. But I think that that's a big mistake because there's eight point five billion people on the planet.

Only around three thousand of them are billionaires. This is the easiest trolley problem ever, and if there's no other job for people, then the job will be to revolt, have a revolution against billionaire anti human power. Right? They will unite the human race in a struggle to preserve the meaning of humanity. So yeah, I don't think they've fully thought it through. All it took was people to get a little bit hungry for the French Revolution to kick off. And they seem to really be wanting to drive in that direction. I think part of their jobs narrative is to convince investors that these trillions of dollars of investment will all pay off because we'll suck all of the value out of the economy into our company if you just keep pouring trillions and trillions of dollars onto our technology. So I think it's important to not fully believe. Believe the narrative that they have the power they say they have to destroy all jobs. Not to be in denial about the degree to which AI is already changing our reality, but not to fully buy into their fantasies and scenarios, because even they are now running into some roadblocks. And you got people like Ed Zitron and others who say this is a big bubble that's gonna pop. And they're trying to convince you that, We're gonna create godlike AI that's gonna kill all the jobs, but that's part of the marketing hype and narrative. We don't know the answer to the question yet. We don't know the full story, but we can't fully believe everything that these guys say that they're gonna do. Another question we have from someone in the chat, will push back against data centers make a difference? It seems like it's a bipartisan issue.

Dave Karpf I wrote on this last week. I think it really could. And the reason why I think it could is that I think it's a bank shot. As Zitron and other people have noted, AI is a bubble, at least financially. There's different types of financial bubbles, but quite clearly they need massive amounts of cash because they're burning through it trying to build the next wave of AI in order to keep up this story, this narrative that eventually this stuff will so transform the entire world. pure cancer and solve all of physics and everything else. And that that's the reason why the money will eventually work out, right? That the math will eventually math. In order to sustain that narrative, you need to be able to constantly make it seem like the future is arriving soon. So the thing that really excites me about this local data center activism, it is the best opportunity, the the best leverage point we have for creating friction that slows the industry down. And if you create that friction, you very possibly pop the financial bubble.

That doesn't mean that all of AI vanishes overnight. There are things that generative AI is good for. It can continue to be used for those things. If you would like shitty poetry, it's really good at doing that for you. In the same way that when the dot-com bubble popped, that didn't mean that the internet was gone, but it did completely reset the table in terms of who has power and who gets to set regulations, right? Who can avoid accountability and who's gonna face it. If we can pop that bubble sooner. Then the AI future gets shaped by different people at the table, right? We won't have the AI future that is dictated by Sam Altman and Elon Musk alone. The way to reset those power dynamics is to pop the financial bubble. And I actually think there's a a chance that local data center activism creating friction ends up bursting that financial bubble. Because if they can't produce what feels like the future at a fast enough rate. Then people start saying, what did we just spend another five billion dollars on? Where'd you put that last five billion you asked for last month? So I think there's a real chance of that activism at the local level scaling up to something very powerful and altering the trajectory that we're on.

Gil Duran It does seem to be one of those rare things that brings about a bipartisan unity. The other thing that's been similar to that has been this California Forever project in Solano County, where they're trying to build this sort of network state tech utopia city, bunch of venture capitalists secretly bought up thousands of acres of land and then no one knew what they were up to, but it would turn out to be this city. I called it the miracle in Solano in 2024 because in 2024 the These guys found a way to unite Democrats and Republicans against this weird city. And it stuck in my mind, someone on Facebook said, this is like some kind of alien invasion. It's suddenly they're here and they're gonna build their thing in your community. And I think that that we're seeing these struggles everywhere from North Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, all over the Utah, all over the country, people are feeling the pressure from these companies want wanting land. Wanting water, wanting energy, wanting resources. And it does seem to be a kind of a physical manifestation of this political project that has the potential to really activate and and unite people. And the polls show that. I don't know if you saw that Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan was cut on a hot mic telling some CEO, yeah, they don't want these things, but we just do it anyway? Data Center Democrats. one of the new villains who have emerged because everybody wants that tech money. But I do think it raises some important questions about what people deserve. Basically you're saying let us come and take your land and your energy and your water and pollute your air so that we can create a technology that's then going to take your job and and destroy your children and kill your future. Not a really good deal there to look forward to. So people should fight while they can and there's interesting organizing taking place all over the country right now. It's really activating a lot of people.

Dave Karpf Part of what we're seeing here is this is where it ends up really mattering that people have soured on tech, but they don't trust them all. Right. If you go back to 2009, Google's building a bunch of data centers and Amazon is building data centers to support cloud based computing and big data. But if there's pulling on that, people are probably, yeah, those companies build products that I like and need. Good for them, right?

People weren't people didn't hate those companies back then. Facebook circa twenty ten is still viewed as kind of cool. people working at Facebook were real proud to wear their Facebook merch because we're, it's such a great company. And then you have the tech lash circa circa twenty seventeen. These companies get richer and richer, but also people come to hate them and to believe they have all the power, we can't do anything about it. And now by twenty twenty six, that that's the place that we're trapped in is Like people fucking hate Elon Musk. And also he becomes a trillionaire. And there's just a sense of no matter what he does, no matter how publicly he fails, the markets just give him more money. And there's nothing that we can do to stop him. And then when you give people some meaningful leverage point, right? Because the national government isn't listening to us. The stock market isn't listening to us. But local zoning boards, yeah, they'll they'll listen to us.

And that then becomes a rallying cry because what people desperately want, I think, is some meaningful leverage point to say hell no. So that's what we're seeing here. And again, it it's not just people crying to the wilderness and there's no point to it. It's people crying to the wilderness and this really could create some leverage that matters.

Gil Duran Obviously the Republicans are trying to destroy the country very openly, but I've said this in my talks and I say it in my book. My bigger fear is the Democrats will take us on a slower path there because they don't seem to be fully awake to how radically anti democratic Silicon Valley has become. And there's still this sort of old outdated talking point. Silicon Valley is about innovation and all these good things, and we have to be on the side of that. And believe me, that's how it was fifteen, ten years ago even. I worked for Democratic politicians and we held Silicon Valley in high regard and nobody viewed it as an existential threat to democracy. But that has all changed. But right now, you've got Silicon Valley now pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into our elections and suddenly becoming the biggest player in politics. Crypto and AI specifically are already putting like over 200 million dollars into the midterms. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, One the worst and most radical, is now one of the biggest players in political donations. And so that becomes a threat, not only in terms of keeping Republicans in power, but buying off Democrats. And I'm working on a piece about this right now, and this will upset some people perhaps in this conversation, but Gavin Newsom, who's running for president in 2028, is currently in the middle of cozying up to crypto billionaires. One of them has already pledged to do whatever it takes to get him elected. And

Just yesterday he was at an event with Garry Tan of Y Combinator, one of the worst of the worst in terms of the network state guys trying to take over California politics. And because I worked in democratic politics here, a lot of the people around Newsom, the consultants who were behind him, have been with him for years. They're now all moneyed up with Silicon Valley and venture capital, right? So Newsom is going to try to run as a Democrat. Who is funded by Silicon Valley. And he thinks he's smart enough to thread that needle. He can he can somehow pull that off, but he fundamentally doesn't understand what these guys are about. Because they might fund him as a stooge, but believe me, they're gonna try to get JD Vance or someone else elected because then they get everything they want. But the more we have famous Democrats out there hugging up and sucking up to these guys, the worse and worse it gets. I guess my point would be that we have to stigmatize that kind of thing and make it clear that. A Democrat who takes crypto, a Democrat who's schmoozing with the Palantir guys, is not a Democrat who can get elected in this country. And I think we're we're a bit of a far away from that realization. But we can start here by telling everybody crypto is corrupto. I mean, think about it, why should any Democrat be for crypto?

