In January 2011, a man in Tahrir Square held up a handwritten sign that read “Facebook: against every unjust.” Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Same exact platform. Radically different relationship to power.
That contrast is the starting point for a piece I’ve spent the last month working on, published yesterday at Liberalism.org, exploring the intersection of decentralization and democracy: Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet. It tries to explain how the internet technology we were told would liberate us is now being used as part of an authoritarian crackdown on rights and freedoms — and, more importantly, why that outcome was arguably built into the architecture from the start.
The key argument builds on Cory Doctorow’s encapsulation of how centralized systems get enshittified — big companies take control of chokepoints to extract ever-greater value from users — but extends it to show how those same chokepoints become targets for political manipulation as well. It also makes the case that infrastructure choices are far from neutral — they shape the incentives that determine who ends up with power:
What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful.
By 2025, everyone had figured it out.
This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentrate power or that distribute it. It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes. And once you’ve built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing.
That’s the Doctorow half of the argument — enshittification, the corporate extraction playbook. But the piece extends it into territory Doctorow didn’t name: despotification, the political analog, where the same chokepoints that enable corporate extraction also enable authoritarian control:
The problem of centralized systems is that they create an irresistible temptation to control and exploit. Users who found value early on feel stuck: they can leave, but doing so means abandoning their community. That lack of easy exit creates lock-in, and lock-in enables enshittification.
And the same chokepoints that let companies extract value also let governments extract power. Those seeking control hunt up and down the network stack for leverage, and centralized providers concentrate it.
Call this despotification: the political analog of enshittification, where the same chokepoints get exploited to extract compliance from platforms—and ultimately to gain control over what people can say and hear.
The temptation of those in power to twist the knobs to their liking became irresistible. This took many forms: X downranking posts with links to external sites, Amazon choosing which products to show you as the promoted results, Instagram choosing which content deserves to be sent to you as a reminder notification, Substack choosing which newsletters to suggest to you. Each of these choices can be tweaked in ways that enable greater usage, engagement, and revenue, and not necessarily in the interests of the users.
But the piece doesn’t just diagnose the problem — it argues that none of this is inevitable. The same way democracy requires active defense, so does a genuinely decentralized internet:
Decentralization, like democracy itself, is something we have to fight for. Absent deliberate effort, the default trajectory runs toward centralization, because centralization is convenient, and convenience wins in the short term.
Which means the decentralized alternatives have to be genuinely better, not just philosophically purer. The centralized platforms won the last round because they removed friction. They didn’t ask users to manage config files or understand network topology—they said “click here and it works,” and most people took that deal. Any decentralized successor that requires users to become their own sysadmins will lose the same way the last generation of open protocols lost.
What’s different now is that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to having decentralized systems that are actually more convenient and more empowering, where the user experience is competitive with the centralized incumbents, and the democratic benefits come built in rather than bolted on. The goal is to build systems where those two things point in the same direction.
There’s a lot more in the full piece, including a section on how this same chokepoint logic is already being embedded into the infrastructure of whatever comes next — and why the architectural decisions being made right now will matter as much as anything that happened with social media.
Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored to shape what people can see, say, and share. In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded.
In 2011, when protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond used social media to broadcast their uprisings to the world, many observers heralded a new era of networked freedom. Governments, however, responded quickly by developing and refining systems of control that have only grown more sophisticated over time. Today’s landscape of regulation, blackouts, and degraded networks reflects that trajectory, as early experiments in censorship and disruption have hardened into a durable system of control—what began as an emergency measure has become a normalized infrastructure of control.
A Brief History of Internet Shutdowns
Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown wasn’t the first. Although the government’s heavy-handed response after just two days of protests caught the world’s attention, Guinea, Nepal, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries had previously enacted shutdowns. But Egypt marked a turning point. In the years that followed, shutdowns increased sharply worldwide, suggesting that governments had taken note—adopting network disruptions as a tactic for suppressing dissent and limiting the flow of information within and beyond their borders.
On January 28, 2011, at 12:34 a.m. local time, five of Egypt’s internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their networks. At least one provider—Noor, which also hosted the Egyptian stock exchange—remained online, leaving only about 7% of the country connected.
In the aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, rights groups sought to understand how such a sweeping shutdown had been possible—and how future incidents might be prevented. There was no centralized “kill switch.” Instead, authorities leveraged the country’s highly consolidated telecommunications sector, which all operate by government license. With only a handful of ISPs, a small number of directives was enough to bring most of the network offline.
In the years following Egypt’s 2011 shutdown, telecommunications companies—many of which had been directly implicated in enabling state-ordered disruptions—began to organize around a shared set of human rights challenges. Beginning that same year, a group of operators and vendors quietly convened to examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights applied to their sector, particularly in contexts where government demands could translate into sweeping restrictions on access. By 2013, this effort had formalized into the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, bringing together major global firms to develop common principles on freedom of expression and privacy and, through a partnership with the Global Network Initiative, engage more directly with civil society. The initiative reflected a growing recognition that telecom companies—unlike platforms—operate at a critical chokepoint in the network. But it also underscored the limits of voluntary approaches: while the Dialogue helped establish shared norms, it did little to constrain the legal and political pressures that continue to drive shutdowns—or to prevent companies from complying with them.
From Emergency Measure to Legal Authority
If the early aughts were defined by improvised shutdowns, the years since have seen governments formalize their power to control networks. What was once exceptional is now often embedded in law.
In India, the 2017 Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules—issued under the Telegraph Act—provided a clear legal pathway for cutting connectivity. The Telecommunications Act, 2023, further entrenched the government’s ability to enact shutdowns, granting the central and state governments, or “authorised officers” the power to suspend telecommunications services in the interest of public safety or sovereignty, or during emergencies. The government has used these measures repeatedly, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir. India’s Software Freedom Law Centre’s Shutdown Tracker shows India as instigating more than 900 shutdowns, 447 of which were in Jammu and Kashmir.
In Kazakhstan, shutdowns have also become common. Over the years, the government has passed legislation that allows state agencies to shut down the internet. The 2012 law on national security enabled the government to disrupt communications channels during anti-terrorist operations and to contain riots. In 2014 and 2016, laws were further amended to expand the number of actors able to shut down the internet without a court decision, and a government decree in 2018 enabled shutdowns in the event of a “social emergency.”
Elsewhere, governments have built or expanded legal and technical frameworks that enable similar control over information flows. Ethiopia’s state-dominated telecom sector has facilitated sweeping shutdowns during periods of conflict, including the war in Tigray, where the internet was disconnected for more than two years. In Iran, authorities have developed regulatory and infrastructural capacity to isolate domestic networks from the global internet, allowing them to restrict external visibility while maintaining limited internal connectivity. This year alone, Iranians have spent one third of the year offline. And amidst the ongoing war, Iranian officials have made it clear that the internet is a privilege for those who toe the government’s official line.
