So let me then give my opinions here, after a few months of trudging through the muck and unfortunately probably becoming one of the world’s most prolific readers of Epstein-related documentation: let me editorialize my findings to you in this piece, and why it’s so important that we make the Epstein scandal another Watergate moment.

Jeffrey Epstein was a former money manager, a felon convicted of “procuring a child for prostitution” and “sex trafficking” who, at the time of his death, was in federal jail again facing new charges in New York for “sex trafficking of minors” and “conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.” He sticks around in discourse both because of his social status and because of how well-connected he was, keeping personal correspondence with such recognizable figures as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, (former) Prince Andrew, and Noam Chomsky. The overwhelming question around Epstein has been in whether these figures knew about his illegal dealings, and even more importantly, whether they engaged with him in them. Evidence for some (e.g. Trump and Andrew) indicates that it seems very likely to be both.

This series of events has enraptured many on the Internet, but has seemingly failed to persistently penetrate mainstream media unlike other, similar governmental moral failings. And this is despite reeking of cover-up after misinformation after incompetence spawning conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. Public outrage over this is almost certainly because of a lack of perceived or real consequences for potential offenders over a severe moral failing. As I said in my last piece, state actors in America have notoriously historically not been punished appropriately for their actions.

Much of the world is acting like the Epstein files are at least mostly accurate:

• Melinda French Gates cited her ex-husband Bill Gates’ personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as a contributing factor in their divorce.

• Andrew Mountbatten Windsor (formerly the United Kingdom’s Prince Andrew) was stripped of his titles and royal privileges.

• Lord Mandelson, former U.K. ambassador to the U.S., resigned from his position in the Labour party.

• Miroslav Lajčák, former President of the U.N. General Assembly and until a few days ago Slovakia’s Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor, resigned from his position.

And yet… the U.S. seems to be struggling yet again to punish state actors. What effort does exist seems to be extremely partisan, e.g. holding votes for contempt of Congress for the Clintons but not for Pam Bondi, who also failed to show for proceedings. The Department of Justice did not adhere to the letter of the law (bipartisan and signed by Trump) and yet the Department of Justice so far has seemed to evade any sort of justice, to say little of President Trump.

To say more of President Trump, he most certainly is not “cleared of any wrongdoing” by the Epstein files and if anything, he’s one of the most implicated. But frankly, it should not take the Epstein case for him to never get out of testifying on the stand for the rest of his life. And this man wants to “nationalize” the elections. I don’t want to talk of him. I want to speak of the many, many victims.

At far too many points were tips and leads completely ignored. Even if few of the claims surrounding President Trump are true, what the Epstein files reveals is a disturbing lack of follow-through on the part of the FBI. Even tips not involving Trump seem infuriatingly ignored and repressed… much like exactly how Epstein’s victims have continued to be treated the entire time. American apathy failed these women and children again and again.

And for their part, I cannot imagine having years of my life stolen from me, trapped in a cycle of abuse, only for the abuser to never meet any real justice, then to find out that many of these abuses were known before my abuse and never properly investigated, and then on top of all of that, only have my opinions be considered when it is politically relevant. Those that have spoken up and continue to speak out are people truly worthy of respect. At every level: city, state, federal, America owes these people an earnest and honest apology. And yet that apology will probably never come, because a true apology requires one to do better.

Consider what that means for a second: America needs to care. Not about political retribution, which is annoyingly the direction that the majority of the House Oversight Committee seems to be currently leveraging towards the Clintons. Or on the flip side, that the Democrats seem to want to use as momentum to oust a poorly-qualified and poorly-performing Pam Bondi. Despite this being the seeming moral Titanic of America, I fear that the one-two combo of years of delays (seemingly intentional on the part of Republicans and apathetic on the part of Democrats) and desire for political retribution will mean that the political capital needed to achieve meaningful justice for the victims will be wasted.

America needs to learn a lesson from the victims the hard way and it simply refuses to. An actual apology requires acknowledgement, understanding, and change. And we’re already moving onto the next thing, fear about the independence of the midterm elections and already seemingly moved on from the last thing of the ICE killings in Minneapolis. I submit to you that America needs to dwell upon the Epstein matters for a long time for there to even be the possibility of meaningful change, and that this administration is the #1 cause of why America won’t take the time to dwell. Individuals will learn lessons for sure, but I’m talking about institutional change.

For those of us on the ground, we can’t deliver justice. That would normally be the role of the legal system, which is slow at the best of times and glacial here. And in many cases, there’s little justice even left to be delivered. Epstein is dead, Maxwell is getting preferential treatment, some people are missing, and some are unlikely to ever see prosecution. So what is left? I believe that the strongest way that we can help the victims of such horrific crimes is to cheer them on from the sidelines and support them however they need it. Though there’s much to protest right now, obviously, yes, protests, but maybe more important is helping people keep perspective on what the endgame is for the victims: restorative justice. Making sure that this isn’t happening now and can’t happen again. Until we prove to Epstein’s victims that we live in a better country than the one that didn’t protect them, their fight isn’t over, and ours can’t be.

I think many commentators will view Renee and Alex’s deaths as a moral “crossing the Rubicon” moment, simply owing to the fact that a woman was clearly, visibly shot and killed in cold blood and conservative commentators and officials are victim-blaming, with the President and his team defending the ICE agent and saying that a “professional agitator” was on the scene and that Renee “viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense.” The President linked a (intentionally badly positioned) video of the incident on his “Truth Social” account, but I will not be posting a clearer one, as it’s quite graphic. Alex Pretti’s death is even more clear-cut, and as Paul Krugman pointed out in his Monday piece, the truth is not marred by peoples’ “misogyny and anti-LGBTQ bigotry” or tricky camera angles. The President’s response to that event notably did not include video. And yet, these citizens are called domestic terrorists by the administration. The whole thing is deliberately untruthful, and to quote Hank Green’s feelings on the matter, “they would use the truth if the truth was enough.”

With that, the federal government is attempting to block both federal and state investigations into their deaths, and attempting to bribe the State of Minnesota with removing ICE from the state at the cost of turning over the voter rolls to the Department of Justice. Looking back to last year’s whitewashing of slavery or the administration’s usage of government websites as a cudgel against the opposition party, it can be hard to keep in perspective that nearly none of what this administration is doing is remotely “normal.” But for a country like the United States, which has failed historically, for example, to appropriately punish the South for its past racism (causing it to linger in many forms), it’s important that we don’t just “talk the talk.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos last Tuesday explained clearly the price of American complacency and the world’s reliance on it.

America, while loving to hold its individual citizens responsible, has very, very often refused to hold state actors responsible. J. Edgar Hoover, My Lai, Nixon, the WMD hoax leading to the War in Afghanistan—all of these lived-memory people and events had state actors being nearly completely shielded from real consequences despite being clearly known and identifiable ethical problems.

Many of us believed in a better America. One that kicked Donald Trump to the curb the second that he mocked a disabled reporter back in 2015. Actress Meryl Streep was completely right in her response, “…this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing.” I’m not convinced that that better America can exist as long as this sort of judgmental hatred continues in this country. It hides behind idealisms like “Southern culture” and “both parties are bad.” If racism is a component of people in your culture, that culture is not one to take pride in. If a given party is bad, and the other one is a different kind of bad, then demand better. America cannot continue to claim the moral high ground while exercising “do as I say and not as I do”-style hegemony.

President Joe Biden’s biggest sin was in becoming classically complacent, as is the American way, and letting the rot continue to spread in the wake of January 6th, 2021. That Donald Trump escaped federal prosecution long enough to become president again, in spite of everything known and discovered, is a democratic travesty. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith did his job. The courts (particularly district judge Aileen Cannon, who blocked or slowed public release many times) failed theirs.

This is a plea to all those who “don’t follow politics because it’s too depressing.” This evil is now banal1. Arendt’s broader point stands: the normalization and acclimatization of evil things can happen in a surprisingly boring, mundane, and bureaucratic fashion. But from the top-down, this isn’t even bureaucratic attempts at fascism. From the bottom it is, but from the top this is heavy-handed, the-water-is-already-boiling-in-the-pot, baby’s first attempt at fascism. And the country is still sleepwalking into it.

For Democratic lawmakers, not-fully-journalistically-compromised mainstream media, and commentators that have simply been decrying every new thing this administration comes up with every two seconds, you’re now part of the problem. We’ve tried this same tactic over the past decade and it’s gotten infinitely worse. You’re still trying to pick the board game pieces out of the landfill that the Republicans chucked out years and years ago, while they’re doing victory laps and speeches at the tournament. You can’t keep playing by game rules for a game that doesn’t exist anymore. Your endgame is to win voters or report the truth, their endgame is for your institutions to not exist, or failing that, be toothless. At least try to meet their tactics. They’re trying to flood the zone every single day. Pick two or three of the big issues and stick to them. Don’t budge. Demand accountability from these single ICE officers. Don’t let Renee or Alex’s name leave the headlines in a week’s time. They’ll tell you it’s politicizing their deaths, anti-American for attacking “our nation’s heroes,” anything to get you to stop pushing and move on to their latest nonsense, like renewed trade wars with Canada and the E.U. The administration thinks they can’t budge on this or they think they’ll look weak, like they’re not backing their people. Force them to budge.

For the people, I reiterate, general strikes and peaceful protests. Yes, that’s dangerous right now, so personal safety comes first. Threaten to primary the seven House Democrats who voted with Republicans to fund ICE after Renee Good’s killing. Demand that Senate Democrats don’t fund ICE. Support community members. There’s a severe blood shortage right now in the U.S.; consider giving blood even if living an an area not directly impacted by ICE’s nonsense.

This is the only way forward that I can reasonably see. But this all has to end, or we collectively lose our sanity. We lose our morality. We lose our democracy. We lose our country. Renee wasn’t even the first person killed in the past year by ICE in a moving vehicle when the officer’s life was not in danger. Let me repeat that. Renee is not the first person who was killed in this fashion in the last year. If you don’t want to see more people die in the same way, then let her death have meaning. This administration didn’t learn from her death, and probably won’t learn from Alex’s. No more American federal qualified immunity or any of Stephen Miller’s “plenary authority.” No more keeping loopholes open in case you need to use them later. The United States is supposed to be the forerunner of the “rule of law.” Make those in government scared of breaking their own laws again.

Even though I had written most of this post in a fever immediately following Renee’s death, I was debating whether or not to post for reasons mostly mentioned in the first paragraph. I ended up talking with a friend of mine living in Minneapolis, reminding her that she has support beyond that city, and I felt that that statement rings hollow unless I use what small platform I have to speak out against clear injustice.

I’ll level with you—my base expectations were very low going into judging, simply because I expected a proliferation of AI slop and very few genuine stabs at a decently-made app. And I’m excited to tell you how happy I am that I was too cynical going into that process. We judges had a solid rubric, and I provided my freeform feedback in three stages: concept, functionality, and design. I judged 12 different proposals, and I’ll summarize my findings.

Sometimes, even for those with an entrepreneurial spirit, it can feel like everything has already been created. It's an unreasonably high bar to clear, to think of something no one else has brought to market, especially for a high school student who almost certainly doesn't have the resources to realize that idea. This might be obvious for the older folks, but I found the students often trying to justify their work by these sort of unreasonable metrics. To many of the groups I simply stressed, “Your idea is good, don't worry in that regard. Just focus on explaining what gap your idea fills or how your idea outperforms existing ideas.” Besides the seeming lack of self-confidence, I am glad to report that these students’ ideas were largely original and unique, and founded in problems they had that they wanted to solve (which is the perfect sort of problem for this sort of endeavor). It was refreshing reading these young viewpoints, largely untainted by pressures of the modern tech market and unbothered with nearly everything except passion and interest in their projects, which is exactly what I would look for here.

It is important to note that the projects submitted for the Challenge are largely small, so app functionality is often quite limited. That and students are no doubt quite new to the process. So the important thing then is that the foundation is in place; that is, the proposal must ensure that basic functionality exists (buttons work, etc.), that the scope of the idea is addressed (does your app appropriately encapsulate your idea), and that any natural questions are tackled in an appropriate fashion (what’s coming next, etc.). I was genuinely surprised at how well most of these apps worked.

Perhaps the thing that astounded me the most was the level of care and detail that went into the UI/UX1 work. One entry in particular had better graphical design than what I’ve seen come out of super-senior industry professionals (talking 15+ years of experience, and better than my own skills in that regard, certainly). And that brings me hope, that high school students can exhibit that level of polish despite their overwhelming lack of experience in the field.

So I must say at the end of this that while I still have genuine concerns about the state of education and learning (especially in the United Sttates given the trends of the past few decades and the allure of faster results through AI), I’m a bit less cynical. The most fundamental part of learning and engaging with computer science (and related topics) is in logical reasoning: assuming that that criterion is fulfilled, the rest will eventually fall into place. And I saw surprisingly few groups and individuals taking the shortcuts that would skip learning that logical reasoning. Anecdotally, for this small window, at the very least, these students largely seem to be engaging how they should to sustain their own learning in these spaces. That spirit and drive is a glimmer of hope to hold on to, to emphasize and encourage in other students.

I think it's relatively easy to take the Internet for granted, when at no point in history has anonymized freedom of information-sharing been so ubiquitous. And we're seeing massive societal shifts as a result of its existence. Everything from how we perceive information about ourselves, to information about others, to information about the world around us is all changing. And it's easier to take a bipolar approach, viewing either Internet content as grassroots and anecdotally authoritative or as wholly invented fiction depending on its origin. As with most things, the truth is much more gray; complicating things is that commonly, information is published sooner than it is verifiable as truth, fiction, or anywhere in-between.

I have struggled to bring this piece together—not because of lack of content, but because of lack of structure. There is so much to discuss here, and prioritizing that has been a bit of a journey. So instead of attempting to meander through moderately connected musings, I decided to make a brief series looking at the freedom of speech. For this piece, we’ll examine the Internet and the ideologies that it was founded in and what it's become today. Future pieces will examine the current U.S. political space, then the current E.U. political space, then we’ll bring it all back together at the end to look at the big picture, and how current technologies like AI are complicating things.