Dave Karpf I I have two reactions. One is I would like to encourage crypto billionaires to donate donate as much money as they would like to Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom is so incredibly Jeb Bush. Go ahead and waste your money on that dude. It is it's not gonna work for him. That, that is a lead balloon. So if they if they want to throw money at that guy, and then we can all sort of point and laugh at him as he does not win a single primary, God bless.

This again goes back to we both need to fix the power of tech in this country, but also need to fix our politics. Right? The the thing that keeps me up at night is less Democrats saying when they, if and when they gain power that they want to make nice with the tech industry. I'm worried about that, but that's that's not the sort of the starring role in my nightmares. The starring role in my nightmares is that they're gonna believe if and when they gain power that. They can treat our government and politics as though we went through normal times and we are still in normal times. Right. If if a Democrat wins in 2028, the amount of work that it's going to take to repair the damage to this country. Just to like just as an example, they will need to clear out the entire FBI and pretty much the entire DOJ. Because the only people left to the FBI and Department of Justice are going to be Kash Patel stooges and personal friends.

That doesn't happen overnight. That's gonna be like a year or more of getting rid of people, having those people then claim procedurally that they were unjustly fired, even though Kash Patel unjustly fired before, and then having to play through courts and maybe facing a Trump judge so it takes a long time. We're gonna have Democrats who come in and say, we're just gonna pretend that now that we're in power, we're back to normal times and we can work for with, whoever is has both been installed in the judiciary and installed in DOJ and everywhere else. As opposed to recognizing an authoritarian was in power and took over the entirety of the government and often handed the keys to that government to Palantir, to Elon, to a bunch of his friends. And we're going to need to reset everything to rebuild the administrative state. That takes a decade or longer. The thing that worries me is that we're gonna have Democrats who tell themselves, no, no, actually it's fine. We'll just sort of pretend that away. And those same Democrats would then be the ones who say, Well, actually now Marc Andreessen wants to have a meeting with me. I should definitely take that meeting. there's crypto people who say that they want to be regulated. They just want to voice the regulation. That sounds reasonable and I'll take the check. But as activists, as members of the public, we're gonna need to push back against that, both because of the corruption, but also because if Democrats do that, then it just won't work because of the actual amount of damage that has been done. We need to take seriously the times we're living in.

Gil Duran Dave Karpf, thank you for joining us. And thank you all for being here.

R.R. Robbins And thanks to our subscribers who joined us for that great conversation. If you want to be part of future special events, become a paid subscriber to our newsletter at http://www.thenerdreich.com. The Nerd Reich is written and hosted by Gil Duran. It's produced by me, R.R. Robbins. Our final word today: about money from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges:

"Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos. Because all pesos are equal, so every day, perhaps every hour, is different."

See you next time.

After multiple artists dropped out of President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 Independence Day celebrations, the administration has settled on a replacement: FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins.

“What a great honor to be a part of the 250th birthday of this great nation,” Wilkins posted on X Tuesday.

The event was supposed to have a series of concerts, with headliners announced in late May. Musicians immediately started dropping out, saying they didn’t know that the event would be politicized.

Now, instead of having performers Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & the Time, and Bret Michaels, the event will feature Wilkins—a country singer with 5,863 monthly listeners on Spotify.

On X, Wilkins fired back at critics questioning her dubious booking, saying, “I was invited to sing this anthem on my own accord, as I have been many other places throughout my career.”

Patel has a track record of inappropriately using government resources in his relationship with Wilkins, including using a SWAT team as her bodyguards and jet-setting in a government plane to go see her. Wilkins denies that she’s gotten special privileges, and is suing MS NOW for defamation alleging that she abused federal resources.

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that President Trump can resume fast-tracking deportations in a 2-1 ruling. While a lower court struck the program down in August, this ruling allows the Trump administration to deport potentially millions of people without offering them immigration hearings.

Judge Justin R. Walker and Judge Neomi Rao, two Trump appointees, ruled in Trump’s favor, while Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, dissented. The Trump appointees argued that it was within the executive’s jurisdiction to decide which migrants to fast-track to deportation, and that the Department of Homeland Security was not required to inform migrants that they could avoid an accelerated deportation if they could offer proof of residency for at least two years.

“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” Walker wrote.

Wilkins noted in his dissent that the expedited removal process was usually reserved for people detained immediately at the U.S. borders, rather than immigrants who’d been in the country for some time.

“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” Wilkins wrote.

This decision is a victory for the mass deportation agenda animating White House adviser Stephen Miller. The DHS celebrated the ruling, claiming that it had “vindicated” Trump, according to The New York Times.

Georgia Republicans are experts at meddling in elections. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, the state’s far-right lawmakers passed a bill to reduce mail-in voting among Black Georgians from 29% in 2020 to just 5% in 2024. Georgia’s methods became the blueprint for other red states’ voter suppression efforts. But with early voting among Georgia…

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Four years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Constitution does not confer a federal right to abortion, overturning nearly 50 years of settled law in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In the wake of the decision, many left-leaning states have moved to protect and expand reproductive rights, while conservative states have…

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The bipartisan housing bill the House and Senate passed this week doesn’t go far enough, Democratic leaders say. But it’s still one of the most significant pieces of housing legislation passed in decades. Further Democratic goals on housing might have to wait for a new Congress.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which President Trump could sign as early as Wednesday, was a collaboration between Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, and ranking member Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts. On Monday night, the bill passed the Senate handily with a vote of 85–5. On Tuesday, the House advanced it with a 358–32 vote.

“The biggest win is we finally did something,” said Senator Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, gesturing at Congress’s usual partisan gridlock. “In this world, the fact that you’ve got Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren and the entire U.S. Senate to support housing shows that we’re finally focusing on something that really matters to the American people. So I see it as a beginning.”

In terms of substantive victories, Warren emphasized a restriction on the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors that own at least 350 single-family homes.

“For the first time ever, [we] tell private equity ‘no,’ they cannot mow through every neighborhood in America and turn us into a nation of renters,” she told The New Republic.

Warren also pointed to the bill’s efforts to increase housing supply, which housing policy expert Will Fischer of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called the “central theme” of the bill. The bill removes some regulatory barriers and streamlines environmental reviews to accelerate the construction of affordable housing—including the first federal guidelines on zoning reform. The bill also creates an “Innovation Fund” that rewards communities that successfully build more housing.

