Elon Says Teslas Drive Themselves. The Crash Data Tesla Tried To Hide From A Court Says Otherwise

Legal Issues

from the doesn't-seem-particularly-trustworthy dept

Just days after a jury found Tesla partially liable in a fatal Autopilot crash and ordered the company to pay over $200 million, Elon Musk took to Twitter with a bold proclamation: “Teslas can drive themselves!”

The timing couldn’t be worse. Because thanks to a devastating article by Electrek’s Fred Lambert that digs deep into the trial transcripts, we now know just how far Tesla went to hide the truth about what happened in that crash. The company systematically withheld evidence, misled police investigators, and actively obstructed efforts to understand how its technology failed—behavior that looks suspiciously like criminal obstruction of justice, yet somehow apparently carries no criminal consequences.

This isn’t just about one lawsuit. It’s about how Tesla’s behavior threatens to undermine public trust in autonomous vehicle technology at precisely the moment when that trust is most crucial.

Let’s be clear: self-driving technology has enormous potential to save lives. Human drivers cause roughly 94% of serious traffic crashes, according to a decade-old study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even imperfect autonomous systems could dramatically reduce that toll, and we shouldn’t hold them to an impossible standard of perfection.

But here’s the problem: overselling what these systems can actually do—and then covering up when they fail—threatens to poison public acceptance of the technology entirely. If people lose trust because companies like Tesla made promises they couldn’t keep, we could end up rejecting technology that might otherwise save thousands of lives.

The aviation industry figured this out decades ago. When planes crash, investigators swarm the scene, companies cooperate fully with authorities, and the entire industry learns from failures. That transparency has made flying extraordinarily safe. But Tesla’s approach in this Autopilot case shows the exact opposite mentality.

The Electrek story, based on trial transcripts from the recent case, reveals a pattern of deception that’s genuinely shocking. Here’s what Tesla did:

Within three minutes of the fatal crash, the Model S automatically uploaded a complete “collision snapshot”—video, sensor data, everything—to Tesla’s servers, then deleted the local copy. Tesla was the only entity with access to the critical evidence.

Within about three minutes of the crash, the Model S uploaded a “collision snapshot”—video, CAN‑bus streams, EDR data, etc.—to Tesla’s servers, the “Mothership”, and received an acknowledgement. The vehicle then deleted its local copy, resulting in Tesla being the only entity having access.

When police investigators tried to get the data, Tesla’s lawyer literally scripted their evidence request. As the homicide investigator testified:

“He said it’s not necessary. ‘Write me a letter and I’ll tell you what to put in the letter.'”

But the lawyer deliberately crafted the letter to avoid sending the actual crash data, instead providing infotainment logs and owner’s manuals.

McCarthy specifically crafted the letter to ommit sharing the colllision snapshot, which includes bundled video, EDR, CAN bus, and Autopilot data.

Instead, Tesla provided the police with infotainment data with call logs, a copy of the Owner’s Manual, but not the actual crash telemetry from the Autopilot ECU.

Tesla never said that it already had this data for more than a month by now.

When police brought the car’s computer to a Tesla service center for help extracting data, Tesla technicians falsely claimed the data was “corrupted”—even though they had the complete dataset sitting on their servers the entire time.

For years, Tesla told courts and plaintiffs that the crucial collision data “didn’t exist.” Only when forensic experts finally gained access to the car’s computer and found metadata proving Tesla had the data all along did the company finally admit what it had done.

As Electrek reports:

The automaker had to admit to have the data all along.

During the trial, Mr. Schreiber, attorney for the plaintiffs, claimed that Tesla used the data for its own internal analysis of the crash:

“They not only had the snapshot — they used it in their own analysis. It shows Autopilot was engaged. It shows the acceleration and speed. It shows McGhee’s hands off the wheel.”

Yet, it didn’t give access to the police nor the family of the victim who have been trying to understand what happened to their daughter.

Just reading through the summary Electrek wrote about the timeline is horrifying and raises obvious questions about why there’s no criminal liability here:

• Tesla had the data on its servers within minutes of the crash
• When the police sought the data, Tesla redirected them toward other data
• When the police sought Tesla’s help in extracting it from the computer, Tesla falsely claimed it was “corrupted”
• Tesla invented an “auto-delete” feature that didn’t exist to try explain why it couldn’t originally find the data in the computer
• When the plaintiffs asked for the data, Tesla said that it didn’t exist
• Tesla only admitted to the existence of the data once presented with forensic evidence that it was created and transfered to its servers.

When the collision data finally came to light, it painted a damning picture. Electrek’s summary of the forensic analysis is quite something:

• Autopilot was active
• Autosteer was controlling the vehicle
• No manual braking or steering override was detected from the driver
• There was no record of a “Take Over Immediately” alert, despite approaching a T-intersection with a stationary vehicle in its path.
• Moore found logs showing Tesla systems were capable of issuing such warnings, but did not in this case.
• Map and vision data from the ECU revealed:
• Map data from the Autopilot ECU included a flag that the area was a “restricted Autosteer zone.”
• Despite this, the system allowed Autopilot to remain engaged at full speed.

That last point is crucial. Tesla knew this wasn’t an appropriate place for Autopilot to operate, but the system didn’t disengage or warn the driver. The NTSB had specifically warned Tesla to “incorporate system safeguards that limit the use of automated vehicle control systems to those conditions for which they were designed.”

Tesla appeared to ignore that recommendation.

The jury found that the driver in this case bears primary responsibility—he admitted to being distracted and not using Autopilot properly. The jury assigned him 67% of the blame. But they also found Tesla 33% responsible, and that matters.

As Electrek notes:

However, there’s also no doubt that Autopilot was active, didn’t prevent the crash despite Tesla claiming it is safer than humans, and Tesla was warned to use better geo-fencing and driver monitoring to prevent abuse of the system like that.

