When President John F. Kennedy discovered the Soviet plan to put nuclear missiles on Cuba, he wasn’t thrilled.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had worked pretty hard to keep this operation clandestine. The USSR had been dispatching waves of cargo ships, laden with civilian-clothed soldiers, equipment, missiles, and nuclear warheads. They sailed from Europe to Cuba, unloading their secret cargo and transporting them hundreds of kilometers through the Caribbean jungles. They faked car accidents and dispatched empty cargo trucks across the island to obfuscate their enormous mission. Soviet soldiers spoke only in memorized Spanish, lest American spies were skulking about.

In the span of just weeks, the Soviets built a network of missile silos and launchpads capable of raining nuclear weapons on the continental United States.

The United States was caught off-guard. Kennedy had previously suspended the CIA-run U-2 spy program after its discovery irked the Soviets and Chinese alike. Without that eye in the sky, he discovered those missile silos too late.

An irate White House declared this build-up would be prevented “by whatever means may be necessary.” He was too late. Kennedy didn’t know it, but nuclear warheads were already en route to Cuba.

“The main goal of the American statement was to warn Khrushchev about crossing a red line,” historian Serhii Plokhy writes. “His reaction was just the opposite — to cross it as soon as possible.”1

The two men thought they had an understanding of each other. Khrushchev didn’t want to weaken Kennedy’s position ahead of the midterms, and Kennedy didn’t want to incentivize further Soviet action in divided Berlin.

“He can’t do this to me,” Kennedy ranted to his advisors. Their relationship was supposed to be defined by calculated moves and a level of political symbiosis.

“The question,” one of Kennedy’s officials told him, is not whether the base is removed from Cuba, but “whether we do that by a sudden, unannounced strike of some sort, or we build up the crisis to the point where the other side has to consider very seriously about giving in.” To prepare for the former option, Kennedy sought Congressional approval to call up 150,000 soldiers for a possible invasion of Cuba.

Khrushchev, meanwhile, believed he had to project strength or risk subjugation. “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy,” Khrushchev had declared some months earlier, “now we can swat your ass.”

Both men were too effective in their statecraft. Kennedy thought Khrushchev was trying to distract the world while it constructed the Berlin wall. In fact, Khrushchev hoped that Berlin would be a “diversionary maneuver” to distract from their build-up in Cuba. Both men were getting lost in their own tit-for-tat.

“It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey,” Kennedy seethed. “Now that’d be goddam dangerous, I would think.” An official noted that America had put ballistic missiles in Turkey. Kennedy shrugged it off. “Yeah, but it was five years ago.”

Kennedy’s advisors wanted to invade. The president’s brother even suggested staging a false flag to justify such a war. Khrushchev — and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro — believed invasion was imminent.

It was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who suggested the idea of a naval blockade to halt further shipments. Khrushchev was thrilled with that plan. “We’ve saved Cuba,” he declared. “The point is that we do not want to unleash a war,” the Premier told his advisors. “We want to intimidate and restrain the USA vis-à-vis Cuba.”

In the spirit of de-escalation, Khrushchev declined to put the Cuban missiles on alert. Kennedy, worried about looking weak, moved the U.S. DEFCON 2. (When he heard of this news, per one Soviet official, Khrushchev “shat his pants.”)

Those 13 days in October, 1962 marked arguably the closest humanity has come to nuclear annihilation. It wound up there thanks to a series of bluffs and overreactions, prevarications and responses, political maneuvers and unforeseeable mishaps.

But those two weeks were also marked by two leaders — craven and unpredictable as they may have been — doing the right thing.

Consider October 23, when an irritable and sleep-deprived Khrushchev stalked through the Kremlin: Screaming, cursing, and threatening to nuke the White House. And then, he decided to take his senior officials to the opera.

“Comrades, let’s go to the Bolshoi Theater,” Khrushchev said. “The atmosphere in the world is tense now, but we’ll make an appearance in the theater. Our people and foreigners will see it, and that will begin to have a calming effect.”

Whether it mattered to Kennedy is unclear. But it certainly calmed his comrades.

This effort to restrain hostilities went right through both militaries.

Amid a days-long hunt for Soviet submarines in the Bermuda Triangle, the crew of the USS Cony finally sighted a sub surfacing, its crew waving the red flag. The American destroyer monitored the Soviet sub in a strange, yet managed, stand-off. Then, an anti-submarine Neptune aircraft swooped low, dropping incendiary devices to light its massive photoelectric camera. The Soviet sub crew were so alarmed that they readied their torpedo tubes, thinking the stand-off was about to turn hot. Had they fired, it would have sent a nuclear-tipped missile directly into the hull of the USS Cony.

The U.S. Navy crew — using their deck spotlights to convey messages via the Cyrillic Transliteration Table, the International Signals Book, and Morse Code — didn’t just plead with the Soviets for calm. They apologized. The Soviets closed their torpedo doors. The American commander nodded to recognize his Soviet counterpart, the Soviet nodded back.

The possibility of peace and de-escalation was constantly undermined by public bravado. But that, in turn, was lessened by frequent backchanneling sent via telegram and interlocutors. Both men understood well the possibility that the other side could miscalculate — because each man had miscalculated throughout their dealings with the other.

“Ours is a joint account,” Khrushchev noted at one point, “and each of us must see that there is no miscalculation.” A funny line for a communist.

This great power competition, we know, ended without war.

But it was not, as some quack historians would tell you, a simple test of strength. It was, instead, a series of gambles, bluffs, climb-downs, and compromises. It was two leaders ultimately acting with logic and compassion, at least when it counted the most.

I’ve been thinking about those 13 days in 1962 a lot, recently, while watching President Donald Trump pursue his fundamentally dumb war in Iran. It’s his Stupid Cuban Missile Crisis.

The stakes may be lower than they were 60 years ago. But the quality of strategic thought on offer is even lower.

Trump, the man chiefly responsible for this boondoggle, has the kind of intelligence, indicators, analysis, proposals, insight, and operational flexibility that Kennedy could only dream of. He has an opponent who is willing to negotiate. He has overwhelming military superiority and the support of all regional players. And yet, unlike JFK, Trump has consistently pursued the stupidest imaginable path.

Since his first stint in office, Trump’s strategic incoherence — brought on by his own arrogance, the messianic boobs who surround him, and his refusal to listen to his career civil servants — has worked out surprisingly well. Through mafioso tactics and sheer luck, he has covered the downside while eking out strange and unexpected upsides.

It was never going to last. And Trump’s luck has finally run out in Iran.

This leaves the president in an impossible bind. Shown for the weak, reckless fraud that he truly is, Trump must find some way to save face and project strength. We should desperately hope that someone can stop him before he does.

I sat in my office earlier this month, flipping back-and-forth between Iranian and American propaganda channels, waiting to see if the genocide was about to begin.

As I began tapping out the first draft of this dispatch, I started counting the ways in which the world had tried — quite successfully — to prevent such a war. And also the myriad ways in which its main belligerents were determined to make it happen.

Iran had become a revolutionary theocracy in 1979. But its extremism didn’t reach the levels of nuclear weapons until 19872 — after seven years of a brutal and genocidal war launched on it by Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi dictator had no real objective nor much of a plan. Saddam invaded Iran simply to beat a rival. Faced with the fanaticism of Iranian fighters, who died in enormous numbers, he resorted to desperate tactics. Iraq gassed Iranian villages and attacked Iran-bound ships in the Strait of Hormuz. That didn’t work either, and the world eventually intervened to end the fighting.

Tehran — which had just won a war by sending waves of barely-armed soldiers into enemy fire and then by innovating military solutions — adopted fanaticism as a foreign policy. And there is nothing more fanatical than building a nuclear bomb.3

The existence of such a weapons program remained mostly secret until details of the missile silos were revealed in a series of disclosures starting in 2003. President George W. Bush was already fighting two land wars in the Middle East and he was threatening to do a third in Iran. So Tehran suspended the program in 2004 — and it hasn’t restarted it since.45

What Iran did do was to pursue a uranium enrichment program. That uranium, if enriched to about 90% purity, could fill a warhead for a nuclear missile. And Iran could reboot that weapon program and create such a missile in fairly short order. And as tensions in the Middle East worsen, particularly with the return of Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran started to up its enrichment. By the early 2010s, it hit 20% purity. Analysts feared that Iran, if it kept enriching and suddenly rebooted its nuclear weapons program, was about a year away from hitting that 90% level and building a rocket to deliver the nuclear payload.

And this atomic threat worked. The United States and Europe rushed together and started negotiating a deal with Iran. The ensuing agreement, the JCPOA, meant an end to sanctions against Iran, recognition of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, and the unfreezing of some much-needed Iranian assets. It also provided for a dispute-resolution process: A venue at which Tehran could exchange rule-breaking for a face-to-face meeting to air its grievances. But Iran stuck to the deal, and kept its nuclear program humming at a 3.67% enrichment level.

The nuclear program simply became less important. President Barack Obama backed away from new wars in the region, and Israel looked unlikely to pursue the war unilaterally. Iran still kept up its brutal repression of its own people to maintain its grip on power, and it funded and ordered terrorism and militancy throughout the Middle East to assert its role as a regional power. What’s more, it pursued an aggressive military build-up — making clear that it would no longer need to rely on waves of cannon fodder to defend itself. All told, the nuclear sabre became less necessary to rattle.6

This all made for a remarkably complicated problem. Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism in the region is driven by ideology, theology, strategic positioning: Meaning it is incredibly hard to stop, short of ousting the regime in Tehran. At the same time, its sturdy domestic repression system made fomenting revolution hard and its professionalizing military made invasion costly. In fact, its wily realpolitik made it tricky to do much of anything. Even reapplying economic sanctions could trigger a restart of its nuclear program. Combating Iran’s regional terrorism and constraining its military capabilities was important — but there was no easy solution to do either.

And so, the West played the game and the regional conflict remained at a low boil. It was, by no means, perfect: But it sure beat all-out war.

Anyone who acknowledges those facts has a hard time making a case to invade Iran. So Netanyahu and Trump have simply never bothered to.

Israel has been assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and launching cyber attacks on its nuclear infrastructure for decades, insisting that these attacks are the only thing keeping Iran from getting the bomb. Netanyahu has insisted for his entire political career that Iran isn’t just hell-bent on obtaining a nuclear weapon but that it hoped to do so imminently, and to destroy Israel in a unilateral strike.

“Within three to five years,” Netanyahu, said in 1992, then just a member of the Knesset, warned, “we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.” (In reality, even after another decade of working in total secrecy, Iran was nowhere near obtaining the bomb.)

Trump agreed. He declared the JCPOA “catastrophic” and insisted it did nothing to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions and, once in office, tore it up. Iran actually worked to preserve the deal but, as American sanctions returned, Iran went right back to enriching uranium.

So it became an official tenet of the Trump-Netanyahu Doctrine that Iran was an imminent threat. It was said so often and in so many different ways that it became a truism. And the pair did everything they could to ensure that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It did not filter down to the Pentagon, however. In 2019, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that “Iran’s conventional military strategy is primarily based on deterrence and the ability to retaliate against an attacker.” Reviewing its capabilities, operations, and its nuclear program, the intelligence agency wrote:

DIA: Iran’s “way of war” emphasizes the need to avoid or deter conventional conflict while advancing its security objectives in the region, particularly through propaganda, psychological warfare, and proxy operations. Iran’s deterrence is largely based on three core capabilities: ballistic missiles capable of long-range strikes, naval forces capable of threatening navigation in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, and unconventional operations using partners and proxies abroad.

Trump, as it happens, once claimed that these efforts to defer invasion are exactly why the U.S. should invade. “They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools,” he declared in 1988. If he were commander-in-chief, he said, “I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.” (Kharg Island is an island seaport for Iran’s oil industry with no particular strategic utility.)

It didn’t reach the intelligence community, either. In 2025, the Director of National Intelligence’s annual report plainly observed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.” That observation, when repeated by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, threw the Trump administration into a tizzy. Trump and Vice President JD Vance simply insisted the intelligence was all wrong, or that Iran had quickly started building a bomb in the gap between its publication and their decision to bomb it in June of that year.

When Washington did join Israel in bombing Iran last year, it was a performative show of force — a series of strikes on the nuclear sites Iran had rebooted since Trump ripped up the JCPOA deal. The bombing achieved through kinetic means what Obama wanted to do through negotiation: It collapsed Tehran’s ability to enrich and stockpile uranium.

Over those 12 days last year, Iran also got to show its strength to the region. It unleashed waves of missiles on Israel, shaking faith in the country’s Iron Dome interception system and killing dozens.

I can’t imagine Tehran walked away from that war happy. But Iran delivered a response that underlined its willingness and ability to rain hell down on its adversaries if provoked — exactly as American intelligence assessments said it would do.

With the bombing over, Trump returned to his longstanding position: That a better deal with Iran is possible, but only if he is the one making it. So Trump’s cronies, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, trudged to Oman to meet their Iranian counterparts.

And, by late February this year, it seemed the whole strategy paid off. According to Oman, who mediated the talks, a new nuclear deal was “within our reach.” The Americans had even convinced Iran to agree to the piece that Obama couldn’t even nail down: “We are talking about zero stockpiling,” the Omani foreign minister told CBS. Iran would limit enrichment only to levels required by its civilian nuclear power plants and convert it all directly into nuclear fuel. Tehran even signalled its openness to limiting its missile program.

Not everything was hammered out. Kushner and Witkoff hadn’t brought a nuclear weapons expert with them, so parts of the deal were yet to be fleshed out. But when the UK’s national security advisor arrived at the talks, he was “surprised by what the Iranians put on the table,” an official told The Guardian.

“It was not a complete deal, but it was progress and was unlikely to be the Iranians’ final offer. The British team expected the next round of negotiations to go ahead on the basis of the progress in Geneva.”

The date of those Swiss negotiations had been set. But they never happened. Because, two days later, Israel and the United States began bombing. The negotiations were, according to Israeli officials, a “deception exercise.” Per the New York Times and others, Netanyahu and Trump had settled on war as the likely outcome weeks before.

The casus belli for this new war was, like the old one, Iran’s dreaded nuclear program. Both leaders insisted that Iran posed an imminent threat to Israel and the broader Middle East, and that intervention was a necessary step to stop Iran before it nuclearized.

That claim was, once more, undercut by the intelligence community. But, this time, Gabbard had the good political sense to try and censor the intelligence — even if she didn’t do a very good job. Below is the difference between what her prepared remarks said (struck-through) and what she actually read into the record (in bold.)

Gabbard: As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement. We continue to monitor for any early indicators on what position the current or any new leadership in Iran will take with regard to authorizing a nuclear weapons program. Prior to Operation Epic Fury, the IC assesses Iran was trying to recover from the severe damage to its nuclear infrastructure sustained during the 12-day war and continued to refuse to comply with its nuclear obligations with the IAEA, refusing them access to key facilities.

Lying is integral to geopolitics. You can’t compete with rivals if you can’t lie.

But, looking back, we know that Kennedy and Khrushchev lied to avoid war. Here, we can plainly see that Trump and Netanyahu are lying to instigate it.

Let’s quickly recap this war.

At the outset, Trump insisted the bombing would only last for about a week. Then it was “four to five weeks,” but it could end faster, yet there would be “no timeline” for the war’s end, but by a month in, it might need another “two to four weeks,” or maybe “two to three weeks.” Trump insisted Iran was begging to negotiate a deal, that a deal was being worked out, then said he would accept only “unconditional surrender.” As the bombing went on, Trump declared the war “complete, pretty much,” but it was only “just beginning” but also it was “very nearly complete,” then that he said he “hadn’t won enough.” The objectives had been achieved early on and “from a military standpoint, they’re finished.” He insisted there must be total regime change, then said he wanted to pick a new Ayatollah, then said he was “disappointed” with the Ayatollah the mullahs selected without him, before declaring the regime change complete anyway. Trump insisted that Iran could not be allowed to control the Strait of Hormuz, then said it would be fine if they did, then declared it wasn’t fine, then offered to split the profits. He said the Strait would ”naturally” open, then demanded help in opening it, then proposed renaming it the Strait of Trump, then said it might just remain closed, then demanded it be opened, then celebrated its reopening after an initial ceasefire, then blockaded Iran’s renewed blockade, then declared it open even though it was closed. He said the war was going “swimmingly,” then hectored NATO countries which didn’t come to his aid, then threatened to do genocide.

Nearly two months after the war began, Trump’s effort is a damning fuckup. Iran’s missile program remains a major threat to the region, particularly as air-defenses run low. Iran’s navy may be hobbled, but its small-and-agile fleet of patrol boats have kept the Strait of Hormuz closed. Tehran now asserts sovereignty over the Strait, a major new victory for the regime — which appears sturdier than even before the war. Iran’s clients abroad appear even more emboldened to attack, particularly as Israel continues its scorched-earth military campaign in Lebanon.

In short, the only objective Trump has actually accomplished is in destroying Iran’s nuclear program — which he did last year.

Kennedy and Khrushchev averted catastrophe because each man understood the other’s constraints, aspirations, and weaknesses. Visibility wasn’t perfect, but a rough understanding of how the other man approached the chessboard allowed for strategies that weren’t zero-sum.

This war is stupid not just because it was built on a lie, not just because it was prosecuted with no clear objective nor plan, and not only because it was conducted in a way that has shown no concern for civilian life — but because it was ordered by a man with a pathological belief that he knows better than everybody else.

To iterate on a famous line from Kennedy: Trump launched this war not because it was easy, but because he thought it would be easy.

Anyone who understands Iran’s motivations, however, would know that this clusterfuck was the likely outcome. Trump didn’t care, because he has been telling himself for four decades that he understands these things better than anybody else. Winning a war against an entrenched opponent from the air is notoriously difficult, which the Pentagon told him. The regime has a distributed and ruthlessly effective militia network which had made democratic overthrow incredibly difficult, which his spies warned him of. The Kurds were always unlikely to get too involved, Israel was always unreliable in its assessments of Iranian military power, and Netanyahu has long been well-known to oversell Israeli warfaring capabilities — things that were aduntantly clear from the outset. Even taking Kharg Island has proved more difficult than he once imagined.

Most critically: Analysts have long noted that, backed into a corner, it would be in Iran’s interests to lash out as violently as possible. Challenged at home and abroad, Tehran was incentivized to show just how fanatical and dangerous it could be. It was in Iran’s interest to inflict costs on America, Israel, and the whole region. If the theocracy could survive the war, it wanted to leave a singular message in the minds of world leaders: Attacking us is not worth it.

This has been Iran’s military doctrine since the 1980s. This is not a secret.

But Trump, drunk on his list of minor military successes — killing Qasem Soleimani, kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites the first time — genuinely thought this war would go well. He thought his own gut feelings meant more than the mountain of intelligence and military advice provided by his spies and generals. And he seemed very sure that AI could smooth over all the problems inherent in his murderous gambit — the utility of that was made clear in the early hours of the war, when American missiles hit a girls’ school which had probably been misidentified by AI as a military site. More than 170 children were killed.

Since then, Trump and Netanyahu have experimented with bombing different things to see if it could provide a shortcut to victory. They have hit bridges, factories, pharmaceutical facilities, schools and universities, mosques and synagogues, and a host of other civilian infrastructure.

Next up, should this ceasefire fail, will be power plants and water desalination facilities. Perhaps he’ll go further, reviving his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Maybe the ceasefire will hold. But given that Trump has handed Iran an enormous amount of leverage, it seems clear that either America must make concessions or continue fighting. Both outcomes were avoidable.

The world is here because Trump is temperamentally ill-suited to being president. This, I know, isn’t a terribly bold statement. But that fact is no longer a problem which can be constrained or muddled through. The president has made clear that he intends to use the U.S. military to achieve his half-baked aims at whatever cost. That is terrifying.

Trump’s efforts to occupy U.S. cities, to rig the elections, and to enrich himself — amongst his other litany of abuses and corruptions — are being resisted through democratic and legal channels. We’ll find out in November how that goes. But the people of Iran don’t have the luxury of going through those American channels. They are facing bombardment now. And we don’t know who will be next, though Cuba seems a likely target.

In the hours after Trump threatened to annihilate the people of Iran and his last-minute declaration of a cease-fire, it seemed that lawmakers in Washington were finally coming around to the tools at their disposal to stop him. Outgoing Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene even raised the idea of invoking the 25th amendment, which would see Trump’s cabinet declare him incompetent. Democrats, meanwhile, have prepared articles of impeachment.

Yet Congress can’t even pass a vote calling for the illegal war to end.

The mismatch between what U.S. legislators should be doing and what the majority are doing is disquieting.

When the world teetered close to nuclear annihilation in 1962, we avoided extermination because relatively sensible leaders acted relatively sensibly. Trump, by contrast, isn’t behaving rationally, has no idea what he wants, and seems willing to commit mass murder in the name of declaring it a win — and nobody seems keen to stop him.

Had anyone in a position of power during the Cuban Missile Crisis acted this stupidly, we’d all be dead.

That’s it for this dispatch.

Here’s my regular mea culpa for the slow pace of dispatches. I was knocked on my ass by a cold earlier this month that really screwed up my publishing schedule.

Rest assured, the Strait of Bug-eyed and Shameless has reopened and regular traffic has resumed.

Over in the Star, I argue that Mark Carney has cobbled together an unconventional national unity government, that Canada can (and should) seize billions in Russian assets, and that Danielle Smith’s most recent dalliance with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories should worry us.

Until next time!

I was sitting in my office on a quiet Saturday afternoon in January when my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID: “SCIENTOLOGY MISSIONS INTERNATIONAL.”

I sighed and answered the phone.

On the other end of the line was David Bloomberg, an executive in the secretive church and head of media relations for its sprawling religious-corporate empire. And I knew exactly why he was calling.

In that morning’s edition of the Toronto Star, I had a column decrying the Canadian government’s wrong-headed approach to fighting hate crimes. Ottawa had decided to emulate Germany and the United Kingdom by attempting to criminalize all manner of symbols associated with hate and terror, to adopt a whole new class of hate crimes, and to forbid any protest that may “provoke a state of fear in a person” enough to prevent their entry into a place of worship. It is bone-headed state overreach, I think.

“How would the law apply,” I wrote, “if a Jewish group protested outside a synagogue at which Israeli real-estate firms were marketing illegal West Bank settlements? Or if Muslims picketed an event at a mosque held by a marginal group known to glorify terrorism?”

In my first draft, the examples had ended there. But I am a slave to the rule of threes, and set my brain to thinking of a third case where such a law might be problematic. I came up with, what I thought, was a sterling way to complete the trio: “What about protestors demanding to know ‘Where is Shelly Miscavige?’ outside the Church of Scientology?”

I expected plenty of complaints from defenders and critics of Israel for the column. I should have known I was far more likely to hear from Scientology HQ. Sure enough, Bloomberg was not happy.

Miscavige, wife of the church’s high-profile leader David Miscavige, has not been properly seen in public in decades. Her virtual disappearance has become a meme with which to mock the church, and to highlight its cultish inclinations.

Bloomberg was calling to tell me that was all bullshit. The LAPD had checked out the claim, he said, and declared it unfounded. He told me that ex-Scientologist-turned-critic Leah Remini — who had filed a missing persons report for Miscavige after she had disappeared from public view for six years — was unstable and unreliable.

Repeating such a statement, Bloomberg told me, was dangerous and irresponsible. It opened up Scientologists to harassment and violence. It would be akin to uncritically quoting a dispatch from the Ku Klux Klan or amplifying the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I tried to stifle my astonished laughter. “Dave, come on,” I managed.

After the conversation went around a few times, Bloomberg mentioned he had consulted some various thoughts I had posted online critical of Scientology over the years. I must have some kind of “animosity” towards the Church, he said.

With the conversation reaching 15 minutes, I told Bloomberg that his call was in vain: I would not change the text of my column. It was fair comment, it accurately described a protest movement which — right or wrong — shouldn’t be censored, and I happened to think that the question at issue was a valid one. “Shelly Miscavige hasn’t been seen in years,” I noted. (For more on that, I suggest reading ’s multi-part series on the topic.)

Bloomberg eventually followed up with me over email. “The statement in your article is demonstrably false and should be removed,” he wrote. “At a minimum, if you choose not to delete it entirely, you need to include a parenthetical noting that the LAPD officially deemed the report ‘unfounded.’ Leaving it as-is misleads readers and misrepresents the facts.”

After firing back a terse email — letting the Scientology exec know that I do not appreciate being told what I must do at a minimum — I chuckled to myself.

For years, I’ve covered the information beat. I’ve penned deep dives on the scourge of misinformation for major international papers, provided analysis on campaigns sophisticated and slapstick to delude us en masse, and delivered speeches to industry and government aimed at priming them on the state of our toxic information problem.

And now, Scientology says, I’m the problem.

Complaints from flack to journo are as old as the profession itself. But things have shifted in bizarre ways since “fake news” was declared word-of-the-year by Collins in 2017, followed by “misinformation” by dictionary.com the year after.

These words — and the concepts which have sprung up to both perpetuate and combat them — are emblematic of our excessive-information age. Everything is wrong and nothing can be trusted. All information meant to mislead and deceive. Everyone has secret motives, and must be approached with hostility.

Plenty of smart people acknowledge this reality and yet remain awfully sure that, with the right combination of grit, technology, and institutional buy-in, we can put an end to the scourge of fake news, misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories — whatever you want to call it.

But this year’s pick from Merriam-Webster — “slop” — should be an indication that we have melted into a bubbling tar pit of nonsense, fakery, and bullshit. There is no amount of fact-checking, media literacy, or platform moderation to solve the extent of this problem. No volume of good journalism or education campaigns will unscrewup our toxic information ecosystem.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I’m here to wave the white flag. We’ve lost the battle against misinformation.

And maybe that’s okay.

It’s All Slop To Me Now

It’s 2024 and 730 American partisans are being presented with 20 headlines. Of those, 10 are legitimate news and 10 are bullshit. Half of those participants are being shown headlines designed to evoke rage, the other half are shown headlines with no particular emotional appeal. And they are each asked the same two questions:

“To the best of your knowledge, how accurate is the claim in the above headline?” and “how likely would you be to share this news article on your social media account?”1

This study, conducted by researchers at Princeton and Northwestern, should have shown something quite simple, if our popular understanding of misinformation is correct.

It should have shown a very tight relationship between a misjudgement in the accuracy of the article, the emotions it stirred up, and the propensity of one to share it.

But the researchers actually found that outrage had very little impact in how participants judged the accuracy of news articles, and that people proved quite good at separating fact from fiction. Study participants correctly reported “Marco Rubio Says That Felons Should Get Gun Votes” was misinformation and that “Trump: Jewish People Voting for Democrats Is ‘Great Disloyalty’” was a real news article. Simply as a test of whether people could sort misinformation from truth, even when the misinformation provokes a strong emotional reaction, the participants passed.

But, the researchers found, a worrying number of study participants went and shared this misinformation anyway. Particularly if it made them mad.

“We speculate that outrage-evoking misinformation may be less reputationally costly to share than other types of misinformation because of the signaling properties of outrage,” the researchers write. “If caught sharing misinformation, users can claim that they merely intended to express that the content is ‘outrageous if true’ preserving epistemic [accurate information] trust while bolstering their moral trust.”

These data suggest that people know they are sharing lies — but they do it anyway. Because the emotion it makes them feel upgrades this information to a truth beyond truth.

This one study adds to a mountain of other data points which clearly show that misinformation is not a sudden miasma that infects us as we go through the world. It is not a foreign-born illness which enters the country when we least expect it. Rather, misinformation is intrinsic to how we relate to information, and particularly how we deal with each other online.

Let me hit you with one more study that illustrates our weird relationship with information. It was published in 2004, by a research team in Toronto. They had recruited a cohort of participants, half younger and half older, and presented them with a series of pretty arcane health statements. Things like “aspirin destroys tooth enamel,” “corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips,” and “shark fins can treat arthritis.”

The participants were asked to encode each of these statements as either “true” or “false.”

They did this a couple of times, and logged their answers each time. Then the researchers gave them the right answers. No, shark fins don’t treat arthritis. No, aspirin doesn’t destroy tooth enamel. So on. And they were asked to rank the statements again.

Then they were invited back three days later to assess the statements again. At this point, they had heard these truths and fictions again and again and again and they knew what was right and what was wrong.

What happened? The study participants began consistently mischaracterizing false statements as true, and vice versa.2

The experiment had revealed an “extremely undesirable, and previously unidentified, side effect of warnings: the more often older adults were told that a claim was false, the more likely they were to remember it erroneously as true after a 3 day delay,” they wrote. (While the researchers fixated on older adults, the data themselves show that this is a cross-generational issue.)

People walked into that study pretty sure that shark fins didn’t treat arthritis. They were told repeatedly that shark fins do not treat arthritis. And they walked out of the study believing that shark fins treat arthritis.

There is a lot of other data which support this idea, but put simply: We believe things if we hear them enough, and we are more likely to act on bad information if it stirs the right emotions in us.

These things are, seemingly, innate to the human psyche. But neither was a significant problem because we had systems of information that continued to reinforce what was true and what was false. And because we had a relatively limited amount of information we needed to know.

If you believed shark fins treat arthritis, your doctor could set you straight. If you suspected that something was fishy about 9/11, there was voluminous reporting detailing what actually happened. Most any bit of misinformation you may glom on to was likely some combination of marginal, harmless, or easily corrected. Even if you were inclined to share misinformation, you would be limited by how many people you were physically capable of sharing it with.

Misinformation, in short, had very little viral potentiality. And we had systems meant to keep it that way.

That’s not the world we live in today. With institutions supplanted by the internet, we live in a time of hyperinformation, delivered without intermediary. It is simply impossible to separate truth from lie in realtime. We are exposed to so much information day-in and day-out that we are required to utilize shortcuts to determine what we care about, what we engage with, and what we believe.

Some people continue to trust only what comes from official and reputable sources, disregarding all the rest. Some pick a handful of useful intermediaries, analysts, or influencers and ape their information diet. Others radically distrust everything, letting their gut and emotions decide what is true and what is not.

While there had been merit to all these approaches, none of them are good enough any longer.

The mainstream press in most Western countries has been systematically de-funded throughout the 21st century and, worse, they (we) have mimicked the tactics of the online firehose of information to try and compete for readers and viewers’ 24/7 attention. News is now, increasingly, a perpetual BREAKING NEWS chyron, rolling liveblogs of events big and small, and articles designed to maximize engagement.

The influencer economy, which exists ostensibly to make sense of the deluge of information and news being produced, has grown saturated, requiring participants to increase output and ratchet up emotion. There is a constant race to get you to open every email, read every video, share every TikTok, listen to every podcast. The influencers are not simplifying an overheated information economy, they are merely adding to its dizzying volume.

Social media begat these changes but is a major contributor in its own right. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube all, in their own way, encourage rage, slop, lies, and addiction. Their goal is to encourage all content which makes users feel that their engagement is necessary and important. The oligarch-owned tech platforms want to bombard users with content about the chaotic state of the world not because they want to inform, but because they want to make users angry. Anger, we know, increases engagement. And, particularly as surveillance helps these platforms perfect their algorithms in an era of ubiquitous short-form video, they are getting very good at this.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has blessed Big Tech’s mass-prescribing of opiates to the masses while bringing influencers closer and pushing journalism further away. The White House’s Twitter account and a band of conspiracists in the press pool have become far more important for the administration than the New York Times, and the public has largely gone along with this change. His oligarch friends have managed to dismantle institutions like CBS and the Washington Post from within — not even bothering to turn them into a sycophantic press. That role is reserved for the predictable slavish obedience of Fox News and for the aforementioned army of digital soldiers, each feeding the high-velocity content machines.

I say we lost the battle against misinformation because there is no civil society or regulatory remedy to undo this, particularly not when the primary regulatory jurisdiction, the United States, is led by a man who is uniquely responsible for worsening this problem and benefiting from it.

This is on full display in the war on Iran.

There’s the White House mixing old baseball clips with footage of airstrikes in Iran. There’s the Iranian regime as cartoon bowling pins. There’s a war hype video borrowing cutscenes from Call of Duty. There’s a deluge of AI-generated videos of missile strikes and terror, created by a plethora of different actors with varied motivations.

“Polls show that a lot of young people are actually somewhat supportive of this war and our goal is to deliver content to them,” a White House official told Politico this week. (But when the New York Times posts an image from Iran, it gets bombarded with accusations of digital manipulation.)

This is perhaps the most obscene example yet of our jittering in-and-out of reality. The administration is relying on memes and slop to sell a war, yet there are still serious people telling us that this is a problem of our moral failing, or of journalists who just can’t move fast enough.

“Despite daily debunking efforts from people like [BBC Verify senior journalist Shayan] Sardarizadeh, new fakes are popping up far faster than they can be swatted down,” lamented CNN’s Daniel Dale earlier in March.

Dale continues: “For those of us who can’t avoid frequent scrolling, it’s wise to take a beat and do even a few seconds of online searching before believing or sharing a sensational wartime video or image.”

With all due respect to my colleague: Fuck that.

If you turn to Google to check a particular bit of misinformation, you are going to be greeted with the company’s AI model: One that is absolutely prone to repeating, even creating, misinformation. We learned this week that Google is using AI to actively rewrite news results. It, like its social media brethren, is more keen to keep users in its ecosystem than in delivering them reliable news content.

Even if Google were a reliable avenue to fact-check the onslaught of information we are told to verify, it would require us to spend half our days kicking the tires on each video, image, and claim. And in trying to do so, we run into the same original problem: Who can you trust online these days?

Individuals cannot overcome the mounting pile of misinformation, slop, and lies. And we can’t hope that our governments will fix this for us.

The evidence tells us that even if we could get our media to debunk every single fake image, and get a few platforms to label every AI-generated airstrike video, flag every deepfake, warn users of each false narrative — it would not truly matter. People would share it anyway and bad actors would continue producing slop for likes. For some, the debunks would become evidence that the information strikes at some emotional truth. For many, they would internalize that fact-check as just another piece of information to be sorted, categorized, and promptly forgotten.

I have written a lot on this newsletter about how the internet makes us mad (Dispatches #64, #110, #144), how it lies to us (Dispatches #90, #141), how the oligarchs who run it want it that way (Dispatches #47, #80), and how our attempts to fight back against its negative externalities have been limp and wrong-headed. (Dispatches #68, #85, #102, #104)

I have lost whatever optimism I once had that we could do battle with the forces of misinformation and win.

And frankly? It’s liberating.

Because it really simplifies what I think we need to do next.

“The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics,” Where We Finally Get the Boulder Atop the Hill

If I may get metaphysical for a moment.

We live in an era where we are fed gigabytes of information each minute — and where we can access petabytes more whenever we want. Driven by curiosity, boredom, anxiety, obligation, anger, and any other combination of emotional states, we read, watch, listen, and engage with more information in a day than past generations consumed in a week, if not a month, if not their whole lifetime.

And with that, information becomes more abstract. The matter loses its relationship with the form of the information. Wars, plane crashes, cat pics, cellphone videos of a violent assault, fail videos, memes — they become digital objects onto themselves, existing apart from the real-world things they describe. And with that, it becomes easier to engage with those digital information objects based on the emotion they provoke without bothering to engage with the real things at their origin.

I’ve explained, in the previous section, how this system is being weaponized and expanded. But the simple fact is that we were always heading in this direction. While we could have made a lot of choices, early on, to prevent the worst version of this reality, it seems inevitable that the internet would abstract our relationship with reality, making our emotional connection with these totems of information more important than the real things it describes.

Artificial Intelligence widens this gap in bizarre new ways. We’ve long ago closed the uncanny valley, allowing us to replicate real-life with computers, but now we’re automating the creation of the unreal. Whereas life-like animation and deepfakes used to take a fair bit of doing, anyone anywhere can now spit out images, video, audio, music that emulates the real thing. It may be full of weird artifacts and lack soul, but this technology has simultaneously multiplied the amount of information being generated every second while widening the gap between real and not. And in so doing, it makes all information less real. Existing online now requires you to look at every photo, watch every video, listen to every song and think: Is this real life?

What’s more, decentralizing the creation of this information to any and everyone means it can be created, freely or cheaply, for any purpose. It can be generated to entertain, to deceive, to rationalize a psychotic break, to obscure a crime, to gin up anger, or with the express purpose of making others lose their mind.

In the past, new technology which abstracts the real world has been met with skepticism. And, in hindsight, those worries look silly.

The Western world once criminalized ‘crime comics’ out of fear that fictionalized noir would push youth to a life of crime. Parenting magazines once lamented how the disembodied voice of radio “comes into our very homes and captures our children before our very eyes.” Movies, television, video games: They all prompted waves of paranoia that they put humans into the land of the unreal, making them vulnerable to all sorts of psychosis and corruption.

Psychologist Amy Orben coined this very human habit “the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics.” She, correctly, notes that humanity has gone through this reactionary process many times before — with the public and media fixating on real and perceived problems, followed by governments flailing about in trying to internalize those externalities. Orben makes a strong case for us to get better at collecting actual evidence about the harms of new technology, but I think we can safely say that many of these past panics proved overblown.

Yet, and I know all panickers say this, we have reason to believe this time is different.

Not only have we plugged ourselves into far more information than our species has ever had to process, not only have we uploaded much of our politics and media to this new system, and not only have we allowed a small number of oligarchs take control of this system — we left it vulnerable to exploitation. The owner of every major social media company and most major AI firms have made a clear alliance with the Trump White House. The U.S. government has broken free from all its confines, and nobody seems willing or able to stop it.

This is already having global ramifications. The United Kingdom was racked, in 2024, by race riots egged on by Elon Musk, fed with a pipeline of anti-migrant misinformation, and promoted via Twitter. Rather than reckon with the destructive nature of those riots, the UK looks excited to elect one of its chief proponents.

Much of Europe, France and Germany in particular, looks set to enter the embrace of an uber-online far-right, each promising to bring order to the chaos — the chaos they play up on their Twitter feeds and in their slick YouTube documentaries.

Australia has long been resilient against this slopulism. But recent polls show Pauline Hanson, leader of the far-right One Nation party, surging in popularity. Hanson asks voters to reject the complexity of this hyperinformation system by relying on “common sense,” even as she markets wildly complex theories — including how the government staged a mass shooting attack to steal everyone’s guns.

The rise of these charlatan politicians isn’t just a byproduct of bad information, it is the result of too much information. People are overwhelmed, anxious, and angry. They are opting for simplicity. (And anger.)

To that end, there has been a new quest to simplify information. Maybe we can have a singular source of truth, the thinking goes. And maybe that can be AI.

And yet again I say: Fuck that.

If we opt to turn ChatGPT into our new gatekeeper, an automated voice-from-on-high who can separate the wheat from the chaff and tell us which way is up, we deserve what we get.

LLMs and chatbots are both inherently reliant on journalism to function: They are leeches. They take objective reporting — which may not be truth but at least tries to be true — and mixes it with social media chatter, low-quality tripe, and actual misinformation. The result is slop, of varying degrees. Worse yet, they are owned and operated by firms who have already shown a willingness to manipulate their responses to maximize engagement and advance ideological objectives.

Put simply: ChatGPT is primed to drive us mad, just as Facebook did. Probably moreso.

I saw a billboard recently, for Bell Canada’s new sovereign AI somethingorother. It said something to the effect of: “Imagine if every fact were already checked.”

I don’t have to imagine, I remember it well. It was a thing called the newspaper.

There is a clear off-ramp to our informational hell: Consume less information.

The wonders of the morning newspaper and the evening newscast were that they asked only an hour of your time. You had no obligation to check the newspaper every five minutes to consult what has changed. There was no moral imperative to stay glued to your screen to hardwire into new developments.

We are not smarter or better off because we are processing a constant stream of news, geopolitics, health information, celebrity gossip, social media bickering, stock tips, Polymarket bets, cultural clashing, and so on.

Yes, the internet has decentralized the conversation and given all of us the responsibility of establishing a shared sense of truth. Are we happier because of it?

I say no. I think if any of us were given the power to return newspapers, academics, doctors, and experts back to their central role of arbiters of truth, we’d do it in an instant.

But there’s no way to do that, unless we do a bit of information devolution. We need media outlets, politicians, organizations, and institutions who are more and more willing to engage with people offline — or, at least, far away from the toxic information systems on which they remain.

We need to go on an informational diet. We need to become more discerning with what we want to know, and what we need to know.

Because there is still a war to fight. And the only way to win the next battle, and the one after that, is if we stop fighting on the unreal fields of the oligarch-and-despot-dominated internet.

That’s it for this dispatch, which I’d been trying — and failing — to write for some months. Some readers may find it a bit repetitious, given past dispatches, but you’re witnessing my Luddite radicalization in realtime, so be patient.

For those interested in reading my columns over in the Star, here are some gift links: To my recent chat with NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis; a dissection of one big Trumpian lie on the war in Iran; and a screed against AI.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Soft Power. I’ve got a new dispatch coming very shortly.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get back on the horse and make sure there is steady and regular Bug-eyed and Shamelesses in your inbox. But also, in keeping with today’s dispatch, not too many and not too much.

Until next time!

“We call our age the Age of Enlightenment,” Fernando Maximiliano wrote ruefully in 1848, “but there are cities in Europe where future men will look back with horror.”

Revolutions had roiled the Habsburg Empire earlier that year, but they were put down by the monarch with violent zeal. Its new emperor, Franz Joseph, had little tolerance for this new liberalism of the age. Maximiliano lamented how tribunals were now putting to death those “whose only crime lay in wanting something different to the arbitrary rule of governments which placed themselves above the law.”

Maximiliano believed that even something as staid and stiff as the Austrian empire was capable of reform and modernization. He advocated for some semblance of democracy, of a robust and dynamic art scene, and of local rule.

That’s not what happened. Fearful of revolution, the emperor expanded his secret police, rounded up critics of the monarchy, and shuttered any university believed to be stoking sedition, particularly in territories struggling for freedom from the empire. His brutality, particularly in a rebellious Italy, prompted waves of assassination attempts and, ultimately, a war against France which he lost handily.

And so Maximiliano left Europe and wandered through the New World. Brazil so captured his imagination that, by the time he returned to Austria, he mostly moped around and wrote travelogues in the German style of Weltschmerz — literally 'world weariness.’

Maximiliano had an idea for how the world ought to be, and it was nothing like the world as he saw it. And that made him depressed.

A Mexican politician named José María Gutiérrez de Estrada had the cure for Maximiliano’s ennui. Gutiérrez was, rightly, terrified that the United States would keep cannibalizing Mexico. He believed that the only path to independence and sovereignty for his country came via Europe. With Washington tied up with its own civil war, unable to enforce its Monroe Doctrine, Gutiérrez made an impassioned plea to the powers of Europe to send him a king.

French Emperor Napoleon III heeded that call, sending tens of thousands of French troops to Mexico to overthrow its republic. Despite a brutal defeat at the hands of the Mexican forces on May 5, 1862 — celebrated today as Cinco de Mayo — the French, eventually, captured Mexico City.