By removing the requirement that manufactured homes have a permanent steel chassis beneath them, the bill could bring down the cost of a new unit by up to $10,000, according to Warren’s office.

These provisions, Fischer said, are “part of what’s needed to address the housing crisis in the country to build more housing, but they are only a first step in order to really solve the affordable housing crisis.”

So what’s next? Fischer pointed to the need for more rental assistance programs that will help the lowest-income Americans afford a place to live. Increasing the supply of housing is critical, he said, but not sufficient to fix the issue. “No matter how much we build, that’s never going to be enough to make housing affordable to tens of millions of people with low incomes,” he said.

Rental assistance programs are a harder sell with Republicans, and the Trump administration has attempted to cut such programs through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s unlikely that the current Congress is going to take the kind of action that’s really needed to sharply reduce homelessness and evictions,” Fischer said.

Democrats echoed that sentiment in their public statements. “Our work is far from over and this is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of a renewed effort to tackle our housing affordability crisis and ensure every American has access to a safe, decent, and affordable place to call home,” said Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California and the ranking member on the House Committee on Financial Services, in a statement.

Still, the message on Tuesday was one of optimism. “Let me put it this way,” Warren said. “The bill is not the one I would have written all by myself, but there are some really big wins here that made all the work and all the pain totally worthwhile.”

Allies of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept the region’s Democratic House primaries Tuesday evening, the latest example of liberal-minded voters shifting their preferences.

And after Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez won—all of whom have been vocal critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza—the biggest loser seemed to be MAGA world, which was left befuddled and irate that voters had turned away from candidates espousing the historically pro-Israel party line.

Appearing on Fox News, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller complained that the “Democrat Party has abandoned [centrism] and instead adopted this radical, revolutionary, and in many cases, violent ideology that wants to tear America down, and destroy everything that we know and love, from top to bottom.”

Miller further used the trio’s massive win Tuesday to urge Democrats to vote MAGA in the midterm elections, claiming that progressive politics—which he said involved hating America, God, family, and gender—would be the country’s “death knell.”

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer was similarly disgusted by the political development, insisting that the Big Apple’s mayor is an Islamic militant and that Donald Trump needs to do something about it.

“I remember when Trump, who I love, said Mamdani isn’t a jihadi. I was shocked,” Loomer wrote on X late Tuesday, reacting to the race. “Mamdani is a jihadi and this growing threat of Islamic jihad and pro-Islamic terror candidates getting elected in America is a national crisis. It needs to be addressed by the Trump administration. Tonight should prove it to everyone.”

Meghan McCain, a conservative TV personality and daughter of former Arizona Senator John McCain, also added her two cents, writing directly to Jewish Americans via social media.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone. We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening,” McCain wrote.

Lander, one of the three Mamdani-backed candidates who cruised to victory Tuesday night, is Jewish.

President Donald Trump had a meltdown Tuesday after a slate of Democratic Socialist candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primary elections.

“America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“Many Communists running in badly failing Blue States. The votes seem to have them doing quite well against each other,” Trump wrote in another post. “The bad news is that history has conclusively shown that the downtrodden States that they will soon be running will ONLY GET WORSE.”

Trump also lashed out at Democratic Representative Dan Goldman, who lost his seat to former city Comptroller Brad Lander, an ally of Mamdani.

“Weak and pathetic Congressman Dan Goldman just lost, BIG! I guess people didn’t like him illegally targeting President TRUMP. In any event, this jerk is finally GONE!” Trump wrote.

Representative Adriano Espaillat, the 71-year-old leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist who previously organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. And Assemblymember Claire Valdez, another member of Democratic Socialists of America, triumphed over the handpicked successor of outgoing Representative Nydia Velazquez.

“Solidarity forever, abolish ICE, free Palestine, organize your union, and join DSA!” Valdez said at the end of her victory speech.

Candidates are casting their messaging around Epstein’s associates and the unaccountable elite, betting that voter distrust of powerful institutions can help them shape the midterm debate. By Grace Panetta for The 19th After Graham Platner secured the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine, his first ad of the general election didn’t mention his opponent, Sen. Susan Collins…

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Being the mayor of New York is an enormous task for anyone, let alone a 34-year-old. But Zohran Mamdani’s ambitions seem to go beyond leading the Big Apple. He wants to help remake the national Democratic Party. And he may succeed. All three of the candidates Mamdani endorsed in New York-area House Democratic primaries won on Tuesday night. Those victories will likely push House Democrats in Washington further left and embolden the increasing successful progressive wing of the party.

With the mayor’s backing, Brad Lander, the former city comptroller who finished behind Mandami in the mayoral race last year, resoundingly defeated incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in the 10th Congressional District. A bigger sign of the mayor’s sway was the 7th Congressional District victory of Claire Valdez, a first-term New York assemblywoman, who easily beat Antonio Reynoso, a former city councilman and longtime figure in the city’s politics. Reynoso had the backing of the district’s retiring incumbent, Nydia Velazquez. Lander could have won without Mamdani’s endorsement, but Valdez almost certainly would not have.

The stunner was the win of Mamdani’s third candidate, activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who narrowly defeated incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District. Avila Chevalier had never run for office before, while Espaillat is a five-term congressman and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Avila Chevalier’s win was entirely about the political power of the mayor and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which boosted Mamdani last year and his preferred candidates this year.

It’s not an exact parallel, but Avila Chevalier beating Espaillat echoes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win over then-Representative Joe Crowley in 2018. This is another sign of voter frustration with establishment Democratic politicians.

Three House primaries alone don’t change American politics drastically. But Lander is a progressive in the mold of Senator Elizabeth Warren and will likely be more supportive of left-wing causes than Goldman. And Valdez and Avila Chevalier are likely to be two of the most progressive members on Capitol Hill, constantly challenging party leadership from the left and perhaps forming an even more progressive “Squad” than the prior version. So Mamdani is building the left flank on Capitol Hill and in the Democratic Party. And Lander and Valdez’s wins will embolden other progressives to run in 2028 and try to knock off more moderate Democratic incumbents.

How this happened is fascinating. Mamdani’s decision to aggressively campaign for his preferred U.S. House candidates was odd and even misguided in some ways. Mayors don’t usually interject themselves into congressional races. A mayor getting his favorites sent to Washington obviously doesn’t help him or her get their agenda passed through the City Council. And in Mamdani’s case, a mayor already hated by the city’s elite establishment made new enemies by endorsing candidates running against two incumbents and a third popular figure in New York politics (Reynoso). New York Attorney General Letitia James was among the one-time Mamdani allies who groused about him playing such a heavy hand in these primaries.

So why did he get so involved, with little personal benefit and considerable potential cost? Because Mamdani is deeply invested in the broader leftist/progressive/socialist movement, beyond his own ambitions. In the run-up to the House primaries, he openly expressed his hopes that progressives winning in New York could inspire a broader reckoning in the Democratic Party. He believes that the party should broadly adopt his populist economic views, focus on affordability and the working class, and skepticism of the Israeli government. While he’s a new figure, Mamdani is following in the footsteps of Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez, who have spent the last several years endorsing progressive candidates in races across the country in hopes of building a cadre that changes the party.