This case (unlike some other stories about autonomous vehicles) isn’t about punishing innovation or holding technology to impossible standards. It’s about holding companies accountable when they oversell their capabilities and then actively obstruct efforts to learn from failures.

Tesla’s behavior in this case—the years of lies, the misdirection of police, the withholding of critical evidence—represents everything wrong with how some tech companies approach safety and accountability. It’s the opposite of what we need to build public trust in autonomous vehicles.

Self-driving technology can eventually make our roads safer. But getting there requires companies that are transparent about their systems’ limitations, cooperative with safety investigations, and committed to continuous improvement based on real-world data.

Tesla’s cover-up in this case shows a company more interested in protecting its stock price (the biggest source of Elon’s wealth) than protecting lives. And Musk’s tweet claiming “Teslas can drive themselves” just days after this devastating evidence came to light shows he’s learned nothing.

If we want autonomous vehicles to fulfill their life-saving potential, we need companies that act more like airlines after a crash investigation (full transparency, immediate cooperation, system-wide improvements) and less like Tesla in this case (cover-ups, obstruction, and doubling down on dangerous claims).

The technology itself isn’t the problem. The corporate culture that prioritizes PR over safety is.

Filed Under: autonomous vehicles, autopilot, crash data, data, elon musk, liability, self-driving, transparency
Companies: tesla

Trump Cuts Kill The Corporation For Public Broadcasting, Harming All Of Us

Journalism

from the befuddled-and-distracted dept

The U.S. right wing has won a generational war against education and informed consensus with the closure of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB), which states it will being shuttering its doors after being unable to survive recent brutal funding cuts by Republicans.

After the White House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a “grift” last April, Republicans successfully pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated the CPB’s entire budget in July. That vote rescinded the $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting during 2026 and 2027.

In a statement, the CPB said the cuts, which “excluded funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades,” were impossible to survive:

“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said. “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”

Public donations in recently weeks, estimated to be around $20 million, weren’t enough to save the organization.

As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media. A media, if you hadn’t noticed, that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).

One of the real harms of the cuts will be to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.

Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Or “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.

U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media can provide a challenge to their war on informed consensus (I’d recommend Penn State professor Victor Pickard’s writing on the subject).

U.S. media reforms (restored media consolidation limits, media literacy education, bolstered public media funding, creative new funding models for independent journalism) are desperately needed, but authoritarians (and affluent corporate ownership more broadly) positively adore an ignorant and befuddled electorate, easily distracted by propaganda, controversy, and shallow infotainment.

A confused, angry, misinformed and distracted electorate means less informed consensus, which means less organized resistance to their unrelenting pursuit of consolidated power and shitty, unpopular policies that only ultimately serve a small sliver of the the extraction class.

Filed Under: disinformation, journalism, local news, media, news deserts, propaganda, public broadcasting
Companies: cpb, npr, pbs

Mastercard Claims NSFW Game Bans Aren’t From Them, Valve Explains How Mastercard Launders Its Control

Culture

from the nice-try dept

This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religious right to get anything it doesn’t like out of the video game industry—put on a pressure campaign with payment processors, writing in to demand that processing companies stop working with the likes of itch.io and Steam over games on those platforms the group has decided are unacceptable. Couched in the claim that the group was primarily going after games that focused on horrid things like “rape” and “incest,” the end result was those two platforms delisting or deindexing all kinds of adult games that either don’t include that type of content or—and here’s why free speech is tricky—approach those topics not to promote them, but to grapple with the horrors of them in an artistic manner.

Notably, far from any cries that these platforms be more focused in their approach, Collective Shout merely cheered on the fallout, illuminating what the actual goal is here: to make game platforms more puritanical through bully campaigns. These are, it seems, the same people going on book-banning crusades that ensare such smut as Calvin & Hobbes comics.

Well, pressure campaigns can work in both directions, as it did in this case. Credit card companies began getting flooded with calls and emails from the public complaining about these puritanical attempts to suppress video games. It’s only been a few days of this, but apparently it’s gotten bad enough that Mastercard put out some messaging pushing back on the idea that it had demanded these changes of gaming marketplaces.

Mastercard has broken its silence after being thrust into the middle of a gaming culture war between anti-porn advocates and anti-censorship activists. While Valve previously laid blame for a recent purge of adult sex games from Steam at the feet of “payment processors and their related card networks and banks,” Mastercard released a statement on Friday denying any responsibility for a new wave of censorship that’s recently led some gamers to flood payment company call centers with complaints.

“Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations,” the company wrote in a statement published on its website on August 1. “Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”

Got it? Mastercard is not involved in the evaluation of games or their content and has not instituted any new rules beyond those that have always existed, namely that payment may only be collected and processed for “lawful purchases.” Summarizing that statement in plain language would look something like: “Nothing has changed on our end. If a purchase is legal, it’s fine by us.”

Now, that’s demonstrably false, of course. Mastercard has built a prudish reputation for itself in multiple instances, be it pressuring OnlyFans a couple of years back, banning VPN providers, as well as its crusade against Wikileaks.

But this is slightly different. In this case, according to Valve at least, Mastercard is just playing word games.

“Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so,” Valve’s statement sent over email to Kotaku reads. “Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks.  Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution.  Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand.”

Rule 5.12.7 states, “A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.”

It goes on, “The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.”

So, two things to say here. The first is that, whatever your moral stances may be and no matter how they align with Mastercard’s rules above, that rule is a far cry from “if it’s lawful, it’s all good.” Instead, it’s more like “If it’s lawful, it’s all good…unless we determine it’s either offensive or isn’t artistic enough for our tastes.”

