AI Funders Back Detectors To Catch Pathogens That AI Might Make

It’s a brilliant business model, isn’t it? Create a problem then make money selling the solution? It’s also a timeless business model. Snake oil salesmen have scared people for ages that their health is in danger without their elixir. Equifax credit rating service, that has data on seemingly everyone, didn’t secure your data well enough and lost even social security numbers to hackers in 2017. Then offered credit monitoring service. For free. But in a way that could automatically subscribe you to their paid service.

Now some of the funders of AI have a similar tack. Since AI might be used by terrorists to create new pathogens, they are investing in a company that sells pathogen detectors to the government. Rather than change AI to not create such problems, they’ll make money feebly trying to deal with the problem after the fact.

The company selling the devices is Pilgrim Labs. It has received funding from Peter Thiel for one. Thiel has long invested heavily in AI. Now two top people in Anthropic, the makers of Claude AI, are part of a big new investment in the company.

The company makes boxes that are mounted on poles and monitor the air to try to detect both known pathogens and possible unknown, new pathogens. The Centers for Disease Control has a contract with the company for these devices.

That’s all good and unfortunately necessary, but it’s also a feeble way to deal with the possibility of newly created pathogens. If one of these boxes detects a possible problem and notifies the CDC, then what? The CDC has to analyze it to see if it really is something new and problematic. Then analyze further to really understand it. Then come up with a plan to try to start isolating affected people. Start working on treatment or inoculation. Long after it has had plenty of time to spread.

I’m sure profits from this company will only be a small part of the income of these AI titans but it will be something. And the first time there is a scare about a possible new pathogen, even if it turns out to be a false alarm or easily thwarted, then every town and neighborhood is going to want one of these boxes for quick detection near to them.

Pilgrim is hardly the only incidence of this. Valthos company wants to “identify biological threats and design medical countermeasures” to AI created bio-problems and is backed by much the same investors. Red Queen Bio wants to, “design antibodies that can be manufactured to protect against…threat of an AI-designed virus”. It’s backed by OpenAI. Then there are other kinds of problems that can be addressed for profit. Adaptive Security, from their press release, “trains employees against emerging threats” from AI. It’s backed by AI investors. And World ID, a company started directly by Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, sells a way to prove your human so as to thwart bots. Overall this “sell the solution to the problem they made” seems to be a growing pattern. There is sure to be more coming.

It’s true that trying to detect new pathogens quickly is necessary in any case because new ones can develop naturally, or be created by terrorists using non-AI methods of hacking existing viruses. Plus it’s hard to imagine how AI could be prevented from ever being used to make new pathogens unless we got rid of AI altogether, which is, of course, impossible at this point. But there’s something ugly about this situation because it is the makers of the problem selling the attempt at a solution. Because it’s not the way we’ve encountered problems, or tried to deal with them, in the past.

We invented the nuclear bomb, but that was a government effort to end a terrible war. There were defense contractors who made money off everything that followed but it was different. The initial reason for doing it was different. The indirectness of the profit was different. With AI, which does have its benefits but could also become the new equivalent of nuclear war, this is entirely a matter of private companies racing for profit. Government is involved as a supporter, and as a client, and as a concerned entity, but private company profit is the direct driver.

There were people in the 1950s who made money setting up bomb shelters for worried families. This time it will be the AI investors themselves making money selling us feeble attempts at assuaging the fears of the fallout of what their products might create.

Welcome to the 1950s of the 2020s.

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This is going to be one of those “Things That Are Going To Happen” articles that no one will believe. I’m writing it anyway because when it does happen next year, or maybe a few years later (but I’m betting on it really getting started soon), I’m going to point to this article as proof I saw it coming a mile away. I will not be happy I was right. I’m rarely happy I am right about this crap.

Let’s get to it. I have been screaming, for YEARS, that the Republican Party is going to go full Nazi. That was ignored, too. But now, here we are, with the GOP infested with goosestepping Hitlerjugend and getting worse by the day. There is no stopping this cancer. Within a handful of elections, the GOP will be openly proud to be running under the banner of Nazism, and the legacy press will be working 24/7 to normalize this aberration.

What I am writing about today is the flip side of that coin. Sort of. Here’s my prediction that no one will believe:

But unlike the very real Nazi cancer on the right, the left’s “Communism Problem” will be fake. All of it.

Oh, there will be useful idiots on the ground who rush out to get sickles and hammers tattooed on their arms. There are already some of them now. But what we’re going to see, I promise you, will be a large, coordinated, and suspiciously well-funded group of “professional” communists. Talking heads with massive social media followings (definitely not bots gaming the algorithm!) that will spring up overnight. Established “far left” influencers who were all-in on socialism “suddenly” discovering that socialism is stupid. So played out and uncool and, I swear to god, “centrist!” Communism is actually the path forward!