Even where laws do not explicitly authorize shutdowns, broadly worded provisions around national security or public order are routinely used to justify them. The result is a growing legal architecture that treats network disruptions not as extraordinary measures, but as standard tools for managing populations.
When that authority is exercised over a population beyond a state’s own citizens, the consequences can be even more severe. Israel’s Ministry of Communications controls the flow of communications in and out of Palestine and has used that power to shut down internet access during periods of conflict. Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has experienced repeated outages, and experts now estimate that roughly 75% of its telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged—leaving essential services severely disrupted.
Elections and the Expansion of Control
Historically, most blackouts have occurred during moments of intense political tension. But authorities are increasingly using them as a tool to preempt dissent.
In 2024, as more than half the world’s population headed to the polls, shutdowns followed. That year alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded, surpassing the previous record set just a year earlier. The geographic spread also widened significantly, with shutdowns affecting more countries than ever before. The Comoros imposed a shutdown for the first time, while other countries, such as Mauritius, instituted broad bans on social media platforms during elections.
What stands out is not just the scale, but the normalization. Notably, the number of shutdowns in 2025 broke the record set the year prior. Whereas network disruptions were once a rare occurrence, they are now a routine measure, increasingly treated by authorities as a standard response to periods of heightened political sensitivity.
Civil Society Fights Back
Governments use all sorts of justifications—national security, curbing the spread of disinformation, and even preventingstudents from cheating on exams—for internet shutdowns. But civil society is watching, and documenting, network disruptions and their impact on citizens.
In 2016, as shutdowns became an increasingly common tool of state control, Access Now launched the #KeepItOn campaign to coordinate global advocacy against network disruptions. The campaign includes a coalition composed of 345 advocacy groups (including EFF), research centers, detection networks, and others who work together to report on, and fight back against, internet shutdowns. Anyone can get involved by signing on to campaign action alerts, sharing their story, or reporting a shutdown in their jurisdiction.
Ending this harmful practice remains the goal. In 2016, the UN passed a landmark resolution supporting human rights online and condemning internet shutdowns, and UN agencies have continued to warn against the practice. But the fight to change government practices remains an uphill battle, leading civil society—and even companies—to get creative.
During repeated shutdowns in Gaza, grassroots efforts mobilised to distribute eSIMs so Palestinians could stay connected. In 2024, EFF recognized Connecting Humanity, a Cairo-based non-profit providing eSIM access in Gaza, with its annual award for its vital work. Satellite internet such as Starlink has been supplied to people in Ukraine and Iran, though it, too, is not immune to state control. Alongside these efforts, civil society continues to share practical guidance on circumventing shutdowns and maintaining access to information.
EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world—and we’ll continue to fight back against internet shutdowns wherever they occur.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog. This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Read the rest of the series here.
In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.
They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.
Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.
With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.
Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?
ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.
The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.
Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.
At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.
What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.
Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms.
“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”
Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.
But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found.
ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.
Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr.
The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.
These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.
ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.
ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting.
The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.
“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”
Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.
A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls.
Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.
Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.
“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”
The Dismantling
Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.
The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.
CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.
After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.
Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA.
Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas.
“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”
A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.
It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted.
The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes.
First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election.
A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”
However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.
“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”
The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.
Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)
Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics.
After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.
A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.
But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. This largely started last spring after Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, put out a memo saying their mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections.
“It’s just a shocking and depressing reversal of the federal government’s role in making real the promise of nondiscrimination in voting and racial equality,” said Anna Baldwin, an appellate attorney for the Civil Rights Division who resigned last year and is now one of those litigating against the Justice Department in a new role at Campaign Legal Center.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to specific questions about the dismantling of the Public Integrity Section or the change in mission for the Civil Rights Division.
In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, DOJ and other departments have left or been fired, ProPublica found.
Team America
Late last summer, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees began convening at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters.
The group — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — looked for federal levers it could pull to make Trump’s March executive order about elections a reality, an effort that has not been previously reported.
They represented the new type of people running the show.
Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz had co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about Antrim County.
Despite the setbacks the executive order had met with in court, there “was not a whole lot of discussion or disagreement” about acting on the directive from Harvilicz or one of his deputies, said a former federal official who interacted with group members. “It was just us saluting to do it.”
This small group was part of a wider team at DHS, DOJ and the White House seeking to push forward the president’s agenda. Some of Trump’s new guard are well known: After the 2020 election, Patel pressured military officials to help investigate a conspiracy theory about voting machines, according to a former Justice Department official. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment but claimed in congressional testimony that he did not recall the event.) Others, like Harvilicz, are more obscure but still wield consequential powers.
These newcomers are seeking to carry out Trump’s executive orders and are unlikely to push back against his false claims that American elections are rife with fraud.
Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves.
Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, falsely asserted that there were more ballots cast in Pennsylvania than voters in the 2020 presidential election. Trump cited this claim, which has been traced back to her, while exhorting his followers to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization seeking to transform American elections. It is led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Gineen Bresso, who holds a top job in the White House counsel’s office, coordinated with the network’s leadership in 2024 as the Republican National Committee’s election integrity chair, ProPublica has reported. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings.
Experts say these former activists who helped forge a movement built on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are seeking to make sure that does not happen again.
“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government, and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections” in ways that undermine the freedom to vote, said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy legal organization. “It’s not just last-minute slapdash attempts to overturn the results” as in 2020, “but more systematic efforts to influence how elections are run months ahead of time.”
In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump, writing that its employees “are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” and working to “implement the President’s policies.” In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”
Mitchell did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House answered questions sent to Bresso about her connection to Mitchell’s network by reiterating its commitment to making American elections secure.
Through the fall and winter, as the Justice Department demanded that states turn over confidential voter roll information, Team America worked to solve problems hindering the use of digital tools to comb the lists for noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote. Honey and others ironed out the technical details of merging information from different agencies and crafted data-sharing contracts. When Honey or others hit roadblocks, they’d go to the White House or senior DHS leaders who “would come in hot” to clear her path, said officials who interacted with them.
Initially, the plan was to run voter information obtained by DOJ through a Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.
More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them.
While DHS told ProPublica that SAVE has identified more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in the past year, officials who have checked those results in detail have found vast inaccuracies, as ProPublica has reported. Most states — including those with millions of voters — have eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential noncitizens as registered to vote, and far less have ever voted. The DHS spokesperson also called SAVE “secure and reliable.”
