When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many levels, of course. When it comes to art, no one person or group of people get to determine what is important culture and what isn’t. At the present, video games are also a massive cultural force in art and entertainment, with the quality and artistic nature of games having never been higher. And, finally, the bargain that copyright law is supposed to be, where a limited monopoly is granted in exchange for the art it covers eventually going into the public domain, isn’t subject to anyone’s subjective thoughts as to what artforms are important and what isn’t.
When games disappear, that is culture disappearing. When no effort is made to preserve this art, either directly or by prematurely freeing the art into the public domain, that breaks the copyright bargain. The publisher got the monoploy, but the public doesn’t get their end of the deal. Honestly, none of the above should be terribly controversial.
I’m going to try to innoculate against a derivative of all of that for this post by saying the following: it also doesn’t matter if the art that comprises a video game quality is even any good, or if the public generally thinks it’s good. And that brings me to the news that Bioware’s Anthem game will become unplayable next week.
We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem—BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter—to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final opportunity to play one of BioWare’s most ambitious failures.
Was Anthem any good? I have no idea; I have never played it. My comrade in arms, Karl Bode, mentioned to me that he really liked it. Having discussed video games with Karl for several years, that’s mostly good enough for me. Still, let’s say it was trash. It certainly wasn’t a success by industry standards in terms of sales. And none of that matters.
Bioware could have done several things to make this not a story about the pure disappearance of culture. It chose not to do so. There was no working with fans to cheaply or freely license some fan-run servers. No release of source code. Nothing in the reasonably short list of demands the folks that run the Stop Killing Games campaign have if we’re going to let these shutdowns continue. It’s just… gone.
If there’s one thing that is true in art and culture, it certainly must be that we learn absolutely as much from failure as success. From bad art as much as good art. From the niche as much as the wildly popular. But in cases like Anthem, class is cut short and the learning largely stops because it all just vanishes into the ether. A whisp of cultural smoke disappearing into the sky.
And I keep coming back to the copyright bargain. The public is being shortchanged on what it is owed. If this were music we were talking about, or literature, that suddenly vanished from the universe simply because a record label or publisher decided to disappear it, there would be outrage. The same should be true for the gaming industry.
It shouldn’t be that Bioware can at once benefit from copyright law to make money and leave it such that this same law prevents the art from ever entering the public domain.
In the first Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode of 2026, Mike and Ben look forward at the year ahead and begin building a bingo card of things that might happen. They discuss a short list of possible squares, ask for listeners to contribute more ideas, and go few a through suggestions that have already come in. Soon, we’ll release an official Ctrl-Alt-Speech bingo card for listeners to play along throughout the year.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that America had toppled Venezuela’s government and would now “run” the country indefinitely.
Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed to the men standing behind him—his Secretary of State, his Defense Secretary, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—and said: “The people standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it.”
Running a nation of thirty million people. Indefinitely. Without congressional authorization. Without a declaration of war. Without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply.
When asked about the legal basis, Trump cited oil rights he claims were “stolen” from American corporations decades ago. When asked about resistance, he promised a “second wave” of military action. When asked who would govern Venezuela, he gestured at his cabinet and said they would decide.
This is the anti-Lincoln moment. Not because Trump expanded executive power—Lincoln did that too. But because Lincoln used emergency authority to preserve the constitutional framework, while Trump uses it to declare himself outside constitutional constraint entirely.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to save the Union. Donald Trump announced imperial conquest to extract oil. One defended the regime. One destroys it. Trump isn’t like Lincoln. He’s the structural opposite—doing exactly what Lincoln would have fought against.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Expanded executive war powers. Asserted federal authority over states claiming sovereignty. This is historical fact.
But watch what else he did.
He submitted the habeas suspension to Congress for ratification—which they gave. He accepted that courts could review his actions. He ran for re-election during war and accepted he might lose. He yielded power when constitutional process demanded it.
Lincoln’s logic was always this: the constitutional framework faces existential threat from secession, and extraordinary measures to preserve it are justified—within constitutional bounds and subject to eventual constitutional accountability.