The reason for this magical surge in love for communism is not that complicated. It all comes back to the necessity of the “both sides” lie.

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I’ve written about this before. The GOP going full Nazi (as well as pro-pedophilia) presents an insurmountable problem to the political discourse in America. The foundation of our politics is that we pretend both parties are the same. No matter what Republicans do, we pretend they are normal. No matter how extreme and violent and corrupt they get, it’s all washed away with “Democrats are just as bad.”

That dynamic cannot survive the GOP’s transition to a party of literal Nazis. It is understood by everyone that Nazis are genocidal monsters. There is no credible way to whitewash them. The New York fucking Times tried it back in 2017, and the public outrage reduced them to a fine mist. A Nazi GOP kills the both-sides lie.

But without the lie, the shield that has protected Republicans for decades disappears. The public would see them for who they really are: A party of ravening monsters. Liars. Grifters. Thieves. Fascists. Rapists. Pedophiles. Genocidal animals.

A true public accounting of the Republican Party would mean the END of the Republican Party. That cannot be allowed.

But what to do? There is no way to equate Democratic Socialism with Nazism. To call advocating for universal health care and school lunches and taxing the rich as extreme as advocating for the mass murder of all non-white, non-Christians in the United States is a non-starter. Even the most bug-eyed conspiracy nutjob can’t square that circle. I thought this would be the end of it. Nazism would finally kill the “both sides” lie and, with it, the Republican Party. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a way out: Astroturf Communism.

Communism has a long and proven track record of killing tens of millions of people. Communism really is dangerous, not because the ideology itself is inherently genocidal, but because it has repeatedly led to genocidal outcomes. Like capitalism, communism is great on paper. In practice, it relies on implementation by people. This wouldn’t be a problem except people are greedy, stupid, arrogant, and corrupt. Without checks on their power, they, more often than not, run amok, and the results are millions of fatalities. We justify the piles of dead bodies under capitalism because a handful of people get extremely wealthy, but, really, neither system left unchecked works out very well in the long run for the average person living under it.1

So, in order to protect the “both sides” lie, the solution to the GOP’s Nazi problem is obviously to manufacture a “Communist Revolution” on the left.

Republicans have been trying to fabricate one for months. Years, really. Every whisper of socialism on the left is conflated with communism. They rely on the public’s general ignorance of the difference between the two. We’re a very stupid nation sometimes. Not for nothing, Medicare is socialism. Social Security is socialism. The word is right fucking there in the name. Municipal services like the police, the fire department, sanitation, public schools. These are all examples of socialism. We all pay for them. We all collectively benefit from them. No one person owns or operates or profits from them.

But while this screeching used to work, it doesn’t anymore. Republicans spent decades crying “socialism!” in order to terrorize their voters. And not at all coincidentally, there appeared a large, coordinated, and suspiciously well-funded group of “professional” socialists. The professional “far left” loved socialism and made lots of noise and got lots of attention. I’m sure this wasn’t a ratfucking operation at all. Totally organic and just happened to gain ground just when the Republican Party tilted over to extremism.

A funny thing happened, though: Socialism, specifically Democratic Socialism, became quite popular. Especially among younger voters. The same voters who are increasingly dominating elections.

Democratic Socialism turned out to have a pretty good track record. It is, after all, what most of Europe follows. Whoops. Maybe the ratfuckers should have picked something less functional. Too late now.

I know, tinfoil hat shit, right? Totally crazy! Except, you know, if you pay attention to the DSA, you’ll notice there are two types of members. The first group can explain Democratic Socialism. How it works, why it’s good, what we would fix, and who would benefit. They have specific, concrete policies they want to implement and plans to do it. These are serious people.

Then there’s the other group. They have…slogans. They’re not really sure what Democratic Socialism is, but they hate the system and both parties! Burn it all down! Policy is boring. Revolution is exciting! These are not serious people.

The first group is going to dominate the conversation going forward because people want solutions, not slogans and mindless anger. The second group?

They’re going to become “communists.” They will be the useful idiots led by the “professional” communists who, again, will have suspiciously large platforms and be suspiciously well-funded.

This “Communist Revolution” will not represent the Democratic Party. It will not represent the left at all. It will be a manufactured astroturf movement. But just like that, the legacy press will have the flipside to the GOP’s Nazi problem.

There will not be a single elected “communist” in the entire Democratic Party. There will not be a single mainstream “communist.” They will not represent the left in any significant way. They will be a fringe movement, but they will be given an astonishing amount of attention from the press.