Now I could carve out examples of how Mastercard doesn’t come close to enforcing its own rule in the video game space all day. After all, I’m pretty sure I’ve “mutilated a person or body part” in roughly a zillion video games and that the NPCs in question didn’t give me consent to do so. That’s called combat and it’s in a ton of games that you can purchase with a Mastercard. But let’s take a more extreme example within the rule: bestiality. It’s one of those things that sounds like an obvious thing to say: you can’t use a Mastercard to buy a good, service, or image that includes bestiality. But I bought Baldur’s Gate 3 with my own Mastercard on Steam and, as is famously known, the game has a mildly explicit scene in which you, to borrow a headline, “Bang The Bear.” This isn’t to say that BG3‘s scene should be labeled “bestiality” (the bear is actually a druid that transforms into a bear), but it certainly could be.

But the second point is more fun to make compared with highlighting Mastercard’s lies and hypocrisy. Mastercard claimed innocence over the adult games purge by stating it didn’t directly talk to game marketplaces about any of this. But, while that is likely true in a technical sense, all it’s doing is pointing out that the company isn’t even secure enough in its own rules to enforce them directly and publicly and instead are laundering its morality stances through its network of partner processing companies.

The end result is the same: run afoul of these rules from Mastercard and enforced by Mastercard through its processor network and a game marketplace can lose its payment processing partnerships with Mastercard’s network. It’s a complete non-denial and, honestly, of no material use. The outcome is the outcome and it’s clear that Mastercard’s network is in fact doing all of this at Mastercard’s request.

And all for some Aussie puritans that want to foist their morality on everyone else? C’mon, credit card companies. What’s the point of amassing hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap if you can’t tell some zealots to fuck all the way off once in a while?

Filed Under: control, gatekeepers, payment processors, video games
Companies: collective shout, itch.io, mastercard, valve

The Trade Deal Coup

Failures

from the constitutional-corruption dept

As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues apace, and MAGA grapples with the gaslit reality they live in, the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn’t an example of a constitutional coup. It’s actually an exercise in sedition, if one were to avoid putting a finer point on it.

The mechanism is breathtakingly brazen: declare a fake national emergency, invoke emergency trade powers designed for genuine crises, bypass Congress entirely, and conduct billions of dollars in international agreements through personal presidential decree. When Japan agrees to invest $550 billion based on Trump’s “Strategic Trade Agreement,” they’re being asked to legitimize constitutional fraud that exists only through Trump’s personal authority rather than constitutional process.

Our allies aren’t stupid. They understand perfectly that what Trump is doing is illegal. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”—not the president. Foreign governments have constitutional lawyers who can read Article I, Section 8 as clearly as anyone. They know there is no emergency, no “unusual and extraordinary threat” that justifies bypassing Congress to negotiate trade policy through executive decree. They must be horrified by how few Americans seem to care that their government operates through systematic constitutional violation.

They’re also not holding out hope that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with its expansive view of executive authority, will do much to stop this constitutional arson. Foreign leaders understand that when courts create doctrines of presidential immunity and presumptive constitutionality, they’re watching American institutions actively eliminate their own constraints rather than enforce them.

Congress could terminate these fraudulent emergencies at any time under the National Emergencies Act. Instead, Republican leaders have chosen to become active accomplices in constitutional destruction. They literally suspended the flow of time itself—declaring that calendar days would not constitute calendar days—to avoid voting on Trump’s fake emergency tariffs. When that proved insufficient, Speaker Mike Johnson simply shut down the People’s House entirely to prevent oversight votes. Senator Markwayne Mullin confessed the conspiracy on the House floor: “What we’re simply trying to do here is give President Trump cover.”

This demonstrates what a fundamentally unserious country we’ve become, with a political economy increasingly designed toward the maintenance of Trump’s personal power rather than constitutional governance. These vulgar arsonists in Congress have voluntarily transformed from co-equal branch into presidential protection service, abandoning their constitutional duties to serve one man’s authority. Every avoided vote, every suspended timeline, every shutdown of democratic process serves the same seditious purpose: eliminating constitutional constraints on executive power.

Foreign governments make contingency plans that don’t depend on American institutional reliability because American institutions have demonstrated they are no longer reliable. When your legislature suspends time to avoid constitutional duties, when your president conducts policy through fake emergencies, when your courts create immunity doctrines that make accountability impossible—you signal to the world that constitutional government has ceased to function.

Every trade deal negotiated through fake emergency powers establishes irreversible precedent that the presidency can operate beyond constitutional constraint by simply declaring emergencies. Trump has converted emergency powers designed to protect the republic into tools for dismantling republican government itself, while Congress provides the accelerant and courts provide the legal cover.

This is sedition: the systematic subversion of constitutional government by those sworn to preserve it. The American republic is being destroyed by constitutional arsonists who have discovered that the most effective way to eliminate democratic constraints is to declare them emergencies that require bypassing democracy itself. Our allies watch in horror as we demonstrate the complete transformation of American governance from constitutional republic to personal rule.

The United States is today one of the most corrupt countries in the world, as a result of the results of our election last November.

The center cannot hold when those charged with holding it have chosen to burn it down instead.

“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Filed Under: congress, constitution, corruption, coup, donald trump, fascism, trade deals

Another Horror Story Leaks Out From Trump’s Favorite Deportation Hellhole

Failures

from the stripping-people-of-their-humanity dept

Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package — something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of bigotry that serves as the GOP’s platform.

No one in the administration cares about what they’re doing to the people they’re dehumanizing, much less what damage they’re doing to the reputation of the United States. True, this nation has never been perfect, but it has at least occasionally striven to subdue the worst impulses of its leaders and their constituents.

Now, we’re just another shitty nation with a deliberately broken moral compass. Trump could have made an effort to return deported people to their home countries or countries willing to take them if it was truly too dangerous for them to return to their homelands. Instead, it deliberately chose some of the worst places on earth to send people, backing this mass ejection with the perhaps too on-the-nose citation of the Alien Enemies Act and paying authoritarians handsomely for subjecting hundreds of deportees to torture.