The key word is preserve. Lincoln expanded executive power to save the framework that makes constitutional government possible. Secession would have destroyed the Union. No Union, no Constitution. No Constitution, no self-government. The emergency power served constitutional continuation.
And crucially, Lincoln submitted to the framework even while defending it. Congress could check him. Courts could review him. Elections could remove him. His question wasn’t “How do I escape accountability?” It was “How do I preserve the system that holds me accountable?”
That’s emergency power in a constitutional republic. Extraordinary measures, constitutional purpose, ultimate accountability.
Trump’s Imperial Declaration
Trump’s announcement Saturday inverts every principle Lincoln defended.
No Congressional authorization under Article I, Section 8. No declaration of war. No emergency requiring immediate action to prevent attack on American territory or citizens. Just the President deciding to wage war, seize another nation’s government, and announce indefinite occupation.
“Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms,” Trump said from his club. “The socialist regime stole it from us… Now we’re taking it back.”
This isn’t emergency power to preserve constitutional framework. This is imperial conquest announced as resource extraction. This is the President declaring he will “run” a foreign nation to compensate American corporations for assets nationalized decades ago.
The New York Timesgot it exactly right: the events “evoked memories of a bygone era of gunboat diplomacy, where the U.S. employed its military might to secure territory and resources for its own advantage.”
Trump hung a portrait in the White House featuring himself alongside William McKinley—the president who seized the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Now he’s acting out McKinley’s imperial playbook, but without even the pretense of Congressional authorization that McKinley obtained.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress—not the President—the power to declare war. This isn’t ambiguous. This isn’t a gray area. The Founders explicitly rejected giving war powers to the executive because they had just fought a revolution against monarchical power.
Lincoln understood this. Even while expanding executive authority to suppress rebellion, he sought Congressional authorization, submitted to Congressional oversight, and accepted that courts and elections could check him.
Trump’s position, articulated by his defenders, is different: Congressional authorization is irrelevant when the cause is just. Maduro is evil. Venezuela’s people are suffering. Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs. Constitutional process is pedantry when outcomes are good.
This is not Lincoln’s emergency power. This is Carl Schmitt’s sovereignty: the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The strong leader acts decisively. Constitutional constraint is obstacle, not obligation. Emergency is permanent condition justifying permanent exception.
Lincoln used emergency power within constitutional framework to preserve that framework from destruction. Trump uses emergency claims to declare himself outside constitutional framework—to wage war, seize governments, and extract resources without Congressional authorization, without declaration of war, without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply to him.
This isn’t isolated. This is the pattern.
When election results constrain him, he claims fraud, attempts to prevent certification, and incites assault on the Capitol.
When courts rule against him, he calls the judiciary illegitimate and promises to ignore adverse rulings.
When Congress investigates, he refuses subpoenas, claims absolute immunity, and purges inspector generals.
When the Constitution limits war powers, he wages war unilaterally from his private club while his defenders mock proceduralism.
Every emergency claim serves the same purpose: eliminate the constraint. Never preserve the framework. Always escape accountability.
His defenders make it explicit. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, said of Venezuela’s interim leader: “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”
Translation: do what we want, or face second-wave military action. This isn’t partnership. This isn’t liberation. This is imperial diktat backed by armada.
Trump himself was clearer: America will extract Venezuela’s oil, and the partnership with the United States will make“the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe”—if they comply. If they resist, he warned: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”
This is conquest. Announced from Mar-a-Lago. Without Congressional authorization. In explicit pursuit of seizing another nation’s resources for American corporate benefit.
Lincoln would have recognized this instantly as what he fought against. This is executive power divorced from constitutional constraint. This is sovereignty claiming exception to law itself.
We’re not in normal politics. Normal politics is policy disagreement within shared constitutional framework. Should taxes be higher? How should we conduct foreign policy? What’s the right balance of regulation?
This is regime crisis. One side claims constitutional constraints don’t apply when emergency or good outcomes justify exception. The other side keeps pretending we’re having normal policy debate.