As a Background

I think it makes sense first and foremost to discuss briefly the context of the Internet. The communication protocols that enable modern web browsing were originally designed to link research computers and enable free sharing of information. The World Wide Web was invented in ‘89, graphical browsers (like the one you are viewing this piece on) popped up in ‘93, and shortly thereafter, the commercialization of the Internet took off as it was finally accessible on consumer devices. Though, it wasn’t until “Web 2.0” in the early 2000s that the average content of the Internet significantly shifted with the rise of user-generated content, including on social media platforms like Facebook. That is all to say, the world of information changed very, very quickly.

But of course with that, not all information is noteworthy to share, or for that matter, good to share. The Internet was founded without restrictions on content in part because to make so otherwise would be self-defeating to the point of the Internet. Those original founders were unlikely to have a firm concept of the breadth and deprh of information that would eventually be shared over those communication protocols. And this has enabled bad actors of several sorts to enter the system and abuse its freedom of information-sharing. This ostensibly libertarian ideal of the Internet has butted against regulations and legislations many times now to maintain the sanctity of its original form.

Worth noting is that information-sharing has needed to evolve into encrypted information-sharing. Encryption tends to be standard across communication these days: even this newsletter was delivered over HTTPS (or SMTP if reading over email), with the “S” meaning “secure” (or encrypted). In uncomplicated terms, it means that you, as the reader, can ensure that the source (or sender) is actually the source. Without encryption, just as you can falsify a return address on a piece of physical mail, you can falsify the originator of a website or a piece of e-mail. That is to clearly establish that there are very legitimate reasons (even though I’m only mentioning the one) for encryption to exist: bad actors, like scammers, have a far easier time conducting business when they can more easily seem like a legitimate source.

What does this mean?

There is a lot more that can be said about the Internet in terms of its functionality, but to not saturate this mostly policy-intended piece with technical jargon, the above should suffice for the points below.

Base Internet architecture, like DNS3, is largely decentralized, of which the main takeaways are intentional redundancy and limited authority. This Internet ethos persists to this day both in how the Internet is structured and in people perceive it. Social media grew up in this time, where first, local and focused message boards (say forums devoted to woodworking or skiing) were the norm, later to be replaced with general-purpose social media like Facebook and the platform formerly known as Twitter (X).

All this said, it's probably more important to note that the Internet has centralized to some great extent. I'm sure nearly every reader is familiar with just how much of the Internet goes down whenever Cloudflare or AWS experiences a major outage. And there are very practical reasons why this is the case—security and scalability are very hard for small shops to bake from scratch and there's a lot of value in working with someone who’s done it before. So a few big players emerged and now the Internet is quite dependent on their continued and constant performance.

Another point is that the Internet is truly global. State actors often act to limit its reach, but the same protocols that service the Chinese government's documents are the same protocols that service cat memes on Facebook. And that universality is something remarkable, when we otherwise don't agree on the construction of electrical plugs or which side of the road to drive on.

To bring these two points together, the Internet in its base form is under threat not from just the commonly-thought issue of state censorship, but business censorship as well. That previously-mentioned centralization serves as a springboard. It was not too long ago that the American right was actively conflating public freedom of speech with privately-moderated speech, and at least for now, American tech companies seem largely aligned with that brand of reactionary conservatism, as the Trump administration comes cracking down on the exact thing they claimed to be so against during the Biden administration. That centralization of content means a centralization of people accompanying a centralization of power.

Why does this matter?

The Internet is a tool. And like any tool, it is a positive force multiplier in the right hands and a weapon in the wrong ones. And when the toolbox changes hands, there’s normally an expectation that the next craftsman will be at least nearly equally deft. However, that libertarian ethos really struggles to adjust to the presence of bad actors.

Just this week, X (formerly Twitter) rolled out a feature noting many “right-wing American” content creators as never being based in America. That does matter. Because foreign propaganda and domestic propaganda often have very different goals even if the methods would be the same. Considering their nature and their effect, I would label these as bad actors.

That said, absolutely no one is immune to the effects of bad actors, or in getting wrapped up in sensationalism. One interesting observable social phenomenon is the propensity of factionalism in major events. I take Charlie Kirk's shooting as an example: right-wing groups (including the administration) were quick to blame left-wing violence, and left-wing groups jumped on the retort once the alleged shooter was purported to come from conservative background. Right-wing groups then jumped on the allegation that the suspect had a relationship with a transgender individual (vaguely linking that individual’s transgenderism with the “woke” left). My high-level view of this event says two things: that while yes, right-wing groups were largely more reactionary and inflammatory than their left-wing counterparts, people on many different sides jumped to conclusions too quickly about an individual that has not yet been proven to have committed the crime. That, and that the suspect in question is as complex an individual as any of us with seemingly and potentially contradictory beliefs and actions.

While different groups are differently inoculated to these effects, the lack of accountability is astounding. And in that previous incident, the most startling thing that I find is not the act of violence itself, rather that the explicitly inflammatory rhetoric held by the highest office says, “no, it’s everyone else who’s inflammatory,” as if that is effective for healing an already-broken nation or that they're not directly responsible themselves. And while certainly possible without the Internet, the sheer speed and volume of speculation almost forces imaginations to run rampant (which has huge implications for the default law of the land as “innocent until proven guilty”).

And on maybe the most basic level, this part is just a fight between personal accountability and social responsibility. That is, discovering the balance between keeping producers of disinformation responsible while keeping consumers aware enough of the possibilities to hold themselves accountable. But it can be hard to strike that balance. So this is the framing that this series operates in: the Internet’s origination didn't provide for the existence of bad actors and we need to clean up the mess that those bad actors made, while protecting from future threats, and while actively safeguarding democracy and democratic values. It is layered, to say the least.

So how do we change this?

All this leads to that we’ve teched our way into an information problem that we can’t tech our way out of. We might be able to learn this lesson from the social sciences, but we haven’t dealt with this problem nearly at this speed or scale before. So all we’re left with is imperfect solutions for very, very difficult problems.

And so we have several issues that we’re butting up against without a convenient way forward. Or rather, if we try to pause long enough to solve this problem, if history is of any indication, two even more complicated problems will appear in the meantime (as we’re now dealing with data privacy and artificial intelligence issues, which largely build from the base issue of information-sharing). But there are a few things that we can think about non-autocratic countries doing that could alleviate some of this.

The simplest answer would be for the legislative and governance processes to become more “agile.” For my software friends, no, I’m not saying that legislators should have a daily stand-up4: I’m saying that the system should be more responsive to environmental change. While this sounds simple, this is a hard ask. Democracy is intrinsically and intentionally slow, filled with checks and balances, so that (in theory) politicians and political parties can’t subject their country to policy whiplash every time the constituency flips. Predictability of change (especially if it’s slow) is good for business, and typically at least tolerable for constituents, so it tends to be the choice for modern policy rollout. But obviously, technology is evolving faster than our governments tend to want to keep up with. I feel even GDPR was quite late to the game, but it's better late than never. Is it possible? Certainly. Is it likely? Well, in my view, it requires people with technical expertise getting more actively involved in the governance and legislative processes to provide that push.

A non-replacing answer could be aligned with the solution to Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance: that is, change how we think about the freedom of speech to exclude any speech for ideologies that would lead to the abolition of the freedom of speech. This concept already exists in partial form in places (e.g. the previously mentioned illegality of Holocaust denial in Germany). This is a hard argument in places like the United States, but could find traction in the aftermath of this current administration. That would likely be part of a larger discussion on misinformation/disinformation.

The last solution I can think of is to change the nature of the Internet. However, doing so would likely irreparably fracture the Internet. Some may argue that this is already happening—siloed sections of the Internet exist where not all websites are accessible even outside authoritarian countries (think the U.K., which now forces age verification responsibilities on private providers, but more on that upcoming). There will be tremendous resistance to change and it might not even be a good change, but trusted, centralized authority figures could at least in theory replace decentralized ones; if I'm being honest, I'm not in favor of this argument at all because it intrinsically suffers from not being able to deal with bad actors even worse than the current system. I can imagine a situation where the United States government was a trusted authority and this current administration was able to completely suppress information that did not align with their stated goals. It's important to understand that a place like China can only reliably suppress because the government also owns5 their Internet infrastructure. Right now, the United States government would have to exert its power on the corporations that own it or nationalize the infrastructure, both of which are complicated and lengthy processes.

So the fundamental structure of the Internet butts up against authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes alike for very different reasons. And a lot of that has to do with the spread of information and the freedom of speech. As with most things, if there was an easy answer, we would have already done it. While I do not necessarily agree with some of the structural ideals of the Internet (since we don’t live in a world made for those ideals), I think this is a situation where governments, as well as perhaps people’s expectations, need to adjust and adapt to how the world is changing around them. The Internet has lowered the barrier of access to information, and at least for now, there’s more associated positives than negatives, the main issue is in limiting bad actors’ effect on it. This includes keeping bad actors out of positions of power in government and business, which we need to do a better job at.

You have likely already heard, but Wednesday at a speaking and student engagement event in Utah, Charlie Kirk, a prominent ultra-right-wing podcaster and political activist, was shot and killed. Law enforcement is still searching for a suspect after the initial catch and release of two suspects. Presumably, this killing was on ideological grounds, but that is uncertain until we know more (that is, anything) about the shooter.

I have been quite a bit preoccupied today, but I had the chance to discuss with some close friends three predictions for the populist right-wing core of the Republican party coming out of this event:

1. They’ll blame the left/Democrats, even if it wasn’t the left/Democrats.

2. They’ll demand additional security, and that market will take off2.

3. They’ll make a martyr out of him, if they can.

And before I was able to put my word onto digital paper today, even before his body is cold, all of one, two, and three3 have already started. To be completely transparent, I’m concerned. My short-term fear is in more needless death. President Trump has already declared flags to be flown at half-mast until Sunday evening, an honor he removed from former President Jimmy Carter and notably did not elect to pursue for the two-months’-prior assassination of Minnesota State Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband. Rep. Nancy Mace said to a reporter that “Democrats [need to] own this,” seemingly hypocritically in the face of Melissa Hortman’s similarly untimely death. His death has been politicized by this and more, before a motive has even been established; that alone is enough to be concerned.

Going forward, if the Charlie Kirk martyrdom messaging doesn’t land, they’ll abandon him. His widow will get something, don’t get me wrong—maybe a Presidential Medal of Freedom4 and a spot at the next State of the Union address, maybe a generous payout from the government, or maybe a generous GiveSendGo payout5 (one of which has already started and has raised $2.5m as a post-posting Friday update, mind you). But while his message will live on, he will become just another list item of the long list of perceived grievances that Trump and MAGA-aligned right-wingers like to throw around. I think this is the more likely case: his death will become yet another justification of the steady erosion of existing institutions that we’ve seen for the entirety of the second Trump administration.

But if it lands… if this fuels the fire that’s aggressively been stoked (and very clearly not by the “radical left” as President Trump so quaintly put it), we Americans have a whole new host of problems that we are staring down the barrel of. I don’t want to speculate right now on what happens in that case, but I am particularly concerned about increased domestic militarization, as well as loss of Democratic focus on maybe the only issue that’s capable of sticking to the President anymore: the Epstein files.

I end to say that while I hold no love and no respect for this man, death by a human hand at the age of 31 was not among the things that he deserved. I even feel next to no schadenfreude for a man who once claimed that, “I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment…” The violent rhetoric needs to step down, but it’s already still persisting in the highest office of the land. In the interest of combating divisiveness, left-wingers, liberals, and centrists of all kinds need to be firm in decrying political violence, and encourage those across the aisle to do the same, even if it falls upon deaf ears. And then move on and move forward, trusting the law to do its job. Violence will only ever be met with more violence, and that’s the big question now.

I will cap off this post with the words and portent of another man I usually deeply disagree with but whose words now I both agree with and am greatly concerned by (as it reads like a contemplative threat to me), Speaker Mike Johnson:

“We need to be thinking thoughtfully about our language and what we’re saying and how we treat one another,” Johnson said. “This could be a big moment … I feel like something has changed.”

This post is predicated on a recent viral Youtube video2 where Mehdi Hasan debated 20 “far-right conservatives,” during which, an individual self-described as fascist, which generated a round of applause from the “far-right conservatives.” He went into great detail explaining his fascism, stating that he believes that democracy should be used as a path to autocracy and nothing more. This individual subsequently lost his job immediately following the publishing of that video, and guest starred on a podcast that partnered with him to start a GiveSendGo campaign to fund him while he job searches. Even though this campaign only began on Tuesday, it has, at the time of publishing, accrued north of $37,000. Many comments on that campaign are white nationalist or Neo-Nazi in nature3. He describes on the page that fascism is a “fully legal traditional right wing political [view],” along with, in the original video, describing Francisco Franco as a benevolent leader—seemingly aligning his own Catholicism with that of the former Spanish Nationalist leader. So, let’s talk about this: fascism in general, what happening in America that someone may feel so emboldened to steadfastly hold these beliefs, and what to do about fascists.

As a Background

Fascism has a thousand definitions by a thousand political scientists, but briefly and generally, it has taken the form of utilizing the means of existing government mechanisms (and when those are too slow or deemed insufficient, violence) to entrench an authoritarian leader and a social hierarchy to bring about a national “rebirth.” It is inherently militaristic and is unafraid of using violence against those existing outside the deemed social norms. Critically, fascism is directly opposed to the concept of democracy; fascism is likewise the enemy of communism or socialism, and has little bearing or relation to those ideologies. Fascism is not simple “far-right conservatism,” as conservatism seeks reinforcing the status quo traditions and social hierarchies to not upset the existing social balance. Enforcing traditionalism by means of revolutionary violence is not within the purview of conservatism.

