A Small Illinois Newspaper Breaks a National Story About Killing Local Government Autonomy and DEI.

Citizen Journalism Alert! At the end of this article, you’ll find out how you can help us investigate this latest power grab at federal control and adherence to Trump policies.

The power-mad Trump administration has begun planting language in federal grant contracts that would give it control over how local governments deal with immigration raids, block public services that may benefit those Trump wants to deport, and ban policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

A small daily newspaper in Urbana, a town of 38,000 two hours outside of Chicago that is rich with academics and scientists , broke the news on Wednesday.

Accepting the Trump administration grant would mean the City of Urbana must close ‘any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.’

Deep in a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)  grant to the Urbana Fire Department is language requiring that the Illinois city cooperate with ICE as a condition of accepting $69,000.

Among grant conditions which have nothing to do with firefighting:

• No restrictions on sharing  information about any  individual’s citizenship or immigration status.
• Complying with prohibitions on encouraging illegal immigration and “harboring, concealing or shielding from detection illegal aliens.”
• Honoring requests for cooperation.
• Not publicizing “the existence of an immigration-enforcement operation.”

In addition, accepting the Trump administration grant would mean the City of Urbana must close “any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.”  This provision could make the city government vulnerable to a Trump administration lawsuit over any program, say free admission to a city-sponsored concert or youth sports programs, if a single undocumented person participated.

Anti-DEI clause

The city would also have to agree not to “operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

This bowing to the Trump administration would be in return for a sum equal to less than a tenth of one percent of the city’s $125 million annual budget.

Accepting the grant terms would mean selling out the principles articulated by several Urbana alderpersons—and for a lot less, relatively, than Judas Iscariot’s 30 pieces of silver. (Alderperson is Illinois-speak for city council member.)

Is this contract provision giving up local autonomy unique to Urbana? Unlikely.

Reporter Jana Wiersema has concisely told a story about this grant that should prompt deep dives by other news organizations. And digging out the facts will be easy in this case. That’s where you can help, as we explain below.

Revealing Documents

Many grant contracts are available online. For paper-only contracts, just stop by City Hall, county offices, and other local government agencies. You could also ask your city council or other representative to email you documents.

Thanks to digital technology, searching grant contracts is easy: Control F for keywords such as immigration, DEI, inclusion, and other terms that trigger Trump and his minister of hate, Stephen Miller. Digital sleuthing would quickly reveal the types of levers the Trump administration seeks to use over local governments and their agencies through grants like this one to the Urbana Fire Department.

Urbana alderpersons have, for the moment, tabled acceptance of the grant. One of them seems hopeful that the grant terms can be renegotiated to remove the command-and-control language the Trump Administration wrote into the contract.

Fat chance. Grants are optional. Grants typically are offered in the way companies provide you similar “contracts of adhesion,” meaning they are one-sided with nonnegotiable terms. Think of the contract you sign when renting a car – take it or leave it.

But how often does a grant contract get the scrutiny that a local official applied to this grant from Washington?

Our prominent national news organizations should follow up on this.

You can do something to get the news out, DCReport readers. Email and call your local news organizations and urge them to investigate conditions on Trump administration grants to your local governments.  Send them the link to this DCReport column. PLUS, read the Action Box below to find out how YOU can use your local lens to help us expose a much bigger national story.

Photo at top: Collage from Africa Images (puppet master), aliftyaku from Solvers (cash), and Andika Setiawan from Dikas Studio

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Trump Using Small Grants to Force Deportation Compliance appeared first on DCReport.org.

David Cay Johnston Provides Another Reality Check!

DAVID’S VIDEO COMMENTARY IS BELOW. David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and DCReport co-founder, highlights a powerful new column by former DCReport contributor, Max Taves, in the San Jose Mercury News. Read Max’s piece HERE.

Taves reveals that leading tech CEOs — from Intel to Meta — are staying silent out of fear of Donald Trump’s retaliation. He also exposes a buried clause in a recent federal “investment” in Intel that could allow Trump to act as an owner, dictating what the company can and cannot do.

This unprecedented intertwining of government control and private enterprise mirrors authoritarian systems abroad — and it’s unfolding in the U.S.