“For far too long, our party has seen its job as managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people,” Mamdani said at a rally last week in support of these House candidates, as reported by CNN. “It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot instead of showing how we can, and that old way of thinking will lose on Tuesday. And frankly, it will lose in South Carolina and New Hampshire. It will fall short of 270 electoral votes, because the party of the past will not be what leads us into the future.”

In a later part of the speech, he said, “People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party. This slate here today is our answer.”

On Election Day, Mamdani said, according to the Associated Press, “It’s not just a question of electing more Democrats. It’s a question of electing better Democrats. When I look at these candidacies, I see in them a willingness to also put working people back at the heart of our politics.”

Those comments were remarkably direct, invoking this November’s elections, but also the 2028 Democratic primaries (South Carolina and New Hampshire are likely to be early voting states), the 2028 general election, and the broader discourse about the party. I am skeptical that House primaries in New York City in 2026 tell us much about Democratic primaries or the general election in 2028. But Mamdani is arguing that what’s happening in New York is connected to the future. And more importantly, he’s trying to will that view into action.

While Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez have been in national politics much longer than the mayor, his stunning and high-profile victory in America’s biggest city has given him a microphone that is perhaps as big as theirs. I wonder if Mamdani will endorse candidates outside of the New York area in the next few years.

There’s another reason Mamdani may be particularly interested in endorsements: He can’t run for president himself. The Uganda-born mayor is the rare powerful, popular figure in American politics who isn’t plotting out his route to the White House. A politician as talented as Mamdani may be frustrated he can’t ever be president. But for the progressive movement, having a famous, charismatic figure who isn’t obsessing over Wisconsin swing voters (as Ocasio-Cortez seems to be doing these days) is very useful. Opposing the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is a gutsy move. But it’s less risky if being mayor may be your only political job. Mamdani can in some ways be president of the American Left because he can’t be president of the United States.

Mamdani’s victory in last year’s New York Democratic primary for mayor seemed like the perfect combination of great candidate, flawed opponents, and ideal political environment. I thought it was a fluke, or at least a perfect storm. But Valdez and Avila Chevalier aren’t masters of viral video like Mamdani, and their opponents weren’t sexual harassers like Andrew Cuomo. Zohran Mamdani has it. He’s transferred it to other politicians in New York. The big question now is if Mamdani-ism can go national.

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Source

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Not so long ago, the Central Highlands of Vietnam were blanketed by forests so dense they blotted out the sun. The American soldiers who slogged through the area during the Vietnam War complained about leeches, mosquitoes, and snakes, but those triple-canopy jungles also teemed with tigers, elephants, and monkeys. The unrelenting darkness and tropical monsoons that made the highland woodlands so inhospitable to humans made them excellent habitat for wildlife.

But now they’re blanketed by coffee farms.

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but your morning buzz kills nature. Agriculture is by far the leading driver of deforestation, and coffee is the sixth-leading driver of agricultural deforestation; coffee farms are also parching the aquifers and ravaging the soils they’ll need to sustain future harvests. A new report by the nonprofit Coffee Watch documents that in Vietnam, which grows about one of every five coffee beans on Earth, about half a million acres of Central Highlands forest have been cleared for coffee since 1990, an area the size of Luxembourg. There are no longer any wild tigers in the region, and very few elephants; the saola, an adorable local antelope known as the ​“Asian unicorn,” is feared to be extinct.

“Most people are good people; they’d never dream of going to Starbucks and ordering a latte plus a dead elephant,”

Again, I apologize for being a Debbie Downer. But while it’s fairly common knowledge that carbon-belching coal plants and gas-guzzling SUVs are environmental menaces, people should know that our diets also degrade our planet, causing most global water shortages, nutrient pollution, and habitat destruction while generating a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture has overrun nearly half of our habitable land, and it replaces more forests, wetlands, and other wildlands every day. That’s why I wrote ​We Are Eating the Earth—and as Coffee Watch founder and director Etelle Higonnet reminded me, we are drinking the Earth, too.

“Most people are good people; they’d never dream of going to Starbucks and ordering a latte plus a dead elephant,” Higonnet said. ​“But that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re raping and poisoning the planet with every cup we drink.”

Vietnam is now the No. 2 coffee-growing nation, behind Brazil; and it’s the leading producer of the cheaper ​“robusta” beans used for most instant coffee, serving nearly 40 percent of the global market. And over the last generation, Vietnam has had one of the world’s fastest deforestation rates; the Coffee Watch report used satellite imagery and other records to show that in the Central Highlands, forest cover has shrunk by a third, while coffee’s footprint has expanded fourteenfold. Traditional jungle provinces like Dak Lak and Dak Nong and Gia Lai have seen less destruction in recent years, but only because there’s so little jungle left to cut.

“If this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every café.”

At the same time, intensive irrigation is lowering the region’s water table, forcing farmers to extend wells as deep as 150 feet, while intensive chemical use is depleting soils, putting farmers on a ​“nutrient treadmill” in which they have to spray even more fertilizer and pesticide to maintain their yields. And when natural forests are cleared, the ecological services they provide—recharging groundwater, controlling erosion, buffering extreme temperatures—are lost with their trees. ​“The production system is eroding the ecological foundations on which it depends,” the report concluded. Droughts are already creating bean shortages, which contributed to record-high coffee prices last year, and as the climate warms, scientists believe half the area’s coffee acres might be unviable by midcentury. That could mean even more deforestation, as production expands elsewhere, and even higher prices.

“If this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every café,” Higonnet said.

Higonnet is a badass do-gooder, a Yale Law School graduate who was a human rights activist for Amnesty International before joining Greenpeace to focus on climate. She got frustrated by Greenpeace’s exclusive focus on the four most prominent deforestation commodities—beef, soy, palm oil, and wood/​paper—so she helped found a well-respected organization called Mighty Earth that works on rubber and cocoa as well as the Big Four; she was knighted by the French government for her efforts to stop child labor and slavery along with deforestation. But she always wanted to expose coffee farming, which also has extreme labor and poverty problems as well as environmental problems, so she started Coffee Watch in late 2024. Coffee is responsible for only about 1 percent of deforestation, but as she points out, it receives way less than 1 percent of the attention paid to deforestation.

Drinking a cup of coffee every morning contributes about as much to global warming as driving a gasoline car 100 miles.

The Coffee Watch report does make a compelling case that the world’s coffee addiction has destructive consequences for nature. There’s something depressing about losing a Luxembourg-sized jungle to farmland in a generation. Then again, Luxembourg is just about the size of Rhode Island; around the world, coffee has replaced about a New Jersey–sized swath of forest. That’s certainly not nothing, but cattle replaced an entire California-size area of forest between 2000 and 2015, more than 200 times what’s been lost in Vietnam, and twice as much as what was lost to all other commodities combined. Globally, pastures now cover an area about twice the size of South America. In the United States, we use about half our agricultural land to produce beef, which only provides about 3 percent of our calories.

