Courage Doesn’t Scale

from the turn-the-volume-up dept

It has been frustrating, to say the least, to watch many of the big Silicon Valley tech firms bow down to Trump and do his bidding, especially when it directly contradicts things they’ve said and done in the past. I’ve tried to explain to tech company execs why this doesn’t end well for them, but it seems it’s a lesson they’re going to have to learn from… what’s that they say…? Oh right, from “first principles.”

Silicon Valley comms expert Aaron Zamost has a new piece in the New York Times calling out the big tech companies for their cowardice in the face of authoritarianism. As he says, “this is how Silicon Valley lost its spine.”

It’s hard to square the idealistic YouTube of the late 2000s with the one that in September paid President Trump $24.5 million to settle a meritless lawsuit over his post-Jan. 6 account suspension.

Big Tech once fought the good fights. Google in 2007 forced the Federal Communications Commission to impose openness conditions on some of the country’s most valuable airwaves, paving the way for the mobile ecosystem we take for granted today. Twitter filed lawsuits to be able to publicly disclose how often government agencies requested user data. Apple in 2016 refused orders to help the F.B.I. unlock an iPhone, defending user privacy even under government pressure. These actions took place under presidents of both parties but shared a common goal — they put the needs of users ahead of the interests of those in power.

To paraphrase the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, the Silicon Valley of the early 2010s was a mind-set, not a location. Its leaders saw themselves as revolutionaries: fighting for everyday people, resisting entrenched authority, all while creating technology that pushed society forward. And the products matched the posture — cellphones untethered from carriers, cars that didn’t run on gas, and pocket-size credit card readers that let anyone start a business.

So what happened? As Zamost notes: “courage doesn’t scale.”

The answer is simple, if dispiriting: For tech companies, courage doesn’t scale.

Google, Apple and their peers now act like the self-preservation-obsessed incumbents they once disrupted. They move slower, talk safer and patrol the moat. They’ve traded risk for complacency — too afraid of offending the president, losing access or inviting a subpoena. Big Tech now serves power before it serves its users.

This is such an important point in a world where companies are desperate to hyperscale, but where scale creates all kinds of new problems. One of those problems, it appears, is that companies are less willing to stick their necks out. Less willing to stand on principle. And that means they can be rolled by an authoritarian who threatens their power.

This is, perhaps, another angle on a number of old axioms about big companies and little companies. It’s another pass on “small companies innovate, big companies litigate.” Or how big companies engage in political entrepreneurship over market entrepreneurship. It’s also at the root of enshittification, where the focus is on how those companies can extract more value from everyone, rather than unleashing more value for the world.

But it’s an important observation about this industry. The biggest players, who came up in a world where they really were disruptive and willing to stand up for the right thing, are now a lot less likely to do so. They may have more power, but courage doesn’t scale with power. So now they act protective of their power, which means kowtowing to anyone who might try to take it away.

And, with each capitulation, the next one becomes easier. They’re all able to be cowards together.

It leads to pathetic, embarrassing situations like this:

Meta is the most egregious example. It sprinted to announce that it was dismantling its fact-checking system before Mr. Trump returned to office, then loosened its hate-speech rules in the name of “mainstream discourse.” By the end of January, Meta had reached a deal with Mr. Trump, agreeing to pay $25 million to settle his lawsuit over being suspended from Facebook and Instagram in the wake of Jan. 6. All before Mr. Trump had spent 10 days back in office.

The surrender is now routine. In April, Amazon publicly quashed reports that it would display the cost of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on product pages. Apple recently caved to pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi and pulled an app that alerted users to nearby ICE agents. This is the same Apple whose chief executive, Tim Cook, in 2017 said, “Apple would not exist without immigration,” and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in criticizing Mr. Trump’s Muslim ban.

The biggest, wealthiest companies in the world groveling, capitulating, and (in some cases) enabling the least popular president in decades. All because he nakedly threatens their own power. It’s pure cynicism over principles. From companies who spent so many years telling us how principled they were.

As Zamost notes, this is really bad in a variety of ways. Having tech actually work well for people, not just as an extractive tool for billionaires, is kind of important. And the big tech players are making it clear that they’re not the ones to rely on for that:

Major changes are coming whether we like it or not — to the economy, to culture, to how we live and work. This is not the time for faith in tech to be at such lows. Adoption depends on public trust, not just in the products themselves, but also in the people and principles behind them. Unfortunately, the tech industry’s leaders have become its worst spokespeople. The problem isn’t their messaging. It’s their credibility.

For years, Silicon Valley symbolized progress. Its retreat from its core values leaves no clear heir — no other industry fights for the future in the same way. When tech is the villain instead of the hero, the future feels leaderless. And a country that stops believing its innovators can make the world better stops believing in much else, too.

Innovation should still be a force for good. It should be an enabling tool for good. But as these companies have grown, as they’ve centralized and consolidated power, that made them targets. Their own scale created their own weak spot. And Trump exploited it.

I am still optimistic that newer upstarts that are built from the ground up to decentralize things and put power back in the hands of users can take up that mantle. But these old guard tech giants had every resource, every advantage, and every opportunity to hold the line. Instead, they chose to abandon the principles that made them matter in the first place. They torched their own credibility for temporary protection from a petty autocrat. That’s not just disappointing—it’s unforgivable.

Filed Under: capitulation, cowardice, donald trump, principles
Companies: apple, google, meta

Cowardice And Capitulation At Cornell

from the not-the-cornell-i-remember dept

On Friday it was announced that my alma mater, Cornell, had caved to the Trump administration and agreed to a “deal” the federal government had offered them to get back the funding it had illegally cut off from Cornell as part of its authoritarian efforts to bully top universities into submission. This capitulation came just days after the American electorate showed that they were in strong agreement that the Donald Trump regime is out of control and needs to be stopped. Doing this now suggests that the administration at Cornell has no business running a top university.

Techdirt wouldn’t exist without Cornell University. I started the seeds of what became Techdirt directly while a student there, and much of the framework through which I view innovation and tech policy came from working with certain professors. I’m taking a moment here to explain why this matters to me personally, because the lessons I learned there make Cornell’s failure all the more painful. As a teaching assistant for both Don Greenberg (who appears to still be going at age 91!) and Alan McAdams (who passed away in 2013) I learned to think deeply about innovation, business models, and policy.

Greenberg taught me how to better understand the trajectories of technological innovation (in 1996 he tasked me with thinking through the implications of both widespread broadband adoption—at a time when most people were still on dial-up modems—as well as the impact of widespread access to digital photography). McAdams, on the other hand, introduced me to the concept of open source software, and pushed me to help him think through why open source software and universal, people-owned broadband access were both wholly compatible with (and, in fact, advantageous to) free market innovation.

McAdams also directly encouraged me to start writing about these ideas and to create a website about them, which eventually gave me the confidence to put together Techdirt. I would sit in McAdams’ office for hours while he’d sit there, in a suit, but while wearing sneakers with the laces untied, going on and on about how too many people didn’t understand how open access and open systems were the secret weapon against tech monopolies. He would talk about how you could use the centrality of tech monopolies against them, by targeting them with open systems.

One other professor who helped shape me was Professor James Gross (who appears to have just retired a few years ago, but appears to still be writing) who taught an incredibly impactful class on “values.” I ended up taking multiple other classes with him and used to go to his office hours way too often, where he was always kind and willing to chat. One of the key lessons Gross taught me was that values aren’t relative. You can’t say “well, that’s different” as an excuse for compromising. If you were compromising your values, you didn’t really have values.

Cornell has compromised its values, proving it doesn’t have them. In their announcement regarding this capitulation, University President Michael Kotlikoff tries to argue that they didn’t really fold, and he asks that everyone read the agreement “in its entirety” before reacting.

And, it is true that the agreement is much less onerous and ridiculous than the ones signed by Columbia, UVA, and Brown (or the one proposed with Harvard). UCLA law professor Joey Fishkin notes that rather than supporting the bullshit racist anti-DEI policies that the Trump admin has demanded of other universities, Cornell only agreed that it would provide that racist nonsense “as a training resource” to faculty and staff.

The incredible shrinking attack on U.S. universities continues.Cornell has signed an agreement—but unlike the UVA agreement, instead of pledging to follow the gov't's highly questionable July "guidance" on discrimination, Cornell simply agrees to hand it out to faculty as a "training resource"!

— Joey Fishkin (@fishkin.bsky.social) 2025-11-07T17:32:09.569Z

Fishkin’s right that Cornell avoided the worst demands—the explicitly racist requirements that other schools accepted. But even this “lighter” version creates serious problems, because capitulation is capitulation regardless of degree. The settlement still includes terms no self-respecting university with values should agree to. It is paying the federal government $30 million for no reason at all. It also is going to hand over “anonymized” admissions data to Trump’s thugs:

Cornell shall provide the United States with anonymized undergraduate admissions data consistent with 34 C.F.R. § 100.6 and similar regulations broken down by Cornell’s individual colleges and schools, race, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests, on a quarterly basis, in a form permitting statistical analyses for each year of the Agreement. Admissions data will also be subjected to a comprehensive audit by the United States. This information will be maintained confidentially and exempt from public disclosure and subject to pre-disclosure notification and an opportunity to object to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, to the fullest extent possible by law

There’s no such thing as truly “anonymized” data at this scale—a fact multiple Cornell professors in the relevant fields could explain to the administration. The settlement language itself reveals the problem: data “broken down by Cornell’s individual colleges and schools, race, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests” creates enough granularity that re-identification becomes trivial. But the bigger issue is that this data will enable the federal government to insist that Cornell is not being racist enough, meaning that further demands, and further capitulation is to be expected.