Read the column (outside the paywall), reflect on what this means for innovation, free markets, and democracy, and help spread awareness.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Silicon Valley Bends the Knee appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Once upon a time, the right was filled with big, strong, manly tough guys. They hated the left because we were so weak and complained about everything. We were always bitching and moaning and whining.

Stop sexually harassing women!

Stop using racial slurs!

Stop gaybashing!

Stop forcing kids to say Christian prayers when they’re not Christian!

UGH! The constant victimhood! Why couldn’t we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in a country designed to hand everything to white men and protect them at all costs? You don’t hear THEM complaining!!!

Except, these days, of course, you do. That’s ALL you fucking hear. Women are dying in hospital parking lots. Unarmed Black men are (still) being gunned down by racist cops. Hate crimes against Jews and Muslims continue to spike. There are literal concentration camps opening and calls to put 65 million Latinos, both immigrants and citizens, in them.

But to hear tell, white Americans are the most oppressed and marginalized group to ever walk the face of the fucking planet. Why, they can’t even get a coffee without being tormented!

I came across this cartoon after reposted a video talking about what utter nonsense it is, and yet instructive.

If you didn’t take the couple of minutes to watch that, the premise is simple: The cartoon is instructive not because it never happened, but because it never would. The idea that any place that sells coffee wouldn’t have plain black coffee is ludicrous. But this is not based on reality. It’s based on feelings and vibes, which explains everything about where we are right now as a country.

It “feels” true and it feeds into the victimization complex that is the core motivation of the right. But it’s more than what the video gets into here.

You see, older white men (and younger white men as well) look around and see a country that promised them everything on a silver platter. All they had to do was show up and “work hard,” aka, put in the minimum amount of effort, and life would be a cakewalk. They’d have a job (money), a wife (sex), a home (stuff), the American dream!

And for a long time, that wasn’t entirely untrue. Being a white man in America meant playing life on the easiest setting. You weren’t guaranteed success, but you had very few obstacles in your path, certainly compared to women and minorities.

And yet, things are so bad now that even being a white man doesn’t really count for much. Republicans have broken the economy so severely that it’s all but impossible to get ahead, or just get by, even on the easy setting. If being a white man doesn’t help, how is that fair?!

Worse, women have spent the last 50 years putting in the work so they no longer require a man to support them. If they don’t NEED a man, then men have to put the work in to get a girlfriend/partner/wife and that’s haaaaaard. Where is the American dream they were promised?!

They just want a coffee. Black!

Let me tell you, I went poking around for that cartoon, and it’s quite the recurring theme:

Good fucking lord. How do white men get anything done with that cross nailed to their backs? I weep for their suffering.

But this is the foundation of everything for the right. The rush to embrace fascism and white nationalism is about restoring white men to their “rightful” place in the order of things. They’re so fucking angry about everything all the time because if we’re living our lives and not putting them on a pedestal, they feel attacked.

Pargin (the guy in the video you didn’t watch. Tsk) suggests that seeing all of these other choices makes the right feel small. Heaven fucking forbid.

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On the one hand, I understand the urge to have what you like be in the majority. The music you like. The movies you watch. The food you eat. It’s comforting, I suppose, to have that affirmation.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t really know. I grew up reading comics, watching anime, and playing Dungeons & Dragons and video games at a time when people claimed they were demonic. They weren’t popular; they were shunned and ostracized.

Don’t feel bad. Even as a little ogreling, I didn’t really care about other people’s opinions. I liked what I liked, and if you didn’t, why would I care? Your lack of taste was a you problem. Opinionated I was, although I kept it to myself until I got older.1

Of course, these days, the stuff I like is so mainstream I’m practically a hipster. “Oh you like anime? I was watching it 45 years ago. D&D? I was playing back in the 70s. Back in MY day, video games were monochrome!” It amuses me greatly that the nerds won and the Boomers who despised my hobbies are bitter and angry about being left behind.

But what does that even mean? To be left behind? And why is it important? I’m the only person I know in real life who loves the movie Xanadu. Even the girls were appalled by how trashy it is (which, of course, is why it’s so awesome2). No one in my family eats cream of wheat.3 I’m the only one who loves turn-based strategy games. None of this means I should enjoy them any less or deride anyone else for not liking them.

To the mind of a right-winger, though, having a minority opinion is no different than being oppressed and attacked. It’s intolerable. It’s why they call themselves “independent thinkers” and then engage in the most rigid form of groupthink imaginable. No dissent is allowed.