I provide here Umberto Eco’s reading of fascism: roughly, that fascism is hard to attribute because of its colloquial use4, but has hallmarks or “features” that highlight fascist thought and practice, calling it “Ur-Facism5,” or a sort of proto-fascism that facilitates the development of fascism, if you will. Eco grew up under quintessential fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, and developed his understanding of fascism through not only academic literature, but also that lived experience. His original essay is worth the read even if the reader is familiar with the “CliffsNotes,” as it is often misquoted, misattributed, or otherwise misunderstood. As it is quite long and a bit technical, I have used Claude to abbreviate (with some light editing) his 14 features below:

1. Cult of Tradition: Fascists believe that all truth was revealed long ago and we must return to ancient wisdom rather than seek new knowledge.

2. Rejection of Modernism: Fascists hate the modern world and especially reject the Enlightenment values of reason and individual rights.

3. Cult of Action: Fascists believe that taking action is more important than thinking, and that too much thinking makes people weak.

4. No Critical Thinking: Fascists cannot tolerate disagreement or analysis because questioning their beliefs threatens their power.

5. Fear of Difference: Fascists exploit people's natural fear of those who are different, making racism a core part of their appeal.

6. Appeal to Frustrated Middle Class: Fascists target middle-class people who feel economically threatened or politically humiliated.

7. Obsession with Plots: Fascists convince followers that enemies (often foreigners or minorities) are constantly conspiring against them.

8. Enemies are Both Strong and Weak: Fascists portray their enemies as both dangerously powerful and pathetically weak at the same time.

9. Life as Permanent War: Fascists reject peace and compromise, insisting that life is constant struggle and conflict.

10. Popular Elitism: Fascists tell everyone they are part of the "best people" while creating strict hierarchies where leaders despise those below them.

11. Cult of Heroism and Death: Fascists glorify dying for the cause and teach that heroic death is the highest honor.

12. Machismo: Fascists transfer their need for power into aggressive masculinity, rejecting women's equality and non-traditional sexuality.

13. Selective Populism: Fascists claim to speak for "the people" but really only represent whoever agrees with the leader.

14. Newspeak: Fascists use simplified language and limit vocabulary to prevent complex thinking and criticism.

Eco notes in his essay that not all 14 features are necessary for fascism to form; in fact, even just one is sufficient for “fascism to coagulate around it.” He indicates that these features are not unique—that they can be present in other forms of authoritarianism and that the actual execution of some of the features can be contradictory.

What does this mean?

Fascism intrinsically argues for militarism and violence to upset and enforce a new status quo—a revitalization of some real or perceived past. Despite that one commentator’s attempt to ignore that violent means will lead to violent ends (and seeming deliberate ignorance that the Spanish nationalists and subsequent Francoist Spain, despite being nominally Catholic, also attacked and killed Catholics that didn’t align with their political goals), being a fascist means advocating for that violence, or at least dismissing it as a necessary stepping stone.

Some have argued that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” for problematic beliefs; however, research shows that repeated exposure to an idea affects even those against it (as evidenced for example by this paper on exposure to climate change denial claims). There are some ideologies that do not deserve to see the light of day, and they should instead be shown the door.

That millions of Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma, and LGBT+ folks died at the hands of German fascism is “a little persecution” to quote that commentator. That hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian, Libyan, Spanish, Slovene, Croat, Montenegrin, Albanian, Greek, Jewish, and Italian peoples suffered due to Italian fascism is only inconvenient at worst. That his lauded Francoist Spain’s killings of hundreds of thousands of government officials, union leaders, teachers, intellectuals, Freemasons (even those only suspected), regional nationalists, non-Spanish nationalist military officers, and yes, even Catholic priests who did not align politically, is irrelevant because of… what? Spain’s economic success in the post-war period? Japan did that in the 80s without killing hundreds of thousands of its own people. As this commentator outlines that he was unhappy with the German persecution of the Christian church (but again, the Jews were only “a little persecuted”), I propose that the commentator’s brand of fascism is one founded in Christian nationalism; the fact that the Spanish Francoist regime was strongly Catholic and had implicit (and even some explicit) backing by the Catholic church to commit these killings means that the killings were valid and therefore beyond reproach.

Why does this matter?

It should not be a bold statement to say that governmental upheaval, even if dramatic or necessary, should not come at the cost of human life. Even if the moral consequence is to be ignored, this is exactly one of the primary reasons why we have democracy and diplomacy: to resolve our societal differences without material or human loss. Upheaval requires rebuilding; rebuilding is much harder with fewer resources.

Shifting a bit, autocracy of any kind comes at the cost of ignoring certain people’s opinions. And people like this commentator consider themselves in the in-group, the people whose opinions would be “valid enough” to not be in the out-group. And despite several decades of cheering for political parties as one would a sports team, it was not until the 2016 election that that mentality of “us vs. them” firmly dug itself into the psyche of American politics.

To be clear, I would not consider the majority of the first Trump administration fascist. Certainly much of the rhetoric was, but the actions taken did not regularly reflect an internalization of a fascist mindset, just a desire—that is, at least not until January 6th, 2021 and the attack on the U.S. Capitol building. If that event were even partially successful, a sort of proto-fascism would have certainly taken hold in the country at that point in time, akin to the Nazi party’s burning of the Reichstag in 1933. Notably though, perpetrators to the event four years ago suffered no lasting, tangible consequences. On the contrary, that that event was deliberately downplayed (‘it wasn’t that bad’), obfuscated (‘actually it was left-wing agitators’), and pardoned for (‘but everyone charged gets a federal commuted sentence/pardon on day 1’) signals that America is in trouble.

The denigration of various peoples like liberals and anyone further left-wing, intellectuals, and immigrants perfectly aligns with fascist ideologies, but again, rhetoric alone does not constitute fascism. And that’s only one example; I could make a reasonable argument for all 14 of Umberto Eco’s indicators That changes with the second Trump administration. The systemic incarceration and deportation of people of largely Latin descent based at least in part on their physical appearance and without probable cause following racist overtones in the election lead-up, firmly and fully internalized the fascist mindset. Whether or not this administration is wanting to entrench a sort of authoritarian conservatism or fascism isn’t clear just yet, but the signs are becoming increasingly worrying.

Dramatically unqualified people have filled the top spots in government and their only real qualification is loyalty to the President, not even to the Constitution. This administration, enabled in part by the Supreme Court and in whole by Congress, has set up an Ur-fascist government that seems to be testing the waters to just how far America can be pushed. And the fact that otherwise ordinary, random people can espouse fascism and be monetarily supported for their fascism is a very deeply disturbing red flag. Add to that the dramatically increased ICE budget (who are often now acting in a paramilitary fashion) and you have a recipe that shouldn’t be published in America’s cookbook.

So how do we change this?

Looking forward to a post-Trump world, it is hard to expect that someone will be able to neatly fill the platform shoes that Donald Trump will leave behind, and his age and health will catch up with him very soon (or possibly his actions, if pressure about Epstein sticks around). None of his children, not J.D. Vance, nor Mike Johnson is ready to take up that Trumpian mantle, and many in the core MAGA-sphere don’t want any of them to. That is one of the inherent “problems” with a cult of personality: it inevitably ends with the death of the leader. However, the residual effects of this time period will continue regardless. Other people espousing this ideology will not go away and are unlikely to change their minds, given the current trajectory.

I see three real non-violent possibilities following the fall of Donald Trump. The first is that someone is able to successfully grab the reigns of the MAGA and redirect that energy for themselves; perhaps it would not be not a political leader, but another outsider like, however unlikely it may seem at the moment, Elon Musk. The second is that no one is able to take up the reigns, and the MAGA movement effectively democratizes. In essence, a “new,” further-right Republican party would be reborn under a sort of neo-Trumpism (and would also likely keep pushing the Democratic party rightward with the shifting of the Overton Window6). This would be similar to what happened with the Tea Party movement by the time of the 2016 election. The third is that the movement relegates reluctantly to the shadows, either becoming disenfranchised with politics (perhaps including aligning with America’s brand of libertarianism) or simply dissipating their more fringe beliefs (probably to still hold onto those beliefs, just not discuss them).

All this to say, Mehdi Hasan’s conversation with this self-proclaimed fascist commentator was one of initial morbid curiosity, but once he realized that the person that he was speaking to had no interest in engaging with reality or even Mehdi’s topic and only had interest in proclaiming his own viewpoints, Mehdi said, “…what are we doing here? I don’t debate fascists.” And this, this is the way to deal with fascists and fascist rhetoric. Ever since the 2016 election, when populism tried to entrench itself in both mainstream parties and only found a home in the Republican party, fascist rhetoric has been slowly normalized both by sheer media exposure and by the authoritarian and rightward creep of MAGA-era Republican politicking. MAGA cannot be allowed to flourish into fascism, but it now flirts with it so often that it could well be mistaken for it. America needs to remember that it fought fascists only 80 years ago, and needs to remind itself on the reasons why.

But that said, this newsletter is meant to be in part a thought exercise of how to heal divisiveness in America. Surely it is divisive itself to consider an individual’s opinions invalid? This brings us back to the paradox of tolerance: we should not tolerate those viewpoints that if enacted in full, would squelch opposing viewpoints. For free expression to be maintained, we cannot allow for viewpoints like fascism, that actively seek to promote its own authority at the cost of all others. If the commentator that this newsletter is referencing actually valued freedom of expression as he says he does, he would intrinsically understand that 1. his own viewpoint would destroy that thing he claims to value and 2. that despite no legal ramifications for exercising that freedom of expression, people and businesses are allowed to not want to associate with him because of how they could be perceived in that same way. Social consequences are not only allowed, but necessary, as it’s how we police legally-protected problematic viewpoints. So the answer is straightforward, don’t platform or value fascism, even under the guise of “free speech.” Learn from its mistakes; it’s important that we talk about it in some capacity (as not talking about it creates a whole new set of issues), but don’t pass it off as reasonable.

I believe that the political science definition of a constitutional crisis is quite useless for the current predicament of the United States. When the sitting President claims that “[he doesn’t] know” if he is supposed to uphold the Constitution (which he is required to by verbal oath3) and that “[he doesn’t] know” if U.S. citizens and noncitizens both deserve due process as laid out in the Fifth Amendment, there is a bit of a “big C” Constitutional crisis. So let me take the opportunity to outline the “big C” Constitutional crisis, some of the ways that the executive administration is undermining the most fundamental rules of law in the country.

To preface all of this, the judiciary and legislative branches do not have the power of the enforcement of law, only the executive branch does. In that sense, it is somewhat up to the executive branch to self-police4. So despite lawsuits, despite appeals in the court of law, and despite Congress’s ability to check the executive branch on many things, the executive branch still needs to respect and respond to rulings and subpoenas. And at the moment, high-level officials seem very interested in contesting this exact thing. To be perfectly clear, I am not a legal scholar, so while there is certainly more nuance to the situation than what you will read below, I have not yet seen a full outline of challenges to the Constitution. I feel strongly that this is important: a basic outline of what is provided as rights to those living in America and what is at stake for the average person who is not well-versed in these matters (along with some contextualization to current affairs).

As a Background

U.S. Const. amend. I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is perhaps the most well-known and perhaps the most fundamental. Despite the text specifically mentioning that Congress may not enact laws against any of what is contained in the list, the text has been broadly understood to mean that this extends to enforcement; that is, that any enforcement of any law that infringes upon these things is likewise unconstitutional.

The frequent defamation lawsuits leveraged by the President and his affliates5, the seizing of students and revocation of their visas who have outspoken against Israel’s treatment of Gaza, and the demonization of some classes of protestors all bring into question the freedom of speech in this administration. Kicking out the Associated Press from White House events and suing news outlets for unfavorable coverage brings into question the freedom of the press in this administration6. And while peaceful protests and assemblies have some history of violent response in the United States, a heavy-handed approach to the current Los Angeles protests yet again brings into question the freedom to peaceably assembly in this administration.

U.S. Const. amend. II. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

President Trump has in his first term directly challenged settled Second Amendment rights in discussing violating Due Process. Due to his alignment with the Republican party (and their near-ubiquitous stance on gun rights), it is unlikely that this is a serious challenge yet; however, with a renewed focus on protests this year, if violence escalates (as it currently seems likely to in LA), there may be a renewed interest in this topic.

U.S. Const. amend. IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Fourth Amendment protects U.S. residents from unlawful search and seizure without probable cause and without warrant. In recent history, “without probable cause” has done a lot of heavy lifting, despite certain policies like New York’s stop-and-frisk being struck down as unconstitutional (with the 2nd Circuit upholding that ruling in Floyd v. City of New York).

Maybe most notably, the Trump administration has argued that lack of evidence in preparing in individual for deportation necessitates that very deportation. To note, a person seeking asylum in the United States may have as equal access to their governmental papers as would an alleged gang member.

U.S. Const. amend. V. No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…

The Fifth Amendment has been ruled to apply to all persons residing within the United States, regardless of citizenship, in part in Shaughnessy v. United States (although as outlined in that case, they may be detained with cause at the port of entry pending a hearing). Regarding deportation, while there are still some grey areas mostly involving duration of existence in the United States, settled people cannot be evicted from the country without due process, as that would deprive them of liberty and property.

U.S. Const. amend. VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

In the history of the interpretation of the Eighth Amendment, there have consistently been considerable outliers. For example, the existence of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has always been contentious, seemingly allowing “cruel and unusual punishments” to be inflicted upon whoever would be deemed an enemy of the State simply by not allowing it to occur on domestic soil. This Amendment does not stipulate how broad its reach is, but contention arises when actors representing the State violate the statute knowingly. Sending individuals not officially convicted of a crime to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (or CECOT) is reasonably included in this line of thinking. Note that a violation of immigration laws in the United States is generally a civil matter and not a criminal one.