So yes, we are drinking a bit of the Earth, but nowhere near as much of it as we’re eating; the 1 percent of current deforestation driven by coffee is a drop in the pot compared with the 40 percent by cattle or the 18 percent by soy and oil palm. I did some crude calculations using this emissions data, and it looks like drinking a cup of coffee every morning contributes about as much to global warming as driving a gasoline car 100 miles—maybe twice as much if you add milk, but that’s just another reminder that cattle are the real climate menaces. They’re coal plants with tails.

Of course, coffee’s relatively modest impact is no consolation to the Asian unicorn. It would be better for the planet if people drank less coffee. Since that probably won’t happen, because people love coffee, and since lab-grown coffee isn’t ready for prime time, there ought to be more pressure on major coffee buyers to green their supply chains.

Coffee grows well in the shade of other trees, and while most of the world’s beans come from monocultures, about 20 percent are now grown through more sustainable agroforestry practices that combine reforestation with production, like planting ​“doughnuts” or ​“zebra stripes” of trees around or through plantations. Brazil has also reduced deforestation by helping farmers get more efficient; in one generation, they’ve doubled production while reducing their land footprint, and Nestlé is developing new climate-resilient varieties that could boost yields even further. Governments can also encourage farmers to use less irrigation water and fertilizer, or ban imports of coffee grown on recently deforested land.

From a policy perspective, though, it makes more sense to focus on beef, even if nobody wants to hear that just before firing up the grill on July 4. We need to get the rich world to eat less beef, even if that means eating more chicken and pork, and helping ranchers produce more beef on less land. We have to go hunting where the ducks are.

The real lesson of the transformation of the Central Highlands is not that drinking coffee is uniquely damaging to the climate or the environment. It’s that everything we consume does at least some damage—and until we start taking that seriously, our diets and our farms will keep ravaging the natural world.

On the evening of June 11, 2025, Shailynn Bray-Waters joined hundreds of other protesters at a demonstration outside an ICE field office in Spokane, Washington. She’d learned through social media that two of her former ESL students—Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, both lawful asylum seekers from Venezuela—had been detained during a routine immigration check-in. Former Spokane city council president Ben Stuckart, who was sponsoring Alvarez Perez through a government humanitarian program, put out a call to action on Facebook: “I am going to sit in front of the bus. Feel free to join me.”

Bray-Waters did not sit in front of the ICE transport van. Nevertheless, public records show the Spokane police arrested her that night on a misdemeanor “failure to disperse” charge, confiscated her cell phone, and sent it over to the FBI for investigation.

Bray-Waters was one of 23 people whose phones were seized during a mass arrest that night. She wouldn’t see her device again until mid-August. On June 20, Spokane news outlet RANGE detailed the confusion swirling around the seized devices with the headline: “Where are the protesters’ phones?”

Now, an investigation by Mother Jones confirms that the FBI used software from the Israeli firm Cellebrite to secretly extract data from the phones of Bray-Waters and at least a dozen other protesters. A month later, one of those protesters, Thalia Ramirez, would be indicted as part of the Spokane 9 case, in which the federal government charged nine people with “conspiracy to impede or injure” officers at the June 11 protest. Every other protester whose phone was extracted in June had their misdemeanor charges promptly dismissed in city and county courts.

“This sounds like a case in which the government basically had a blank check to hoover up everyone’s data,” said Tom Bowman, policy counsel at the Security and Surveillance Project of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. The extractions, Bowman said, underscore the danger of sweeping conspiracy charges: “Your mere proximity to somebody else can be used to justify an invasive search into your entire digital life.”

I reviewed hundreds of pages of Spokane police reports from the June 11 protest, obtained via a public records request and shared with Mother Jones. One document, a “Property and Evidence Case Jacket” from the City of Spokane, lists numerous phones and personal items seized from protesters, as well as an envelope provided by FBI Special Agent Kevin Loader containing a storage drive with digital extractions from 13 devices. I cross-referenced the numbers assigned to those devices with phone triage forms and other documents in the public records dump to confirm the phones’ owners.

“If someone calls about their phone, inform them it is still being held for investigative purposes,” states a June 13 entry at the top of the evidence case jacket. “Do not send them to the FBI or inform them the phone is with the FBI.”

The FBI needed search warrants to extract data from the devices in June, according to Laura Moraff, staff attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. But it’s difficult to determine whether those warrants were obtained and what they said. The government is not required to notify people if their devices have been searched in an investigation—that information is normally only revealed through the discovery process in court. But 12 of the 13 protesters whose phones were extracted were never indicted. 

“Warrant procedures are ex parte—it’s the government going in and saying, ‘We need to do this,”’ said Moraff. “The defendant doesn’t have an opportunity to challenge that until they’re made aware of it, which is usually in a criminal case.”

“If someone calls about their phone, inform them it is still being held for investigative purposes. Do not send them to the FBI or inform them the phone is with the FBI.”

When I told one of the protesters, Shauna Lowery, that I had reason to believe the FBI had extracted data from her phone, she was unsurprised. Her SIM card, she said, had been removed and taped to the back of her device. Bray-Waters told me she’d had similar suspicions after getting notifications about an attempt to access her iCloud account from Seattle, the site of the nearest FBI office. 

The FBI did not address specific questions about whether the agency obtained search warrants for the phone extractions in June. The US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Washington, which brought the Spokane 9 case, also declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

One defense attorney involved in litigation, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that law enforcement will sometimes take an “extract now, search later” approach, creating copies of phones, but waiting to search the data itself until a warrant is acquired.

But even that aspect of the extraction, said Moraff, the ACLU attorney, should still have been done pursuant to a warrant. “The Supreme Court recognized the vast quantity and sensitive quality of information on cell phones in 2014 when it held that a warrant is required to search a cell phone—even when a phone is seized incident to arrest,” she told me. “At the least, the FBI likely extracted all data that [a] user can access on the device. That’s a highly intrusive seizure, and it shouldn’t be done without a warrant.”

The FBI’s investigation came shortly after an internal directive from the Department of Justice ordering federal prosecutors to aggressively pursue and publicize cases against anti-ICE protesters. “There should be no bottleneck of referrals for complaints,” wrote Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh. “Push out press releases whenever you file charges in these matters.” That email went out June 12, 2025, the morning after the protest in Spokane, and the same week that mass demonstrations against ICE swept Los Angeles.

My colleague Sophie Hurwitz covered the Spokane case in May:

Videos from the day show brief scuffles—protesters and ICE agents pushing each other—but no evidence of serious injury to anyone. “None of the protesters were hurt. Fortunately, none of the law enforcement officers were hurt either,” Richard Barker, then the acting US Attorney for eastern Washington, told PBS in March. Yet local police arrested more than 30 people on the scene.

During DHS’ high-profile occupations of cities like Minneapolis, Barker and almost 100 other federal prosecutors came under severe Trump administration pressure to prosecute ICE protesters. It was an order Barker resigned rather than carry out. In that March interview, Barker told PBS he “didn’t feel in this case that a conspiracy charge that would carry a six-year term of incarceration was true to who I was or who I wanted to be as a federal prosecutor.”