Trump — the self-proclaimed artist of the deal — is selling the nation’s soul and demanding nothing in return but sadism-by-proxy. As Venezuelans falsely portrayed as Tren de Aragua gang members are finally being returned to their actual home countries, if not back to the United States to finally avail themselves of the due process rights they’ve always had, they’re letting everyone know the backdrop for DHS sadist-in-chief Kristi Noem’s photo ops is every bit as horrible as even our own State Department has been saying for years.

Another victim of this administration’s deliberate cruelty and dehumanization has spoken out following his release from El Salvador’s torture prison, CECOT. Reyes Barrios — like so many others — was labeled a gang member by DHS/ICE simply because he had a couple of tattoos. (And despite intel from actual law enforcement experts who have repeatedly made it clear in guidance ICE is now deliberately ignoring that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua doesn’t have the rich history of self-identification via tattoo that, say, El Salvadoran gang MS-13 does.)

While it would be dangerous enough to simply be housed with actual foreign gang members who have been arrested locally, the people who appear to be most interested in harming deportees aren’t foreign gang members. Well, at least not the ones in tattoos. Instead, the real threat is the gang that roams more freely through CECOT than even the most powerful MS-13 members.

“The only thing I can say is human rights don’t exist there,” Reyes Barrios told HuffPost on Tuesday. There were “beatings all the time,” he said. “If you didn’t eat, they would hit you. If you took a shower when it wasn’t time, they would beat you. If you spoke roughly to them, they would beat you.”

[…]

Reyes Barrios’ time in CECOT was marked by psychological abuse and “countless” beatings from guards, who hit, kicked, and used police batons on detainees while their hands were cuffed behind their backs, he said.

Once, after he showered at the incorrect time, guards punished Reyes Barrios by sending him to “the Island,” a 2-by-1-meter cell with a cement bed and a toilet, he said. He spent about four or five hours there, alone in the darkness.

Barrios was, unbelievably, more fortunate than others dumped into CECOT by a gloating Trump and the equally abhorrent leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who refers to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator.” You can see why Trump admires Bukele. And you can see how both men truly enjoy the ongoing abuse of hundreds of people who made the apparent mistake of trying to escape the horrors of their homelands and/or scrape out a life worth living in a nation that has attempted to position itself as just such a beacon of hope. Making America great again apparently means destroying every worthwhile thing this nation has ever stood for. And because it’s happening to people too many people in power (and too many people who insist on voting for them) don’t consider to be actual human beings, the people who enact, aid, and abet this cruelty can’t be convinced they’re actually part of the problem.

Filed Under: cecot, dhs, gang database, kristi noem, mass deportation, tda, trump administration

Take Back Our Digital Infrastructure To Save Democracy

Culture

from the a-time-to-build dept

Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you’ll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they’ve built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power.

This isn’t about technology being inherently dangerous—it’s about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove us toward digital infrastructure that mirrors authoritarian power structures. Through bullying, threats, and coercion, Trump moved to turn the chokepoints of the centralized internet to his advantage. The MAGA world discovered that when digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions will follow.

But here’s what the oligarchs don’t want you to understand: the same underlying technologies enabling this power concentration can be architected to resist it. The key isn’t begging for better billionaires or smarter regulations—it’s recognizing that decentralization isn’t a technical preference, it’s a democratic necessity.

The same authoritarian capture that took over centralized social media is already threatening AI systems as well. Just as we’ve watched Musk morph Twitter’s algorithms into X’s non-stop amplification of his personal political preferences, we’re seeing AI systems designed to reflect the biases and political agendas of their corporate owners. But this pattern isn’t inevitable. We need to understand that AI doesn’t have to be another tool of oppression. Designed correctly, it can be a weapon of liberation.

How Concentration Breeds Control

The concentration of digital power wasn’t an accident—it was the inevitable result of Wall Street incentives that rewarded greater centralized control over user empowerment.

Here’s how it happened: investor demands required tool builders to seek ever-greater returns, which meant transitioning from building user-empowering tools to controlling infrastructure. The most successful companies stopped building ever more useful services and started focusing on how to better extract rents from digital chokepoints—the equivalent of privatizing roads, then charging tolls.

These companies colonized the open internet, turning their services into necessary but proprietary infrastructure. They erected barriers to entry, barriers to exit, and tollbooths for everyone else, with your attention as the price of admission.

The result is what Cory Doctorow famously called the enshittification curve: platforms start by empowering users, evolve to capture them, and end by exploiting them. Wall Street’s demand that only investors matter as stakeholders strips away user agency with each step and hands it to corporate overlords.

And corporate overlords, it turns out, are natural allies for authoritarians. When you control the digital infrastructure that shapes how people communicate, learn, and organize, you become an attractive partner for anyone seeking political control. The promise of regulatory capture, government contracts, and protection from competition makes the bargain irresistible.

This convergence wasn’t inevitable—it was a choice made by people who confused convenience with empowerment, scale with value, and engagement with democracy.

The consequences are everywhere: platforms that enabled the Arab Spring and #MeToo are now coordinating genocides and undermining trust in elections. Tools that connected marginalized communities are promoting fascist agendas. And the tech oligarchs who built these systems are now literally standing behind authoritarians at inaugurations.

Digital Infrastructure Is Democratic Infrastructure

Most people still don’t understand the core insight: digital infrastructure and democratic infrastructure are the same thing.

Democracy is the ultimate decentralized technology. It distributes power away from kings and aristocrats to the people—imperfectly, through struggle, but fundamentally. The early internet promised to do the same for information, communication, and commerce. Anyone could publish, reach audiences, and break down barriers between producers and consumers, experts and amateurs, the powerful and powerless.