You can see the calculation Cornell made here. There were hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money that were being illegally blocked by Trump as part of his and his minions’ bullying. So paying $30 million to get back way more seems worth it. Agreeing to hand out racist nonsense as “guidance” rather than demands, and forking over “anonymized data” feels like a small price to pay to get these goons off your back.

But that calculation is based on a false premise: that the Trump administration will now leave Cornell alone. They’ve shown no signs of actually doing that. Authoritarian regimes don’t reward capitulation with restraint—they take it as permission to demand more. And more. Beyond that, the administration itself is weak and has been losing battle after battle. And the election last week showed how incredibly unpopular they are. To cave now gives a weak administration a desperately needed win, allowing it to get back off the ground when it was down.

On top of all that, as a university that claims to have values that it seeks to instill in its students, capitulating to such obviously bullshit bullying wipes out any belief that the University stands for anything real at all.

Finally, as Fishkin also notes, the lighter weight details of this agreement suggest that the Trump regime itself was desperate for a win… and Cornell just handed it to them.

But I am really struck by the rapidity and scale of the government's retreat from its much more extensive and destructive list of demands that it tried to impose on schools at the start of this mess.It would be far better if Cornell and other schools simply said "no."But still, a notable shift.

— Joey Fishkin (@fishkin.bsky.social) 2025-11-07T17:39:38.562Z

Cornell here has not modeled values. It has modeled cowardice and capitulation, and it’s a stain that should remain on the university going forward. What does this teach current students about institutional courage? What message does it send to faculty who might face similar pressure? What signal does it give to other universities watching this play out? Cornell had a choice between its stated values and expedience, and it chose expedience. That choice will define this administration’s legacy.

Filed Under: capitulation, donald trump, principles
Companies: cornell

Mamdani’s Win Shows That Believing In Something Beats Performative Hatred

from the if-you-stand-for-nothing,-what-will-you-fall-for dept

Last week, I wrote about how the Trump administration has replaced any sort of concept of governance with governance-by-trolling—a government optimized purely for making a huge segment of the country angry while the base cheers them on. The entire apparatus of federal power has been repurposed into a machine for generating engagement through cruelty, with no actual governing philosophy beyond “own the libs.”

The usual response from Democrats has been to offer… nothing. Safe, poll-tested blandness. That kind of vacuum is exactly what allows governance-by-trolling to thrive—at least MAGA offers some vision, however deranged.

Tuesday night, New York City voters delivered a decisive rebuke to both MAGA nihilism and the traditional Democratic technocratic blandness. Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist who was polling at literally 1% in February, won the election for mayor. And he did it by doing exactly what conventional political wisdom from the Democratic political consultants says you’re not supposed to do: he ran on an authentic vision of what he actually believes in, rather than running away from anything the consultants deemed a “political third rail.”

He didn’t shy away from his support for trans New Yorkers or immigrants. He stood side by side with them proudly throughout the campaign. He didn’t play down his own religion, background, or policy ideas, even as some of them challenged Democratic Party orthodoxy.

The contrast couldn’t be starker. On one side, you had another version of the politics of cynical spite and traditional political backroom king-making—Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, backed by at least $22 million from 28 different billionaires, running attack ads calling Mamdani a dangerous radical, questioning whether he “understood New York culture” because he was born in Uganda, and quite literally suggesting he would cheer for another 9/11. Pure governance-by-baseless concern trolling, optimized to generate fear and anger.

On the other side, you had someone who said “this is who I am, this is what I believe in, and here’s my positive vision for making your lives better.” Free buses. Universal childcare. Frozen rent for rent-stabilized apartments. City-run grocery stores in food deserts. Simple, clear policies that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from.

Guess which one won?

Even if you don’t agree with his policies or political leanings, you have to be able to see that he offered quite the contrast to traditional politics these days. Even publications staffed with Never Trumper former Republicans, like the Bulwark, pointed out that Mamdani’s “socialist” policies are well within the confines of modern liberal democracy, while Donald Trump’s are not. For all the baseless fear that Mamdani will “seize the means of production,” Donald Trump is literally doing it.

Leadership Means Leading, Not Following the Polls

As Anil Dash wrote in his excellent piece “Turn the Volume Up,” one of the defining features of Mamdani’s campaign was that it started with principle:

You have to start with the principle. You must have a politics that believes in something. You can’t win unless you know what you’re fighting for. Something specific, that people can see and believe. Something that people will know when it’s been achieved. It can’t just be a vague platitude, and it can’t just be “root for our team” or “the other guy is bad”. Zohran and his team understood this profoundly well, and made a campaign focused on substance — grounded in humanist principles, and tied to extremely clear, understandable and specific policy deliverables.

This is exactly what the Trump administration—and Cuomo’s campaign—completely lack. They don’t believe in anything except their own power and the validation that comes from making their opponents angry. There’s no vision beyond “give us power” and “watch the other side cry.”

Every week, we see another crop of Democratic political consultants pushing out their big plan to win elections. And almost all of them involve the same basic strategy: ditch what they claim are “unpopular” wedge issues. Embrace “popularism”—just supporting the policies we know poll well, and avoiding anything else. Don’t talk about trans rights. Downplay your support for progressive economic policies. Take a harsh stance against immigration. Don’t talk about diversity. Find the safest, most poll-tested positions possible and stick to those.

Indeed, last week, before this election, we saw the launch of yet another of these (there have to have been at least a dozen similar things this year, it’s hard to keep track of them all) called “Deciding to Win.” It had a bunch of big-name political consultant types (David Plouffe! Matt Stoller! Nate Silver! James Carville!) sign onto it. Yet it urged the same fucking thing this group of strivers always says: “play down anything that is seen as a culture war, political third rail.” What that usually means is “throw marginalized groups like trans people and immigrants under the bus.”

It’s running scared. Not running to lead.

Mamdani did the opposite. He was a strong, vocal supporter of trans rights, immigrants, and Palestine from day one, and it didn’t hurt him one bit. The consultants from the sidelines seemed to be screaming about how he had to minimize his Muslim faith and his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. Instead, he leaned into both.

And rather than hurt him, this authenticity became a core part of his appeal. Even voters who disagreed with specific policies responded to someone offering a genuine vision over consultant-approved talking points.

Leadership is about leading people by convincing them of your vision. Not just feeding them what the polls say will work. If you want people to follow you, it means you need to be worth following. You need to present a vision of a world they can believe in, that they want to help achieve. That’s leadership. Campaigning just on focus groups and polls gives you a median campaign, with nothing that excites people. It gives them nothing to believe in.

Worse, the popularism approach cedes all the framing to your opponents. They’re going to call you a radical communist Marxist socialist anyway—just ask Kamala Harris, who got labeled all of those things despite mostly running a campaign so cautious it could have been designed by the most risk-averse consultant imaginable. She started with energy and authenticity, then let the consultant class convince her to pivot away from anything even remotely appealing, to emphasize traditional Republican talking points on guns and immigration, and to downplay support for trans rights, Palestine, and other “divisive” issues.

And she lost.

Meanwhile, Mamdani got called all the same things—communist, radical, dangerous extremist who doesn’t understand America—and he just… floated above it. He didn’t waste time trying to prove he wasn’t those things. He just kept talking about free buses and childcare and what he actually believed in. He showed people what he stood for rather than spending all his energy explaining what he wasn’t. And he made it clear that he believed in his vision not because he thought it would get him elected, but because he thought it was actually the best platform to actually help New Yorkers.

As Dash notes, this required a kind of courage that’s become rare in Democratic politics:

If you run from who you are, you have already lost.

Coming on stage for a political victory to Ja Rule’s New York (I had bet that there would be some Jadakiss involvement in whatever walk-on music he picked), and walking off to Dhoom Machale, while saying with his full chest that he’s a Muslim, a New Yorker, and a young Democratic Socialist — these are the moves of a person who knows that those who are motivated by hate will never back down if you try to hide or be evasive about who you are. A coward dies a thousand deaths, and a politician who hides their identity loses a thousand elections before a single vote is cast. We see Vivek Ramaswamy tap-dancing around his faith every day, and the white supremacists that he’s cozied up to will never let him win. But fourteen years ago, the racist and hateful media falsely called President Obama’s private birthday party a “hip-hop BBQ”. And as I said years later, you should just have the damn hip-hop BBQ — they’re going to accuse you of it anyway. Lean into who you are, own it, and let the haters stay mad.