The right’s childish fear of not being the center of attention or the pinnacle of culture is pathetic. If white men (and women) would get the fuck over themselves, everyone, including them, would be a lot happier. But that would mean accepting they’re not special and they just are not capable of doing that. If they can’t be more special than everyone else, then they have to drag everyone down so they can stay on top, even if that means living in the mud.

It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and deadly.

I’ve said this before, and I will continue to say it: One of the most important ways we get out of this mess is to stop coddling white men (and women, but really, mostly men). Is life tough? Yeah. Welcome to the reality everyone else has had to live with for the last…forever. The sooner they learn that even their oppression doesn’t make them special, the sooner they’ll learn to do something constructive with their anger instead of burning everything to the ground.

White men have been telling everyone else to grow up and stop playing the victim card. It’s time for them to take their own advice because, frankly, we’re all tired of the nonstop fucking whining.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 24 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

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I know things seem bleak. The regime is murdering fishermen in the Caribbean. Masked thugs are shooting protesters in Chicago and Portland, trying to kick off a riot. Stephen Miller is in front of every camera, lying about non-existent widespread violence so Trump will declare martial law. Republicans refuse to reopen the government so they won’t have to give back millions of Americans their healthcare or talk about the Epstein files.

And that’s just this week!

But as dark and terrible as this all seems, there’s a constant undercurrent to all of this, and it’s one I keep pointing out: The regime is weak, failing, and everyone IN the regime knows it.

The latest bit of evidence is quite the doozy. posted a note about it and, honestly, I didn’t believe it.1 But it’s true, Curtis Yarvin is talking about fleeing the country.

In a blog post published this weekend on his Substack Gray Mirror, San Francisco-based Yarvin wrote: “Because the vengeance meted out after its failure will dwarf the vengeance after 2020 — because the successes of the second revolution are so much greater than the first — I feel that I personally have to start thinking realistically about how to flee the country. Everyone else in a similar position should have a 2029 plan as well.”

Now, the majority of you (all of you?) are saying to yourself, “Who the fuck is Curtis Yarvin and why the fuck do I care if he flees the country?” And that’s a fair question. In a sane world, you would have never heard the name Curtis Yarvin in your entire life. But here we are, in this world. Sorry.

Curtis Yarvin really is no one. He’s a shitty writer and an even shittier philosopher. But he stumbled into a very lucrative career telling billionaires exactly what they wanted to hear: All of your greed and narcissism is actually good and you are the hero of the story. Everyone opposing you in the name of the common good is a bad person and you are morally justified in crushing them.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Yarvin is just a scifi rehashed version of Ayn Rand, the Patient Zero of libertarianism. She also told rich people that greed is good and all forms of government are bad because it keeps the rich from living their fullest lives, dedicated only to themselves.

Here’s more on Yarvin:

Yarvin rose to prominence for his essays written under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, which helped launch the “Dark Enlightenment” movement. In a 2008 manifesto, Yarvin proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” followed by the transfer of power to a CEO-in-chief like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen. This CEO/king could transform the government into a “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation” that could “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE), kill the press, and incarcerate “decivilized populations.” (If this sounds familiar, maybe you just watched “Alien: Earth.”)

Yarvin dresses up fascism in pretty words to make the fascists feel good about themselves. No one wants to look in the mirror and see the bad guy, so they needed someone to spin them a fairy tale of their heroism. That’s what Yarvin gave them, and they rewarded him mightily for his work. Mind you, his writing is crap and his arguments are…well, “weak” doesn’t really capture the essence of the lazy thinking involved. But the billionaires didn’t NEED high intellect and deep thinking. They needed a fig leaf, and that’s what Yarvin delivered.

So that’s who Curtis Yarvin is. He’s not stupid. Delusional, maybe. A piece of shit, absolutely. But not stupid.

Yarvin is looking around at the same landscape you and I are looking at, and he does not see the “Triumph of the Will.” He sees a collapsing regime. He sees the Fourth Reich failing before it even begins. He sees a backlash so severe that fleeing the country is a reasonable response.

Which is something I’ve been saying for some time now.

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Listen to the Ogre say it every week!