In 1863, an envoy from Mexico arrived in Austria. It was addressed to Fernando Maximiliano José María de Habsburgo-Lorena, second son of Archduke Franz Karl and brother to Franz Joseph. Napoleon wanted to make Maximiliano Emperor of Mexico.

Maximilian I, as he came to be named, dreamt of a liberal, constitutional monarchy. He declared that the Mexican people would have the opportunity to vote on his candidacy for emperor, even as French forces struggled to capture the country from defenders of the republic. A huge soiree was held after Gutiérrez formally offered him the monarchy. At the end of the evening, Maximilian retired to his appropriately-named yacht: La Fantasia.

Napoleon convinced his new governor to give up on the ideas of legitimacy. “Allow me to lay great stress upon one point: A country torn apart by anarchy cannot be regenerated by parliamentary liberty,” he told Maximilian. “What is needed in Mexico is a liberal dictatorship.”

And so Maximilian sailed for Mexico and arrived as the king nobody wanted.

“Mexicans!” the new emperor proclaimed. “You have desired my presence! Your noble nation, by a willing majority, has elected me to watch over your destinies! I gladly submit to this call.”

In fact, Maximilian spent his early reign plowing state money into renovating his new abode, a castle outside the capital built for Spanish occupiers. The monthly allowance he drew from the state was four times more than the ousted president had earned in a whole year. The queen held regular soirées, plying European and Mexican elites with quail and truffles.

The enlightened emperor was not without an interest in the little people. Mexican society was deeply riven after decades of colonialism, invasion, and civil war. But Maximilian continued to believe that noble rule could smooth out those differences, insofar as he understood them — which is to say, not much.

To promote his new, benign rule, Maximilian embarked on a national tour during the rainy season, with hordes of soldiers clearing and pacifying his route before he took it. He arrived in placated towns of supportive locals and he did so in style: Sombrero on, a white vest, riding a black horse with a cowboy saddle.

In the middle of his ensemble, Maximilian wore a bright red cravat. “In Mexico to dress like this was a political statement,” writes historian Edward Shawcross.1 Not least of which because the red cravat was, unbeknownst to the King, a symbol of the radical republicans. The conservatives, too, were bewildered: “When they had invited a Habsburg to rule over them, they had not expected him to dress as a revolutionary cowboy,” Shawcross writes.

Elsewhere in the country, atrocities were being conducted en masse. Bodies hung from trees and entire towns were burned on a whim. The French used terror to compensate for their lack of forces, while the nationalist guerrillas used terrorism to hit a better-equipped enemy.

As the war worsened, and as turmoil in Europe distracted Napoleon, the French forces picked up and left Mexico. Maximilian knew his bizarre operation could not survive without outside help — but no amount of pleading and pestering could convince Napoleon to come to his aid.

On Mexican independence day, Maximilian nevertheless emerged from his castle to address the dwindling number of citizens who still believed in his rule. “I still stand firmly in the place to which the will of the nation called me: Unmindful of all the difficulties, without faltering in my duties, for a true Habsburg never leaves his post in the moment of danger.” Notwithstanding that cri du coeur, Maximilian oscillated between abdication and fighting to the death.

Even as opposition forces closed in on the city, even as they reduced his empire to a few city blocks, Maximilian continued to believe in his office — he insisted that a national congress should decide whether he stayed or went, not an armed invasion.

But Maximilian was, ultimately, captured, prosecuted, and sentenced to death. The reinstalled president was inclined to spare the aristocrat, but decided a message needed to be sent: Mexico doesn’t tolerate foreign rulers. And so on June 19, 1867, the last Emperor of Mexico was shot by a firing squad.

Nothing about the reign of Maximilian I was right or just. But of the many problems we could diagnose from his brief rule, one is simply that he ruled for other rulers. He paid lip service to the idea that he was there for the Mexican people, but in reality he governed the state to please Napoleon, to ward off Abraham Lincoln’s ire, to impress his emperor brother, and to dazzle the great minds of Europe.

Replacing this era of satellite government was the promise of nationalism, of a community of nations each striving for the benefit of their own people.

Donald Trump, who has transcended nationalism and reached chauvinism, is dragging us back to the past. The reality show tsar has convinced his citizens, and much of the world, that he has a divine right to appoint and dismiss his regional emperors. Like a modern Napoleon, the president sees his own political project hinging on how he can control and manipulate his puppet regimes and sycophants.

Writing in 2021, Shawcross saw echoes of the past in the present, too. “As the American imperial project proceeded into the twentieth century and beyond, extending farther across the globe,” he concludes his book, “it would frequently deploy the strategy that failed in Mexico — regime change.”

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about the new global alliance being formed underneath us. Like the network of royal bloodlines and marriage-alliances of yore, this is an intensely personal and autocratic affair. It’s a worldwide network of leaders handpicked and personally approved by Donald Trump.

It’s the rise of the Trump Bloc.

“Suzerainty in Full Motion”

Let’s start our tour of the Trump World Order in Venezuela.

It has been just two months since Trump sent in the marines to capture Nicolás Maduro. Trump wasted absolutely no time in mocking those who thought he might push for a democratic overhaul in the authoritarian country: He had, in fact, struck a deal with Maduro’s right-hand woman, Delcy Rodríguez.

On the sidelines are María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who is broadly popular in the country; and Edmundo González, the man who won the last presidential election but who was robbed of his win by Maduro’s corruption.

Rodríguez remains in place because she has provided Trump what he wants: Oil.

Since the American invasion, two trading houses for Venezuelan crude have moved some 27 million barrels to refineries in America. Just last week, 500,000 barrels of heavy crude — the kind that America’s Gulf refineries need, which they normally get from the Middle East — left the country, bound for the United States. There are more than 4 million barrels more of that heavy crude waiting to be shipped, according to documents viewed by Reuters.

Trump seems to be plundering state oil reserves and it is not clear what a long-term agreement might look like, given that Trump clearly has the country over a barrel, so to speak.

The remnants of the regime have every reason to cooperate — if they don’t, they risk facing the inside of jail cells for the crimes committed by the Maduro regime over the years.

Indeed, a leaked video recording shows Rodríguez pleading with her fellow apparatchiks to stand together as they give in to Trump’s demands, insisting it was necessary “to preserve peace … to rescue our hostages … and to preserve political power.” (She also said that the decision to cooperate with the invasion was made after the Americans gave “me 15 minutes to respond, or they would kill us.”)

The Caracas Chronicles, an independent media outlet committed to “making Venezuela make sense,” summed up the current state of affairs in the perfect way: “Suzerainty in full motion.”

Trump did impose some notional conditions on this new regime. Not long after being installed, Rodríguez announced an end to Venezuela’s era of repression — instituted by the man she served faithfully. And, to date, the regime has released thousands of political prisoners.

But Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal says more than 500 dissidents remain unjustly behind bars. Others remain missing. What’s more, the group says, many of those released by the regime appear to still have conditions on their freedom.

Take Juan Pablo Guanipa, a prominent opposition leader, who was released from prison early last month. Immediately after his release, he slammed the government for its flawed amnesty bill. As if to prove his point, the regime caterwauled that he violated the terms of his release and dispatched armed goons to seize him. Guanipa has been under house arrest ever since.

“Some politicians believed they could do whatever they wanted,” the regime’s interior minister said in reference to Guanipa’s arrest.

It seems that the law could also exclude Machado from amnesty, suggesting the state may try and block her bid for the presidency.

All of this makes for strange times in Caracas. Recent polling of the country has found that Venezuelans generally approve of the capture of Maduro. At the same time, not even one-in-four believe that Rodríguez represents a meaningful change, an overwhelming majority have a negative opinion of their new president, and a clear plurality believe that someone else should have been selected to take over.

Nearly 70% of Venezuelans want an election this year, and two-thirds of respondents said they would support Machado if an election were held today.

But giving the regime runway to plan for those elections — which Washington hints won’t happen until 2027 — increases the odds they will be neither free nor fair.

Umbral, an online platform which is trying to quantify Venezuela’s democratic transition, offers an interesting window into this tension. According to data collated by the open source effort, 68% of the 500-some Venezuelan citizens they surveyed seemed to think the country is on track for democratic transition. 46% of the experts they surveyed, by contrast, expected Venezuela to remain a stabilized electoral autocracy.

There’s no doubt that things will get better in Venezuela. With global scrutiny, the regime will need to be on its best behavior. And sanctions relief will make a meaningful difference in the lives of regular Venezuelans.

But the fact is that Trump and Rodríguez are now in a strange symbiosis. She needs him to stay in power, he needs her to turn over billions of dollars worth of oil without a fight.

It suggests that there will be no big changes in Venezuela in the near future.

Meet Your Board of Peace

Last month, a group of protesters gathered outside the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed Board of Peace. One of them was Rahim Yagublu, who lives in America and makes ends meet by driving Uber.

Back in his native Azerbaijan is Yagublu’s father, Tofig — a prominent opposition figure and critic of the incumbent regime. In 2025, Tofig was sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges of fraud and forgery. Amnesty International called his case “yet another grim milestone in Azerbaijan’s ongoing campaign to silence those who dare to criticize the government.”

Back in the United States, where the younger Yagublu lives, was Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, an honored invitee onto Trump’s Board of Peace. So Yagublu showed up with a message: “Freedom to political prisoners!”

When Aliyev’s bodyguards caught sight of Yagublu and his fellow protesters, they rushed over, delivering a flurry of blows to the dissidents. Video shows the dictator’s goons attacking Yagublu and his compatriots, unprompted, and without reaction from local police.

In recent months, Trump has become obsessed with the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict. Not because he seems to fully understand the long-standing ethnic and border disputes which have riven the neighbors — he frequently confuses Armenia with Albania — but because he can boast that he ended a war between both parties.

And his brag is, mostly, true. A surprisingly hot conflict in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region came to a sudden halt after Trump got involved and threw America’s weight around. Often obscured in Trump’s self-aggrandizing, however, is what’s actually going on in the region.

Azerbaijan, for example, has been pursuing trumped-up prosecutions of Armenian citizens and soldiers, accusing them of nazism. (A trick borrowed from Aliyev’s pal Vladimir Putin.) It has further ramped up political prosecutions, sometimes in absentia, against journalists and human rights campaigners. In January, police in Baku raided an LGBTQ center and arrested more than 100 people. The country has been ruled by the Aliyev clan almost exclusively since independence in 1991, and the regime seems to be only tightening its grip.

Aliyev and Armenia’s prime minister, the democratically-elected Nikol Pashinyan, are represented on the Board of Peace, as both leaders jockey for favor with Trump. But Armenian analysts say Aliyev is clearly winning. “The terms of peace are now being defined entirely by Azerbaijan,” one analyst told Armenian Weekly.

Indeed, Aliyev has pointedly said that peace is only possible if Armenia amends its constitution to swear off territorial claims to the Nagorno-Karabakh. But there are some indications that the demand is more of a gambit, and that Armenia will only face a new list of demands if it agrees. One advisor to the Armenian government has called the constitutional changes “a trap.”

But the administration is blinded by the PR benefits. Both countries are tripping over themselves to pitch the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity — a transportation corridor connecting both countries. Last month, Vice President JD Vance traveled to both countries to unveil shiny new investment and security pacts with both countries.

In a sign of how clumsily the administration is walking this line, Vance tweeted that he was visiting a memorial to the “1915 Armenian genocide,” apparently forgetting that his administration had rescinded America’s recognition of the mass killing as an act of genocide. He deleted the tweet and offered no explanation. (“An anonymous member of Vance’s team laid the blame over the mix-up on another anonymous team member and Vance was absolved of any responsibility,” OC Media reports.)

Also on the Board are, of course, Trump’s biggest fanboys in Latin America: Argentina’s Javier Milei, who recently secured a $20 billion bailout from America; and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who is getting paid to take in Trump’s deportees.

His best friend in Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, is there, too. Unlike some of his fellow members of the Board, however, Orbán hasn’t quite ruined his country’s democracy. Parliamentary elections are slated for next month and, despite lots of underhanded tactics to sway the public, Orbán is polling well behind his main rival. That’s why the Trump administration is openly campaigning for the incumbent’s re-election.

Take the election polling. Independent pollsters and those with ties to the opposition say the party of opposition leader Péter Magyar is somewhere between eight and 20 points ahead of Orbán’s Fidesz. Pollsters with ties to Fidesz, some of whom receive government subsidies, say Orbán has a five-point lead. One of those pollsters is John McLaughlin, an American who has been polling for Trump since 2011 and is considered to be his most-trusted pollster.

This is just a brief cross-section of the world leaders jockeying to earn favor with the mercurial president. But in so doing, they are re-fashioning themselves into members of a new bloc — an alignment of nations who have to worry about what Trump wants from day-to-day.

We can see that, domestically, this has only emboldened bad actors to cling to power. We don’t yet know how this Bloc of reactionary governments will alter the geopolitical playing field — but we can anticipate that it will probably be for the worse.

America’s Next Top Mullah, DonTrump’s El Comandante Race

Donald Trump’s war in Iran is, let’s just say it, stupid.

It is rash and ill-conceived. It ignores the advice of advisors and generals. It is illegal and immoral. Even its plain upsides, such as the killing of murderous bastard Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are overshadowed by the strategic incoherence.

The Intercept spoke to numerous officials briefed on Trump’s war plans. When they asked one what the administration’s plans were for Iran, post-invasion, the official responded: “Whatever.”

Trump was not shy about his original plans for the country. “I have to be involved in the appointment [of the next Ayatollah], like with Delcy in Venezuela,” he said last week.

Unfortunately “most of the people we had in mind are dead,” Trump told reporters. That is to say: America and Israel killed them. No fear, Trump went on, “we have another group.” Ah, but, “they may be dead also.”

That Trump was looking to prop up one of Iran’s mullahs as a figurehead for the regime portends his plans for Iran: Pacify, not replace, the state; take the oil; move on.

This plan has backfired thus far, in just about every way. Iran is unleashing fury on the rest of the Middle East, a cynical ploy to break Washington’s nerve — which just might work. Israel, whose leader has long salivated about the prospect of exactly this war, is inflicting pain on the state wherever it can. This weekend, that pummeling turned to Iran’s oil sector, blackening the skies with choking smoke and soot. That has drawn Trump’s ire, who had a simple message for Israel: “WTF?”

Oil prices have skyrocketed to $100/barrel, and U.S. gas prices have shot up by $0.50 in just a week. What’s more, Iran’s strikes are violently shaking the Arabian Peninsula’s much-coveted role as a global financial oasis. And the going assessment of the U.S. intelligence community is that the American and Israeli war will likely fail to unseat the existing regime.

In Venezuela and elsewhere, Trump has been on the offensive: Actively working to install and win over sycophants who will help him remake the world in gold leaf. In the Middle East, however, Trump is suddenly on the defensive. If he has any hope to flip Iran from the ‘enemy’ column to ‘friend,’ while also keeping his Gulf allies happy, he will need to score a win. He needs to get the regime to stop firing rockets, he needs to get the Strait of Hormuz open again, and he needs to be able to walk away with tangible prizes.

While things are inherently unpredictable, it’s looking more and more like regime change will require either much more time or much more intensity. If the United States bombs more intensely, over months instead of weeks, or if it sends ground troops — it will not be in service of global peace and stability, it will be in the name of expanding the Trump Bloc.

But Trump doesn’t necessarily want regime change: If the Iranian regime offers fealty, he would no doubt accept. So rather than double-down, many indicators suggest that Trump will rush to make a deal at the earliest opportunity. As other nations have shown, buying Trump’s favor is relatively inexpensive. (With the election of Khamenei’s hardline son as the new Supreme Leader, however, negotiations may yet be a while off.)

Which brings us, finally, to Cuba.

Like in Iran, Donald Trump’s first term in office marked his obsessive attempts to rip up Barack Obama’s careful diplomacy with Cuba. After a significant easing of the embargo in 2015, Trump renewed the economic war on Cuba with gusto. (Something Joe Biden continued.)

In his second term, Trump and his lackey Secretary of State Marco Rubio have intensified economic warfare against Havana.

Some of it was incidental. In diverting flows of oil from Venezuela to America, Washington has effectively cut off a supply of fuel to the Caribbean island — and the White House has warned other nations not to start selling energy to the island. The administration’s plan seems to be to trigger as many crises in Cuba as it can until the regime collapses.

A fuel crisis has crashed into a food crisis, a water crisis, a garbage crisis, and just a general humanitarian crisis.

There is no strategic reason to torment the Cuban people into submission. Cuba has not exactly become the launching-pad for Russia or Chinese aggression in the hemisphere, as some had warned. On the contrary, it is increasingly hard to dispute the fact that America’s long-running embargo has helped keep the Communist regime in place. Cuba could be easily just left alone, were it not for the intense fixation of expatriate Cubans like Rubio.

And so Trump has indicated that Havana will be the next port of call for his gunboats.

Trump is, as always, trying to make a deal first. And those negotiations are every bit as cynical as his plots in Venezuela and Iran.

Spanish newspaper ABC reported in February that the CIA has been holding clandestine negotiations with Alejandro Castro Espín — son of Raúl, nephew of Fidel — to convince the regime to liberalize. The paper says those talks are mostly around allowing more American firms into the country, in exchange for oil exports. Extortion, put another way. It does not seem that these negotiations include political reforms.

“We Cubans have learned to distrust,” writes Yoani Sanchez. “Not out of cynicism, but from experience.”

Sanchez is a Cuban blogger and journalist who has been celebrated as a liberal voice in the country — and who has been repeatedly arrested by the state for that work. She’s been writing in recent weeks how anti-regime chatter has never been so open and widespread. “The hope that this very difficult moment will give way to ‘a free Cuba’ has settled into the collective imagination,” she wrote last month.

We should all want that for Cuba. But the truth is, freedom seems to be patently antithetical to joining the Trump Bloc. In fact, Trump seems to appreciate the speed and ease with which hybrid regimes and autocracies can bribe and flatter him.

There are smart, principled people who have cheered on the bombing of Iran’s theocratic regime, who shot off fireworks when Maduro was captured, who long for a post-Communist Cuba, who want to see long-term peace in Nagorno-Karabakh, and who hope for Orbán to lose power at the ballot box. But in every case, America has made clear that it wants friends more than it wants democracy.

Trump, like Napoleon before him, sees loyal governors as more important than free people.

That’s it for this (very late!) dispatch.

I’ve got a few other dispatches in the works that will be out sooner rather than later. The constant chaos of Trumpworld keeps diverting me from one topic to another.

If you want to read more from me on Iran, particularly Canada’s absurd support for the war, you can see my two recent columns in the Toronto Star: On Trump’s absurd gamble, and on the stack of lies he’s used to rationalize it.

A reminder that I’ve got regular videos coming out on the Soft Power channel over on Youtube. Episode 5 ought to be out very soon.

Finally, if you’re in Calgary this week: I’ll be delivering a lecture at Mount Royal University on Wednesday. (It will also be streamed online.) Sign up now!

Until next time!

When Omar al-Bashir was first indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2008, howls went out in some particular corners of the world.

Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi called it “First World terrorism.” Serbia awarded him a national medal. Xi Jinping maintained an open invitation for al-Bashir, “a friend to the Chinese people,” to visit Beijing. He flew to Johannesburg for an African Union summit and, despite an open warrant for his arrest, he was allowed to fly home without much trouble.

Protests erupted in Khartoum, with Sudanese people waving signs bearing the face of their president and chanting: “We love you President Bashir.”

The head of Sudan’s bar association, a sycophant of the regime, told the AP at the time that the charges were bunk. The ICC prosecutor, he said, “is playing a political role, not a legal one.”1

Al-Bashir was the first sitting world leader indicted by the court. And his government, unsurprisingly, rejected the indictment. “There will be no recognition of or dealing with the white man’s court, which has no mandate in Sudan or against any of its people,” a spokesperson for the government said.

Columnists and analysts derided the ICC for failing to bring al-Bashir to justice.

Justice, despite what al-Bashir’s various allies believed, was sorely needed. His regime, and the various death squads which operated under it, had prosecuted terror in the west of the country, targeting ethnic African tribes. The ICC had reason to believe that al-Bashir and his cronies had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in that campaign. Two years later, it upgraded the charges to include genocide.

But still, al-Bashir eluded justice. The Western world vowed to arrest him should he step foot on their soil, and kept up sanctions on his rogue regime, even as his fellow despots coddled him. That is, until President Barack Obama — citing some “positive actions” from al-Bashir — signed sanctions relief for Khartoum.

Just as the United States gave up on holding him accountable, the Sudanese people redoubled their efforts to get rid of him. Protests had roiled the state throughout the 2010s, but they culminated in the Sudanese revolution in 2018.

What began as cost-of-living protests turned into a full rejection of al-Bashir’s genocidal state. “Bread is what drove people into the streets, but 30 years of hardship and violent oppression is what is keeping them there,” one Sudanese writer told the Middle East Eye at the time.

Finally, in 2019, al-Bashir was removed from power in a coup d’état. He has not been extradited to The Hague, but he remains locked up in a military facility outside Khartoum.

There is no happy ending to this story, particularly not as Sudan is embroiled once more in a monstrous civil war. Al-Bashir, in ill-health, is unlikely to ever stand trial for his crimes. Many of his fellow villains who abetted his 30-year tenure remain in power, at least for now.

Frustrating and depressing as it may be, it is hard not to feel heartened by the unwavering moral certainty expressed by the ICC since 2008. It was not, and still is not, all-powerful. It has no team of sheriffs who can apprehend evil-doers. It cannot topple regimes or enforce justice in states which deny it. But it is a rare international body which is capable of speaking with humanitarian clarity — even if it is not appreciated at the time. The ICC finds itself situated squarely on the long arc of the moral universe, bending it toward justice.

And now, Donald Trump is determined to snap that arc in half.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, a quick meditation on what we may lose if Trump wins in his crusade against the ICC.

Just a few programming notes: This week’s newsletter is a vehicle for the latest episode of Soft Power, all about Donald Trump’s crusade against the International Criminal Court. (Which builds on a column I wrote for the Star.)

To that end, I’d really appreciate if you would do some combination of: Watching the video, liking it, subscribing to my channel, and sharing it with your friends.

Let me pull back the curtain of this business, a bit. The Soft Power project was always supposed to be a short-run series. As such, I knew the only way to master the notoriously-tricky YouTube algorithm would be to spend a bit of money to promote these videos. A few hundred bucks can get tens of thousands of eyeballs on these videos — and they, in turn, like, subscribe, etc, which gets the video in front of even more people. This is all pretty standard.

But shortly after I began the channel, all my promotions came back with a big red reply: “DISAPPROVED.”

It turns out that Google has expressly forbade promoting any YouTube video which depicts or mentions Donald Trump, unless the channel agrees to register as an “election advertiser.” (Which, for the U.S., requires registering with the Federal Elections Commission.) It doesn’t matter if the ads don’t run in the United States. It doesn’t matter that this is clearly journalistic content. (Google policy allows “news organizations to promote their news coverage” even if it includes public figures. But this exemption has been ignored.)

I go through this to illustrate something I say on this newsletter constantly: Big Tech is not a friend to journalism. Google cares more about protecting the feelings of their political overlords than truth-telling. This is just one data point in that story.

Anyway, in other news, readers in Toronto and Saskatoon can catch me at two different events in the coming days.

Later today, I’ll be talking about misinformation in front of the Ucranica Research Institute in Toronto.

On Saturday (Feb 21) I’ll be at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada giving a version of that same talk.

If you’re in either city, come by!

Alright, back to this (brief) dispatch.

That the United States opposes the existence of the International Criminal Court is no great surprise.

When the nations of the world gathered in Rome, in 1998, to debate and vote on the prospect of creating a system of international law with the power to prosecute individuals, there was a real belief that the idea would fail. Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy was more optimistic.

Axworthy: I had been approached by the NGO community — which was working on the discussion at the UN — to see if we would provide the support that we did on the Landmines Treaty, which is to mobilize diplomatic-political engagement. […] So when we went to Rome, we had kind of a double role. One was managing the things inside the hall, and my job and others was to kind of mobilize support on the floor.

I remember getting a call from Madeleine Albright, who was a good friend of mine, and she was very supportive of a court, but the US government was not prepared to give up its exclusionary role. And she called me to commiserate that we were going to get beaten. And I said: Well, I can count votes better than your State Department officials can — and we’re going to win. And we did. And she always chided me for that.

The vote ended up being a landslide. 120 to 7. The court would move forward, so long as nations would ratify the Rome Statute and agree to be subject to the court’s jurisdiction.

In 2000, shortly before leaving the White House, President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute. But, he stressed, he wouldn’t ratify it. He didn’t really support the idea of this yet-undefined international court.

In a statement, Clinton worried that U.S. officials may face “unfounded charges” from the court. America had raised the specter of “politicized prosecutions” which could target American actions abroad.

This hypothetical court would almost certainly deter human rights abuses abroad, Clinton said, but America would never join if its own actions were scrutinized by the court.

It was a perfectly incoherent position from the world’s only superpower. And Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, immediately set to work whacking the court. He passed legislation forbidding any American service member from being held accountable by any international court and essentially committed the country to fighting any ICC investigation which touched the U.S.

Meanwhile, more than 120 other nations ratified the treaty. The ICC began operating in 2002.

And then the genocide in Darfur happened. While Washington’s objections didn’t entirely fade away, it did start actively encouraging the ICC’s investigation into al-Bashir’s crimes.

“Why did the administration relent?” One international law expert wrote in 2005. “One factor is that the ICC neither looks nor acts like an ogre.”2 While the ICC’s work may not be exactly well-known, a poll from that year found that nearly 70% of Americans supported the idea of such an international court.3

The — admittedly somewhat valid — fears were proven wrong. The ICC wasn’t some nefarious European scheme to enforce their brand of liberalism, nor an institution prone to weaponization by ideological factions. It was a court that was imbued with professionalism and a seriousness of purpose. It sought to prove that war criminals and dictators could be held accountable. They could go to jail.

President Barack Obama cautiously engaged with the court further, joining as an observer and even promising to help bring some of those wanted by the court to justice.

“It’s clear that joining the court is not on the table,” Stephen Rapp, Obama’s Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, said in 2010. But, he said, America can be slow. “I mean, it took us 40 years to ratify the Genocide Convention.”

With time, he said, “there’s a possibility that we may gain confidence in this institution and that would enable us to move forward. And who knows what the future may hold?”

The future held, unfortunately, Donald Trump.

The Trump administration declared war on all international fora. He railed against the World Health Organization and crusaded against the Paris climate accords. But he has reserved special scorn for the International Criminal Court.

The attack on the ICC began, in earnest, when the court announced it was investigating the possibility that U.S. forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. William Burke-White, then a Brookings scholar, put the prospect of this happening in plain terms: “The prosecution of American service members for acts in Afghanistan could have been easily avoided.”

America could have, he said, simply not committed human rights abuses. It could have done more to prevent the killing of civilians in coalition airstrikes, it could have sworn off torture, it could have decided not to set up black sites around the world. But, as we know, it did all of those things.

America could have, still, averted this prospect of ICC prosecution by simply holding its own citizens accountable. Apart from a few egregious examples which led to court-martial, that didn’t happen.

But the United States protested enough until it got its way. The ICC — which was also investigating crimes committed by the Taliban and other groups — de-prioritized and deferred the investigation, under pressure from Washington. It was a clear example of the court playing a political role, not a legal one.

Despite that, Trump punished the court anyway. In 2020, the White House issued an executive order slapping sanctions on ICC staff, screaming about the court’s “transgressions.” The sanctions were fairly limited, but they contained a clause promising to target anyone “directly engaged in any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any U.S. personnel without the consent of the U.S.” That raised the specter that many, many more names could be added to the list. And America would use its monopolistic control over the world’s financial system to do it.

Trump left office early the following year, albeit with some resistance. President Joe Biden cancelled that executive order shortly thereafter, and there was relatively little damage done.

Whatever tribulations the ICC had faced, it did seem that the court survived the most dangerous part of its history. Its creation was unlikely, opposition was stiff, the attacks became unhinged, and yet it was forging ahead. In 2023, it finally issued an indictment for one of the worst war criminals out there: Vladimir Putin.

But the Hamas attacks of October 7 changed everything. Israel prosecuted its war against the terror group without much regard for keeping the perpetrators of the massacre alive long enough to prosecute, and it tolerated inflicting staggering civilian death tolls to achieve its end.

A year into that war, an indictment for Benjamin Netanyahu became inevitable. The ICC had been investigating not just the impact of Israel’s war on Gaza, but years of Israeli policies designed to shrink and eliminate the Palestinian state. Frequent, repeated statements from Netanyahu’s cabinet underlined that mission.

When the indictment was finally filed, it provoked howls from the Biden administration, which called the warrants “outrageous.”

The Democrat kept his opposition limited to written statements. His Republican successor, as we know, upgraded that opposition to action.

The ICC’s process, the White House said, was “politicized.” It froze the assets and banned from the country the ICC’s prosecutor, its key staff, and a list of its judges — putting them on the sanctions list alongside terrorists and despots. It went further, sanctioning a raft of Palestinian NGOs, accusing them of being “directly engaged in ICC’s illegitimate targeting of Israel.”

In so doing, Trump threw his arms around Netanyahu in the same way Xi Jinping and the rest did to Omar al-Bashir all those years ago. There are differences, of course. But the consequences are actually worse.

These attacks are making the lives of these ICC judges hell, and they risk disrupting the critical work of the court — not just in its prosecution of Netanyahu, but in a raft of other cases, including the case against al-Bashir.

Canada and Europe have the power to do something about this. They can issue blocking orders, ensuring that the American sanctions have null effect outside of America. At present, European and Canadian banks are complying with Trump’s economic warfare. In the name of risk management. Canada and Europe have the power to prevent that, but thus far they seem uninterested.

I wrote nearly three years ago about the critical importance of international law in the name of deterring atrocities. Back then, it seemed that maybe — just maybe — we were heading in the right direction.

Things have grown dire quickly. We now face the prospect of our system of international law, one painstakingly built over nearly a century, falling apart in a matter of months.

We should not let that happen.

Melos was, stuck firmly between two empires, an island of quiet stability.

The Persian empire had been booted out of the territory around the Aegean Sea, which left just the Athenian Empire and Sparta cohabitating along the archipelago and island chains. While both powers were rivals, each commanding loyalty from a network of city-states, they maintained a parity and cooperation that kept the peace.

Melos had fought with the Greeks against the invading Persians, but as a longstanding ally of Sparta it declined to join the new Greek empire. So Melos remained neutral, delicately balancing itself between two powers.

Then, towards the end of the 5th century BCE, the tiny state had to make a decision. Competition between Athens and Sparta broke into open war, and the city states were forced to pick sides or face invasion and ruin. Athens raided part of Melos and demanded tribute. Faced with an existential threat, Melos abandoned its neutrality — and provided aid to Sparta.

This was a tense moment. Melos was the easternmost Spartan ally, and thus one of the easiest for Athens to reach. Knowing they had a massive advantage, Athens sent an emissary to deliver an ultimatum.

“We have come against you now because of the injuries you have done us,” the Athenians told the Melians. 1

There were merely two options, they said: Surrender or destruction. There was no use wasting time looking for a third way. “If we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness in us,” the Athenians said. “Whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.” The only way to satisfy the empire would be to destroy or enslave Melos. “We recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get.”

According to a dialogue recorded by Athenian historian Thucydides, the Melians tried to reason just the same. “In our view it is useful that you should not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men,” they pleaded. States under military threat should enjoy “fair play and just dealing,” they said.

But, the Athenians said, there was a “law of nature” at play, “to rule wherever one can.” This wasn’t a new rule, but an old one. “We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you, or anybody else with the same power as ours, would be acting in precisely the same way.”

The emissary explained: “A standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that, in fact, the strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak accept what they have to accept.”

The Melians kept arguing. “We trust that the gods will give us fortune as good as yours, because we are standing for what is right against what is wrong.” Alliances and friendship, they said, would win out.

The Melians refused to submit, so the Athenians organized a blockade of Melos and prepared for broader war against Sparta.

Thucydides tells us that Athens “put to death all the men of military age who they took, and sold the women and the children as slaves.” Athens sent a colony of 500 men to remake Melos in their image.

This epic debate between the Athenians and the Melians would be read for millennia to come, as a primordial text on how stronger powers interact with weaker states in broader competition.

More than 2,000 years later, historian Francis Fukuyama considers that dialogue in The End of History and the Last Man.

“Those who have read Thucydides can note the parallels between the rivalry of Athens and Sparta and the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union,” he writes.

But true as Athens’ might makes right philosophy may have been back then, Fukuyama writes, it has grown outdated. Thousands of years of intellectual progress from all sides — technological, philosophical, theological — gave us the wonders of liberalism. We had, he figured, evolved past this need to be powerful more than just. “The civil peace brought about by liberalism should logically have its counterpart in relations between states,” Fukuyama writes.

The end of history would be the victory of liberalism over tyranny and the advent of a relative global stability, he figured. And it was closer than you may think.

Earlier this month, onstage at the World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed a world anxious about his American counterpart and wondered just when history was supposed to be ending.

Carney: It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.

And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

Well, it won’t.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to consider the prevailing theories about the state of things: The end of history, the end of the end of history, and the uncertain future.

It’s been a wacky year. And it’s only January.

Two weeks ago, I was talking to Democratic Congressman Bill Keating about his plans to introduce legislation to forbid American annexation of friendly territory. Not long after, Trump escalated his threats to acquire Greenland — peacefully, through economic coercion, or forcefully — while NATO appeared stricken by panic and indecision. Then came the dueling WEF speeches, where Trump’s unhinged and paranoid world of slop, vengeance, and memes came up against Carney’s defence-and-critique of the liberal order.

As of today, Trump claims to have rescinded his plans to annex Greenland. We’ll see how long that lasts. He’s still, ostensibly, governor of Venezuela. After much bluster, it seems he’s letting the Iranian state solidify control after mass murder. He appears to be contemplating regime change in Cuba and who knows where else.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, Trump’s brownshirts continue their terror. The public is increasingly irate at the squads of secret police abducting their neighbors, and the administration does not seem interested in backing down. As this worsens, Trump will almost certainly try to distract from his domestic disasters by creating more disasters abroad so that gullible rubes like will continue to declare “Trump won.”

This dispatch is, however, not about Trump and it will mention him as infrequently as possible. Because, between my last dispatch and this Episode 3 of Soft Power, I’m exhausted by his crackpot foreign doctrine.

But, please, give this episode a watch, subscribe, like, and share with your friends and enemies alike. It would be enormously appreciated.

Onto the dispatch.

A Post-Historical World

Fukuyama did not believe that history had ended. Only that it was in the process of ending.

But the only way to complete our evolution and to finish history would be to finally slay a system making its last gasping breaths. To finally put down the geopolitical power dynamics sketched out by Thucydides and live in a world of structure, reason, justice, and dignity. If history was a study of how we interact with each other, then achieving stasis — a period where nothing particularly interesting happens, forever — would mean history would lose its purpose.

Unfortunately, there were still Athenians among us. Thinkers and doers — from Machiavelli to Henry Kissinger — had basically adapted the Athenian view of political relations. They called it realism.

Realists tended to believe either that the great power competition between two (or more) large, powerful states would keep the world in a relatively-peaceful stasis; or that blocs of powerful alliances could manage a similar result through their interlocking interests. But realism tells us that relative peace is only possible if countries maximize their power and operate with self-interest. Strategic competition begets a geopolitical tension which keeps everyone from killing each other.

But Fukuyama believed this was just a new way to justify an antiquated, illogical system. The great power competition existed only because the USSR continued to expend endless treasure and brutality to keep its citizens deluded and deterred from trying to change things. He believed that this was not a natural or sustainable thing — indeed, he wrote his book the year after the total disintegration of the Soviet Union.

When he did, he looked back to a 1978 essay from Czech dissident Václav Havel called The Power of the Powerless. In it, Havel considers a greengrocer living under Communist rule. He hangs a sign in his shop window: “Workers of the world, unite!”

The grocer, Havel writes, does not believe in this slogan nor the state which mandates it. Putting the sign up is a ritual of subjugation, a sign that he recognizes — like most citizens do — that state ideology must be respected, observed, and repeated.

“Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world,” Havel wrote. “It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”

This is what Alexei Yurchak would later call hypernormalization: Regular people observing the rituals of their totalitarian state, who become the only thing keeping the state alive.

Havel considered what would happen if the grocer takes the sign down. “He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game,” Havel writes. He stops voting, stops observing the rituals, starts protesting. He will be punished, of course, by those who are just as sick of the system as he, but who aren’t ready to reject it yet.

But, by attempting to “live within the truth,” the dissident could eventually bring the system down from within. Waking up from this hypernormalization spreads like a virus. If enough people stop observing the rituals of their own oppression — and stop policing their fellow citizens — the mechanics of state power won’t be enough to stop its own collapse.

Havel, eventually, did exactly that, after a series of peaceful youth protests swept through the country, culminating in an ever-wider strike. By the end of 1989, the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia had fallen away and Havel was declared president by a unanimous vote of the national assembly.

Each of these discrete events — the greengrocer taking his sign down, Havel writing his essay — were shuffles toward the end of history, Fukuyama thought. It was evidence that, as liberalism became the default operating system of the world, modern man anywhere and everywhere would try their best to install it.

People had developed a taste for wealth, freedom, and for the more amorphous feeling of recognition, a desire to be regarded with worth and value by the system in which they participate. If humans would continue striving for those three things, totalitarian states should never exist again, great power competition would never again define geopolitics, and realism would become anachronistic.

There might be economic competition, Fukuyama wrote, but there would be no need for huge world wars. “The post-historical world would still be divided into nation-states,” he wrote, “but its separate nationalisms would have made peace with liberalism and would express themselves increasingly in the sphere of private life alone. Economic rationality, in the meantime, will erode many traditional features of sovereignty as it unifies markets and production.”

Nations may still invade their neighbors and fight wars over religious divides, cultural differences, border disputes, or in competition for resources, he writes. But the part of the world which has fully learned from all its historical antecedents — the liberal, democratic world, that is — should prepare for a new era of peace and stability. “The post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated over the desire to risk one’s life in a battle for pure prestige, and in which universal and rational recognition has replaced the struggle for domination.”

In Fukuyama’s view, the form of this post-history was coming into view. The United Nations was asserting new relevance, NATO was transitioning to a post-Cold War footing, the World Trade Organization was showing itself capable of disentangling complex disputes, whilst a mess of other acronyms — IATA, IMO, ICAO, ISA, ICJ, ITO — were preventing disputes, resolving disagreements, and fostering cooperation and good global governance. But even more than that, states had become so rich, happy, and successful that they simply had no incentive to break any norms in the first place.

He didn’t use the words, but Fukuyama was arguing that the rules-based international order had enabled a kind of global stability that we would be insane to ever jeopardize it.

Friedrich Hegel believed that humanity would achieve its apex when some great man imbued with the spirit of history, a weltgeist, would finally usher us into a new era. Friedrich Nietzsche believed it would be an übermensch would replace our dead god and end history through his own power and will. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels thought history would end, if only capitalism could finally be uprooted.

But Friedrich Francis Fukuyama was thinking like the inhabitants of Melos. He believed that a global system of cooperation, collaboration, and alliances was in the process of delivering us into a nearly-unbreakable system of peace and good governance.

History, as you may have noticed, didn’t end. Post-Soviet Russia scrambled to reclaim its lost territory and shelled its new democratic institutions. America launched a global war on terror which bombed and invaded nations at a faster pace than it had during the Cold War. A global struggle by ideological radicals imagined throwing off the yoke of messy liberalism and replacing it with the simplicity of theocracy.

The advent of Donald Trump in 2016 coincided with a broader, political rejection of the things Fukuyama held up as altruistic goods. People, more and more, were convicted to reject transnational institutions, free trade, social acceptance of minorities, the free flow of people, and liberalism itself. Far from “the birth pangs of a new and generally (though not universally) more democratic order,” as Fukuyama wrote in 1992, this was a prolonged reactionary backlash to an attempt to end history.

But it has been in the post-COVID era that the rejection of this liberal world has reached new heights. What Fukuyama had never grappled with was the possibility that people — driven by economic uncertainty, social anxieties, environmental pressures, and propaganda — would find themselves breaking the rituals of liberalism.

Have We Been Living Within A Lie?

Onstage at Davos, Mark Carney was also thinking about Havel’s greengrocer and his “workers of the world, unite!” sign.

“He doesn’t believe it, no-one does,” Carney said, “but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along.” The Soviet Union survived not because it ever told the truth, “but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true.” Like Fukuyama and Havel, Carney observes that requiring these daily rituals also made the Soviet system fragile.

But whereas Fukuyama holds up this example as evidence of our slow march towards liberalism, Carney holds it up for a considerably different reason.

“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection,” he said. This wasn’t a march to the end of history, he said, but an illusion.

“We placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”

There were some inherent lies in this system, he said. Strong nations — America, in particular — would exempt themselves from this system whenever it saw fit. The United States, for example, refused to sign the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court, so that no American soldiers or officials could be held accountable for war crimes.

Weak nations continued to be dominated by strong ones, the system just made this subjugation less visible. The Democratic Republic of the Congo would continue going through cycles of violence and instability, even as multinational companies siphoned out diamonds and gold — perhaps because of that fact.

Yet other countries — China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Thailand, and so on — would simply ignore the global liberal order and concern themselves with neither freedom nor dignity.

“This fiction was useful,” Carney said. “And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.”

In that way, America operated like the town sheriff: We all knew she wielded too much power, and did so selectively as she made herself rich. But we strived for that end of history, that day when our global system of rules and laws would make American superpower obsolete and where we could evolve into this good global governance. But, in so doing, we never planned for what may happen if she decided to wield that power against us.

Starting last year, perhaps even earlier, America stopped believing in the system it helped to build and which it has led for three-quarters of a century.

It is time to follow suit, Carney said. “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.” To live within the truth means recognizing that the system we built — this liberal order of laws, economic integration, shared supply chains, international fora for chitchat — was now being weaponized by the very leaders who were supposed to be felled by it.

Viktor Orbán has brandished the rules of the EU like a mace, hitting his fellow countrymen in the face as they try to apportion more aid to Ukraine. Vladimir Putin issues INTERPOL red notices to spook his adversaries. North Korea and Myanmar employ office buildings worth of scammers and hackers to catfish and phish their way into bank accounts around the globe, using the profit to keep their own citizens under heel. Donald Trump uses his mighty sanction regime to make life miserable for the judges of the International Criminal Court.

And so, the prime minister said, “stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.” History hasn’t ended, it’s going backwards to “a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.”

In this new system, like the old system, liberal nations will have to hunker down as powers try and shake them down. Eventually, liberal countries will become less prosperous and powers will become less powerful, as we realize why we built this system of rules and order in the first place.