This gets at something fundamental about how to actually beat back today’s fascism and the politics of spite. You don’t do it by accepting their framing and trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. You do it by offering a compelling alternative vision that people actually want to vote for.

The Cowardice Is Coming From Within

That kind of courage is rare in Democratic politics for a reason. Unfortunately, the consultant and donor class’s grip on Democratic politics remains so strong that even the party’s own leaders couldn’t bring themselves to support their most dynamic candidate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—both representing New York—refused to endorse Mamdani at all. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, only gave his endorsement in the final days before the election and then claimed he didn’t think Mamdani was the future of the Democratic party.

Think about what that says. You have a candidate who is energizing voters, bringing new people into the process, winning a massive grassroots campaign against a billionaire-backed opponent—and the Democratic leadership is too scared to publicly support him until it’s basically over, if at all.

Why? Because they’re terrified that Trump will call them communists too? Or that the billionaire donors who supported Cuomo won’t keep supporting them? They’ve internalized the consultant wisdom that says you can’t be seen anywhere near a Democratic Socialist, that you have to keep your distance from anyone who actually believes in progressive policies, that the safest play is always to hedge your bets and play it safe.

They’re Going to Call You a Communist Anyway

The Democratic consultant class never seems to understand one simple thing: Republicans are going to call any Democratic politician an extreme leftist radical communist no matter what they actually believe or say—or how they actually lead. They called Joe Biden a socialist. They called Kamala Harris a Marxist. It’s just blatant baseline name-calling that gets deployed against literally anyone with a (D) after their name.

So if they’re going to call you that anyway, you might as well actually stand for something and give people a reason to vote for you rather than just trying to prove you’re not what Fox News and MechaHitler1488 on X says you are.

Mamdani understood this intuitively. When they called him a communist, he didn’t waste time explaining why Democratic Socialism is actually different from communism or how his policies are really quite moderate. He just kept talking about concrete things that would make New Yorkers’ lives better. He worked to front-run and mock the typical GOP tried-and-tested criticisms. Literally a day before the election, he posted a video about Vito Marcantonio, a popular NYC politician in the 1940s who was regularly called a communist, who delivered for New Yorkers.

Traditional political consultants would have told him to hide from and denounce anyone who was investigated by the FBI for his “leftist” views. But Mamdani reminded people that these kinds of scare tactics and nonsense are often used against legitimately popular politicians who deliver for their constituents.

The consultants told Harris to run away from trans rights and progressive economics. She largely did, and lost. The same consultants would have told Mamdani to do the same thing. He ignored them completely and won by a massive margin.

When Both The Message And The Messenger Are Authentic

Cuomo had everything the consultants say you need: name recognition, political dynasty, massive funding, endorsements from establishment figures like Bill Clinton. And he had the benefit of running against a young, relatively unknown candidate who by all traditional metrics should have been easy to defeat.

But Cuomo didn’t have a message beyond “I should be in charge” and “the other guy is scary.” That’s not a vision. That’s just entitlement wrapped in fear-mongering. And when you don’t believe in anything yourself, you can’t make anyone else believe in you.

Mamdani, by contrast, is an exceptionally skilled communicator who understood how to meet people where they are. His campaign’s mastery of social media—from TikTok to Instagram to YouTube—wasn’t just about being “very online.” It was about authentically connecting with voters in the spaces they actually occupy, rather than demanding they come to him. He also showed it daily, all over New York City. Over and over again, the clips you saw of him showed him walking the streets in all five boroughs, happily talking to people all over.

Mamdani kept reinforcing a clear, simple, positive message that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from. As Dash explained:

They have to be able to talk about us without us.

This is one of the refrains that comes up most when I’m talking to people about communications, in almost any context from organizing to business to building a community. A message has to be simple enough, memorable enough, and clear enough that even someone who’s just heard it for the first time first time can repeat it — in high fidelity — to the next person they talk to. The Mamdani campaign nailed this from the start, focusing not just on “affordability” in the abstract, but specific promises around free buses, universal childcare, and frozen rent in particular. The proof of how effective and pervasive those messages have been is that detractors can recite them, verbatim, from memory.

That’s a message. That’s something people can understand and repeat. “Free buses, universal childcare, frozen rent.” You don’t need a focus group to tell you whether people want their rent frozen or free bus rides.

Compare that to the typical consultant-approved Democratic campaign message, which usually amounts to “we’re going to fight for working families by implementing sensible, pragmatic solutions that move us forward, not backward.” What does that even mean? How do you repeat that to your neighbor? How do you know when it’s been achieved?

Hope Beats Hate

There’s one more element to Mamdani’s success that’s worth highlighting: joy. As we’ve written about before, Mamdani’s citywide scavenger hunt wasn’t just a campaign stunt—it was a demonstration of what politics could be when it’s about creating something positive rather than just attacking opponents.

Thousands of New Yorkers came out not because they were angry at Cuomo, but because Mamdani offered them something joyful to participate in. He showed them a vision of NYC where politics isn’t just about endless grievance and combat, but about building community and celebrating what makes the city great.

Indeed, this vision even meant that he won by a huge margin among young men, a group that many consultants have written off as permanently MAGA fans of Joe Rogan-style podcasts. Mamdani got people excited across the board in nearly every age group and demographic.

This stands in stark contrast to the politics of spite that defines MAGA. As I wrote last week, Trump’s entire governing strategy is optimized around one question: how mad can we make the other side? There’s no vision beyond that. No positive agenda. Just endless trolling and performative cruelty designed to generate engagement from the base.

Mamdani proved you can beat that by offering something better. Not by trying to out-troll the trolls or by running away from who you are to avoid their attacks, but by presenting an authentic, positive vision that gives people something to vote for rather than just against.

The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling captured this at Mamdani’s victory party:

Hope over tyranny, hope over big money and small ideas, hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible, Mamdani said. We won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.

The Path Forward

Mamdani’s victory doesn’t solve all of the Democratic Party’s problems. One mayoral election in New York City isn’t a national political revolution. But it does offer a clear roadmap for how to actually beat back the politics of spite and fascism. Especially given that across the country, in almost every election where Democrats were on the ballot, they won handily. They took the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, with Virginia’s being against an actively transphobic Republican campaign. They even won elections in surprising places like Georgia and Mississippi.

Running campaigns where you show what you’re for, instead of cowering in the face of attacks, can work. People want a positive vision of the future. They don’t like the constant attacks. But they also want authenticity and a vision for the future.

The roadmap is sitting right there: Don’t accept your opponents’ nonsense culture war framing. Don’t waste time trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. Don’t let consultants talk you into abandoning the issues and constituencies that need you most. And definitely don’t try to out-troll the trolls.

Articulate a clear, positive vision of what you actually believe in. Be authentic about who you are. Give people concrete reasons to vote for you, not just against the other side. Be joyful about the opportunities of the future for everyone. Trust that voters are smart enough to see the difference between someone who believes in something and someone who’s just performing for engagement metrics.

The politics of nihilism and spite, whether it’s Trump posting videos of himself dumping shit on citizens or Cuomo running racist attack ads, is ultimately hollow. It has no vision, no substance, nothing to offer beyond the temporary satisfaction of making your opponents angry, scared or both.

Mamdani proved that the politics of belief—of actually standing for something, of offering people hope and a positive vision—can win decisively. The Democratic Party establishment probably won’t learn that lesson. They’re too invested in the consultant and billionaire donor class that keeps feeding them the same failed playbook.

But candidates don’t need the party establishment’s permission. And voters don’t need to wait for the consultants to catch up. Mamdani won because he ignored the people telling him to play it safe and instead trusted voters to respond to something real. That option is available to anyone willing to take it. The blueprint is right there, proven and tested. All it takes is the courage to actually believe in something beyond politics.

Filed Under: andrew cuomo, authenticity, donald trump, nyc, politics, polls, popularism, principles, zohran mamdani

A Memo To Corporate America: How To Stop Being Cartoon Villains

from the stand-for-something dept

I’ve spent considerable time lately documenting how America’s corporate elite have transformed themselves into the exact cartoon villains that Marxists always claimed they were—groveling before authoritarian power, paying tribute to criminal regimes, abandoning every principle they’ve spent decades claiming to represent. But criticism without constructive alternatives is just intellectual masturbation, so let me offer some practical guidance for any CEO who might still possess a functioning moral compass.

If you are a person of influence in the corporate world, if you actually care about this country and its future, if you understand that your company’s long-term interests depend on the survival of constitutional governance—here’s what you should do immediately.

The Board Room Speech You Need to Give

Call your senior executive team together. Get all your board members on video conference. Tell them that you are committed to the company’s interests, and that one of the things you believe serves the company’s interests is maintaining basic ethical standards—both inside the company and in the society where the company operates.

Remind them that at the end of the day, we are all members of that society, and it is in all of our interests that we live in a free and fair nation governed by law rather than personal whim. Point out that if your company were to make bribes or pay favors to foreign governments, you would face criminal liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Ask them: do any of us think that’s wrong?