But Wall Street’s demand for exponential returns required fencing off the digital commons. The billionaires rebuilt the old gatekeeping systems in digital form, turning tools of value creation into mechanisms of value extraction. They offered convenience in exchange for control, scale in exchange for agency, connection in exchange for confinement within their walled gardens.

As Taiwan’s former digital minister, Audrey Tang, explained, democracy and digital freedom aren’t separate concepts—they’re the same thing. When digital platforms become centralized and authoritarian, democratic institutions follow the same pattern. When we surrender control over our digital lives, we surrender control over our political lives.

The concentration of digital infrastructure inevitably leads to the concentration of political power. That’s why the battle for decentralization is fundamentally a battle for democracy itself.

The Path Forward: Protocols, Not Platforms

The solution isn’t building better platforms—it’s making platforms an obsolete concept.

Platforms concentrate power; protocols distribute it. Platforms extract value from users; protocols enable users to create value for themselves. Most importantly: platforms can be captured by bad actors, but protocols resist capture by design.

This resistance isn’t theoretical. We’re seeing it emerge across multiple projects—from the AT Protocol to ActivityPub to nostr. The key insight is architectural: when you separate identity, data storage, and algorithmic curation into different services, no single entity can control the whole system. Users can choose their own moderation services rather than trusting corporate decisions. They can customize their information diet rather than accepting engagement-maximizing feeds. They can control their own data and move between services without losing their social connections.

They have choice. They have transparency. They have their own intentions controlling things, rather than some unseen entity driven by unaligned incentives.

The same architectural principles apply to AI—perhaps the most critical battleground for digital power today. Centralized AI services don’t just mine your data for corporate benefit; they can shape your thinking, limit your capabilities, and make you dependent on their infrastructure. But it doesn’t need to be that way.

We’re already seeing the emergence of open source models, opportunities to control your own system prompts (as DuckDuckGo recently introduced), and smaller distilled models that work in decentralized environments. Projects are emerging to give people more power over their own data, letting you decide how AI can interact with your information, rather than the AI system slurping up everything it can about you.

This isn’t about technical preferences—it’s about the difference between renting someone else’s vision of how you should think and work versus building your own.

The Technological Poison Pill

The beauty of truly decentralized systems is that they’re extremely resistant to capture.

This is what I call the technological poison pill: systems architected so that growth makes them harder to capture, not easier. Traditional centralized platforms become more valuable targets for authoritarians as they scale. Properly designed protocols become more resilient against capture as adoption increases.

Protocol-based systems demonstrate this principle by distributing different functions across services that no single entity controls. Even if one implementation gets captured by bad actors, users can retain their data, connections, and digital identity while moving to alternative services. The architecture makes takeover attempts self-defeating—the very structure that creates value also prevents consolidation of control.

The same principle applies to AI infrastructure. When you control your own models, data, and computational resources, no corporation can unilaterally change terms of service or start mining your conversations. The more people control their own AI infrastructure, the less valuable centralized AI services become as tools of control.

Breaking the Helplessness Loop

The concentration of digital power has trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords—and that learned helplessness may be more dangerous than the concentration itself.

Every week brings demands that tech giants “do better” or that governments “crack down” on platforms. But this approach assumes we need permission from powerful entities to fix the internet. It transforms what should be user empowerment into a performance of powerlessness.

This helplessness isn’t accidental—it serves the interests of concentrated power. The more we believe we need tech giants to solve our problems, the more indispensable they become. The more we focus on regulating existing platforms instead of building alternatives, the more we entrench their dominance. The more we beg politicians to save us, the more attractive these companies become as partners for authoritarians seeking control.

The tech oligarchs standing behind Trump at his inauguration represent the logical endpoint of this dynamic: when digital infrastructure owners become kingmakers, democracy becomes a performance staged on their platforms.

But this endpoint isn’t inevitable—it’s the result of choices we can still change.

The Choice Before Us

The underlying infrastructure that enabled our current digital dystopia can enable something radically different: a genuinely democratic digital ecosystem where users control their own experiences, data, and tools.

But this future requires active choice. It means learning new tools, supporting new protocols, and building new habits. It means moving beyond the comfortable convenience of corporate platforms and taking responsibility for digital sovereignty.

The alternative is continued concentration of power in the hands of billionaires who literally stand behind authoritarians at inaugurations, viewing democracy as an obstacle to their vision of control.

Yes, decentralization creates challenges—technical complexity, potential for abuse, fragmentation. But these aren’t arguments against decentralization; they’re arguments for designing it thoughtfully. Democratic institutions have always grappled with similar tensions between distributed power and effective governance. The solution isn’t to abandon democratic principles but to architect systems that embody them while addressing their practical challenges.

The same principle applies to digital infrastructure. Tradeoffs exist, but they don’t justify accepting concentrated control any more than political tradeoffs justify accepting authoritarianism. We can build decentralized systems that address concerns about complexity and abuse without centralizing power in the hands of corporate oligarchs.

Digital Democracy or Concentrated Control?

The choice before us is stark: do we build democratic digital infrastructure, or do we accept permanent concentrated control?

Digital democracy means building systems that embody democratic values—transparency over opacity, user agency over corporate control, distributed power over centralized authority. It means using AI as a tool of personal liberation rather than corporate surveillance. It means supporting protocols that resist capture rather than platforms that court it.

Most importantly, it means rejecting the learned helplessness that treats concentrated tech power as inevitable rather than recognizing it as a temporary arrangement we can change.

The tools exist. Open protocols are maturing. AI models are being democratized. Decentralized infrastructure is becoming viable. The question isn’t technical capability—it’s political will.

Will we choose the difficult work of building democratic digital infrastructure? Or will we continue asking permission from oligarchs and authoritarians?

The battle for the open internet and the battle for democracy aren’t separate fights—they’re the same fight. The future of our digital lives is the future of democracy itself.