Comrade Chris and Comrade Tina will make the rounds on all the major networks, explaining how they’re the “real” left wing of America. How they’re going to bring communism to the nation and overthrow the corrupt corporate something-something blablabla. Workers Unite! No private property! Down with capitalism!

Just like that, the GOP isn’t extreme anymore. Sure, they’re Nazis, but have you seen how crazy the left is?! Because when both sides are extreme and dangerous, no one is.

I know this all seems far-fetched. Who would ever fall for something this ludicrous? I dunno…the same people who listened to the ratfuckers in 2016 and then again in 2024? When they told us not to vote for Hillary because she murdered Vince Foster and she was a warmonger, while Donald Trump would never EVER abuse his power? That the Supreme Court wasn’t important? That Kamala was a cop and Trump was a “populist?” That Biden was too old, but Trump wasn’t?

The professional “far left” is out there right now trying to whitewash Tucker Carlson, a literal white nationalist, because that’s the current play. If they’re told to push communism by their paymasters, they’re going to start spouting Karl Marx and waxing on and on about the wonders of collectivism. They have no ideology beyond “whatever keeps Republicans in power.”

The legacy press, of course, will eat it up with a spoon, grateful that they won’t have to talk about the violent extremism of the right. They’ll know it’s all bullshit. It won’t matter. A fake communist revolution will give them the fig leaf to continue the “both sides” lie indefinitely.

For my part, I would love to be wrong. I would love nothing more than to wake up one year, two years, five years from now and see the “both sides” lie reduced to cinders. I would love to see Republican extremism finally reach a breaking point where it can no longer be hidden and ignored. But too many people have too much invested in protecting the GOP from itself. When they start seig heiling at their rallies, something will have to be done. That something will be to invent an equal and opposite threat from the left, and Zohran Mamdani filling potholes and planting trees isn’t going to fucking work. Democratic Socialism doesn’t pack the boogeyman punch they need. It’s too popular and, worse, too functional to be a counterweight to Nazism.2

My guess is that the Communist Revolution is coming. And it’s going to be 100% bullshit. Watch for it. Know who your enemies are and act accordingly.

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Let’s get this out of the way right now: General George S. Patton Jr. never gave a speech to his troops standing in front of a wall-sized American flag. That was Hollywood, all the way – brilliant as an attention-grabber in the first moments of the film about the World War II combat commander but conceived in an airless little office on a studio lot by none other than Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote the scene and the dialogue and knows a thing or two about creating legendary characters.

The photograph above was taken yesterday in Quantico, Virginia, at yet another of Hegseth’s chest-pounding lectures to his betters – this one aimed at several hundred mid-career officers and non-commissioned officers. Apparently Hegseth concluded from the stone-faced looks he got from the generals last year that another yell-fest might go over better with their juniors.

I really don’t know where to start with this blithering balloon-ego maniac. No one, not even Coppola himself, could have come up with Hegseth’s signature line in his lecture – “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” – he clearly believes is a description of his ideal military.

But wait! There’s more! The Washington Post reported that Hegseth began his day working out in the parking lot of the Pentagon with the soldiers he would later lecture, all 600 of them, attired in black shorts and gray t-shirts with the phrase “THIS IS WAR” emblazoned on their chests. They did some push-ups, and then they jogged around the Pentagon. Afterwards, Hegseth grabbed a microphone and mounted a PT-stand and exhorted them, “Do unto your formation that which you would have done unto your son or daughter’s formation. Meaning no games, no gimmicks, no low standards, no excuses.”

I mean, huh?

Meanwhile, 7,000 miles to the east of the Pentagon parking lot looms the unfinished war on Iran where 50,000 soldiers and sailors and airmen and airwomen await the orders of that famous warrior, Donald Trump, who has spent the last several days saber rattling his intention to maybe-perhaps-we’ll-see “annihilate” Iran right after the midterm elections. To that end, today Trump dispatched a third aircraft carrier group to the Middle East, along with 10,000 more troops, and really, you have to wonder if they were given their “THIS IS WAR” t-shirts before setting sail.

The only explanation I could possibly have for such a display of adolescent crotch-grabbing self-glorification is that Hegseth is a dry drunk on Adderall, or maybe Ketamine, or both.

Hegseth’s speech to the junior officers and enlisted soldiers was full of bluster and unfunded plans to establish a new military base somewhere in the United States, after state governors engage in a kind of “Apprentice” style show of making applications to be picked for the honor. I suppose Hegseth has a special panel in the Pentagon scouring the records for the name of another loser Confederate general to put on the sign outside the new base.