Then ask the crucial question: what do we think of the idea of paying bribes to the president of our own country in order to get government licenses or approval for business transactions? Is it really our position that we’re just going to go along with this as “business necessity,” or are we going to lawyer up like responsible corporate citizens and sue the government when it demands tribute?

The Legal and Moral Framework

Here’s what principled corporate leadership looks like in practice:

Refuse Tribute Payments: When administration officials suggest that regulatory approval might go smoother with a “contribution” to Trump-approved causes, document the conversation and file complaints with relevant authorities. Yes, this may slow your approval process. That’s the point—legitimate government doesn’t operate through tribute systems.

Challenge Illegal Conditions: When agencies attach political loyalty tests to routine business transactions, sue immediately. Every settlement payment, every accommodation to illegal demands, every “pragmatic” compromise with corruption makes the system worse for everyone while temporarily protecting your immediate interests.

Coordinate Resistance: Work with other companies facing similar pressure to challenge corrupt practices collectively rather than individually. The administration can intimidate isolated companies much more easily than coordinated business resistance backed by serious legal firepower.

Maintain Public Standards: Continue operating according to constitutional principles even when the government doesn’t. Maintain transparent procurement, independent auditing, ethical business practices that demonstrate what legitimate governance should look like.

The Business Case for Constitutional Governance

This isn’t just moral positioning—it’s strategic necessity for any business that wants to operate in sustainable market conditions:

Legal Predictability: Tribute economies destroy the rule of law that makes long-term business planning possible. When regulatory approval depends on political loyalty rather than legal compliance, no business can predict future operating conditions.

Market Integrity: Corruption destroys competitive markets by making political connections more valuable than product quality, innovation, or efficiency. Your company’s success should depend on serving customers, not serving regime officials.

International Reputation: Every American company that accommodates Trump’s tribute demands destroys America’s reputation as a reliable business partner and constitutional democracy. This makes international cooperation more difficult and expensive for everyone.

Talent Retention: Ethical employees don’t want to work for companies that pay bribes to maintain market position. Brain drain toward companies with integrity creates competitive disadvantages for collaborationist firms.

The Historical Examples

The German Industrialists’ Mistake: Business leaders who thought they could use the Nazis while remaining untouched discovered that authoritarian regimes don’t honor implicit deals with collaborators. When their usefulness expired, their collaboration became evidence of their expendability.

The Post-Apartheid Reckoning: South African businesses that accommodated apartheid found themselves facing massive legal liability, international boycotts, and domestic fury when the system collapsed. Their “pragmatic” accommodation became permanent reputational damage.

The Post-Soviet Transformation: Russian oligarchs who built fortunes through corruption under Yeltsin discovered that their wealth made them targets rather than protected them when Putin consolidated power. Corruption doesn’t create security—it creates vulnerability.

The Choice You Face

You can continue the current path—paying tribute, staying silent, accommodating illegal demands, hoping that compliance will protect you when the regime’s appetite for control inevitably expands. This path leads to the complete destruction of competitive markets, constitutional governance, and ultimately your own legitimacy as business leaders.

Or you can choose the harder path of principled resistance: challenging illegal demands through courts, coordinating with other businesses facing similar pressure, maintaining ethical standards despite government pressure, and demonstrating that American business still believes in American values.

The Stakes for You

Every day you delay this choice, you make capitalism’s eventual reckoning more severe. Every tribute payment, every silent accommodation, every “pragmatic” compromise with corruption provides ammunition for socialist organizers who argue that business interests inevitably choose authoritarianism over democracy when their privileges are threatened.

You are proving their argument correct. You are validating every Marxist critique of capitalism through your own behavior. You are ensuring that whatever emerges from this constitutional crisis will be far more hostile to market systems than anything you would have faced by choosing resistance over accommodation.

The Leadership Opportunity

The irony is that principled resistance would actually enhance your long-term position rather than threatening it. Business leaders who stood up to authoritarian demands, who defended constitutional principles despite economic costs, who chose democratic integrity over oligarchic access—they would emerge from this crisis with enormous moral authority and political capital.

Instead, you’re choosing the path that maximizes short-term comfort while ensuring long-term destruction. You’re preserving immediate profits while discrediting the market system that makes profit accumulation legitimate.

The Bottom Line

If you actually believe in the free market capitalism you’ve spent decades defending, then defend it. If you actually think constitutional governance serves business interests better than oligarchic tribute systems, then defend constitutional governance. If you actually care about leaving your children a country worth inheriting, then stop acting like the cartoon villains in someone else’s revolution.

The hour is late, but it’s not too late. American business still has the resources, legal standing, and collective power to challenge systematic corruption if you choose to use them. But that window is closing rapidly, and every day of continued accommodation makes the eventual reckoning more severe.

You wanted to be remembered as job creators and wealth builders. Keep accommodating authoritarianism, and you’ll be remembered as the useful idiots who handed socialists the perfect argument for why capitalism cannot coexist with democracy.

Choose wisely. History is watching, and your children will live with the consequences of whatever choice you make.

But not much time. The choice is yours, but you have to make it now.

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

Filed Under: cartoon villains, corruption, principles

How America’s Business Elite Became Their Own Marxist Caricature

from the these-things-matter dept

There is a moment in every authoritarian takeover when the business elite must choose between principle and profit, between defending the system that made their wealth possible and accommodating the forces destroying that system. That moment has arrived for America’s capitalist class, and they are failing the test so spectacularly that they’re validating every Marxist critique of capitalism ever written.

I have a question for my center-right friends sitting on their hands: what do you think is going to happen when all is said and done, when all the blood is spilled, and all the corporate leaders who bent the knee to this regime try to resume their lectures about the virtues of free market capitalism? Do you really think monologues about Milton Friedman’s pencil parable are going to resonate with a population that watched you collaborate with authoritarianism?

Their inaction, their neutrality, their “pragmatic” accommodation—every golden plaque presented to Trump, every settlement paid to avoid retaliation, every silent acquiescence to constitutional destruction—all of this is discrediting capitalism in the eyes of ordinary Americans in ways that no socialist organizer could achieve. They are acting like the cartoon villains Marxists make them out to be, and they should not be surprised when the torches and pitchforks come for them.

Tim Cook’s trembling hands as he presented Trump with a custom Apple plaque on a 24-karat gold base will be remembered as the moment American capitalism genuflected before American fascism. The image is perfect: the leader of the world’s most valuable company, literally shaking as he offers tribute to a criminal regime, gold adorning gold in the gaudy corruption of what was once called the people’s house.

Mark Zuckerberg’s hot mic moment was even more revealing: “I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with,” he whispered to Trump after announcing that Meta would invest $600 billion in American AI infrastructure—a figure so astronomically absurd it would require borrowing more than twice the company’s total book value. The CEO of a publicly traded company admitting on live microphone that he fabricates financial projections based on whatever pleases the Dear Leader.

These aren’t isolated incidents of individual moral failure. They represent the systematic transformation of American capitalism from a system of competitive enterprise into a protection racket where tribute payments and loyalty demonstrations determine market outcomes. Every tech oligarch who showed up to grovel, every Fortune 500 CEO who stayed silent about constitutional destruction, every venture capitalist who treated systematic institutional capture as normal political transition—they’ve all participated in the conversion of free enterprise into oligarchic feudalism.

We have seen this before. German industrialists who thought they could use the Nazis while remaining untouched by them discovered too late that authoritarianism doesn’t respect prior arrangements or sophisticated calculations. When it suited Hitler’s purposes, their “pragmatic” collaboration became evidence of their expendability. The business leaders who enabled the regime found themselves consumed by it when their usefulness expired.

But at least those industrialists could claim they were operating under duress, facing a regime that had already seized power through violence. America’s business elite have chosen collaboration freely, calculating that accommodation serves their interests better than resistance. They’ve made this choice with full knowledge of what Trump represents, complete awareness of the constitutional destruction he’s implementing, and perfect understanding of the historical precedents they’re ignoring.

They cannot claim ignorance. They cannot plead coercion. They cannot appeal to patriotism or constitutional duty. They have chosen collaboration with full knowledge of what they’re collaborating with, and that choice will be remembered when the reckoning comes.

What makes their behavior particularly contemptible is how completely they’re destroying their own long-term interests through short-term accommodation. Every day of silence, every tribute payment, every legitimizing gesture serves to discredit the very system they claim to represent.

How do you maintain intellectual authority to defend market systems when you’ve demonstrated that market leaders will accommodate any political system that protects their immediate profits? How do you argue for principled governance when you’ve shown that business principles disappear the moment they become inconvenient? How do you claim capitalism serves human freedom when you’ve collaborated with forces systematically eliminating human freedom?

The center-right’s accommodation strategy assumes this regime will be temporary and normal politics will eventually resume. But they’re helping ensure that normal politics becomes impossible by legitimizing the very forces that are systematically destroying the conditions where competitive markets could function. Constitutional governance, rule of law, independent institutions, democratic accountability—all the prerequisites for legitimate capitalism are being eliminated with their silent consent or active participation.

When economic policies driven by personal loyalty rather than market logic begin producing the inevitable catastrophes—supply chain collapses, currency instability, institutional breakdown—the fury will focus not just on the regime but on those who enabled it through their cowardly calculation that accommodation was smarter than resistance.