As the election approaches, current and former officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Harvilicz and Honey, who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theoriesabout elections, are in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.
It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”
Red Flags
Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden.
In December 2020, just days after Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.
Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.
“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”
In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter.
Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair.
When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.
Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.
Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica.
Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.
An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”
Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed.
With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement.
Trump administration officials also took another step to keep control of the investigation.
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Thomas Albus, whom Trump had appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to prosecute the case even though it fell far outside his usual regional jurisdiction. Albus had been meeting with Olsen since around the time the White House lawyer was hired, ProPublica has reported. (Albus declined a request for comment.)
In late January, the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid in Fulton County — and the agency’s affidavit, put together by Albus and Brown’s replacement, cited a version of the report Olsen gave to Brown as evidence supporting the seizure. ProPublica was part of a news coalition that sued to unseal the affidavit.
An FBI spokesperson said that its agents “followed all procedure to ensure everything was in proper order, and FBI evidence team had the necessary court-authorized search warrant before they arrived on site.”
Ryan Crosswell, who worked in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for around half a decade, handling a number of election cases, called Brown’s replacement and Albus’ involvement a “red flag” because of the unusual circumstances of their appointments.
“They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” Crosswell said.
The Justice Department did not respond to a question about Crosswell’s comment.
The extraordinary raid was also enabled in a previously unreported way by the destruction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.
Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”
Crosswell said, “Based on everything we know, if PIN was still there, we’d say no.”
John Keller was principal deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.
“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.
“Dismantling the Brain”
The week the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots, about half of the nation’s secretaries of state converged on Washington, D.C., for their winter conference.
They had urgent questions about elections for Bondi, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other luminaries who had promised to appear at the event. But none of the headline names showed, leaving conference attendees staring at an empty podium, until the session was abruptly canceled.
The breakdown was emblematic of a widening chasm between state officials and the parts of the federal government that had, until recently, worked with them to secure American elections.
Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview that the trust between the Trump administration and states is “absolutely demolished.”
This loss of trust reflects that election deniers have assumed so many top roles at federal agencies. Honey sometimes represents DHS on cross-departmental conference calls with state election chiefs, an unsettling reality for those who spent years countering the false claims she made from outside the government.
On a February call, state officials expressed confusion about whether the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would still assess their election systems for physical and cyber vulnerabilities. Honey said it would, but Bellows said she’d been told it wouldn’t.
Two DHS officials told ProPublica CISA’s remaining staff avoids election work, afraid they could lose their jobs if they engage with state and local officials. “In CISA, elections are a toxic poison,” one said.
A DHS spokesperson said state and federal officials are still working together “every single day” to protect elections and that “The claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”
The cuts to career election specialists and their divisions have eliminated information channels that spotlighted threats as voting took place, including Election Day command posts run by the Justice Department and FBI. Another information channel, which DHS used to fund, will still operate but will be available only to state and local election offices, not the federal government.
Jessica Cadigan, a former FBI intelligence analyst who investigated Election Day threats, said FBI headquarters’ command post was critical to her cases.
“That is dismantling the brain, if you will,” she said. “They are the ones that piece the whole thing together.”
An FBI spokesperson said the agency will still have capabilities to monitor the situation on the ground through designated election crimes coordinator experts in all its field offices.
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, has come to see the federal government as adversarial to elections and election administration, rather than a partner.
Colorado is one of around 30 states the Justice Department has sued for confidential voter roll information. At least four courts that have fully considered those cases so far have dismissed them, although the Justice Department has appealed most of the decisions. (The others are pending.) Griswold told ProPublica she has added another lawyer to her staff to fight whatever comes next from the Trump administration.
“Donald Trump,” she said, “has made American elections less safe.”
I love America. You’re so fucked up. But I love you.
You’re built upon a beautiful and preposterous idea: that ordinary people—you and I—can govern ourselves. Together. Not through superior intelligence. Not through noble birth. Not through accumulated wealth. But through the messy, difficult, glorious work of reasoning together when no one has final answers and everyone has standing to speak.
Some of us have gotten really rich. Really powerful. And they’ve decided the real problem is that we dare to think we’re capable of this endeavor. This experiment in self-governance. They want to replace your Constitution and its laws with a Terms of Service Agreement. They say the “customer service” will be better. They’re the cognitive elite, you see. And the commons—us—is a tragedy. Unrestrained, we’ll vote for regulations and taxes that will slow the march of progress.
Progress toward what? For whom? Where are we going?
They think they know. Musk to Mars. Thiel to monarchy. Yarvin to corporate feudalism with better branding. A whole apparatus of Silicon Valley intellectuals convinced that democracy failed and hierarchy is the answer. That most people should accept subordinate roles. That the intelligent few should rule. That your capacity for self-governance is the problem, not the solution.
They’ll tell you it’s inevitable. That fighting it is naive. That efficiency matters more than agency. That optimization beats dignity. That customer service under enlightened technocratic rule will be better than the messy democracy you’re clinging to.
To hell with that.
Our nation must be defended, of course. China and Russia are real threats. But in meeting those threats, we cannot lose the very thing that makes us different from them. The reason there is a line in the sand. The reason an American soldier would lay down their life. For freedom. For liberty. For the preposterous idea that ordinary people can govern themselves.
Not so some fucking oligarch can tell us that hierarchy is inevitable. Not so feudalism with Wi-Fi can replace the Constitution with terms of service. Not so the “cognitive elite” can optimize us into subjects.
I’d rather wait in line at the DMV with missing ceiling tiles than take a knee before these men.
Because here’s what they don’t understand—what they cannot understand because their frameworks won’t allow it: the inefficiency is the point. The messiness is the point. The fact that democracy is slower and harder and more uncertain than rule by superior intelligence—that’s not a bug. That’s what makes it worth defending.
When you govern yourself, you make mistakes. You argue. You compromise. You change your mind. You live with decisions made by people you disagree with. You accept that your superior insight doesn’t grant you authority over others. You do the hard work of reasoning together across difference.
They say: inefficiency. I say: human dignity.
The oligarchs look at this and see waste. I look at it and see everything worth fighting for.
They want to sell you the idea that surrendering agency will make your life better. That if you just accept your place in the hierarchy, the people at the top will take care of you. That democracy is too hard, too messy, too slow for the challenges we face.
This is the oldest tyranny dressed in the newest language. It’s the same thing every authoritarian in history has offered: surrender your freedom and I’ll give you security. Accept my rule and I’ll solve your problems. Trust me to decide and you won’t have to do the hard work of deciding together.
Every time, it’s a lie. Not because the authoritarians are uniquely evil—though some are—but because the bargain itself is corrupt. You cannot trade freedom for security and get either. You cannot accept hierarchy and keep dignity. You cannot surrender self-governance and remain free.