I know a lot of people have been brushing this off. We won’t have elections. They’ll arrest all the Democrats. Even if they lose, no one will go to jail. Democrats will just let them go. Etc. Etc.

I get it. Doomcasting is easy and comfortable. Hope and anger are harder to sustain. I can’t speak to boundless hope, but I am an endless font of rage that will burn until the end of time. Healthy? Not really. But useful in times like these.

When I look at what Republicans have done, I do not see politics as usual. I do not see your typical government overreach. I do not see normal corruption and incompetence.

I see evil so unforgivable, so beyond the pale, so depraved and sadistic that Yarvin is correct: The backlash will be extreme.

We are going to come for them. The Nazis in the White House. The masked Brown Shirts in ICE. The propagandists in the media. The fascist billionaires polluting our politics. None of them will be safe from the trials. Trump can pardon whoever he wants. California will come for them. Oregon will come for them. Illinois will come for them. Every state they attack will be waiting for the regime to fall, and they will all come for their pound of flesh.

And the ones who fail to pay Trump the requisite bribe to get a pardon before he dies or flees the country himself? The DoJ won’t stay broken forever. The next Attorney General will not be a useless Merrick Garland. They will be someone with teeth, and then the right will long for the days when we didn’t charge political opponents for crimes.2 Too bad Trump destroyed that norm and fucked the entire criminal organization known as the Republican Party.

So, yes, Yarvin is panicking because he can see where this is all heading as clearly as I can. The regime may still win. It’s not a slam dunk that the fascists are doomed. But they’re in a lot of trouble, and the leaders of the movement are deranged imbeciles trapped in a propaganda bubble of their own making. Our greatest ally is their own stupidity. We just have to keep fighting and help them destroy themselves.

And once the regime falls, and it will, we have to destroy them and salt the earth. There can be no “moving forward for the good of the nation.” No “reaching out to heal the divide.” No reconciliation. There must be justice and vengeance. The two are not incompatible. We have to smash American fascism so thoroughly, it will take them another 80 years to rise again.

Curtis Yarvin had a dream of destroying American democracy, killing 2/3 of the population, and enslaving the rest. I have a dream that Curtis Yarvin should spend the rest of his life in a prison cell or on the run, looking over his shoulder and praying a Nazi hunter hasn’t found him.

Whose dream do YOU prefer?

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 25 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

A European justice minister who does have principles!

The EU “chat control” proposal I wrote about the other day has been scuppered by Germany’s justice ministry saying forcefully that it will never support this particular form of mass surveillance. Here’s what their minister, Dr. Stefanie Hubig, had to say:

“Chat control without cause must be taboo in a state governed by the rule of law. Private communication must never be under general suspicion. The state must also not force messengers to scan messages en masse for suspicious content before sending them. Germany will not agree to such proposals at EU level. We must also make progress at EU level in the fight against child pornography. That’s what I’m committed to. But even the worst crimes do not justify the surrender of basic civil rights. This has been insisted on for months in the votes of the federal government. And that’s how it will stay.”

Brief context; at the beginning of this week it was rumoured that Germany was wavering on its opposition to pre-emptive and permanent scanning of everyone’s phones. Purportedly, the European Commission DG HOME proposal was ‘just’ to identify child sexual abuse materials, but as anyone (ok yours truly) who’s been fighting surveillance for close to three decades can tell you, blanket surveillance starts with a justification of ‘serious crime’, and quickly becomes used for trivial issues and against all perceived enemies of those in power. So, when organisations including Signal raised the alarm, lots of people swung into action, again, to let the German justice ministry know that this would not go quietly for them. The statement above is Dr Hubig saying they never wobbled at all. I’m pretty certain they did, but who knows, maybe someone in her office sent up the bat signal so people in the movement I’m part of to go to the barricades on this issue one last time. It’s certainly a play I’ve seen before.

I’ve been doing this for close to 30 years (thought tbf had v. little involvement in this particular campaign). The stakes have never been higher. Even many ‘normies’ now get how these powers will be abused and that this time it might not just be against others. It could happen to them. It hits different, as they say, when you’re staring down the barrel of a government run by AfD or the Front National.