U.S. Const. amend. XIV, §1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside…

The Fourteenth Amendment contains a particularly interesting issue. Citizenship birthright is somewhat of a Western Hemisphere phenomenon, in that most countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa do not even consider birthright citizenship as a legislative possibility. While this Amendment has largely been uncontentious in the United States, the President in this term has made it a point of contention in part by executive order, supported by Cabinet members like Attorney General Pam Bondi. This is notably a separate initiative from how Justice Thomas seems intent on overturning most precedent decided from the later Due Process Clause7 in this same amendment.

U.S. Const. amend. XXII, §1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once…

President Donald Trump has directly challenged the Twenty-second Amendment by repeatedly touting “President for life.” While he has since walked some of these statements back, he continues to “joke” about it, and that sort of rhetoric is fresh to the American government. Former Trump political strategist Steve Bannon (who still maintains some level of influence in such circles) explicitly wants Donald Trump to run for a third term. There is also a proposed bill in the House that would allow for President Trump to run again, amending the existing Amendment.

U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 2. The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

As a final quick note, habeus corpus should be discussed. The principle of habeus corpus simply states that it is unlawful for any function of government to detain an individual without being able to produce that individual or continue to confine that individual without bringing charges against them in a court of law. Interpretation of this clause has been disparate, but is certainly in effect for the federal government. That said, suspension of habeus corpus as indicated in the clause has occurred four times in the past, probably most notably by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. That exact language, “invasion,” is being used as pretense for current ICE sweeps broadly and alledgedly against gang Tren de Aragua. The current administration seems to be discussing the invocation of this clause in suspending habeus corpus under the direction of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

What does this mean?

While not all laws are good and perfect, having laws in a general sense is a good thing. Laws provide safety and security for citizens. Laws provide predictability and stability for businesses. Laws confer rights to those that are paying taxes for the express purpose of having those rights. This is not complicated nor is this remotely a contentious statement.

However, some commentators have asserted that the rule of law in the United States is dead. This is owing in part to that the present United States administration seems set on challenging any sort of settled law that does not align with their stated agenda. This is up to and including defying the letter and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. The first five months of the second Trump administration have been riddled with challenges beyond settled law to settled Constitutional law. This is turn is a threat to settled rights.

While America has had problematic history with poorly treating perceived out-groups (up to and including poor decisions in the Supreme Court), at least in theory it has at least attempted (or pretended to attempt) to ensure “equal justice under law.” Sometimes people discuss how “if one group doesn’t have these rights, no group has these rights” and I think that’s a very coherent argument here. ICE deportation sweeps have caught up U.S. citizens, and the onus of proving one’s citizenship should not be the burden of the individual, it should be the the burden of the deporting authority to prove a reason for deportation. There is some very basic racial issue here, based on how the bulk of ICE sweeps are currently being conducted: the argument that certain individuals may not have to worry about ICE sweeps is implicitly making that argument because those same individuals are not of Latin descent. And that should make some basic level of sense; after all, the executive order is specifically targeting Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. Presumably, such people would “look” Venezuelan. And the seeming lack of concern for due process seems to highlight how much of this could simply be racial profiling.

To that, it is important to note just how much terminology seems to be being intentionally muddled; this administration is willing to label citizens exercising their First Amendment rights as “domestic terrorists” and then to take away or threatening to take away Due Process (Fifth and Fourteenth) rights for “domestic terrorists.” There is no effective boundary; there is no realistic difference between these two groups, and the verbiage is the same. It seems to be that the message is “fall in line with current U.S. policy and you have nothing to worry about.”

Why does this matter?

President Trump and his administration evidently does not care for the rule of law. While conservative justices, congresspeople, and executive officers in the United States have long been accused of interpreting and writing laws that favor them or their interests, this trend of ignoring the concept about being “above board” is quite new to the Trump presidency.

The Constitution under threat alone is likely not a popular subject enough to see mass protests; however, coworkers, neighbors, and loved ones being seized without a warrant or probable cause has shown public pushback against ICE most notably in Los Angeles. Overwhelmingly, the people protesting currently are people exercising their 1st Amendment rights in demanding that the government respect others’ 5th and 14th Amendment rights. The U.S. Constitution affords due process to every resident, not only to citizens or to people that align with our political views8.

One saving grace is that seemingly unlike most of the majority in Congress (save a rare few like Senator Lisa Murkowski who spoke out in April), the Supreme Court actually seems intent on maintaining a modicum of separation of powers. The White House is seeing fit to contest this too, however. Currently, the Trump Administration is hiding behind their assertion on, for example, wrongfully and mistakenly deported Kilmar Abergo Garcia9, being a member of MS-13 and worthy of deportation.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “no court… has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.” What the Supreme Court gave their exceedingly rare 9-0 opinion on in Trump v. J.G.G. does not constitute foreign policy, it merely concerns upholding the law while conducting that policy, which is very much within their purview. Willfully and deliberately ignoring that point seems to be a recurrent trend. The White House also seems to be justifying their case by repeatedly claiming that García is a member of MS-13, of which they badly formed “proof”10 to support their argument. This also ignores the point that even if we suppose that he would be in MS-13, it ultimately does not matter because he is afforded the legal process (not to mention, in his case, there was already outstanding court precedent).

I believe that there is a messaging problem around a “constitutional crisis.” Leftists debating the term by adhering to the strict political science definition undermines efforts to align behind the cause. I believe that the US is experiencing a constitutional crisis, but I believe that is and should be largely irrelevant because the political science definition is nearly meaningless for the average voter. I believe more to the point that the U.S. Constitution is in crisis. I am not attempting to debase the term, but Americans are generally not civically aware and the logic of a jump between “there is no constitutional crisis” and “the Constitution is not is crisis” is way, way too small. People need to be exact in messaging right now. Keep what is real and tangible to voters in mind.

The Republican party has long been affiliated with “states’ rights,” which has in turn long been used in (usually racial) discourse as a colloquialism for everything from justifying segregationism to white supremacy. Current Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as recent as 2024 stated that federalizing the National Guard in Texas would be an affront to states’ rights. One year later, she advocates for the same in California, just this past weekend, to curb the protesting in Los Angeles because she disagrees with the leadership in California. Important to this conversation is that in both practice and procedure, fundamentally, the U.S. Constitution is states’ rights. The Amendments to the Constitution are composed of binding laws created by federal legislature elected by the constituency of the states, then later ratified by individual state legislature or ratifying conventions in the states, giving up their control on certain matters to the federal government to ensure equal protections and rights across state lines. Even the current proposed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” championed by the President and his administration strips away civil technology regulation from the states, hardly indicative of a promotion of state’s rights. A necessary takeaway from this administration must be that the a significant core of the current Republican party never cared about actual states’ rights: they only ever cared about “States’ Rights.”

So how do we change this?

The excesses of the first Trump administration were curbed largely by his own administrative team, but now, the guardrails are off. Some point to the Supreme Court’s pushback as one of the stopping points of how far this administration will push the limits, but this resembles complacency too strongly for me to advocate for. Even if the Supreme Court successfully halts the steamrolling of the Constitution, so many other things have been lost to get us to this point. American economic policy is nonexistent and many fear that we are diving headfirst into a recession, American foreign policy has significantly harmed relations with many countries (including our closest allies), and American health policy is creating an autism registry and downplaying measles outbreaks. Americans cannot become complacent even if the Constitution remains nominally intact because things are still actively getting worse regardless.

Contacting your Congresspeople is a good first step. Tiny cracks in total party loyalty to this administration are beginning to show, and the opposition is starting to display signs of having a spine. Americans, both businesses and individuals, need to keep up the pressure on Congress to effectuate any change; after all, public opinion of this administration is quite poor and yet while there are signs of brakes being applied, it does not really look like the train will be stopping any time soon.

For demonstration, there are regular peaceful protests happening through e.g. 50501 in most major cities, with the next being this Saturday, June 14th. If you are in a position to do so, consider demonstrating in “No Kings” for a few hours to lend your solidarity. Peaceful protests are effective and necessary. According to Erica Chenoweth of the Harvard Kennedy School, this looks like 3.5% of the total population to effectuate change, which is very manageable given the current disapproval ratings. Silence is synonymous with passive acceptance. America needs its people to stand with its institutions and with its law or it risks losing both entirely.

I use that anecdote often in my professional life to explain how unprepared people in the field were for the current wave of generative artificial intelligence. Even companies studying AI possibilities in detail, like Google and Microsoft, were caught completely off guard by how quickly it advanced. I feel that at a time when we were already struggling societally to deal with issues surrounding data privacy globally and the generational consequences of social media, that AI is Pandora's box. I find that these previous issues are still unsatisfactorily addressed. Even GDPR feels a bit too new still, as despite being a widely recognized standard when it went into effect in 2018, it is far from a global agreement. With the box being opened, AI has complicated existing problems while also creating brand new ones, including on issues of data privacy.

This will get worse as the technology gets better. For some disciplines, the labor pipeline needs rethinking now, not in 10 years as market forces shift. Take computer programming, software engineering, coding. The traditional pipeline for years has already been misaligned—a three-to-four-year bachelor’s degree in computer science with two years of experience only nets an entry level job. Becoming a standout applicant to land a job to just get those two “safety” years of experience was a harsh rite of passage for so long and now it is even harsher. Employment rates in the field, at least since the Great Recession in 2009, followed short-term business cycles that were predictable. Past the blanket COVID hiring freeze a decade later, and the job market has not rebounded in that predictable way, partly due to the uptick in AI usage in late 2022. The pipeline as we knew it is now fully broken, and we are largely not discussing that with students and prospects.

Every educator now needs to have an opinion about generative AI. The teaching profession as a whole, however, does not make enough money to be the stopgap solution for a worldwide shift in learning. The world was not prepared for these post-COVID shocks to the labor market, yet at a time of rising global income inequality, AI does not invalidate the work of multi-billionaires but does invalidate the work of many white collar workers. More and more computer science students are graduating at a time when junior roles are less frequently available, and this will affect businesses. Companies want senior roles filled now, but this is short-sighted if fewer seniors are currently being made. Businesses may not understand this fully right now, but chasing AI’s productivity gains in the short-term means potentially losing out on labor in the long-term. The latest “vibe coding” craze (that is, programming using AI without prior experience in programming) cannot hope to claim to fill this knowledge gap. If AI fails to capture what senior roles are capable of in the timeframe stated by AI leaders (2030 by many estimates), the labor market will be a mess for both those hiring and those looking to get hired. That is an awful lot of faith to put in a science that showed few productivity gains for around 60 years.

Unlike over a decade ago when I conversed with my cohort, I now have a firm opinion on the topic. There is no going back, obviously. Pandora’s box is open. Many have discussed the benefits that AI will bring, but few describe what the post-AI world looks like and even fewer describe the path to getting there. And of those possibilities, which future does AI enable? I am fascinated by AI and in turn afraid that we are blindly running off a cliff that will make hard skills even harder to learn and replicate in humans. I worry for the last few batches of computer science cohorts, much more so than I did for my own. That is all to say, I believe that artificial intelligence is a genuinely wonderful tool that humanity is wholly unprepared for, and that computer science educators and businesses alike need to look past their quarterly reports and evaluate if the industry is going in the right direction.

As a final word, I believe that the answer requires reevaluation of the computer science discipline. While computer science is a remarkable field, very very few computer science jobs exist. What actually exists are software engineering jobs. My recommendation is for a separation of degrees. Keep computer science as the specific “how does the science actually work” degree, but branch off a new degree that contains what graduates actually need for getting a job in software engineering. Maybe this looks more like a trade school program, but whatever the case may be, it should be founded in projects that students can put their names to on a résumé or a CV. Optimally, this could look like local and regional partnerships with businesses: building the students’ professional networks while developing real products for real businesses. Until we see a major shift in how computer science education is conducted, there will continue to be a broad disconnect between what academic instiutions offer and what businesses want out of an employee.

As a Background

Last Wednesday, April 2nd, President Donald Trump announced a “Liberation Day” for the United States. This was the announcement via executive order of a global 10% tariff on all imported goods to commence on April 5th, with more targeted tariffs to individual countries kicking off today, April 9th. China was specifically targeted by an additional executive order, adding both flat-rate tariffs and a 34% tariff to imported Chinese goods later in May. This Chinese-exclusive tariff was amended yesterday by executive order to commence in line with other country-specific tariffs today, and to raise the percentage-based tariff to 84%. This is partially in a move to fulfill a long-standing campaign promise to enact tariffs, allegedly to correct trade deficits, and was proceeded by the announcement of tariffs on automobiles and automobile parts on March 26th.

The Trump administration seems to be variably open and closed to negotiating these tariffs with individual countries, with Vietnam being told publicly by U.S. senior trade advisor Peter Navarro stating that, “this is not a negotiation.” However President Trump himself has stated that negotiation may be possible for some countries, and may not be possible for others.

China has notably refused to back down on the tariffs. Despite being one of America’s largest trading partners, the US has imposed a 104% cumulative tariff on the country, and China has responded in turn by issuing an 84% tariff on the United States, stating that they will not back down to US pressure. Chinese leaders have been calling for world leaders to present a unified front against these tariffs.

Many authoritarian leaders are seeing this as a boon for their own countries. While this will take some time to settle out, Russian leaders, for example, have spoken out about improved outlooks both on the war in Ukraine and the viability of Russia as a trading partner. In Chinese social media, which was largely critical of President Xi Jinping in recent times, blame has as least temporarily shifted to the United States for China’s economic outlook.

In response to these tariffs, prior to today, every major domestic stock market has taken a significant hit, a “correction” in trading terminology (that is, an over 10% adjustment in value). President Trump has specifically warned auto-makers not to raise prices in response to the tariffs. Economists are trending toward viewing the economic shock as indicative of a possible recession.

As-of today, the president has announced that the global 10% tariff will remain in place, along with a further heightened Chinese tariff of 125% and the preexisting sector-specific tariffs. Notably, this would need to be passed by executive order (instead of simply declared on the president’s Truth Social page), but this was not publicly posted on the White House website until April 10th.

While ordinarily the President of the United States is unable to issue tariffs as that power is controlled by Congress, the President does have the power to do so during a declared state of emergency, via the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This is the legal basis for the current declared tariffs.