He also announced a panel of “three of our best minds” to come up with the “futuristic” weapons our military will need on “any future battlefield, from under the Earth to beyond the Moon.” Whatever the fuck that means. I know you’re trembling with anticipation to learn who Hegseth picked. Naturally, one is Elon Musk. Another is Newt Gingrich. The last is someone called Palmer Luckey, whose biggest qualification seems to be that he is Don Jr.’s best friend and gave a million dollars to Trump’s superPAC, for which his defense firm, Anduril, has received nearly $25 billion in Pentagon contracts. And oh, almost forgot – Don Jr. is a stockholder in Anduril, don’t you know.

It’s hardly necessary to tell you that neither Gingrich, Musk, nor Luckey has served even a single day in uniform and wouldn’t know the barrel from the stock of a rifle. Here is Testosero-Pete’s military brain trust as they were introduced to his uniformed audience yesterday:

Hegseth came up with some other absurd shit in his address to the mid-career military men and women, but the one that should catch your eye, and the eye of Democrats elected to Congress next month, is his plan to form the “Office of Religious Affairs” in the Pentagon, because in past administrations, “Political correctness and secular humanism got a vote, chaplains did not.” Hegseth invoked his favorite general officer, God, to justify his new imposition of religion on our nation’s military, referring to Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

You will not be surprised to learn that Hegseth is a follower of a right-wing Christian nationalist pastor, Doug Wilson, who has a fundamentalist church in Idaho, because of course he does. Hegseth has invited Wilson to preach at one of the monthly religious services he holds at the Pentagon, which are voluntary to members of the armed services, who have spent the last year watching Hegseth fire generals and admirals and interfere in the military promotion system, removing those he apparently thinks are too “woke” to be promoted, most of them female and Black officers. Hegseth announced his approach to leading our nation’s military at the International Christian Media convention earlier this year in Nashville with this: “We train our troops, we no longer trans our troops. Gone is godless and divisive DEI. Gone is gender bending and divisive quotas. We are not in woke we trust, we are in God we trust.”

He received a standing ovation from the conservative religious broadcasters for that nugget of military wisdom.

Hegseth needs to be impeached by a Democratic Party-controlled Congress in the first week of January of 2027. By establishing his office of “religious affairs” in the Pentagon, he has violated the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states with its first words, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or the free exercise thereof.”

I predict that the next time Hegseth gets up in front of a bunch of officers and non-commissioned officers in that lecture hall at Quantico Marine Base, he’s going to announce that attending church is mandatory for members of the U.S. military. Mark my words. That’s where he’s headed.

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Especially when it comes to shit details, tasks or missions that have no purpose other than polishing the brass of the senior commanders and the egos of the politicians who give the orders. Iraq was such a shit detail, maybe the biggest in our nation’s history, certainly in competition with Afghanistan and before that, with Vietnam for that dubious honor. George W. Bush launched us into the war with Iraq in 2003 on a thin veneer of lies, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had somehow had something or another to do with the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Almost as soon as the United States Army beat Saddam’s military and occupied Baghdad, it became clear to the soldiers on the ground that this was another shit detail. As looting and chaos in the streets of Iraq’s capital city surrounded them, soldiers were given nothing to do. They stood by and watched and set up defensive perimeters, the largest of which soon became known as the Green Zone, and were witness to the bewildered response of those senior to them, the chief culprit being Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Here he was, the guy in charge of the Pentagon and all the nation’s military services, and in charge of the war itself, and all Rumsfeld could come up with when confronted by the fact that there was no plan, none whatsoever, for our military to carry out once they had “taken” Iraq, was to utter this gem explaining why we had saved Iraq from Saddam: “Stuff happens. And it’s untidy. And freedom is untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” He would later compound his crimes against command with his remark, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” in answer to a question by the press about why soldiers were driving around in Humvees with canvas sides and tops and frequently no doors, when they were facing attacks daily from roadside bombs planted by insurgents that were killing dozens of soldiers.

Vehicles with better defenses would be developed and deployed later, but they didn’t make the bodies of dead soldiers from the days of Humvees with no armor earlier in the war any less dead. Altogether, by the time the last of our soldiers flew out of Iraq today, 4,400 would die and 32,000 would be wounded, many with debilitating wounds such as lost limbs and brain damage due to blast waves from nearby explosions.

More than 1.5 million soldiers served in the Iraq war during its initial phase from 2003 to 2011 when it was called “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” as if pasting an important-sounding title on the unfolding disaster of our presence there would turn the whole thing into the “victory” it never became. Soldiers knew we had no business being in Iraq right from the start. Even a general who turned into what passed for one of the war’s few heroes, General David Petraeus, was quoted by a reporter in the first days of the war saying, “Tell me how this ends,” a despairing remark that soon became famous as the war ground on and on and on.