When the President wages war without Congress, that’s not “foreign policy I disagree with.” That’s constitutional violation requiring constitutional response.
When the President announces from his private club that his cabinet will “run” a foreign nation of thirty million people indefinitely, that’s not “aggressive foreign policy.” That’s declaration that constitutional war powers don’t constrain him.
When his defenders argue the violation doesn’t matter because Maduro is evil and outcomes are good, that’s not “different political philosophy.” That’s rejection of constitutional constraint as governing principle.
Every act of “let’s debate the Venezuela policy” is collaboration with framework destruction. Not because debate is bad, but because they’re not proposing policy within the framework—they’re eliminating the framework while we debate.
You can’t defeat “constitutional constraints are optional” by following constitutional constraints politely while the other side wages war from private clubs. You can only defend the framework by using every power that framework provides.
This is the regime crisis I wrote about in the manifesto. This is what happens when democratic constraint disappears. This is what Lincoln fought to prevent.
And this is what defense of the republic requires us to stop.
We cannot treat this as normal politics.
Lincoln preserved the framework. Trump declares himself outside it.
Your grandparents knew which side they were on when the republic was threatened. They fought. They won. They built the middle class and the democratic alliance that kept the peace for seventy years.
We will do it again.
2026 begins now.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. This is an abridged version of a version originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
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Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box of her SUV that rammed into another car after she’d been killed for no reason at all.
We have video of what happened. Multiple angles. The Trump administration is lying about every single detail anyway.
Donald Trump kicked off with a blatant lie, claiming that Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
Known liar, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, called Good a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Kristi Noem made up a complete fantasy:
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.
Not a single one of them is telling the truth. They are flat out lying.
Here’s what actually happened. The folks at Bellingcat put together a top down view showing the murder, pieced together from multiple videos:
Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.
This morning (after equivocating all day yesterday, as I’ll discuss below), the NY Times put out a video using multiple bystander videos, showing that the ICE agent (1) was not hit (2) was not in the path of the vehicle and (3) was absolutely fine afterwards (contradicting claims from the administration that he was run over and in the hospital). See it here:
From all the evidence, it’s clear that Good had stopped and when ICE agents started demanding she move, she started to pull around the ICE vehicle in front of her. She paused to let another vehicle drive by her. As that happened (for no apparent reason) the ICE agent who eventually murdered her walked around the right side of her car to the front. As he does that two other ICE agents approach the car, with one telling her to exit the car while another yells for her to move. She then proceeds to try to drive away from the ICE agents. The one who had stepped in front of her car steps aside and then just starts madly firing at her head.
He murdered her. And Trump and his cronies are lying about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word.
This isn’t the first time ICE has killed someone. This is actually the ninth such shooting by an ICE agent since September, every single one of which involved an ICE agent blatantly violating policy by firing into a vehicle. This is at least the second outright murder, as opposed to attempted murder.
While ICE conveniently took down its page describing this (got something to hide?), the official policy is that “firearms shall not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.” Also, “discharging a firearm from a moving vehicle is prohibited.” There are some limited exceptions, but they appear to apply solely to a case where the car is driving directly at an ICE agent.
ICE shouldn’t even be in Minneapolis. It shouldn’t be anywhere. It shouldn’t exist. Nor should it ever have existed, as many of us have warned for many, many years. When we first started writing about ICE over 15 years ago, it was already a lawless organization.
This murder of an American citizen on a quiet street—someone who was just there to observe and monitor ICE agents kidnapping people—exemplifies why ICE is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We’re talking about a masked federal police force, operating in secret, with no apparent limits, no meaningful rules, and no consequences for violence. They’re engaging in lethal force against anyone—citizens and non-citizens alike—because they’ve been given implicit permission by the White House to do whatever they want. MAGA folks mock the Gestapo comparison, but what else do you call an unaccountable secret police force that operates with impunity, murders citizens in broad daylight, and then lies about it with the full backing of the state?