What does this mean?

Tariffs are traditionally typically meant to boost domestic production of a good, similarly to subsidies. Subsidies work by cheapening the domestic production of a good (by kicking over a bit of money to domestic producers), while tariffs work by making foreign substitutes more expensive (by leveraging a tax on the good at the port of entry). However, subsidies are an expenditure by the government and tariffs are a tax collected by the government. Both of these are long-term solutions to any problem, as businesses must adjust to the expectations of the market. Potential entrepreneurs will only invest normally in times of stability, so as to make a stable profit.

The tariff calculations appear to have used a straightforward equation in calculating how to leverage country-specific tariffs. However, even economists associated with conservative institutions have taken significant issue over these calculations, stating that there are unquestionable mistakes. Some media outlets have particularly noted that the White House’s findings reflect those that would be created by generative AI, if prompted to create tariff policy for the United States. This is somewhat troubling, as it means either: one, that White House staffers used a tool like ChatGPT or Claude for economic policy advice instead of actual economists or two, that White House staffers are only as competent as generative AI in crafting complex policy. Generative AI cannot give the nuance required yet for something as complicated as tariff policy.

Part of the claim put forth by the White House is that these tariffs are meant to offset the national deficit and correct trade imbalances. However, because this order was put forth by the executive portion of the government and Congress still handles budgetary matters, as-of this moment, Congress cannot count on tariffs as part of the annual budget. This disconnect is evident in other areas (notably that legally, the tariffs were in full force on April 9th because the executive order was only signed to take effect on the 10th), but shows that despite possessing the legal power to push through these tariffs, it is likely not fully thought through.

Why does this matter?

To take a step back, the optics of declaring a “Liberation Day” are already quite overdramatic. The only “liberation” that can be reasonably taken away from this tariff policy is the “Golden Rule” proposed by the White House: that other countries have mistreated the American economy and that they need to be mistreated in return—almost a “liberation” of a compulsion to be nice. This goes beyond missing the point of the actual “Golden Rule,” into a direct bastardization of the concept. The point of the Golden Rule is to treat others with the respect that you yourself want, not to slight those around you based on your perceived slights. That is to say that the Golden Rule has a place in international diplomacy especially, where individual, human-to-human discussions are had; applying it to economic policy like tariffs already seems spurious, but to then redefine its very nature by flipping its paradigm seems untenable. I have more to say here (maybe for another time), but the verbiage behind this supposed “economic liberation” is both a kind of textbook reactionary populism and also dramatically overselling the present economic situation.

If the goal is to boost domestic industry (as is one of the stated goals), then dramatically increasing global tariffs all at once is not the way to accomplish this. Businesses have two things to keep track of to function: labor (the workers supporting its functions) and capital (the materials and buildings utilized to provide the good or service). Neither is easy to move; neither is straightforward to adapt. Much of what the White House is currently complaining about is tied to offshoring of domestic manufacturing, so let us first consider capital, and what it would take to return.

For capital in manufacturing to return to the States, a few things can or must happen. If these tariffs persist, it will become unreasonable for companies to continue operating with their current supply chains without changing prices. There are very few cases where nothing will change, and that will likely be akin to local farmer’s markets where the supply chain is completely local (and even then, if seeds for crops are imported, prices will go up).

Consider chocolate and coffee. Outside of extremely limited supply in Hawaii, cacao and coffee beans largely do not grow in the United States. While certainly, chocolate manufacturing could be entirely onshored (imagine more towns like Hershey, PA), there is simply no replacing the raw input at scale. That is, a 10% increase in the cost of cacao for the business will directly result in higher domestic manfacturing costs. No business will allow this to eat into their profit margins in the long-term. The business will raise their prices accordingly1. Domestic manufacturers with domestic supply chains (say, those few who are able to source from only the Hawaiian crop), if their chocolate products are already competitively priced, will raise their prices to match the going market rate2. Coffee manufacturing will suffer a similar pattern. For these products, the crops simply cannot grow throughout most of the United States. It is not that there does not currently exist a viable domestic alternative, it is that there cannot exist a viable domestic alternative without acts of science or nature, given the current demand of these products.

For labor in manufacturing to return in the States, either large-scale immigration will need to take place (very unlikely at best in the current administration, since these jobs are not the touted H1-B jobs) or valuable and meaningful manufacturing jobs will need to be overrepresented in the market, to draw domestic talent to those jobs. To that, the United States labor force does not currently possess the skillsets necessary for large-scale domestic manufacturing. Despite Treasury Secretary Bessent’s insistence that furloughed federal workers can and should help fill the gap, the skills of these specialized individuals largely do not overlap with the manufacturing sector. Even if these jobs were manufactured overnight (pun intended), it would take months to train up labor to be efficient and productive in that role. That sort of labor, despite being termed “unskilled3,” does require a healthy amount of wind-up time.

All this leads to, why would a business owner spend millions in opening a manufacturing plant domestically when it may not be staffable or productive in the short-term? And why would this same business owner bank their profitability on the stability of these tariffs when within a week of being announced, before they go into effect, they have already changed? And then changed again significantly on the day they were due to go into effect? This sort of unpredictability is not conducive to business, and this lack of confidence in the market is maybe somewhat surprisingly driving a lot of issues in the economy right now.

Economists generally agree that a trade deficit is not necessarily a bad thing. Even if a trade deficit would be solely a bad thing, tariffs are not necessarily the right tool for the job, at least not alone. Tariffs alone will not fix all of the stated goals of “taking back our economic sovereignty,” “reprioritizing U.S. manufacturing,” and “addressing trade imbalances.”

The pausing of the majority of this tariff policy today (quite annoyingly after I already hit publish) reinforces the current instability of the market. President Trump commented about buying today ahead of the announcement, and some significant trade occurred prior to the market rebound today, causing Senator Adam Schiff to call for an insider trading investigation to be opened. It is important to say: if the President is inventing tariffs to create market instability for the purpose of making him and those around him richer, then the President is missing the point of the office that he was elected to.

So how do we change this?

I had written a paragraph here today that was unfortunately prescient4 that I preserved in the footnotes. These tariffs and the repealing/pausing of these tariffs are creating high amounts of market volatility that is not conducive to conducting business. Changing policy this significant on a whim is also not productive for America’s diplomatic interests, as other countries lose trust. As far as I am aware, the only ways that this could be beneficial for America’s interests are to “look strong” or to benefit traders. Neither offsets the issues presented by flippant policy.

The most straightforward answer to market uncetainty is for business leaders to ask for predictability, so that they can invest company assets appropriately. Many of them are already doing this, but there needs to be more publicly-visible alignment on the matter. Consumers of these businesses can put pressure on companies via their spending and saving habits, and shareholders can apply similar pressure in shareholder meetings when appropriate. All of these should happen to return certainty to the economy.

Assuming that these tariffs continue as they are slated to, companies will raise prices despite being told not to, and the public backlash to any cost-of-living crises needs to be severe to affect any change. April 5th was one of the largest organized protests against the current administration across the nation, despite receiving comparably less media attention than what it may have deserved considering at least tens of thousands of people took to the streets. This will likely be dwarfed in size by the crowds drawn if families are less able to buy groceries or other necessary goods because of the tariffs, and they will need to be that size. American attention needs to be on the plight of the working-class American and needs to be maintained there for change to occur.

As a Background

The first publicly noticeable crack in the varnish appeared in mid-2018, when Elon Musk accused a British diver in a Thai cave rescue of being a “pedo.” While this argument eventually was ruled in Musk’s favor in a jury trial of a defamation case, it is not unreasonable to say that this action tarnished an otherwise burnished appearance. This spat came out in the middle of other arguments that Musk was having with regulators and financial analysts.

In early 2020, amidst COVID-19 lockdowns across the world, Elon Musk notably kept his Alameda County Tesla plant open despite a shelter-in-place order. He further repeated erroneous claims that downplayed the severity of COVID-19, calling it a strain of the cold in an internal company email. This messaging reflected conservative talking points at the time. A company representative argued that Tesla, a car manufacturer, be considered critical infrastructure.

Elon has long been particularly drawn to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. As early as 2017, he replied to a tweet possibly feigning interest in acquiring the company, but in 2022, he started buying up significant numbers of shares. By April, he was the largest shareholder of the company. He put in a takeover bid that was described as “hostile,” and spoke publicly about wanting to make Twitter a platform for “free speech,” particularly showing more interest in changing Twitter’s moderation policies. With much back-and-forth ending in Twitter suing Musk to close on the bid as he tried to back out, Elon ended up the owner of Twitter and took it private, rebranding the platform to “X.” Elon quickly took to unbanning largely right-wing accounts banned in the wake of the January 6, 2021 protest (and later those banned for COVID-19 disinformation).

Prior to the November 2024 election, Elon Musk entered swing state voters into a $1 million “giveaway” for signing a petition through his PAC (political action committee). At the time, he stressed publicly that these payouts would be awarded at random. Lawyers for the PAC in a Pennsylvania court admitted that these prizes were assigned based on who would be the best spokespeople for its pro-Trump platform. This action has been accused of being somewhere between “running an illegal lottery” as the Philadelphia District Attorney tried to outline, and “vote buying” in what is definitively a gray area of election law.

On January 20th, 2025, President Donald Trump, after his inauguration, signed an executive order legitimizing the existence of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE for short. This temporary department (more accurately called a task force2) that got its namesake from a decade-old internet meme was tasked to identify waste, fraud, and other financial abuses within the executive branch of government, as well as assist in the President’s goal of deregulation.

The purview of DOGE has ramped up in February. Elon’s team received access to the Treasury’s payments system, which sends out Congressionally-approved funds to the entire federal government. This critically could allow DOGE to halt outgoing funds on a whim, which is exactly the New York City Comptroller alleged today. The Trump administration has closed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), sending workers home and blocking new payments to continue operation. At the moment, this organization is in limbo.

Elon also called USAID a “criminal organization,” saying that it is “time for it to die,” after helping prompt the laying off of thousands of USAID workers, which a judge has partially, temporarily blocked. This is despite USAID being a Congressionally-authorized organization, codified in law. USAID has also indicated in a report that the payment stop and subsequent confusion about layoffs has put nearly $500 million worth of food at risk of spoilage, which runs contrary to the stated goal of eliminating waste in government.

What does this mean?

There is much to unpack, but let us start with the egregious inauguration. Most people ignored the inauguration itself to talk about exactly what happened during Elon Musk's speech. While I firmly and personally believe that Elon’s “my heart goes out to you motion” was in fact, a very intentional Nazi salute largely meant to “troll the libs” as one might delicately put it, it is what he said immediately following that concerns me somewhat more. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” Civilization would surely continue if a non-Republican were elected as President, no? And even if the United States were to blink out of existence, the rest of the world would surely go on? He's said weird stuff before like how “[interstellar travel will] protect the light of consciousness,” but I believe that idea of “global civilization” is simply not the civilization that he's referring to.

Elon Musk, has, on several occasions, espoused an extremist position called the Great Replacement. To very briefly address what it is, the Great Replacement is a conspiracy theory stating that white individuals are intentionally being replaced by minority groups in Western states. This line of thinking has taken off in some far-right circles, and aligns nicely with President Trump's mass deportation missive (after all, targeting non-white people and sending them away means they can no longer “replace” white people). While he has explicitly stated that he is not a believer in the Great Replacement, his stated explanation is not vastly different (he roughly outlines that it is occuring but for political, not racial, reasons). The point is, the result is the same regardless of the method, and that result puts him in lock-step with white nationalists.

He followed the inauguration up with speaking on a video call and otherwise aligning with the far-right party in Germany, Alternative for Germany, whose local chapters have been known for repeating white nationalist and Neo-Nazi slogans and talking points. All the while, Elon has been attacking center and leftist governments (e.g. Prime Minister Kier Starmer in the United Kingdom) and aligning with other far-right parties (e.g. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Italy or President Javier Milei in Artgentina). This is to say that we should expect that the inauguration was no fluke, accident, or misunderstanding, and we should expect more Neo-Nazi and white nationalist-aligning rhetoric from Elon Musk going forward.

This is a man who has made an “insane” pivot from standard, Silicon Valley tech-bro cyberlibertarianism to courting Neo-Nazis and white nationalists. This is a man who has a history of fighting with bureaucrats over regulations designed to protect both investors and customers. This is a man who should be viewed with a much higher level of scrutiny by both the incumbent administration and by the people. Scrutiny should include even prior forecasted bids, like the strangely-obfuscated3 State Department’s 2025 bid to purchase $400 million worth of “Armored Teslas.”

Why does this matter?

This man stood behind the President on Tuesday, and delivered a speech from the Oval Office detailing how certain unelected people in the federal government, “bureaucrats,” as he called them, needed to be audited or otherwise investigated for fraud and abuse: this is at a time when nearly every one of the more than 32 investigations into companies that Elon Musk owns are actively being dropped or stalled by the various executive agencies. There is some extreme level of entitlement present, to so flagrantly violate the exact same thing that he is telling the public is happening and that only he is willing and able to fix. Elon Musk is simply no more than one of the unelected bureaucrats that he’s actively raging against right now. Despite his largely unfounded retort of a “judicial coup,” Elon Musk has been accused of orchestrating and perpetuating an “executive coup” or “hostile takeover” by Democratic lawmakers. White House attorneys have also now stated that they may be willing to go through legal procedures against current and former employees who do not allow DOGE access to requested data.

An unelected, unappointed4 private citizen is completely subverting the executive branch of government. How do we have any assurance that this has not been co-opted by other, even foreign, actors? None of these people in DOGE have been vetted by Congress; none of these people have been career civil servants. Almost none of them have sufficient security clearances to be handling the kinds of data that they are handling. These are largely fresh yes-men, interns or not much more, looking for a one-of-a-kind experience. If the only tangible barrier to being able to access all federal workers’ data is being a young, unquestioning supporter of the Trump/Musk coalition, then why should these people even remotely be trusted with this data? People typically need robust security clearances at minimum to be able to access this data, and I’m certain that even if there are no bad actors that have infiltrated the transition team, that there are buyers willing to pay life-changing amounts of money for access to this exact data. That temptation, especially for a fresh 20-something, is undeniable.