Public records show that the same day the DOJ memo went out, FBI agent C. Parker called the Spokane police and “requested that any cellular devices [in the department’s] custody would be processed by the FBI.” The next morning, officers met with Parker and Special Agent Loader to transfer custody of the 23 phones.

“That process was unbeknownst to me or my executive leadership team, and when we found out about it, it caused a little bit of consternation,” Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall told me. “From my standpoint, as a relatively new chief here at that time, this was unusual that line-level staff detectives would make the decision to go ahead and transfer phones or evidence to a federal partner without running that up the chain and making sure it didn’t impact the local investigation.”

Hall added that, after learning some evidence had been transferred to the FBI, the department “hit pause for a couple of days while we figured out exactly why that was occurring, and at whose behest.”  But public records show it was too late for the protesters’ phones: “I was also asked if evidence seized as a part of the investigation, namely cell phones, had been already turned over,” an officer named Zachary Storment writes in a police report. “This had in fact already been done.”

Another report by Officer Nick Geren states a lieutenant called him at home on the afternoon of June 13 and ordered him “not to release any further evidence to the FBI.” 

“I advised that we only had one item remaining in our lab area, a laptop that had also been seized during the arrests,” Geren wrote. 

Hall told me that, after conversations with the FBI and his legal team, he determined that the FBI should provide the Spokane Police Department with a subpoena to take custody of the devices. That subpoena was provided late in the day on June 13, Hall said, after the phones had already been transferred over. Hall said the subpoena authorized only the seizure of the devices and did not include information about a search warrant.

By June 20, nearly all of the protesters’ misdemeanor charges had been dismissed, and the FBI returned the phones and storage device containing extractions to the Spokane PD. At the time, the FBI advised that two of the phones not on the extraction list should continue to have their WiFi and cell signals blocked. Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that such a step is usually associated with ongoing investigations. “Making sure a phone doesn’t have a data connection is a best practice before forensic extraction,” he said. 

Nearly one month after the protest, on July 9, a federal grand jury indicted the Spokane 9 on felony conspiracy charges. Thalia Ramirez, Ben Stuckart, and four others took plea deals. The remaining three defendants—the “Spokane 3”— were convicted last month by a jury in a major, largely unexpected victory for President Trump’s war on dissent.

Justice Forral, one of the Spokane 3, also had their phone seized upon arrest in June. Forral’s device was not included in the list of extractions reviewed by Mother Jones, but their device was uniquely flagged in police documents as “out to external agency for investigation.” An extraction from their phone was eventually included as an exhibit in the Spokane 3 trial.

Court documents show that the government listed Loader, the FBI agent who obtained the cell phones from the Spokane PD, as an expert witness in that trial. 

“Loader will testify that he took custody of Defendants’ phones, used the forensic tools of Cellebrite and Greykey [sic] to retrieve data off of the phones, and provided that data to case agents,” prosecutors wrote.

Since the protest last year, Hall said the Spokane PD has “made some progress in leveling expectations, so that folks on the investigative side, as well as folks on the tactical side … know where I stand on how we address these types of incidents.” He added that his department has created a “dialogue policing unit, where you inject officers into the crowd just to have conversations, build rapport, and help facilitate First Amendment protected activities.”

It’s not uncommon for the FBI and other federal agencies to take extractions from cell phones in criminal investigations. “What I think is really new and really concerning, from a privacy and civil liberties perspective, is their use in cases that are directly related to free speech and association rights,” Bowman, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said.

Indeed, some of the phone evidence presented at the Spokane 3 trial included benign political expression.One FBI agent testified that messages on defendant Bajun Mavawalla II’s phone showed he’d discussed the June 11 protest on Reddit—but admitted that the messages didn’t evince any criminal activity. Another agent highlighted that defendant Jac Archer had sent fellow defendant and former city councilor Ben Stuckart’s Facebook post calling for the initial protest in Signal chats. (Stuckart took a plea deal in December.)

“This is one of the first pages in the authoritarian’s playbook,” said Bowman. “Identify the people who disagree with you by surveilling their free speech and association rights, and then conduct further surveillance to intimidate or suppress their speech.”

Bowman and Moraff pointed to the lack of guardrails governing the government’s use and retention of data from phone extractions—and the potential for that data to be resurfaced by police in future investigations. 

“We think police departments should be a lot more transparent about these retention policies, and should have restrictions on how long they can retain the data, especially after a case is closed or they decide not to bring charges,” said Moraff. “When an extraction is performed on a device, that’s obviously way more data than there was ever probable cause to seize. So even if we assume that the FBI followed all warrant procedures and sought a warrant within a reasonable amount of time, and then got a warrant that was limited to a search just for the information that there was probable cause to search for—even if they follow all those steps, then we still have this issue of what happens to the extraction.” (The FBI did not answer a question about its data retention policies. Federal law on the matter is not well established.)

The Spokane 3 now face up to six years in prison. As their attorneys appeal the verdict, the Trump administration has continued to pursue aggressive federal conspiracy charges against protesters across the country. Some of the government’s cases have collapsed spectacularly. But the FBI’s Spokane investigation highlights just how easy it is for protesters to become unwittingly swept up in a much larger network of state surveillance and secrecy, regardless of whether they’ve been charged with a crime. 

“This creates enormous distrust in government, and can have severe chilling effects on First Amendment–protected activity like protesting,” said Bowman. “People might be less likely to engage in protest activity if they think that there’s a chance that someday the FBI might take their data and spy on them with it.”

In Feburary, Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, one of the young men whose detention sparked the initial protest, was released on parole. A judge found his constitutional rights had been violated.

The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also overseen a now-problematic overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, given the White House a gilded makeover, bulldozed the famed Rose Garden, and even has plans for a so-called “Arc de Trump” that mirrors France’s Arc de Triomphe.

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So what’s behind all of this? Art historian Erin Thompson—author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments—says that whether it’s Romans repurposing idols of leaders who had fallen out of favor or the glorification of Civil War officers in the American South, monuments and public aesthetics aren’t just about the past. They’re about symbolizing power today.

“The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present,” Thompson says. “It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Thompson sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why Trump has decked out the White House in gold (so much gold), the rise and recent fall of Confederate monuments, and whether she thinks the Arc de Trump will ever get built.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in December 2025.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Less than one month after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration I ventured the prediction that Trump’s anti-regulation strategy, which was to gum up operations at regulatory agencies in every conceivable way, was self-defeating. (See “Trump’s Incompetence Is Botching His Own Deregulation Spree.”) To deregulate, I explained, a regulatory agency must be functional. Eliminating a Biden-era regulation is a process: It requires an agency to propose a new regulation reversing the prior one; collect public comment on same; and follow various other time-consuming steps required under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. The same logic applied to eliminating Biden-era precedents at quasi-judicial independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, or the National Labor Relations Board. To achieve these goals, you need a quorum at such agencies. Firing board members and refusing to fill vacancies, which is Trump’s preferred method, deprives you of that quorum.

Disciplined deregulation requires the sort of patience and intelligence that, happily, is in short supply within the Trump administration. Even White House budget chief Russell “Project 2025” Vought can’t summon it.