But creating coalitions again and again to fight off stupid, dangerous nonsense is hard. Civil society and real movement politics, as so many of CT’s enduring readers know, is hard fucking work. I’m glad that we do it and that we have deep knowledge and experience of it, but I’m also exhausted. Again and again I find myself wondering, if we didn’t have to expend most our energies saying ‘No’ to this stupid, ghastly shit, and saying ‘No’ to the stupid, ghastly shit of the tech oligarchs, what might we have built instead? How productively and joyfully could we be spending our lives? Actually growing good things? Showing what can and must be done for us to live decent lives for our own purposes and in service of others, and not repeatedly campaigning so that a few less lives will be wrecked?

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of us – indeed, growing numbers – are working on the alternatives. But if feels like we lost twenty years just trying to get tech policy and tech firms to kill fewer people, to be just a bit less egregious, and that is time we’ll never get back. Time we needed to be building and growing the technology infrastructure and human networks, capabilities and structures of feeling we so desperately need for what comes next.

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years, and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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The crash of 2008-2009 was not fun. Watching millions of people have their lives destroyed because of the greed of Wall Street was infuriating. And scary as fuck. Jordan was less than six months old when the economy exploded, and there I was, a stay-at-home parent, praying my wife would not lose her job.

The bubble we’re in now? The AI bubble? That makes the housing bubble of 2008 look small and benign in comparison. It’s not clear how much longer it can go on, but I’m seeing an awful lot of people talking about the fact that we’re IN a bubble.1

That’s a bad sign, and we have to be ready to hold the billionaire assholes pushing us off into the abyss accountable this time.

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The OgPod hates billionaires...

Bubbles are fueled by delusion. By the unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, of the people pumping money into the bubble to acknowledge that they’re setting money on fire. The fact that there is a growing awareness that the bubble exists and a willingness to say it out loud means that the time for delusion is coming to an end. Probably.*

Here’s The Financial Times explaining just how big the bubble is:

The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. And some analysts believe that estimate doesn’t fully capture the AI spend, so the real share could be even higher.

AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in US stocks so far in 2025. That is helping to fund and drive US growth, as the AI-driven stock market draws in money from all over the world, and feeds a boom in consumer spending by the rich.

After I got mostly through with this article, I came across Paul Krugman’s piece today, also explaining how severe the bubble we’re in is. He even helpfully compared it to the dotcom bubble of the 90s, which I get to later (for different reasons):

Instead, let’s focus for now on the way that hopes about profits to be made from AI — and fear of missing out (FOMO) — have led to huge business outlays, largely on those data centers. By the second quarter of this year spending on information processing equipment and software, as a percentage of GDP, had already matched its peak in 1999, the height of the Internet bubble. There’s every indication that it’s going to go even higher, maybe much higher.

That is objectively insane. Not just on the part of Silicon Valley, but all of the outside investors flushing their money down the drain. The reason for this irrational behavior? The rich think AI will magically solve a lot of economic problems. I don’t mean in a “Super Intelligent AI Will Solve World Hunger In Three Seconds” way. I mean that they think AI is a silver bullet:

The main reason AI is regarded as a magic fix for so many different threats is that it is expected to deliver a significant boost to productivity growth, especially in the US.

Higher output per worker would lower the burden of debt by boosting GDP. It would reduce demand for labour, immigrant or domestic. And it would ease inflation risks, including the threat from tariffs, by enabling companies to raise wages without raising prices.

LULZ! Have companies EVER raised wages without raising prices? That would mean using profits to reward workers. That’s fucking insane. We don’t DO that in America! But it’s very sweet that the Financial Times imagines such a future.

Putting that aside, this is what I mean by delusional. AI is just going to swoop in and boost productivity? Increase wages? Reduce demand for labor (and we’ll conveniently ignore the subsequent unemployment)? Shower the economy is mana from heaven and all will be well!

Here’s the problem: AI does not work. Not the way investors are being promised. It’s deeply broken in some very fundamental ways, and the amount of time, resources, and money it will take to fix is almost certainly more than the bubble can handle. I dug into the specifics a little more deeply a few weeks ago if you need a refresher:

This is like the dotcom boom of the 90s (but as Krugman points out, worse). Everyone and their mother was foaming at the mouth over this new “internet” thing. It was going to change EVERYTHING, and companies became wildly overvalued. Then they couldn’t deliver on the hype and, POP!, there went the bubble.