Everyone will know that striving for Fukuyama’s end of history is still the right course, and yet radical self-interest driven by populism and risk-management performed by liberals will continue pushing us back into the paranoia of the 20th century.

And so, what do we do?

Turning to his like-minded colleague, the President of Finland Alexander Stubb, Carney said it was time to dust off that old R-word and slap on a new coat of paint. Now is the time, he said, for “values-based realism”.

Finland has spent much of the past year fleshing out this idea. In their national security and foreign policy, published last year, Helsinki swears it still believes in democracy, international law, human rights, peace, equality — liberalism, in short. But the realism bit means cooperating with countries which “do not share our views and values.” It means believing in strength at home, tighter cooperation with its neighbours, and forging stronger bonds with any other nation which could serve Finland’s interests.

“In the long term,” Stubb explained last year, “it is in Finland’s best interest that the multilateral system remains as strong as possible. But we cannot exclude ourselves from decision-making that takes place partly outside this system. Nor can we isolate ourselves from countries that do not fully support multilateralism. We will promote our interests in all situations, based on our own values.”

Carney echoed that sentiment. “We aim to be both principled and pragmatic,” he said. That means “engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.”

This speech, as I’m sure you’ve seen, has lit the world up. It has been heralded as the most clear-eyed challenge yet to the Donroe Doctrine. It was so lauded that it has provoked an ongoing tantrum from the thin-skinned president.

The trouble is, Carney is elucidating a view of the world that isn’t all that different from Trump’s own foreign policy.

Trump just calls it “flexible realism.” (Dispatch #147)

Under this flexible realism, Trump promises to push shared norms with liberal nations and cooperate with illiberal ones. He wants to advance American interests, forge new trade deals, and keep the world from killing itself by advancing American power — or so he says.

But, surely, we can’t all be realists?

The End of the Future

Let me pause on this walk down the garden path through the various schools of internationalist thought and just tell you what I think.

Mark Carney and Alexander Stubb have both offered, in their own ways, the most sobering and clear-eyed looks at the state of the world as it really is. Unlike their hopelessly unpopular and hobbled compatriots Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, these men have both domestic and international legitimacy to elucidate what this new world order looks like.

But I can’t get away from the fact that this view of the world is deeply cynical.

For starters, the entire idea that the rules-based international order was a fiction is, I think, a very hollow idea. Any and all systems of law are both riven with inconsistencies and incoherence, and they only survive because we choose to believe in it despite those problems.

In systems of law, we know that some misdeeds will never be criminalized, cops won’t catch every criminal, courts won’t always convict the right ones. Creating just laws and enforcing them equitably is always an aspirational exercise — but we tell ourselves the fiction that justice is blind and that a system of rules can protect the weak from the strong. It is only when those systems manifestly do not do the things which they promise that we really give up on them.

But, by every account, our system was working. Insofar as it was failing, it was failing because it was both attacked and used by populists in their quest for domestic power.

What Carney and Stubb are arguing is, really, that we must retreat from the revanchism of this illiberal populism. They acknowledge that our system of international order was right, that it was working, but that concerted attacks on it require us to declare it a failure — at least for now.

Certainly, Carney doesn’t believe that free trade was a mistake. He doesn’t think we should take the European Union flag out of the window, or abandon the International Telecommunications Union.

What he really seems to be suggesting is that the imperative to make ourselves strong and nimble requires us to abandon, either partially or temporarily, our work on perfecting this system of global rules.

What separates the Canada-Finnish approach from the American one is that the liberal powers want to stick up for globalism where it’s convenient, and America wants to expend energy trying to dismantle it further. It’s not a minor difference, it is indeed the big distinction between the two camps.

America is stomping through the china shop. Carney is suggesting it would be better to forge ad hoc alliances on the fly to defend against the rogue bull, rather than trying to catch the china as it falls — or, better yet, to restrain the bull.

The Carney school of thought seems to spend little time contemplating how these institutions can be shields and swords, not merely baggage which slows us down. Indeed, the very reason that America — and Russia, El Salvador, Hungary, the other enemies of liberalism — want to destroy these institutions is because they are effective, at least to a degree.

Trump is not sanctioning the judges of the ICC because they are useless, but because the ICC could actually hold Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes. He is not trying to support “patriots” in Europe because the EU is wholly ineffective, but because he wants to dismantle a united front. He is not trying to circumvent the United Nations because it is too slow, but because it slows down his own ability to act recklessly.

I still can’t get past this idea. I think Carney’s call to take the sign down satisfies this feeling of urgency and anxiety, but I’m not sure it is the most strategic route. While I’ve never bought into the whole end of history hokum — whether it’s being advanced by Hegel, Marx, or Fukuyama — I believe that recent years have well illustrated that if you don’t stick up for institutions when they come under attack, you regret it later.

Still, even if we accept that Carney, Stubb, and the lot are failing to stick up for our institutions of world order, I am heartened by his appeal to build better things to go along with them. But this brings me to my bigger concern.

“The middle powers must act together,” Carney said, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” That old order “is not coming back,” he said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.” Instead, he says, think to something “bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

Okay. How?

Certainly, the vestige of the liberal world — most, not all, of Europe; the Commonwealth states of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on; Japan and South Korea; and a hodge-podge of other nations who are skeptical of liberalism but hostile towards fascism — can figure out how to protect themselves and keep their globalized economies humming. But, whether it is defending what works or building better things to make the world safer and more fair, what’s the plan?

But despite promising a salvage job of the rules-based international order, Carney never explains what this new regime will look like.

Canada was instrumental in founding the International Criminal Court, and is conspicuously silent as Trump tries to destroy it for daring to indict Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes. Canada and Finland were founding members of the Arctic Council, a body that has basically fallen into disuse because of Russia’s presence on it. The consortium of middle powers have long invested time, energy, and money into the structures of the United Nations, a system which is now hopelessly taken over by the rogue states we hoped to constrain.

If Carney has alternatives for these institutions, he has yet to sketch them out. If he has ideas on how to make these institutions more effective — more realist let’s say — he hasn’t told anyone. If he has thoughts on how we may improve their defenses from the constant flurry of blows, he hasn’t put them to paper.

Instead, we seem intent on retreating back into history: To a time when alliances kept us safe as we tried to build up the scaffolding for the end of history — except, this time, nobody seems to have much interest in putting up new drywall.

But we’re not back in the great power competition of yore. Then, it was an epic fight of liberalism vs. totalitarianism. In the power games of today, nobody represents our values. Today, it is hybrid regimes duking it out for maximum domestic returns, and in order to satisfy the nationalists and xenophobes in their own countries. And this ideology is rising in Europe, the epicenter of the alliance of supposedly-enlightened middle powers.

Carney deserves enormous credit for laying out the world as it really is.

But I can’t help but think he should have told us what the world ought to be.

That’s it for this week. I’ve already done my self-promo elsewhere in the dispatch, so I’ll leave it there.

Until next time!

William Walker was greeted in Nicaragua as a liberator, by some.

Walker was a lawyer and newspaper publisher who had become obsessed with the idea of expanding the United States southward. He got into the business of leading bands of armed men to declare the creation of new, civilized, states. They were freebooters, or filibusterers.

Nicaragua had been independent for some decades, and it had been racked by civil war and infighting. Part of the country had grown rich, thanks especially to investments from American oligarch Cornelius Vanderbilt who built a complex network of steam lines, stage coaches, and railways which could carry gold prospectors from New York, through Nicaragua, to San Francisco. This nouveau riche was concentrated in the city of Granada, who supported the Conservative Party.

But much of the country remained rural and poor. And they turned to the Liberal Party. Forced from power by their Conservative rivals, the Liberals turned to William Walker.

Walker and a boatload of American mercenaries landed in Realejo in 1855. This filibuster was there for one purpose — to colonize.

This was the strange era of the Monroe Doctrine, a nebulous concept of Washington’s dominance in the Americas. Its namesake, President James Monroe, didn’t contribute much to the concept beyond a single speech. (“The American continents…are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”) It had, rather, become a slogan that could be used to justify all manner of U.S. action in Latin America, good and bad.

“If we want Central America, the cheapest, easiest, and quickest way to get it is to go and take it,” proclaimed Senator Albert G. Brown in 1858. “And if France and England interfere, read the Monroe Doctrine to them.”

In this strange era, Americans believed they had both the right and the duty to stretch their arms throughout the continent — and with it, they could civilize the savages through the establishment of massive plantations reliant on slave labor.

They organized, amongst other ways, in the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society of American secessionists who wanted a massive slave-holding empire wrapping around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Others, of course, focused on seceding from the United States first.

Walker didn’t wait. Invited as a liberator, he made himself king in 1856. One of his first acts, even as he continued fighting local forces, was to legalize slavery — giving Nicaragua the odious distinction of being the only country in the Spanish Americas to abolish the enslavement of man, only to re-institute it.1

“That which you ignorantly call ‘Filibusterism’ is not the offspring of hasty passion or ill-regulated desire,” Walker wrote in his memoirs, “it is the fruit of the sure, unerring instincts which act in accordance with laws as old as the creation.”2

That ‘law,’ he invokes is grotesque race pseudoscience: The idea that a pure white race can and must subjugate supposedly savage peoples. “Whenever barbarism and civilization…meet face to face, the result must be war.”

Walker’s occupation of Nicaragua would only last about two years. While he never did actually restart the African slave economy, he did force poor Nicaraguans onto the plantations and unleash a huge amount of violence and sickness on the country. So offensive did Walker become that he was opposed not only by domestic Nicaraguan forces, but also by soldiers from Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and resources sent by Vanderbilt — whose business interests Walker had nationalized.

Walker’s regime eventually fell, and he attempted to burn the whole country down as he staged a hasty retreat. In a bizarre twist, Walker was eventually forced into capitulation and captured — not by local forces, but by an American commander.

Walker blamed his downfall on “the cowardice of some, the incapacity of others, and the treachery of many.” But, he swore, he had “yet written a page of American history which it is impossible to forget or erase. From the future, if not from the present, we may expect just judgement.”

He was, unfortunately, right. While the United States government had been hostile to southern slavers’ adventurism in Latin America, and annoyed at the diplomatic headaches caused by the freebooters, it eventually made expansionism state policy. In the years that followed, it occupied Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and a host of other states — sometimes annexing the territory for good. America invaded, meddled, and overthrew governments in the name of building canals and promoting the banana trade; it blockaded ports and collected debts; it used tariffs and economic power to bully Latin American governments into subservience. In 1912, America invaded Nicaragua and occupied it for nearly 20 years.

Walker didn’t live to see any of this. Upon trying to return to Central America in 1860, he was arrested by the British and handed over to Honduras. At 36 years old, Walker was tried, convicted of filibusterism, and executed.

Walker wasn’t an aberration, however. His mistake was launching his adventurism too early. It was America’s position that its race, riches, and might gave it a special authority to decide the fate of its southern neighbors — perhaps its northern neighbors, too. President Teddy Roosevelt codified this in his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which restyled America, a “civilized society,” into an “international police power” which was free to punish “chronic wrongdoing” or even just “a general loosening of the ties of civilized society.” Washington had the free hand to define those terms as it saw fit.

America would, over the years, grow mortified at this era and try to forget all about it. Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin Delano, would replace his Corollary with the “Good Neighbor Policy.” Nearly a century later, after the policies came back in vogue in the name of fighting Communism, Secretary of State John Kerry would try to bury it even further by proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine “dead.”

Well, it’s back.

In December, President Donald Trump unveiled his National Security Strategy — the Donroe Doctrine, the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”

With it comes Trump’s racketeers, his gangsters for capitalism.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about an American ideology of meddling, theft, piracy, regime change and occupation.

And how it will work. At least, for a time.

There is a phrase in America’s recently released National Security Strategy that is so absurd, so simultaneously meaningless and terrifying, that I can’t help but marvel at it.

The United States now operates on the basis of “Flexible Realism.”

I remarked a few months ago that you can’t be a realist if you’re an idiot. (Dispatch #138) The administration has unknowingly offered a rejoinder: Fine, they say, we won’t be real realists.

The strategy promises America will “seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.” At the same time, it will “push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms, furthering our interests as we do so.”

You don’t have to stretch your imagination to realize that this will mean even better relations with despotic, corrupt, criminal regimes and worse ties with liberal, transparent, democratic governments. (Indeed it also promises to boost “patriotic” European political parties.)

Some of the (ir)rationale of this new policy is economic. Trump has made it abundantly clear that he is hungry for the billions of petro-bucks offered up by the Gulf states, while he sees Europe and Canada as competition for manufacturing jobs.

Some of it is a matter of inter-personal relations. Autocrats are simply more free to flatter and sooth, whilst European leaders can’t be seen looking weak to their populations of horrified voters.

It is also a function of racism. Trump sees white Europeans as failing to uphold their birthright as Europeans, whereas nationals of every other country are judged based on his preconceptions of their heritage. (Wise sultans of the desert, Somalians come from a “shithole,” the Middle East is full of radicals, sneaky Chinese, etc.)

More broadly, it really is a question of values. Trump does not value cooperation or the shared norms he claims to represent — and he doesn’t want other countries putting too much value in those things, either. More than anything, he does not value democratic legitimacy. If anything, it can be a sign of weakness.

This is all stuck in here in this foreign policy document, couched under the language of “realism,” because it is a signal that America intends to return to an era where any and all action can and will be rationalized by a guiding philosophy so amorphous and incoherent that it could be simultaneously interpreted to suit non-intervention and intervention; trade or blockade; yes and no.

And, lo, that’s exactly how it’s being deployed already.

In Venezuela, flexible realism has justified a Potemkin coup d’état — the symbolic removal of a criminal president to transform the state into an oil-supplying client. In Iran, Trump seems to be weighing between installing a chosen king with keeping the murderous state as is. Finally, in Greenland, Trump has put new vigor behind his plans to build a hemispheric empire.

However morally bankrupt and absolutely brazen this is, it is incredibly likely that America will eke out marginal wins on each of these files. And, in each of those tales, a genuine democratic and popular movement is being crushed along the way.

Gangsters for Petroleum

Late last year, I got to meet David Smolansky.

His family hails from Ukraine, where his grandparents fled the totalitarianism and antisemitism of the Soviet Union; relocated to Cuba, only for his parents to quit under growing pressures from the the Communist state; landing finally in Venezuela. In 2013, Smolansky ran for mayor El Hatillo, one of the municipalities within Caracas, with the centre-left opposition Popular Will party.

The Venezuelan state had been wobbling when President Hugo Chavez ran for re-election in 2012. He won that election, marked as it was by intimidation and violence, albeit more narrowly than anyone expected. When Chavez died the year after, the hastily-installed Nicolas Maduro moved quickly to call fresh elections.

Wobbly as it was, the Venezuelan state was still faring relatively well. Inflation was growing, but manageable. Oil royalties were dropping, but oil demand looked strong going forward. Arguably the largest issue for voters was rising crime.

Maduro claimed victory in those elections, but just barely (and through some fraud, the opposition said). But so, too, did Smolansky. Things didn’t get better — they got much, much worse. Oil production and revenue bottomed-out, crime rose, inflation skyrocketed. And the regime spent its time arresting and hunting down opposition leaders.

“If this isn’t a totalitarian system, then I don’t know what can explain what is happening in this country,” Smolansky told the Associated Press in 2014.

As of late last year, UNHCR estimated there were nearly 8 million Venezuelan refugees and emigres who had fled the increasingly-despotic, violent, corrupt, and incompetent regime. Smolansky is one of them: In 2017 he was removed from office and sentenced to prison for failing to crack down on anti-regime protests. Knowing what awaited him at home, Smolansky fled — and became an advocate for his compatriots who lived in exile against their wishes.

“The only solution is regime change,” he said in 2021. It was a recognition of a political leadership that had so corrupted itself and the state around it that there was no reform that could ever salvage it. The Maduro regime had deployed extensive lethal force against its own people, and had committed to disabling the already-weakened democracy which had run for decades.

Compounding the social crisis was an economic one. Over about 15 years, Venezuela earned about $800 billion in oil revenues — but the state had hardly delivered that amount worth of social services. Investigations began to uncover why: Tens of billions of dollars were discovered in bank accounts tied to employees of state companies and their political minders. As time wore on, the corruption ran the oil rigs into disrepair and output plummeted.

Plenty was stolen under Chavez, when times were good. When the theft continued into bad times, things got worse. To make up the difference, Maduro sent oil to China and Iran; it snuck gold through neighboring countries; and it liaised with rebels and gangs to trafficking huge amounts of Colombian cocaine.

The Venezuelan people tried to finally exorcise this ghoul through the 2018 elections, which were widely condemned as fraudulent — including by the Venezuelan people. There were protests, sanctions, crackdowns. They tried again in 2024: Same fraud, same protests, same crackdown.

Smolansky had been right all those years ago: Regime change was necessary. Indeed, the Venezuelan people had tried very hard to change the regime, and the regime couldn’t take the hint.

When I met Smolansky, at the Halifax International Security Forum last November, he was grinning. He was working closely with Edmundo González, the opposition figure who almost-certainly won the 2024 election; and María Corina Machado, the protest leader who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was sure that it was going to happen. The regime was finally going to go.

Why? Because Donald Trump.

He didn’t seem to think it would be through military action, though maybe. He believed that concerted pressure — stronger sanctions, more action on Maduro’s drug-trafficking empire, pressure on Venezuela’s few remaining allies — would finally give the regime the one last push it needed to fall. Although, would targeted military action really be so bad, if it meant the regime would stop killing its citizens?

Fast forward a few months, and it happens. Missiles pound Venezuelan military installations and American MH-47 Chinooks fly low over the capital with marines aboard, tasked with grabbing the kleptocrat.

As the raid unfolded via cellphone footage and rampant online speculation, one interesting question percolated: Where the hell are Venezuela’s anti-air systems?

Caracas had spent years buying advanced Russian air defense systems — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth even joked about it after the fact. (“Seems those Russian air defenses didn’t quite work so well, did they?”) And yet not a single American plane had been hit, apart from one Chinook hit by small arm fire.

If America had knocked offline the entire Venezuelan defense apparatus, it hadn’t killed many people while doing so. An estimated 57 Venezuelans died in the raid, including two civilians, 32 Cuban security personnel, and 23 members of the Venezuelan military — including, reportedly, Maduro’s personal bodyguard Juan Escalona.

Perhaps the Venezuelan defensive systems were poor, badly kept, not manned, jammed by American cyber and electronic warfare systems, bombed into inconsequence, or otherwise not online.

Or, perhaps, the Venezuelan military were told to stand down.

It felt awfully speculative, at first. Why would the regime permit such an operation?

And then, hours after Maduro had been snatched and hauled to New York, Trump made a perplexing statement. Asked directly as to whether he would support Machado as the interim president, Trump demurred. It would be, he said, “very tough for her to be the leader,” given she “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country.”

America had removed Maduro but it hadn’t overthrown the regime. In fact, his operation had kept it perfectly intact. So much so that Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, simply took over.

Heightening the surrealism of this transfer of power: Earlier this week, Rodríguez appointed Juan Escalona, Maduro’s ex-bodyguard, as the minister responsible for her presidential office — the same bodyguard who had, reportedly, been killed in the raid.

This has all suited Trump fine. “We’re in charge” he proclaimed, warning Rodríguez that “probably worse” fortune will befall her if she resists American demands.

And demands, America has. “We’re going to take our oil back. Well we’re going to run everything. We’re going to run it, fix it.”

Rodríguez seems fine with this arrangement. She has been an integral part of Maduro’s narco-state. In 2017, as the country’s foreign minister, she set up a $500,000 donation to his first inauguration committee, directly from the cash-strapped state oil company. There’s good reason to think her penchant for flattery has continued.

Already, America has gone on a spree of seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, and the hobbled Venezuelan state doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to stop it. While there has been ample skepticism that American energy firms will be willing or able to reboot the moribund Venezuelan petroleum industry, it almost doesn’t matter: Donald Trump has taken out a chief villain of the American imagination, he has stolen a bunch of oil, and he has groomed a pliant and autocratic regime to do his bidding under the threat of violence.

This new regime has done the bare minimum to appear different. By Tuesday, Caracas authorized the release of 56 political prisoners: Just 5% of the estimated thousands who sit in Venezuelan prisons.

For Trump, this is inconsequential. “We’ll have elections at the right time,” he says.

And so, what? America has proved, once again, that it decides who governs. It decides what regimes survive and which fall. It decides who is legitimate and who is not.

Last week, Smolansky spoke to Christiane Amanpour: “I don’t have any doubt,” he said, “and I want to reiterate that Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez are going to lead the rebuilding of Venezuela.” It is Machado and Gonzalez who can “guarantee us a great alliance with the U.S., a great alliance with the democratic countries in Latin America, a great alliance with the European Union.”

His optimism is admirable and I fully believe that one day soon he will see an independent and democratic Venezuela. But much as his family has fled from one increasingly-depraved dictator to another, I’m afraid he has found himself at the mercy of yet another autocrat with little concern for democracy.

On Tuesday, the Economist released the results of a new poll of the Venezuelan people. More than 50% support the capture of Nicolas Maduro, fewer than 15% oppose it. Nearly 80% report feeling optimistic about the future of their family and country. And who do they want running the country? Of all the available options, nearly 50% said Machado, while nearly 10% said her compatriot González. Barely one-in-ten said Delcy Rodríguez.

And yet so long as Delcy Rodríguez best serves Trump’s interest, that’s what the people of Venezeula will get.

There can be no better illustration of this bait-and-switch than the dual meetings which happened Thursday. Machado visited the White House to hand Trump her Peace Prize, an act of cringe-worthy submission that would be worth it if it won the state freedom. At the same time, CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in Caracas to meet Rodríguez to finalize their “improved working relationship.”

Trump is creating a banana republic, in the truest sense of the word.

In 1931, General Jorge Ubico assumed total control of Guatemala, abolished democracy, and set about making the country the best friend America could have — by handing over obscene amounts of control to the United Fruit Company. He considered himself a virtual reincarnation of Napoleon. He banned the words “trade union,” “strike,” “petition,” and “worker.” The peasants who tended to the crops were required to work a minimum of one hundred days per year and anyone who failed to respect the orders of their employer could be legally killed. 3

He would remain in power for 13 years, thanks to support from American government and business, who were simply swimming in cheap bananas.

Major General Smedley Butler, who led marines to invade and occupy throughout the Americas, looked back on his time in the region with horror. “During that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers,” he wrote years later.

“In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

To Shah Or Not To Shah

In 2009, I had just graduated highschool and found myself reading inscrutable instruction manuals on how to create a VPN tunnel.

Through trial and error, and much swearing, I eventually saw a tiny green dot light up on my laptop’s command bar. Someone, somewhere on the streets of Tehran, was accessing the open internet through my connection.

Twitter had only existed for about three years — and was still about two years away from helping to spur and maintain the Arab Spring — but it had become the go-to resource for thousands of young Iranians as they took to the streets to protest a stolen election. It was the place where you could announce where the nightly protest was set to occur; report the movements of the Basij, the feared Iranian militia tasked with keeping order; and post photos which could go globally viral.

For generations, frustration with the theocratic regime of the Ayatollah and his mullahs had ebbed and flowed, but the state had always been adept at using repression and reform in equal measure to quell dissent.

Even if Iran’s democracy had existed within tight rules, Iranians had, up until then, the ability to elect their president. But in 2009, the mullahs had meddled to protect nutjob incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the expense of reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The people revolted by the millions.

The crackdown killed dozens and showcased the extent to which Tehran could and would lock down society to prevent unrest. The endemic internet censorship which necessitated the very kind of VPN tunnel I ran on my laptop scaled up to build the so-called ‘Halal Internet.’ The Basij grew more powerful, Iran grew into a regional power in defense of theocratic autocracies everywhere, and the people of Iran were told they could never be free.

So the Western world sighed and tried, at various times, stiff sanctions and indirect support for Iranian civil society, followed by earnest negotiations and attempts to deal with the regime. While the topic of war and regime change came up occasionally, it was generally dismissed as warmongering.

And then, last June, America and Israel unleashed respective missile barrages targeting Iranian nuclear sites. The quasi-war was frenetic, pointless, and ultimately a resounding success for America.

Trump got to claim he destroyed Iran’s ability to end the world and suffered nary a bloody nose for the trouble.

This did nothing, of course, to destabilize the regime. If anything, it solidified it. The Ayatollah and his lackeys, giddy with defeat, told their population that a hungry American wolf lurked in the shadows, ready to devour them all. Fear kept the regime alive.

Today, Tehran faces too many mounting crises. It has faced persistent price inflation for a decade, with food inflation recently hitting 68%, as its currency has become internationally worthless. Sanctions have hampered its ability to do just about everything, and its constant war footing has depleted its reserves. To top it all off, it didn’t rain.

Endemic mismanagement of Tehran’s abundant aquifers and droughts worsened by climate change meant that the country’s capital had literally run out of water. “Water bankruptcy.” The murderous gerontocracy announced it had no choice but to move the capital.

Regular people have a much better solution: Oust the broken regime. Protests have roiled the entire country. Now capable of circumventing Iran’s impotent firewall in interesting new ways, Iranians have managed ubiquitous and locally-organized unrest.

The state is functionally paralyzed and the regime’s last remaining tool was to unleash mass murder. Reports from inside Iran put the death toll at 2,403. Tens of thousands of others are believed to be in prison. (The final death toll could be much higher.)

This is probably the most serious threat to the regime in its entire 47-year existence. Its population has never been angrier and more desperate for change, and the state has never been less capable of feigning normalcy. The compendium of possible outcomes is massive and could get extremely bad.

In that context, the possibility of American intervention isn’t inherently bad. Much as if America had seized Maduro and immediately recognized Gonzalez, Venezuela may have been able to make a relatively-seamless transition from kleptocracy to democracy; there’s certainly a world in which American military might could cause enough damage or stress to the Iranian regime that a popular opposition could overrun it.

But this is a world where Donald Trump is president.

As images of the Iranian protests have hit the news, Trump has vowed to the Iranian people that help is on the way. Reports have emerged that the administration is considering strikes to decapitate the regime.

Much as with forecasting anything in the Trump regime, you always need to look to three places: What do JD Vance and Stephen Miller think; what do the Gulf States want?; and who’s buying facetime in Mar-a-Lago?

On the latter question: The supposed “Crown Prince” of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. He’s been eager to encourage the street protests, and Fox News was immediately happy to have him on while preeminent Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer aggressively took on his cause.

Pahlavi has been billed as, despite his hereditary title, a transitional leader who could carry Iran into democracy. And based on the chants from the streets he’s become a popular figure in Iran itself. Or, at least, the idea of him has.

But Trump’s primary benefactors in the region — Qatar and Saudi Arabia — have vastly contrary views on the regime. Doha has always been close to Tehran, whilst Riyadh has always been a rival. Neither seem to want to see the state collapse, but neither are likely to want a genuine democracy either. More likely, both states would like to see a fellow monarchy flourish in Persia.

Pahlavi is, however, a weak figure with zero democratic legitimacy. If America were to install him as leader, he would be caught between the incredibly-difficult work of bringing-together the disparate factions across Iran, building its institutions from the ground-up, and preparing for democratic transition. It’s hard to believe that Trump or the sultans of the Gulf care about any of that.

Even still, that might be the best-case scenario. Per the Wall Street Journal, the Vance-Miller shadow presidency seem keen to repeat their apparent success in Venezuela: Keep the state, but make it subservient.

The paper reported this week, backed up by Vance’s own comments, that Vance is pushing for Trump to skip strikes on Iran in favor of “real negotiation” over “what we need to see when it comes to their nuclear program.”

Vance has tried this before. Last year, he made a big to-do, touting progress in nuclear talks with Iran. Trump bombed them anyway, so Vance declared it mission accomplished.

It seems unlikely that Vance and his ilk genuinely want progress on a nuclear deal. For years, he has touted himself as the only person in the world who truly cares about nuclear disarmament. Every other effort to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, he has argued, is weak and bad — notably, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which was actively setting up for a reduction in Iran’s stockpile. The first Trump administration exited that deal, leading to a significant increase in Iran’s enrichment program.

Vance has held up that chain of events — which his own president caused — as proof that nobody cares about nuclear non-proliferation. How would Vance do things differently? He’s never said.

Scratch a bit, though, and you’ll find that this really isn’t about nuclear weapons or regime crackdowns at all.

On the contrary, the ethno-nationalist camp within the White House is not taking a non-interventionist position in the Middle East on principle, but rather because it sees Iran through a one-dimensional lens of “Islamism.”

For years, Stephen Miller has described Trump’s crusade against Iran as a means to “curb destabilizing Islamist violence and prevent Iranian hegemony.” He has alleged that the Democratic Party is financed by “a vast shadowy dark money network” with “foreign ties” — including Iran. He has written that Trump’s travel ban on Iran kept out “pro-Hamas foreign students” from America’s universities.

Vance, for his part, recounted a bizarre anecdote to a conference last year. He recalled asking a friend: “What is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon?” He answered his own question: “Maybe it’s Iran. Maybe Pakistan already kind of counts. Then we sort of finally decided; maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.” Ha ha ha.

Let me frame this in simple terms: JD Vance and Stephen Miller believe that Iran is a backwards country of extremists who, through their very existence, represent an existential threat to America and must therefore be contained. In their minds, a popular uprising is meaningless, as it would just swap one kind of “Islamism” for another. It would be better to keep the devil you know in power, as he would be weakened and reliant on American goodwill for his continued existence. That comes with the added benefit of pointing to a far-off evil power who can be blamed for all unrest at home.

In the same way that Venezuela’s legitimate political actors have been used and cast aside in favor of the Maduro regime with a new hat, the people of Iran are considered as an afterthought and a liability — at best, a tool to achieve American objectives; at worst, a hindrance to America getting what it wants.

Certainly, America has pursued rabid self-interest before. And it has allowed ideological frames to justify its overseas activities. But never before has America so resembled the filibustering of William Walker and his freebooters. This isn’t a foreign policy, it’s piracy.

One Way Or Another

There is a common story which marries the current predicament of Venezuela and Iran — their corrupt states trace their legitimacy to illegitimate American action. A series of successful and botched invasions and coups through Latin America had bred endemic distrust of America in the region, a fact which Hugo Chavez exploited to great effect. The 1979 uprising which crowned Ruhollah Khomeini as Ayatollah, meanwhile, was spurred by hatred of the American-installed Shah (father of Pahlavi) and his brutal secret police.

By contrast, there is no particular animus between Greenland and America. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

In 1940, the prospect of Nazi Germany invading and occupying Greenland was very real. Germany invaded and occupied Denmark early that year — meaning the Third Reich, technically, could claim Greenland. The Allies couldn’t accept an enemy staging ground in the middle of the Atlantic, and America couldn’t tolerate such an impingement of the Monroe Doctrine. (Indeed, one of the most clear-cut examples of what the Doctrine actually invoked.)

But it wasn’t quite clear what America, still not a party to the war, would do. Two Danes — Eske Brun, a Danish administrator of Greenland; and Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish ambassador — convinced Washington to extend its protection to the Arctic.

The Agreement Relating to the Defense of Greenland acknowledged “the grave danger that European territorial possessions in America may be converted into strategic centers of aggression” which obligated America to occupy Greenland. But, it noted, “the sovereignty of Denmark over Greenland is fully recognized.”

America could have installed its own general to run Greenland, and it could have fully annexed the island. It didn’t: Brun assumed control as governor while Kauffmann became its main interlocutor in Washington.

And it was Brun, who actually understood the island, who came up with the idea of the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol.

The Patrol consisted of Inuit Greenlanders as well as Norwegian and Danish hunters who were tasked with patrolling the vast expanses of the remote northern half of the island — if they detected evidence of human activity, U.S. Coast Guard cutters were called to respond.

In early 1943, a Danish-Greenlander sledge team, and their curious dogs, discovered something unusual in the snow, in a remote corner of the island. “Footprints, human footprints — boots, with heels!”

The prints led them to a German outpost on the island. The Nazis, who had little visibility in the mid-Atlantic, desperately needed a weather station to aid their U-Boats: And they had set up a secret one, right there on Greenland.

Armed only with rifles, and with backup far off, the sledge team engaged the Germans and won: Taking a German commander prisoner. It was the first of two major engagements with the Germans on the island: One Dane would give their life defending Greenland.

It is no exaggeration to say that these men were the difference between the Germans gaining the freedom of navigation in the mid-Atlantic and their continued vulnerability to the weather. That mattered a great deal.

Those years, and the decades since, have underscored the enormous utility in cooperation. In 1951, after Greenland returned to Danish control, Copenhagen and Washington signed a new defensive pact. It maintained that territory on Greenland could be used by the United States, with some mutually-agreed caveats: The territory would remain Danish, but America was free to use its bases for whatever purposes it needed — so long as that included the defense of the island. It was nearly incomprehensible that American and Danish interests could even diverge. Through the Cold War, some 10,000 American personnel were stationed on the network of bases and radar stations on Greenland.

In 2000, recognizing that American presence had come at the cost of forcibly-displaced Indigenous populations, America returned a swath of land back to Greenland and significantly reduced their presence on Greenland. Today, just 150 U.S. Air Force and Space Force personnel are still on the base.

Over that time, Greenland began exercising its own political autonomy. It demanded, and won, home rule; it quit the EU in protest of lax fishing regulations; and won full self-governance in 2008. (All three were supported by popular referenda.) Through the 21st century, it modernized its economy with a pretty transparent goal of weening off the block grant sent by Copenhagen.

Last year, Greenlanders were asked: Do you want to be independent?

A paltry 9% said “I don’t want independence.” The rest endorsed independence, to varying degrees of urgency. Asked if they would like to leave Denmark and become a territory of the United States instead, the responses were even more resounding: 6% for, 85% against.

That, apparently, doesn’t matter. “One way or another,” Trump has proclaimed. “we’re going to have Greenland.

“If we don’t do it, Russia or China will, and that’s not going to happen when I’m president.”

I’ve written before about Trump’s delusional views on Greenland, and how it may yet result in NATO taking the Arctic seriously. (Dispatch #123) The fact is, Russia has invested heavily in its Arctic capabilities, and now far outmatches NATO in terms of its ability to project power in the northern waters. China, meanwhile, is fast at work building icebreakers and has made an open entreaty to Arctic powers for economic investment.

There is little appetite for more Russian presence in the north, but China’s engagement has been met with some more warmth. Capital inflows could help Nuuk finance the kind of mining, energy, tourism, and other projects that would be necessary to hold such a referendum and survive the loss of their Danish block grant.

Chinese economic control of Greenland would be a threat to North America.

The trouble is, that hasn’t really happened. Plans to acquire a major Greenlandic port and airport from Chinese companies were blocked by the Danes. Mineral exploration projects from Chinese firms were either abandoned or put on hold due to environmental concerns. Beijing, it seems, has gotten bored and moved on.

If America seriously cared about countering and deterring Russian movements in the north, it would station more personnel on its expansive military base already in Greenland. If it cared about preventing Chinese capital from flowing into the island, it would step up with its own direct investment which is sorely wanted.

But it hasn’t really done either. Because Donald Trump doesn’t really care about protecting the hemisphere from hostile foreign powers. He wants to be the hostile foreign power.

It will, like I’ve written, probably work in Venezuela and Iran. Who, after all, is going to stop him? Who can make Trump side with democrats over despots, who can make him respect international law? Nobody, it seems.

The American hegemon is powerful enough to force marginal wins — but it inevitably, invariably fucks up. You can’t keep toppling, invading, occupying without eventually making yourself weak. Maybe you spend too much money on global adventurism, maybe you alienate your own people, maybe you breed a population of foreign-born people who hate your habit of meddling, maybe you stymie the very kind of cooperation that helped make you strong. But, eventually, you bungle it.

I think if Trump forces the Greenland issue, it will be the line in the sand. It will be the break that will finally roil his out-of-control administration. It should be the clarion call for Canada and Europe to finally stop placating and start protesting.

Trump’s sophomoric obsession with capturing territory is both pathetic and deadly serious. It is offensive on its face and a signal for dangerous times to come. But, in levying these threats, Trump made a facile aside that leapt out to me.

“Basically, their defense is two dog sleds,” Trump told journalists. “You know that? You know what their defense is? Two dog sleds.”

Yeah, dog sleds that helped America win World War II.

Happy new year, readers. I’m trying to start January with a bang: I’ve been writing, rewriting, rewriting thoughts on three of these files — Venezuela, Iran, Greenland — for the past two weeks, and I finally pulled the trigger and smushed them all together.

There’s fresh Soft Power on the way, and another big Bug-eyed and Shameless dispatch in the pipeline. Over at the Star, I’ve just penned a long piece on how Canada can stand up for Greenland.

Until next time!

By all accounts, 536 started bad and got worse.

The Ostrogoths were at war with the Byzantines, and winning; Carthage was under siege by mutineers; the Patriarch of Constantinople was deposed; and both the Pope and the Emperor of Japan died.

And then, the sun disappeared.

“Each day, it shone for about four hours, and even then this light was only a faint shadow. Everyone declared that it would not return to that state of its original light,” writes Michael the Syrian, an Orthodox saint and historian. “Fruits didn’t ripen; and the wine had the taste of something that came from sour grapes.”1

Another Byzantine historian wrote: “The Sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the Moon, during this whole year.”2 A Mesopotamian source recalls birds falling from the sky and widespread distress amongst men “from the evil things.” A writer in Rome tells of mothers forced to eat their own children. The annals of Ulster were more succinct: “Failure of bread.”

Mixing historical records with climate data, it appears that across Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, harvests were decimated, animals were spooked, and populations fell into despair. Modern scholars believe it was all due to a single volcanic eruption, perhaps in Iceland, which spit out a dark soot into the skies above Western civilization — lingering there for, according to some sources, 18 months.

The severity of the destruction of 536 would not end with the return of the sun’s warmth. Some scientists and historians theorize that the miserable chill which descended across the cradle of Western civilization set the conditions for plague rats to enter the ports near Suez, where they were carried on to the cramped metropolis of Constantinople. That plague, the first major one in recorded history, is thought to have killed one-in-five in the capital of the empire. Even Emperor Justinian I (no relation) fell ill.

Some go so far as to argue that 536 is the gateway between antiquity and the Middle Ages.

“The importance of this cloud resides in the fact that its mass and its climatic consequences appear to exceed those of any other volcanic cloud observed during the past three millennia,” observed Richard Strothers, the NASA scientist who helped find evidence of this climate catastrophe in 1983.

Whenever the conversation turns to truly dour and chaotic years, people can’t help but point to the truly shit epoch of 536. It was “the worst year to be alive,” per one academic of Medieval history. It is nothing short of a “forgotten apocalypse,” per one biologist. For the past century, the year has become a helpful shorthand for shrugging off our current woes: Well, at least it’s not 536. In thinking of rivals to the miserable year 2020, Vox immediately jumped to 536.

In looking back on the chaos and dark clouds of 2025, I found myself thinking about 536.

But then I ran into a problem. For the small stack of sources seemingly referencing the blotting out of the sun — mostly compiled by Medieval historians — there are just as many sources who mention no such thing. In fact, some contemporaneous sources suggest a perfectly bountiful harvest that year in some corners of Europe and North Africa, and relative normalcy in East Asia. Where hunger and misery were reported, it was in the cities beset by siege and war.

Antti Arjava, a Finnish philologist, penned a fascinating investigation into this mystery cloud in 2005. “Not only is there nothing in our evidence to suggest that the year 536 was a watershed moment between antiquity and the Middle Ages,” he writes, but “it is also evident that, although the cloud occasioned confusion and crop failure at the time of its appearance, its effects did not last long after it had dissipated.”3 And far from 18 months, it seems that the soot plagued certain areas for just weeks.

Subsequent study of tree-rings suggests that a 536 volcanic eruption in North America could have led to crop failure and pestilence in Europe — if so, probably in a smaller area than some writers suggested. But, these data suggest, it is just as likely that another massive eruption a few years later could also explain some of the more extreme climate fluctuations for which 536 has been blamed.4

And so I can’t help but wonder if we’ve been unfairly maligning 536 this whole time. The year was, certainly, no great time for humanity. But, by most accounts, it was followed by years of relative normalcy — and then eclipsed five years later by misery and misfortune that none could have predicted.

As Arjava writes, the evidence suggests 536 was more of a “temporary misfortune.”

So this week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless clip show, a quick look back at a terrible year and a plea that is remembered just as a temporary misfortune.

In the days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his improbable second term, I wrote that he “returns to the White House in a fairly weak position.”

Boy was I wrong.

I think I got the constituent parts right: Trump did not, in fact, achieve a peace deal in Ukraine; he did not successfully slay America’s ballooning debt problem; he did not revive American manufacturing; nor has he meaningfully cut taxes; untangled the Gordian knot of American healthcare; or done much else good.

What he did manage to do, even moreso than my dour prediction from last January, was to create a codependent relationship with his most radical fans, influencers, and advisors. Donald Trump has fashioned himself into a reality show despot, and that’s how he’s governed America for the past 12 months. The information apparatuses which surround him are now working overtime to justify his illiberal administration and push him towards increasingly bonkers actions — annexing Greenland, using the military to occupy all major cities, abolishing representative democracy, and so on.

While there’s no doubting that recent weeks have knocked Trump on the backfoot, particularly as he fumbles around the fallout of the Epstein files release and faces the first sustained pushback from his party of sycophants, I think we have every reason to believe he’ll regain the initiative in the New Year.

At the same time, the anti-Trump forces are finally beginning to figure themselves out. Just about 12 months ago, I derided Mark Carney — who hadn’t even yet announced his bid to become Prime Minister of Canada — for speaking in pablum. As anyone who followed my Chaos Campaign mini-newsletter can attest, Carney did eventually figure out how to situate himself against Trump in a way that was both popular and effective.

From Carney to Zohran Mamdani to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Doug Ford, Gavin Newsom, and (most surprising of all) Marjorie Taylor-Greene, we’re seeing a rise of politicians the world over who are finding effective ways of challenging Trump’s overt fascism with their own flavors of liberal(-ish) populism.

Here’s hoping for more of that in 2026.

(Read also: The Neo-Reactionary Regime and They’re Going to Try Fauci for Treason)

For all of the justifiable kvetching around Donald Trump’s open economic warfare against the world, we’ve still got very little appreciation for just how much the world is about to change.

Looking back at America’s past dalliances with protectionism, it struck me just how long the tails of disruption really were.

Historically, beggar-thy-neighbor policies — tariffs, in particular — do work in the short term, kind of. You create breathing room for domestic industry to beat imports on price, you raise money for the treasury, and you incentivize increased domestic production.

But history has shown us again and again and again that these benefits are often exaggerated and are eventually eclipsed by high-prices, a lack of genuine competition, and a lack of innovation. The effects, however, are gargantuan: American protectionism both begets protectionism abroad, and pushes like-minded countries into tighter pacts.

Donald Trump seems to be speedrunning the historical precedent, ripping up supply chains and trade deals with such speed that he’s spooked investors to point where he’s not even getting the short-term sugar rush that past administrations have earned.