Further, as detailed in the Court’s factual findings, agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders…. While the Court acknowledges that some unruly individuals have been present during these gatherings, their presence among “peaceful protestors, journalists and legal observers does not give Defendants a blank check to employ unrestricted use of crowd control weapons,” and, in many of the instances in which agents deployed less lethal munitions, they did not direct the force anywhere near such bad actors…. Agents’ “use of indiscriminate weapons against all protesters—not just the violent ones—supports the inference that federal agents were substantially motivated by Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment activity.”
Judge Ellis also called out DHS’s systematic lying—the same pattern we’re seeing now:
While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent
And yes, they will lie in the face of directly contradictory video evidence. Judge Ellis again:
Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. Buta review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claimsthat their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
A federal judge warned us six weeks ago that DHS and ICE would likely kill people and lie about it even when video proved them wrong. Yesterday proved her right. Again.
I had a few other stories I planned to write up on Wednesday, not to mention taking care of some other work, and I spent most of the day just unable to do anything, feeling sick to my stomach.
Yes, this happens in America (and elsewhere), but it shouldn’t. This is fucked up.
As 404 Media points out, this has become the standard course of action by the Trump admin these days.
This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt.
And, again, why the fuck is ICE even in Minneapolis anyway? Because a small-time MAGA grifter YouTuber made a misleading video a few weeks ago claiming day care centers in Minneapolis were running a scam. His “evidence”? The day cares had locked doors and wouldn’t let him in with his cameras—which is what day cares do when random people show up demanding entry.
Noem is claiming that ICE had to be in Minneapolis based on her lies that the city is “dangerous” and full of “criminals” who don’t belong there. But as multiple people have pointed out there has been only one murder in Minneapolis in 2026.
It was the one committed by this ICE agent yesterday.
The Trump MAGA DHS position is that if you don’t immediately submit in every possible way, they will frame you as a “threat” who they can kill with impunity. Defector’s summary is exactly right:
Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them….
In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It’s punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.
And, of course, the compliant media is playing its part. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post initially embraced the view-from-nowhere approach of claiming the events around the shooting are “disputed.”
Come the fuck on. Five hours later and the headline is still about a disputed shooting. Just a basic lack of courage to acknowledge the obvious.
The old journalism joke is that if one person tells you it’s sunny outside and the other says it’s raining, you don’t report that the weather is disputed. You go the fuck outside and check. We have the video here. Multiple angles. It shows exactly what happened. But the Times and Post were treating the administration’s obvious lies as equally valid to the documented evidence because… why? Because acknowledging that a federal agency will murder a citizen and then lie about it in the face of video evidence is too uncomfortable? This isn’t neutral journalism—it’s active complicity in state violence. When the media treats documented murder and transparent lies as a “dispute,” they’re telling every ICE agent that there will be no accountability, no matter how clear the evidence.
Yes, eventually, this morning, both the NY Times and the Washington Post published more thorough investigations, showing that the administration is lying. But they let the “dispute” stand for 24 hours, allowing the administration to set the narrative that will live on. And even now they’re using equivocal language. The Post’s story talks about how the video evidence “raises questions about” what the admin is saying, rather than just coming out and saying that they’re LYING.
And I won’t get into how state media like Fox News is reporting on this: focusing on whatever it could dig up about Good to mock her, as if anything in her personal life or views somehow justifies her being murdered. Or all the GOP elected officials going on TV trying to pretend that she might have deserved to have been murdered in the street.
Yes, I know that in these tribal times so many people are playing the team sports thing of just immediately defending their cult leader. Going on X and looking around, you see just an overwhelming flood of absolute bullshit from MAGA folks cracking jokes (remember when they wanted people fired for joking about Charlie Kirk’s murder?) and trying to spin the story, knowing full well it’s all bullshit.
But some are seeing through it. A neighbor near where the murder happened, who identified himself as “right leaning,” admitted that the situation shook him, as “this is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”
Really worth watching this interview with a bystander who witnessed the ICE shooting in Minneapolis: "I'm pretty right-leaning. But seeing this, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America.”