America, you’re built on the idea that this bargain is bullshit. That ordinary people figuring it out together beats extraordinary people deciding for everyone. That the mess and uncertainty and difficulty of democracy is the price of being human rather than being managed.
Some days I look at you and despair. At how close you are to surrendering what makes you worth defending. At how many people are ready to trade your beautiful preposterous idea for the promise of better customer service. At how the oligarchs have convinced half the country that their own capacity for self-governance is the problem.
But then I see the governors who won’t bend. The representatives calling for new leadership. The millions who took to the streets saying “no kings.” The jury in D.C. that refused to enforce political prosecutions. The judges still building factual records and defending constitutional constraints. The ordinary people who keep showing up, keep organizing, keep insisting that they have standing to determine their collective fate.
And I remember: you’re not your worst impulses. You’re not your oligarchs or your authoritarians or your accommodating establishment. You’re the idea that ordinary people can govern themselves. And that idea—however battered, however threatened—is still alive because enough people refuse to surrender it.
The fight ahead is existential. The oligarchs aren’t going to stop because we ask nicely. The authoritarians aren’t going to respect norms they’ve explicitly rejected. The establishment isn’t going to fight power because fighting costs more than managing.
It’s going to take genuine resistance. Sustained organizing. Economic power used against economic power. Democratic institutions defended by people willing to use them. Governors who fight. Representatives who mean what they say. Citizens who refuse to become subjects.
It’s going to require accepting that some things are worth the mess, the uncertainty, the inefficiency. That self-governance is harder than being ruled but that the difficulty is what makes it dignified. That waiting in line at the DMV with missing ceiling tiles is preferable to kneeling before men who think your capacity for self-governance is the obstacle to their vision of progress.
America, I love you. You’re so fucked up. But the idea you’re built on—that ordinary people can govern themselves together—is the most beautiful and preposterous thing humans have ever attempted.
Some want to replace it with hierarchy. With feudalism dressed as innovation. With Terms of Service where the Constitution used to be.
I say: Let them try. Let them make their case. Let them explain why surrendering your agency will make you free.
And then let us make ours: that you are capable. That self-governance is possible. That dignity requires the right to fail rather than the security of being managed. That freedom means doing the hard work of reasoning together rather than accepting the easy comfort of being ruled by your betters.
The wire still holds. Not because the forces trying to break it are weak—they’re not. But because enough people remember what you’re built on and refuse to trade it for better customer service.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And ordinary people can govern themselves if they choose to do the work.
I choose the work. I choose the mess. I choose you—beautiful, preposterous, fucked-up America, built on an idea worth defending even when defending it costs everything.
May love carry us home. Not as escape but as reminder that what we’re fighting for—the right to govern ourselves together despite our flaws—is worth more than all the efficiency and optimization the oligarchs can offer.
The circus continues. But the idea at its center—your idea, America—is still ours to defend or surrender.
I know which I choose.
The question is: do you?
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that ordinary people can govern themselves. This isn’t poetry or aspiration—it’s the foundational premise of the American project. And right now, a faction of tech oligarchs is betting everything on proving that premise wrong.
They want to replace “We the People” with “We the Users.”
When Peter Thiel writes that democracy and freedom are incompatible, he’s not making a philosophical observation. He’s stating a preference. When Elon Musk guts federal agencies while posting American flags, he’s not reforming government. He’s replacing citizenship with administration. When Silicon Valley oligarchs speak about “optimization” and “efficiency,” they’re not talking about improving systems that serve citizens. They’re talking about managing peasants.
Because that’s what they think we are. Peasants. Masses incapable of self-governance. Users to be monetized. Workers to be replaced. Voters to be manipulated through algorithmic feeds designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Populations requiring management by those with superior intelligence and technological sophistication.
You see this in your daily life. An algorithm decides what news you see, not your own judgment about what matters. Your feed is curated by systems optimized for engagement rather than truth, designed to keep you scrolling rather than thinking. Your attention becomes their commodity. Your consciousness becomes their resource. Your capacity for independent judgment gets systematically eroded by platforms that treat you as a user to be optimized rather than a citizen capable of self-governance.
This represents the complete inversion of the American founding premise. The revolutionary generation staked everything on a radical proposition: that ordinary people could govern themselves, that citizenship was possible, that republican self-governance was superior to rule by kings, aristocrats, or anyone claiming the right to govern based on superior status, breeding, or intelligence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident” means exactly what it says—not that kings acknowledge these truths, not that the intelligent agree with them, not that the powerful grant them, but that citizens assert them as the foundation of legitimate government. Self-evident to whom? To us. To the people who govern ourselves through collective deliberation rather than submitting to administration by our betters.
Lincoln understood what was at stake when he stood at Gettysburg and declared that the war would determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Not government for the people by superior managers. Not government of the people by technological elites. But government by the people themselves—the radical proposition that citizens possess the capacity to govern rather than requiring governance by those who claim superior qualification.
The distinction between citizens and peasants isn’t semantic. It’s ontological. Peasants exist to be governed. Their role is obedience, tribute, and acceptance of decisions made by those qualified to make them. Citizens govern themselves. Their role is participation, judgment, and shared responsibility for collective outcomes.
We are not peasants. And yet every assault on American institutions over the past several years represents the systematic effort to transform us into exactly that.
The systematic elimination of civil service protections doesn’t improve government efficiency—it replaces professional judgment answerable to law with personal loyalty answerable to power. The attacks on independent agencies don’t reduce bureaucratic waste—they eliminate the institutional mechanisms through which citizens check oligarchic extraction. The celebration of “disruption” doesn’t foster innovation—it destroys the stable frameworks within which genuine self-governance becomes possible.
DOGE isn’t a government efficiency project. It’s the systematic replacement of citizenship with administration, democratic accountability with optimization metrics, collective self-governance with management by superior intelligence. When Elon Musk eliminates entire agencies staffed by career professionals and replaces them with political loyalists, he’s not improving government. He’s implementing his explicit belief that most people are incapable of meaningful judgment and require direction from those smart enough to know better.
This is why the flag-posting rings so hollow. Genuine patriotism implies reciprocal obligation—that loving your country means contributing to its maintenance as a collective project, that national pride entails responsibility for national institutions, that citizenship is something you participate in rather than perform. What the tech oligarchs demonstrate is nationalism without reciprocity: they want the aesthetic of belonging to a great nation while refusing every actual obligation that citizenship requires.
They love America as a brand, as an identity marker, as a territory they control. But they hate America as an actual collective project requiring their submission to democratic judgment, their participation in shared governance, their acceptance that other citizens possess equal standing to challenge their preferences and constrain their power.