Soldiers, including generals, were assigned to Iraq over and over. Petraeus earned a third star and then a fourth as he took over larger and larger chunks of the army’s shit detail in Iraq. Other officers went from being captains to colonels during the war. Sergeants earned stripe after stripe. And still the bodies piled up.

For what? In November of 2003, with the war only six months old, I asked a colonel who commanded a brigade under Petraeus in the 101^st Airborne Division in Mosul what the hell we were doing in Iraq. He took a deep breath and said, “Everybody knows the orders we get come from General Rove,” sarcastically referring to President Bush’s political majordomo who was known to be already positioning Bush for reelection in 2004.

That is what the war in Iraq became: an escalator nobody could get off. They couldn’t even come up with a way to prove that we were achieving a “victory.” They couldn’t use the enemy body-count, the figure that was supposed to reflect the victory in Vietnam that was always just one search and destroy mission or carpet bombing away.

So why were we in Iraq, anyway? Well, it morphed from stopping Saddam from “developing weapons of mass destruction” that never existed, to ending the “insurgency” they finally admitted existed, to fighting ISIS, which moved into northern Iraq and took over large swaths of land that the U.S. once thought it controlled. Then there was the threat of attacks from Syrian forces to the West and Iranian-controlled militias from the East. Most recently, Iran has had its proxies hitting U.S. base camps in Iraq with drones and missiles, so the Trump administration started closing our base camps and deploying the troops from Iraq to bases in Jordan, further away from Iran and its proxy militias so that no more American soldiers would die in Trump’s war on Iran that is turning into Bush II, or Iraq II, or a war for oil, or whatever the hell is going on over there.

And now, according to the Pentagon, the last of our military forces have left whatever mission they had in Iraq, marking “a transition from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort,” according to Hegseth’s hand-puppet, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman Trump and Hegseth have put up for promotion to Secretary of the Army. Hegseth fired the last one, Daniel Driscoll, apparently because he wasn’t on board with Pete’s testosterone push and was more interested in modernizing the army to fight with drones the way every other military in the world is rushing to do right now.

It never stops. We go into a country like Vietnam, or more recently, Iraq, and we spend years fighting people who don’t want us there, so they are killing us, and we are killing them. And then somebody at the Pentagon comes up with “Vietnamization,” which was turning the fighting over to our Vietnamese “allies,” or a doofus like Parnell calls it a “transition” to mask the fact that one day we were there, with our base camps and the trillions of dollars spent on “security” and weapons and killing Iraqis, and the next day, we’re gone. Like, poof.

No explanation that even attempts to make sense of the last 23 years and the more than 4,000 of our troops who died. No statement that we “won,” because of course we didn’t, and if Hegseth and Parnell claimed that, you’d be able to hear the laughter over the roar of one of Musk’s Starships taking off on its next satellite run.

Soldiers always know. They’re the ones with the muddy boots and the exhausted faces and the sore bones from sleeping on the ground and riding in armored vehicles that never, ever, end up with enough armor to protect them from the roadside bombs and these days, drones and missiles, that wound and kill them.

I remember one day when I was in Iraq in 2003 on a base out near Tal Afar, an outlaw town near the border with Syria. I was sitting in the dining facility having breakfast with a bunch of soldiers who had just returned from another useless mission down in Sinjar, where they were supposed to suppress insurgents who were taking over the town. The soldiers were dirty and tired and hungry. They hadn’t eaten a hot meal in three weeks. Their M-16 rifles leaned against their chairs as they bent over their meal trays inhaling their third servings of eggs and bacon and cut-up fruit and pancakes.

On a flatscreen television that was mounted on the wall of the huge tent-like structure of the dining facility, a man was giving a speech in Washington D.C. to a group of people. The words at the bottom of the screen said the speech was at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. The man was wearing a suit. Everyone in the auditorium was wearing suits. The man giving the speech was talking about Iraq and how we were “expanding our footprint” in the Middle East, and our victory over insurgents who opposed us was a sure thing because the United States of America had “the most powerful military in the world,” and “no one can beat us.”

One of the soldiers sitting next to me asked if I knew who the speaker was. I recognized him. It was Douglas Feith. The soldier asked, “who the hell is that?” I answered that he was one of the architects of the war in Iraq.

Suddenly every soldier at the table began throwing pieces of toast and empty half-pint milk containers and plastic forks and spoons at the screen, shouting “shut your mouth you stupid fuck” and similar epithets.

It occurred to me this afternoon as I read Sean Parnell’s remarks about the end of our military involvement in Iraq that men in suits are still telling the same lies to the same rooms full of people wearing suits in Washington D.C., as soldiers get on C-130 transports wearing dirty battle fatigues and dusty boots and fly to new base camps in other Middle East countries to do the same thing we’ve been doing for over twenty years.