*The wild card here, and I’ve mentioned this before, is that Silicon Valley is gripped by a cult that doesn’t really care about money. The TESCREAL cult sees AI as a literal godhead and will pour every last penny into it with zero expectations of a profit. One does not require a monetary return on investment when one is creating a deity who will, in turn, make one immortal.

But while the Silicon Valley techfucks are gripped by religious insanity, they still need the money flowing from outside investors, and they WILL want to see progress and profit. Sooner than later. When that doesn’t happen, because the broken junk AI Silicon Valley is producing will not generate a fraction of the money it’s consuming, that funding is going to dry up. The hype will be over, just like it was back in the 90s.

Now, the hype did eventually deliver, of course. Can you even imagine the world without the internet? As much as I hate Silicon Valley and the tech fucksticks, I’d hate to go offline forever. Bleh. And here’s the thing - AI WILL work someday. It’s inevitable. We will figure out how to write programs that do the things we dreamed of on Star Trek.

That’s not going to be the sloppy large language models we’re pumping out now. Those are just lazy predictive programs that guess what the next word should be, gobbling up other people’s work and pumping out mimicry instead of understanding what is being asked of it. We’ll get to the real thing someday, just like we got to the real internet after the frenzied hype of the dotcom era imploded.

But first, we have to get past the implosion, and this is where we have to prepare.

After the 2008-2009 collapse, the public was enraged at the Wall Street scumbags who engineered the crash. We wanted heads to roll and we were going to get it, too. Then the “Tea Party” appeared out of thin air to blame…“taxes?” Also, they blamed Obama, who wasn’t even president when the economy collapsed in the most spectacular fashion in 100 years.

The press was quick to gobble up the myth that the Tea Party was 100% grassroots. Totally authentic! Honest! Please ignore how well-funded it is and how it appears to be completely controlled by the Koch Brothers. Shoo! This is not fake at all!

And so America went from demanding the heads of CEOs to…being mad about a Black president and threatening to murder Democrats right after Republicans and Wall Street put millions of them out of work, and made their homes and life savings vanish.

Think they’re not planning to do that again? They absolutely fucking are. They control social media and most of the legacy press. They will tell the public who to blame, and Tea Party 2.0 will be born. Totally organic. We swear!

Republicans also foisted “austerity” on us, so watch for that to come around again. You remember austerity, don’t you? All government services needed to be cut because America had to “tighten its belt.” We’ll be hearing lots of that next year as Project 2025’s economic sabotage really kicks in and the economy withers on the vine. The only way to save America will be to cut another trillion dollars from Medicaid! Also, it’s time to privatize Social Security and Medicare. It’s just too damn expensive for the federal government to run anymore.

By the way, we need to give Elon Musk another trillion-dollar tax cut to “create jobs,” and increase the budget for ICE by another $200 billion. Because America is broke and blablabla “immigrants.”

I promise you, the regime already has a blueprint to distract the public from the widespread destruction the AI bubble will leave in its wake. Martial Law? The Insurrection Act? A few more high-profile assassinations and indictments? Maybe a war with a nearby country and internment camps for everyone from that country. That would definitely keep people too busy to Luigi half of Silicon Valley.

But we have to stay focused.

No, don’t Luigi half of Silicon Valley, although I’m not going to shed a tear when a bunch of MAGA gun nuts take out some tech bros. Populism, baby!

Instead, we have to respond to the horrors the regime will unleash while still demanding the billionaires be held accountable for the millions of lives they’ve destroyed. These are people who see us as not even human. We’re barely even “human resources.” We’re NPCs, “non-playable characters.” We’re not real to them because they’re the main character and we don’t matter. Except when we show up and take away all their toys and money and mansions and compounds and they flee the country to avoid spending the rest of their lives in prison, maybe they’ll remember that being the main character doesn’t mean you’re the hero or that you win. Ask Shakespeare how that goes.

The AI bubble is going to pop. Almost certainly sooner than later, regardless of how unhinged and deranged Silicon Valley has become. When that happens, a lot of people are going to be hurt. A lot of lives are going to be devastated. The people who took a flamethrower to the country will expend massive amounts of effort to make us look in any direction but theirs. They’ve gotten away with this for decades, coming back richer and more powerful after every economic catastrophe. Not this time. This time, we burn down their empires and leave them with nothing but disgrace.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 27 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.