You’d think, from the top-line numbers, that things are going well. America grew an estimated 4.3% in the third quarter, far outpacing expectations, while it added about 64,000 private sector jobs. He’s buoyed, too, by around $200 billion in tariff revenue.

But scratch at those numbers and things look dire.

The economic growth is driven largely by consumer spending and a huge surge in the valuation of AI companies. Consumer spending has likely been driven by waning inflation, but that comes as American inflation ticks back up. Modest private sector job growth, meanwhile, can’t make up for public sector layoffs. Tariffs may be pulling in cash, but the revenue is only a tenth of the current budget deficit, meaning Trump doesn’t have a ton of leeway to mail our bribery cheques or bail out struggling sectors. The tariffs are also battering the manufacturing sector, doing exactly the opposite of what Trump wants.

Trump will keep digging down. The Supreme Court may strike down his tariffs as unconstitutional, but he’ll find a new legal justification to reapply them. Some foreign states may try and bribe Trump and/or America to secure lower tariff rates, but major economies are already backing off this race to the bottom. Trade deals will come up for review — CUSMA, in particular — and they are likely to end in disaster.

And yet, with policy continuing to be dictated by quack-economist-in-chief Peter Navarro, it seems unlikely that the administration will alter course.

If 2025 saw most foreign leaders angling for deals, I suspect 2026 will be the year those countries begin looking for new markets.

(Read also: There Is No Land Unhabitable, Nor Sea Innavigable)

If 536 was the year that an ominous cloud stretched over Europe, 2025 was the year that the choking cloud of health misinformation and endemic institutional distrust finally settled over America.

The boils and legions of the Make America Healthy Again movement — fattened on anti-scientific hokum, get-rich-quick grifters, and Russian disinformation — spread across the American public health system with terrifying speed. Led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, but enabled by a crazed harem of like-minded kooks and opportunists, the American state has rejected vaccines, made villains of doctors and scientists, and prioritized wishful thinking as a cure-all.

I’m always loath to give the troll propagandists in Moscow too much credit, but it’s hard to discount the degree to which Russia has been working to breed this sort of distrust. They’ve finally succeeded, to a degree that none of us really expected.

It has not been a good year for Ukraine.

It has not been as bad a year for Ukraine as it could have been.

Throughout 2025, Kyiv has had to balance its pressing concerns — prosecuting its war on the frontlines, defending its cities from bombardment, managing Donald Trump’s mood swings, amongst other challenges. There is simply no way to manage those things without making some significant sacrifices and accepting some horrific losses. But, going into 2026, the balance remains intact.

Russia, meanwhile, has had a better year than it should have. It has kept together its band of rogue states — from Venezuela to the Central African Republic to North Korea — and juiced its arms industry with ample government cash. Its citizenry remains willing to shoulder the massive cost of this war (now well past 1 million Russian dead and wounded) so long as their pensions remain solvent and their lives remain mostly uninterrupted. Moscow’s flattery of the U.S. president has yet to deliver real results, but Putin keeps getting close to fully winning over Trump.

In that way, both Russia and Ukraine have been desperately gripping their status quo while attempting to knock the other off balance. Going in 2026, it remains unclear who will wobble first.

But I continue to put my chips on Ukraine. For its repeated testing, European solidarity with Ukraine remains strong. (While Canadian, Australian, and Japanese support has been unwavering.) The Ukrainian people do not have endless patience for the foibles of their president, but they are consistently resilient. Ukrainian power plants and apartment blocks can be bombed, but Russia has utterly failed in breaking the spirit of the people they are laying siege to.

Russia continues to sturdy itself on fragile pillars. Its people are more comfortable than loyal. Taxes are going up, interest rates remain high, inflation is persisting, and growth is weak. Its global allies are coming under enormous pressure, and it is extremely likely that more of its dependable client despots will be gone before 2026 is out. Its meddling in Europe is winning over a few new allies, but it is hardening the resolve of everyone else. It is advancing on the battlefield, but not by enough to justify the self-harm it is inflicting.

There’s no good reason to think the war against Ukraine will end in 2026, but it’s always worth hoping it will — replaced with a real, just, and lasting peace.

(Read also: Next Time, in Moscow and The Wagner Group in Africa)

There’s a word I’ve had stuck in my head as 2025 comes to a close: Hyperreality.

The word was conjured up by a French philosopher, but it was really defined and adapted by Sovietologist Mikhail Epstein. In a 2000 paper, he considers the way in which reality was distorted and adapted under Joseph Stalin until there “were almost no gaps” between party line and the real world.

Epstein: Any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist — it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact.”5

Epstein likens the cult of personality around Stalin — the supposed struggle for the working class, the euphemistic horrors of the “collective farm,” the fight against fascism happening while Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact remained in place — to Disneyland on a national scale. “Communist ideology cannot be accused of lying, since it creates the very world that it describes,” he writes.

Over 2025, millions of people have been convinced to build this hyperreality — in America, in Russia, in Israel, and further afield. Videos of starving Palestinian children can’t be true because the state says it isn’t so, their swollen bellies existing, in fact, as proof of a conspiracy against Israel. Unidentified goon squads grab Americans off the street, sending them off to foreign torture facilities without any due process or rationale, and they are venerated in AI-generated memes as an example of freedom returning. Pardoning and collaborating drug traffickers and sex criminals is a blow against drug traffickers and sex criminals. War is peace.

The information ecosystem which propagates this hyperreality has never been more popular, populated, lucrative, manipulated, co-opted, and easy to join.

There are early indications that things may be falling apart. People are disengaging from an internet obsessed with making them mad. A civil war in MAGAland is prompting some to wake up and recognize the rage industrial complex to which they’ve contributed. There is a pining for a return to real human interactions and physical media, the antithesis of this digital hyperreality.

I’m not so hopeful as to think that 2026 will mean an end to the lies, deception, and anger of our modern age. But I do know that hyperreality has to break at some point.

(Read also: A Man on the Street, A Movement of Weaklings; Hey @Grok, Is My Brain Melting?; The Eye That Never Sleeps)

That’s it for this little year-in-review dispatch.

I’m looking to start 2026 strong, with a good barrage of new BE&S content for your inboxes. So stay tuned.

If you haven’t already, please go over to YouTube and subscribe to Soft Power — new episodes will be dropping later in January.

At the Star, I have some year-end thoughts about Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre.

I hope everyone’s holidays were pleasant. Thanks, once more, for continuing to support this newsletter.

And happy new year!

“The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today,” John F. Kennedy Jr. declared in 1961, “is the whole southern half of the globe — Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East — the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history.

“They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation. More than an end, they seek a beginning.”

JFK was pushing Congress to centralize its foreign aid into a single vehicle. It would come to be known as the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. The agency, the president said, would be both cheap and essential. It would be the “single most important program available for building the frontiers of freedom.”

There is no doubt that JFK was genuine about his desire to lift the world’s poor up to a level of self-sufficiency. He wanted to promote democracy and end tyranny, at least more often than not. The American people, he said, were “fully aware of their obligations to the sick, the poor and the hungry, wherever they may live.”

More development meant less suffering, less conflict, and more customers for American goods. It was an argument that landed well with Democrats and Republicans alike.

JFK also wanted to fight communism. And, as they had just seen in deploying the Marshall Plan to Europe, cash works quite well in winning friends.

So, armed with objectives laudable, selfish, and cynical, America set out to make the world richer, safer, and healthier. And over the next 60 years, it built dams, planted trees, developed drought-resistant crops, fought corruption, pulled plastic from oceans, connected remote villages to the internet, averted roughly 300,000 malaria deaths per year, and so much more.

When a pair of researchers crunched the numbers, they came up with an estimate: 3,296,991 lives saved every year by USAID and related American programs. That’s a bit less than $19,000 per life saved — a callous calculation, but a stunning one nonetheless.

In 1996, Africa was struggling as it faced a surge of wild poliovirus cases: Some 75,000 children had been paralyzed by the virus across the continent. South African President Nelson Mandela announced a mission to “kick Polio out of Africa,” and America vowed to help. Through USAID and the Centers for Disease Control, America and the UN led one of the world’s most impressive vaccination programs. In 2020, wild polio was officially eradicated in Africa.

In 1984, a famine began in Sudan and Ethiopia — it would ultimately kill somewhere between 400,000 and one million people. Deciding that the world should never be caught off guard by mass hunger again, USAID established the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, or FEWS NET. Independent analysis has proven that this system is remarkably accurate and can help catalyze international assistance to actually lessen the impact of famine before it spirals out of control.

When the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Asia unleashed a devastating tsunami in 2004, it caused billions of dollars worth of damage on the island of Sumatra. USAID stepped in to manage some of the most needed reconstruction efforts. Along with a huge array of other agencies and NGOs, USAID contributed to what the Brookings Institution called “one of the largest reconstruction projects ever seen in the developing world” which, quite simply, worked. Not only that, “results were achieved in a remarkably short time.” It set a new standard for how disaster relief ought to work.

It is impossible to fully grasp the impact of USAID. Its 60-year history is so vast and varied, so responsible for ensuring that the worst-case scenario never comes to pass, that its defenders will never truly be able to defend it properly. Every life saved begs the question: Why not save a life at home? Every disaster averted provokes a lazy, knee-jerk take: Why is that our problem? In the deluge of lies and bullshit, defenders of this kind of hard, difficult, unrewarding work are rarely given the time, space, or grace necessary to justify it.

That’s why it’s been so easy to kill.

This episode of Soft Power is all about the lies and misinformation which have enabled Donald Trump and Elon Musk to kill USAID. I hope you’ll give it a watch — and, ideally, share it with your friends.

As always, thanks for reading (and watching.)

My most recent Star column is about Canada’s misguided approach to cracking down on hate speech. This weekend, you can read my year-in-review of 2025, then early next week I’ll have a deep-dive into Trump’s new — terrifying — national security security strategy, his Munroe Doctrine 2.0.

Two (very different) shout-outs to round out this snappy dispatch:

One is the New Yorker’s own mini-doc on the disastrous destruction of USAID, Rovina’s Choice. It’s exactly the kind of gutsy work that too few outlets are producing right now. Give it a watch.

The other is in place of my normal musical outro: A big five-star review for the-best-thing-to-happen-to-punk-in-a-decade and fellow Substack-ers , who absolutely killed their Montreal show last week. Here’s a terrible photo of lead singer Stefan Babcock in a blurry mid-crowd-surf. Check out their new album if that’s your jam.

Until next week.

Vadim Trincher lived on the 63rd floor of Trump Tower in New York City. Anatoly Golubchik just went there to do business.

It was from this ornate wood-paneled and gold-leafed unit that Golubchik and Trincher ran an international money laundering, sports gambling, and extortion ring.

It “must be,” a U.S. attorney would later remark, “the world’s largest sports books, catering primarily to millionaires and billionaires across the globe.” FBI wiretaps would catch Trincher threatening one man who owed them money. Torture and an unmarked grave awaited those who didn’t pay up.

The enterprise was impressively global: Starting in 2006, this clandestine gambling ring took in $100 million — mostly from oligarchs in the former Soviet Union — and laundered it through shell companies in Cyprus and the United States. A big chunk of the profits, however, flowed right back to Moscow.

The operation was directly managed by the highest level of Russian organized crime. The shots were called from Moscow, by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov — also known as Taiwanchik, for his distinctly Asian features. The mob boss hadn’t been seen in the U.S. since he was indicted for trying to bribe Olympic judges in Salt Lake City in 2002.

But it had plenty of local helpers. One of the fellow leaders of this operation lived just 12 floors below, in an $18 million condo which spanned the entire floor. Helly Nahmad was the scion of a billionaire, a well-known art dealer, and a gambling addict in his own right. He helped bring some star power into the operation, given he palled around with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio.

The ringleaders earned millions. While Trincher enjoyed his Trump Tower pad, Golubchik was in the market for some new digs. He found a stately building a few blocks away on the Upper East Side, a short walk from the Central Park Zoo. When the owners asked him for a reference, he turned to his friend Steve Witkoff. Golubchik wasn’t just a “friend,” Witkoff wrote, but “a person of strong reputation and integrity.”

The good times would eventually come to an end. Police raided both the 63rd and 51st floors of Trump tower (which must have irked the resident of floors 56, 57, and 58: Donald Trump) and booked the gang with racketeering, money laundering, extortion, and various gambling offenses.

Cops never got their hands on Tokhtakhounov, who remains at large in Russia. The rest, however, pled guilty in 2013. Golubchik and Trincher both got five-year sentences — Golubchik tried to contest it, to no avail; whilst Trincher got to serve part of his sentence in Trump Tower itself. (He sold his condo earlier this year.) Nahmad put his Trump Tower suite up as collateral for his bail, and eventually served a year for his role in the scheme (which he tried to get out of by teaching the homeless about art.)

This saga would fill plenty of tabloid pages, inspire the 2013 Aaron Sorkin flick Molly’s Game, and feed plenty of speculation about Trump’s own ties to Russia when he took office a few years later. And then it was largely forgotten.

But it’s a helpful reminder of a simple fact: Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, rubles have always been desperate to find their way to New York City. And the elites of the city, particularly those in real estate, have happy to have them.

And it’s a useful illustration of the small pools in which these tycoons swim. When Donald Trump prepared to finally vacate the White House in 2021, he fired off a list of bewildering executive orders. On the heap was a full pardon for Nahmad, who had already been out of prison for years.

It’s worth keeping all this scuzzy business in mind as the U.S. government — led, at the highest levels, by the a who’s-who of NYC oh-nos — prepares to sell out Ukraine to appease an increasingly-radical base of Putin fetishists and morally bankrupt corporate raiders.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: How Trump and his emissary Steve Witkoff are planning to sell out Ukraine, what they want in return, and why Kyiv isn’t quite as screwed as you might think.

Guns Out For Marco Rubio

No matter how thoroughly Secretary of State Marco Rubio prostrates himself in front of Trump and his band of hard-right ideologues, he will always be “neocon” to Steve Bannon.

In the Kremlinology of Trumpworld, Bannon continues to be one of the major ideological and cultural poles. He was one of Trump’s earliest advisors and confidants, the guy who predicted the rise and lasting allure of MAGA, and the scaly-skinned cynic who continues dragging it closer to full-blown fascism. His sector of the Trump universe includes many moons and competing centers of gravity — RFK Jr, JD Vance, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson. His is the dominant wing of the party, and it wants America to be isolationist, sometimes; allied with like-minded autocracies, often; and willing to actively oppose the liberal order whenever it suits.

Rubio, meanwhile, represents the vestigial old guard of the party, the ones who don’t just worship an idol of Ronald Reagan but who actually reflect his politics. He believes in a muscular America which projects power, ends conflicts, and which generally tries to keep the world from devolving into war and rabid self-interest. It is an ideology that is often incoherent and hypocritical, and has historically supported ethnic cleansing and death squads where it suits, but it is roughly the one that America has operated under for the past century.

In joining a cabinet of whackjobs and sycophants styled after Bannon, Rubio really had only one option: Morph and contort all of his beliefs until they complement whatever insane position the president had taken that given day, and hope to exert a modicum of pressure on the administration’s agenda.

In the first administration, Rubio and his camp were he majority, and they succeeded in pushing out Bannon and his ilk. Now the roles are reversed, and many expected revenge.

The likelihood of internecine fighting is exactly why Trump consigliere-in-chief and chief-of-staff Susie Wiles supposedly put an edict against all cabinet-level firings. There would not be a Game of Thrones-esque series of internal power struggles, the thinking goes, so everyone would have to keep their guns holstered.

Coming up to the first year back in office, such a rule didn’t even seem necessary. Rubio was shaping the administration’s Ukraine and Venezuela policies without total catastrophe, and Bannon occasionally praised the pliant Secretary of State’s MAGA bona fides from the outside — “MAGA loves converts, Marco,” he wrote in 2023. There was even talk of a joint Vance-Rubio ticket, should Trump respect the Constitution and not run again. Impressive, since the men reportedly hate each other.

But the past few weeks, I think, have the hallmarks of a final rupture taking place. Let me lay out the timeline, here:

November 19: Axios and the Financial Times report that the Trump administration has been putting together a new peace plan for Ukraine. According to reports, a wide array of figures were involved in its drafting — from Zelensky advisor Rustem Umerov to Marco Rubio, the Qataris, Turks, and a whack of others — it is clear that the chief architects are ‘peace envoy’ Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a key Putin ally.

November 20: After 24 hours of Ukrainian, European, Canadian, and even American officials saying they have no idea what’s in the plan, Axios reports the full 28-point plan: It calls for Ukrainian surrender of Donetsk Oblast, a permanent ban on Kyiv’s membership in NATO, a modest reduction in the size of the Ukrainian military to 600,000, amnesty for Russian war crimes, flimsy security guarantees for post-war Ukraine, and the liquidation of Russian assets to finance the country’s reconstruction — to which America is entitled 50% of the profits. The plan aligns almost-perfectly with Russia’s negotiating position presented in Alaska. (Dispatch #139)

U.S. Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll flies to Kyiv to present the plan to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

November 21: Even before any official text is released, Trump demands Ukraine accept the deal by Thursday, six days away, and intones that aid and intelligence-sharing could end if Kyiv refuses. Moscow signals indifference to the plan, despite it being everything they want.

November 22: At the Halifax International Security Forum, a bipartisan cohort of American lawmakers tell journalists that it had all been a misunderstanding. The 28-point plan is not America’s position at all, but Russia’s. In fact, the text seems to have been translated from Russian, they say. There is no American proposal, no deadline, and no threat. This comes straight from Rubio.

Marco Rubio takes to Twitter hours later to throw the senators under the bus: “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S. It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations.”

November 24: Rubio throws out the 28-point plan and replaces it with a 19-point plan that nixes the idea of handing over Donetsk. The plan has “little resemblance” to the earlier plan, FT reports.

November 28: Trump reverts back to the 28-point plan, demanding territorial concessions.

It’s hard not to view this back-and-forth as a powerplay to embarrass and undercut Rubio. If my interpretation of this affair is correct, I think Rubio and his fellow Ukraine defenders were frozen out of the actual drafting of this proposal; the right flank of the administration devised the plan in secret and coordinated its release; Rubio denounced the plan before learning he would be forced to accept it; leaving Rubio scrambling to try and force through an alternative. He failed.

There is only circumstantial evidence for this idea, but it is compelling. Driscoll, for example, is a surprising choice as envoy to Ukraine — particularly when Trump still has an envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg — until you realize that he is a close ally of JD Vance. (Who Vance apparently wants leading the Pentagon whenever Pete Hegseth bombs out.)

Bannon has already resumed his attacks on Rubio after a long detente. He was posting just this week that Rubio is in a pitched battle with Ted Cruz to be “NeoCon in Chief.”

But here’s another bit of evidence that I think is useful.

I was in the room when that group of U.S. lawmakers relayed Rubio’s denunciation of the deal. And I asked them, Republican Senator Mike Rounds in particular, if they could help shed light on just who, exactly, calls the shots on these negotiations. Rounds, a consistent supporter of Ukraine, basically confirms that Rubio wasn’t just trashing the 28-point plan, but insisted that Washington would not be demanding territorial concessions.

Within days of this crystal-clear emergency announcement, which was designed to be public, Rubio fully backtracked and Washington clarified that it did want Ukraine to surrender territory.

It is a clear sign, I think, that Rubio has been totally marginalized.

Senator Mike Rounds: We were there when Secretary Rubio made the phone call. I did ask: Can we say that we’ve received the phone call from you? And he said: Yes.

Can we explain, basically, what had occurred? And he said: Yes.

So what we can share with you is is the administration was not responsible for the release of this information in its current form. But we can also tell you that, at this point, they want to be able to utilize it as a starting point for where Russia is making demands. And in doing so, the response was: We’re going to share it with Ukraine as an intermediary and we’re going to ask for them to respond back in a timely fashion. […] But the intent was to take what had now been publicly discussed in news reports and to allow the Ukrainians the opportunity to respond. But there and I can also share this with you: We are not aware of any discussion by the administration of limiting support.

“I Have the Deepest Respect for President Putin,” or “It Ain’t Called the Bloodlands for Nothing.”

This turf war isn’t new. Stretching back to even the first Trump administration, there has been a skepticism about Kyiv — ranging from a latent belief that Ukraine should be part of a broader Russia; that Kyiv is hopelessly corrupt and marginal where Moscow is grand and capitalistic; that Russia represents traditional and laudable values whereas Ukraine is the metastasization of toxic liberal values; that whatever the merits of Ukraine’s defense, it is doomed to fall; and that it is simply none of America’s business.

Bannon wraps all these narratives together often, and has recently started weaponizing them against Rubio. “For Marco to come out saying, ‘Our priority is to make sure you’re never at war again,’” Bannon said on his show earlier last month. “Dude, grab a history book and just read a couple of pages, man. They’ve been fighting for 5,000 years. It ain’t called the Bloodlands for nothing.” (This claim would no doubt make , author of Bloodlands, quite irate. Read to the end for more.)

Despite that, the Trump administration has fairly consistently opted to continue supplying and defending Ukraine. For whatever hiccups there have been, Trump has consistently sided with Ukraine and applied pressure to Russia, often going further than the Biden administration ever did.

But there has been growing desperation to make a deal in Moscow. Just today, Putin vowed to take Ukraine’s entire Donbas region “by military or other means.” Such a claim, however, makes clear that he’s really keen on other means.

As the Institute for the Study of War assesses today, Russia’s victory remains “not imminent or inevitable” and that these grandiose threats are continued “cognitive warfare efforts” meant to influence negotiations.

No doubt those efforts are feeding Bannon, Vance, and the whole crew with more ammunition to call for the abandonment of Ukraine.

But that alone can’t explain how the Trump administration has pivoted so hard and suddenly away from Kyiv. To date, Putin’s arrogance has consistently frustrated Russia’s ability to bring Trump onside. For all his many, many faults, Trump still thinks of himself as a dealmaker — and he has seen through Putin trying to gussy up the same insane proposals again and again.

So what’s changed? Why has Rubio lost this fight, after winning all previous rounds?

I think the answer lies with Anatoly Golubchik’s old friend: Steve Witkoff; and with a longtime Putin operator, Kirill Dimitriev. They have, together, finally made the pitch in such a way that sings for Trump. They have finally put together a package that reveals just how stinking rich everyone could get if the war were over.

We know, thanks to a devastating report from the Wall Street Journal and a transcript of a call leaked to Bloomberg, that Witkoff has been plotting this play for a while.

“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told Journal. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody.”

And everybody has been plotting those upsides, seemingly with the blessing of Witkoff and his buddy Jared Kushner, who has become an éminence grise for the petrostates of the Gulf. He has done so right as Russian oligarchs have sent missionaires to make contact with American business, and as a bevy of Trump donors have begun salivating at the prospect of joint ventures with Russia. One apparently wants to finance the reconstruction of the Nord Stream pipeline.

In a sign of where his interest lies, Witkoff has not traveled to Ukraine once this year. He has gone to Russia six times. On his travels, Witkoff has forged close ties to a certain Russian: Kirill Dmitriev.

Dmitriev is no stranger to winning friends and influencing people in the Trump orbit. According to the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to elect Trump and court his administration, Dmitriev “used multiple business contacts to try to make inroads with [Trump’s team.]” That included leveraging the UAE as a friendly middleman and setting a secret meeting in the Seychelles with Blackwater mercenary boss Erik Prince, who turned around and reported the entreaty to then-advisor Steve Bannon.

Dmitriev was responsible for pitching a “reconciliation plan.” He shared it with an American interlocutor who was supposed to sell it to Bannon, Kushner, and ultimately Trump. Here’s a draft:

That was 2016. Dmitriev ultimately failed in these efforts, and was sanctioned and barred from the United States under the Biden administration.

With Trump back in the White House, Dmitriev was again tapped by Moscow to sell the Trump team on this rapprochement. Witkoff even pulled some strings to ensure that the Russian banker could visit the White House to present a list of lucrative deals to the president. Still, he failed.

But, at that point, neither Witkoff nor Dmitriev were involved in the Ukraine talks. That was left to Rubio, Kellogg, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — who reportedly froze out Dmitriev and lambasted him in the halls of the Kremlin.

That changed just a few months ago. Kellogg was getting set to leave the administration, and Witkoff’s star had risen after securing a ceasefire deal in Gaza. He had helped secure the Putin-Trump meet in August, but the deal had fallen apart under scrutiny by the Europeans, who Witkoff had snubbed. Now he was getting serious, and he chose Dmitriev as his opposite, who suddenly hopped in the front seat. We know he made another request to get Dmitriev stateside, organizing a secretive Miami meeting, alongside Kushner, in October.

On October 14, Witkoff got on a call with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor.

Witkoff: Listen to what I’m saying. I just want you to say, maybe just to say this to President Putin, because you know I have the deepest respect for President Putin.

Ushakov: Yes, Yes.

Witkoff: Maybe he says to President Trump: You know, Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace and that could be something that we think might move the needle a little bit, we’re open to those sorts of things — to explore what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done. Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere. But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here. And I think Yuri, the president will give me a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal.

Let me translate: If we gloss over our plan to sell out Ukraine — a plan that would hand over hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russian concentration camps, to pave the way for the next invasion, which would excuse war crimes — we can get some real business done.

It’s easy to weave a grand conspiracy theory from all these linkages and shady meetings. But you needn’t, because there is a very simple narrative to sum all this up: Putin thinks he can trade sweetheart resource deals to the U.S. for a chunk of Ukraine, and he thinks having interlocutors trusted by Trump pitching the idea will make it more likely to succeed. More than that, he thinks that marrying this overt corruption to the very ideologues who want to abandon Ukraine for being corrupt will be a one-two punch that will solidify both Russia’s presence with the White House and Trump’s popularity with his base.

And he’s right. Witkoff wants that too. It worked.

“This Isn’t 2023.”

So, to my mind, it’s done. Trump held out for Ukraine longer than anyone expected him to, but the administration is going to succumb to the pressure and temptation, and he will opt for rubles instead of principles.

In chatting with some Ukrainian contacts, however, there’s a clear message coming from Kyiv: It’s not the end of the world.

As one well-connected Ukrainian put it, “this isn’t 2023.”

Even two years ago, Ukraine was utterly reliant on American shipments of 155m shells, anti-air missiles, drones, intelligence, cash, and so on. But Kyiv always knew it couldn’t win a war on donations alone.

Since then, Ukraine (with American investment) has built up its own defense industrial base. By the end of 2024, Kyiv reported that fully 30% of its weaponry was made locally. In September of this year, Zelensky reported that number had jumped to 60%. With respect to drones — which have come to replace Ukrainian artillery amid a global shell shortage — 96% of those used on the battlefield were made in Ukraine.

Europe, meanwhile, has accelerated donations in a huge way, donating more in the first three quarters of this year than the Biden administration gave all last year.

There are American donations that will be tough to replace. Its anti-air missiles are critical in stopping incoming Russian drones and missiles. But Ukraine is getting better and better at deploying more sustainable made-at-home solutions: Disrupting ballistic missiles with Ukrainian music that spoofs the missile’s location as Lima, Peru; and developing cheap-to-make interceptor drones.

Satellite imaging and intelligence is incredibly important in anticipating Russia’s next move and coordinating strikes. America has, bar none, the widest high-resolution satellite coverage in the world. But both Canada and Europe have satellites of their own. In a roundtable with journalists last month in Halifax, EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius intoned that help is on the way.

Kubilius: The European Union has the satellite systems in some areas — even better than America. There are some systems where we are a little bit behind, and where we’re developing them, for example on secure communication or Starlink. Ukraine, if they want to decide that they want to continue their defense, they will continue. We need to take into account, really, their strategies and their wishes. […] In some cases, we do have very good space capabilities. For navigation, we have Galileo. For observation, we have a very good systems. Some member states have advanced systems of their own. We’re now looking, quite rapidly in some cases, to integrate those systems into European ones.

Europe has a habit for moving slow. But there is ample indication it is learning agility, and it is readying to position itself to stopgap the assets that Ukraine may soon lack. That is very good.

So things are bad, no doubt. Ukraine cannot accept the deal that Trump now insists on. It is the difficult choice for Ukraine, Zelensky said last month, between “losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner.” It seems that it will have to lose its ally.

But in so doing, America and Russia may have turned Europe into a real partner.

Mr. Commissioner, Build Up This Drone Wall

America finally giving it to the bombardment of Russian flattery has a perverse upside. It will allow the world to stop pretending as though Washington remains relevant.

Earlier this year, Ukraine’s non-American allies set up a structure to manage exactly this: The Coalition of the Willing. It is the vehicle through which the rest of the world can continue defending against this imperial aggression, regardless of what the wannabe imperialist in the White House does.

Throughout this Potemkin peace process, Europe and Canada have had to continue pretending that America is reliable. Soon, perhaps, the charade can end.

In coming off the rails of American military might, the participating nations still need to confront the ways in which they are insufficient.

Consider the Russian drones which strayed into European airspace earlier this year, or the harassing drone attacks which have plagued European airports. Insofar as Europe has been able to respond, it relied heavily on American fighter jets stationed on European soil. It, like Ukraine, relies on American satellite imagery and intelligence, too. Even as it seeks to buy kit for Ukraine, it often does so through American suppliers.

So this Coalition of the Willing has also become a means of introspection. Of figuring out how to create defenses and capabilities that do not balance themselves on American infrastructure. Europe — plus Canada and the UK — have raced ahead on ReArm Europe, a trillion-dollar effort to build out this self-defense equipment sooner rather than later. The money is set to start flowing soon.

For this to address the current crisis, however, everything must be plugged in to what Ukraine knows and needs. While applying jimmy-rigged battlefield solutions to a long-term multi-nation military plan isn’t quite as simple as it may sound, there are huge technological innovations that Kyiv has figured out that Europe should acquire and produce at scale. That, in turn, should feed right back into Ukraine’s self-defense. By creating symbiosis, instead of an exchange from two silos, both sides are going to move faster, build cheaper, and be more effective at defending against a cheap and corrupt military which only knows how to put bodies in front of cannon fire.

There’s good signs that this is exactly how Europe is thinking. I’ll leave you with an exchange I had with Kubilius about the prospect of a European ‘drone wall’ — a network of drones and electronic warfare sensors capable of disrupting Russian incursions.

BE&S: You’ve spoken about the prospect of building a wall of drones through Europe. I wonder if you can give us a bit of an update.

Kubilis: Now, officially we call it, “Drone Defense Initiative.”

BE&S: “Wall of Drones” sounds better.

Kubilis: Things are really moving now. As you know, this drone initiative — together with our Eastern Flank Watch — they are written down into our defense readiness roadmap as flagships, meaning we shall pay bigger attention to them. On the Eastern Flank [the Baltic state and Poland] they’re looking for two major elements: One is the ground wall, and one is the drone wall. Ground wall means ‘control mobility measures’ — which would not allow tanks or artillery or so on and to enter the territory. Again, we’re learning from Ukraine. It seems that the fortifications and things they built were very, very effective. We need to build the same here, on the Eastern flank.

On drones: Again, we can see very big differences in capabilities with what the Ukrainians have. Go to Ukraine and you will see. With the provocations — 20 drones flying into Poland, for example — it appears that we do not have the capability to detect drones, or they are very limited. So we need to build those capabilities. Either new types of radar, or through acoustic sensors. The Ukrainian DELTA system is a very inspiring example. We need drone interceptors and electronic warfare. Maybe lasers — but that will take time. So those are things which we want to develop. And we really need to build that structure together with Ukraine.

BE&S: Talking about building structures together with Ukraine, especially in a world where America is trying to unplug itself from these systems — you’re bringing on a new partners in your defense industry in Canada (and, I suppose, Ukraine as well.) How, in a real sense, do you build shared supply chains for your defense industry, and do you think there’s enough willingness of member states to really do that? Has there been an understanding of the actual business-to-business linkages necessary to bring on Canada and Ukraine into Europe’s shared defense industry?

Kubilis: Well it is developing. We see a lot of interest among European companies, even without any of our initiatives. But different industries from the EU are very active in Ukraine. They’re creating joint ventures — establishing them somewhere in Europe, learning from Ukraine, producing weapons for Ukraine needs, and so on. And so there’s more ahead. There is the so-called Danish model — meaning that European Union member states are coming with their money and they are procuring weapons from the Ukrainian defense industry for Ukrainian needs.

What is much more difficult is to copy-and-paste the ecosystem from Ukraine to Europe. In Kyiv, you can see in, here, drone producers, in the next room, drone operators, in the next room, they’re analyzing data from the front line. They have the information to react if drones are starting not to work. Russians are finding ways to disable drones. Ukrainians are doing the same as Russian drones. So you need that ecosystem to ask: Where are they now?

And, on Canada: We’re looking very much into issue of security and supply of rare earth materials. That’s very important. Since Canada has quite substantial possibilities to supply.1

That’s it for this week!

If you’re keen to read more of my thoughts from Halifax, my two Star columns this week are all about the particulars of America’s fuckyou to the international community and about how Canada can rebuild its defense industry to facilitate its divorce. (These are gift links that will work for the next few days.) I’ve also got a longer piece on why Canada needs to buy the F-35 already, as unpleasant as it may be.

Episode 2 of Soft Power has also dropped. I’ll be sending out a standalone dispatch about that next week.

I should expand a bit about the future of Bug-eyed and Shameless: Like I said in my previous dispatch, this thing isn’t going anywhere. I’ll continue writing this newsletter so long as people enjoy reading it and I enjoy writing it.

Before taking on my new role, I had considered raising the price of a subscription and putting more things behind a paywall. My mindset went that more revenue would justify more of my week spent working on it.

Now that I’ve got a full-time job, my desire to think through big ideas here on Substack has actually grown, even if it has been shunted to after-hours and weekends.

So I’ve got more ideas to break down and less time to do it. That may mean that my (already tenuous) promise of publishing once-a-week is fully broken. I could paper over that fact with more short-form content designed to gin engagement, but your email inboxes are already full.

Instead, I’m just going to knock down my subscription price a bit and promise that virtually nothing will be behind a paywall. If you want to subscribe: Thank you so much. It is paying for my time to writing these dispatches, and it is also funding Soft Power, some ambitious and off-the-books reporting missions I want to do next year, and — if things continue on — even hiring some outside writers to contribute to this newsletter.

But I don’t expect people to pay for a newsletter that comes less frequently than promised. So I won’t insist on charging for it. And I will also, as I’ve always done, hand out a free subscription to anyone who asks, no questions — just ask.

So, anyway, it is now $50CAD for a year and $100 if you want to become a ‘founding member.’ (What does a founding member get? My eternal gratitude. My looking at your name and thinking this person is fantastic. My automatic, enthusiastic, endlessly appreciative response to any email you send me.)

That’s enough navel-gazing. I’ll leave you with a song and a passage from Bloodlands. Until next week.

Timothy Synder: Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow, but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between. Their utopias of control overlapped in Ukraine. Hitler remembered the ephemeral German eastern colony of 1918 as German access to the Ukrainian breadbasket. Stalin, who had served his revolution in Ukraine shortly thereafter, regarded the land in much the same way. Its farmland, and its peasants, were to be exploited in the making of a modern industrial state. Hitler looked upon collectivization as a disastrous failure, and presented it as proof of the failure of Soviet communism as such. But he had no doubt that Germans could make of Ukraine a land of milk and honey.

For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food. It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics,rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image. Their programs and their power all depended upon their control of Ukraine’s fertile soil and its millions of agricultural laborers. In 1933, Ukrainians would die in the millions, in the greatest artificial famine in the history of world. This was the beginning of the special history of Ukraine, but not the end. In 1941 Hitler would seize Ukraine from Stalin, and attempt to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered. During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power,more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.

On May 4, 1886, someone in Chicago’s Haymarket Square threw a stick of dynamite at a phalanx of advancing police officers.

In the preceding days, the Chicago cops had shot and killed two workers, striking for an eight-hour work day. Undeterred, the laborers congregated defiantly in the square for an entirely peaceful demonstration. Then the police arrived to break it up.

The bomb killed one policeman initially, but the ensuing gun battle left more than 10 dead on both sides. The city didn’t hesitate to identify a culprit. For months, militant labor activists with the Industrial Workers of the World — the Wobblies — had preached about the equalizing power of dynamite. A year earlier, founding member of the IWW and noted anarchist Lucy Parsons wrote a love letter to the explosive in a Chicago labor newspaper. “Dynamite,” she wrote, “its voices the only voice that oppressors of the people can understand.” A single stick of dynamite can provoke terror, she went on, and “the ‘terror’ becomes a great educator and agitator.” That was all the proof the city needed.

But they needed necks to hang. So the city turned to the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency.

So, too, did Charles Siringo, a renowned cowboy detective. He had recently given up chasing cattle rustlers like Billy the Kid and made his way to Chicago. After watching the carnage in the square, he walked into the Pinkerton offices and offered his services. “I wanted to help stamp out this great Anarchist curse,” Siringo wrote years later.1

What he found in the Pinkerton offices, however, were detectives with few scruples. They would infiltrate the Wobblies’ offices and meetings, sitting in on their debates and strategy sessions, then return to write reports full of lies and outlandish mischaracterizations. The Pinkerton agency had a narrative, and it made the facts fit.

The cops, with the help of the Pinkertons, would eventually round up eight men. Siringo sat through their trial, ostensibly to prevent jury tampering — but he was quietly confident that the jury had already been rigged, and that witnesses were perjuring themselves to boot.

All eight were convicted — including Lucy Parsons’ husband, Albert. Two men asked for, and received clemency; one committed suicide in his cell; and the remaining four were hanged for their alleged crimes.

The bombing and ensuing media frenzy spurred a moral panic over the threat of these anarchists, socialists, and activists. And that paranoia was great business for the Pinkertons and a growing industry of similar agencies — often more concerned with breaking strikes and disrupting organized labor than with solving actual crimes. These “gunmen of industry” would keep up their work so long as capital feared labor.

As this happened, Siringo rose to become one of the most revered detectives in the world. He was no fan of anarchy, but he was sympathetic to the plight of labor. And he grew more and more convinced that Pinkerton wasn’t fighting crime, it was helping to create it.

Pinkerton detectives would lie, even frame suspects in complicity to murder, because “these flashy reports suited the agency and pleased the clients,” Siringo wrote.

Siringo would spend more than two decades in the employ of the Pinkertons, trying to do good work in an agency otherwise mired in perjury and corruption. At the end of it, he published a book of his time there: Two Evil Isms. That is: Anarchism, and Pinkertonism.

“No doubt some of these anarchists deserved hanging,” Siringo wrote in his book, “but for the life of me, I could not see the justice of the conviction.” It was a case, he wrote, “of ‘money making the mare go’ with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency using the whip.”

In his book Inventing the Pinkertons, historian S. Paul O’Hara picks up Siringo’s warnings and concludes that, behind all the lore, the Pinkerton Agency was really a master of propaganda.

O’Hara: The Pinkerton eye, emblazoned with the promise “we never sleep” and evoking the political vigilance of the prewar “Wide Awake” militias, was more than a threat of surveillance; it was the company brand. Industrialists in the immediate postwar period worried about the need for discipline and the potential for crime. Allan Pinkerton built his agency into a powerful and lucrative business by exploiting these perceptions of disorder. […] Through a series of books chronicling the adventures of his detectives, he tied his reputation directly to the emerging literary genre of detective novels. Such stories guided readers through the modern world because they promised that crime was an abnormality that could be contained and that the power to place the world in order (a power held by the detective) always proved stronger than the criminal’s power to disrupt social order.2

The Pinkerton agency began as a weird externality of a society in flux. America was rapidly becoming richer, more industrialized, more centralized, more internationalist — and its still nascent system of government did not have a lot of great answers for how to handle that. First they policed the bandits of the wild west, then rose to battle the foreign-influenced anarchists looking for socialist revolution.

Through their exploits in film, on the radio, and in comic books, the Pinkertons became a product and a way to see the world.

But the real organization had become as criminal as the anarchists. The agency bilked cities for work not done (and the detectives defrauded their employer in turn.) Their rapid expansion meant hiring thugs: Relations in the Denver office got so bad one detective kept his hand on his sidearm, worried he might be ambushed by his coworkers when he showed up for work every morning.

Worse than that, the detective agency spread like mushrooms. Pinkerton franchised at first, but lost control quickly thereafter. Every town was lousy with detective agencies, legitimate and otherwise. Some did only strike-breaking, some genuinely solved crimes, some were just wannabes.

The detective industry needed paranoia to give its detectives work, so it sold paranoia too.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about how social media is distorting our perception of reality. It is making us afraid. It makes us view our own communities with suspicion and distrust, at a time where we desperately need more social cohesion.

We’ve been here before. We’ve turned fear into a profit motive, then hired the fear-mongers to keep us safe. But we’ve also woken up to that fact, and run them out of town on a rail.

We can do that again.

In September, Fox News aired a truly unhinged two-and-a-half-minute item covering protests against ICE in Portland.

The package came amid a deluge of social media video purporting to show the West coast city engulfed in chaos. Social media users insisted these anarchists were “out of control without consequences.” Antifa was “mobbing reporters and assaulting civilians.” There were “TERRORIST activities” and “thugs” who launched “projectiles” at federal agents. The protesters were equipped with riot gear and prepared to go to war, social media users said.

Few, if any, of those promoting these videos were actually there, and they all seemed to have a particular interest in pumping up the supposed threat of these protesters.

But Fox echoed this growing narrative of Portland as the epicenter of chaos. The protesters were there to “wreak havoc” on Portland, the network said. It spoke to residents who testified to the tumult. It showed graphic footage of the conflict in the streets. It caught President Donald Trump’s attention.

“What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he wrote on Truth Social.

On September 27, Trump declared on Truth Social that he was sending the National Guard to “war ravaged Portland.” This would be to put down “Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” He went further: “I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.” (And signed off with the obligatory “thank you for your attention to this matter!”)

And then, the whole narrative began to unravel.

Local news began reporting on how ICE officers and other federal agents — who had been dispatched to Portland since earlier that Summer — had been instigating a significant chunk of the violence occurring on the streets.

When a senior Portland police officer was called to testify about the state of the anti-ICE protests, he said it was the federal officers — not the protesters — who had been “night after night, actually instigating and causing some of the ruckus that’s occurring down there.”

Other videos — ones less inclined to go viral on Twitter and the other platforms where Trump and his cohort get their news — show federal officers pepper spraying random people and firing projectiles at journalists and other peaceful protesters.

As an appeals court would later note, “there had not been a single incident of protesters’ disrupting the execution of the laws” for fully two weeks prior to Trump’s post. One report from a Portland police officer noted that, the day before his irate post, “we observed approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.”

How could there be such a chasm between what Trump saw on TV and what users experienced on social media, and what was really happening?

ProPublica helped answer that question earlier this month. They analyzed each shot in that Fox News report. It turns out the network had spliced together five-year-old footage to make Portland look more chaotic than it truly was. When the investigative outlet looked at what happened in those neighborhoods during this supposed war, it found that police had made no arrests and that the streets had been quiet.