Even Steve Bannon—nationalist populist, former Trump strategist, authoritarian movement builder—recognizes what the Silicon Valley faction represents. In a rare point of agreement across factional lines, Bannon has observed that the tech oligarchs aren’t patriots but post-national extractors using patriotic language to disguise systematic looting. When even authoritarian allies can see that you’re not engaged in national renewal but oligarchic capture, the performance has become too obvious to maintain.
Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that self-governance is possible, that ordinary people possess the capacity for judgment, that democratic deliberation beats optimization by superior intelligence. Every accommodation to oligarchic extraction, every acceptance of their framing, every failure to defend citizenship against those who would reduce us to subjects in their optimization experiments—all of it betrays the fundamental premise that makes America America.
We deserve better than this because citizenship is the foundation of what we are. Not subjects. Not users. Not populations to be managed. Citizens.
And citizens don’t wait for permission to defend what we are. We govern, or we lose everything that makes us who we are. The choice is here. The choice is now. History will not forgive us if we forget what we are—and surrender without a fight to those who would reduce us to peasants in a land our ancestors bled to make free.
We are not peasants. We are citizens. And citizenship is not a gift granted by superior intelligence. It is a responsibility we claim, a burden we carry, a right we defend—or lose forever to those who never believed we deserved it in the first place.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
When the U.S. government signs contracts with private technology companies, the fine print rarely reaches the public. Palantir Technologies, however, has attracted more and more attention over the past decade because of the size and scope of its contracts with the government.
Palantir’s two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is used by corporations in the private sector to help with global operations. Gotham is marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and is primarily used by governments.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I’m observing how the government is increasingly pulling together data from various sources, and the political and social consequences of combining those data sources. Palantir’s work with the federal government using the Gotham platform is amplifying this process.
Gotham is an investigative platform built for police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients. Its purpose is deceptively simple: take whatever data an agency already has, break it down into its smallest components and then connect the dots. Gotham is not simply a database. It takes fragmented data, scattered across various agencies and stored in different formats, and transforms it into a unified, searchable web.
The stakes are high with Palantir’s Gotham platform. The software enables law enforcement and government analysts to connect vast, disparate datasets, build intelligence profiles and search for individuals based on characteristics as granular as a tattoo or an immigration status. It transforms historically static records – think department of motor vehicles files, police reports and subpoenaed social media data like location history and private messages – into a fluid web of intelligence and surveillance.
These departments and agencies use Palantir’s platform to assemble detailed profiles of individuals, mapping their social networks, tracking their movements, identifying their physical characteristics and reviewing their criminal history. This can involve mapping a suspected gang member’s network using arrest logs and license plate reader data, or flagging individuals in a specific region with a particular immigration status.
The efficiency the platform enables is undeniable. For investigators, what once required weeks of cross-checking siloed systems can now be done in hours or less. But by scaling up the government’s investigative capacity, Gotham also alters the relationship between the state and the people it governs.
Shifting the balance of power
The political ramifications of Palantir’s rise come into focus when you consider its influence and reach across the government. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone has spent more than US$200 million on Palantir contracts, relying on the software to run its Investigative Case Management system and to integrate travel histories, visa records, biometric data and social media data.
These integrations mean that Palantir is not just a vendor of software; it is becoming a partner in how the federal government organizes and acts on information. That creates a kind of dependency. The same private company helps define how investigations are conducted, how targets are prioritized, how algorithms work and how decisions are justified.
Because Gotham is proprietary, the public, and even elected officials, cannot see how its algorithms weigh certain data points or why they highlight certain connections. Yet, the conclusions it generates can have life-altering consequences: inclusion on a deportation list or identification as a security risk. The opacity makes democratic oversight difficult, and the system’s broad scope and wide deployment means that mistakes or biases can scale up rapidly to affect many people.
Beyond law enforcement
Supporters of Palantir’s work argue that it modernizes outdated government IT systems, bringing them closer to the kind of integrated analytics that are routine in the private sector. However, the political and social stakes are different in public governance. Centralized, attribute-based searching, whether by location, immigration status, tattoos or affiliations, creates the capacity for mass profiling.
In the wrong hands, or even in well-intentioned hands under shifting political conditions, this kind of system could normalize surveillance of entire communities. And the criteria that trigger scrutiny today could be expanded tomorrow.
Gotham’s capabilities may enable government agencies to carry out similar operations on a much larger scale and at a faster pace. And once some form of data integration infrastructure exists, its uses tend to expand, often into areas far from its original mandate.
A broader shift in governance
The deeper story here isn’t just that the government is collecting more data. It’s that the structure of governance is changing into a model where decision-making is increasingly influenced by what integrated data platforms reveal. In a pre-Gotham era, putting someone under suspicion of wrongdoing might have required specific evidence linked to an event or witness account. In a Gotham-enabled system, suspicion can stem from patterns in the data – patterns whose importance is defined by proprietary algorithms.
This level of data integration means that government officials can use potential future risks to justify present action. The predictive turn in governance aligns with a broader shift toward what some scholars call “preemptive security.” It is a logic that can erode traditional legal safeguards that require proof before punishment.
The stakes for democracy
The partnership between Palantir and the federal government raises fundamental questions about accountability in a data-driven state. Who decides how these tools are used? Who can challenge a decision that was made by software, especially if that software is proprietary?
Without clear rules and independent oversight, there is a risk that Palantir’s technology becomes normalized as a default mode of governance. They could be used not only to track suspected criminals or terrorists but also to manage migration flows, monitor and suppress protests, and enforce public health measures. The concern is not that these data integration capabilities exist, but that government agencies could use them in ways that undermine civil liberties without public consent.
Once put in use, such systems are hard to dismantle. They create new expectations for speed and efficiency in law enforcement, making it politically costly to revert to slower, more manual processes. That inertia can lock in not only the technology but also the expanded scope of surveillance it enables.
Choosing the future
As Palantir deepens its government partnerships, the issues its technology raises go beyond questions of cost or efficiency. There are civil liberties implications and the potential for abuse. Will strong legal safeguards and transparent oversight constrain these tools for integrated data analysis? The answer is likely to depend on political will as much as technical design.
Ultimately, Palantir’s Gotham is more than just software. It represents how modern governance might function: through data, connections, continuous monitoring and control. The decisions made about its use today are likely to shape the balance between security and freedom for decades to come.
One of the things upon which I spend a lot of time pondering: watching right-leaning, but otherwise intelligent people in my life look at Donald Trump’s systematic destruction of constitutional government and see just mere incompetence, but generally normal politics. These aren’t people force-fed reactionary propaganda in media bubbles. These are sophisticated observers who, if the same fact patterns were playing out in Hungary or Venezuela, would immediately recognize authoritarian consolidation for what it is.