He’s right. And it is beyond disgusting that so many powerful forces in our government and the media are trying to twist and manipulate the story to justify an out of control ICE.
The only appropriate response here is to shut down ICE. Shut down DHS. Yes, there are important and necessary roles in DHS, but they existed without DHS before it was formed two decades ago, and we can redistribute those roles elsewhere in the federal government. But we don’t need ICE. We don’t need a secret federal police that goes around in masks kidnapping and murdering people.
It’s about as un-American as you can imagine.
This murder has at least appeared to wake some politicians from their slumber. We’ve seen multiple Democratic politicians, especially in Minnesota, speak out as forcefully as I’ve seen politicians speak out in years, telling ICE to get the fuck out of Minneapolis and calling out the administration’s lies directly. That matters. When officials with actual power are willing to name the truth—that ICE murdered a citizen and the administration is lying about it—it creates space for others to do the same.
But also thousands came out to memorialize Renee Nicole Good, in the freezing cold in a Minneapolis January. Hundreds turned up at a training session for legal observers, even as hundreds more are already patrolling Minneapolis, observing ICE’s illegal actions, and doing so knowing that ICE and DHS won’t hesitate to shoot them dead.
That’s what a movement looks like when institutions fail. Not waiting for someone to save us, but showing up in the freezing cold to say: you will not do this in our name. You will not kill our neighbors without witness. You will not lie about it unchallenged.
I’m going to leave this post up for a while before we post anything else. This matters more than the usual tech policy stories right now.
There are plenty of things going on that are infuriating. Ever day this administration finds new ways to spit on the Constitution. We’re still dealing with the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and apparent plans to attack multiple other nations around the Western Hemisphere.
But Renee Nicole Good’s murder cuts through all of that noise. A masked federal agent murdered an American citizen in broad daylight for no reason at all. The administration lied about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word. The media called it “disputed.” And thousands of people said no.
The institutional guardrails have failed. The courts warned us this would happen and it happened anyway. The media won’t hold power accountable. So the work falls to us—to show up, to document, to refuse to accept the lies, to make the cost of this violence too high to sustain.
ICE must be abolished. This cannot stand. And anyone who makes excuses for what happened yesterday has chosen a side, and it’s not the side of America or freedom or anything resembling justice.
Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a citizen murdered by her own government for the crime of existing near an ICE agent having a bad day. Remember her name. Remember what they did. And remember that they lied about it even with the cameras rolling.
Last year we noted how the Trump organization had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. It was barely even a “phone company”; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.
The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to be a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone the Trump org claimed would be “proudly designed and built in the United States” and released sometime last August. Not only was the device never going to be made in the States (all mention of that was quickly stripped from press materials), the August launch date came and went with no Trump phone.
With 2025 over there’s still no sign of the device. And the delay is being blamed on the government shutdown, despite the fact this device doesn’t have anything to do with the government (outside of trying to make a lazy buck off the Presidency):
“Though Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — the president’s two oldest sons — initially said that the gold-coloredsmartphone would come out in August, a Trump Mobile customer service representative told Business Insider that the phone won’t be shipped until the end of January 2026, a delay they partially attributed to the recent government shutdown.”
The phone, had it actually become available, appears to just be a sloppy reskin of a much cheaper sub-$200 phone produced in China; ironic coming from the MAGA folks who’ve spent the last decade whining about the national security threats posed by Chinese companies like Huawei and TikTok. The delays are also quite likely caused by either rank incompetence or the pointless tariffs, which they obviously can’t admit.
This was such a lazy grift that not only is there no phone, the Trump Mobile X account hasn’t posted since August. Despite the endless delays, the company is still taking $100 down payments from rubes. Normally here is where regulators might step in to penalize the company for its empty promises, but since Trump has destroyed what was left of U.S. consumer protection, that’s obviously not happening.
The project is run by the Presidents’ two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, who clearly can’t even grift competently and continue to make third world dictatorships seem like an upgrade over our dim, clumsy-ass nepobaby kakistocracy.