Every Marxist critique of capitalism as inherently corrupt, inevitably authoritarian, and ultimately concerned only with profit maximization over human welfare is being validated in real-time by capitalists themselves. The theory that business interests will always choose fascism over democracy when their privileges are threatened is being proven correct by the very people who spent decades arguing it was unfair caricature.

They are demonstrating that when forced to choose between democratic principles and oligarchic access, between constitutional governance and regime favor, between defending the system that made their wealth possible and protecting the wealth itself—they will choose wealth every single time. They are confirming that capitalism has no loyalty except to capital, no principle except profit, no commitment except to whatever arrangement allows continued accumulation.

The golden plaques and fabricated investment figures will become iconic images in socialist propaganda for generations: capitalism revealing its true nature when tested, business leaders prostrating themselves before power, competitive markets dissolving into tribute economies. No amount of future lectures about entrepreneurial virtue will overcome the visual record of American business elite on their knees before a fascist regime.

When this regime falls—through electoral defeat, economic collapse, or internal contradictions—the business leaders who enabled it will discover that their “pragmatic” calculations were profound strategic errors. Their accommodation will be remembered not as wise adaptation but as moral cowardice that enabled systematic destruction of everything they claimed to value.

The political coalitions that historically defended market systems—educated professionals, constitutional conservatives, principled libertarians—have been systematically alienated by business leaders’ craven accommodation. The intellectual frameworks that justified competitive capitalism—innovation, merit, freedom, individual responsibility—have been discredited by capitalists’ own behavior under pressure.

What remains will be a population that has watched business leaders choose collaboration with authoritarianism over defense of democratic principles, watched them prioritize access over integrity, watched them demonstrate that all their rhetoric about freedom and competition was performance art covering crude calculations about power and profit.

The socialists won’t need to convince anyone that capitalism inevitably serves authoritarianism—the capitalists will have provided all the evidence anyone could need. The torches and pitchforks won’t be socialist organizing tools but democratic responses to documented collaboration with forces that destroyed democratic governance.

The most bitter irony is that they had every opportunity to be heroes. Business leaders who stood up to Trump, who defended constitutional principles despite economic costs, who chose democratic integrity over oligarchic access—they would have emerged from this crisis with enormous moral authority and political capital.

Instead, they chose the path that maximizes short-term comfort while ensuring long-term destruction. They preserved their wealth while discrediting the system that made wealth accumulation legitimate. They maintained their access while eliminating the institutions that made access meaningful.

They wanted to be remembered as pragmatic realists who navigated difficult circumstances with sophisticated calculation. They will be remembered as the useful idiots who handed socialists the perfect argument for why capitalism cannot coexist with democracy, why business interests inevitably choose authoritarianism when their privileges are threatened, why competitive markets inevitably become tribute economies when tested by authoritarian pressure.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And American business leaders are systematically destroying capitalism while claiming to defend it, validating every socialist critique through their own behavior, and ensuring that whatever emerges from this crisis will be far more hostile to market systems than anything they could have faced by choosing resistance over accommodation.

They thought they were being smart. They were being the cartoon villains in someone else’s revolution, writing their own obituaries in gold ink on tribute plaques presented to a fascist regime.

When the reckoning comes—and it is coming—they will have no one to blame but themselves for choosing temporary comfort over permanent legitimacy, immediate access over lasting authority, collaboration over courage.

The free market they claim to defend required defending. They chose collaboration instead. And they will reap exactly what they have sown.

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

Filed Under: capitalism, capitulation, donald trump, fascism, mark zuckerberg, marxism, principles, tim cook
Companies: apple, meta

How The Republican Party Became A Party That Believes The Constitution Only Applies To Its Enemies

from the a-constitutional-charade dept

Let’s talk about constitutional hypocrisy so brazen, so comprehensive, so morally bankrupt that it would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous to the republic.

I’ve learned something about modern Republicans that crystallizes everything wrong with our current political moment: they care more about the constitutionality of Biden’s student debt forgiveness than they do about the 4th and 5th Amendments being universally applied. Let that sink in for a moment.

They’ll spend months screaming about executive overreach when it comes to loan forgiveness—a legitimate constitutional concern, to be fair. But when it comes to the systematic violation of due process rights, when it comes to warrantless searches and seizures, when it comes to the weaponization of law enforcement against political opponents—suddenly, constitutional principles become negotiable.

This isn’t principled constitutional interpretation. This is weaponized constitutionalism—using the Constitution as a cudgel against political enemies while ignoring it entirely when it constrains their own power.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the Republican Party has become a fascist organization that simply doesn’t think the Constitution applies to them.

We’ve never seen anything like this in either party in our history until now. Not during the Civil War, when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus but acknowledged he was acting in constitutional gray areas. Not during World War II, when FDR interned Japanese Americans but at least maintained the pretense that all citizens deserved constitutional protection. Not during Watergate, when even Nixon’s defenders argued he was acting within presidential prerogatives rather than claiming he was above the law entirely.

What we’re witnessing now is different. It’s a party that wants power, and it wants that power to be unchallenged by legal or democratic constraints. It’s pushing in every direction it can to solidify its grip on power—from trying to steal elections (like they attempted in North Carolina recently) to illegally shutting down entire government departments mandated by Congress because they perceive them to be filled with ideological enemies.

This is a coup. And the entire party is participating in it.

It wasn’t always this way. The Republican Party once had genuine constitutional conservatives—people like Barry Goldwater, who famously said “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, but moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” yet still believed in constitutional constraints on power. People like John McCain, who defended the independence of democratic institutions even when it hurt him politically. People like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who put constitutional duty above party loyalty.

But here’s what happened: the Republicans who were actually committed to constitutional government were systematically purged from the party. They were branded “RINOs”—Republicans In Name Only—for the sin of believing that constitutional principles should apply even when inconvenient. They were primaried out by candidates who promised more aggressive partisan warfare. They found the door themselves when they could no longer stomach what their party was becoming.

The result is a party that has been hollowed out of anyone who might provide internal resistance to authoritarian drift. The constitutional conservatives didn’t change their principles—they were driven out for having principles at all.

What remains is a party captured by people who view constitutional constraints as obstacles to be overcome rather than principles to be upheld. They kept the constitutional rhetoric—it polls well and provides useful cover—but abandoned the constitutional substance entirely.

The constitutional charade works like this: When Democrats exercise executive power, Republicans discover a sudden, passionate commitment to constitutional limits, separation of powers, and congressional prerogatives. But when Republicans exercise power, these same principles become obstacles to effective governance that must be swept aside in the name of efficiency, national security, or fighting the “deep state.”

Student loan forgiveness? Constitutional crisis! The president can’t possibly have that authority! Where’s Congress? What about the separation of powers?

Defying Supreme Court orders? Well, the Court overstepped its bounds. The executive has inherent authority. Sometimes you have to break a few constitutional eggs to make an authoritarian omelet.

Weaponizing the Justice Department against political opponents? That’s just effective law enforcement. Besides, those people are criminals anyway—due process is a technicality that gets in the way of justice.

Shutting down congressionally mandated agencies? Congress doesn’t understand the complexities of modern governance. The executive knows best. Constitutional requirements are suggestions.

This selective constitutionalism reveals what the modern Republican Party has become: an organization that uses constitutional language tactically while abandoning constitutional principles strategically. The Constitution is useful when it can be weaponized against opponents and inconvenient when it constrains their own authority.

And anybody who claims to oppose this but strategically votes Republican over some issue like trans rights or “woke” culture or taxes is a fool. And a moral traitor to the country.

I don’t care how much you hate progressive social policies. I don’t care how frustrated you are with Democratic economic proposals. I don’t care how offended you are by campus speech codes or diversity training or whatever cultural issue keeps you up at night.

None of that—none of it—justifies voting for a party that has abandoned constitutional government entirely. When you vote for Republicans because you’re angry about trans athletes or critical race theory, you’re not making a strategic choice about policy priorities. You’re voting to end constitutional democracy in America.

You’re saying that your cultural grievances matter more than the rule of law. That your policy preferences matter more than the Constitution itself. That your ideological comfort matters more than preserving the system that makes democratic debate possible in the first place.

This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t partisan exaggeration. This is the documented reality of what the Republican Party has become: an organization dedicated to establishing one-party rule through the systematic dismantling of constitutional constraints on power.

The tragedy is that the party once had voices who might have prevented this transformation. But they were systematically silenced, marginalized, and expelled for the sin of taking constitutional principles seriously. What remains is a hollowed-out shell using constitutional rhetoric to justify unconstitutional behavior.

And to argue that the GOP is the better party for judicial matters while that very party is actively trying to turn public opinion against the judiciary? That’s very special indeed.

They spent decades building the conservative legal movement, appointing originalist judges, claiming they were restoring respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. And now, when those same courts occasionally issue rulings they don’t like, suddenly the judiciary is illegitimate, biased, part of the “deep state” conspiracy against real Americans.