The shit details just keep on coming. The presidents keep starting the wars. The generals keep getting promoted. It never ends.

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In many of the conversations I’m having this week, and in my girls group chats and on my social media feeds, it seems like we’re all swirling around one story: the Cornell Seven.

I wrote about the case for Slate and thought I said most of what I wanted to say. That piece is about the limits of the law to tell us much about ethics and morals; how the perils of vigilante justice live alongside the necessity of drawing social rules and enforcing them with social penalties; what might have been going on in the brains of the young men who made up the Cornell Seven. I hope you read it; it was hard to write, but cathartic to write, even if I didn’t get to any answers.

What I’m thinking about now, though, is the rest of us. All of the women (and some men, but let’s be honest mostly women) for whom this case is bringing up… everything.

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You know the statistics: One in three women will be sexually assaulted in her life. More than 99 percent of rapes never result in a felony conviction. Most rapists walk free. Most women never report. Of course all of those facts are animating the response to this case.

But there’s something deeper at play here, too, and I think it’s the text messages — the young man who invited his fraternity brothers over for “free pussy,” by which he meant a young woman who was drunk and high on ketamine. Most women who are sexually assaulted have no idea what was going on in their assailants’ minds. For the many women who are assaulted by men they knew or trusted, and especially when the assaults are not sudden violent attacks but rather the result of minutes or hours or days or years of ignoring “no” and overriding your own sense of agency, it’s possible and perhaps tempting to construct a more palatable story: He didn’t know what he was doing; he didn’t read my cues; I wasn’t loud enough; I wasn’t clear enough; perhaps this was a misunderstanding. These texts offer an insight into what was actually happening in the minds of these seven men who stand accused of rape, and what was actually happening was not misunderstanding — it was a belief that the young naked woman was not a real person, but was an object, a thing over which they could bond by engaging in a collective sadistic desire.

The texts pull back the curtain. They reframe the night as less about what she did and more about what the men did. What they were thinking. How little they thought about her. How she became just a body part.

To be clear, no crime has been determined by a court of law, and the truth of what happened may never be litigated in one. Here is what we know, though: A girl who was 19 or 20 years old, drunk, encouraged to take ketamine. A guy she thought was her friend, who encouraged her to have sex with him and his friend, and maybe she thought that was ok at first. A text message that went out to more than 50 young men, advertising her as “free pussy.” Several additional men who show up. A girl who says she hides under the covers, swats the men’s hands away, says no, is pushed and pressured. She says she was physically assaulted, too, that the men slapped her and verbally insulted her. And eventually, she says, she was so out of it she was unable to say yes or no at all — and young men who at the very baseline least knew they were having sex with a young woman who was heavily intoxicated, and who I suspect understood perfectly well that she would not have consented to a group sex scenario in the sober light of day. It’s hard not to read the texts and understand that they saw her as a thing, and that demeaning her was fun for them, and that it felt like a way to bond in their shared dominant status — the presence of a drunk naked girl who could be used as “free pussy” made their fraternity, and by extension them, cool (“I fucking love chi phi,” one man wrote in the text chain).

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I don’t know if the facts of this case meet New York State’s high legal bar for proving rape occurred. I don’t know if the facts of this case meet the lower bar for proving civil damages, which wouldn’t put the men in jail but could mean they owe the woman in question some restitution. I have been tempted — so tempted — to dig into the legal questions involved here. But I haven’t. Because that may be what it’s about for Jane Doe’s lawyers. But that’s not why so many women I know are thinking about this case so much.

For some women, the interest is clear: Something very much like this happened to them. For many others, it’s related if not as direct: This didn’t happen, but the story behind the story — that’s familiar. Feeling de-personed, reduced to a sexualized thing, to a collection of body parts. Feeling profoundly betrayed because you thought a man was worthy of your trust and you learned the hard way he saw you as less than a human and more of an orifice with a brain inconveniently attached. Feeling the sheer terror of realizing your physical safely is contingent on the whims of a larger, stronger man (or a group of them). Watching a man you trusted or loved or respected or simply thought was fundamentally decent go along with the degradation of a woman, or realizing he watched that degradation happen and said nothing, or hearing him deny that the actions were degrading at all. Understanding that objecting makes you the bad guy, the un-fun one.

Fifty-seven men were in the Cornell group chat where their friends were advertising “free pussy” and promising you could just “whip it out” and asking “shop still open?” Some of them showed up to partake. Most said and did nothing.