This means that critically, we have to treat this as a data breach of the highest order. This is not alarmist; it is realistic given it is already a data breach by way of unauthorized people accessing critical data. Have you ever anonymously whistleblown on a company? Expect that that company will have access to knowing exactly who you are. If you've ever worked in a foreign country for the federal government? Expect that foreign governments will know where you were deployed and when. And maybe most critically, if you've ever worked for the federal government in any capacity, it's very likely that Elon Musk and those working in DOGE have unlimited access to your personal information. If DOGE’s work spreads in detail to the IRS, expect that every resident in the United States will be compromised in this way. This is not an unrealistic scenario, and individuals cannot be complacent until finding out that there has been a data breach. Do people trust that this government will disclose it if they are aware of it?

So how do we change this?

It’s a bit complicated on how we proceed from here. The chances are high that this administration ignores laws and court orders in proceeding to dismantle the executive branch, so the normal legal checks and balances will be limited in their scope to do much. Elon Musk insisted in the meeting Tuesday that “the people voted” and that “the people want this,” and we need to actually challenge that notion if we are to make any sort of reasonable effect. But given the scale of the potential data breach, individuals, especially if they are current or former federal workers, should probably take a few steps personally.

If you are a United States resident (and particularly as a current or former federal worker) who escaped identity theft and fraud in the wake of the 2017 Equifax breach, it may be worth the time to lock down your credit. There are numerous guides and discussions on how to do this, but “freezing your credit” with the three credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) is both free and quick, and prevents lines of credit from being opened in your name. Unfreezing your credit is much, much less painful than having to consult with the credit bureaus because someone else applied for a credit card using your info. There are no downsides to doing it besides the time commitment, and I think it should be standard operating procedure moving forward (at least until the federal government actually enacts sweeping data privacy laws, but our collective breaths will need to be held on that one). At the very least, monitor your credit reports a bit more carefully.

If you are a United States citizen, contact your Congresspeople and let them know that you find Elon Musk’s treatment of the executive branch unacceptable. That an unelected, Congressionally-unappointed individual cannot act of their own accord to close establishments that have their existence codified in law. That as your constituent, they have a vested interest in ensuring that the government still functions well enough to support you, the people. Even if they are Republican, do they enjoy that a man with this much leveraged power went unappointed by Congress and has little actual Congressional oversight? Do they like that executive branch is trying to close agencies and shutter departments that have a substantive basis in federal law that Congress signed into existence? These thoughts need answered, because it directly calls into question whether or not Senators and Representatives actually want their jobs to be meaningful (which should be the case on any side of the aisle).

And if you are near Washington D.C. especially, consider joining some of the organizations and protests in and around Capitol Hill. Consistent, peaceful protests are one of the few things that can actually make a difference at the national level, and rather than only bemoan on the internet or attempt to “ratio” Elon Musk on his own platform, getting feet on the ground and slowing progress with physical bodies is tangible progress that Congress or other governmental entities can (and should) use to intervene. Government is slow, but people on the ground are faster (which is one of the reasons that the DOGE task force has been so quick at getting into systems). We need to actually use this power for good, and slow or halt the shuttering of departments and organizations that do critical work in the United States and around the globe.

Interesting Bytes

As a completely random aside, Elon was found to be credibly cheating at numerous video games, violating the terms of service agreements for playing those games, and later admitted to doing so. Those companies will not comment on whether or not they’ll enforce their terms of service agreements and ban him from their service (which is a very typical punishment for this sort of behavior). This is an entire topic of its own, but I find it amusing that there seems to be a double-standard even in addressing this sort of behavior in online games. Perhaps both companies fear Elon’s current executive power.

When Donald Trump was banned from the platform in 2021 for inciting violence on January 6th, he spun off his own venture called “Truth Social.” There has also been a recent exodus of users from the Twitter platform following Elon’s takeover but especially following the November 2024 election, largely in favor of competitor BlueSky. Both of these platforms existed prior to the takeover in 2022. If right-wingers already have Truth Social and left-wingers flock to Bluesky, then Elon Musk only has himself to blame for lesser engagement on his platform.

Also, I am sorry to be the one to convey this, but the letter “x” (as featured in companies X, xAI, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s child named “X Æ A-12”, etc.) isn’t actually that cool. It’s just a letter, Elon. It’s just a letter.

Americans do not really want another trade war with China, mass tariffs for allies, or for America to consider purchasing or fighting for sovereign land in Canada, Greenland, or Panama. Americans do not particularly care about geopolitics and the current role the US plays in global geopolitics. Americans do not exactly need federal jobs to be cut en masse, or for billionaires to dominate the leadership of the executive branch. Americans largely voted for Trump because of the state of the economy, and while the brunt of that fault is not on the back of former President Biden, the blame has been set, and the decision has already been made to transition back to once-again-President Trump.

This discrepancy, between what is being said and what Americans are claiming to vote for, is widening. And much of it seems to be going unnoticed. It needs to be talked about. We need to not normalize many of the social issues at play here, and yet we continue to see different standards being applied across the board. People are right to call this out, but it remains to be seen whether or not something will actually change.

As a Background

Then-President-elect Trump indicated earlier in January that he would use “economic force” (as opposed to military force) to push Canada into being the 51st United State. Canadian leaders have overwhelmingly denounced the comments as Canada is a sovereign nation, but nonetheless, it appears that the United States and Canada will be renegotiating their partnership.

President Trump’s second remark lies in Greenland. Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, and apparently a strategic interest of the current administration. President Trump had an “icy exchange” with the Danish PM prior to the inauguration. A poll released just yesterday found that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to leave Denmark to join the United States. Denmark is notably a NATO member.

His third and final interest lies in the Panama Canal. With both Greenland and the Panama Canal, he refused to rule out economic or military force to bring those territories into the fold. While some commentators are right to point out the Canal’s economic importance, it is quite an escalation to be talking about using any sort of force on an ally to give up their territory.

As a final note, President Trump’s announcement of the US-based renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America nearly encapsulates this entire issue. The Gulf of Mexico does not need renamed (and is not named for the actual country of Mexico as he implies), and having the United States call it something different and self-serving elevates the US to an unnatural position. President Trump’s renewed focus on the southern border and inflammatory statements about any migrants from that side of the border emphasizes how he thinks people from the United States should see not only Mexicans, but also all Central Americans.

What does this mean?

It would not seem unreasonable to surmise that President Trump is looking to consolidate North American power entirely within the United States (except in keeping Mexico around as sort of a penal colony for illegal immigrants). While business mergers are common and country mergers are not unheard of, forcing a party into a union has rarely been taken well. This sort of “hostile takeover” does not particularly have a place in modern politics. It leads to some of the ideas talked about during the first presidency, that “Donald Trump leads the business of the United States” rather than “President Trump leads the nation of the United States.” That matters. Maybe that is some of why people elected him again, but this sort of “merger-and-acquisition” activity from day one should worry commentators and onlookers more (after all, even two years is a long time for a potential course change and this admnistration seems determined to make the most of its time this go-around).

Why does this matter?

On the domestic side, there is the distinct growing feeling that the attention of lawmakers and regulators is completely disconnected from the average American experience. Given that last Monday’s well-overbooked, closed-door inauguration was stacked with the economic elite, it is hard to justify any position that says that this administration will actually be in-touch.

My biggest domestic concerns for this upcoming administration are the:

1. Gutting of necessary social programs by otherwise unqualified people.

2. Erosion of the working class in many geographical regions, driven by unchecked technological advancement at the expense of labor.

3. The normalization of this sort of imperialistic rhetoric amongst the elite (particularly Elon Musk, who is fully deserving of his own post).

This imperialistic rhetoric comes at the expense of actually focusing on domestic issues; it focuses on expanding America’s material reach without focusing on the issues of why President Trump was largely elected again in the first place.

I want to expand on the second point specifically—AI is not likely to be curtailed in the upcoming administration. Businesses are currently evaluating AI as “agents” to fill both frontline and behind-the-scenes positions. This “agentic AI” is in turn being viewed as having little-to-no associated labor cost. In that regard, the slow march of capitalistic perpetual growth has come for one of the final vestiges of the current American backbone, white-collar workers. With blue-collar workers already struggling (on average) and trying to claw back some semblance of a decent living in the United States, it seems as though business has now come for saving labor costs on their more expensive laborers.

My pronounced concern in the short-term is that the well-established pipelines for white-collar workers (e.g. lawyers needing tremendous amounts of fine-toothed review and giving that work to interns, or computer programmers not being able to find positions without multiple years of work experience that they do not get in undergrad) are quickly disappearing. The rug is currently being pulled, and even mass unionization might not do anything but slow it down. The economy must grow. Even if it hurts the purchasing power of ninety-nine percent of the people in that economy? The economy must grow. Even if the younger generations are largely priced out of property ownership? The economy must grow. Even if big tech controls an ever-larger share of the pie, and even stock valuations are entirely speculative and not based in reality? The economy must grow. This growth indicates that economics is not intrinsically a zero-sum game, but it can certainly feel that way for the average person who is actively losing the game that they did not even know that they were playing.

Because of this, we are likely to see more acts of vigilantism like we are currently seeing in the trial of Luigi Mangione. While “class war” is an inflammatory term that’s been thrown around in this matter, an actual war requires pitched battles on both sides; it is hard to feel that the average American is punching up compared to the weight of many different monolithic systems punching down. Americans don’t typically talk about how the privatized healthcare system kills people directly by denying to pay for necessary treatments, delaying agreeing to pay for necessary treatments, and defending their stance over nothing but the bottom dollar1. This “service” gets away with being a silent and intentional mass murderer on the direct orders of individual people like private healthcare insurance CEOs and boards and yet the media focus was almost entirely on one individual who committed a single, inmtentional crime as a response. All of this is because that is not how the conversations have been engineered in this country, but I expect that the conversational window is shifting in the popular view (as evidenced by the across-party-lines popular public support for Luigi). This topic is broad and well-deserving of its own post, but it is sufficient for this to say that domestic divisiveness is becoming more transparent and is not relegated to only left-wing and right-wing politics.

On the international side, while there is always some question during any presidential transition over whether or not America will stand by agreements made during the previous administration, this question is asked much more often given Trump’s penchant for talking about removing everything that his Democratic predecessors have done. America’s current place in the world order is decisively and indefinitely at-risk at best and dying a slow death at worst.

My main international concern is how the United States has completely undermined its own message with international organizations; notably last week’s executive order to pull out of the World Health Organization is a significant and understated problem that will result in many preventable deaths. Combining that with the US’s continuous tendency to already be self-serving regarding the World Trade Organization and the United Nations (and those organizations were previously struggling to maintain relevancy), and the US is simply giving up its role as the world leader to become insular and protectionist (i.e. “America First”). Even historically, the United States has not espoused its own globally-projected values when business interests take over. This can be seen when capitalistic tendencies override democratic ones—a great example of this is during the democratization movement in South Korea in the 80s, when the United States ignored South Korean citizens’ demand for democracy, favoring instead the apparently more stable military dictatorship despite thousands dying for that cause2 and American military being present close by.

I therefore argue that the United States is not currently losing its position on the international stage, it has already lost its position. The renewed sense of imperialism is not only problematic for the US’s enemies (perceived and otherwise), but also its economic, military, and research partners; this in turn directly affects the US. For tech policy and law, the EU is the only regulator standing up against massive US tech corporations. For the future of energy, it will be countries who are focusing on producing renewables (most likely China) that take the lead. The US will keep a substantial lead for some time in one notable area, its military. And that is exactly why America’s renewed sense of imperialism is so dangerous: a United States that is falling behind the global stage by prestige or by economics may feel threatened enough to lash out militarily in the future, and the flippant kind of discourse that US leaders3 are engaging in could be a precursor to that.

So how do we change this?

Well at the moment, not a lot. This past week is an expensive victory parade for the few, and we will see where things go from here. However, as Robert Reich has pointed out, the American people are resilient. No matter how bad the next 4 years and onwards gets, the American machine will keep chugging because of American people. And that should bring us some hope despite the seeming death of truth, despite concerns over the rule of law, and despite renewed imperialism.

The entire point of democracy is to elect leaders who represent the average person. Elections will still be important. Next year’s midterm elections will be particularly critical. We need to pressure the Democratic party to actually pander to the working class in the meantime. We cannot allow America the chance to prove people like billionaire Peter Thiel right, “…that freedom and democracy are [in]compatible.” America’s freedom was founded in its democracy, and though the Founding Fathers were not perfect, that original vision lasted hundreds of years despite many missteps and many misgivings.

We can still shape America into a place that is for all Americans, and not only the few. It will take time to rebuild, but it is necessary. If we want to revitalize the working class in this country, it is not an overnight change; rather, it is decades of continuous, incremental work and generations of effort. It isn’t fun, it isn’t pretty, and it certainly isn’t quick. But it will be necessary. As it is written on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial: Out of the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope.

The Issue of Banning TikTok

The looming TikTok ban on January 19th is one such example. Congress has ordered Tiktok’s parent company ByteDance to sell off TikTok to an American company, promising to ban the software should ByteDance fail to do so. Explaining the backstory and the ramifications of this ban in full would deserve its own article (John Oliver performs a great recap of this), but in short, there are two categories of issues repeatedly cited by lawmakers as problems significant enough to warrant a ban:

1. ByteDance is hosted in China and is therefore subject to Chinese laws stating that their government can request any and all manner of data from ByteDance at any time and has ways of forcing them to comply. The concern here is over United States citizens’ data getting in the hands of foreign actors.

2. TikTok employs addictive algorithms to keep users engaged and on the platform. This has several associated issues, but there’s widespread regulatory concern that the app could be used as a proxy cultural attack on American values.