The Supreme Court isn’t conservative enough when it occasionally rules against Republican interests. Lower courts are activist when they enforce constitutional rights. The entire federal judiciary becomes suspect when it tries to maintain some independence from partisan political pressure.

This is how authoritarianism works: first you capture institutions, then you delegitimize any institution you can’t fully control. First you pack the courts with ideological allies, then you attack the courts when even your allies occasionally follow the law instead of your preferences.

We are watching the live-action implementation of fascism in America, carried out by people who wrap themselves in the flag while systematically destroying what that flag represents. They invoke the Constitution while violating its most basic principles. They claim to defend democracy while working to dismantle democratic institutions.

And the most morally disgusting part? They expect us to treat this as normal political competition. They expect us to pretend that this is just another partisan disagreement, just another election cycle, just another policy debate between competing visions of American governance.

It’s not. This is a party that has purged its constitutional conservatives and embraced authoritarianism. This is a party that believes the Constitution applies to its enemies but not to itself. This is a party that will use any means necessary to gain and maintain power, including the systematic destruction of the legal and institutional frameworks that make democratic self-governance possible.

If you vote for this party for any reason—if you prioritize any policy preference over the preservation of constitutional democracy—you are complicit in the destruction of the American republic. You are helping to dismantle the system that makes political disagreement possible in the first place.

The constitutional conservatives didn’t abandon the Republican Party. The Republican Party abandoned them. What remains is the advancing edge of American fascism dressed up in constitutional rhetoric.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And anyone who can’t see that the modern Republican Party represents an existential threat to constitutional democracy is either willfully blind or actively complicit in its destruction.

The center must be held. And holding it requires recognizing that there is no center left in the Republican Party—only the hollowed-out shell of what was once a constitutional conservative movement, now captured entirely by forces that view the Constitution as an obstacle rather than a foundation.

Choose accordingly.

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

Filed Under: civil liberties, constitution, donald trump, double standard, due process, maga, principles, republicans, rino

Gavin Newsom Is Normalizing Trump’s Constitutional Violations

from the don't-accept-the-framing dept

Gavin Newsom’s rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality.

Newsom appears to have convinced himself that the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding “common ground” with an administration actively dismantling constitutional governance. This calculation rests on a dangerous conflation of popularity with principle—the belief that because Trump won an election, his approach must be what “middle America” wants and therefore what Democrats should emulate.

This logic fails on multiple levels. First, it fundamentally misunderstands why many Americans voted for Trump. They didn’t necessarily embrace constitutional violations, the weaponization of government against critics, or the abandonment of democratic norms—though many have come to excuse them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be moved by moral clarity when it’s offered without condescension. Many voted based on specific economic anxieties, cultural concerns, or—crucially—because they believed demonstrable falsehoods about both Trump and his opponents. Winning their support doesn’t require adopting Trump’s authoritarian tendencies but addressing their legitimate concerns while providing a clear alternative to his approach to governance.

Second, Newsom’s strategy assumes that political victory is worth any moral cost. That defending constitutional principles, standing for truth, and maintaining democratic norms are luxuries that can be sacrificed for electoral advantage. This isn’t just cynical—it’s self-defeating. If Democrats adopt Trump’s rhetoric, accept his constitutional violations as mere
“distractions,” and seek partnership with his administration, what alternative do they actually offer? They become not an opposition but an echo. Not a choice, but a counterfeit.

American voters are not looking for Democratic candidates who behave like junior varsity Trumpists. They’re looking for clarity. For conviction. When Democrats blur that contrast, they don’t win converts—they confirm Trump’s dominance of the political terrain. Voters can smell incoherence and opportunism from miles away. When leaders abandon their principles for perceived political advantage, they don’t gain credibility—they lose the very foundation of trust upon which political leadership must stand.

What Newsom fails to grasp is that the most powerful response to Trumpism isn’t accommodation but clear moral contrast. Not moving toward Trump but standing firmly on democratic principles. Not adopting his language but offering an alternative vision of governance based on truth, constitutional fidelity, and democratic values. The voters who might be swayed by a genuine alternative won’t be impressed by Democratic leaders who seem willing to abandon their principles for political advantage.

Perhaps most disturbing is how Newsom’s approach reveals a fundamental lack of faith in Americans’ capacity for democratic citizenship. It assumes citizens cannot be persuaded by truth, cannot be moved by appeals to democratic principles, cannot recognize the difference between governance and demagoguery. It treats voters not as citizens capable of democratic judgment but as consumers to be won through marketing and positioning—giving them what polling suggests they want rather than what democratic governance requires.

This approach directly contributes to the crisis of meaning I’ve documented throughout Notes From The Circus. When political leaders on both sides treat truth as optional, principles as negotiable, and constitutional violations as mere tactical concerns, they reinforce the nihilistic view that nothing is real, nothing matters, and power is the only currency worth pursuing. They don’t just fail to counter Trumpism; they actively strengthen its foundations.

Political leaders who convince themselves that accommodating authoritarianism is the path to defeating it have already surrendered the moral ground from which effective resistance must operate. They haven’t found a clever strategy; they’ve abandoned the very principles they claim to defend.

The center must be held—not by moving rightward in pursuit of imagined political advantage, but by standing firmly on the constitutional principles and democratic values that make legitimate political competition possible at all. Not by treating truth as optional but by insisting on its centrality to democratic governance. Not by dismissing constitutional violations as distractions but by recognizing them as fundamental threats requiring clear moral response.

The ground approaches. And those who respond by triangulating, accommodating, and seeking “partnership” with the forces undermining democratic governance may find they’ve not only failed to defeat Trumpism but actively enabled its transformation from political movement to governing regime.

At this point, Newsom isn’t just forgetting what’s real—he’s surrendering the very possibility of its defense.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Balwin

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

Filed Under: democrats, donald trump, gavin newsom, principles

As Columbia Folds, Harvard Shows What Institutional Courage Looks Like

from the to-spite-our-face dept

The first few months of the Trump administration have seen a quick divergence between those who are quick to bend the knee to unconstitutional, authoritarian, censorial demands from Donald Trump, and those with the spine to actually stand up and say “fuck that.”

While it’s important to call out and shame those who cave, it’s equally crucial to highlight institutions willing to take a principled stand. What’s unfolding now at Harvard isn’t just about one university’s funding or academic policies — it’s a critical test case for whether America’s institutions can withstand direct governmental attempts to control speech and thought. The precedent being set will determine whether universities remain independent centers of learning and research, or become extensions of whatever administration holds power. This week, Harvard University has demonstrated what institutional courage looks like in the face of escalating threats from the Trump administration.

Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and the independence of private entities continues apace. The administration has been on something of an authoritarian tour across the country, spanning multiple verticals, in which the main goal appears to simply be to exert as much power as possible, breaking both norms and institutional safeguards with wild abandon.

Trump and his cadre of minions have been playing language games all along in this endeavor, attempting to redefine free speech as only applicable to speech Trump likes, exposing journalists and their sources to danger, punishing university students for exercising their speech rights, and coercing law firms into “good behavior” by withholding security clearances if the firms have or do take any actions the administration doesn’t like.

It’s hard to overstate just how wildly dangerous this all is, nor how infuriating it is to watch so many of these victims bend the knee rather than fight what is undeniably a battle worth waging. What’s at stake is nothing less than the independence of American institutions. The administration is currently using federal education and research grants like the sword of Damocles, insisting that schools fall in line or risk losing government money that powers all kinds of valuable, important research. But as Columbia University recently learned, there is never a “last ask” from a strongman and the sword never rises beyond an inch from the neck. Giving in only propels the next demand. And then the next. And the next.

The Trump administration recently made all kinds of demands of Harvard, a bizarre mix of demands to end diversity in some places, but mandate it in others, while making other demands that would essentially amount to the school caving to Trump. The demands represent an unprecedented level of government interference in a private institution. No more DEI initiatives for admissions or hiring. A requirement that data over such things be shared out freely with the federal government. Punishment for any students or groups deemed by the government to be “antisemitic.” And a overhaul of international admissions such that candidates are to be screened out if they have any “anti-American” viewpoints.

Except then the government also demands a very specific form of DEI: diverse viewpoints in all programs and departments.

After having presented Harvard’s existing diversity efforts as the antithesis of a merit-based approach, it suddenly demands that the university enforce what it terms viewpoint diversity. It never defines what this term means—perhaps alchemy in the chemistry department? But the implications are that it amounts to affirmative action for conservatives. Harvard is directed to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Any department that fails the audit would be required to start hiring new faculty until it can pass the undefined standards demanded by the feds.

Here again, we see the hypocrisy of the strongman on display. Diversity of thought when it comes to Israel? Banished! Diversity of thought on America’s actions and values? Verboten! Diversity of backgrounds within the student body and faculty itself? Nothing could be worse!

But there must be a quota carved out for the kind of thought that the government prefers or there will be punishment. Were we to need a perfect example of thought-policing in the modern era, it appears we have it.