What this means is that, although Trump has reversed a lot of executive orders, fired a lot of people, and cut off a lot of funding (often, in the latter two instances, in violation of the law), he hasn’t killed a lot of major regulations. I count five thus far, according to a regulatory tracker maintained by the Brookings Institution, of which only one—an Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinding an Obama-era regulatory finding that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a danger to the nation’s health and welfare—is cause for serious alarm. And whether even these five regulations were crafted with sufficient care to survive court challenges remains to be seen. During Trump’s first term they usually were not. In a 2021 law review articletitled “Tired of Winning,” Bethany A. Davis Noll, litigation director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, reported that where previous administrations had won 70 percent of all regulatory court challenges, the Trump administration won a mere 23 percent.

I can’t find a comparable tracker for quasi-judicial rulings at independent agencies, but the business lobby lost a couple of big ones this month at the NLRB. Both cases were about union-busting at Amazon, whose chairman, Jeff Bezos, kisses Trump’s ass so relentlessly that even Trump finds it a bit much. These NLRB rulings might have gone in Amazon’s favor had Trump not fired NLRB Chair Gwynne Wilcox (in violation of a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that the current high court is expected any day now to overturn) and then delayed giving the NLRB a quorum until this past December.

The first NLRB ruling, on June 15, rejected Amazon’s request to overturn an organizing victory by the United Food & Commercial Workers at a Whole Foods market in Philadelphia. Employees at the grocery voted to unionize in January 2025, and the NLRB certified the victory four months later. It was the first successful union drive in the 46-year history of Whole Foods. Amazon is hopping mad, and it filed no fewer than seven complaints to the NLRB about it, starting before the union election even took place. Amazon’s principal argument is that management was not permitted to compel Whole Foods employees to attend gatherings at which the company discouraged unionization because a Biden-era ruling (also involving Amazon) forbade such “captive meetings.” That decision, Amazon said, “imposed a flagrantly unconstitutional set of handcuffs on [Whole Foods management] in violation of the First Amendment.”

The board didn’t elaborate on why it rejected Amazon’s First Amendment argument, but one likely reason was that the board felt it lacked sufficient Republican members to overturn a Biden precedent. The NLRB did finally acquire a quorum in December, along with a Republican majority, with two Republicans and one Democrat. But the board has declined to overturn any precedents with fewer than three votes, and that would require one more Republican member. This is longstanding practice at the NLRB, not required by any law or regulation. It’s the kind of genteel tradition that one would expect a Trump appointee to flush down the toilet. But the current NLRB chair, James Murphy, worked as a staff aide at the NLRB more than 40 years, and the tradition matters to him; he recommitted to honoring it earlier this month at a House hearing.

It was Amazon’s hard luck that its case came before the board before the Senate got around to confirming Trump’s nominee to fill a vacant Republican slot on the board, James Macy. For his part, Trump didn’t get around to nominating Macy until this past April, even though the slot had been open since August 2025. Macy’s nomination is expected to get a Senate vote today.

The second NLRB ruling against Amazon’s union-busting, handed down by a regional administrative law judge rather than by the Washington-based board, occurred earlier this week. The case was about Amazon’s refusal to bargain over a union contract with warehouse workers in San Francisco who voted, way back in October 2024, to affiliate with the Teamsters. This refusal violates a Biden-era ruling by the full board that said after a successful “card check” (in which a majority of workers sign union authorization cards) management must immediately start negotiating a contract or request a more formal NLRB-supervised union election. Amazon did neither. Once again, Amazon asked the NLRB judge to reverse a Biden precedent, arguing in this instance that it was at odds with a Supreme Court precedent. Amazon lawyers had to know that the administrative law judge, or ALJ, lacked any power to overturn NLRB precedent, so it can hardly be surprised that it lost.

Amazon’s intended audience was never the ALJ, but rather the Washington-based board, or, failing that, an appellate judge. It seems likely that the Republican board will be willing to overturn the offending precedent if Macy is confirmed. I doubt the Democrats will try to postpone or kill Macy’s nomination, but that would be one way to prevent Amazon from winning this one. Too bad it isn’t up to the House, which has already demonstrated its willingness to compel management to negotiate union contracts. The pro-union Republican virus, alas, has not crossed over to the Senate side.

1619 (PREDATES 1776)

Establishment of slavery and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Some respondents focused on the original sin of the slave trade, others on the infamous Supreme Court decision that called enslaved people property, but they were all saying the same thing: Slavery, while not a single “moment,” was our greatest shame.

1830–1850

Indian removal/Trail of Tears
The forced removal and ethnic cleansing of some 60,000 Native Americans. Wrote one survivor: “Many days pass, and people die very much.” It was led by Andrew Jackson. Whose portrait now hangs in Donald Trump’s Oval Office.

1861

Firing on Fort Sumter/the Civil War
Lincoln had just been elected. South Carolina had just seceded and insisted that the U.S. Army abandon its military installations in the state. It refused. South Carolina’s militia attacked. The Civil War was underway.

1865

Lincoln’s assassination
John Wilkes Booth vowed that a speech he heard Lincoln give on April 11 would be his last. And so it was. An act that felled our greatest president—and gave us one of the worst.

1877

Compromise of 1877 ending Reconstruction
The political deal that ushered in the era of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws. Oh, and finagled the presidency away from the guy who got more votes. Sound familiar?

1921

Tulsa Massacre
Two days of mob violence that destroyed 35 square blocks and left 10,000 Black people homeless. And it took seven decades for the state to form a commission to acknowledge and study it.

1941

Pearl Harbor
Japan attacked a naval base in Hawaii and ended America’s neutrality in World War II. The “date which will live in infamy,” in FDR’s famous phrase. His first draft? “A date which will live in world history.” Most important speech edit in history?

1942

Japanese American internment in World War II
Without question, FDR’s low point—120,000 Japanese Americans (80,000 of them citizens) sent to 10 camps. The Supreme Court defended this in 1944’s Korematsu v. United States, which has gone down in history as one of its worst decisions.

1945

Dropping atomic weapons on Japan
Harry Truman said he never lost a night’s sleep over the decision to drop the bombs that ultimately killed nearly 200,000 people. It did shorten the war—but it launched a dark and paranoid era in human history.

2001

9/11
Three items on this list are not things the United States did, but things done to the United States. This one was awful: Four planes attacked the country, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring thousands more. It was made even worse by our government’s overreaction.

2021

January 6
It’s still hard to believe that a sitting president led an insurrection against the United States of America and was at best indifferent to the idea of the mob killing his own vice president.

2024

Reelection of Donald Trump
Future historians will ask how the hell the American people decided to do this. Let’s just hope those historians are still living in a democracy.

1776

Declaration of Independence
The one that started it all—the reason we’re celebrating a semiquincentennial. The Founders “embrace[d] a world-quaking creed that values individual freedom and the rights of man over heredity, might, or wealth,” writer and historian John A. Farrell noted.

1787

The Constitution
An imperfect document (both because the framers tacked on 10 Amendments soon after and because of its slavery compromises), it was the result of a host of compromises that produced some epic arguments at the Constitutional Convention. Still, it created a flexible and enduring system.