We can accept concentrated control over our digital lives, or we can build democratic infrastructure of our own. The choice is ours, but the window for making it won’t stay open forever.

Filed Under: concentration, control, decentralization, democracy, empowerment, enshittification, extraction, fasism, institutions, protocols not platforms, social media

Daily Deal: The Complete Raspberry Pi And Alexa A-Z Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, Sega, and Playstation games and a personal digital assistant using the Google Assistant API. You will also learn how to build Alexa Skills that will run on any Amazon Echo device to voice control anything in your home, and how to build your own Echo clone. The bundle is on sale for $29.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

The “Warrior Ethos” According To Trump: A Field Guide To Being Scared Of Everything

Culture

from the real-warriors-don't-ban-books dept

The Trump administration wants you to know they’re very, very tough. So tough, in fact, that they’re launching a comprehensive purge of the Naval Academy to eliminate “corrosive DEI programs” and restore what they call the “warrior ethos.” Because nothing says “fearless military leadership” like being absolutely terrified of books about civil rights and the radical concept that people of different backgrounds might have something to contribute.

According to a draft memo obtained by Fox News, the Navy is establishing a “Naval Higher Education Review Board” tasked with removing any materials “deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter progression.” The board will focus particularly on—brace yourself—the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English.

The memo is worth quoting directly, because the language reveals how thoroughly this administration misunderstands both education and military effectiveness. It talks about the necessity of “remov[ing] materials and practices deemed inappropriate for today’s warfighter” and says:

A particular emphasis will be applied on the Humanities and Social Sciences, including History and English. Faculty recruitment and selection processes will be reviewed to ensure merit-based selection that leads to preparing our future officers for leading in Peace Through Strength and then success in combat when the Nation calls.

Notice what’s missing here: any explanation of how studying history or literature could possibly undermine military readiness. The assumption seems to be that learning about the complexities of human society somehow weakens future officers, rather than preparing them for the complex operational environments they’ll actually face.

But here’s the thing about this supposed “warrior ethos”: when you actually look at what the Trump administration considers tough-guy behavior, it’s basically a master class in being scared of literally everything.

A Warrior’s Guide to Being Terrified

Let’s examine what the “warrior ethos” looks like in practice under this administration:

Warrior Move #1: Be So Scared of CBS News That You Extort Them for $16 Million Nothing says “fearless leader” like forcing a news organization to pay what amounts to a protection racket fee because they edited an interview with your opponent—who you beat in the election—in ways you didn’t like. Trump’s demand that CBS pay as part of a settlement shows the true warrior spirit: if you can’t handle a free press, just threaten people until they pay you to go away.

Warrior Move #2: Transportation Secretary Too Frightened of NYC Subways to Ride Them Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, apparently finds the New York City subway system so terrifying that can’t stop talking about how terrifying and scary it is. This is the same subway system used daily by millions of ordinary New Yorkers, including children going to school. But hey, nothing embodies the warrior ethos like being more scared of public transit than a 12-year-old with a MetroCard.

Warrior Move #3: Be So Intimidated by TikTok That You… Wait, Actually, Never Mind That One The administration’s flip-flopping on TikTok—from “existential threat that must be banned immediately” to “actually it’s fine now“—perfectly captures the strategic brilliance of the modern warrior ethos: be inconsistent enough that nobody knows what you actually stand for.

Warrior Move #4: Cower in Fear of Trans People Using Bathrooms Nothing demonstrates battlefield courage quite like being absolutely terrified that someone might use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. The administration has made restricting transgender rights a top priority because apparently, the greatest threat to American military readiness is the possibility that a trans person might pee in peace. Real warriors, as we all know, spend most of their time obsessing over other people’s bathroom choices and genitals.

Think about the operational absurdity here: these are the same people who claim they want military officers, based on “meritocracy,” prepared for complex global conflicts, but they’re prioritizing policies that actively drive qualified personnel out of the service over… bathroom anxiety.

Warrior Move #5: Be So Scared of Accurate Data That You Fire People Who Collect It The administration’s pattern of removing officials who produce economic data they don’t like—like firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief—shows true warrior spirit: if reality doesn’t match your narrative, just eliminate the people whose job it is to document reality. Because nothing says “strong leadership” like being threatened by… math.

Warrior Move #6: Tremble at the Thought of Foreign Students Learning Things The warrior ethos apparently includes being so intimidated by international students that you want to kick them out of American universities. Because clearly, the best way to maintain American dominance is to prevent talented people from other countries from getting educated here, potentially staying here, and contributing to American innovation. Strategic brilliance.

Warrior Move #7: Be Defeated by Windmills (Literally) Trump’s ongoing war against wind energy—claiming windmills cause cancer, kill birds, and are generally terrifying—perfectly encapsulates the warrior mindset. Don Quixote fought windmills as a delusion; Trump fights them as policy. At least Don Quixote had the excuse of being fictional.

Warrior Move #8: Run Away from Public Media The warrior ethos includes being so threatened by NPR and PBS that you need to defund them entirely. Because apparently, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of tough guys quite like… thoughtful journalism and educational programming. Clearly, “Sesame Street” and “All Things Considered” represent an existential threat to American military readiness.

Warrior Move #9: Eliminate Books Because Words Are Scary The Naval Academy previously purged nearly 400 books from its library, covering topics like civil rights, the Holocaust, LGBTQ+ issues, and feminism. Because apparently, learning about American history and understanding different perspectives is too dangerous for future military officers. Nothing says “prepared for combat” like being unable to handle a book about the Civil Rights Movement.

Warrior Move #10: Replace Diversity with “Merit” (But Only Our Definition of Merit) The memo calls for “merit-based selection” while simultaneously demanding that military academics be restructured to eliminate civilian influence and focus solely on what they define as appropriate warrior content. Merit, in this context, apparently means “thinks exactly like us and is scared of the same books we are.”