The only conclusion that makes sense is that some humans simply value tribal loyalty more than truth. Once that choice is made, everything else becomes motivated reasoning in service of protecting the tribe from its designated enemies.
The American right has achieved remarkable clarity about who their enemy is: “the left.” Whether it’s woke ideology, trans rights, Marxism, or whatever dark fantasy currently haunts their imagination, they’ve identified the existential threat that must be stopped at all costs. Once that becomes the organizing principle of your political worldview, everything else—competence, integrity, constitutional governance, basic honesty—becomes secondary to the primary mission of keeping “them” from power.
Donald Trump is obviously a fraud. A transparent con man who has never successfully negotiated anything beneficial for America in either of his administrations. There is no “art of the deal”—just decades of failed businesses, stiffed contractors, and elaborate schemes to avoid accountability for obvious crimes. His Republican enablers know this perfectly well.
But they also know who daddy is. And daddy is the guy their tribe gathers around, however repulsive and vulgar he might be.
Some of these people even recognize that Trump wants to be king. They can see the authoritarian impulses, the constitutional contempt, the obvious desire for unchecked power. But they reassure themselves that institutions will contain him, that checks and balances will hold, that somehow the system will prevent the worst outcomes. What they can’t admit is that institutions don’t constrain themselves—they’re constrained by people willing to defend them. And when daddy is systematically capturing those institutions, placing loyalists in every position of authority, redefining institutional purpose from public service to personal protection—the institutions become daddy’s tools rather than democracy’s safeguards.
Watch Republicans in Congress when Trump prostrates America before Vladimir Putin. You can see the embarrassment in their faces, feel their moral misapprehension at watching American soldiers kneel on tarmac to prepare red carpets for war criminals. They know what’s happening is wrong—deeply, obviously wrong.
But they also understand their role in the daddy dynamic: you give gentle suggestions while you watch him humiliate the country you claim to love. You offer private counsel while publicly defending his “negotiating style.” You express quiet concerns in closed-door meetings while voting to block any oversight that might constrain his collaboration with foreign adversaries.
The same psychology was on display after the Bolton raid. Republicans who spent years screaming about “weaponized law enforcement” fell silent when it actually happened—when the FBI raided a former National Security Advisor for the crime of writing a book critical of the president. They know it’s constitutional vandalism. They just can’t bring themselves to oppose daddy, even when he’s systematically destroying the institutions they claim will contain him.
The “daddy” dynamic captures both the infantilization involved—looking for a strong father figure to protect them from scary changes in the world—and the way authoritarian movements depend on personal loyalty rather than institutional consistency. Daddy doesn’t need to deliver results; he just needs to make the right enemies suffer. And if he happens to embarrass America on the world stage, collaborate with adversaries, or betray fundamental values—well, that’s just daddy being daddy.
There’s a stark contrast here with how truth-seekers operate. Liberals, genuine conservatives, and independents committed to democratic governance don’t look for daddy figures—they look for competent public servants accountable to constitutional constraints. They criticize their own leaders when those leaders fail or overreach. They value institutional integrity over personal loyalty. When Joe Biden’s classified documents were discovered, Democrats didn’t rally around him with excuses—they supported proper investigation. When Democratic governors gerrymanander, progressive activists organize against them. Truth-seekers understand that no individual is more important than the system of accountability itself.
But once you’ve chosen daddy over democracy, normal political persuasion becomes futile. You’re trying to have a rational policy debate with people who have fundamentally abandoned the framework where policies matter. They’re engaged in tribal warfare where competence matters less than loyalty, where truth matters less than victory, where national dignity matters less than keeping “them” from power.
The tragedy is watching intelligent people voluntarily surrender their analytical capacity to tribal belonging. They’ve chosen the comfort of knowing who their enemies are over the difficulty of thinking clearly about complex realities. They’ve chosen daddy over country, tribal identity over constitutional duty, personal loyalty over national interest.
This isn’t stupidity. It’s the deliberate subordination of truth-seeking to threat perception. Once someone becomes convinced that political opponents represent existential danger, everything else becomes tactical calculation. The question isn’t whether Trump is competent or honest or patriotic—the question is whether he’s useful for destroying the people who threaten their vision of America.
In tribal warfare, daddy doesn’t need to be good. He just needs to be theirs. And as long as loyalty trumps reality, daddy wins—even if it means America loses.
Republicans love daddy.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Eight months ago, those of us actually paying attention—not just scrolling outrage bait about Biden’s age or the latest campus controversy, but genuinely tracking the systematic preparation for authoritarian rule—warned that Trump represented an existential threat to democratic governance. We were diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The reasonable people explained, with infinite patience, that we were being hysterical. That institutions would hold. That checks and balances would constrain him. That we were catastrophizing over mean tweets and rough rhetoric.
We weren’t sharing viral clips of Biden stumbling over words or getting worked up about some college kid’s pronoun demands. We were reading the actual plans—the Schedule F preparations, the Jeffrey Clark memos, the systematic identification of loyalists willing to ignore legal constraints. We were watching what the people planning Trump’s return to power were actually doing and saying, tracking the ideological pipelines from Yarvin to Vance, the tech oligarchs pre-positioning themselves for the collapse of democratic oversight.
While everyone else was debating whether Biden was too old or whether DEI had gone too far, we were documenting the actual infrastructure being built to dismantle democracy itself.
Now grand juries are being empaneled to criminally investigate Barack Obama. The Justice Department has become a revenge machine. American soldiers kneel on tarmac to prepare ceremonial welcomes for war criminals. Our financial system is being handed over to crypto fraudsters who’ve paid their protection money to the regime. Civil servants who object on constitutional grounds are being purged. Corporate power lines up to pay tribute in a now-gold adorned Oval Office, each CEO performing their submission in increasingly vulgar displays. And those same reasonable people who were so concerned about Biden’s cognitive decline are explaining why this is all perfectly normal, actually, and besides—at least we don’t have to deal with diversity training anymore.
The Moral Panic That Ate Democracy
Let’s be clear about what happened. Yes, different people voted for Trump for different reasons—some were angry about inflation, others about immigration. But there was a specific class of commentators and self-described “center-left” intellectuals who spent years constructing an elaborate moral panic about “wokeism” as an existential threat to Western civilization.
Bari Weiss built a media empire on the premise that wokeism was a five-alarm fire for democracy. They genuinely convinced themselves that diversity training represented a greater threat than oligarchic capture, that pronoun etiquette was more dangerous than judicial corruption, that land acknowledgments were harbingers of totalitarianism while actual authoritarians were purchasing the machinery of state.