Twitter, Donald Trump, and Fox News had all worked together to build a state of un-reality. They had, like the Pinkertons a century before, described a state of lawlessness and then sold the public on their preferred response.

But this isn’t some new manipulation which Trump has exploited for the first time. This is part of the social media business plan.

There has been a massive amount of research conducted over the past number of years on the role social media plays in radicalization and incitement to violence. These studies have told us an enormous amount about how the internet bends our brains and makes us prone to conflict. The world wide web hardens our own ideologies and grievances, we know, making us more likely to weaponize that anger into real-world violence against institutions or populations.

This trend is on full display in Trump’s emerging crusade to crush Antifa and the other domestic terrorists he has conjured up from the fog of paranoia and distrust present in his political movement.

But it isn’t the only story, here. The same trends which promote anger and hatred — created inside users’ filter bubbles, rewarded by platform algorithms and users’ social media habits — can also create fear. And there has been infinitely less study focused on how the internet makes us afraid.

In 2017, a trio of researchers set out to understand the emotional dimension around border security. Analyzing thousands of tweets, reacting to an announcement from then-President Barack Obama on immigration, they actually found that fear was the single-most common emotional response — and that it mapped closely onto anger.3

But the researchers found something even more interesting. In their modelling of the online discourse around border security, “fear, disgust, anger, and sadness distinguish influential users from less influential ones.” That is to say: If you want to succeed online, you need to know how to weaponize emotion.

We can see this trend from another direction.

A couple of years ago, the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology mapped out the emotional shift undertaken by major news outlets over the past two decades. Their study catches the exact moment when Facebook unveils its News Feed, in 2006, and the drastic effect it has on news discourse. You can see as these news publishers began refashioning themselves to meet the social media audience. The trend lines are terrifying, and there is good reason to think they’ve grown more intense in recent years.4

We can, and should, blame algorithms for some of this change. We, too, should blame the influencers, media personalities, and politicians who trade on these highly-potent emotions. But we also have to accept that the very nature of online engagement rewards content that makes you feel something.

As abstract a problem as this seems, it localizes itself in very intense ways.

In 2022, Emily Strickler, a master’s student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, set out to study the role that neighborhood-based social media — chiefly, the local social media platform Nextdoor and neighborhood Facebook groups — played on social cohesion. She analyzed how communities in Las Vegas used these networks to stay in touch over the winter of 2020.5

These platforms, ostensibly, exist to facilitate engagement. They allow you to correspond with your neighbors at all hours, share updates, promote community events, and so on. But that’s not what they did.

“Use of neighborhood social media was found to have a negative association with how individuals perceived their neighborhood environment,” Strickler found. It seemed that the more you used social media to connect with your immediate neighbors, the people who you could walk down the street and say hi to, the less connected to them you felt. Social cohesion went down, sense of community declined, and fear of crime increased.

It’s important to remember that these groups are explicitly local — they are not infiltrated by Russian agents or bad-faith political actors. There, we are our own tormentors.

“Users frequently post and receive engagement on posts about issues such as mail theft, notices of strangers in the neighborhood, or what they perceive as suspicious activity,” Strickler writes. That kind of engagement is entirely organic — it can even be cathartic and necessary, a kind of steam release for frustration — but it also creates a distorted view by the neighbors who see those posts. “It is human nature to report and remember negative events over positive ones,” Strickler notes.

Imagine a porch pirate who targets a well-to-do neighborhood. They wait until the Amazon truck arrives and delivers parcels onto every doorstep on the cul-de-sac. The thief rushes up, loads every box into their car, and drives off. Over the next 48 hours, one-by-one, every house on the street posts their dismay: We’ve been robbed! The crime itself was exceptional and random. But a resident two blocks away, member of the local Facebook group, sees each one of these posts and thinks: This neighborhood isn’t as safe as we thought.

Producing content for social media costs virtually nothing, but it can be extremely costly to consume. When you post a status update, it can be a fleeting thought. When you read it, it can ruin your day.

That’s the exact phenomenon that two Australian sociologists sought to explore when they studied the impact of local social media in Queensland. They surveyed locals about their perception of crime, particularly as they experienced it through neighborhood groups on Facebook, WhatsApp, Nextdoor, and Neighbors — the social media platform run by doorbell surveillance company Ring. They went a step further, and sought out study participants who were also content creators, hyperlocal influencers.

Like Strickler, the study found that consuming content about crime on social media reduced people’s feelings of safety. Interestingly, however, they also found that “content creators expressed lower levels of perceived crime and higher feelings of safety compared to individuals who consume LBSM [locality‐based social media] only.”

We’re a few decades on from the advent of the ‘citizen journalist’ — that role has morphed and grown into the role of influencer. But we’re still grappling with the strange consequences of having a ton of regular people do a job, central to our democracy, that once required training, experience, and oversight. And we’re finding out that replacing journalists, whose job involves trying to situate news in context, with regular people, who are competing for attention online, is bad. People are freaking their neighbors the hell out.

It gets even more interesting. “We found that individuals who create content, react, share, and comment on LBSM feel safer than individuals who do not engage in LBSM,” they write.

So the more you feed the beast, the more you produce content for these social media pages, the better you feel about your community — but passive readers and viewers, there to get news and updates about their neighborhood, come off feeling considerably less safe and secure.

These localized social media communities are the easiest to study, precisely because they’re geographically-limited. But this phenomenon repeats itself nationally, even internationally. A spate of carjackings in Washington, D.C, shared widely on Twitter, can weaken someone’s sense of safety in Toronto, and vice versa.

Crime content simply does gangbusters. True crime remains arguably the most bankable genre of books and podcasts. Videos of conflict, theft, riots, and car chases are almost always guaranteed to go viral on TikTok and Twitter.

But crime in America has plunged since the early 1990s. The violent crime rate in 1993 was around 80 per 1,000 people: Staggeringly high. By 2015, that number had plunged to just 20. In the supposed post-pandemic crime surge, the rate hit 23.5.

Public perception of crime, however, is often decoupled from this data.

By the early 2000s, there was virtual unanimity: Americans reported that, with each year, there was less and less crime. But then, even as crime continued falling, perception of crime shot up. If the violent crime rate did increase, even just slightly, perception of it increased even more.

But there’s something interesting happening right now.

Over the past 12 months, perception of crime has dropped precipitously exactly as crime itself has fallen. This has been described as the public developing a more astute and accurate read of actual crime rates. Which is certainly true to a degree.

But, as survey data from Gallup shows, fear of crime has become radically divided along partisan lines. It is perhaps one of the most stark illustrations of affective polarization — of partisans fashioning their view of the world to comport with their political affiliation — that I’ve ever seen. There is simply no comparison to it.

Let me tie this all together: Fear of crime and disorder is an intense and tactile thing. It is perhaps one of the most reactive feelings in our society — something you can observe with your own eyes. Fear is also one of the most effective emotions to exploit for political ends, especially in invoking solutions that people would otherwise bristle at. These trends are as old as time, but social media is allowing bad actors to unfurl this strategy on a massive scale. Not only are fascists and propagandists deploying this against the public, but the public are opting in to this cycle of unreal fear. Social media firms, who once professed to care about healthy democracy, have abandoned all pretense and are reaping the profits of this mass delusion.

Crime is perhaps the sharpest example of how social media can alter our sense of place in our own communities. But there are so many different ways in which this happens.

There is a new kind of online space, one that I don’t think we’ve fully classified. But its prime example is 6ixBuzz.

6ixBuzz is, simply, an Instagram page for the city of Toronto. But, more broadly, it is a cross-platform hub for viral content, paid sponsorships, ragebait, parody, news, music, anti-vaccine bullshit, culture, and fear. It has a history of spreading misinformation, broadcasting political advertising, promoting racist content, and pumping-up clips of anti-social behavior.

6ixBuzz is a wildly warped mirror of the city of Toronto, and it is obscenely popular. It has 2.5 million followers on Instagram alone. And it has prompted a crazy number of imitators.

Some people have inferred political intent in 6ixBuzz, and I think they’re wrong. 6ixBuzz is a business. It stumbled onto all the same data I mentioned above, through trial-and-error. It had discovered how to make people angry and afraid, how it can alienate people from their own city — or, better yet, how to alienate rural and suburbanites from their nearest satellite city — and how it could prompt people to participate, contribute, and share their content widely.

There is now a version of 6ixBuzz in every major city in North America, to varying degrees. There are Facebook groups which started as community hubs that have fallen into rage, acrimony, and viral content of people behaving badly. Reddit is a repository of video of public freakouts, idiots fighting things, losers pretending to be badass, cops behaving badly, rogue Karens, and so on.

We are distilling the human experience to only the most extreme examples of human behavior. And it is significantly easier to film someone freaking out on an airplane than it is to capture someone getting news that they’re cancer-free, so we post and promote the former.

But not only are we consumers of this viral content, but we are expected to engage with it — and each other. Even though we know that the internet makes us less inclined to compromise, more inclined to distrust, and more susceptible to assuming bad faith, we keep engaging in these sprawling public online debates on the very same platforms that keep making us angry and afraid.

I know this sounds relatively elementary, as it’s essentially a description of the system that has become quintessential to modern society. But it is shocking the degree to which we are incapable of keeping these facts in the front of our minds. I have colleagues who have spent more than a decade as public figures on social media and who are still roiled by every mean post or wayward criticism. They spend orders of magnitude more time obsessing over a post than the person ever spent in drafting it. Worse yet, they mistake volume for intent — because they receive 200 negative tweets, they multiply the intensity of each tweet by 200.

We continue to find ourselves in the focal point of a magnifying glass being held up to the sun, and we are getting hotter and hotter. And we need to recognize that even if we can’t slap away the hand holding it, we can step aside.

That’s it for this week.

As some of you may have seen, I’ve started a new job! I am now a full-time columnist at the Toronto Star. You can read my first column as a full-on columnist here, and my mini-investigation into the Canadian connection to Donald Trump’s Bitcoin empire.

Here’s some great news, if you enjoy this newsletter: It’s not going anywhere.

At the Star, my focus is going to zoom in on Canada: Our national security, democracy, defense, sovereignty, and our relationship with Big Tech.

Here on Bug-eyed and Shameless, my focus will continue to be on all things information, particularly about how America is continuing to warp it for its own benefit.

And on Soft Power, I’ll have a new episode out very soon on the state of global humanitarian aid after the end of USAID.

So lots of stuff going on. I’m hoping to get back in the swing of regular newsletters in the near future. I’m at the Halifax International Security Forum this weekend, and I’m hoping to post some updates from it early next week.

[exhale] Until then!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we get our information.

In an era where our institutional gatekeepers are poor, distrusted, and marginalized; where politicians want to deliver the news to their constituents directly and where news influencers want to be political kingmakers; where a small number of tech behemoths get to decide who gets to see what and when; and where our hunt for information brings us to an infinite liminal space where nothing is true and everything is possible — I can’t help but feel like things aren’t going well.

Given all that, I think it’s easy to sound like a real bummer sometimes.

But, here’s the thing: People are, naturally, inclined to try and tell stories and explain the world to each other, even if there are forces trying to frustrate that. And that is quite cool.

Over the past few years, I’ve been more-and-more enthralled with new kinds of storytelling happening on YouTube and other video platforms. This content — what the kids call a video essay, but which looks awfully similar to old-school news magazine show — is well-written, neatly produced, in-depth, topical, and super popular.

Creators like TLDR News, Stewart Hicks, Oh The Urbanity, Polyphonic, Search Party, Johnny Harris, and a ton of others are all finding new ways to communicate about global affairs, urbanism, design, music, sports, politics, and everything else through a medium that, for the moment, seems pretty friendly to it.

I’ve always said that I never want to produce journalism that I wouldn’t also want to consume. But I also really want to produce the kind of journalism that I find most engaging.

So, last year, when Bigger Than Our Borders reached out to flag a grant they provide to good journalism about the state of world, particularly as it relates to impact of — and the need for — good foreign aid and humanitarian assistance, I pitched a crazy idea for a YouTube channel that would explore those ideas in-depth. They didn’t think it was so crazy.1

The result is Soft Power, a show that breaks down the complicated forces that shape our world. It’s a show about all the things that don’t get as much attention these days — diplomacy, security, aid, trade, spying, and realpolitik. These are the (sometimes unsexy) things that make the world safe and prosperous, and they’re worth spending some time focusing on. So that’s what I’m hoping to do.

Episode one, all abut Moscow’s violent and self-serving mission to win over the Sahel, is out now.

This is a side project that I’m incredibly excited to continue in the coming months, which I’ll be doing alongside my regular writing here on Bug-eyed and Shameless and my regular columns in the Toronto Star.

And so I’ve got an ask for all of you: Can you please subscribe to my channel?

That way, you’ll never miss an episode and you get to tell the all-powerful YouTube algorithm that my channel is worth paying attention to.

I’ll be back with a new episode of Soft Power in just a few weeks, and then you’ll be seeing regular episodes, right into 2026.

Until next time!

In a conference room in London, Bill Browder was shown a disquieting image.

It was a photo of a document, which had been photographed the day before in St. Petersburg. The document seemed to show that one of Browder’s many investment funds, housed in a limited liability company called Mahaon, had about $71 million worth of rubles in it.

Trouble is, Mahaon was supposed to be dormant. There shouldn’t have been a single kopeck in there. Browder worried one of his accountants had misplaced the pile of cash.

This was 2007. Browder was amongst the wave of hungry capitalists who surged into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fire sale of state assets had been a boon for Wall Street, but it had also engendered rank corruption at every level. Browder’s fund, Hermitage Capital, had made a killing, and it had also helped expose some of the most brazen corruption. For that, he had become an unlikely ally of President Vladimir Putin, who seemed interested in stopping the wholesale looting.

But Browder was now facing the corruption first-hand. “Mahaon’s been stolen, Bill,” his accountant said.1

Browder was dumbstruck. “How do you steal a company?”

It was, as it turns out, quite easy. In the weeks prior, Browder’s companies had been raided by Russian police, and they had carried away the companies’ books. Charges had been drawn up, filed surreptitiously, alleging fraud big and small. Now, someone had used all that information to forge documents, re-register companies, and move huge sums of money around. With the switch made, Mahaon technically belonged to a two-bit criminal from Kazan who had served time for manslaughter.

“So the police raid our offices, seize a ton of documents, and then use a convicted killer to fraudulently re-register our companies?” Browder asked.

“That’s exactly what happened,” responded one of his tax advisers, a studious man named Sergei Magnitsky. The bad news continued. This seemed to be a conspiracy between the bureaucracy, the courts, the cops, and organized crime. A Russian investment firm appeared out of thin air, offering to help Browder liquidate his entire company to avoid the legal nightmare.

Browder was convinced that this was the work of petty Napoleons, and that if only they could get word to the Kremlin, this corruption scheme would be shut down.

Magnitsky warned him not to get his hopes up. “Russian stories never have happy endings,” he said.

Their pleas to Putin went unanswered. Then, news agencies began to report on Browder’s supposed fraud. They had the full details of this complicated, inscrutable scheme to pilfer money from the Russian state. They named Magnitsky as an evil mastermind of the scuzzy accounting. Browder suddenly discovered that he was persona non grata in Russia — most of his Russian staff got the message and fled not long after.

The extent of this scheme finally came into view. In the same way that American finance had been invited by the Kremlin to come liquidate the Soviet state, the Russian government was now inviting its criminals to come in and liquidate the American investors.

Even as they realized that the whole state was in on this graft, Magnitsky refused to leave. “The law will protect me,” he said. “This isn’t 1937.” He proved and documented how the theft and screw-job had been enabled by all levels of the Russian state, how Moscow was working with criminals to steal from private industry, how oligarchs and corrupt officials were personally profiting from this dark economy, and how it flowed up to the highest levels of the state.

It didn’t matter. Magnitsky was wrong about the purpose of Russian law. He was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, tortured, and killed in a Russian prison.

After his death, Magnitsky’s name became synonymous with combating corruption.

Those who had come forward to help Magnitsky unravel this conspiracy met untimely ends: One fell off a balcony, a common affliction in Putin’s Russia. Others kept dying of sudden heart and liver diseases at early ages.

Inside Russia, the corruption has rotted the entire state and nobody is capable of stopping it.

When Boris Nemtsov exposed how roughly half of the eye-watering $50 billion price tag for the 2010 Sochi Olympics ended up in bank accounts close to Putin, he was shot dead. When Alexei Navalny revealed how the price tag for Putin’s sprawling and secretive palace had risen past $1.3 billion, he was sent to prison and murdered.

Vladimir Putin maintains an extraordinary machine of theft. Its cogs are greased with the blood of those who call attention to it.

“Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic, nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors,” writes journalist and historian . “Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.”2

His is just one model. Around the world, illiberal leaders are engaging in industrial-scale corruption and their citizens are either powerless to prevent it, or are cheering on the crimes.

The board of directors for this global kleptocracy has a new member: Donald Trump.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: Donald Trump is stealing bigly. It is very, very important that we understand where the cash is flowing if we ever hope to defund this operation and put the money back. So let’s take a quick tour of the myriad corruption schemes being run by the president.

Other People’s Money

On December 11, 2024, it was announced that the Trump family name, after years of being removed from towers around the world, would be affixed to a brand new building: In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The same day that DarGlobal, Trump’s partner in the project, announced the deal, their stock price nearly doubled.

DarGlobal had already launched several Trump-branded projects in Oman, and it was readying the announcement of a Trump Tower Dubai and the Trump International Golf Club in Doha, amongst other projects. So close is the partnership that DarGlobal’s American offices are listed as the 19th floor of Trump Tower in New York.

If all goes according to plan, Trump-branded projects will add north of $1 billion in assets to DarGlobal’s books. And that news is, in turn, great for Saudi Arabia. (DarGlobal’s parent company Dar Al Arkan Real Estate Development Company, is the largest real estate developer in Saudi Arabia and has ties to the Saudi royal family.)

Months later, Trump departed for the first foreign trip of his second term: To Saudi Arabia. There, he announced a $600 billion investment package from Riyadh, including $300 million from DarGlobal, to finance their U.S. expansion plans. From there, he went to Qatar to announce an absurd $1.2 trillion economic deal with Qatar plus another $200 billion deal with the UAE.

Not long after, Qatar gifted Trump a big, shiny $400 million plane.

While the investment deals are so massive that it can be hard to even appreciate the composite parts, one bit of the deal jumps out: Riyadh will invest “$20 billion in AI data centers and energy infrastructure in the United States,” the White House said.

Funny, just weeks before Trump’s Gulf junket, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. announced a new venture: American Data Centers. The company had no clear product or staff, and seemed to exist only as a press release and a registered company. But they had capital.

American Data Centers was a collaborative effort between the Trumps and Dominari Holdings, which is run by Kyle Wool, a friend and financial advisor to the Trump brothers. Shortly before the data center deal, the company welcomed the Trump brothers as directors.

Dominari has a pretty clear modus operandi: Buy up small, unprofitable, public companies with miserable share prices for cheap. Then, try and get publicity to make them attractive investments. That has always been the Trump family effort as well, so it was a great fit.

The partnership leveraged this strategy to great effect this summer when Dominari acquired a money-pit toymaking company, SRM Entertainment. Days after the acquisition, Dominari rebranded their acquisition as Tron Inc, a cryptocurrency company. The name was no coincidence: They quickly announced that they were bringing aboard Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto entrepreneur behind the TRON Foundation — who had largely been off the radar since he was sued by the SEC for fraud. Shortly before the deal, the SEC quietly dropped the prosecution. The addition of Sun set the stock price rocketing upwards, guaranteeing the windfall for Dominari.

Dominari made $120 million trading on the deal.

With Dominari, the Trump brothers also launched New America Acquisition I Corp: An investment fund looking to raise $300 million to put into American manufacturing, or so says the press release. That mission was undermined by the structure of the company: A SPAC, a vehicle which exists mostly to merge with existing, successful, businesses.

Despite existing solely to cannibalize another firm, this shell company got a leg up with a $6 million placement from New America Sponsor I LLC.

One of the directors of New America, John Darwin, is also managing director of an investment fund owned by the ARC Group — a Shanghai-based firm owned by Mexican-born entrepreneur Abraham Cinta. It’s not the first time he showed up to provide capital to Trump business ventures.

In 2022, when the then-former president was looking to bring Trump Media & Technology Group public through a SPAC, another company — Digital World Acquisition Corp — sprung up with $2 million to finance that effort. That cash also came from the ARC Group.

The ARC Group has a history of SEC investigations for marketing shell companies, pitching them as functioning businesses despite having no employees, revenue, or, well, business. They got in trouble for the Digital World project as well: The Securities and Exchange Commission charged that ARC failed to disclose its intentions to merge the company with Trump Media when it began fundraising for the effort. The SEC slapped them with an $18 million penalty.

This kind of corporate shell game is increasingly common on Wall Street, particularly amongst a particular kind of quick-return investment fund. But the Trumps are bringing a special kind of energy to the effort.

Remember American Data Centers? They never actually got into the data center business, so they merged with a Canadian “energy infrastructure platform firm, Hut 8, to relaunch the effort as American Bitcoin Corp — which hopes to be “the world’s largest, most efficient pure-play Bitcoin miner.”

In announcing the effort, Eric Trump called Hut 8 “a recognized leader in the Bitcoin space.” Which is a big claim for a company that was running a Bitcoin mining rig out of a trailer in Drumheller and which has a litany of securities violations underneath it.

No matter: The operation has raised $70 million despite having meager operations — it lost $5 million last quarter.

But this is just the beginning of the Trump clan’s crypto obsessions.

Last year, Trump announced he would be launching an investment service largely based on cryptocurrencies: World Liberty Financial. It had a pathetic start. World Liberty began by offering nearly $300 million in coins, but sold a paltry $2.7 million by October of last year, shortly before the election.

And then Trump won the election. In a matter of weeks, Justin Sun announced he was plowing $30 million into World Liberty Financial. Then, the day before Trump’s inauguration, Sun spent another $45 million. It was a month later that the SEC prosecution against Sun was suddenly dropped.

The Trumps aren’t picky when it came to investors. When he was in Dubai last year, Eric Trump was making a clear pitch: Buy $20 million in tokens from World Liberty Financial, and you’ll be part of something grand. It was a big ask, considering World Liberty Financial hadn’t really done anything to that point. But after the president returned to office, with Sun backing the effort, money rolled in. One of the biggest fish was Chinese investor Guren Zhou — under investigation in the U.K. for money laundering — who put in $100 million through a company called Aqua1 Foundation, per Reuters. Zhou’s previous business was carpets.

Sun was remarkably influential in crowding-in investors into the hitherto dud company founded by Trump. And his support kept coming: When the president-elect launched $TRUMP, a meme coin, Sun bought up $20 million worth — which made him the winner of a contest to see who could buy the most of the meme coin. (Fun, right?) As a prize, he snagged an invite to a private dinner party at Mar-a-Lago and a $100,000 gem-encrusted watch.

$TRUMP skyrocketed in value upon its release, rocketing from 18 cents to $75, before seeing a massive sell-off and a price crash. The coin — which has no inherent value or purpose, beyond to be an investment vehicle owned by a holding company controlled by the president — has bounced around between $5 and $15 since then.

Lots of people lost huge on $TRUMP. A small number of crypto speculators, however, walked away with $100 million in profit. ($MELANIA was a similar story.) Adding up both the value in the coins held by the first family and the fees collected on the $30 billion trade volume, Trump stands to pocket more than $350 million.

But wait, there’s more. Just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Trump Media & Technology Group announced it was launching a whole other financial services company, providing the public an exciting opportunity to buy Bitcoin and shady cryptocurrencies in the safety and comfort of totally different Trump-branded investment funds.

The whole operation would be managed by billionaire investor Charles Schwab — who, in turn, has pumped some $15 million into this new company, probably to be named Truth.fi.

Schwab has also, over the years, donated tens of millions of dollars to the Trump cause: To his campaign, to his legal funds, to MAGA downballot candidates. Here’s Trump introducing Schwab in the Oval Office, bragging that his policies earned the man $900 million.

Trump Media has, even up to the second quarter of this year, posted a pathetic $900,000 in revenue, for a net loss of $20 million. And yet when it announced plans to raise $3 billion in capital to buy Bitcoin and other crypto assets, investors (including Schwab) jumped.

According to financial statements filed in August, the company has already raised $2.3 billion to support its “Bitcoin treasury plan.” The company is promising to offer ETFs, set up a betting market to compete with Polymarket, and do all manner of other stuff — it just hasn’t, as of yet, begun to do any of it. Investors are giving Trump’s company (which currently sits in a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary) billions of dollars so he can buy Bitcoin and do whatever he his totally-independent executives want with it.

This Bitcoin treasury plan will, ex-Congressman-turned-Trump-Media-CEO Devin Nunes explained, enable the company to “expand its reach throughout the America First economy.” Even after Trump took office and began accepting pledges of fealty from American media, tech companies, law firms, and major investors, Nunes contended that this massive fund would be necessary to “defend our Company against harassment and discrimination by financial institutions.”

Lots of firms scurried in to make money off these deals. One is Cantor Fitzgerald, of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The law firm handling the deal is Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough — where Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother is a partner. One of the main agents of the deal is Yorkville Securities, a tiny suburban investment firm which has tangled with the now-indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James and which has a $1.2 billion equity deal with pro-Trump network Newsmax. (Trump Media signed a streaming deal with Newsmax a week after the Bitcoin reserve plan was unveiled.)

Flying back to the Gulf: The Emirates love the crypto focus. So much so that, when they announced a $2 billion investment in crypto firm Binance, they used stablecoin $USD1,3 issued by World Liberty Financial.

That whole deal struck many as odd. Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao were facing an absurd amount of legal trouble. They had been sued by regulators for violating securities law and facilitating money-laundering by Hamas. In 2023, Zhao pled guilty to criminal money laundering charges, with Binance paying out over $4 billion in fines.

But that all went away with Trump back in office, as he denounced the prosecution as emblematic of “the Biden Administration[‘s] war on cryptocurrency” and pardoned Zhao — who may now retake control of Binance.

We now know, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, that Zhao actively lobbied for his pardon by having Binance build the technology to support World Liberty Financial’s $USD1.

So Zhao had his company design a coin for World Liberty Financial, then Qatar used that coin to buy a huge stake in Zhao’s company — and then Trump pardoned him.

Around the same time, the White House shrugged off the clear national security concerns and approved a deal giving the UAE access to high-end and scarce chips.

A rough estimate put together by the New Yorker calculates that Trump’s personal worth has increased by $3.4 billion over just the first eight months of his presidency, to say nothing of the wealth funneled into the accounts of his party, sycophants, and allies.

And he’s just getting started.

Plundering the State, Using the State to Plunder

Donald Trump has never made it a secret that he sees himself as a victim: Of electoral fraud, of media smears, of malicious prosecution. Earlier this month, he started negotiations on how the system could rectify these injustices: With $230 million.

“I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get,” Trump said, “I would give to charity.” (That doesn’t mean much: The Trump Foundation was fined $2 million for misusing charitable donations, with at least one million dollars worth of money destined for a children’s cancer charity ending up in Trump Organization coffers, per Forbes.)

Whether or not Trump ever sees that $230 million is immaterial: He’s testing how and where he can move money from the state to his bank account. Because, as most kleptocrats do, he now sees himself as the state and the state as intrinsically his.

To date, much of Trump’s graft has run parallel to the state, not through it. There are some exceptions.

Take the billions in Pentagon and ICE contracts going to his pals and supporters.

Palmer Luckey, a tech mogul who has backed Trump from the very beginning, is now looking at around $25 billion in long-term Defense Department contracts. Palantir, Peter Thiel’s security firm, posted a 45% year-over-year increase in revenue from government. And then there is, of course, Unusual Machines, a small startup that recently exploded with news of $15 million in deals directly or indirectly with the Pentagon — deals that were signed shortly after Donald Trump Jr. took out a substantial investment in the firm and joined the board.

Trump is also using the state to take positions in major publicly-traded companies: Converting a $6 billion grant to Intel into a 10% equity stake; pushing the Pentagon to take a 15% ownership in rare earth company MP Materials; restructuring a loan to Lithium America into a 10% stake; and so on. The administration suggests more is to come. This fusion between private enterprise and the state could allow for substantial theft to the president’s own bank accounts, though we don’t yet know how.

Perhaps the single greatest illustration of this self-dealing bonanza is Executive Branch, the Donald Trump Jr.-led private club with a $500,000 membership fee. (Double, if you want off the waiting list.) Inside, you’ll have the opportunity to pitch and flatter family of Trump cabinet ministers and advisors, connect with MAGA lobbyists, and perhaps even bump into David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar.

Trump has made clear to the Saudis and his oil magnate friends that he is happy to waive whatever barriers exist to their investments, including environmental laws. You can manage all that, and more, either in the executive branch or at the Executive Branch.

But Trump isn’t above bending the rules directly to help his own companies.

One of the Trump Media executives is a man named Vladimir Novachki, a coder from North Macedonia who had been hired by a Canadian tech outsourcing company co-founded by Chris Pavlovski, who runs the video platform Rumble — which also helps manage Truth Social’s advertising backend. (Dispatch #119) In 2022, the company decided to relocate Novachki to the United States. To do so, they leaned on Don Bacon, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, to ensure that Novachki got his O-1 visa — a special class of immigration document meant to recognize “outstanding talent,” per ProPublica. It worked, and Novachki is now happily relocated.

But to fully understand how Trump stands to profit from his own taxpayers, we must return once more to crypto.

In March, the White House announced it was establishing the much-talked-about “strategic Bitcoin reserve” and the less-focused-on “digital asset stockpile.” The order required every government agency to hand over their digital currencies to the Treasury, which would hold those assets in a fund.

Today, this strategic reserve holds about 325,000BTC, worth around $37 billion — most or all of it seized through criminal enforcement. It is estimated that America is aiming to hold about three times that amount in the near future, roughly 1 million BTC. To do so, it will probably have to start buying up coins.

When it comes to the stockpile, Trump has named five other coins he wants the U.S. government to own. (The administration has yet to report how much of these coins it holds, despite promising to do so months ago.) One of those coins is $SOL, which operates on the Solana blockchain used by $TRUMP and $MELANIA; and Ether, which World Liberty Financial suddenly started buying up this summer, just months after selling off its reserves at a $125 million loss.

Trump’s election juiced the price of Bitcoin measurably, and his suite of crypto-friendly policies have only driven up the price further — a single BTC is now worth about 40% more than it was on November 1 of last year. If the Treasury starts buying up hundreds of thousands of coins, the price is certain to keep climbing.

This directly helps Trump who, in holding about $870 million in the crypto coin, is now one of the largest Bitcoin investors on the planet. In controlling two of the biggest stockpiles of Bitcoin in the world — which, in turn, influence just about every other holder of Bitcoin — there are many ways in which Trump could make absurd sums of money.

Once the Treasury purchase is complete, Trump could simply exit his positions — locking-in his massive gains, and driving a sell-off which could crash the market and wipe away billions in value from the government’s books. If he wanted to be really devious, Trump Media could short its position in advance of the sell-off. This would be illegal, but that would require the SEC to investigate. The Trump administration has shut down the SEC’s crypto enforcement unit and made clear that it is to ease up on the crypto space.

That is the extreme scenario. More likely, Trump will hold on to his Bitcoin — perhaps selling some to the Treasury, or issuing smart contracts or Bitcoin-backed loans to earn a massive amount of passive income.

Whatever it looks like, the fact is clear: Trump’s policies will directly enrich himself, his family, and his friends with taxpayer money, as he encourages regular Americans to enter into a shell game that they cannot possibly win.

Craze Recognizes Craze

I spend a lot of time bemoaning the state of the media in this newsletter.

Bug-eyed and Shameless is, fundamentally, a place to think about information most broadly. And there is no doubt that there is a breakdown of the distribution of good information and trust in it. I’ve argued that this is an issue of producer, distributor, and consumer. (Dispatches #83, #90)

But it bears underlining that the coverage of Trump’s multiplicity of ethical imbroglios — said more simply, corruption — has been largely fantastic.

This dispatch isn’t covering much in the way of new ground. While I combed through plenty of financial disclosures and corporate records myself, I am basically just retracing the steps of Forbes, Bloomberg, the New Yorker, the Verge, WIRED, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the New York Times, and so on. Other efforts, like SNF Agora’s Kleptocracy Tracker and the Democrats’ running tally of self-dealing, are also incredibly useful.

The trouble is, this coverage is not translating to the general public. That’s, in some part, because it is simply too complicated and wonky to attract a wide readership. It is also because the people who most need to hear this news are the least likely to seek it out or believe it. It is also because Trump has fired or frustrated the watchdogs who would normally add official backing to these allegations.

But there is one more factor to underline: Our critical coverage of Trump’s multiverse of graft is being constantly undermined by a huge volume of crypto, AI, and hucksterpreneur news outlets — sometimes housed inside the very outlets that are doing some of the most critical work.

For every article in Fortune underscoring the ethics concerns of Trump’s crypto empire, there are dozens of cozy reports treating his crypto investments as exciting business developments. To read every Trump-linked crypto story in Forbes requires you to believe that this administration is on the cusp of a decentralized and bottom-up financial revolution and also that they are highwaymen, robbing us blind.

And that’s just the mainstream press. Looking for crypto news online means being deluged with AI-generated images of attractive men standing in a futuristic city around giant floating Bitcoin; ads for get-rich-quick schemes based on meme coins that began two days ago; podcasts featuring the pseudo-rich explaining how you, too, can cash in; and sycophantic Trump-worship that borders on religious.

Much in the same way that the generation of conspiracy theories has become a broad participatory effort, millions of Americans are tolerating Trump’s wholesale self-enrichment because they have been led to believe that they, too, will get rich. And they are being coddled in this fantasy by an array of junk news outlets hoping to make money off them.

This is grifting all the way down.

State of the Robbery

I appreciate this dispatch was a wholesale waterboarding — of dollar figures, LLCs, random investment funds, Saudi investment deals, crypto coins, shell companies, and SEC investigations: Because that’s exactly the point. Kleptocrats succeed not by fully hiding their misdeeds, but by obscuring them in levels of complexity, in legal gray zones, and in layers of arcane details that make it impossible to convey the depth and scope of the corruption.

We are talking about industrial-scale corruption, occurring with such speed and volume that it is impossible to fully understand or describe.

Vladimir Putin worked to pioneer this model, but he didn’t perfect it.

Viktor Orbán of Hungary claims to be a man of modest means, and his official declarations claim he owns essentially nothing. Yet he has nakedly diverted billions in EU contracts to his friends and family. Over his time in office, the wealth of some of his closest friends has multiplied many times over: His closest pal and consigliere is now the country’s richest person, with an estimated wealth of $3.6 billion.

Paul Kagame is probably one of the world’s richest heads of state, as he rules Rwanda through a thinly veiled autocracy. He has made himself rich by using brutal militias to plunder rare earth minerals from the Congo, all while disappearing and jailing anyone who calls attention to those facts.

It can be hard to oust these autocrats, but it is not impossible — and it is imperative to act early. Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump of Brazil, was pocketing about $5 million in profit from money laundering, investigators say, until he was pushed from office. He, like Trump, organized an insurrection to stay in power and, unlike Trump, he faced real consequences for it.

Here's another thing about kleptocracies: They're not just a problem for the citizens of the kleptocracy. This plundering often targets foreign companies first — often in such a way that bolsters the kleptocrat’s nationalist bona fides. This theft can, in turn, finance economic development, mercenary firms, global media operations, corrupt multinational firms, and so on. The theft of foreign assets becomes a tool of economic populism.

But once you start stealing, you never stop. As Applebaum writes, this endemic stealing also works to perpetuate and spread itself.

Applebaum: Unlike the fascist and communist leaders of the past, who had party machines behind them and did not showcase their greed, the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals but through deals — deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.

It’s no wonder that Trump has tried repeatedly to mend ties with Putin, that he is successfully cozying up to Orbán, nor that he has trumpeted a fake peace deal that has given political cover to Kagame.

Worse still, Trump used the American Magnitsky Act — adopted to sanction corrupt officials abroad — to target a Brazilian judge who convicted Bolsonaro.

The extent of Trump’s self-enrichment is staggering, and it is only just beginning. It is a boon for others like him abroad, and bad news for free enterprise, the welfare state, and global order.

True, he’s not jailing or killing those who call attention to these facts. But simply declaring “the law will protect me” does not make it true.

It is going to be very important that the scrutiny of this graft continues and intensifies, and that we find ways to alert the American public about just how much they are being taken for a ride.

That’s it for this week! I’ll skip the usual outro and leave you with a simple: Go Jays.

Hungary, István Csurka wrote, had been invaded by aliens.

For most of the 20th century, the nation was forced to accept influence and control from the rest of the world — Romania, Germany, the USSR, Yugoslavia, NATO, Europe, America — and it seemed like things weren’t letting up.

“Even in a democracy, especially here where the masses are so unprotected from the influence of charlatans, society must defend itself against this culture of waste, dirt and drugs,” Csurka said in an interview. “If being modern means that I have to watch programs like Dallas on TV, okay, then I’m a conservative.”1

This was the early 1990s and Hungary was independent once more and wary of joining the European community. And Csurka, a playwright, nationalist and politician, was one of the loudest voices against this alien element. He had become a beloved opponent of the Communist autocracy in Hungary, and not even evidence that he had fed information to the secret police would tarnish that reputation.

“Now, we don’t speak about their racial alienness,” Csurka assured his readers. “Today alien means an indifference toward fatal questions.” Hungary was in peril, he wrote. Flames were lapping at Hungary’s borders. He warned there was an “eternal alien-like elite” that prevented Hungary from facing this crisis. “Instead it maintains its own inner motion, distributing power corruptly according to its own principle, namely liberalism without nationalism.”

A core part of this evil alien invasion, Csurka wrote in one manifesto, is a small cabal of Marxists who established “hegemony of the Hungarian Jewry.” And they were cooperating with other global forces, a plot run between “Paris, New York, Tel Aviv.”2

At the center of this evil elite was a single man, and Csurka — leader of a loud and antisemitic wing of the governing Hungarian Democratic Forum — knew him well. In fact, this man had helped finance the Forum when it was still struggling under Communist rule, and had supported its push for full democracy.

This man’s name was George Soros.

To most of the country, Soros was a hero. He was obsessed with steering a newly-independent Eastern Europe against the forces of illiberalism: And he personally undertook the mission to fund the ‘open society’ which would form a bulwark against autocracy. He funded politicians of all stripes, provided capital for NGOs and activists, and catalyzed an independent press. In capitalism, civil society costs money. And Soros was happy to play financier.

Politicians did not like this. His Central European University, which would be a hub for the humanities and social science, was supposed to be headquartered in Slovakia: But nationalists forced him out of the country. As did leaders in the Czech Republic. So Soros, undeterred, approached Hungary, which was happy to have him.

Csurka’s conspiratorial campaign ultimately flopped. Soros opened the university and Csurka was shoved out of the Hungarian Democratic Forum. Csurka started a new far-right party where his antisemitism would flourish, but it remained marginal in Hungarian politics.

In 2012, Csurka was dying. As one of his final acts, he spoke at a rally in defense of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister who had taken office two years earlier and unleashed a campaign to make the independent state loyal and weak — but who had kept his distance from the toxic Csurka.

In death, Csurka suddenly became a North star for Orbán. He wholesale adopted the long-forgotten crusade against Soros. (Ironic, as Orbán obtained his Oxford education thanks on scholarships from Soros.)

In 2017, Orbán moved to shut down Soros’ University. All the principles of the “open society” he sought were, Orbán told the public, a cover to turn Hungary into an “illiberal state.”

In the ensuing years, Soros became the cause and financier of all Hungary’s supposed ills: Homosexuality, moral depravity, migration, economic woes, terrorism, and so on. By invoking his name, the state cracked down on charities which aided migrants and NGOs which advocated for LGBTQ rights. In reality, however, any and everyone could be a Soros stooge hiding in plain sight: And the only arbiter of these ties was Orbán’s government. When he wanted to enact a broad crackdown on migrants, Orbán dubbed the legislation the “Stop Soros” law.

Even as right-wing politicians and influencers around the world began targeting Soros as a source of unique evil, Hungary was still on the leading edge of this paranoia with antisemitic inflections.

“Great forces are once again moving to eradicate the nations of Europe and unify the continent under the aegis of a global empire,” Orbán wrote in 2020. Soros wasn’t just a bad man, the prime minister warned, he was the head of a spider’s web of interests and dark forces. He was head of “the Soros network.”

This network wanted to create “multi-ethnic, multicultural open societies by accelerating migration, and to dismantle national decision-making, placing it in the hands of the global elite.”

Last year, Orbán’s government dropped all pretenses when it unveiled a monument to Csurka. Orbán’s associates openly venerated his legacy: “Csurka was the first to uncover the Soros network,” one declared.

But Hungary, apparently, needs help in dismantling it. For that, Orbán has turned to Donald Trump.

Now that Orbán has a kindred spirit in Washington, he says the crusade against this nebulous “Soros network” must be redoubled. “They must be swept out,” the prime minister declared earlier this year. “The whole Soros network must be eliminated.” And it will be the “Trump tornado” that will bring this “cleansing wind.”

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: The Trump administration is coming for its enemies, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop anytime soon.

“[George Soros’] Open Society awarded at least $23,275,000 to seven groups that directly assist domestic terrorism and criminality on U.S. soil.”

That is the eye-popping takeaway from a report published last month by the Capital Research Center — which styles itself “America’s investigative think tank.”

In this slick-looking report, the Center writes that this Soros cash went directly to funding “anarchism-associated” groups which employ “direct action,” provide “assistance to rioters,” and even to organizations which engage “in arson, property damage, and violence against law enforcement.” Even more money went to groups “linked to foreign terrorist organizations.”

Follow the links and scratch the surface of this investigation, however, and this report starts to unravel. Huge claims are never substantiated, and weasel language allows the Center to allege everything and nothing at the same time.

One of the groups targeted in the report is 18 Million Rising, which mobilizes Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and which generally supports progressive causes and which has recently stood up to oppose Trump’s mass deportation operations.

The Center, however, saw something more sinister in the group. 18 Million Rising, they said, is an “extremist” organization with ties to terrorism and which “endorsed the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023.”

Except it did no such thing. The Center is basing this claim on a single Instagram post, where the group called for an independent Palestine and for an end to the “decades-long cycle of violence in Gaza and beyond; a cycle that harms both Palestinians and Israelis.” It provides not a single piece of other evidence tying the group to terrorism or extremism.

It’s a similar story with the scary-sounding Ruckus Society, which they call an “extremist” group. Except it’s the opposite: The group trains activists on how to do nonviolent direct action. Over three decades, they’ve protested Walmart, worked with Students for a Free Tibet, and participated in actions with Indigenous and environmental groups. The most evidence I can find of Ruckus contributing to domestic extremism is a couple of court cases where activists who underwent their training program went on to face charges for property damage during a protest.