The Real “Corrosive” Problem

Here’s what’s actually happening: the Trump administration is so threatened by the idea that America’s military might benefit from officers who understand the full complexity of American history, society, and the world they’ll be operating in, that they’re willing to gut educational institutions to prevent it.

The memo talks about addressing “imbalances in civilian-dominated governance that weaken the Academy’s military mission”—but civilian oversight of the military is literally a foundational principle of American democracy. The idea that civilian input into military education is somehow corrupting reveals (not for the first time) a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how democratic institutions are supposed to work.

And let’s be clear about what “DEI programs” actually were at the Naval Academy: they were efforts to ensure that the military could draw from the full talent pool of American citizens, rather than limiting themselves to a narrow demographic slice. The idea that this somehow undermines military effectiveness is contradicted by, well, reality. Diverse teams consistently outperform homogeneous ones in complex scenarios—exactly the kind of challenges military leaders face.

The Irony of “Warrior Ethos”

The most ridiculous part of all this is that the people claiming to champion a “warrior ethos” are displaying the exact opposite of what that might actually mean. Real “warriors” aren’t afraid of books. They don’t need to silence critics or eliminate diverse perspectives to feel secure. They don’t demand protection money from news organizations or avoid public transportation out of fear.

Real strength comes from being able to engage with challenging ideas, to learn from different perspectives, and to adapt to complex situations. The Trump administration’s version of strength looks more like fragility dressed up in insecure tough-guy language.

The Naval Academy has produced military leaders who successfully fought fascism, integrated the military, and protected democratic values around the world. They did this not despite understanding the full complexity of American society and history, but because of it.

Now we’re supposed to believe that future officers will be stronger if they’re shielded from learning about civil rights, protected from diverse perspectives, and trained to see civilian oversight as a threat rather than a feature of democratic governance.

That’s not a warrior ethos. That’s authoritarian fragility with a military costume on.

What This Actually Accomplishes

The real goal here isn’t to create better military leaders—it’s to use military institutions as political weapons. By purging educational content and restructuring governance, the Trump administration hopes to ensure that military institutions reflect their political priorities rather than serving the broader American public.

This undermines both military effectiveness and democratic norms. When you politicize military education, you create officers who are loyal to a particular political faction rather than to the Constitution and the American people. When you eliminate diverse perspectives from military leadership development, you create blind spots that enemies can exploit.

This approach makes America less safe, not more. Military leaders who don’t understand the full complexity of the societies they serve and the world they operate in are less effective, not more.

But then again, none of this is actually about military effectiveness. It’s about using the language of “warrior ethos” to justify political purges and authoritarian control.

And if that’s what passes for “strength” in the Trump administration, it explains a lot about why they’re so terrified of everything else—from windmills to bathroom choices to the basic concept of civilian expertise. Real strength doesn’t require purging books or eliminating perspectives. But real authoritarianism absolutely does.

Filed Under: dei, donald trump, education, maga, naval academy, scared, warrior ethos

Trump FCC Abandons Efforts To Make U.S. Broadband Fast And Affordable

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Section 706 of the Telecom Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed “on a reasonable and timely basis” to everyone. If the answer is no, the law says the FCC must “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.”

For decades, the FCC has tap-danced around this mandate. Corruption and regulatory capture has resulted in a U.S. telecom sector that’s barely competitive, highly consolidated, and dominated by a handful of regional telecom monopolies. Those monopolies don’t have to try very hard to expand access, lower prices, or improve speeds. The FCC has been historically feckless about doing anything about it.

Every so often the FCC tries to do the absolute bare minimum to improve on this dynamic. Like during the Biden administration, when the Biden FCC last year boosted the definition of broadband to a still pathetic 100 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream, pledged to hold gigabit access as a future goal, and made a thin pledge to maybe take a closer look at why U.S. broadband is so expensive.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is killing all of that.

In a flimsy explanation, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr claims that having meaningful standards and ensuring that broadband is affordable are “extraneous” matters. To further prop up his agency’s apathy, he points to the recent Loper Bright Supreme Court ruling that curtail the FCC’s authority to do anything that might upset a big U.S. corporation:

“The Carr FCC’s proposal points to a Supreme Court ruling that limited the ability of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. Given that ruling, “we believe it is most prudent to strictly adhere to the statutory text,” the proposal said.”

We’ve noted repeatedly how this is the legal and logical incoherence at the heart of Trump and Brendan Carr’s FCC. Carr wants to wield FCC authority like a tyrant, leveraging often completely nonexistent agency power to force TikTok to sell itself to Trump’s buddies, bully telecom companies into being more racist, or cajole media companies into softening their journalism of our idiot king.

The problem is, only one side can “win” this standoff, and it’s corporate power. Carr can saber rattle and threaten all he likes, but the primary agenda of Trump 2.0 (outside of the racism) is delivering the final killing blow to federal consumer protection, regulatory autonomy, and corporate oversight.

If you’re an amoral billionaire or corporation with zero interest in a habitable planet, any sort of equality, or functioning democracy, the project is going very well. If you’re an actual resident of the United States, interested in things like labor rights, clean drinking water, or evenly available and affordable broadband access, you are in very, very serious trouble.

Companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon want a federal government that just mindlessly rubber stamps their harmful mergers, then turns a blind eye to all of the harms of consolidation and market failure. And while U.S. regulators were already terrible at taking meaningful action to stop this, Trump 2.0 is making all of our regulatory capture and corruption problems immeasurably worse.

Our broken, consolidated corporate press doesn’t much want to talk about it, but U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight is effectively dead, the impact will reverberate for decades, and a significant portion of the damage of the second Trump Presidency will be permanent.