These sophisticated intellectuals should have known better. They had platforms and influence, yet chose to spend years directing attention toward minor cultural irritants while systematic preparation for authoritarian rule proceeded in plain sight. They provided the intellectual framework that let millions of Americans convince themselves they weren’t voting for fascism—they were voting against the “woke mob.”
Was there political and cultural excess on the left? Of course. Some of it was genuinely stupid. But treating it as existential—that was the lie that made everything else possible.
The Reichstag Fire of Our Time
Woke ideology became the Reichstag Fire of the 21st century—a real but limited phenomenon catastrophically inflated to justify the seizure of power. Like the Bolshevik threat that haunted late Weimar Germany, “wokeism” became the all-purpose boogeyman that justified any authoritarian measure, any institutional capture, any suspension of democratic norms.
Yes, there was a fire—some DEI trainings were genuinely stupid, some campus activists genuinely illiberal. But the response was to burn down the entire democratic order to stop it. The anti-woke commentariat played the role of those German conservatives who thought they could use the Nazis to defeat the communists—sophisticated intellectuals who provided respectable cover for forces they claimed to oppose. They spent years building the intellectual framework that let authoritarians claim they weren’t seizing power, they were just defending Western civilization from the woke mob.
Just as anti-communism justified everything from McCarthyism to military coups throughout the 20th century, anti-wokeism became the universal solvent for democratic norms in the 21st. Criminal investigations of political opponents? Necessary to stop woke prosecutors. Purging civil servants? Essential to eliminate DEI bureaucrats. Oligarchic capture of government? Better than letting the gender ideologists win.
The Availability Trap
There’s a psychological phenomenon that explains how even brilliant people became so catastrophically wrong: the availability heuristic. Our brains assess risk based on how easily we can recall examples. The more time you spend thinking about something, the more dangerous it seems—regardless of its actual threat level.
If you spend all your time reading about campus cancellations, documenting every diversity training gone wrong, collecting examples of progressive excess, eventually your brain becomes convinced this is the existential threat. Not because the evidence supports that conclusion, but because these examples are the most cognitively available.
The anti-woke intellectuals weren’t lying when they said they felt democracy was under threat. They’d trained their brains to see danger in the wrong places by immersing themselves completely in left-wing excess. Every problematic DEI training became another data point in an imagined authoritarian takeover. Every campus controversy confirmed their priors about totalitarian drift.
Meanwhile, the actual authoritarian takeover—happening through judicial appointments, regulatory capture, and systematic preparation for ending democratic governance—didn’t feel as threatening because they weren’t immersed in those stories. The Federalist Society’s judge pipeline was boring. Schedule F preparations were technical. The neoreactionary movement’s manifestos were abstract. These things didn’t create the same visceral response as a video of college students shouting down a speaker.
This is how smart people become useful idiots: not through stupidity but through selective attention. They created information ecosystems where campus politics was the main character and everything else was background noise.
The Attention Wars We Lost
The real divide wasn’t between left and right. It was between those consuming political entertainment and those tracking actual power. While millions rage-watched videos of college students saying silly things about gender, we were watching what Trump’s movement was actually planning—reading their own words, their own manifestos, their own explicit declarations of intent to end democratic governance.
The algorithm fed you what made you angry. The anti-woke intellectuals gave you sophisticated reasons to stay angry about the wrong things. And those of us warning about actual fascism? We were dismissed as hysterical by the very people who claimed to be defending liberal democracy.
Every hour spent debating whether “Latinx” was destroying language was an hour not spent noticing that Thiel’s network was placing judges who believe democracy is obsolete. Every essay about the authoritarian dangers of DEI was attention not paid to the actual authoritarians building parallel power structures. Every podcast about cancel culture was time not spent understanding that the real cancellation would be of democracy itself.
The Useful Idiots of Our Time
These anti-woke reactionaries became exactly what Lenin would have recognized: useful idiots. Not idiots in the sense of lacking intelligence—many are brilliant. But idiots in the sense of being useful to forces whose ultimate goals they would claim to find abhorrent.
Their sophisticated critiques of progressive excess provided intellectual cover for authoritarian movements that care nothing for liberal pluralism. They spent years training audiences to see university administrators as the primary threat to freedom rather than presidents who suspend constitutional rights or oligarchs who purchase Supreme Court justices.
The fascists didn’t need these intellectuals to actively support their program. They just needed them to keep everyone focused on the wrong threat while the real coup proceeded.
What Those Paying Attention Saw Coming
We saw it because we weren’t watching the circus—we were watching the crew dismantling the tent poles. While Bari Weiss was building The Free Press to combat the civilizational threat of diversity training. While others wrote books about the dangers of identity politics, we watched the Federalist Society systematically place judges who believe the unitary executive theory supersedes the Constitution.
We weren’t smarter. We just looked at what the actual authoritarians were saying and doing rather than obsessing over cultural annoyances. We read the actual words of people gaining power rather than fixating on some graduate student’s problematic tweet.
And now it’s here. Everything we warned about. The criminal investigations of political opponents. The military being deployed against citizens. The systematic replacement of democratic governance with algorithmic control. Corporate CEOs genuflecting in a gold-plated Oval Office, paying tribute to maintain their market positions. All of it, exactly as those diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” warned it would be.
The Historical Verdict
History will see this exactly as it was: a society that fell for its own Reichstag Fire. Where the intellectual class was so obsessed with the manufactured threat of “woke totalitarianism” that they provided cover for actual totalitarianism. Where supposedly serious thinkers spent years constructing elaborate arguments about the danger of pronouns while oligarchs constructed the actual infrastructure of authoritarian rule.
The reality? The “woke excess” was just democracy being messy—requiring us to negotiate with people different from ourselves. The backlash was already happening through normal civil society channels. The notion that “woke ideology” was on the precipice of seizing total control was always nonsense.
But like the Bolshevik threat before it, the specter of wokeism justified everything. It became the perfect foil for authoritarians to weaponize the performance of liberal values like free speech—values they had no intention of upholding once in power. They didn’t need wokeism to actually threaten civilization; they just needed enough people to believe it did.
Now we’re heading toward a society where your political opposition gets criminally investigated. Where the military deploys against citizens. Where billionaires prostrate themselves before a gold-throne president to maintain their fortunes. Where democracy itself becomes a luxury we can no longer afford.
And the intellectuals who should have been warning us? Too busy warning about the totalitarian implications of inclusive language.
The Resistance That Remains
Democracy can still be saved. But not by taking these people seriously as legitimate political actors. Not by treating transparent power grabs as normal policy disagreements. Not by pretending criminal investigations of political opponents are just “hardball politics.”