It is a very strange thing to move through the world understanding that the one half of the population that never had their humanity doubted on the basis of their genitalia, that enjoys the privilege of being the default category of human, remains the primary arbiter of your physical safety and, sometimes, your personhood. The gleeful misogynists of the manosphere have made misogynist subtext text (midway through writing this newsletter I went back and re-read the New Yorker exposé on the Tate brothers, and if you haven’t read it, you should). That’s not to say that every man in the world is a secret Tate-addled ultra-misogynist. It is to say that we are reading about this case in the context of a political moment infused with the most unabashed and virulent misogyny I’ve ever seen and experienced in my life. This case, for so many women, is a reminder of the flesh-and-blood costs that misogyny extracts, whether it’s men laughing online about how women are hoes who need to be abused and controlled, a president laughing about how he grabs women by the pussy, or men laughing in a group chat about a woman whose personhood they stripped away — who to them was “free pussy” and nothing else.

Nothing about that night was “free” — not for her. And not for the millions of women today who cannot stop thinking about this case.

xx Jill

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Former Special Counsel Jack Smith underwent several hours of stupidly aggressive and just plain stupid and just plain aggressive questioning from Republicans at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill today, emerging as unscathed as he was bewildered by Republican blithering. Smith of course knows exactly what the whole thing was about. Donald Trump got his feelings hurt when a bunch of FBI agents and a couple of prosecutors from the Department of Justice went through his collection of purloined top-secret documents he had stashed around his resort/hotel/club/pedophile palace in Palm Beach, Florida, way back in 2022. That Smith didn’t even come on board to take up the prosecution of Trump as Special Counsel until six months later matters not to Trump or to the Senators who allegedly asked him alleged questions today in an attempt to catch him in lying to the Congress.

As if. Smith knows more about the federal perjury statute than most of the Senators know about how many bottles of $200 “special batch” Kentucky bourbon they’ve been able to squeeze out of lobbyists and stash in the bottom left hand drawer of their desks in the Senate office building.

For those whose memories have disappeared down the rabbit hole of Old Trump Scandals of the Distant Past, the tale is a sordid one. As Trump departed the White House in January of 2021, having recently dispatched his army of Nazis In Training to indulge him with their attack on the Capitol earlier in the month, he ordered several rental trucks to pull up to the front portico so his lackeys could load dozens and dozens of white file boxes containing everything from stacks of state dinner cocktail napkins to clippings of ass-licking Wall Street Journal editorials and love letters from his good friend North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and oh yes, dozens of documents marked top secret and some with red-slash covers indicating they were top secret “compartmentalized,” an even higher category of secrecy.

It was run of the mill stuff as top secrets go – a plan of attack on the not-yet attacked country of Iran including a map, a few odds and ends about U.S. nuclear weapons capability, some lists of defensive weapons held by the U.S. and its allies, and several documents that if analyzed by an enemy foreign intelligence service could lead them to learn about U.S. intelligence sources and methods that we really, really don’t want them to know.

You’ve got to remember how the FBI ended up in Trump’s Mar a Lago office. The National Archives, to which every scrap of paper produced by the Trump White House was supposed to go under the Presidential Records Act, noticed some missing documents in the fall of 2021 and made inquiries to Trump’s post-presidency factotums about where they were and why there were missing documents among those the White House did send to the Archives. Trump stiff-armed them and kept playing hard to get until December, when his lawyer notified the Archives that they had found 15 boxes of documents at Mar a Lago.

In January of 2022 the Archives started negotiating to get the 15 boxes of documents from Mar a Lago. When they received the boxes, they found 184 documents with classified markings, included top secret and some marked “Special Access Program.” The Archives notified the Department of Justice, which got the FBI involved.

The DOJ started sending out subpoenas to people who had been involved in moving documents out of the White House in the closing days of the administration. Things were getting serious. By May, the DOJ subpoenaed Trump himself, demanding return of all documents with classified markings. Trump dithered around, talking to his lawyer, asking if he had to turn over the documents. The lawyer told him, yes, he was subject to the subpoena. In June, lawyers for the DOJ showed up at Mar a Lago to receive 31 classified documents Trump claimed to have found. One of his lawyers, a young woman who worked for his SuperPAC, signed a document saying that that was all the classified documents they found and that all the documents from the White House were stored in a single basement room at Mar a Lago. The room was insecure, and the DOJ demanded that a strong lock be put on it.

The FBI subpoenaed security tapes showing the storage area in the basement and found that people working at Mar a Lago, who did not have security clearances, were removing boxes from the storage room.

In August, the FBI got a search warrant and showed up at Mar a Lago to find classified documents and boxes from the White House all over the place – stored in a public restroom, on the stage of the ballroom, and in drawers of Trump’s desk. They retrieved 13,000 documents that belonged in the National Archives, including secret documents with markings that specified they could only be seen by people with the very highest security clearances inside a so-called SCIF, a secure compartmented information facility. Some of the secret documents were found in Trump’s office, and some were found in boxes that contained random stuff like T-shirts, gifts, and magazines.