1863

Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln’s declaration didn’t immediately liberate anyone, but it made “the U.S. Army into a force for liberation,” University of California, Davis historian Eric Rauchway pointed out. “Every step a U.S. soldier took into rebel territory afterward created free soil and free people.”

1865

Victory in the Civil War
The Union prevailed in what was not only an existential fight but also a contest to define the nature of freedom and start to expiate the nation’s original sin, slavery. It came at the price of more than 600,000 dead, and the assassination of our greatest president.

1865–1870

Reconstruction Amendments
Yes, it took a while for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to achieve their full potential (OK, we’re still waiting), but they ended slavery while dramatically expanding all Americans’ rights.

1920

Nineteenth Amendment
It’s strange to think that guaranteeing in the Constitution a woman’s right to vote was once a controversial idea. It’s even weirder to realize that there are still people around who think of it that way.

1945

Victory in World War II
The United States led the original forces of antifa, liberating the globe and establishing itself as the moral and political leader of the free world. Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States was considered by many to be a huge mistake. We made him pay.

1963

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Capped by Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, this August 1963 event attracted a quarter-million attendees and countless more watching on television. King’s moral and rhetorical might helped galvanize the nation.

1964–1965

Civil/Voting Rights Acts
A century after the Civil War, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), laws that “actually began to fulfill the failed promise of the Union victory,” said Vanderbilt University political scientist John Sides.

2008

Election of Barack Obama
By becoming the first African American to achieve the nation’s highest office, Obama became a living embodiment of our Union bending toward greater perfection.

Because it’s America’s birthday, we decided in full ecumenical spirit to invite a few conservatives to the party. They are, as you’ll see on the facing page, all respected thinkers, scholars, and jurists. And their answers are interesting—they give Dr. King his proper due—and even surprising (how did they omit Phyllis Schlafly?). As the widely respected former circuit court Judge J. Michael Luttig wrote us: “This is an ingenious idea for celebrating the 250th Anniversary of America’s Founding. My lists are American lists, not ‘conservative’ lists. And no, I was not surprised that they often tacked more liberal.”

The Greatest Moments in American History
1. Constitution and Bill of Rights
2. Declaration of Independence
T-3. Victory in World War II
T-3. Abolition of slavery/Thirteenth Amendment
5. Lee surrenders at Appomattox
T-6. Moon landing
T-6. Victory in the Cold War

The Worst Moments in American History
1. 9/11
2. Pearl Harbor
3. Trail of Tears/Indian removal
4. Japanese internment
T-5. Lincoln assassination
T-5. Southern secession
T-5. Arrival and institutionalization of slavery

The Best Presidents
T-1. Abraham Lincoln
T-1. Ronald Reagan
T-1. George Washington
4. Thomas Jefferson
5. Franklin Roosevelt
6. Calvin Coolidge

The Worst Presidents
1. Andrew Johnson
2. James Buchanan
T-3. Joe Biden
T-3. Donald Trump
T-3. Woodrow Wilson
T-6. Warren G. Harding
T-6. Franklin Pierce

The Most Influential Founding Fathers
T-1. Alexander Hamilton
T-1. Thomas Jefferson
T-1. James Madison
T-2. John Adams
T-2. Benjamin Franklin
T-2. George Washington

The Most Consequential Politicians Who Never Became President
1. Alexander Hamilton
2. William Jennings Bryan
3. Henry Clay
T-4. Benjamin Franklin
T-4. Barry Goldwater
T-4. John Marshall

Most Important Americans in Public Life Who Never Held Elected Office
1. Martin Luther King Jr.
2. Thomas Edison
T-3. Frederick Douglass
T-3. Henry Ford
5. Jonathan Edwards

“The great American novel about freedom, conscience, and the courage to defy an unjust society. Huck’s decision that he’d rather go to hell than return Jim to slavery is the most libertarian moment in American literature.”—Veronique de Rugy, Mercatus Center, on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Images That Define American History
T-1. Iwo Jima flag raising
T-1. Washington Crossing the Delaware
T-3. Moon landing
T-3. Statue of Liberty

The Most Important Court Cases
1. Brown v. Board of Education
2. Marbury v. Madison
3. Dred Scott v. Sandford
4. McCulloch v. Maryland
5. Obergefell v. Hodges

The Most Important Women
T-1. Susan B. Anthony
T-1. Eleanor Roosevelt
3. Sandra Day O’Connor
T-4. Frances Perkins
T-4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
T-4. Harriet Beecher Stowe
T-4. Harriet Tubman

The Most Important People of Color
1. Frederick Douglass
2. Martin Luther King Jr.
3. Barack Obama
4. Jackie Robinson
5. Booker T. Washington

The Most Important Works of Art in American History
1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
T-2. Casablanca
T-2. The Wizard of Oz
11-way tie for fourth place

The Liberal Mount Rushmore
1. Franklin D. Roosevelt
2. Martin Luther King Jr.
T-3. Lyndon B. Johnson
T-3. John F. Kennedy

Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt each received substantial support.

Conservative Contributors

Richard Brookhiser, National Review
Veronique de Rugy, Mercatus Center
Robert George, Princeton University
Allen Guelzo, University of Florida
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, American Action Forum
R. Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University
J. Michael Luttig, circuit court judge (ret.)
Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University
Michael McConnell, Stanford University
Henry Olsen, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Amity Shlaes, Coolidge Foundation
Stephanie Slade, Reason
Eugene Volokh, UCLA (emeritus)

Sports fans do it obsessively. Who’s on the Yankees Mount Rushmore? The Lakers? Kobe, Jerry West, Magic, and Kareem? What—you’re leaving off Wilt Chamberlain?! The exercise leads to some intense, and fun, arguments.

“This idea troubles me … because it seems to me there’s something intrinsically illiberal about monumental representations of persons. If we must put four progressive depictions somewhere, I vote for Norman Rockwell’s representations of the Four Freedoms.”—Eric Rauchway, University of California, Davis

This was the question we posed to our contributors: Which four progressive titans—elected officials, activists, thinkers, what have you—would you put on the famed mountainside? The illustration above tells you how it came out. King got the most votes, then FDR, then Douglass, and then Lincoln, a somewhat surprisingly distant fourth. We were disappointed no woman made the mountain. The closest competitors, just a couple of votes behind Lincoln, were Jane Addams, Frances Perkins, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Barack Obama, John Dewey, and Robert La Follette also came close.

We should note that a few of our respondents wrote to say they reject the whole idea of a Mount Rushmore. “On America’s 250th anniversary, it’s time to move from exceptionalism and hero worship to a politics of memory that embraces complexity, ambivalence, tragedy, greatness, and love,” argued NYU political scientist Cristina Beltrán. Fordham Law’s Julie Suk described a similar sentiment: “A democracy should not give immortal godlike status to four progressive ‘titans,’ but rather it should represent the masses of people who have invisibly built this country and sacrificed their lives to move it closer to its stated ideals of democracy, equality, liberty, and justice for all.”

We think hey, it’s fun to argue over.