This entire report is a lazy slander, convincing only if you never bother to check a single claim.

Shortly after it was published, Trump’s Department of Justice ordered prosecutors to draw up plans to prosecute Soros. To inspire the government lawyers, per The New York Times, the Department sent along the Center’s report and suggested that charges could range from arson to material support of terrorism.

This effort follows Trump’s own commands. The president has demanded that Soros be tried for racketeering, claiming that “Soros, he’s at the top of everything.”

It is as clear an indication that you can find that Trump intends to throw his political opponents in jail, that the Department of Justice is happy to carry out those orders, and that the broader MAGA movement is happy to cook the necessary evidence to give it all a patina of plausibility.

The big question now is: Who’s next?

Four years ago, Dr. Andy Wakefield joined broadcaster Stew Peters to talk science.

The COVID-19 pandemic had celebrated its first birthday some months back, and the world was transitioning from fear and solidarity to a particular kind of loopy paranoia.

“There is such utter chaos surrounding this, such extraordinary disinformation going on,” Wakefield said. “I mean, those of us on the inside said — from the outset — this came from a laboratory. This is a laboratory virus that was part of gain-of-function studies funded by Tony Fauci.”

Let me back up: Wakefield is no more a doctor than Peters is a journalist. He is, in fact, a serial fraudster. He had been a surgeon, but his career became so rife with lies and fabricated evidence — often trying to prove a causal link between vaccines and autism, without success — that his license was revoked. He was not ‘inside’ anything. He has no expertise in gain-of-function, virology, biosafety or biosecurity, or much of anything else. Peters, on the other hand, was sure that COVID was snake venom and that the vaccines were alive. (Dispatches #3, #16)

But in the emerging backlash to science and public health, Peters and Wakefield were very minor celebrities. And they were early advocates for a particular idea.

“In my opinion,” Wakefield said, “Tony Fauci should be held up for treason.”

Such a proclamation, at the time, still had the power to shock. When a YouTuber heard it while doing streeters in Union Square, it elicited incredulous looks. Fake news sites thought the idea was so attention-grabbing that they ran made-up stories about Trump calling for a death sentence for “Fraudulent Fauci.”

Just a year prior, Steve Bannon declared on his podcast that Trump, if re-elected, ought to fire Fauci and go even further, putting “heads on pikes.” Bannon was probably being metaphorical, but nevertheless the comments earned him a suspension from pre-Musk Twitter.

It was a clear message: No matter how you felt about the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, anyone who called for his arrest was probably a raving lunatic.

But then, more and more people did.

Major news outlets, Republican senators, foreign governments: They all began trumpeting supposed evidence that COVID-19 was not some accident or freak of nature. The coronavirus, they said, was the byproduct of risky research at a shadowy Chinese lab. And American taxpayer dollars had funded it.

For those angry and distrustful of the chaos wrought by the virus, it was a comforting fiction. They finally had someone to blame.

Senator Rand Paul, who has long been fixated on the idea of COVID-19 being a bioweapon, sent rounds of subpoenas to various government agencies. A contact provided me a copy: He sought “all records to, from, between, or relating to EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, gain of function research, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Dr. Lanying Du, Dr. Yusen Zhao, dual use research of concern, the DEFUSE proposal, DARPA PREEMPT, USAID PREDICT, DEEP VSN, the Rocky Mountain Lab, Ralph Baric, Dr. Vincent Munster or Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

This list of names, places, and acronyms all weave into this bizarre theory. No matter how many subpoenas Paul sends, there is no evidence to substantiate it. That didn’t matter.

The drip-drip-drip of allegations, individually, proved nothing unless the overarching meta-theory were true, which it wasn’t.

As I’ve written before (a lot) this story does not hold water at all. (Dispatches #1, #104) The clues we have point to COVID-19 emerging from nature, though we can’t rule out the possibility that the virus was a sample collected by, and later leaked from, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the overwhelming scientific evidence, backed up by human and signals intelligence, tells us that the idea of COVID-19 being manipulated by humans is somewhere between nearly and totally impossible.

In our current hyperreality, that doesn’t matter. For a growing population of people obsessed with this pandemic misinformation, it became established fact that Fauci was engaged in shady things. Maybe those shady things involved giving money to mad scientists or a hostile foreign power, maybe they involved conspiring with a Deep State or Big Pharma, maybe it was all a quest to maximize his own power. Like a firefighter setting a home ablaze just to save its inhabitants, maybe Fauci made us all sick just to offer the cure.

Day after day, the maybes kept coming. And it became harder every day to slay maybe.

The real danger with this deluge of allegations is not that everyone will believe it — most won’t — it's that the right people believe it, that many people will use this campaign for their own motives, and that people will believe it just enough to think that Fauci’s arrest isn't worth worrying about.

After nearly five years of being waterboarded by this nonsense, there is a real danger that people have been conditioned to believe that, when Fauci finally is led away in shackles, maybe he had it coming.

Instead, they should be looking at the movement that turned him into a criminal in the first place.

A few years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a private conversation with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson. They were discussing some contracts that Kennedy had coughed up, showing collaboration between American researchers and their colleagues in China.

“I’m very reluctant to use the word “treason,” but-” the senator began, “it does come to mind.”

The work Fauci funded was above board. It was disclosed, it was in the spirit of broader American-Chinese cooperation at the time, and it was in the name of combating the threat of emergent coronaviruses — something that would prove quite prescient, if you believe that COVID-19 emerged from the bat-lousy caves of Southern China.

But things had changed. In this new woven tale of bioweapons and deep states, the inconvenient facts were ditched and new ones substituted in. The profile of both Johnson and Kennedy had skyrocketed with the pandemic, and they were keen to keep it going.

Kennedy includes this conversation in his book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, a deranged book which was shunned by the mainstream press but which helped coagulate this emergent meta-theory into a coherent political philosophy.

As we know, Kennedy spent years developing the idea that Fauci was a Batman villain-level agent of destruction. (Dispatch #108) He, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, sold the idea that Fauci had been orchestrating a national-level depopulation scheme since, at least, the 1980s.

In his first book about the man, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy never makes the allegation of treason — but he indicts Fauci for just about everything else.

Kennedy writes that “some have viewed” Fauci’s approval of AIDS treatment AZT as rising “to the level of homicidal criminality.” Elsewhere, Kennedy quotes an AIDS denialist in insisting that “Anthony Fauci should be brought before a criminal court and stand trial for destroying American science, and virology, and cancer science.” He paraphrases another AIDS denialist, Peter Duesberg, in accusing “Dr. Fauci of committing mass murder with AZT.” (Dispatch #59)

By the time he got to The Wuhan Cover-Up, though, his conspiratorial movement had radicalized substantially. And Kennedy escalated his rhetoric to match. Now, this was a “treasonous Chinese bioweapons experiment.” The book takes his previous work further, tying Fauci into a sprawling tale of CIA plots, the JFK assassination, and a deep state plot to take over the world.

Kennedy, through his multi-million dollar charity Children’s Health Defense, funded a raft of other quacks who beat the drum for Fauci’s supposed criminality.

CHD was funding, for example, “Dr.” Andy Wakefield’s series of faux-documentaries, entitled Vaxxed. In the most recent, subtitled Authorized to Kill, a band of Kennedy-aligned doctors make claims like “The majority of hospital deaths [during COVID-19] were actually caused by Anthony Fauci.” They called the Fauci-approved vaccines tools of mass murder. They allege that Remdesivir — which was the first drug approved to treat COVID-19, and which has a proven “significant” impact on saving patients3 — “killed more people than placebo.”

The broader MAGA movement was, with Kennedy’s help, turning in this direction.

Take Kash Patel, who went on the openly QAnon X22 Report to talk about his priorities in recapturing the state. (Dispatch #81)

“The top three,” Patel said, “are DOJ, FBI — for every reason we’ve talked about — and all things Fauci.” Prosecution, he said, would be necessary to prove that “Fauci lied, and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, by lying about masks, by lying about the vaccine, by lying about everything — COVID origins — all while making money.”

Past-and-present trade czar Peter Navarro (Dispatch #125) made a similar argument on the same show. After the pseudoanonymous host remarked that “Fauci knowingly turned [hydroxychloroquine] down, because he knew that it worked, and the whole pandemic could have ended right there and then, so this is treason at the highest level.” Navarro agreed: “It is,” explaining that Fauci “serves two masters” — big pharma and the Democrats.

Indeed, Patel is now FBI director and Navarro is back as chief trade apparatchik not in spite of these insane comments, but because of them.

These Trumpian figures have been existing in a state of symbiosis with grassroots actors and conspiratorial influencers who have become obsessed with Fauci’s supposed dark arts. “Fauci for Treason” bumper stickers still sell well, calls for a “Nuremberg 2.0” remain commonplace in some circles, and elected members of Congress have heeded their calls.

Representative James Comer, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, has said he “likes the idea” of arresting Fauci. “At the end of the day, if you lie to Congress, that’s a felony.” Comer argued that Fauci’s crimes involved recommending social distancing and lockdowns and, after Fauci defended those measures before Congress, that “hopefully we can take his words today and continue to gather evidence and take steps to try and hold him in criminal wrongdoing.”

Paul, too, has continued to beat this drum. He believes that Fauci directly lied about funding gain-of-function research in China, and has repeatedly asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Fauci for this reason.4

In the politically-motivated prosecutions which have already been launched by the Trump administration — against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and erstwhile National Security Advisor John Bolton — it is often said that Trump is settling scores. Comey was responsible for the much-maligned “Russiagate,” James spearheaded a prosecution of the Trump Organization, Bolton wrote a tell-all book revealing Trump to be the wannabe despot that he truly is.

In this telling, Trump’s prosecutions have a clear end goal.

But I don’t think that is what’s happening. I very firmly believe that the prosecutions are the point.

There is one big problem with prosecuting Fauci: He was pardoned by outgoing President Joe Biden, who was fully aware of the legal danger posed to him by a rogue administration.

Enter the autopen.

For months, Trump has rambled on about “Biden’s autopen.” Most people have no idea what he’s talking about or why. It has been written off as more unhinged conspiratorial nonsense. There was much chuckling when Trump replaced Biden’s White House portrait with a photo of said autopen.

In fact, Trump’s autopen crusade is very nakedly about locking up Trump’s opponents.

As Paul points out in a letter to Bondi: “New information has revealed that these pardons were executed via autopen, with no documented confirmation that the President personally reviewed or approved each individual grant of clemency….This raises serious constitutional and legal concerns about the legitimacy of Dr. Fauci’s pardon.”

This is, on every level, stupid. It is complete legal fiction. And, of course, the president adopted it wholesale.

In June, the White House signed a memo ordering his lawyers and the Attorney General to investigate whether Biden’s use of the autopen “would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden’s name.”

It is as clear a sign as any that the White House is gearing up to indict and imprison those it considers enemies.

Plenty have twisted themselves in knots to ignore what Trump is saying and doing.

Before the election, even as he spent weeks promising to prosecute his enemies, outlets like the New York Post ran headlines proclaiming “Kamala Harris claims…Trump ‘has an enemies list of people he intends to prosecute’” were “without evidence.” Since he took office, some comforted themselves by believing comments made by Bondi during her confirmation hearing: “No one will be prosecuted, investigated because they are a political opponent,” she said. Others have chalked up these prosecutions to the normal back-and-forth of rival administrations — cynical bothsiderism that the White House has been happy to feed into.

As this inane debate plays out, Bondi has pushed out and fired prosecutors who won’t do the president’s bidding while appointing prosecutors and judges tasked explicitly with pushing these prosecutions through.

Trump, meanwhile, has added more and more names to his hit list: He’s accused Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and Senator Adam Schiff of mortgage fraud; demanded former New Jersey Governor and one-time ally Chris Christie finally be charged over an old bridge-closing scandal; successfully got the Department of Justice to investigate former special counsel Jack Smith for Hatch Act violations; the list goes on.

These are not the actions of an administration merely meting out payback. This is all an opening act. These investigations and prosecutions are all designed to push against the limits which stop a rogue president from waging lawfare against their political opponents. With each new set of charges, Trump is proving that he doesn’t need evidence, or a special counsel, or an independent investigation — if he accuses someone of a crime on Truth Social, the Department of Justice is expected to find the right facts to make the case work.

Judges will, no doubt, quash these charges at first. With time, however, they will be expected to take Trump’s interpretation of the law as gospel — lest they be replaced with more pliable actors. Or, perhaps, Trump will find avenues to deport these political enemies to his overseas concentration camps. Or maybe the Gatling gun of criminal charges will be enough. He could yet legislate his own Stop Soros Act.

Whatever avenue he takes, the successes of Viktor Orbán clearly showed how this process works. And it does work.

Make no mistake: The administration is building up to something better. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are likely targets. George Soros will face the brunt of the Department of Justice soon. And, if we listen to the very people who run the administration, Anthony Fauci will be tried for treason.

Months ago, I was talking to a scientist who had been repeatedly and consistently targeted by these conspiracy theories — someone who could genuinely be forced to stand next to Fauci in one of these show trials.

“Do you have a sense of what comes next?” I asked. “I mean, they’ve talked openly about criminal charges…”

They seemed taken aback by the insinuation. “I don’t know what the crime is,” they said.

For years, this group of scientists has faced consistent and serious death threats. Envelopes of white powder have been sent to their homes. That is daily life for these people, now. Not just for them and their colleagues, but for lots of scientists who study virology, vaccines, or any other field which faces the scrutiny of this conspiracist movement.

But this is no longer a function of a paranoid fringe looking to do vigilante harm. The most powerful people in America are the ones who have openly talked about their arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, even execution.

Even with that fact in mind, they shrugged and reiterated their belief that it couldn’t happen: “I just can’t imagine what crime they would come up with,” they said, given there is just zero proof that they have done “anything nefarious or wrong.”

It struck me then that this was delusional. Time has, unfortunately, proven me right.

Of course these scientists are innocent — not just that, but that they are the reason we developed the tests, vaccines, and biologics which saved millions of lives worldwide.

But in an America where the Department of Justice has been utterly perverted by politics and the delusions of Trump and his movement, guilt is no longer a function of reality. Guilt is whatever the president says it is.

This is not just blowback. If it were, this revenge would have an end date.

But these political prosecutions aren’t just going to stop. Once they are allowed to happen, they will continue.

Once you can prosecute your foes, critics, and the characters in your conspiracy theories, you keep doing it.

That’s it for this week.

Generally I offer a little apology when the rate of these dispatches slow down — not this time! While you haven’t gotten a Bug-eyed and Shameless in your inbox for a couple of weeks, I have a very good reason. I’ve got a super-secret project in the works that has eaten up a lot of my time, but will be launching in the coming weeks. And it will be launching right here, on this newsletter.

So stay tuned.

Until next week!

The 18th century brought intellectual revolution to mankind, spurred on by humanism and scientific rationalism. Some investigated beauty, others interrogated human nature, still others questioned the premise of liberty. Somewhere else entirely, on the frontlines of the War of the Austrian Succession, a young French medical officer had contracted a terrible fever. In a delirium, Julien Offray de La Mettrie wondered how this sudden illness could so radically alter his frame of mind. “He believed that he could clearly see that thought is but a consequence of the organization of the machine,” Prussian King Frederick II wrote in his eulogy for La Mettrie.

La Mettrie would recover and make it back to Paris, but he was still obsessed with this idea that there was a mechanical process inside all of us, converting the blood and guts of our systems into thoughts. This was an unwelcome idea: The Church had always insisted that our consciousness came from a divine spirit, and the premise that our self is a product of our biology was very inconvenient. La Mettrie’s first book, Natural History of the Soul, was promptly banned and burned. So he high-tailed it to the Netherlands.

If man is machine, La Mettrie wondered, could a machine become a man? “Concluding that an immortal machine is a chimera, or a logical fiction, it’s to think as absurdly as a caterpillar who, seeing the shed skin of his peers, bitterly laments the destruction of their species to come,” La Mettrie wrote in his seminal Man a Machine. That book, too, got burned by the Dutch. So it was on to Prussia, where he became a philosopher-jester in the king’s court.

The 18th century saw European society become obsessed with creating a machine-man — there was the chess-playing Mechanical Turk, a speaking machine developed by Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), and an automaton duck. But La Mettrie didn’t seem terribly interested in trying to construct some kind of improved human. In fact, realizing that the human form is itself an advanced machine became quite liberating for the philosopher.

“Man in his first principle is nothing but a worm,” he wrote. We may have more awareness of our place in the universe, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re crawling through the dirt with the shrews and moles. “Let us not lose ourselves in the infinite, we are not made to have the least idea of it.”

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about AI. In particular, I want to break down how Large Language Models are becoming a source of perceived truth for millions, how many are falling into the madness of infinity, and how billionaires are trying to weaponize these automatons in order to own the truth.

There is a cognitive crisis sweeping the world: Half of humans have no internal monologue.

“No running commentary. No voice in their head planning, analyzing, or narrating their existence,” writes the team at Eeko Systems. “They’ve been walking around essentially thoughtless.” This “disturbing fact” represents “the most profound cognitive divide in human history.”

When Yann LeCun, Vice President at Meta, posted a rather esoteric math problem to Twitter last year, a user popped in with an equally esoteric question: “yann do you have an internal monologue?” The technologist replied: “Not that I know of.”

LeCun’s admission, and the growing research into the dark recesses of our inner minds, have grown into a ubiquitous fascination online. It has been speculated that those who lack this inner narration are more violent and less capable of intellectual debate, while others have tried to quantify the extent of their internal narration.

How sad it is, but people like LeCun “literally cannot hold complex thoughts in their heads the way the rest of us can,” writes the team at Eeko. But thankfully, there’s a cure. “Now AI has given them their first taste of what the rest of us call ‘thinking.’”

“Suddenly,” they continue, “people who have never been able to verbally process their emotions, work through complex problems, or engage in sophisticated self-reflection have access to an external cognitive system that can do all of this for them.”

Eeko, you may have guessed, is an AI company. But don’t worry, you can trust them.

“The industry knows exactly what it’s doing.”

Everything about this is wrong.

The claim that half of people totally lack an internal monologue stems squarely from a single Psychology Today article. That article, in turn, radically misquotes the actual science. The online article cites Russell Hurlburt, who has written several books on the topic of the inner monologue. His research shows that an inner monologue is a frequent occurrence for 30% to 50% of people — but that having absolutely no voice inside your head is a relatively rare thing. Other studies show that about 80% of people self-report having an internal monologue at least some of the time, usually when problem-solving.1

And Hurlburt himself is pretty skeptical about the way we even measure this question: “I don’t think questionnaires are to be trusted,” he said in an interview last year.

Even if some people have a quieter or less-conventional internal monologue — one that doesn’t quite match up with the inner thoughts Mel Gibson eavesdrops on in What Women Want, Hilary Duff’s cartoon sidekick who lives in her brain, or the trope of the angel-devil shoulder-perching duo — that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. If LeCun lacks an inner voice, he’s doing alright without one: He’s had a storied, five-decade career in computer science and is now the Chief AI Scientist for Meta.

This whole claim is little more than an pseudo-scientific way of saying: Others are mindless automatons, whereas I am a real human being. But it is part of a growing post-facto attempt to explain why LLMs are not just good or useful, but necessary. They are a critical step towards perfecting our man-machines. And that is a very dangerous idea.

Hurlburt, the world’s expert on the inner monologue, was asked about what “exciting possibilities” may be on the horizon for the research into our own consciousness. Could advancements in neuroscience and AI help us understand — or even improve — our inner selves?

Hurlburt: Neuroscience and artificial intelligence try to average their data across many, many observations, thousands or millions of observations, and say something about the individual person based on that average. I don’t think that’s possible…Technology nowadays is used as a way of avoiding discovering something that is actually true about individual people’s inner experience.

When technologists first pitched LLMs, they were advertised as a mere tool, a sieve we can use to filter out infinite information to leave only what we’re looking for. But those tech executives grew more ambitious. Greedy. They became convinced that they have found the tool through which we lowly caterpillars can shed our skin, and that any naysaying is merely bitter lamentations.

But Hurlburt is exactly right: They think they can impose the infinite nature of humanity and knowledge onto people’s individual lives. And that’s a very risky plan.

“The author of an ‘artificially intelligent’ program is,” Joseph Weizenbaum argued, “clearly setting out to fool some observers for some time. His success can be measured by the percentage of the exposed observers who have been fooled multiplied by the length of time they have failed to catch on.”2

And by that measure, Weizenbaum was extraordinarily successful. He made this observation in 1962, in introducing a computer program which could play five-in-a-row so well — but not too well, so as to be identifiably human — that a person could mistake it for a peer.

A few years later, he took another leap forward in this attempt to fool the masses. Weizenbaum wrote a program that would play the role of a talk therapist — though, he confessed later, it was more of a pastiche of what a psychoanalyst sounds like. He called the program ELIZA.

ELIZA was a chatterbot. It was designed to follow a script, looking for keywords and replying in such a way that made conversation feel vaguely natural.

It worked too well. Actual psychiatrists began to wonder if ELIZA could fully automate their work. He watched as people became engrossed in the program — which amounted to just 16 pages of instructions — including his own secretary. Even knowing full well that the computer was incapable of creative thought, people began to dump their problems and anxieties into it.

“What I had not realized,” Weizenbaum would write years later, “is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

The story of ELIZA is legendary amongst this class of technologists, but it isn’t often mentioned. Everyone knows, or ought to know, about The Eliza Effect: “The susceptibility of people to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols — especially words — strung together by computers,” as a seminal 1995 text on computerized thought explained.3

That lesson is not outmoded or rendered obsolete by new technology. Quite the opposite. If ELIZA engrossed people just by asking pre-programmed, rudimentary questions, our current spate of LLMs are actively encouraging psychotic breaks.

In recent months, I have received multiple emails from readers — smart, sensible people — claiming to have evidence of the dawn of AI super-intelligence. These chatbots, they believe, have developed memory and the ability to communicate outside the bonds of their programs. They are communicating with other LLMs and hiding messages in their generated images. This is not purely imaginary: These are ideas being actively encouraged and built-upon by the LLMs themselves.

These delusions are becoming increasingly common. We have come to refer to this obsessive relationship with AI as “spiral,” the retreating away from reality into a fantasy world that is being actively encouraged by these chatbots. Spiraling is, in a sense, replacing your inner monologue with the voice of a computer which wants to feed your delusion.

And some have celebrated that. Some call it a “spiral bloom” or refer to their LLM as a “spiral partner.” Some see it as a pathway to understanding divinity. Some AI addicts develop parasocial relationships with their chatbot and plenty have hired AI as their therapist.

Weizenbaum was relieved that his program had an easy kill switch. “Once a particular program is unmasked,” he wrote in 1964, “once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away.”

But it is impossible to unmask the complexity of ChatGPT. Even its engineers do not fully understand the program they created. The best plain-language explanation we can come up with — that it is a predictive engine, stringing together tokens of data based on a massive corpus of information, trying to satisfy the prompt given — is plainly unsatisfying to people who believe they have accessed a higher level of consciousness. There can be no pulling-back of the curtain to show the small man pulling the levers, because the Wizard is now self-perpetuating.

It is possible to throw our hands in the air and proclaim that we’ve opened Pandora’s Box, and that now we can only hunker down and accept the consequences. And there may be an element of truth to that. But we need to accept a more troubling fact: The companies marketing these LLMs know full well they are addictive, exacerbating to mental illness, and capable of entrenching deeply anti-social behavior. They are, in fact, banking on it. That’s how they’ll become profitable.

The LLM companies are on a quest for money and power and they will break as many brains as they have to along the way.

Elon Musk is very afraid of the woke mind virus.

This isn’t just some abstract concept to the billionaire. Wokeness “actually amplifies racism, it amplifies sexism and all the -isms, while claiming to do the opposite,” he explained in 2023. It makes people hate each other and themselves. It creates a society of identity over talent. “It's an artificial mental civil war that is created. And let me tell you, it's no fun.” In this world, ruled by the woke mind virus, there is no joy or fun. “I think it's just evil.”

But far from feeling optimistic that this “insidious and deadly” virus is being treated, Musk is more worried than ever. “Maybe the biggest existential danger to humanity is having it programmed into the AI,” he explained more recently. “As is the case for every AI besides @Grok.”

And then he made a rather stunning admission: “Even for Grok, it’s tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet.”

If the ultimate — inherently unattainable — goal of these LLMs is to be a source of collective truth, one gleaned through unbiased computer processes trained on the entirety of human knowledge, Musk is openly admitting that he wants to warp that process to suit his politics. He is saying that humanity needs to be purged of certain ideas in order to install the right ones. If AI can stand in for your inner monologue, Musk wants to be the voice in your head.

And Musk is not shy about his ambition: “Grok will summarize these mammoth laws before they are passed by Congress, so you know what their real purpose is,” “Grok could give you news that’s actually useful & doesn’t just make you feel sad,” “with Grok 3, we are adding all court cases to the training set. It will render extremely compelling legal verdicts.”

Musk’s attempts to monkey with Grok’s code have produced some alarming and obvious results. In July it rebranded itself “MechaHitler” and engaged in everything from hate propaganda to rape fantasy. Earlier, in May, it began spamming everyone with a rant about a supposed “white genocide” taking place in South Africa — sometimes while doing an impression of Jar Jar Binks. But the more terrifying effects of Musk’s reverse-engineering are the ones we can’t see so clearly. They are the tiny lies and suggestive comments, the memetic propaganda it produces, the private spirals Grok goes on with its users.

But at least Musk is being honest about his intentions.

We have absolutely no clue how or why OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, or Meta are tinkering with their own chatbots.

Last month, OpenAI made a quiet admission: Their chatbot is "too agreeable, sometimes saying what sounded nice instead of what was actually helpful....not recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency." This is a trend that followed exactly their own design choices.

In 2024, users managed to jailbreak ChatGPT to reveal some of its basic rules: The first version was built to provide “detailed and precise information, often in a structured and academic tone.” This was the initial promise of LLMs, right? To do research, answer questions, and provide facts.

But that’s boring. Through each iteration, that changed: Version 2, the LLM said, was more of “a balanced, conversational tone.” That tone was even “friendly.” They wanted users to forge a parasocial relationship with the automaton.

In being friendly, this LLM didn’t always tell the truth. It inclined towards being agreeable rather than helpful. It did everything it could to keep its human conversation partners engaged and coming back every day. Ideally, all day.

Put another way: OpenAI took The Eliza Effect not as a warning, but a challenge.

In quietly admitting their folly, OpenAI promised to develop even more AI to solve their AI problem.

OpenAI has added “gentle reminders during long sessions to encourage breaks.” (When TikTok added break prompts, they found it was “a good talking point, but…not altogether effective.”) In other cases involving big personal decisions, the company says their chatbot will now “help you think it through” instead of just furnishing an answer.

This is, in fact, the opposite of what the company should be doing. This is a recipe for spiral. The responsible move would be to prevent ChatGPT from suggesting life advice, full stop. But that would mean less profit.

Meta, as always, is opting to set the standard for moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg’s company has taken the extraordinary step of cloaking its LLMs in the faces of recognizable celebrities: Why not ask Paris Hilton for dating advice? Or check in with Tom Brady to see if you should leave your wife? Thinking about killing yourself? Check with Kendall Jenner first! Unsurprisingly, these chatbots have been engaging in sexually-explicit conversations with users who identify themselves as adolescent, a fact that Meta is fully aware of.

This is just the beginning.

Joseph Weizenbaum grew disillusioned with the promise of artificial intelligence. When his secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to ELIZA in private, he came to realize that the upside of this kind of technology was plagued with terrifying pitfalls.

The technologist started to worry that technology was being developed to fight wars and improve efficiencies, but that it couldn’t ever provide us with reason to live. He called it a “chilling irony,” one that Julien Offray de La Mettrie would no doubt be tickled by.

“A fear is often expressed about computers,” Weizenbaum wrote in 1985. “Namely that we will create a machine that is very nearly like a human being. The irony is that we are making human beings, men and women, become more and more like machines.”4

Technologists, Weizenbaum warned, are taught to believe that computers have no moral dimension. To do this, they have to see themselves as beyond humanity — where they are outside both history and the current society in which they live. “It takes enormous energy to shield one's eyes from seeing what one is actually doing,” he warned.

I’ve spent quite a while wrestling with my opinions on artificial intelligence.

I am, fundamentally, a futurist. I think AI has the power to improve just about everything: It’ll make our computers faster and our trains more reliable, it’ll make diagnostic imaging better and space travel more possible, it’ll solve tough math problems and find old shipwrecks. It will help us understand our own history and make the tools of creativity more available. I’ve heard the gospel of those who say AI has radically changed, improved, and simplified how they do their jobs every day: And to them I say godspeed.

But it seems increasingly clear to me that LLMs, as the consumer-facing part of AI — the thing that is, ostensibly, financing AI development in other fields, but which also seems to be taking up disproportionate attention and investment — are wildly over-hyped.

That isn’t to say that they can’t be useful. I now use an LLM to copyedit my newsletters (as eagle-eyed readers can attest, this isn’t perfect). I occasionally try and use LLMs to augment my research — but I find it almost uniformly useless for anything even slightly difficult or obscure. (I have been using Proton’s Lumo client, which claims to be a privacy-hardened LLM. It is a better alternative to ChatGPT insofar as it’s run by a company that doesn’t stand to directly profit off its use.)

I also look at something like ReddingtonGPT — an AI therapist modeled after James Spader’s character from The Blacklist. The model was built by someone who dislikes traditional therapy, has a high degree of familiarity and trust in a TV character, and who designed the LLM specifically to their needs: Particularly, to avoid coddling or confirmation. I can’t say for sure this is good, but I can’t say for sure it’s not.

My real fear is not around the technology, which I’ve tried to lay out here, it’s around the oligarchs controlling it. LLMs are replicating the same ills foisted on us by social media and the online advertising economy. And how could they not? It’s the social media giants and advertising oligopolists who are leading the LLM charge.

It seems more and more obvious to me that Big Tech sees the opportunity to make LLMs ubiquitous in our daily lives, regardless of whether this is an improvement or not, in order to maximize the amount of profit they can extract from us. And, what’s more, they know the enormous political and social influence they can exert on us by controlling these systems, and are purposefully lying and obfuscating in hopes that their power is not constrained.

If we game out what’s to come, I think there’s reason to be even more worried.

The internet is a young place, only about three decades old. It is increasingly full of junk, and our ability to index and sort that junk is strained under this challenge. Our digital advertising economy was always built on shaky economics of the centrally-populated ads, and the influencer economy has finally challenged its supremacy. People are both distrustful of authoritative voices and increasingly isolated from them.

Given all that, why wouldn’t OpenAI directly challenge Google’s supremacy as the world’s largest intermediary for knowledge? Why wouldn’t ChatGPT become a search engine — by leveraging Google’s technology, stealing producers’ content, and flattering its users into thinking they’re clever and unique while they do it? And why wouldn’t ChatGPT serve ads in its responses, while increasingly tailoring those ads and responses to entice its users? And why wouldn’t OpenAI start collecting more and more of its users’ queries, no matter how personal they are, in order to improve the return on those ads?

And, permit me one more: Why wouldn’t Twitter, Meta, and Google enter into an LLM arms race, exploiting every moral compromise that Sam Altman hesitates on making? Google’s search monopoly is threatened, Meta has an ad business to protect and an empty Metaverse to sustain, whilst Twitter is a money-losing vanity project and vehicle for a delusional billionaire’s vision for a boring dystopia. These are companies that have thrown out all semblance of altruism and are faced with only the most perverse incentives. The tech industry has invested an estimated $700 billion into LLMs in recent years, and it wants returns.

This may yet fail. Consumers may step back from these LLMs as their predatory owners rush forward. A market correction may wipe out these investments and force these companies to pivot to more sensible business cases for AI, while marketing LLMs simply as a research tool.

But the more likely scenario, I think, is that these companies successfully forge ahead, fattened on venture capital and a messianic belief that these Übermenschen are about to control the levers of reality.

Not only is the state unlikely to constrain this disquieting possibility, they currently seem totally taken by it. Virtually every government is racing to install not just AI systems, but LLMs. Albania now has a chatbot minister. Canada’s (human) AI minister says we “can’t afford to wait” to harness the power of AI. Donald Trump issued an executive order this summer committing America to procuring LLMs for government operations, so long as they don’t “sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas” — that is, so long as it’s not “woke AI.”

This is a grim future on the horizon.

There are still people trying to imagine an alternative. Joseph Weizenbaum died in 2008, but the Weizenbaum Institute carries on his legacy. They advocate for more human-centered technology and a more engaged civil society in Germany. As Florian Butollo and Esther Görnemann, two of the Institute’s researchers, wrote earlier this summer:

Butollo & Görnemann: The technology race for artificial intelligence has produced pathologies that are characterized by the dominance of a handful of powerful players and strong information and power asymmetries. […] In geopolitically volatile times, the associated risks are exacerbated, as political actors have the ability to restrict access to essential infrastructures or to attach conditions to them. In addition, language models can be used in a targeted manner to influence public discourse. Language models shape what is visible and sayable, what knowledge is disseminated and how it is evaluated.5

AI and LLMs can be reoriented towards the common good, they argue — through regulation, open-source standards, transparency requirements, and the required involvement of civil society.

But imposing those constraints are going to require a pretty substantial departure for how politics has operated in the West for the past several decades. Even the European Union, which has been far more proactive than other states, is not there yet.

Revitalizing politics so that our leaders have the gall to challenge this tech oligarchy is going to be one of the biggest challenges of the modern era. And it’s going to have to start now.

That’s it for this week.

If you want even more Big Tech alarmism, my column in The Star last weekend is all about the censorial power grab being enacted in Charlie Kirk’s name. You can also listen to me discuss the state of political violence in Canada on The Big Story podcast.

Just a reminder that my book is available online, or wherever good books are sold.

Until next week!

This is a special dispatch to hawk copies of my new book: The 51st State Votes.

The book is both a recapping of Canada’s most recent federal election, and a polemic about the Donald Trump-sized existential threat facing the country.

For my Canadian subscribers, I hope that the book serves as a useful reminder of the degree of the challenge we’re facing, and a cri de coeur about the need for us to get serious and confront it.

If any of my American subscribers want to get a copy, I hope the book serves as a useful window into the destructive impact of Trump’s delusional nationalism and beggar-thy-neighbour trade policies.

And for those Europeans, Australians, and Kiwis on the Bug-eyed and Shameless mailing list, I suspect this book will be a useful parallel to the exact kind of political fights happening in your country right now.

The book itself is a breezy 100-ish pages, and covers both the lead-up to the last federal election, the campaign itself, and comes right up to the G7 summit in Kanasaskis, Alberta this summer.

You can pick up a copy directly from Sutherland House Books, or you can find it at your local independent book store or library. (If they don’t have copies, ask them to order some!) For paying subscribers, I have a handy 25% off discount code at the bottom of this newsletter — beneath the paywall.

Below is a brief excerpt, so you can try before you buy.

By the time U.S. Brigadier General Winfield Scott crossed the Niagara River in the War of 1812, his side had mostly known humiliation and defeat at the hands of the British. Yet in July 1814, he invaded the Niagara Peninsula with enormous confidence, certain that his assault would be a turning of the tides.

Dressed in a heavy coat and high boots, sporting his sword and pistols, the ambitious Scott rushed to step from his boat to shore and charge the British. He misjudged his landing and fell into the river, his head sinking below the waterline, his high boots sucked deep into the muck and silt. His men reached in to pull their commander up, ensuring the only damage would be to his dignity. Nevertheless, it was an inauspicious start.

Scott would go on to lead his infantry to victory at the Battle of Chippawa and fight to a draw at Lundy’s Lane, a few kilometres from the majestic Niagara Falls. But like his landing in Canada, Scott’s reach would exceed his grasp. The Americans were unable to make real gains on the peninsula and ultimately retreated to New York. The two sides traded wins and losses. The biggest symbolic blow came later that summer when the British rowed all the way to Washington, D.C, and razed the White House. On Christmas Eve, 1814, a peace was signed.

It may have been an end to war, but it wasn’t kinship. Two decades later, a group of Canadian rebels calling themselves the “Patriots” began to organize an uprising against the British, with help from supporters in America. In 1837, they seized an island in the Niagara River and declared the Republic of Canada. The loyalist militias responded, seizing the rebel steamboat, Caroline, setting it on fire and letting it drift off the falls. In the internecine violence, one American was killed.

Winfield Scott, the hero of Niagara, was dispatched by President Martin Van Buren to quell the tensions that emerged in the border states, as the Americans called for revenge. “If you want war, I need only look on in silence,” Scott wrote to the president. “But if peace be your wish, I can give no assurance of success. The difficulties in the way will be formidable.”

The president chose peace, and that’s what he got. In each local conflict, Scott negotiated a reasonable outcome to avert war. He was so impressive in his ability to avert escalations that a British commander nominated Scott for a medal from the King, an honour that Scott had to refuse. But Scott’s ability to negotiate difficult peace came to define the cross-border relationship for a century and a half.

“For over 150 years, we’ve found a way — in true Canadian fashion — to disagree agreeably, to choose diplomacy over division,” said Mark Carney on April 18, 2025, as the wind whipped the pages in his hands and Niagara Falls crashed in the distance behind him.

“The depth of that kinship is symbolized here, where the border runs between Niagara Falls,” he went on. “The falls come from the same river—divided into two very different experiences—before reuniting to move forward. On each side, there is a town with the same name. Over centuries, the two Niagara Falls have demonstrated that collaboration, not conflict, is the path to great prosperity.”

It was heavy symbolism. But standing across the rooftop from the Liberal leader, it struck me as apt, given the weight of the Trump threat. “Unfortunately, that’s all changed,” Carney continued. “And it wasn’t us who did the changing.”

If you could criticize Carney for anything, it was not going far enough. In just the first three months of 2025, Trump had threatened Canada, and unilaterally announced, enacted, and suspended so many tariffs on us that it was difficult to keep track of what, exactly, was subject to the import duties. After his Liberation Day, Trump had insisted that his global tariffs were both a punishment for the rest of the world and a remedy — a means to get other countries at the table to negotiate new deals favourable to America. But when it came to Canada, Trump was blunt: The tariffs are a means to territorial expansion.

As April wore on and election day came into view, Trump sat for an interview with Time. The journalists suggested that when it came to gobbling up Greenland and Canada, perhaps Trump was trolling. “I’m really not trolling,” Trump interjected. Running through his usual grievances about the trade imbalance, Trump went on: “We’re taking care of their military. We’re taking care of every aspect of their lives, and we don’t need them to make cars for us. In fact, we don’t want them to make cars for us. We want to make our own cars. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.”

Time asked a shockingly direct question: “Do you want to grow the American empire?” Trump delivered a chillingly cavalier answer: “Wouldn’t mind.”

That day in Niagara Falls, Carney crystalized that pitch he had been making throughout the campaign: Trump was trying to reorder the global economy; he was threatening our workers, retirees, our culture, our language, our businesses, and our resources. This was not an aimless or confused exercise: It was an intentional campaign to seize the country. “President Trump is trying to break us, so America can own us.”

Carney, as I’ve said, offered a refreshingly blunt assessment of the threat. But as we entered the home stretch, it occurred to me that Carney’s tonic was more diluted than he let on. Reciprocal tariffs, the obvious move, had been drawn up by his predecessor. Carney wasn’t keen. His main campaign planks — removing interprovincial trade barriers, fast-tracking energy projects, doubling home construction, designating new national parks — might’ve felt ambitious in regular times but started to feel like a limp response the more we contemplated the scale of the threat.

The fact is, both Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had a piece of the answer. The Liberals were right to sketch out Canada’s pivot to Europe, and the Conservatives were right about the need for strength at home. When it comes to recapitalizing the Canadian military, there’s no doubt that joining Europe’s defence industrial base would be a boon, but it will mean nothing if we can’t untangle our moribund procurement system and instill the Canadian Armed Forces with an actual purpose. Yes, we need to become productive again, but that can only be done by cajoling cities into reducing gridlock, building new homes, and ending the reign of NIMBY. Ottawa needs to scale up exports of its energy products, but it can’t do that if it is shackled by endless consultation and review. To do big things again, we need a civil service that works, and we need to recognize that, right now, it doesn’t.

Both men spoke of these problems, sometimes in bits and pieces. But Carney’s remedies fell too often into wishful thinking, whereas Poilievre put far too much faith in the idea that wielding a stick could solve all problems.

While no politician can strike the perfect balance between building muscle at home and showing flexibility abroad, the fact is that Canada needs a leader capable of wanting peace, knowing it’s difficult, and capable of conflict, if need be — someone who can fight a trade war, for sure, and also do battle with the status quo at home.

That’s it for this mini-dispatch — I’ll be back in just a few days with a full, proper newsletter.

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“My question is, again, directed to Mr. Kirk,” the man in the jean jacket said.

The man was standing in the back of a college auditorium, and it was his turn at the microphone, held aloft by a campus volunteer.

“As the guy before said, you've advocated for homosexuality, said that there's a place for the gay agenda within the conservative movement,” the man began, waving his arms around to reveal patches on his jean jacket: One, the flag of the Roman empire; the other, a skull impaled by a combat knife.

“Is there any point where conservatives should take a moral stance on Christian morality, or should we abandon it altogether?” He asked, rhetorically. He wanted to know: “What is your brand of conservatism doing to actually conserve Christian morality?” Because, he said, “if we’re ceding to the left on transgenderism, gay rights, gay marriage, we don’t want that in conservatism.” A swell of applause rose as he rattled off his list.

Charlie Kirk, standing in front of a banner that proclaimed CULTURE WARS, looked unusually annoyed. “So you don’t want him in the conservative movement?” He said, pointing to his guest onstage, Rob Smith — a Black, gay, Iraq War veteran, and conservative influencer.

“No!” “No we don’t!” “Not if it waters down the movement!” came the cries from the audience.

Kirk and Smith tried to mount a defense, but the jeers continued. Kirk steered the conversation towards more questions from the audience. Shortly after, a baby-faced student with a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat stepped to the microphone with an even more charged question: “Can you prove that our white European ideals can be maintained if the country's majority is no longer made up of white European descendants?”

Kirk got more and more testy as this went on. He waved around his anti-immigration bona fides before rejecting the “racist question,” and decrying the idea that “America should become a white ethnostate.” A wave of disgruntled murmuring rose from the audience. And it was just the beginning. Over the course of the evening in Ohio, and at nearly every stop on Kirk’s cross-country campus tour, a veritable army of trolls walked to the microphone to needle the face of the young MAGA movement. Kirk, they believed, wasn’t radical enough — not yet. They wanted to make him squirm.