As the saying goes in racing…aaaand, they’re off!

Trump claimed that the FBI planted the classified documents, like they just had them lying around the DOJ for that purpose. His lawyers sued to get a “special master” to go through all 13,000 documents to weed out any “privileged” material. The judge assigned to the case was in Fort Pierce, Florida, and her name was Aileen Cannon, and folks, she’s still involved today in running a grand jury that the DOJ empaneled to investigate the investigators, chief among them former special counsel Smith, but also former CIA director John Brennan and of course James Comey, whose crime, it seemed, dated back to the dinner he had in the White House when Trump asked him if he would swear loyalty to him, and Comey had the temerity to defer.

The problem the DOJ is having in Florida with its “investigate the investigators” program is that they’ve got a grand jury, they’ve got subpoenas, they’ve got the whole force of the Department of Justice, and no indictments have been forthcoming. Plus, their two chief prosecutors assigned to the Florida clown car overseen by Aileen Cannon have resigned -- Joseph diGenova, a long-time right wing loon lawyer from Washington, and Kurt Olsen, a “stop-the-steal” defender of January 6 Capitol terrorists, along with Jack Eckenrode, the lead FBI agent assigned to the revenge investigation, who had spent years under another special counsel, John Durham, who completely unsuccessfully investigated the investigators in the probe into Russia’s connections to the 2016 Trump campaign. Yes, folks, it goes back that far.

The real problem they’re having is this thing called “evidence.” The way it has gone so far is this: Trump says he wants Comey prosecuted, so somebody says what can we get this guy on, and somebody else says, hey! I’ve got evidence! And the evidence turns out to be a cell phone photo taken by Comey on the beach of some sea shells arranged to form the numbers “86” and “47” and another clown in the car says, hey, that’s a threat on Trump’s life, you know, because some unidentified person on a beach arranged the shells and the criminal mastermind Comey came along and took the picture.

That’s the way it’s been going with Trump’s Florida retribution campaign. He’s all pissed about his Mar a Lago ballroom stage and public bathroom and office showing up in FBI photos filled with boxes taken from the White House, so he wants somebody to swing, and it ain’t happening. This week, or was it last week, a story came out that said he fired Pam Bondi as Attorney General because she hadn’t brought any revenge indictments, and now he’s got Todd Blanche in there, and Blanche’s big prosecution team is leaking top prosecutors and FBI biggies like a busted skiff that got sunk in El Nino.

And get this. The second chief prosecutor, the stop-the-steal guy who defended January 6 Nazis, he got out because he had problems with his security clearance – gee, ya think? And now that he’s out, he’s blabbing, and according to the New York Times, he told Brennan’s lawyers that there is not just one, but “multiple” grand juries overseen by Aileen Cannon, and one of them is – you guessed it – tasked specifically with investigating the search of Mar a Lago. The problem with that grand jury? Evidence. Lawyers for FBI agents who have been subpoenaed to testify have told the court that they will swear that the search warrant was legal, the search was proper, and as FBI agents, what they did at Mar a Lago was their job.

For which they were fired by Kash Patel, of course, who old Mar a Lago hands will recall was appointed by Trump way back in 2022 as one of two lackeys in charge of dealing with the National Archives about what, exactly? The top-secret documents that were found by the FBI scattered all over Mar a Lago, because security tapes had shown workers for Trump stashing them hither and yon in a failed attempt to keep them from being discovered.

Oh, goodness! Didn’t you just know that Kash would be in there not just once, but twice, and involved in the cover-up both times.

Isn’t Donald Trump having a hell of a time getting revenge on his enemies? His problem is, they all had jobs to do, and the jobs were to investigate the most corrupt president in the history of the country, and what do you know, but they kept finding corrupt stuff! Look over there! Is that a video I see of a jet at the Palm Beach airport being loaded up with white file boxes carried by Trump flunkies from Mar a Lago in May of 2022 as he departed Florida for his New Jersey golf resort? Why, I think it is! Do I hear a tape of Trump in Bedminster bragging about a plan to attack Iran to a writer working on a puff-piece bio of one of his many, many first term chiefs of staff, as Trump was waving around the top-top-top secret plan to attack Iran? Why, I think we do!

And what about evidence that Comey and Smith and Brennan and sundry other commie Democrats were doing bad things to Donald Trump? Do we have any of that?

Uuuhhhh…let me sort through these DOJ resignations and failed grand juries and Senate hearing clusterfucks and I’ll get back to you.

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