Even entertaining such demands would amount to the takeover of a private educational institution by the federal government. And the research funding that the government is withholding isn’t for pet projects in niche circles. It’s funding for medical breakthroughs, for improving the lives of children. For technology advances that could improve the lives of Americans generally. That’s important, so please understand: the withholding of these federal funds from Harvard isn’t merely a punishment for Harvard, but a punishment for all of us.

Which is exactly what is happening, as the government has frozen billions in funds because Harvard has refused to bow at the altar of Donald Trump.

The university has decided these demands force it to fight, and it’s attacking on two fronts. The first is public-facing; Harvard has turned its homepage into a tribute to its researchers and the work they pursue. Although it starts with a huge banner article as shown here, links to 30 individual articles on research fill the entire page. I have a fairly high-resolution screen, and it took hitting page-down nine times to finally reach the bottom, where a handful of links to the rest of the university finally appear. The message is clear: The research that’s under threat matters, and humanity will be worse off if its funding is cut.

Separately, Harvard’s legal response, which it made public today, is basically: nope. After detailing the steps the university has already taken to address antisemitism, it gets to the crux of the issue: “your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.” The harms these demands are meant to address, the letter alleges, haven’t actually been demonstrated through processes that are required by law.

Even more direct is the letter Harvard’s President, Alan Garber, sent to the Harvard community:

We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. 

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. 

Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.

This is a battle worth waging. Columbia’s funding is still on hold, despite its attempts at appeasement. I have no doubt the same would be true if Harvard attempted to do likewise. There will end up being a court battle over this, no doubt. One that will hopefully rise to the level of the Supreme Court and will surface an argument over how and why the Executive Administration should be able to hold for ransom funds allocated by Congress over the demand for the erasure of institutional independence.

The contrast between Columbia and Harvard couldn’t be clearer. As Columbia has shown, if you cave, Trump will still demand more and withhold funds. If you fight, you might still lose, but at least you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing you did the right thing. Plus, it’s contagious. While Columbia quickly caved to Trump’s demands, we’re seeing other universities stand up as well.

Princeton has indicated that it won’t fold. Cornell has sued the Department of Energy over the $1 billion in frozen grants. Stanford’s leadership has expressed support for Harvard as well. Fighting back is contagious and the right thing to do, both for the fundamental academic freedoms that these institutions of higher learning supposedly support, and to show a fascist bully that you won’t comply in advance.

It won’t be easy. Indeed, since Harvard’s pushback on Monday, Trump has made the $2.3 billion funding freeze official, effectively admitting that he is punishing the university for its free expression (which I’m sure will be useful in court). Trump is also musing about removing Harvard’s non-profit tax-exempt status:

That’s Donald Trump posting to his personal social media site:

Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?” Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!

Some of us remember when it was a huge scandal — perhaps one of the biggest of all time — when the IRS under Obama investigated a few conservative non-profits to make sure they were obeying the law. I also remember how under the first Trump administration, the IRS was made to apologize to those non-profits and agreed to settle the cases. Yet, here, the very same Trump admin is just nakedly threatening to pull tax exempt status solely on the basis of not kissing up to Trump and his unconstitutional demands.

Equally, some of us also remember the misleading claims during previous administrations about the supposed lack of “free speech” on college campuses and will note how silent those who were screaming the loudest about that are now that Trump is just going door to door from university to university demanding the suppression of speech and punishing universities that oppose him.

This is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the concept of higher learning. It is an attack on the concept of free speech and academic freedom. It is an attack on the important research that universities do that have bettered the lives of millions. It is an attack on American ideals.

Harvard’s stand represents something profound: institutions with resources, prestige, and power using those advantages to protect fundamental principles rather than themselves. In doing so, they remind us what genuine institutional courage looks like. While the courts will eventually weigh in, the immediate battle is being fought in the court of public opinion, where each institution’s response signals to others what’s possible. The cascade of universities now following Harvard’s lead suggests that principled stands — not capitulation — may become the new normal. So, kudos to Harvard and Princeton and Cornell, for doing what Columbia couldn’t be bothered to do. Hopefully more institutions of higher learning take the right lesson from this and recognize now is not the time to fold, but to stand up and do what’s right.

Filed Under: bending the knee, caving, censorship, dei, donald trump, federal grants, first amendment, principles, research, shame, threats
Companies: columbia, cornell, harvard, princeton, stanford

Everyone’s Mad At Cloudflare; Is There Room For Principled Takes On Moderation?

from the the-impossibility-of-infrastructure-moderation dept

I originally wrote a version of this post last week before Cloudflare decided to block Kiwi Farms, intending to post it after the long weekend, but I needed to rewrite a significant portion of it after Cloudflare’s decision. None of the salient points have changed (nor has my mind on how to think about all of this), and large chunks of this post remain from the original. But the change in direction from Cloudflare changed the nature of the post.

I’m going to do the thing that every so often I feel the need to do: discuss a topic that is complicated and requires nuanced thinking, but where many people have strong opinions that leave little room for nuance or discussion. As I’ve been known to do when I write these posts, I ask, politely, that you to try to read the whole piece and consider it before resorting to the immediate response.

Here’s something, however, that’s not nuanced, and fairly straightforward: Kiwi Farms is awful.

Also, people want Kiwi Farms to be shut down. Whatever it takes.

If you don’t know what Kiwi Farms is, it’s an online forum that is basically the definition of “the forum for the worst, most maladjusted, horrible, awful people in the world.” Kiwi Farms has basically no redeeming qualities, and that includes the fact that many of its users gleefully embrace the doxxing and harassing of people it doesn’t like — sometimes up to and including swatting. The people who like Kiwi Farms push back on this and insist that they just like crass and norm-breaking humor. But the fact remains that, on the whole, it’s a forum for punching down on the marginalized, where people gleefully try to make others’ lives miserable, with a special focus on attacking the trans community.

To many of the people who wanted Kiwi Farms shut down, there was a simple solution: Cloudflare should stop providing its anti-DDoS protections to the site, which would almost certainly lead to the site going down.

It’s a simple solution. Except that it isn’t quite that simple.

While we may think that Kiwi Farm is, fairly objectively, a horrible awful website with no redeeming value, we live in a world where (1) not everyone agrees (for example, many of the people on Kiwi Farms seem to believe it has value), and (2) there are many other sites that we believe do have tremendous social value that other people believe are horrible, awful websites with no redeeming values.

Before we get to the Cloudflare question, let’s take a step back and talk about another time. A decade ago, there was a pretty big debate over SOPA. This was a law that was, in the minds of its backers, a tool to take offline (completely) a bunch of websites that, to the law’s supporters, were horrible awful websites with zero redeeming value. Those were sites “dedicated to piracy” of copyright protected material.

The underlying basis of SOPA was that it potentially allowed copyright holders to travel further down the stack. The DMCA already existed to take down content where there was an accusation of infringement. But the core idea in the SOPA law was “that’s not enough, we need to be able to take down entire websites.” And part of that effort involved the ability to target infrastructure providers.

And that was problematic then, as it should remain problematic today. The biggest issue with targeting infrastructure providers is that — generally speaking — they don’t have any nuance on their side when it comes to remedies. They pull their services, and an entire site breaks. It does not allow for the more narrow targeting of specific content (in the case of SOPA, with infringing content). It’s very much a nuclear option.

And, in part, that’s why it’s an appealing solution to people who insist that entire sites must be wiped out.

But as we learned, not just in the SOPA fight but in other copyright battles, it is somewhat — unfortunately — inevitable that those looking to silence or suppress a certain bit of content will travel further up the infrastructure stack as far as they can go to kill a site entirely. And that can be quite problematic. When we’re talking about taking down entire sites because some content on them is objectionable, even to a horrifying level, things get really messy, really fast.

Now, let’s get back to Cloudflare. Everyone has been mad at Cloudflare. People wanted Kiwi Farms dead, and they’ve moved up the stack to the point where they’ve discovered that Cloudflare provides some security tools to Kiwi Farms. The easy answer was that Cloudflare should pull the plug.

Now, if you’ve been following this at all, you probably already know that five years ago (almost exactly), Cloudflare stopped providing its anti-DDoS service to the neo-Nazi forum the Daily Stormer, which kicked off a debate (one that Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince directly asked for) about the role of infrastructure providers in content moderation. Unfortunately, to date, that debate has not resulted in many conclusions.

Last year, here at Techdirt, we hosted an online symposium (starting with articles, and following up with a live discussion) all about the challenges of moderating content at the infrastructure layer. And what came out of that, to me, is that all of this is way more complicated than any simple answer can provide. I came into that discussion believing that the content moderation discussion should be focused at the edge providers — those that directly touch the users — and that infrastructure providers were the wrong layer to focus on.

But, over the course of the discussion — as with so much these days — it became clear that divvying up infrastructure and edge isn’t so easy either, and there will always be cases where what seems to make sense as a principle doesn’t necessarily apply in practice. But, still, we need principles, because if we’re just making these decisions on the fly, it’s going to create a mess.