Even under an ideal situation where Trump authoritarianism is conquered and some sort of sensible alternative takes office, restoring oversight of companies like Comcast and AT&T — both bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance networks — is never going to be a priority in a Congress that’s now too corrupt to function, under a broken court system that treats corporate power as an unimpeachable deity.

If the FCC was a serious agency, there’s plenty it could do to improve broadband access. It could take aim at monopoly power. It could encourage municipal broadband and local cooperatives. It could impose real penalties for service quality and privacy violations. It could implement and enforce consistent standards demanding better of our regional monopoly giants.

With only the occasional short-lived exceptions, at every opportunity the U.S. does the exact opposite, in blind service to telecom monopoly power.

Filed Under: affordable, brendan carr, broadband, fcc, fiber, telecom

‘Hail Satan’ But For Break Rooms, As Trump Issues Guidance For Religious Freedom In Workplaces

Legal Issues

from the Baphomet-reporting-for-duty dept

Trump — perhaps more than other presidents — often feels compelled to present his religious bona fides. Of course, he naturally has none. But as often as evangelical figureheads proclaim him to be (their) God’s personal pick for POTUS, even Donald Trump occasionally feels obligated to give something back to a community that has given him so much and asked for literally nothing in return.

The evangelical crowd cheers Trump on as he sides with Israel’s genocide, something that becomes a bit more conflicted when entities like “Jews for Jesus” mix white evangelical traits with a far older religion that generally tends to reject the supposed existence of Jesus Christ.

While evangelicals do like to throw themselves on the cross on a regular basis, it’s not self-sacrifice. It’s self-service. Christians in America do love to portray themselves as persecuted, as though the mere existence threat of death metal human equality or a swear word within hearing distance is the exact equivalent of being thrown to the lions like they were back in the good old days. (They mostly weren’t, not even then.)

Trump is one of them, at least in terms of converting self-pity to an idiot’s interpretation of selflessness. And he definitely wants those votes. Conveniently, most evangelical Christians absolutely adore periodic ceremonial events, including those overseen by the same government they swear to Gawd might be persecuting them every time their preferred candidate loses an election and/or some minority scores a free lunch at school.

All in all, Christians have it pretty good in the United States. Most people treat them as mildly annoying at worst. And most Americans (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) consider self-proclaimed Christians to be good neighbors, non-molesters of children, and potential sources of unsolicited marital advice.

And, because no one needed this more than Trump — a Christian hero despite his long history of sexual harassment, sexual assault, multiple marriages, sexualization of his own children, cheater at golf, and the proverbial rich man who, as the Bible says, would find it exceedingly difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven — Trump has delivered. We’re getting more religious “freedom” added to our alleged “separation of church and state”, whether we wanted it or not.

The Trump administration released guidance on Monday reminding federal agencies that religious expression in the workplace is protected by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act — guidance that protects employees and supervisors seeking to recruit fellow federal workers to their religion.

Such expressions are protected as long as they do not cross into harassment, the guidance says. Wearing religious symbols and staging them in office cubicles is also protected, the guidance says, as are hosting prayer groups in empty offices and posting about religious events on office bulletin boards.

An agnostic (in the political and religious sense of the word) reaffirmation of religious rights is to be commended. This ain’t that, though. While it might be taken to mean that every other employee can throw down on a rug up to five times a day while facing Mecca without interference from their federal employers, I can absolutely guarantee you this only means anyone mildly criticizing someone for hassling their fellow employees daily about their weekly Bible study will be protected by this new guidance.

The guidance doesn’t seem to add much to what already exists in terms of protection of religious expression in the workplace. But what it does add definitely crosses the line. Listed as examples of protected expression by federal employees are these (and only these) examples:

A park ranger leading a tour through a national park may join her tour group in prayer.

A doctor at a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital may pray over his patient for her recovery.

While it does seem weird that a park ranger wouldn’t just hang back a bit and wait for the tour to finish praying (rather than joining them and giving them an implicit governmental blessing of their religious expression), it’s goddamn frightening that this “affirmation” of religious protections gives medical professionals (perhaps due for a scare quote…) permission to pray to their preferred god in hopes of securing a patient’s recovery. Hopefully, this is something a VA doctor might do in addition to providing actual, science-based treatment, rather than in lieu of anything stronger than some empty words hurled in the general direction of a power whose innate “higherness” has yet to be scientifically demonstrated.

That’s the bad news. The good news anyone of any religion can do a bunch of religious stuff at work without violating this guidance. Sure, there’s some vague stuff said about crossing the line into harassment, but the government bears the burden of proving this. And the fact that it’s the government loosening the reins on religious restrictions, that battle is more uphill than it ever was.

So… you know what to do, government drones? Pick literally any religion (if you don’t already have a preference) and litter cubicles, break rooms, and coworkers’ minds with its attendant detritus. I foresee a huge uptake in non-mainstream religions by government workers, who are now free to ask fellow workers if they’ve heard the good news about Satan or perhaps drape a holocaust cloak across their cubicle wall to inform others they’re not only adherents to the power of fire, but possibly willing to bodily wield it if need be.

Maybe you can just ask the names and sexes of fellow coworkers’ firstborn children because, according to your religion, Paimon will always need a willing (or even unwilling) male host. Those of you uncomfortable with small talk may just want to practice Santeria during allotted break times and/or spread salt around the entirety of the agency campus to help limit demon summoning-related chaos. If nothing else, a pithy ode to the greater of all evils is perhaps all that’s needed to brighten up a dull office:

Let’s just hope this Godsucker-pleasing performance results in a melting pot of every religion Trump has never considered real, much less realized actually exists. Christianity is — at best — running neck-and-neck with Islam. Only a white guy with a shit tan would have pushed this thing through without thinking it through. But that’s Trump for you: a guy who shoots first and fires people who ask questions later.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, church and state, constitution, religious freedom, trump administration