While data-sharing concerns and algorithmic data processing concern many lawmakers, the fact of the matter is that these concerns exist largely only in the context of the China-America relationship. The problems evident do not really clear up in the event that ByteDance divests of TikTok. Other social media companies employ similar algorithms, and there’s no particular reason that the Chinese government couldn’t already possess that data. An actual, tangible solution to the core of the issue would be for the federal government to pass sweeping data privacy laws; however, these prove unpopular to current business interests and will certainly not pass in the next two years. Notably, the United States is the only major developed country that does not have such regulations in place. Given all of that, it is hard not to see the problem with TikTok as, “yes, this is certainly a problem, but it's not a problem limited to TikTok so why is only TikTok being punished for it?”

Cynically, this is a small win for lawmakers because they get to claim that they had a victory in data privacy while actually doing very little. TikTok users aren’t going to significantly change their habits following a ban, so it’s expected that Meta, X, and Google (all domestic companies) will take over TikTok’s market share. It is therefore inherently a very protectionist ban, even on the off-chance that lawmakers aren’t proactively thinking about that market share.

The Issue of the Expansion of Big Tech

This potential ban comes at a time when Silicon Valley leaders are kowtowing to the incoming Trump administration. Between Meta’s Zuckerberg aligning with Trump interests, including donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund, OpenAI’s Altman matching that $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and X’s Musk rapidly becoming a mouthpiece for the entire Trump campaign. All of these people seem to expect returns on their investment in the new administration. But while voters largely wanted to protect domestic jobs in voting in the new president, businesses largely want lower domestic labor costs. This combined with AI’s expanding role in the labor market is likely to expand American business dramatically at the expense of American jobs.

Donald Trump heavily favored big businesses over voters in his first presidential go-around, and it seems likely to continue in his second. Despite coming to blows with industry leaders in the past (especially following the disastrous January 6th), most leaders in big tech now are at least trying to get along with Donald Trump enough to avoid his ire. This shift in signalling from corporations indicates a renewed, relaxed interest in protecting democratic institutions. Labor may suffer already if proper guardrails are not enacted for AI, but at least for the moment, it seems like Big Tech will continue to get an economic foothold over the United States.

Part 1 available here.

Fully healing divisiveness can only really begin when certain individuals are held accountable for their actions in stoking that divisiveness: yes, for some that means only social repercussions but for others that does include legal repercussions. At this present time, it does not appear that the rule of law will be enforced equally in the United States (although for certain characteristics like race, it rarely has been). This needs to matter, as each aspect of the law differently affecting people groups stokes the fires of divisiveness. America has become desensitized to the idea of collective action, but a wide-ranging general strike grinding economic growth to a halt might be the only thing that could have a tangible effect before the inauguration (as long as clear demands are presented). In lieu of legal accountability, since that seems a stretch to ask for at the moment, we can look to social accountability.

One easy and tangible way, that people have already started jumping on en masse, is leaving Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter). Almost systematically since acquisition, that platform has engaged in questionable banning of certain content and has displayed concerning trends in unbanning. President-elect Trump’s return to the platform, despite being banned from it shortly following the events of January 6th, was heralded by Musk personally. That ban mattered, as Trump’s replacement media, Truth Social, does not pull the same kind of engagement numbers even amongst his own base. The ban also signaled strongly that public actions can have private consequences even for the powerful. Disengaging from the sort of rhetoric that has been prevalent on X has the benefit of both lowering that platform’s engagement numbers (and thereby reducing platform revenue) and lowering the effectiveness of false information campaigns that propagate from there. Hopefully, deplatforming X would slow some of the disinformation/misinformation cycle that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the AI age, and this should go for any platform that chooses to engage in this sort of toxic public discourse.

Another important way to stay engaged is to keep calling out disinformation and misinformation. This gains significance as AI becomes more and more convincing. Just yesterday, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Russian and Iranian entities found to have been using AI in part to influence the 2024 general election. This is not a new trend, and it certainly does not end just because the United States is now out of an election cycle. Foreign interference should be a unifying factor across political lines, but given the completely underwhelming governmental response to election interference in 2016 and 2020, it seems like this will continue to be ignored. The public needs more tools to fight disinformation and misinformation, but not giving into perpetual sensationalism (a thing that affects any side of the aisle) is a strong step in the right direction.

Closely linked to disinformation/misinformation is what I will call the “normalization of the malignant;” that is, the act of news media treating every story as equally engaging and equally worth the consumers’ attention. It should not be solely up to the consumer to interpret and determine which stories are more significant. Perhaps the most obvious example was in the 2016 election cycle, wherein it seemed that Hillary Clinton’s private email exchange seemed almost a bigger story (or at least, had more sticking power) than Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape. The zealous moral outrage over emails that was so prevalent at that time seems to have completely died off now that the Trump transition team is doing something similar. As we inevitably head back into a 24-hour shock news cycle on January 20th, media will likely play along for the next four years. We need to, as consumers of all forms of content, hold any and all entities accountable for the normalization of the malignant.

There’s more to be said, but I wanted to draw attention to these issues because I believe that solving them would have the broadest effect. I'm going to be posting something short every week in the lead up to the January 20th inauguration—while I would like to be solely positive starting off the new year, things are changing and they are changing quickly. The second part of this series will look at what is likely to change regarding tech policy, and the third part will talk a bit more broadly about the socioeconomic implications of everything going on around us. For those of us trying to pay attention to all of the moving parts, it’s a lot to keep in context, but we have to keep trying. I want to stress at the end of this article that individuals and even groups of the public are not to blame for the mass desensitization of the public, nor are they responsible for the sanitizing of otherwise extremely important topics; however, having open discussions concerning what individuals can do is important to fix the ecosystem. Many individuals combined consciously changing their behavioral patterns forms an effective group, after all.

As a Background

Forced arbitration recently reappeared back in the news cycle, largely owing to a recent Disney case in Florida. Briefly, it is a wrongful death lawsuit between a widower whose wife sadly passed after an allergic reaction to food prepared in a restaurant on grounds leased by Disney. The plaintiff's argument alleges that Disney is implicated in the lawsuit because of claims listed on their website about the restaurants they host on their property. Disney‘s lawyers had originally responded by attempting to remove themselves from the lawsuit, arguing that the plaintiff had agreed in 2019 to resolve all legal matters with Disney through arbitration when he signed up for Disney+. They argue further that the plaintiff in 2023 reaffirmed this agreement when he purchased Disney Epcot tickets online. Legal experts have pointed out that the facts of the case are not necessarily represented by the media accurately, but it is hard to agree with Disney when part of their argument rests on a completely unrelated service.

To take a step back, we should talk a bit about arbitration. Arbitration is, in layman’s terms, taking what would normally be a civil lawsuit out of the public courts and into a private one. Arbitration itself is not new, but the raw commercialization of mass forced arbitration is rather new. This is spurred onward by our digital society where extensive contracts can be easily signed without being read or fully understood. In most cases when you click that checkbox stating “I have read the Terms and Conditions” when signing up for an online banking service, social media account, or other digital product, you are contractually agreeing to settle potential matters out of court1. More exactly, you are waiving your Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

Some legal scholars have argued that following the Supreme Court’s decision in 2011 on AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, that there was an explosion of companies that transformed their terms of service to capitalize on that more lenient ruling on arbitration. While I believe that more research can and should be done here, I would argue that this could be a matter of convergent evolution: the Supreme Court’s decision came at a time when many services were shifting to digital platforms and thus needed new contractual terms. Concepcion therefore simply set a new standard at a time when standard-making was needed.

What does this mean?

The concept of arbitration is not necessarily a bad thing, especially in the context of the United States, but it is ultimately a wet band-aid trying to cover up a larger problem. Understand that the United States has a comparatively weaker regulatory framework than other legal jurisdictions, and while America’s citizens are sometimes called overly litigious, often a lawsuit is the only recourse for American citizens to pursue justice under the law. High-profile cases administered by the United States’ regulatory bodies against corporations often end up in the courts themselves. This policy decision, keeping regulatory bodies disempowered from pursuing cases outside of the court of law (and freshly reinforced with Chevron Deference overturned), is a driving reason behind why courthouses are so often behind on cases. Arbitration is an easy way out of this backlogged system.

Keep in mind that arbitration has a handful of additional advantages for a business that can be capitalized upon in the case of a consumer lawsuit. Firstly, the selection of an arbitrator is subject to both parties’ awareness of the given arbitrator’s impartiality—that is, if the arbitrator has business dealings with the business outside of the case, bias can be introduced without the other party being aware. Secondly, arbitrators are typically understood to be more conservative with payouts than public judges. Thirdly, public judges tend to side with arbitrators and arbitration is typically final and legally binding, so if there exists any error or issue over the course of the arbitration, such matters have to be resolved within the arbitration without a chance to appeal. Fourth and finally, what happens in arbitration is usually kept private and confidential between the parties present under the threat of losing whatever payout might come of the case, meaning that companies can dodge costly public relations battles in addition to the lawsuit. To put it simply, at the economies of scale that large and multinational corporations operate on, arbitration is a cheaper option than letting everything go to public courts.

Why does this matter?

A different case, McGinty v. Uber, makes for another good example into the details of why forced arbitration can be a problem. Briefly, the McGintys were in a crash while riding with an Uber driver and launched a lawsuit against both the driver and Uber. They racked up tremendous hospital and surgery fees in trying to reclaim normal mobility. Uber’s argument rests on that an individual authorized to use the wife’s phone (whom the paintiffs allege was their daughter) agreed to the Terms and Conditions outlined by Uber, and therefore agreed to arbitration, upon ordering food through the UberEats service. The case is currently in the New Jersey Superior Court after they released an opinion last week stating that the McGintys must resolve their issue with Uber in arbitration, but that the lawsuit against the driver can continue. The panel’s opinion stated that regardless of who agreed to Uber’s Terms and Conditions, that the contract was legally binding for the entire family, including the husband. Regardless of whether the McGintys have standing to bring Uber into the lawsuit, how common this legal argument is becoming is a concerning trend.

It is impressive how extensive simple, boilerplate, forced arbitration has become associated with nearly every service in the modern United States. The McGintys’ lawyer, Mike Shapiro, is right to point out that even grocery store loyalty programs employ forced arbitration clauses. What is starting to change seems to be the landscape of how far companies are willing to push the boundaries of exactly how enforceable these agreements are. To be clear, Shapiro’s job is partially to appeal to the public eye, and there is generally some fearmongering over forced arbitration in the United States. This however does not invalidate this completely valid concern. There are problems with arbitration as a whole that might involve a party not wanting to waive their Seventh Amendment rights to a jury trial, but in the digital service economy, this is typically not even an possibility.

And so we reach our ultimate argument: that the United States has a relatively unique problem with arbitration spurred by its hands-off policy decisions that ultimately fail the consumer. Other regulatory jurisdictions, like the European Union, do not have this same problem. There are two broad strokes that I would like to paint here.

The first is that the upcoming elections will have a dramatic and direct impact on how the United States proceeds concerning arbitration. The conservative-backed Project 2025 aims among many, many other things to gut many regulatory bodies and cut government overhead, which will likely increase judiciary burden and push even more cases into arbitration. Further, given conservative justices’ inclination towards business and arbitration, more conservative-appointed federal appeal judges would likely see an uptick in cases decided in favor of arbitration.

The second is that corporate consolidation has run rampant in recent decades. Looking at the digital world, where intellectual property and other non-physical assets can be easily transferred, expedites this process. The inevitable end of this sort of forced arbitration is that corporations will continue to find ways to pressure consumers out of their Seventh Amendment rights. There are arguments for and against corporate consolidation, but in both Piccolo v. Disney and McGinty v. Uber, there is a clear thread sewing these cases together: courts seem to be willing to enforce that procuring completely different services from company subsidiaries or brands still subjects the consumer to the same forced arbitration agreement. That should scare consumers, because it’s not clear currently where the line that enforces contractual arbitration ends.

There are many calls on the Democratic donor side currently that if Harris wins, to remove Lina Khan from her post as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, as well as Johnathan Kanter from his post as head of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. If Trump wins, no doubt the result would be the same. Described as neo-Brandeisian, these two have spearheaded some of the biggest antitrust cases since United States v. Microsoft Corp. in 2001. If they and others are removed, without further action to arbitration, it is likely that we’ll see increased numbers of cases like Piccolo v. Disney and McGinty v. Uber.

So how do we change this?

Broadly, we can in the short-term push to keep media pressure on bigger companies to back down from these aggressive stances. This has already worked in the case Piccolo v. Disney, as Disney has backed down from its stance and has now agreed to let this specific case move forward. This is not a permanent solution, as people will begin to become used to this sort of story, weakening its potential as a catalyst for change. The short-term path for McGinty v. Uber is that it gets appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court2, though I would suspect that the case would then at least make its way to the desk of the Third Circuit regardless of the decision there. Uber still aims to resolve their portion of the lawsuit in arbitration. Whether or not Piccolo v. Disney and McGinty v. Uber become the poster children for how arbitration cases are presented in the media going forward remains to be seen.

There are long-term goals to aim for. However, this starts with either marching down the path of a stronger regulatory framework like the European Union and/or limiting arbitration’s grip on the digital service economy by having Congress pass laws outlining when arbitration can and cannot apply. These actions inherently lend themselves to a stronger antitrust environment, but this trend has not yet solidified in any party now coming out of the Biden administration.

Broader implications for American society still need to be discussed. These seem to be glossed over out of sheer mundanity and acceptance at this point, but I think it’s healthy to revisit these questions. And so I’ll leave this newsletter asking the question that keeps running through my mind: if a right is so easily waivable, that by a simple half-of-a-second checkbox click, a consumer can waive a Constitutional right to a jury trial regardless of what happens over the course of using a service, is it actually a protected right?