And definitely not by listening to the same intellectuals who spent the last decade missing the actual threat because they were chasing phantoms. They had their chance to defend democracy and spent it providing intellectual cover for its destroyers.
The first step in resistance is refusing to normalize what’s happening. Stop looking for reasonable interpretations of unreasonable actions. Stop pretending there’s legitimate debate with people openly dismantling democratic governance. Stop treating the vulgar displays of corporate submission in the Oval Office as normal business relations.
Resistance remains possible. Not through violent revolution—that’s what they want, an excuse for harsher crackdowns. But through the simple, difficult act of refusing to pretend this is normal. Through maintaining the capacity for moral recognition. Through remembering that two plus two equals four, no matter what the algorithm says.
The Joke’s On All of Us
Eight months ago, it was “derangement” to predict exactly what’s happening now. Today, it’s “hyperbole” to notice it’s happening. Tomorrow, it will be illegal to mention it happened.
But we don’t have to accept tomorrow. We can refuse normalization today. We can stop taking seriously the people who traded democracy for the death of diversity initiatives. The bitter irony—that those who complained most about “cancel culture” enabled the cancellation of democracy itself—doesn’t have to be the story’s end.
Those of us who saw it coming aren’t geniuses. We just looked at what the people planning authoritarian capture were actually saying and doing, rather than obsessing over campus controversies. We read their words, their plans, their explicit intentions—while others constructed elaborate theories about why campus activists were the real threat.
Welcome to the future the anti-woke commentariat helped create while fighting their imaginary war against their imaginary Bolsheviks.
But we don’t have to accept it. Resistance starts with refusing to be gaslit. With insisting what we’re seeing is what we’re seeing. With remembering those of us who predicted this weren’t deranged—we were right.
And if we were right about what was coming, maybe we’re right about how to stop it.
But please, tell us more about how the real problem was woke college students.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” — two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he’ll take the latter in the lieu of the former…)
The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s National Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Neat! How did this happen? Well… it looks a whole lot like what’s happening in the USA right now:
New Ideas and its allies in the National Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favor and three opposed.
So, that’s the Congress part of it. Who else has been pitching in with the effort to consolidate all the nation’s power in the Executive Branch? Oh. Right.
Bukele overwhelmingly won reelection last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 that it allowed reelection to a second five-year term.
Things like these once seemed like an impossibility in America. Now, they almost seem inevitable. And while it might be extremely difficult to make this happen as quickly as the world’s “coolest dictator” has in El Salvador, it’s probably neither as hard as we want to believe it is, nor would it take nearly as long as we might hope.
The groundwork for destroying the remnants of a democratic republic is already being laid by the Trump administration. If we’re hoping for an extension of our (mostly) representative democratic ideals, we’re going to need a whole lot more than the obviously faulty assumption our fellow Americans won’t be willing to get stomped in the face by a boot heel, just as long as people they don’t like get the boot heel first.
Jasleen Singh, writing for The Brennan Center, has an extremely detailed report on every effort being made by Trump and the GOP to ensure any future elections (if there are any) will be a.) limited as much as possible to people who support the GOP, and b.) so bereft of security and integrity the GOP can claim any election outcome they don’t like is fraudulent.
It all starts with Trump’s most brazen move — the pardoning of nearly every January 6th insurrectionist convicted of federal charges. This made it clear it didn’t really matter whether you were on the right side of history. It only mattered whether or not you were on Trump’s side. In doing so, he set precedent for anyone willing to follow in his footsteps, providing people engaging in criminal acts with a pretty much guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card so long as their violence is on behalf of the GOP.
Singh’s report is as enlightening as it is horrifying, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’m not going to be able to do it justice with a few pull quotes because there’s just so much being done to undermine the entire election process.
It’s not just the voter suppression efforts, which have been a favorite tactic of Republicans ever since anyone other than white, male landowners were allowed to vote. Multiple aggressive redistricting efforts are underway to throw more votes to local Republicans, and in far too many cases, courts are failing to shut these efforts down.
On the other side of things, nearly anyone or any entity that provided evidence contradicting Trump’s claims about a “stolen” election has been kicked to the curb.
The president and his DOJ appointees have repeatedly threatened to prosecute the election officials who administered the 2020 election. In a March 14, 2025, speech, President Trump stated, “What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country. And the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.” The president has also threatened to target nonprofit advocacy groups that play an important role in voter engagement, election monitoring, and litigation to protect the freedom to vote.
That same month, CISA paused all election security activities pending an internal review. The review was completed in March, but the Trump administration has refused to release the findings. It is unclear which CISA services have been restored, if any, despite repeatedrequests for information from members of Congress responsible for agency oversight. Reporting from April suggests that CISA is planning massive additional cuts.
The goal here is obvious, especially when combined with the deliberate culling of other forms of oversight and election integrity efforts previously provided by the federal government: make every election so insecure and bereft of external support that every election result can be questioned. Of course, results will only be questioned if they don’t go the way the GOP/Trump want them to, but that’s the entire point of this deliberate destruction of anything related to election integrity. Even those simply interested in ensuring the voting process is as secure as possible won’t actually be able to achieve these aims, perhaps leaving some of them to question the outcomes.
There’s so much more in this report. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself. But let’s dip back in for a second to witness yet another aspect of the Department of Justice the Trump administration has dismantled because it doesn’t serve the squad goals of a bunch of GOP members who were fortunate enough to be born in a country they seemingly want to turn into a country people will regret calling their home.
The DOJ has since dropped every voting case in which it had been a plaintiff at the start of this administration, and it has withdrawn its involvement in several other voting and redistricting suits. It also gutted the civil rights division of its career staff. By the end of May 2025, an estimated 250 attorneys making up approximately 70 percent of the division’s lawyers had left the department. The staff of the division’s voting section dwindled from approximately 30 lawyers down to about 6. But the division has begun hiring new attorneys. The voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, a longtime DOJ lawyer who rejoined the department after a stint at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative organization that has for years sued election officials to try to force aggressive purges of the voter rolls.
At this point, even the most “glass is half-full” person will be forced to recognize the glass is at least two-thirds empty. There’s no “it will get worse before it gets better” going on here. It’s just going to keep getting worse unless there’s a sea change in leadership and an extremely focused effort to right this ship after Trump has deliberately run it aground for four straight years. Nostalgia is useless, as is pretending that playing by the rules will somehow return everything to normal. The other side is wiping its ass with every American ideal it can get a handle on. We’re regressing to the mean, which is never something the Leader of the Free World should be doing. If we stay on this path, we’ll be nothing more than a footnote on the wrong side of history.