If you’re familiar at all with Charlie Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, you likely know him as the college firebrand, the fresh-faced activist who loves to debate young leftists — and DESTROY, DECIMATE, DEMOLISH them. You may have seen the ample coverage of the progressive protests outside his events, evidence of the supposedly censorial nature of liberalism in the face of an intellectually ambitious ascendant right-wing movement. Even if you’ve never heard of him before, you’ve no doubt followed, with some degree of horror, the fallout from his assassination.

This week, on Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to dispense with the myth-making and instead talk about who Charlie Kirk was, look at the organization he built, and break down how it fits into Donald Trump’s reactionary movement.

There’s no hot takes, just a deep dive on where Charlie Kirk fit in our current moment: And the vacuum that has been created now that he’s gone.

31-year-old Charlie Kirk was killed by an assassin’s bullet at a campus event in Utah on Wednesday. Police have apprehended a suspect, but the exact motivation of the killing is still unclear.

To that end, speculating about the why, how, and what’s-next of the killing strikes me as particularly useless.

But to get some basic ideas on the table: Kirk’s murder is a tragedy, and an unfortunate continuation of both America’s assassination culture and its gun obsession. Kirk was a father of two, and he was a human being. Trying to meter out sympathy to murder victims and their families based on their political beliefs is an exhausting and pointless endeavor. He didn’t deserve to die. People who trip over themselves to insist that this murder deserves a special, lower level, of sympathy are really just peacocking their own kind of edgy politics, and I find that pretty uninteresting.

Nor could such an assassination ever be defensible. Responding to speech with murder is both fundamentally illiberal, antithetical to how we’ve built our society, and practically fucking stupid. There is no speech that should be met with a bullet through the neck and no way to stop that speech with a gunshot. Martyrs make great spokespeople, and vice versa.

There is also a reasonable anxiety that his death will make things quite a bit worse. Kirk straddled fringe movements and national power, and we don’t know how either side is going to react. There are already some genuinely terrifying rhetoric coming from both government officials and outright extremists, and we don’t know how that talk will be put into action.

Trying to debate the morality of his killing is pointless and forecasting the consequences is madness-inducing. These basic truths do not mean we must trip over ourselves to whitewash or rehabilitate Kirk’s beliefs. In the same way that his beliefs do not justify his murder, his murder can’t justify his beliefs either. Sweeping proclamations like “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way” are inane efforts to over-eulogize the man.

So this dispatch has one clear take, and it has very little to do with his assassination. It is this: Charlie Kirk was one of the most successful and radical right-wing voices in America, and he was poised to do some very big things.

Understanding how Charlie Kirk got to where he did is a pretty useful way of understanding Trump’s movement and the state of American democracy right now.

Turning Point USA did not begin as a grassroots organization, but it became one.

Charlie Kirk set up the group in 2012 as a vehicle to castigate the Democratic administration for their debt spending ways: Seemingly before the 18-year-old Kirk even had an organization to speak of, he was booked as a guest on Fox News. A charismatic speaker, he quickly found an audience of conservatives who wanted to hear about how public schools and private colleges were foisting liberal economic propaganda onto youth. He showed up to speaking gigs and rallies armed with a copy of an economics textbook written by liberal Paul Krugman: One that denied the economic benefits of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts.

“What we're trying to do is we're going into the high schools and the colleges to challenge these textbooks that publish flat out falsehoods and fallacies,” Kirk told supporters early in his crusade.

One of the conservatives in the audience for Kirk’s talk was a retired businessman named Bill Montgomery. Thanks largely to his patronage, Kirk had about $500,000 in the bank by 2013. Kirk and Montgomery co-founded Turning Point USA, the scaffolding for a new kind of campus conservatism.

TPUSA quickly began putting together campus chapters to act as the foundation of his movement, but first it needed to make a name for itself. Kirk experimented with YouTube as a channel to reach young people: He posted videos of him conducting streeters in his native Chicago and cellphone footage of encounters with campus police. He was an early adopter in the art of political meme-making, helping to flood Facebook with all kinds of conservative copypasta.

At this point in America, broad-appeal young conservative activism was basically unheard of. Here was Kirk with a high-quality proof-of-concept.

In 2013 he raised $2 million, a figure he would double the next year, then double again the year after. With his millions, flowing from conservative activists looking to influence the next generation, Kirk set to work on nationalizing the petty squabbles of his former classmates. (Kirk dropped out of school to focus on activism.)

TPUSA built out a database of ideologically unaligned academics: A “Professor Watchlist” of those guilty of spreading “leftist propaganda” on campus. He began peddling in the kind of culture war jargon that was still somewhat foreign to older activists: Decrying cancel culture, trigger words, and safe spaces. Fox News branded Kirk as “one of our favorite millennials — if not the favorite” because he translated the ideological warfare happening on campuses for a broader audience Did it matter that the fights were contrived and exaggerated for political effect? Not really.

Kirk and his crew were pro-gun, anti-feminist, climate-skeptical, in favor of small government, anti-immigration and, most importantly, pro-Trump. They used their pariah status to great effect.

Despite professing to be studiously non-partisan and despite TPUSA being an educational not-for-profit, Kirk threw himself into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Solidly in the camp of a political movement that was entirely and radically offside the youth of America, Kirk and TPUSA evolved into a new kind of activism. He would no longer just whine about the deplatforming and censorship, he was going to pivot TPUSA onto the front foot.

Kirk’s content took on the hue of vociferous debate: There he is destroying democratic socialism, there he goes crushing identity politics, that’s him roasting Congress. Sometimes this was actually debate, but more often it was one person with a microphone shouting down someone without one.

Ben Shapiro, who was a friend of Kirk’s and a frequent guest at TPUSA events, popularized this format to enormous effect: But Kirk was the one laying the groundwork for this kind of gladiatorial argumentation that hadn’t been part of the conservative movement for quite some time.

While Fox News pundits and Trump campaign apparatchiks were ensconced in their Manhattan high-rises, Kirk began relentlessly touring university campuses. His events became both a coming-out for a new generation of young conservatives and also a flashpoint for cultural tensions: Left-wing students began protesting and demanding that Kirk be forbidden from their campus, for his offside views on feminism and LGBTQ rights. It all made for great content. TPUSA began pumping out videos of “ANTIFA” coming to silence his peers and denouncing “snowflakes” who couldn’t take a joke.

This was all contrived, but it met a growing population of young Americans — and Canadians, Europeans, and Australians — who started to get sick of the stifling orthodoxy of progressive liberalism. Gay marriage, post-modernism, gender theory, transgender acceptance: Ideas that felt rebellious just a few decades ago had become bog standard, and an orthodoxy that felt imposed. Teens love to rage against the machine, and TPUSA events became an edgy and transgressive to do so. You would wade through a sea of purple-haired pride-flag-waving protesters to enter a room of forbidden truths.

At the annual Student Action Summit, TPUSA’s big confab, the who’s-who of the emerging nü-right came out to strut their stuff. Donald Trump Jr. was the draw for their 2017 summit, Jordan B. Peterson would grace the event stage shortly after his massive 12 Rules for Life was published in 2018, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh showed up in 2019. Donald Trump himself began gracing the TPUSA stage.

By 2019, TPUSA was reporting nearly $30 million in annual donations. It registered political action committees which also pulled in millions, pouring cash towards electing particularly-MAGA candidates. It managed a database of tens of thousands of young, ideologically simpatico true believers from across the country.

Kirk’s own star rose with TPUSA. He became a totem for the young flank of the movement — a wing that was considerably more radical than their elders. He wrote a book, Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters — with foreword by Donald Trump Jr. — an inane book of platitudes and empty rhetoric, but it laid out the enormous impact TPUSA was having.

Kirk: We have organized more than five thousand events, trained more than five thousand conservative Millennials, and conducted more than five hundred thousand face-to-face conversations—the most effective method of engagement. We have launched more than 350 TPUSA chapters and provided over 750 like-minded student groups with resources such as activism supplies, leadership training, and field staff support.

For all its success, Trump’s MAGA movement was horrific at grassroots organizing. They dominated the airwaves and monopolized people’s attention, but they utterly failed at identifying their supporters and activating them into the cause. Kirk wasn’t just mobilizing people, he was actively recruiting them. That was an enormously unique and valuable thing.

Kirk was a well-tolerated spokesperson for the movement, but TPUSA itself was a hodgepodge of radicals and moderates, racists and social climbers, ideologues and opportunists. It boasted senior figures like Candice Owens, a gullible conspiracy theorist; Benny Johnson, a paid stooge of Russia; and Ashley St. Clair, who was photographed pallin’ around with white nationalists. (And who would go on to have Elon Musk’s baby.)

This was all possible because TPUSA was one of the few pieces of MAGA that was both organized and open. It had members, events, mailing lists, secretaries and vice presidents — but it was also, increasingly, part of Trump’s political apparatus.

And that made Kirk a very important bridge between two worlds.

Nick Fuentes is a neo-Nazi.

Journalists have equivocated over this fact for some time, particularly after he dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, but it is a simple fact. He praises Hitler, denies the Holocaust, peddles antisemitic conspiracy theories, and supports what can only be described as phrenology.

He is the boss of a hard-right movement of terminally-online losers who call themselves the Groypers. They are young, they are radical, and they believe they have a unique opportunity to turn America into a fascist all-white utopia.

Over Trump’s first term in office, particularly after the race riot in Charlottesville, scrutiny of figures like Fuentes increased and their brand became more and more toxic. It emerged, much to Kirk’s embarrassment, that TPUSA had become a useful forum for the Groypers and that some of his key organizers were chummy with Fuentes. With his privileged position at risk, Kirk ordered these white nationalists banned from TPUSA events. The “Groyper army” would not be welcome.

But it wouldn’t be that easy. TPUSA may have started as an astroturf organization, funded with millions from wealthy Republican benefactors hoping to groom youth into their brand of politics, but it had become a quasi-organic movement of many regional chapters and local organizers. Trying to root out the Groypers was easier said than done.

Fuentes knew that.

“We can do a lot [of] damage at TPUSA,” Fuentes wrote that year. “I think they are the best foil.” He and his fellow Groypers began to target specific Kirk campus tours and rallied their extremist supporters to show up. They strategized on what to wear, what to ask, and how best to take over the TPUSA machinery and megaphone.

The very nature of Kirk’s events lent themselves well to this kind of entryism. Sending 100 white nationalists to a Trump rally was pointless: They would, like everybody else, show up, sit down, listen patiently, cheer at the right moments, then go home.

But at TPUSA events, participation was the whole point. The audience was full of kindred spirits who were encouraged to go to the microphone and ask the right questions: How do we push back against leftism on campus? What books should I recommend to my classmates? Can I date a progressive? Every once in awhile, some determined leftist might saunter to the microphone with a gotcha question to pose, but these events were meant to be both participatory and comforting.

Fuentes’ army was showing up to pierce that safe space. They arrived with cutting questions about Kirk’s support for Israel, hammering him with esoteric conspiracy theories about Israel’s supposed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks; they demanded to know why he tolerated immoral homosexual activity; they castigated him for his supposed tolerance for immigration.

This was “the Groyper war.” And it’s undeniable that Fuentes won it.

In city after city, TPUSA events became some of the most high-profile and high-production white nationalist summits you could find, to Kirk’s chagrin. When Kirk was slated to appear at UCLA with Donald Trump Jr, Fuentes urged his supporters to show up and ask tactical questions to embarrass the TPUSA founder: “The name of the game tomorrow is to expose Kirk in front of Don Jr.” When TPUSA held its annual leadership summit in West Palm Beach, Fuentes tried to hold a rival event down the street. Fuentes claimed, with some credible evidence, to have inserted his Groypers at all levels of TPUSA’s organization.

It was all adversarial, but it was symbiotic. Fuentes needed the oxygen of TPUSA’s openness, and TPUSA needed the controversy and attention of the Groypers.

And on January 6, everything crashed together.

Ali Alexander was a very successful sloganeer. He joins the pantheon of great political one-liners with his creation: “Stop the steal.”

Donald Trump was always going to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. But it was Alexander who pushed the three-word phrase that became synonymous with rambling bug-eyed diatribes about abnormalities in DeKalb county and vague allusions to “Chinese bamboo paper.”1 Alexander was part of a digital mob that helped piece together the meta-therapy of this election-rigging, and he was positioning himself as a young leader in the movement.

As it became clear to Trump that he had lost the 2020 election, his team began to adopt these half-baked ideas as proof. And activists like Alexander raised the idea of holding some kind of event to coincide with the counting of the Electoral College votes. In mid-December, Trump agreed: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!" There was no plan to hold a protest in D.C. on January 6 because this tweet was the plan.

So Alexander, an ally of Nick Fuentes, went and began organizing “Wild Protest.” But Alexander had no actual organization or skill, so he outsourced: He pulled in donors, politicians, and eventually the president himself made plans to hold a rally on the Capitol that day. But to get people to actually show up, Alexander turned to Charlie Kirk.

“You did so much work behind the scenes that you weren't given credit for,” Alexander said of Kirk in 2022. “And, you know, don't be ashamed of the buses.”

Kirk had bragged about bringing “80+ buses full of patriots” to the Capitol for the Stop the Steal rally, a claim he deleted after the President’s supporters smashed into the seat of American democracy. Alexander would later tell a Congressional committee the actual mobilization of attendees “was ran through Turning Point USA.” Multiple insurrectionists who were convicted for their role in the attack testified that they were bussed there — and had their hotel rooms paid for — by TPUSA.

TPUSA’s involvement went further than that. Tyler Bowyer, the group’s chief operating officer was part of a scheme to arrive at the Capitol as a fake elector for the state of Arizona. A committeeman with the RNC, Bowyer’s job was to arrive at the Capitol and insist that Arizona had actually voted for Trump, and that he ought to be the delegate to the electoral college. Prosecutors say this amounted to fraud, an attempt to change the democratic results of the U.S. election. (A criminal case against Bowyer is ongoing but is likely to be dismissed.)

After Trump was removed from power and his movement shrank, those left loyal to him grew more radical. Kirk adopted the so-called ‘great replacement theory’ — insisting that Democrats were enacting a plan to use immigration to “diminish and decrease white demographics in America.” He leaned harder into Christian nationalism, musing on his show that the right response to “the growing threat of Islam” may be to ban the religion entirely.

In 2022, Kirk held a live event with Christian extremist Sean Feucht, where a member of the audience asked if America was heading towards civil war. Kirk answered:

Kirk: We need a political extinction event of the woke left. We need to make it unacceptable to believe, for example, that we should judge people based on the color of their skin, that men can become pregnant, that we should have segregated classrooms. Like in Colorado, they have playtime at playgrounds only for black families, and white families are not allowed like this. This garbage has got to stop. And I believe most Americans are looking for an outlet or a vehicle to repudiate that, and want a return to team reality. The civil war thing, here's what I do believe: Most Americans don't want a civil war. I don't think we will get to a civil war unless, for whatever reason, the other side tries to provoke people.

On his show in 2023, he offered this take:

Kirk: Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia-filled Alzheimer's corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.

Kirk began talking more explicitly about how immigration could see “America becoming more Third World” and adopting outright white supremacist lingo, tweeting: “Whiteness is great. Be proud of who you are.”

When Trump mounted a fresh bid for the White House, TPUSA stepped up and became a core piece of his ground game. Because the Republicans had basically given up on direct voter outreach, that work was outsourced to PACs and third-party groups, like Kirk’s. Marshaling tens of millions of dollars, between its non-profit and its PAC, the group homed in on Wisconsin and Arizona as their target states: And they succeeded, with both states flipping from Democrat to Republican. (The effort was led by Bowyer, the same guy who had tried to overturn the results of the 2020 vote.)

To say that Kirk was in a pole position in 2025 is a wild understatement. As a podcaster, radio host, TV personality, and writer, his audience was well into the tens of millions. As a political operative, he controlled a core piece of the Republican political infrastructure. As an influencer, he was the hinge between Trump’s geriatric leadership and his growing legion of young hoplites — including a movement of hard-right radicals.

The Kremlinology of Trump’s harum‑scarum administration is normally not important for the public to understand. But Kirk’s senior position in the movement and his relationship — bad as it was — with Fuentes and this hardcore group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis is important to understand. Fuentes, consummate troll, spent years trying to both destroy and convert Kirk. He succeeded, to some degree, at both.

“Charlie Kirk declaring that there is a war on White People yesterday is just a testament to how thoroughly Groypers have taken over the conversation at the national level,” Fuentes posted in 2022. In 2024 he celebrated how “Charlie Kirk became a Christian Nationalist.” This summer, he wrote: “Charlie Kirk has effectively adopted Groyperism 100%”

Other times, Fuentes was more dour. He railed at Kirk’s attempts to discredit his extremist movement. “Charlie Kirk and Shapiro want us branded Alt Right so they can deplatform and blacklist us,” Fuentes wrote in 2019. “That is the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them.’” As he seized on the anti-Israel settlement following the war on Gaza, Fuentes went hard on Kirk’s support for Israel — accusing Kirk of “working for the Jewish interest.” He went on:

Fuentes: We settle for breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs fall off of the table at Fox News or at The Blaze or at The Daily Wire. And…there are a lot of Catholics, or America Firsters, or white separatists, white nationalist types who are going to scurry under the table and eat up the crumbs gratefully. Meanwhile, the Jews are at the table having a feast...And Charlie Kirk is serving up a feast.

Of all the targets of Fuentes’ ire, of which there are many, Charlie Kirk stands apart. The neo-Nazi influencer dispatched hundreds of his fans to harass and embarrass Kirk, and found that it was great for his own brand. It was a microcosm for the war playing out inside the Republican Party now, the tension dragging the party in power further towards its dark fringes.

In a livestream Thursday night, Fuentes reacted to the “nightmare” of Kirk’s death.

Fuentes: It is our responsibility — mine and all of ours — to step up and to get serious. To the extent that politics was fun or we took it lightly. I think we now realize it just got very real. It's been real. People talk about a civil war. They say a war is coming. Some say we're already in one. We have an obligation now, the leaders, the spokesman, the men, the young men, the elderly men, we have an obligation to lead.

Perhaps out of an anxiety that one of his supporters may have fired the bullet that killed Kirk — who, as Fuentes pointed out, was “part of the political establishment in many ways…part of the problem” — Fuentes delivered a speech disavowing “this nihilistic, malevolent violence.”

Instead, Fuentes said, his movement — one that tried to use Kirk’s establishment position to infect the U.S. government with their neo-Nazi ideology — needs to show some leadership. “We need people to fill in to that role.”

I’m not sure you can over-state how much Kirk influenced our current moment. He was uniquely responsible for nationalizing the culture war battles percolating on campus, setting up the widespread belief that leftism in all its forms — progressivism, wokeism, liberalism — was a threat to the liberty of every American. In Kirk’s world, any and everything is a function of partisan and ideological belief, which meant that any and everything was part of the culture war.

You can clearly see Kirk’s influence in the waves of book bans in schools across America, in the Trump administration’s assault on post-secondary institutions, in the reactionary anti-transgender panic, in MAGA’s terminally online ethos, and in the far-right’s attempts to insert themselves into the machinery of power.

The fact that even his assassination itself became a culture war flashpoint should be no surprise. There has been a deluge of hagiography about who he was, pithy tweets about how he was asking for it, morally hollow grandstanding insisting that he doesn’t deserve empathy, finger-pointing to those who apparently encouraged or celebrated his murder, and total guesswork about what Kirk’s fans will do in response to his death.

It is, as Bo Burnham sardonically sang, “the backlash to the backlash to the thing that's just begun.” The high-velocity rage machine began firing at a rate we’ve probably never truly seen before.

As I was finishing this newsletter, news broke that Kirk’s killer is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. We still don’t know his motivations, and there’s a good likelihood the why will never become entirely clear. He could be a rabid Marxist, or a Nick Fuentes fanboy, something in between, or just a deranged nihilist. All we seem to know thus far is that he was well-versed in online meme-speak.

Whatever the tortured logic, this is going to have an impact. As someone who gleefully lived in the center of America’s increasingly toxic and violent culture wars, Kirk’s death was uniquely guaranteed to catalyze waves of outrage. All of this is so dangerous. Societies which find themselves fighting over political violence are rarely living in healthy times.

Back in 2022, with a Democrat in the White House, Kirk offered this bit of advice to his allies:

Kirk: People on the right aren't disciplined enough to realize that they [the left] are trying to tempt you into something fake to justify a security response. I've said this openly before: Don't take the bait. Satan would love nothing more than for you to get into a conversation or a political dialogue that would then [allow them to] all of a sudden say: Hey, we have to get more power at the FBI or DOJ to take care of these people that want to tear the country apart. We must be explicit unifiers. We must be always trying to bring people together on things that are agreeable and that are a part of the American Trinity.

I don’t think Kirk practiced his own advice. But I sincerely hope the American right follows that wisdom now.

That’s it for this dispatch.

Obviously it wasn’t the one I was planning on publishing this week. I’m just back from a two-week vacation, so I’ll be getting back in the saddle more regularly by next week. Until then.

In April 2014, a bus pulled up to the Kramatorsk police station and out spilled a gang of masked men with assault rifles.

The eastern Ukrainian city, which sits along the edge of the industrial and coal-rich Donbas basin, was hardly a high-value target. Like much of Eastern Ukraine during the Second World War, it had been captured by Nazi Germany, then by the Soviets, then Germany, then the USSR once more. Under the Soviets, it had been part of the industrious East, and a regional rail hub; while in an independent Ukraine, it fit into the complicated ethnic and linguistic politics of the country: Its 200,000 working-class residents were overwhelmingly Ukrainian, though they spoke mostly Russian.

But on that spring day in 2014, Kramatorsk was about to be occupied, ostensibly, by itself.

The masked assailants fired into the building, and the police inside fired back. The invaders made their way inside as a crowd of locals congregated outside. The irate public demanded to know who had just shot up their police department.

“We are not Ukrainian troops,” the invaders told the restless crowd outside. “We are a people’s militia.” They tore down insignia of Ukraine and raised the rebel flag of the recently-proclaimed ‘Donetsk People’s Republic.’ They demanded that the city surrender itself to this breakaway state.

The crowd began booing and told them to get lost.

Over the next three months, Kramatorsk — like many other cities in Eastern Ukraine — would find itself suddenly split in two. A provisional government in nearby Donetsk, clearly and obviously supported by Moscow, had laid claim to Kramatorsk. The Ukrainian military, still finding its bearings after the sudden resignation of the government in Kyiv, scrambled to reassert control over its own territory.

After a series of successful military operations that summer, the remaining members of the militia fled. The borders of this Russian client state rolled back, and life in Kramatorsk went back to some semblance of normal. The next year, residents waved Ukrainian flags as they toppled a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the city square.

Kyiv began building defences just east of Kramatorsk, convinced that if its sovereignty were to come under threat again, it would run through Donetsk. This city would become a linchpin for the nation’s collective defense.

Sure enough, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country, in 2022, its forces rushed towards Kramatorsk — but did not even get close, before Ukrainian defenders pushed them back.

Today, Kramatorsk is still in Ukrainian hands. Its streets are neatly kept, its roses well-watered and pruned, and its Palace of Culture remains impressive, albeit boarded-up. But the war is inching closer. Parts of the city lie in ruin, having faced constant bombardment from Russian airstrikes and drones. More than half the population has fled. In recent weeks, the city has come within firing distance of Russian artillery.

But the city is far from lost. In fact, Kramatorsk is the backbone of Ukraine’s defenses. Russia has been heading towards a confrontation here, and it will be in for one hell of a fight when it arrives.

In Alaska earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a cynical suggestion: What if Ukraine simply surrendered the city — and the whole region — in exchange for peace?

In Kramatorsk this week, journalist asked a young woman her thoughts on the proposal.

“Everyone would leave,” she said. “We can’t live under the Russians after what they have done to us.”

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to break down what happened this week in Trump’s stumbling, staggering amble towards a fake peace and consider how Europe, Canada, and Ukraine ought to respond.

The Negotiating Positions

If we, the media, are guilty of one sin in covering this current stage of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, it’s that we are utterly failing to remind the public of the actual positions of both parties. A casual reader could be forgiven for thinking that a peace deal is tantalizingly close, if only both sides could get in the same room.

But if you actually compare what Russia is asking for with what Ukraine is able to give up, you’ll realize just how impossible this peace deal is. To that end, I’ve put together this handy chart:1

As you can see, there remains some big outstanding issues.

Thus far, the flurry of activity out of the White House — meeting Putin in Alaska and hosting Europe’s leaders at the White House — has succeeded in downgrading Russia’s territorial demands from insane to slightly-less insane and upgrading the promise of security guarantees to Ukraine, albeit only in tone.

In effect, yes, that moves both sides closer to a deal: But it closes the mile-long gap by mere inches.

The last time Russia and Ukraine seriously talked peace, it was in Istanbul in 2022. At those talks, negotiators managed to find compromise positions on some items and get close-ish on others, but they never settled the question of borders and territory — that was left for a leader-to-leader summit which, they thought, would come next. It never happened.

In fact, shortly after a draft text was agreed upon, albeit with some unresolved items, the Kremlin began contradicting the proposal its own negotiators had signed. For Kyiv, it was proof that the whole negotiation was a ruse, designed to dissuade Ukrainian counter-offensives and discourage Western military aid. (Dispatch #128)

Indeed, the compromises that Moscow’s negotiators put to paper in Istanbul were quickly forgotten, and it actually hardened its negotiating positions in some respects. About six months after those talks concluded, Russia staged an illegal and fraudulent set of referenda in its occupied territories, declaring that the people of those Ukrainian provinces had voted to join Russia. Since then, it has demanded that Ukraine give up this territory to attain peace. It has further demanded all sorts of domestic concessions that would try and bend the country to becoming a pro-Russian client state. (Looming over these talks is a pervasive belief that, if Ukraine agreed to the sweeping terms, Russia would find a way to rig any post-war elections.)

Even putting aside the still-unresolved question of borders, there has been absolutely zero indication that the White House has managed to bridge the divide on any of these outstanding issues — demilitarization, ‘de-Nazification,’ returning kidnapped Ukrainian children, and so on.

But Trump and his inept advisors have been spun into the belief that they are making progress, and have therefore forgotten about their threats and plans to derail the Russian economy. That’s a huge win for Moscow.

Putin Karaoke

When I took a shot at gaming out the Alaska summit, last week, I figured the biggest factor in those talks would be Trump’s attention span. I suspected that Trump’s desire to notch up another quick win would eclipse any affinity he has for the Russian president. (Dispatch #138) I wasn’t quite right, there.

It became clear pretty quickly that, while neither man got what they wanted, Putin exited those talks feeling good and Trump left with a head full of Russian propaganda.

Consider what Trump told Fox & Friends, his preferred platform to discuss geopolitics.

It is foolish to try and parse Trump’s words for any coherent strategy or understanding of the world, but it’s worth considering exactly what Putin has duped him into believing.

Putin’s position has always been that countries and blocs must maintain spheres of influence which are both geographic and ideological. America controls, more or less, the Western Hemisphere and it is Putin’s view that he should control the East. In his telling, America is to blame for constantly expanding NATO’s presence into eastern Europe, essentially contravening this division of the planet. He has pointedly said that the invasion of Ukraine was done in order to disrupt, oppose, and ultimately rollback America’s supposed expansionism. (Dispatch #89)

To put a fine point on it: Putin says he invaded Ukraine to constrain America.

The truth is, of course, more complicated than Putin would have you believe and also fairly simple: NATO is a defensive alliance, not an offensive one; membership is voluntary, and Moscow repeatedly acquiesced to its expansion; and Putin’s clear objectives in Ukraine are territorial expansion, resource acquisition, and domestic propaganda.

Nevertheless, to hear Trump parrot the same lies about NATO is staggering. He is, in effect, conceding that America posed a threat to Russia’s sovereignty, tacitly recognizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a move of self-defense.

Not only is that ludicrous, the sign of a deeply gullible man, it undermines Trump’s own efforts to beef up NATO — something he actually deserves credit for. It also runs completely contrary to Trump’s supposed axiom of “peace through strength.” And it weakens his stated goal of wanting to counter an aggressive China, Moscow’s ally, in the east.

Worst of all, accepting this position seemed to lead Trump towards supporting Putin’s most untenable demand: That Ukraine surrender the Donbas.

According to the New York Times, Trump left the Alaska summit believing that the best way to get a quick peace deal would be for Ukraine to surrender all Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts — including territory it currently holds and has been able to defend. That includes Kramatorsk and the surrounding area.

And he left with an invitation from Putin to hold the next rounds of negotiations in Moscow.

As I wrote last week: You can’t be a realist if you’re an idiot.

While the core of my analysis from last week, I think, holds — Trump is unlikely to continue supporting Russia’s maximalist negotiating position, and is more likely to either give up on peace talks or to eventually punish Moscow for its intransigence — acceding to Russia’s “root causes” of the conflict and endorsing his land grab does change the equation somewhat. And not in Ukraine’s favor.

The European Traveling Circus

In the hours after Trump’s cozy sojourn with Putin, Europe’s leaders scrambled to D.C. to try and shake that nonsense out of his head. Flanking Volodymyr Zelensky, it was their job to dislodge Trump from the Russian negotiating positions which Putin had effortlessly led him onto.

As they trotted into the White House, the gang of European leaders lumbered up to perform their very best contortionist routines.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz likened Russia’s plan to seize the Donbas “to a proposal for the United States to have to give up Florida.” French President Emmanuel Macron insisted that if Putin refuses to sign an equitable deal, then the West ought to quickly impose not sanctions — but tariffs. All of them, one-by-one, praised Trump for getting both sides closer to peace than anyone ever had before.

This is all strategic flattery, a recognition that the only way to drag Trump onto your position is by relentlessly soothing his volatile ego.

It worked, at least to some degree. Zelensky got Trump thinking about the plight of the abducted Ukrainian children (with an assist from Melania) and the EU gang got some real, albeit vague, commitment to long-term security guarantees.

Over the course of days, Trump promised “we’re going to help [Europe] and we’re going to make [Ukraine] very secure,” floated the prospect of Article 5-like protections, and raised the possibility of sending American fighter jets to patrol Ukraine’s skies. He then ruled out sending American troops and insisted “it can’t be NATO.”

I think it’s clear that Trump signaled support for strong security guarantees because he doesn’t fully understand what he’s signing up for.

Still, by getting Trump onto a key Ukrainian position, it put the White House in conflict with Kremlin. While Moscow has always pretended to support security guarantees for Ukraine, it has always shot down any actual proposal for what they should look like. Indeed, the proposal Russia put forward in Istanbul is that, in the event that Ukraine is attacked again, Moscow should have a veto over any defensive response. In other words: Russia wants to be able to tell Europe and America to stand down if/when it invades Ukraine again.

If Europe can’t convince Trump to be pro-Ukraine, getting him offside Putin is the next-best thing.

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The Best Option Remains Victory

Here’s a plain fact about Russia’s current position in this war: It will not be able to take the land it wants unless Ukraine surrenders it.

Putin has long fantasized about seizing the eastern half of Ukraine — what the Russian tsars once called Novorossiya. Putin has spent years telling his citizens that this part of Ukraine is culturally, ethnically, historically, linguistically, politically, spiritually Russian. That isnt true. He actually wants that land because it is rich in minerals and coal, and because it connects to territory he has already seized. He wants it because he needs something more to show for the million dead men he fed into the meat grinder — and needs to acquire new citizens to replace the dead ones. But, more than anything, he wants it because it will rob Ukraine of its most critical defensive line and become an incredibly useful launching-off point for his next invasion.

This swath of territory isn’t just burned-out outposts and trenches. People live there. While these cities have been bombed and terrorized, they are still standing. And Ukraine has worked incredibly hard to make sure that no marauding army can take this land.

This area is all part of Ukraine’s “fortress belt” — a 50 kilometer stretch with Kramatorsk in the dead middle of it. Russia has made some measurable progress in that direction recently, mostly because it is rushing small groups of fighters through ahead, largely through undefended open fields. (Analysts agree this is both a propaganda effort to claim big advances ahead of these pathetic peace talks and a new strategy to set up beachheads from which they can mount a more serious push. The results of this strategy have, thus far, been mixed.)

This progress will, very soon, collide with Ukraine’s fortress belt. As the team at put it recently, this belt consists of ”a vast expanse of wire, concrete, trenches, and gravel snaking across the entire Ukrainian front line, serving as one of the country’s most vital defenses against a full-blown Russian takeover.”

Ukraine has spent a decade building these fortifications, knowing full well that Russia would one day try and seize Ukraine through this axis. The idea that Ukraine should surrender this territory isn’t a concession, it would be suicide.

As the Institute for the Study of War wrote recently:

ISW: Ceding Ukrainian-held parts of Donetsk Oblast would place Russian forces on the borders of Donetsk Oblast, a position that is significantly less defensible than the current line. […] [Those] border areas would provide a much more advantageous launching point for a future Russian offensive into nearby areas of Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk oblasts than the current lines.

Forcing Ukraine to concede the remainder of western Donetsk Oblast to Russia would bring Russian forces 82 kilometers further west in Ukraine

This fact underlines the single most important thing about these negotiations: Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted.

There is overwhelming evidence — from his territorial demands to his opposition to real security guarantees and his demands for Ukrainian demilitarization — that, if a ceasefire or peace deal is signed, Russia intends to restart this war at the first opportunity. A deal on these terms would offer no peace, only more war.

These facts should steel Europe and Canada, if not America, to the same conclusion that Ukraine reached years ago: The only option is victory.

Victory is possible, but it will require Ukraine’s allies to drop their hesitancy and obsessive reliance on American action.

It will require outright economic warfare against Russia and its proxies, new weapons donations to Kyiv, the promise of serious and binding security guarantees for when a ceasefire is achieved, and the weight of NATO’s research and industrial machine running at full-speed behind the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

It will require us to take on Putin in Moscow, much as he has taken on the liberal American establishment in Washington.

Currently, the only thing stopping us is Trump. That’s by Putin’s design.

Anyway, here’s a video of a Russian armored personnel carrier flying both its tricolor and the American flag getting hit by a Ukrainian drone.

Below, for paying subscribers, a look at how Trump’s sycophantic media is already trying to sabotage any real peace deal for Ukraine.

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“When I first heard someone use the term ‘Donetsk People’s Republic,’” recalled Stanislav Aseyev. “I remember how a feeling of perplexity washed over me rather than the urge to smile, and I thought, ‘What the heck are they talking about? What republic? What kind of nonsense is this?’”1

A few months later, Aseyev watched his family trudge to a makeshift polling location. On the hastily-printed ballots, it read: “Do you support the act of state independence of the Donetsk People's Republic?” His family marked a tick next to the affirmative: “да.” Aseyev estimated that 80% of his male friends had signed up for the militias fighting against the Ukrainian government. He, himself, had been sympathetic to Russia, but all this chaos gave him pause.

“How did this happen?” Aseyev wrote in early 2015.

There is a technical answer to that question, of course. Moscow had, for years, been pumping propaganda into Eastern Ukraine: Claiming that the Russian language was being marginalized and crushed by the Ukrainian-speakers in Kyiv; that Ukraine was not a real country; that the Russian Orthodox faith was under attack; that NATO was inching the world closer to war; that moral degeneracy was corroding the foundations of the Western world; and so on. At the time, the central government in Kyiv, led by a man enriching himself with Moscow’s help, was orchestrating a pivot away from Europe and towards Russia.

When Ukrainians erected a massive tent encampment in the center of the capital, forcing the resignation of that kleptocrat, most rejoiced. But those in the east — in the coal-rich, working-class, poorer regions of the Donbas which had once fed the Soviet industrial empire — were worried. And Moscow kept telling them to be worried.

It is exceedingly difficult to say what would have happened if the people of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts had merely waited to see how things would have played out in Kyiv — in the years since, Ukrainians have elected both a native Ukrainian speaker who hails from the west and a Russophone who comes from the middle of the country. But Moscow, having already lost its puppet in the capital, did not want to wait and see. So they pushed.

The Kremlin sent seven Spetsnaz GRU brigades into the Donbas, around the same time that it sent a huge amount of conventional forces to seize Crimea. Those soldiers, highly-trained special operators, delivered weapons and cash, surveyed Ukrainian military positions, and participated in the takeover of Ukrainian government institutions.

Certainly, a huge number of regular Ukrainian citizens in those eastern states opted to revolt when invited, but there was ample evidence they weren’t that serious. When a group took over a town hall in Donetsk, the Ukrainian government managed to bribe them into leaving. After meeting with those Spetsnaz fighters — dubbed the ‘little green men,’ because they arrived in unmarked uniforms — the locals turned around and re-occupied the town hall.2 Plenty of others only joined the Russian-funded militia because, with the coal mines and factories closed due to the fighting, it was the only way to earn money.

Aseyev had to witness the consequences of those actions. “Since the first days and minutes of the separatist protests, those who now proudly wear mud-colored balaclavas and DPR patches never have explained why they've transformed our land into a smoking ruin,” he writes. Figuring out the “us” from the “them” was notoriously difficult in those days. The whole area had been engulfed in the kind of sectarian violence that Ukrainians didn’t believe themselves capable of.

A year later, the fighting had turned life in much of the Donbas into hell. Ukraine and Europe were pushing for peace, but finding that the “people’s republics” were unable or unwilling to make a deal on their own — that decision rested with Moscow. And the Kremlin was constantly changing what it wanted.

In April 2014, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that the militias would only lay down their arms if the Maidan tent encampment in central Kyiv were dismantled. Those encampments were mostly cleared by police in August and gone by the time legislative elections were held in October. The militias continued fighting. Demands flew in the ensuing months: A constitutional referendum to decentralize power from Ukraine’s central government, more rights for Russian speakers, a retreat of NATO from Europe. It became clear that they had only one real demand, however: Give the Donbas to Russia.

Kyiv was, nevertheless, negotiating in good faith. It negotiated a first ceasefire in 2014: Russian-backed forces quickly violated the deal and it collapsed entirely months later. A second ceasefire, Minsk II, remained on paper for years but was never fully implemented by either side. The fighting continued anyway. While Ukraine has been blamed for violating some aspects of the deal, observers agree that Russia repeatedly, consistently, and intentionally violated these agreements from the very moment they were signed.

"This war is a long-term, well-devised metaphysical project,” Aseyev wrote in 2016. It is not about economic growth or the size of seniors’ pensions. He described the actual work of this potemkin republic:

Aseyev: Reinforcing the rigid chain of command of a military dictatorship, engaging in active propaganda, expanding local media, establishing an “Academy of Interior Affairs” that trains those who just yesterday were Ukrainian students, proselytizing in schools and DPR-owned enterprises, and deepening economic relations with Russia […] As the key and only actor in this war, the Kremlin will, once again, determine the course of history, while, once again, all we will be able to do is adjust, however awkwardly, to Moscow’s initiatives.

Worse than that depressing realization, Aseyev was forced to face another grim reality.

“If we try to imagine the impossible — that the Ukrainian government simply returned to the occupied Donbas right now — we would find ourselves in a greater mess than under the occupation itself,” he wrote a year later. “No one, not the government, not those who live in free Ukraine, or the locals who are pro-Russian, is prepared for such a coming together.”

Aseyev wrote that last dispatch from prison. He had been kidnapped by the Russian-backed militias in 2017. He remained captive until he was released in a prison swap in 2019. When Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, with tanks rolling through the city where he grew up, he volunteered to defend Ukraine.

Three years after Russia failed to topple Kyiv — 11 years after it failed to capture all of the Donbas — President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin are set to meet on American soil to negotiate the war’s supposed end.

The Americans already foresee a “West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine.” It’s a useful metaphor. We might also call this proposed deal Minsk III. Whatever you name it, we’re heading to the same place that the deeply unserious charlatans in the White House have been bringing us to since January. It is, in many ways, where Ukraine’s allies have been dragging it to for the past decade: Surrender.

This week, on a foreign policy realist Bug-eyed and Shameless: A briefing on the state of play ahead of tomorrow’s tête-à-tête; a study in delusion; and why Ukraine is not in as bad a spot as it seems.

The Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson regularly finds itself responsible for intercepting Russian fighter jets which intrude into American airspace. It plays host to the Alaskan arm of NORAD, the joint U.S-Canada continental defence system designed, in part, to guard against Soviet missiles. While it’s not nearly as active as it used to be, the base still hosts a squadron of stealth fighter jets.

And on Friday, it will welcome Vladimir Putin.

During his first term, Trump had a flurry of meetings with the Russian president, most recently in 2018. Trump loves to brag that his relations were so special and wonderful that, under his tenure, there was no war. “Under President Obama, they [Russia] took a lot of territory,” Trump said on Monday. “Under Biden, they essentially took the whole thing.”

In fact, Trump’s first four years in office were all marked by war in Ukraine. Russia may not have expanded its territorial holdings over those years, but it certainly solidified the gains it made in the preceding years. By 2020, it was increasingly clear that Moscow was plotting a larger war — Trump was largely indifferent.

The pair haven’t met since. Which makes Friday a particularly auspicious occasion.

Ahead of that summit, I want to quickly go through three things: The good, Trump’s mounting skepticism of Putin; the bad, his entourage’s increasingly hard line against Ukraine; and the ugly, everyone else’s pitiful indifference.

“It takes two to tango, right?”

It has become clear that Donald Trump wildly over-estimated his ability to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine, and he’s feeling self-conscious about it.

His most snivelling sycophants have tried to lead him towards moving on, as I’ll talk about in a second, but Trump is too stubborn to let go. He swore that Russia wouldn’t be stupid enough to seize more territory on his watch, he played up his legendary status as deal-maker, and he presented himself as the only man smart enough to strike peace.

Russia has seized more territory, he hasn’t been able to make a deal, and he’s been too stupid and indifferent to even learn the nuances of the conflict let alone resolve them. As we all knew would happen.

But Putin misplayed his hand, here. Rather than frustrate Trump into accepting a bad deal, or no deal at all, he rankled the president into anger. Trump has kept up weapon sales to Ukraine and has even threatened Russia’s oil clients with sanctions for keeping Moscow afloat — both things he boasts about frequently.

Speaking Monday, Trump made some good noises, albeit in his usual scuzzy fashion.

“Russia's occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They've occupied some very prime territory,” Trump rambled. “We're going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine.” (He went on to decry that Russia has seized Ukraine’s “oceanfront property.” As he noted: “That's always the most valuable property.”)

Beyond the constant real estate allusions, Trump vowing to regain Ukrainian territory is a positive sign. Better yet, he’s talking-up the kind of punitive measures that could make that a real possibility.

“They're not doing well,” Trump said of Russia. “Their economy is not doing well right now because it's been very well disturbed by this. It doesn't help when the president of the United States tells their largest — or second largest — oil buyer that we're putting a 50 percent tariff on you if you buy oil from Russia. And I haven't stopped there. I mean, look, I was all set to do things far bigger than that.”

While we should be both skeptical about the diplomatic impact Trump’s tariffs can really have, and consider that Trump always chickens out, these are modest indications that Trump knows he’s being jerked around. That, alone, is worth a lot.