Of note, this is not a commentary on the presidential debate. While that certainly seems to have gotten the most attention in the media; ultimately, it's unlikely that the debate itself swayed any significant number of minds in any particular direction. It did however serve to highlight two items in the aftermath: firstly, that the Democratic leadership is hesitant to field an imperfect candidate after 2016. Secondly, it shows the discrepancy (see the below image for some of what I am talking about) between political commentators tending to argue that President Biden should step down as the Democratic nominee instead of former President Trump stepping down as the Republican nominee (for example, to address one of his statements in the debate: no, “post-birth abortions” are still not happening).

Instead, this piece will be an unexpected follow-up to the previous post, and discuss more about the current Supreme Court, and outline why this upcoming election is so crucial. Briefly, together we will look at some of last week’s rulings and their practical effects.

Firstly, last Wednesday saw the ruling of Snyder v. United States being handed down. Essentially, the decision declares that state and local officials cannot be pursued for charges at the federal level for gratutities. That is, it draws a distinction between a bribery and a gratuity, where the former is a gift granted prior to work performed (and thus currently federally prosecutable as a corruption charge) and the latter is a gift granted after the work is already done without any sort of prior arrangement. The Supreme Court ruled on federalist grounds, stating that states and localities have gratuity laws and charges should therefore be pursued in their own jurisdictions. Justice Kavanaugh summarizes the Court’s opinion while evoking images of ‘mail carriers accepting a holiday tip.’ As Justice Brown notes in her dissent, the result of this is directly that federal prosectutors will have a much more difficult time pursuing charges at the federal level for gratuties (and that they never did pursue charges for a mail carrier accepting $5 and cookies).

Secondly, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decided that courts should exercise independent authority to pass judgments on whether an agency was adhering to the letter of the law, overturning 1984’s landmark ruling in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Res. Def. Council. In that case, the Court decided to create a two-part test to determine the legality of the actions of government agencies, now referred to as Chevron deference. Essentially, it required courts to evaluate if Congress had legislated on that particular issue before, and if so, if the agency had adopted a “reasonable interpretation” of any laws. Overturning Chevron deference means that the courts have taken back the power to decide how to interpret laws from government agencies, who were previously assumed to be generally acting in good faith. Instead of policy changes happening internal to the executive branch during presidential transitions, going forward it seems as though this will be decided by the federal courts (a much longer cycle driven by executive appointments).

Thirdly, the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling decided that for those camping on public lands, being charged with civil or criminal penalties does not constitute a “cruel and unusual punishment” as outlined by the Eighth Amendment. In his concurrence, Justice Thomas advocates for overturning a precedent case, Robinson v. California, allowing for a status like homelessness to be criminalized. Justice Sotomayor outlines a few additional legal routes in her dissent that individuals affected by anti-camping ordinances can pursue (that was beyond the purview of the Court to decide in this case), but it seems like an incredible burden to raise for those in such positions. In the meantime, local jurisdictions determined to punish homeless individuals will likely feel empowered to continue legislating againat them.

Fourthly and finally, on Monday, the landmark Trump v. United States was decided. The opinion of the Court boils down to this: a President has absolute immunity for actions taken as part of and under the purview of their Constitutional authority. This ruling has effectively stalled all court cases against former President Trump—even the sentencing from the New York hush money case, People of the State of New York v. Trump1—as judges determine if the immunity ruling applies to the cases that they are presiding over. At the moment, it seems unlikely that any save perhaps the New York criminal case will be decided before the election later this year in November.

Notably, all four of these cases above were divided by party-appointed lines in 6-3 judgments.

What does this mean?

So many unanswered questions arise from these rulings. If individual municipalities can outlaw homelessness, where do such people go? If the president is immune to certain activities, are they not in essence and practice above the law? How do we heal divisiveness when the Supreme Court has effectively ruled that there exist different classes of people? There are two somewhat separate issues that need tackled here.

The first being that rulings like Loper Bright Enterpries (and landmark decisions like Citizens United v. FEC and last week’s SEC v. Jarksey and Ohio v. EPA) imply that the Court thinks that executive branch agencies have too much power. In a sense, the Court has remedied this by taking away some of their power, and gifted it to corporations2 or the judicial branch. This potential overreach is threatening the balance of the separation of powers as Congress remains largely gridlocked on such matters.

The second being that especially with the Snyder, City of Grants Pass, and Trump rulings, there is a feeling that the current Court views different individuals differently. These rulings may excerbate existing class tensions and spur further divisiveness. If nothing else, promoting unequal treatment undermines the principle of “Equal Justice under Law.” To quote the late Justice Marshall in his concurrence from Pennzoil v. Texaco:

The principles which would have governed with $10,000 at stake should also govern when thousands have become billions. That is the essence of equal justice under law.

So how do we change this?

Most will disagree at least in part with the above rulings, as holding public officials to well-established standards and basic moral principles should be non-partisan. Even though it will take decades to change the Supreme Court, there are some things that people can do. Regarding Snyder, state prosecutors can pursue charges for gratuity cases (and the public should spur them to adopt these cases when they traditionally have not). As Justice Sotomayor has outlined, there are still legal arguments to be made for homeless people to fight fines and jail time doled out by the lower governments; donating to advocacy groups and local shelters can make a difference here. If he is guilty of crimes committed in office, we can vote to ensure that former President Trump does not enjoy continued immunity. Of course, pushing our Congresspeople to be exact in their wording with their bills given the current Court is important, too.

Nevertheless, a lot that happened last week seems to be a leap in the wrong direction. It can be frustrating to read about such cases and easy to wonder if the law does actually apply uniformly. However, losing faith in democracy and shedding it for a quick fix is not a good or sustainable solution. That is important, as the events of January 6th, 2021 are not a reasonable course of action for any side to take. Voting in favor of democracy is critical in this election, and will likely continue to be critical in the near future. We, the American people, have an opportunity not only to do Justice Marshall proud, but also do ourselves a favor by advocating and voting for equal justice under the law.

Back in 2022, I was trying to see and do the things in D.C. that I was not able to see and do during the pandemic. I had the unfortunate timing of moving to the area shortly before that global event occurred. However, I attempted to make up for lost time partially by making my way to the July 4th fireworks celebration at the National Mall. This particular day was notable both for marking the full return to some kind of normalcy in the yearly events of the nation’s capital, and for the extreme recency of the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision.

It seems to me that Americans feel detached from politics either from a notion of inertia (too much needs changing and bureaucracy is too slow to change) or from a perspective that the job is too large for them to handle; and, that is correct in a sense. It is not the job of the average American to fix the government nor is the responsibility theirs alone to bear. However, the government is supposed to be held accountable to the people, and if the government refuses to hold itself to enact what the average voter wants, then it falls to the people to try enforce that will. While many know the passage of the Declaration of Independence concerning “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” few seem to acknowledge the very next sentence1.

--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles sand organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This is the fundamental point of modern voting: cast votes are tabulated to appoint and remove individuals who do not appropriately represent the collective will of the people. Failing this process, e.g. if unelected government officials circumvent the will of the people to promote their own agendas, then the people subsequently are allowed to be upset with the outcome. No, this is not a call for revolution, but it is a call to acknowledge the fact that an increasing proportion of the American population is likewise increasingly dissatisfied with the structure and function of the government. There is even a generational aspect to it, where younger Americans are feeling the brunt of this2.

There is little doubting that the trust in the current Court is supremely troubled. As I witnessed these meager protests happening in front of the Supreme Court, knowing that hundreds of thousands3 of my closest friends were parked right next door waiting for the fireworks, three thoughts entered my mind as I stared at the inscription stating “equal justice under law.” The first being that, if Americans cared about abortion rights more than they cared about fireworks, then perhaps the Supreme Court never would have been able to overturn Roe v. Wade due to potential public outcry. The second being that Americans have seemingly largely forgotten how effective collective bargaining can be, and how much progress has been made due to prolonged public demonstrations. The third being that both of the above complacencies feel explicitly engineered (whether intentional or not, the feeling certainly comes across) from decades of media exposure and variably weak or selective protection for public and private demonstration.

So how do we change this?

The second of the above is actionable and worth discussing further. Collective bargaining efforts have encountered difficulty in recent years. Occupy Wall Street stalled and fizzled as participants failed to find a meaningful goal; even the George Floyd and Rodney King protests struggled to gain actionable traction outside of certain municipalities. Seemingly gone from the modern era are the winds of change found in women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement. Yet we find ourselves in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction and disgruntlement at our current state of affairs, and unwilling or unable to take effort to change it. While a complete solution will take decades and generations to resolve, there is more we, the average Americans, can do now.

1. We need to advocate for the democratic process. America likes to live and die on principles, but we cannot forget the fact that these principles exist because we have built societal structures that allow us to have these principles. If actors wish to subvert or otherwise circumvent the democratic process, Americans must continue to use the tools of democracy to maintain that democracy. For the average American, that includes voting and nonviolent protests.

2. We need to update and remind each other about ongoing issues—no, it’s not enough to acknowledge that something happened or could happen. “Politics” isn’t an aloof, abstract concept that only affects us yearly when it comes time to file a tax return and every two-to-four years as some kind of infrequent football game. If the media cycle will not actively engage us until something “new” comes along, then we must push to keep each other engaged. Push for content updates on social media, push to keep momentum going in social spaces, and push to keep eyes on topics that need second, third, and fourth glances, rather than fall for the allure of slacktivism. In the words of Gil Scott-Heron, “the revolution will be live,” and change will not occur by occupying the sidelines and simply being a cheerleader.

3. We need a renewed sense of patriotism, not the trite kind that politicians often refer to, but a genuine interest in the nation: their neighbors beyond the block. This means building a renewed sense of community, no matter how long that takes. While there are many paths to this, one way we can start with is pushing for better transport infrastructure to bring people closer together. This can look like promoting public “third spaces” again, which have seen post-pandemic shrinkage (including promotion of libraries as prime-candidate resurgent social spaces4). As mentioned in the last article, we can be more open to listening to each other; agreement is not necessary, but genuinely getting to the root of people’s motives and emotions in interaction with those around us will be critical in moving forward.

The 4th of July is a symbol of national independence. But while this independent spirit has helped make the United States into what it is today, that independence was formed from collective action against a common cause. While there seems to be little that Americans can agree upon in public discussion, if most of us can look up and enjoy a fireworks show, then there must be other things that we can work on together. Reclaiming a collective understanding will be difficult task, but we as individuals need to start working on this too, if we want actual change.

All photos and videos included in this article © Alexander Treasure 2024. All rights reserved.

A recent issue around tech literacy cropped up, and prompted me to want to actually write some on the topic. If the title is any indication, this is largely concerning the state of American government and its role in promoting tech literacy. A Wired article from 2022 resurfaced, along with a public statement concerning a House Representative’s mitigation strategy for pornography viewing inside of his family, involving an app downloaded to his personal device. I argue that while the national security risk that Speaker Johnson’s phone poses is not insignificant, in the long run, the threat posed by continuing to ignore basic tech literacy principles is, at least domestically, worse.

The Speaker has previously claimed in 2022 to be using the software, “Covenant Eyes,” choosing his then 17-year-old son as a mutual accountability partner1. It is a piece of software sometimes labeled as “shameware,” but while this illustrates the typical social purpose of the software quite well, I view it dramatically undersells the security risk. I will generally bucket it as “consensual spyware” for the rest of this article.

It is consensual spyware in the sense that a user willingly downloads a piece of software that can arbitrarily upload your activity. This fulfills the title of spyware, although the main distinction from traditional spyware is that the user is aware of its presence. Several issues arise as a result of this in general, but the results magnify for a high-level civil servant.

1. The software product is as effective as they are transparent and auditable. Spyware is implicitly dangerous. This places the bar for establishing trust considerably higher. To establish trust, a good start to this is clearly defining the responsibility of the company with your data, as well as disclosing the nature of algorithms used in processing that data (the most straightforward path to this is open source). Covenant Eyes does not disclose algorithms (only methodology, algorithms are likely considered proprietary), and does not define responsibility clearly. Covenant Eyes has already been removed from the Google Play Store for violating Terms of Use concerning accessibility features (although a management-only version of the app has been reinstated since).

2. Even in the case that the company is above board, they transmit and store phone screenshot data. The processing to evaluate whether or not what the user’s phone is viewing is “risky” content does not happen on the user’s phone. This info gets uploaded to the company's server. This data transfer process creates a separate potential attack vector, even if the encryption method is secure.

3. The two prior points still hold true in the event that the Speaker does not conduct work on their personal device. Even if there is zero chance that potential state secrets would be uploaded to the cloud, there still exists the possibility that personal info leaks. Bad actors would love to get their hands on health or financial information concerning such a high-ranking US civil servant.

I want to be clear that while I take personal moral issue with this practice on the grounds of respecting individual privacy and the burden of consent, that is not the basis of the argument of this post. General tech literacy is desperately needed across all levels of society, and it falls to leaders to reinforce healthy habits while society adjusts to change. These same leaders need to take strong stances that are not simply moral for society to continue its path of progress.

I sit now in my student dorm in Canada, knowing that the United States does not lack for experts willing to engage in public discourse. I have experienced no shortage of brilliant people in my current foray into the academic world, and America has no shortage of those. My hypothesis has shifted. While I believe there is still certainly room for experts to discuss critical issues, these discussions will ultimately go nowhere if discourse is not had. And America is critically short on discourse. Specifically, the ability to actually listen to others’ words and internalize them. My greatest fear for America is that we have run out of patience to listen.

Listen to experts, and set a healthy precedent. While this request is directly for the Speaker, the same public interest applies across public servants. Moreso than the moral signaling of sticking to one’s guns and doubling down on consensual spyware, civil leaders have tremendous opportunity to actually create meaningful change in reinforcing healthy habits. This sort of software is unnecessary and creates a national security risk, even if the underlying company would be perfectly trustworthy. Upon taking the role of a prominent civil servant, one takes on a social responsibility that is more important than one’s personal, parental responsibility. The Speaker is accountable to and for Congress, and sets the bar for conversation. America needs that bar to be high. Listen to experts, and ditch the consensual spyware.