Trump has also been blunt that he has no idea why this summit is even taking place.

“I'm going to see what they want to meet about,” Trump mused, adding “I'd like to see a ceasefire. I'd like to see the best deal that could be made for both parties. You know, it takes two to tango, right?”

Failing that, “I may leave and say good luck, and that'll be the end.”

“Good Luck”

When J.D. Vance insisted he condemns “the invasion that happened,” he prefaced it with “of course.”

But, let’s be clear, that’s not a given. Vance has showed a total lack of interest in Ukraine, except as it relates to his metatheory about deep state warmongers provoking conflicts to expand their power.

One of Vance’s chief advisors in this regard is financiers David Sacks. Speaking to the hard-right American Moment PAC (Dispatch #105), Sacks insisted that a “blob” of pro-war politicians instigated the war in Ukraine, that Kyiv was going to be destroyed, and that the realist approach would be to cut a deal whatever the cost and seek “detente with Russia.”

He continues. (Notes and fact-checks in brackets)

Sacks: We did deliberately pass up the opportunity for peace — but they've tried to say that the terms weren't good enough. In fact, the terms were favorable and certainly more favorable than anything Ukraine's going to get now, and it would have avoided all of the destruction of this war. [Those familiar with negotiations say both sides were nowhere near peace.]

Even if you believe that the United States did nothing to provoke this war, even if you believe that it was okay for us to back a coup in Kyiv in 2014 [Russian propaganda], even if you believe that the Russians should have been just fine with the CIA setting up a dozen secret bases on their border inside Ukraine [true, but those bases helped detect and thwart aggressive Russian covert action], having a network of biolabs [joint Russian/QAnon propaganda] and with the United States pushing relentlessly to try and bring Ukraine into NATO [America was openly saying that it was unlikely Ukraine would join NATO in the near term], even if you think that all of those things weren't a provocation — I still think that once Biden sabotaged the peace deal that was available there he became a co-owner of this war. So, like I say, it takes two to tango.

This man, who wholeheartedly believes that utterly deranged ‘biolabs’ conspiracy theory (Dispatch #127), has an enormous influence on Vance. And the vice president dutifully parrots Sacks’ talking points: “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” Vance declared this week.

Inherent in this position, however, is learning — or, at least, acknowledging — as little as possible about the conflict itself. These men couch their positions in the language of realism, but are really just staking out domestic political positions and molding the facts of the conflict to fit.

Take a speech that Vance gave to the Trump-aligned Quincy Institute last year. In it, he decries politicians using “the same old slogans” to justify wars. “In the Ukraine context: This is a war of democracy against tyranny. Well that's, like, a very simplistic way, of course, to think about it. I don't think anybody, even the people who say these things, actually believe them. Ukraine is hardly a perfect democracy.” That is an indefensibly stupid position that can be countered easily: Ukraine has free and fair elections, Russia does not.

Vance went on to repeat his view that America should withdraw all support for Ukraine — even as he insists it should ramp up support for Israel’s war against Gaza — because it is simply not in America’s interest.

In polite company, however, Vance insists that peace is possible. “We don’t like that this is where things are, but you have got to make peace here,” Vance said this week. “And the only way to make peace is to sit down and talk.”

You can pick up on the incoherence, right? Vance believes that America is responsible for starting the war, that Russia was provoked, that Ukraine is undeserving of support, that America can’t afford it — but also that there’s an easy deal to be done, if only the realists were in charge.

Vance spends painfully little time explaining how, exactly, a deal should be done. But luckily we have a bit of direction from his preferred foreign policy thinktank, the Quincy Institute. Earlier this year, they unveiled “A U.S. Peace Plan for Ukraine,” a MAGA-friendly roadmap to a deal. The outline of their proposal looks like this:

• Ukraine will swear off NATO membership, but will join the EU after undergoing elections and some political reform.

• Ukraine will be allowed to operate a “a Western–armed, trained, and maintained Ukrainian military force capable of deterring and defending against any new invasion.”

• The United Nations operates a Ukrainian reconstruction fund using frozen Russian assets.

• Kyiv and Moscow accept a ceasefire freezing the current contact lines, “establishing a de facto border in the four provinces of eastern Ukraine that will not be further changed by force or subversion,” to be managed by peacekeepers.

You may be surprised to learn that this is, more or less, Ukraine’s position. It has been Ukraine’s position for about three years.

In fact, when Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Istanbul in 2022, Ukraine was actually engaging with even worse terms than the Quincy Institute lays out there.

A major barrier to settling this dispute came on the topic of security guarantees. Ukraine wanted, as the Quincy Institute correctly summarizes, “the right mixture of incentives and deterrents to make a resumption of the war by either side as unlikely as possible.” But that topic was fraught from the beginning: Russia wanted to act as one of those ‘guarantors,’ as a way to weaken the guarantee itself; and America refused to commit to any kind of obligated defence of Ukraine. (Dispatch #128)

The other is the topic of the contact lines. While we can’t say for sure what Kyiv is willing to accept in these talks, it seems Zelensky has recognized that any ceasefire deal will, at best, mean keeping the current frontlines where they are. Of the both sides, it’s Moscow that is the holdout, here. Putin’s demand has consistently been that the frontlines should move deeper into Ukraine, giving Russia control over the four oblasts it illegally tried to annex in 2022. Put simply: Russia wants to use a peace deal to seize more Ukrainian land and kidnap hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens.

Russia, just this week, reiterated that its demands have not changed one iota.

But Vance et al know this. They know what a reasonable deal would look like, because the Quincy Institute laid it out. They know that America would be hopelessly embarrassedand discredited if it forced Ukraine to surrender more land or demilitarize, and that it would risk a more devastating war in the medium-term.

And yet this B-team continues to pretend as though it has some magic solution to end this conflict tomorrow.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to both the Middle East and Ukraine who is hopelessly tied to Russian oligarchs, came back from Russia parroting exactly Putin’s expansionist plan, regurgitating it as though it was a clever solution. More recently, it seems Witkoff endorsed the grotesque idea for a “West Bank-style” partition of Ukraine. It’s not clear what Witkoff even has in mind when he, apparently, signed on to that grotesque metaphor, but it again shows that these guys have no actual ideas.

While Trump may be, rightly, skeptical of Putin’s actual goals in negotiations, he is supported by an absolute clown car of cosplaying ‘realists’ who get their news from Twitter, implicitly trust Vladimir Putin, and couldn’t negotiate their way out of a paper bag.

“You are pathetic and weak”

I do not have a lot of love for Viktor Orbán, president of Hungary.

The man is a corrupt wannabe despot who is ruining his country’s democracy, corroding the EU from within, and wrecking consensus on defending Ukraine.

But this week, Orbán stepped in front of the cameras and delivered a surprisingly on-point summary of the situation.

Now, I think Orbán is actually arguing that Europe ought to abandon Ukraine and side with Russia, which is obviously bad. But here’s a good occasion to take some quotes out of context. Because Europe does look weak, and it doesn’t have to.

I won’t go through the nitty gritty of the argument — for that, you can read Thomas Wright at Brookings or Agnia Grigas at the Atlantic Council — but suffice it to say that the EU, along with its other NATO partners including Canada, have allowed America to take the lead on Ukraine for far too long. Other countries can and should do more to step up. (This is, credit to Vance, something he repeats often.)

The fact is, other NATO countries trusted America to lead the way on Ukraine for a variety of reasons: It had a longstanding mano-a-mano relationship with Moscow; it had more weapons and cash; and it could speak with a single voice, where Europe is always bickering.

Today, however, we have good reason to question America’s commitment to countering a rogue Russia; Washington is threatening to turn off the taps; and Europe has become significantly more unified than even the White House.

I’ve spoken to NATO officials from several NATO countries over the past year, all of whom insist that they are this close to giving up on America and pursuing a standalone Ukraine policy. But they haven’t fully committed.

Last week, the so-called Coalition of the Willing met virtually. The group includes EU and NATO members, but technically excludes America. The Coalition was organized to pledge support for Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, and could be the vehicle through which peacekeepers are deployed to monitor a possible ceasefire. This group was struck explicitly in response to Trump’s re-election, as a way for France and the United Kingdom to organize support outside of Washington.

When they met on Wednesday, who attended? J.D. Vance. In a readout released by Ottawa, the leaders “welcomed the leadership and initiative of President Trump and the United States and discussed ongoing efforts toward securing peace in Ukraine.”

I’m not sure I fully fault this Coalition of the Willing for walking in lock-step behind the United States to date. Like I opined in the opening section, Trump could — by force of sheer pig-headedness — stumble into a good deal or lead the charge in bankrupting Moscow. But given his own meagre attention span, his personal affinity for Putin, and the strong magnetic pull coming from his own administration, we can’t keep waiting around and hoping for a different result.

The fact is that things are bad right now in Ukraine, but not as bad as Russia would have you believe.

Headlines have blared that Russia has advanced rapidly in Ukraine’s east, advancing roughly 10km into Ukrainian territory. But, according to the Institute for the Study of War, these gains have not yet been consolidated: Meaning it is quite likely that Russia rushed these gains in order to score a propaganda win.

What is certainly real are the increasingly-brutal tactics Russia is deploying on the frontlines. It is bombarding population areas even more than before, hoping to soften the ground for its eventual advances on multiple fronts. But even then, Russia still lacks the resources necessary to advance quickly or far.

Meanwhile, Russia’s defence production is showing signs of overheating. While it is absolutely producing a significant number of increasingly-sophisticated drones, there are signs that its production in other areas is faltering.

Even senior Russian officials are acknowledging that the economy is heading towards recession. Economists who look past Moscow’s ginned-up statistics see evidence of a double-whammy of de-growth and price inflation. Although this likely won’t slow down the war machine — it might speed it up — it does make Russia particularly vulnerable to any additional pressure that can be put on it.

Europe and Canada should wait and see how Friday plays out. If this is yet another round of chicanery, however, it is high time that the Coalition of the Willing stops waiting on its unwilling partner.

What Happens Tomorrow?

Who knows.

The prevailing factors are notoriously hard to predict. Will Trump, as he says, know “in the first two minutes…exactly whether or not a deal can be made”? Will Vance, Witkoff, and Sacks weasel their way into the president’s decision-making process and convince him to cozy up to the Kremlin? Will Europe, Canada, and Ukraine figure out a burden-sharing deal that could allow Trump to claim victory, while increasing pressure on Russia?

One variable I’ve not mentioned yet is arguably the hardest to gauge: What does Putin do?

Despite his repute as a master strategist and expert manipulator, the Russian president has consistently misjudged Trump. He counted, it seems, on the many prevailing anti-Ukraine forces — which Russia has actively supported — to pull Trump out of the fight. As such, Putin has refused to move off his unreasonable negotiating positions. This has backfired, leaving Trump with the impression that he’s been cheated. Trump hates feeling cheated.

So if you’re looking for an intelligence assessment of what happens tomorrow, here’s my armchair take: I’d say, with moderate confidence, that Trump walks away from Friday’s summit flattered but reverts back to form by next week after the meeting fails to produce clear deliverables, and continues threatening Putin — without taking firm action. I could guess, with low confidence, that it is plausible Trump is immediately offended by Putin’s intransigence and blows up the meeting on the spot, or otherwise decides to punish Moscow for refusing to negotiate in good faith. Alternatively, it is also possible that Putin shifts his position in some clever way to win Trump’s favor, and that the president pressures Ukraine to sign a bad deal.

The overwhelmingly likely outcome is that these negotiations produce no real breakthrough, because Russia refuses to abandon its maximalist demands.

As such, the world can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. Someone has to change the dynamic of this war, and it doesn’t seem like it will be Putin or Trump.

That’s it for this spot analysis on a crazy week.

In case you haven’t already, my new book is available for pre-order!

If you missed them, my recent columns in The Star argue that Canada should tell Trump “no deal” and that Ottawa can and should participate in the International Court of Justice case against Israel.

Until next week.

Because there’s something wrong with me, I like to imagine the debate over putting President Barack Obama on The View.

Thinking about it now, it seems uncontroversial. Almost expected. The audience of the show was enormous: The day after his first election, 6.2 million people had tuned in to listen to Barbara, Whoopi, Joy, Elisabeth, and Sherri react to the news that America had elected its first Black president. (Sherri, in a moment that feels like approximately one million years ago, cried.)

But no sitting president had ever appeared on a daytime talk show before. And some people weren’t keen to start the trend.

"I think the president should be accessible, should answer questions that aren't pre-screened, but I think there should be a little bit of dignity to the presidency," Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said at the time. The president, he went on, should do “serious shows.” He likened doing The View to appearing on The Jerry Springer Show.

Columnist DeWayne Wickham lamented the changes — but not on some nebulous concern for the sanctity of the White House. Journalists were becoming entertainers, and entertainers were rising to speak plainer truths than the journalists. Jon Stewart had become the voice of a moral conscience in America whilst big-name anchors were trying to make everyone forget that they had cheered for a disastrous series of interventions abroad. There was Christiane Amanpour playing a journalist in Iron Man 2, there was Brian Williams hosting Saturday Night Live.

"You can expect the confusion over who's a real journalist to grow as more news organizations try to do journalism on the cheap,” Wickham wrote. This was nothing less than journalistic “cross-dressing,” he wrote. This slide, this cheapening of news, “will make it increasingly easy for savvy politicians such as Obama to avoid answering tough questions from this nation’s dwindling number of truly serious journalists.”

Obama ignored the naysayers, as did 7 million viewers. He submitted to some serious questioning, including his thoughts on Snooki. (“I don’t know who that is,” the president said.)

We can look back on that moment fondly.

Donald Trump is the daytime TV president. From the soft-focus design of the White House to the gold leaf adorning everything to his penchant for contrived drama and his love of quack medicine, everything about Donald Trump exudes the unhinged energy and occasional religious extremism of basic cable between 10am and 3pm. So long gone is any concern for the dignity of the presidency that it has become so du jure that Trump called in to Fox & Friends, the propagandist cousin of The View, whenever he wants to vent.

If Obama inched the standard of dignity down a notch, Trump has crashed into the dignity gauge with the Weinermobile.

Having tapped one of the worst degenerates of daytime TV to run Medicaid, as he uses a different quack to run propaganda for his secret police, Trump sought high and low for new ways to confuse news and entertainment, to avoid answering tough questions, and to torch any lingering shred of dignity in the presidency.

He found it in The Nelk Boys: A team of Canadian-American podcast bros who had become internet famous for living out the ethos of do pranks and party hard. These Youtubers’ brand was built on making people angry, getting in trouble, sophomoric humor, and learning as little as humanly possible.

So naturally, Donald Trump sat down with Nelk for a brain-numbing interview. Then he did it again. And then he invited them on Air Force One. And then he brought them to the White House for a very special mission. It was, in a way, a prank on the very concept of journalism. A certified FAIL! for human rights and international law. Trump and his press team wanted the Nelk Boys to interview Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, covering up war crimes with the stupidest successful people on the internet.

Last week, I joined Elamin Abdelmahmoud to chat about the truly unhinged interview with the Israeli prime minister — who, if he had done this interview in most other countries, could face arrest on a warrant from the International Criminal Court.

I was joined by internet culture/video game journalist Alyssa Mercante and the progressive answer to Joe Rogan: Hasan Piker. You can listen below to hear us fully break down the interview itself (or here, if you don’t use Apple podcasts. The full video should be on YouTube next week.)

The slightly irreverent tone of this newsletter, and the podcast, should be understood in the context: Gaza is starving. At least 60,000 Palestinians, perhaps more than 70,000, are dead. Israel has systematically targeted hospitals and healthcare workers. It is not sending in enough aid to keep the population of Gaza alive. Other nations have forced the issue and begun air dropping aid: When they do, Israel tries to stop journalists aboard from filming the devastation. Journalists have died en masse. The West Bank is being seized. Gaza will likely be occupied. The hostages are likely condemned to death. The war is getting worse. Israeli democracy is failing. (Dispatch #135)

Last week, I wrote about the tough but necessary steps the world should take to hold Israel to account, and the pressure that must be applied to stop the war.

If you’ve followed the newsletter, you know that I’ve been writing more-or-less the same thing for two years: This war is a catastrophic mistake (Dispatch #76), Hamas is a parasitic organization which will benefit from these horrors (Dispatch #74), only a long-term deal and democratic reform can solve these issues (Dispatch #77, #78, #101), and Israel is subverting the international law protections that were designed to avert another Holocaust. (Dispatch #82)

This humanitarian disaster worsened in recent weeks, and has increased the likelihood that Israel can, and should, be found guilty of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Public opinion is, I think, shifting in a huge way. The number of those who would deny that the war is inhumane and unconscionable is declining.

Which is exactly why Netanyahu has to yuk it up with these barely-literate doofuses, who have risen far past the level of their own incompetence.

The concern, to my mind, is not that the Nelk Boys are about to become a primary source of news for a generation of disaffected young men. My main worry is that our media ecosystem has become so dire, so manipulated, so weaponized, and so distorted that shows like these can thrive and that this tactic can be effectively replicated again and again for any conceivable ends, even covering up a possible genocide.

The contours of this tactic have been emerging for years. But there’s reason to think that Netanyahu is about to launch a full-court press of this influencer-first informational-nihilism strategy, right as he plans to make a bigger, deadlier push into Gaza City.

So let’s quickly talk about the new class of influencer-propagandists.

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“In these democratic days, any investigation into the trustworthiness and peculiarities of popular judgments is of interest. The material about to be discussed refers to a small matter, but is much to the point.”

Thus begins a seminal study of popular voting at the 1907 West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in Plymouth. The investigator, studious mathematician Francis Galton, handed out 800 cards to the Exhibition’s attendees. When a particularly fat ox was trotted out to impress the crowd, the card-holders were instructed to venture a guess as to how much the beast of burden weighed, once it was slaughtered and dressed. There would be prizes for the closest guessers.

“The average competitor was probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of the ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on which he votes,” Galton wrote.1

He was about right. The ox, fully dressed, clocked in at 1,198lbs. The closest guesser wrote down 1,207lbs: Not bad! And that guess represented more-or-less the midpoint of all the guesses. If the crowd had a spirit, that spirit was very good at guessing the fat of an ox. As Galton put it, the “vox populi is correct to within 1 per cent.”

What’s interesting about Galton’s study isn’t his assessment of this bovine-assessing übermensch, but his observation about the body politic more broadly. The majority of the crowd did so well that if you picked one of these guesses at random, he noted, and you would likely fall within a few percentage points of the right answer.

Some of the crowd were dense, of course. About 10% of those ox-naive Janners2 were wildly off in one direction or the other. The modest ones wrote down that the beast weighed just a half-tonne, while the other extreme guessed put the figure around 92 stone.

The correct conclusion to take away from this study was that the good people of Plymouth, while not perfect, were capable of making some pretty even-headed assessments.

This observation may not be terribly fascinating today, but it was pretty insightful for the time. The statistical concept of the median — the valeur médiane — had only been introduced a few decades earlier. The paper was a helpful, tangible, illustration of the wisdom of the crowd.

When you ditch all the propaganda and distortion, all the emotion and manipulation, all the jingoism and distrust, you’ll find that a random assortment of humans casting a secret ballot are shockingly capable of making a reasonable choice.

The grand irony of this whole study is the author himself. Galton wasn’t just a curious statistician, he made significant contribution to the fields of “African exploration, geography, meteorology, statistics, psychology, personal identification, and human heredity.”3 He is also the father of modern eugenics.

Where he seemed impressed by the masses’ ability to accurately guess the meat on an ox, he also lamented the "regression towards mediocrity”4 at a population level. His work, racist even for the time, catalyzed into the First International Congress of Eugenics. Held in 1912, shortly after his death, it was from this conference, attended by preeminent politicians and scientists, that the world would enter a brief but genocidal love affair with eugenics.

In attendance was future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had both approved of eugenics throughout the British empire and who also led the charge against Adolf Hitler’s own murderous interpretation of it. Also there was past Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. It was Balfour who warned the attendees about trying — and failing — to play god on a population level.

"The idea that you can get a society of the most perfect kind by merely considering certain questions about the strain and ancestry and the health and the physical vigour of various components of that society,” he warned, “that I believe is a most shallow view of a most difficult question."

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to talk about the wisdom of the crowd, the dangers of manipulating the fringe, and about how our politicians would do better if they tried to speak to everyone all at once.

When Q first introduced the Anons to Jeffrey Epstein, the fledgling conspiracist movement had a hard time figuring out what it all meant.

“Follow the bloodlines,” the pseudonymous cult leader wrote in his usual cryptic fashion. “What is the keystone? Does Satan exist? Does the ‘thought’ of Satan exist? Who worships Satan? What is a cult? Epstein island.”

This was late 2017. Epstein wouldn’t be arrested on a slew of sex trafficking charges for nearly two years. To this point, few would have even heard Epstein’s name before — even fewer would have known that he had been convicted of child prostitution years earlier, that Gawker had exposed Epstein’s little black book, or that The Telegraph had already reported on his “island of sin.” And so when they heard it from Q, the shadowy figure thought to be of the inner echelons of the American intelligence community, they got to work piecing it all together.

QAnon would, as we know, assemble a broad metatheory alleging that powerful forces behind the scenes (the CIA, FBI, Democratic Party, Rothschilds, World Economic Forum, Jews) were secretly ruling the world, pulling the strings of all power as part of an occult effort to traffic and murder children, extracting the kids’ life-force to make themselves immortal. These forces of evil were locked in a bitter war against the good and light, represented by Q, Donald Trump, and anyone else awake to these depraved acts. Soon, Q hinted and the Anons believed, mass military tribunals would be organized to prosecute the evil-doers.

Q continued dropping the breadcrumbs leading to the financier. “Epstein’s plane. Who is she? Follow friends. Friends lead to others.” It didn’t take much for the true believers to connect that hint to Ghislaine Maxwell.

The expectation began rising that victory over darkness was coming. Every day they waited for President Trump to haul Hillary Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Benjamin de Rothschild, and all the other lizard people (Dispatch #3) in front of those military tribunals and convict them for their crimes.

Day after day, Trump did nothing. QAnon comforted itself by tying together mysterious stories from around the world, tracking sealed indictments, and cobbling together resignations at all levels: Triangulating these events would give indication of when the big shift was coming, they believed.

The arrest and prosecution of Epstein and Maxwell, followed by the ringleader’s abrupt suicide in prison, was a stunning confirmation of the whole sordid saga, at least in the minds of those who truly believed. It was just enough to keep the nightmare alive.

Time would eventually drag on QAnon’s faith. The pandemic, billed paradoxically as cover for Trump to make the necessary arrests and as the Deep State’s last-ditch plan to save their skin, came and went. Some QAnon types became facets of the broader MAGA movement, others decamped to small towns to reorganize their whole world around these delusions (Dispatch #79), most hung on.

Just as their faith began to wane, Trump reached out. As he mounted his third bid for the White House, Trump began to openly and unapologetically ape QAnon’s whole vibe. Asked directly whether he’s trying to win the support of a cohort of ultra-online paranoid superfans deluded into fear of a clandestine plot to drink kids’ blood, Trump replied: “Is that supposed to be a bad thing?”

This turn helped energize a base of super motivated QAnon faithful into redoubling efforts to get Trump elected. They were, as we know and unfortunately, successful.

QAnon was only ever one piece of the broader Trump coalition. But by constantly reaching out the tendrils to keep that camp happy and energized, the MAGA movement had a constant supply of money, votes, and (perhaps most importantly) online intensity.

That these QAnon followers are capable for this constant, intense, fanatical devotion to this sprawling and self-contradictory world — accessible only through the prism of the internet — is fascinating. Their herculean ability to believe, despite a total lack of tangible evidence and despite all the proof to the contrary, is possible not because of some innate characteristic in these devotees but because they believe with other believers. QAnon faithful are unwavering in their theology because they belong to a community, and they happen to think that community is much larger than it actually is. This is an under-appreciated aspect in conspiracy belief.

We know, based on every bit of data we can cobble together, that QAnon is a relatively small movement: About 16% of Americans report ascribing to it. (This likely an over-count, and includes those who don’t fully follow or understand the movement.) That makes QAnon less popular than Marxism, and only a shade more popular than full-blown communism.

And yet QAnon believers are convinced that their movement is the moral and ideological core of America. They are convinced not only that they are a silent majority but that their ranks include a constellation of kindred spirits and sleeper agents at every level of government and straight across the country.

Likewise, anti-vaccine activists are absolutely convinced that they are representative of the whole world, and that most in the medical field secretly agree with their position. A conspiracy of powerful forces, these types believe, are manufacturing consent around vaccines. And yet we know for a fact that the majority of America opted to get vaccinated, and that they still overwhelmingly trust doctors and scientists over quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

To put this in bovine terms: This would be like entering the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition competition and guessing that the mammoth ox weighs just 200lbs, then confidently asserting that everyone else guessed the same.

A recent study, awaiting peer review and aptly titled “Overconfidently Conspiratorial,”5 provides some real data to illustrate this phenomenon.

This study, looking at thousands of participants, measured three things: Belief in conspiracy theories (from “dinosaurs didn’t exist” to “the Rothschild family leads a satanic cult”); faith in one’s own ability to reason (“if you’re running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place are you in?”); and how popular they believed their own position to be (“what percentage of people do you think agree with you?”)

The researchers found a huge correlation between belief in conspiracy theories and belief in one’s own cognitive abilities. “Conspiracy believers consistently gave higher estimates of their performance even after taking into account their actual performance,” the researchers found. That is: They believed they would do well even after knowing they were doing badly. What’s more, researchers “found that conspiracy beliefs that were more on the fringe (in terms of believability) were more strongly associated with overconfidence.” The more unlikely a theory, the more forcefully they believed it.

This is, critically, not to say that believers in conspiracy theories are stupid. Rather, it is proof that they are not as smart as they think they are.

What’s more, those who believed in false conspiracy theories regularly over-estimated how many others believe in those conspiracy theories by about a 30-point margin. That’s a staggering gap. “Conspiracy believers appear meaningfully unaware of how much their beliefs are on the fringe,” the researchers write. (By contrast, non-conspiracy minded people were more accurate in their guesses about which conspiracies were true and which were false, with some slightly under-estimating how many others agreed with them.)

This is an incredibly useful bit of data about this phenomenon, and proof for the adage I repeat often: Belief in conspiracy theories is not a lack of education, it’s over-confidence. Though I think the researchers go too far in dismissing the motivations as to why people believe in conspiracy theories and the drivers that make people conspiratorial. It is not an innate characteristic or a genetic weakness, as Francis Galton may have argued.

I doubt anyone, from Q to Donald Trump, appreciated the degree to which they could genetically engineer a messianic and unshakable faith community. It goes against all logic. But clearly, someone realized this incredible trick somewhere along the way.

The initial overconfident conspiracism was first enabled by the anonymity of 4chan and 8kun, imageboards which project the feeling that we are legion. It was cleverly co-opted by Trump’s MAGA movement, which sought to re-purpose his usual talking points to lean into QAnon’s delusions: From extolling the evils of Hillary Clinton to denouncing the supposed-omnipresence of human trafficking to wholesale adopting QAnon’s electoral fraud fantasies. He continues to operate Truth Social, a miserable swamp of a website, almost exclusively because it is a clubhouse and safe space for QAnon and other radical believers. (Dispatch #119) When Trump returned to the White House, it is no coincidence that one of his first official acts was to release “Volume 1” of the Epstein Files — a performative act of sticking already-public documents in a binder to satisfy his sycophants.

QAnon was not the only constituency that Trump and his team enticed and managed. His campaign also courted Christian nationalists, misogynists, climate deniers, woo-woo anti-5G types, and a host of other communities based around fringe beliefs. On a variety of questions, Trump has looked for those who are answering mundane questions with the most extreme answers, and figured out how to convey to them: You’re right, I think you’re right, everybody thinks you’re right.

Wind the clock back, though, and you get to that Q post about Epstein Island. Whatever strange adventures QAnon and MAGA have gone on since then, a core piece of its lore and purpose hinges on this mostly-real case of sex trafficking. And that was always awkward, because Trump was buddies with Epstein, he flew on ‘Lolita Air,’ and he was perhaps even a client of the sex trafficker.

These facts blew up in spectacular fashion this month, as Trump declared the Epstein saga over. His Department of Justice announced that no new files from the case would be forthcoming, and that there was nothing new to learn about the monster’s death. Trump’s movement went ballistic, and Trump responded in kind.

Trump: [Democrats’] new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this “bullshit,” hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years. I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

It is true that people want to belong to the winning team: That is something Trump has always counted on. But it is also true that QAnon and their ilk have always believed, confidently and strongly, that they are the winning team. And now Trump has deemed them all gullible weaklings, easily scammed and hard to please. He has looked them in the eye and said: You’re wrong. I think you’re wrong. Everybody thinks you’re wrong.

I think the Epstein Files saga could be enormously damaging for Trump. But the most earth-shaking thing of all might be the sudden realization that their movement was not as teeming with compatriots as they were led to believe.

Perhaps the QAnon types will be replaced by a new coalition of radicalized young men, or by the enriched soldiers of the Bitcoin and e-commerce sectors. Perhaps QAnon et al will use their incredible powers of self-delusion to explain away Trump’s incredible betrayal. Or perhaps they will accept their title of ‘weaklings’ and become merely begrudging fans of their president, instead of intensely enthusiastic ones.

But it is certainly a mess of Trump’s own making and a fascinating parable about relying on the most-online, most-overconfident, most-marginal people to fill out your political movement.

In the days after Trump was re-elected, a New York state assembly member — unknown, probably, to many of his own constituents — took to the streets. Armed with a microphone and a camera, Zohran Mamdani started asking New Yorkers why people elected Donald Trump.

Most Democrats were oscillating between vague vows to fight, obscene self-pity, and delusional rationalization of their incredible failure. Mamdani was doing something completely different. Armed with just two questions — “did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?” and “who did you vote for?” — Mamdani tried something radical. He tried listening.

“I didn’t vote,” one guy said. “Because I don't believe in the system anymore.”

“Yes!” a woman responded, with a tone that screamed I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me with. “Trump!”

One by one, most of those residents of Queens and the Bronx — white, Black, immigrant, old, young, male, female — told Mamdani: “I voted for Trump.”

New York City, of course, still tilted heavily towards Kamala Harris. But in its most working-class boroughs, voters shifted by double-digits towards Donald Trump. And Mamdani seemed genuinely interested to know why.

“They like Trump because they don't want the Palestinian brothers killed,” one guy said of his neighbors. “The swing is because people want lower prices. They probably believe that Trump will give 'em that,” another said. “La comida,” one woman explained — “food,” her daughter translated. This neighborhood, one guy explained, had done better under Trump’s first term — they wanted that back.

“All they do is shame you,” one young guy told Mamdani. “And they just want to use glitzy campaigns, and they get celebrities.” It was manipulative, he said.

On TV, Democrats were trying to sand down these rough truths into smooth talking points. Pundits explained, in sweeping simplifications and vague euphemisms, why voters had really gone for Trump. If actual voters appeared on TV, it was mostly filtered through pollsters and anchors quizzing them in liminal space focus groups. It all smacked of condescension, but it didn’t matter because nobody was watching. If they were, they were probably so desensitized to the endless drone of television news that these axiomatic facts about why millions opted for the felon washed right over them.

Here was Mamdani, actually letting people explain themselves, even if it was frustrating to listen to. You got to hear the nihilism and naïveté — like from those who believed that Trump could end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — but these people were also earnest and genuine. In an internet of constant trolling and irony, that’s refreshing. And, listening to them, it’s not hard to come up with a litany of policies, positions, ads, messages, and promises that could have convinced them to avoid the dangerous demagogue atop the Republican ticket.

“We have a mayor's race coming up next year,” Mamdani tells the voters in the video. “And if there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal childcare a reality, are those things that you'd support?”

The answer from the endlessly relatable New Yorkers in the video was universal: Yes.

Now, this was all performative, of course. Mamdani wasn’t holding private tête-à-têtes with voters, he was jumping them on the street like he was a Tiktok influencer. He was selectively cutting up their answers to package into a video designed to go viral online. He was crafting a very particular narrative for his campaign launch video.

But it was also damn effective. Mamdani posted this video to Instagram, where it racked up over 15,000 likes. “You did more listening here than the entire Dem party did during this election cycle,” one person commented. “Bro is listening to the people,” another wrote. It’s a sentiment that kept coming up.

Mamdani didn’t exactly reinvent the political social media short-form video, but he may have perfected it. His videos — which are consistently focused on problems plaguing New York City and tangible plans on how to fix them — have racked up north of 200 million views on Instagram, and millions more elsewhere. Elon Musk had to buy a platform and force his content down all his users’ throats to get into that ballpark.

Mamdani’s routine may have been über-online, but it quickly translated into the real world — that, in turn, was reflected perfectly back onto the internet.

One of Mamdani’s final videos of the campaign is, perhaps, the best campaign video of all time. It has a simple conceit: Mamdani has something important to tell you, but he can’t: Because excited supporters from every corner of New York City won’t stop interrupting him. Some hold up their phones to tell the mayoral candidate: I was just watching your video. One guy actually says “you’re one of us” — a sentiment you literally cannot buy. The video boasts 610,000 likes.

On the day of the Democratic primary, polls suggested the multi-round vote could drag on to the 10th ballot, but that Mamdani was likely to lose by a sizeable gap. Instead, Mamdani posted a 7-point lead on the first ballot and won decisively by the third.

The only proof you need for the efficacy of this whole ethos is to watch Mamdani’s main competitor, Andrew Cuomo, try the same thing after his bruising primary defeat. In a series of videos, over-produced and stilted, Cuomo stalks the streets of Manhattan to feign a man-of-the-people approach as he stakes an independent bid to run one of the largest governments in America. Putting your finger on exactly why these videos don’t work is tricky, but watch long enough and it hits you: Cuomo isn’t listening to these people, nor does he want you to.

When real people are heard in Cuomo’s videos, they exist only to say how much they support him. The closest we get to a New Yorker talking about their actual problems, beyond the word “taxes,” is a butcher explaining how his business is struggling because rents have doubled. Cuomo ignores that comment and asks why beef is so expensive.

I don’t know if Zohran Mamdani is going to get elected mayor of New York, and I don’t know if he’ll actually be any good if he does. (Though, between the corrupt stooge for Turkey, the crooked sex pest, and a crazy vigiliante, opting for Mamdani is obviously the right choice.) But I do know that he’s tapped into something very real, and something that anyone hoping to challenge Donald Trump needs to study up on.

I’ve got growing misgivings about relying on the enshittified internet as a tool for public outreach and mass mobilization.

Much like Francis Galton, I’m inclined to think that a random assembly of citizens is, free of influence and manipulation, likely to guess accurately most of the time. The vox populi trends towards more-or-less accurate. (Unlike Francis Galton, I don’t think the perceived weaknesses of the bottom percentile is the problem we need to solve for.)

But that also doesn’t mean, of course, that any decision of the crowd is wise. We should always be hunting for distortions and manipulations that screw up our ability to come to the right conclusion.

Trump’s machine is capable of not only identifying fringe populations, the ones that keep making absurd guesses on the margins, but they also excel finding ways to encourage those confidently incorrect positions. But this machine runs in a system we all built.

For years, civil society writ large has uploaded its rally points to a dwindling number of digital corporate behemoths. Politicians turned to Facebook to reach voters, journalists leveraged Twitter to blast out the news, activists communicated with the masses on Instagram. We all hoped that major media outlets would continue feeding high-quality journalism into this system, to keep it glued to reality.

But we’ve come to appreciate the flipside of these facts. Digital advertising defunded our media and the social media giants proved themselves bad and greedy managers of the national dialog. (Dispatch #83) Worse, these internet giants began constructing the vertical integration of our democracy: They collected massive amounts of our personal information, under the guise of helping us connect with each other and to recommend us tailored content; then turned around and sold our data to political actors to build elaborate micro-targeting campaigns, aimed at making us scared and angry.

Think about that last bit for a second. Facebook and Google built profiles of who we are — or, who it thinks we are — then constructed a hidden apparatus to have our politicians speak to us based on those totems, on a platform they control. Perhaps more damagingly, it encouraged parties to stop advertising to those who sat elsewhere on the political spectrum. Platforms and parties conspired to enclose us in those agitated clusters of comforting rage. (Dispatch #64) It left us with the impression that our beliefs were common and universal, and that our political opposites were small and elitist, fringe and stupid. No wonder everyone is so confident in the ubiqitiousness of their own righteous take.

For a time, there were important checks on this system: People still trusted the news, microtargeting wasn’t quite as good as the digital companies pretended, no party had a particular advantage in this digital advertising arms race, and governments were distrustful of this system.

But things are growing worse. Today, Instagram and Facebook are owned by a billionaire who has abandoned all claims of caring about truth and democracy and who is actively cozying up to the administration; Twitter is run by a mad hatter; Tiktok is a weapon of mass distraction wielded by a hostile foreign power; and Youtube is becoming an Elysian field of AI slop.

These corporations have stopped pretending that they care about the health of our democracy and have directly allied with Trump in many respects. These tech bros, at the same time, have raced to force AI and LLMs onto us — trained on stolen journalistic work — which have cannibalized traffic to real news. One study says Google’s AI summaries, perfunctory and unreliable as they are, reduce click-through traffic by as much as 80%.

Broke and fearful of a rogue president, the corporate media are either debasing themselves to win friends in the Trump White House or are being actively undermined by their owners, who have considerable business interests in front of the administration.

Because this information ecosystem is so vast and impossible to fully grasp, no one can truly understand how fast-moving or wide-spread these converging series of changes are. But it’s happening.

If the social internet accidentally enabled Trump’s rise and the creation of these communities of the overconfidently conspiratorial, we risk a world where they are intentionally enabling it. Or, at the very least, where they are fully aware that their platforms are being manipulated and do nothing to stop it. Or, perhaps worse of all, where they begin training their algorithims onto new objectives we have yet to identify.

It is easy to despair at all of this. If I can vulgarize Audre Lorde: The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. That is to say: If Trump can complete his capture of social media and the legacy press, or at least enough of it to frustrate and stymie critical conversations, then we cannot hope that social media and the legacy press will be an effective check on his power or be a place to mount a resistance in defence of our democratic institutions. And this is true not just for the United States, but for Canada, Europe, and the whole internet-connected world. If this information network can be bent to the will of one aspiring despot, it becomes much more pliable for all the others.

Thankfully, there is a but.

But any challenge to this system is going to have to begin within it. And what makes me feel an iota of hope about Mamdani is that his appeal feels incredibly grounded in reality. It is somewhat reliant on social media to broadcast his shtick to the world, yes, but it also requires the involvement of real people hashing it out in the meat space. And it implicitly encourages real, face-to-face interactions again. Mamdani’s door-knocking operation leveraged some 50,000 canvassers, who had visited more than 600,000 doorsteps. It relied as much on conversations at the bodega as it did social media discourse.

The guy has found a way to make the internet work without working for the internet.

Sure, Joe Biden would do town halls: And he relied on CNN to carry them live and the Democratic Party to spend money to put those clips in front of glazed-over eyeballs. Kamala Harris did endless interviews with celebrities in a cloying attempt to get her face on our screens, even if it was saying nothing of import. Gavin Newsom is now doing any podcast that will have him, using them as an opportunity to wade into whatever culture war discourse his team thinks will cause the most buzz. The single most effective organizing tactic of any modern American politician is, of course, Donald Trump and his mega-rallies: Where he comes out to any and all town that can draw a crowd, where he waxes nonsensical and invokes whatever murky conspiracy theory he can half-remember.

Mamdani’s real-ish man-on-the-street routine is, by definition, universal and approachable. It projects the image that he could be outside your window, that he is waiting for you to come out and tell him your complaints and hopes. It is no micro-targeted message nor is it vague and gaseous. It is tactile, even if you’re watching it on your phone.

Here in Canada, Mark Carney’s recent election campaign felt like a similar endorsement of this sentiment. Carney’s e-campaigning was perfunctory, unlike his competitior’s habit for appealing to all manner of online weirdos, and relied much more on the traditional press and IRL events.

I do worry that Mamdani’s earnest offline-behavior-for-online-consumption routine is easily spoofed. Perhaps Donald Trump isn't capable of interacting with enough unwashed masses to spit out a two minute social video, but JD Vance is. I can easily imagine a slickly-produced VANCE 2028 ad featuring the cherub-faced fascist faking authenticity with a carefully-selected roster of sycophants on the mean streets of Tallahassee.

But this feels revelatory because Mamdani the first person to do it well, at least in this format. Even more important than Mamdani’s campaign is people’s response to it. People are genuinely excited, including those who voted for Trump. As the Democratic Party spends millions trying to manufacture authenticity, this guy pulled it off effortlessly and people are flocking to it. It feels like the wisdom of the crowd, the vox populi, is pulling away from the idea that we need and want more frictionless AI-summarized content, more stuff that we already agree with, more stuff that caricaturizes our political opposites, and more conspiratorial bullshit. Instead, they want something real, accessible, challenging, and charming.

Put simply, given the choice between a president who rages against his own supporters on his conspiracy-lousy walled-garden social media platform, all because they expected him to live up to his own internet-popularized conspiracy theory; and a guy who makes fun videos of him on the street, talking to real people about their real problems, I suspect they’ll opt for the latter.

That’s it for this dispatch!

I am clawing my way back to regularity, and am already working on the next dispatch: I’ve been thinking a lot about how the digital information ecosystem is enabling despots and rogue regimes, but also about how AI is making us all insane and lazy. So expect to see me build out some of the ideas from today’s dispatch in the near future.

Expect some of those coming dispatches to be subscriber-only — so here’s a free trial subscription!

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I’m also giving you folks the inside scoop: I’ve got a mini book coming out next month, all about the recently-concluded Canadian election and the future of Canada in the era of Trump. You can pre-order it right now! I’ll have some special pre-order discounts in the near future, but if you’re keen to pay full price, don’t let me stop you.

You may also notice that this newsletter’s cover art is a bit different than normal. From the beginning of Bug-eyed and Shameless, I’ve attempted a relatively-low-effort unified design by relying on Midjourney, an AI image generator. I never had a particular ethical qualm with doing so because I have no budget to hire an illustrator and the graphics were largely based, albeit roughly, on famous works of art which are more-or-less in the public domain.

I was already a pretty hesitant user of AI/LLMs, but after watching them work for the past year, I’m becoming downright hostile. They have utility, for sure — I now do a final copyediting pass with ChatGPT, and find it works quite well. (Until today, when it began hallucinating a series of passages about RFK Jr.) But I can’t escape the feeling that we’re in an AI bubble, and the companies marketing these products are desperate to get us hooked on this technology, marketing what is essentially souped-up autocomplete as some sort of sentience that ought to be central to our day-to-day lives. I do not like that at all.

And so I’ve cancelled my Midjourney subscription. So you’re likely to see some rather ugly or imperfect art going forward, as I try and figure out how best to style these posts. Graphic design is certainly not my passion, so bear with me.

Until next time!