So, that finally brings us to the statement that Cloudflare put out last week (signed by CEO Matthew Prince and their head of public policy, Alissa Starzak, both of whom have been thinking deeply about these issues and talking to many, many experts), which was obviously a response to this whole mess, even if it doesn’t directly address Kiwi Farms. People were very mad online about the statement. Mainly because it doesn’t say the one simple thing they want to hear: “we’re kicking Kiwi Farms off our service.”

Instead, it was four days later that Prince put out a second statement that went further. It said not only was Cloudflare no longer supporting Kiwi Farms, but that it would redirect visitors to another site:

We have blocked Kiwifarms. Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare’s services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post. Kiwifarms may move their sites to other providers and, in doing so, come back online, but we have taken steps to block their content from being accessed through our infrastructure.

Now people are still mad at Cloudflare, because they feel it took them too long to make this decision. As Prince’s statement notes, the change was due to “targeted threats” on Kiwi Farms having “escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.”

That, alone, is a bit difficult to believe if you’ve followed any of Kiwi Farms’ history, in which targeted threats that could put lives in danger happen regularly enough.

So there’s a strong argument that if it was reasonable to pull service from Kiwi Farms on Saturday, it was worth doing it earlier.

But, before we discuss the final decision, I want to go back to the original statement from last Wednesday. It is worth reading and considering, even as tons of smart people were screaming about it being ridiculous. Even if you disagree with it, I think it’s hard to argue that the statement is ridiculous. It actually lays out the nuances and challenges involved in its position.

This is actually unlike most companies’ statements on content moderation, which are vague and post-hoc rationalization for decisions. Cloudflare’s statement actually lays out an understandable set of principles and a framework for how to think about things.

It notes, correctly, that Cloudflare has a number of different product offerings and services, some of which are closer to the edge, and some of which are deeper in the infrastructure layer. It even lays out this nice graphic displaying not just the way it views the different layers, and where Cloudflare plays within those layers, but also where content moderation comes into play as compared to where legal due process comes into play (and it’s interesting to see how these things are represented as almost the opposite of one another).

You can disagree with pieces of this, but you can see that a lot of thought has been put into how all of this works together and plays out.

And the writeup lays out some pretty clear principles. Including this one which it’s difficult to deny is quite accurate (and important, as principles go):

Our guiding principle is that organizations closest to content are best at determining when the content is abusive. It also recognizes that overbroad takedowns can have significant unintended impact on access to content online.

The discussion over how to handle moderation of its security practices is similarly sensible and principled. The analogy of the fire department here is as powerful one:

Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn’t respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities.

The fire department analogy also got me thinking, because it kind of highlights how much of the anger directed at Cloudflare is similarly misplaced. The anger is basically saying “you need to remove your protection, so that we can burn Kiwi Farms down.” But, the larger question remains unaddressed: why does Kiwi Farms exist in the first place, and why is it left to Cloudflare to determine whether or not the public should be able to burn it down?

When we’re in a place where the only way to deal with those seeking to harm others is to demand that the fire department stand aside so we can burn down their house, we’re in a very, very dark place.

Again, to those being targeted and harassed (to ridiculous lengths) by people on Kiwi Farms, there is no time for principles and nuance. And that’s where much of all of this feels like it falls down. It also seems to be the breaking point for Cloudflare, which also realized that at some point lives are on the line for no good reason at all (actually terrible reasons), and there’s the question of how not doing anything itself can enable harm. And that’s also a principle worth taking seriously.

Cloudflare’s statement then highlights something that I think is key. In the rare instances where they have taken down other services, the immediate response is greater demands, often from authoritarian countries (and they don’t say this, but I know it’s true: also some countries we don’t normally think of as authoritarian) to take down other sites citing the exact same language used as the reasons for taking down the initial sites:

This isn’t hypothetical. Thousands of times per day we receive calls that we terminate security services based on content that someone reports as offensive. Most of these don’t make news. Most of the time these decisions don’t conflict with our moral views. Yet two times in the past we decided to terminate content from our security services because we found it reprehensible. In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan.

In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.

I recognize that to many people, it feels like there’s an easy response to this: take down the truly reprehensible sites and tell the authoritarian regimes to fuck off. Of course, that includes a lot of assumptions that aren’t necessarily true in real life — mainly that everything is as black and white as that. The reality is that it’s not that clear, and it’s reminiscent of the arguments from people who have never dealt with any real content moderation decisions, and who insist that it’s simple “just delete the bad content, and leave the good content.”

The reality is not that simple. Whether content is good or bad is not a clear thing. Lots of people think it is, but it’s not. What’s good to some people is bad to others. It’s not like there are obvious decisions here. Everything involves judgment calls, and even if you can point to something like Kiwi Farms and say that the only people who can see any good in it are sociopathic, it still leaves you with other questions and challenges with no easy answer.

Let’s say we assume that on the scale of sociopathic rage sites from 1 to 100, KF is at 100. So, you say, “that should be left unprotected for people to tear down with pitchforks.” Then where do you draw the line? The site that is 99% sociopathic is still pretty problematic. What about the one that’s 70%? 50% is still halfway there.

And if you say that those other sites don’t exist, you’re wrong. There are all kinds of sites out there, and some are way worse than others. Drawing that line is an impossible task.

So, Cloudflare is taking a principled stance to say “look, this shouldn’t be up to us.” And the company is right about that — except that it appears that the rest of society, which should be taking responsibility for minimizing the harms of such things, has basically said that it won’t. And what do you do in that case?

The rest of society — including the government and law enforcement — seems unwilling to do anything, so the next in line is Cloudflare. That’s not a great situation, but it’s reality. And reality sometimes makes principles difficult. Especially when lives are at stake.

There’s value in having principles rather than arbitrary decision making (which feels much more common in content moderation). But that’s incredibly unsatisfying to anyone who simply wants Kiwi Farms to not exist any more, and for horrible people to stop harassing others.

Cloudflare is actually right to take a principled stance. It’s right to look at all this and say “this decision shouldn’t belong to us, because if it does, it’s going to lead to other bad decisions.” But the people who want Kiwi Farms to stop putting lives in danger are also absolutely right. And those two forces were opposed, and eventually Cloudflare did what it needed to do.

This is immensely unsatisfying to everyone, but it again highlights that we should be looking at the question of why something like Kiwi Farms exist in the first place — not why Cloudflare is providing services to them and preventing the public from burning them down.

Do we need better law enforcement that takes such things more seriously? Yes. There are countless reports out there of people harassed to ridiculous lengths by Kiwi Farms who, when they turned to law enforcement, were basically said that there’s nothing that can be done. Do we need better education and mental health care so that fewer people are attracted to a sociopathic forum like Kiwi Farms? Yes. That too.

But we don’t have those things. And that’s not very helpful either. And it’s going to lead to more problems down the road.

While I’m assuming most people didn’t read the full piece from Cloudflare, down towards the end, the company highlights how the demands keep going further down the stack as well, and tie it back together to the point I made up top about SOPA, with regards to demands that Cloudflare block certain sites entirely via its DNS offering:

While we will generally follow legal orders to restrict security and conduit services, we have a higher bar for core Internet technology services like Authoritative DNS, Recursive DNS/1.1.1.1, and WARP. The challenge with these services is that restrictions on them are global in nature. You cannot easily restrict them just in one jurisdiction so the most restrictive law ends up applying globally.

We have generally challenged or appealed legal orders that attempt to restrict access to these core Internet technology services, even when a ruling only applies to our free customers. In doing so, we attempt to suggest to regulators or courts more tailored ways to restrict the content they may be concerned about.

Unfortunately, these cases are becoming more common where largely copyright holders are attempting to get a ruling in one jurisdiction and have it apply worldwide to terminate core Internet technology services and effectively wipe content offline. Again, we believe this is a dangerous precedent to set, placing the control of what content is allowed online in the hands of whatever jurisdiction is willing to be the most restrictive.

That should be quite concerning to everyone, and brings us back to what the SOPA fight was all about. But if you argue that it should be Cloudflare’s responsibility to take down truly awful websites, then it’s difficult to have a principled response when the legacy copyright industries show up to demand that other sites be taken offline globally.

What’s been most fascinating to me is watching the reaction to this. Almost universally, people are attacking Cloudflare’s stance, even as it’s carefully laid out and argued on a principled level. But since the original post answers the simple question “will you still provide services to Kiwi Farms” with a “yes,” most people have no time for the nuances and principles.

The only exception I’ve seen is that the people I know who have spent years grappling with these tricky and impossible tradeoffs regarding moderation at the infrastructure level have been mostly highlighting how thoughtful Cloudflare’s piece is. I’d link to some of those discussions on Twitter, except that at least a few of the examples I’ve seen have since been deleted, as they were attacked in response, because they appeared to be supporting Cloudflare’s thoughtful take on this — and that meant not allowing the public to burn down Kiwi Farms. Is there some irony in the fact that those demanding the removal of Kiwi Farms for the harassment it enables immediately resort to harassment of anyone who tries to hold a nuanced discussion on the topic? Perhaps.

There are other parts of Cloudflare’s statement that I question. I think the company is way too quick to claim that its security services are the equivalent of a utility, as that seemingly suggests a kind of must-carry requirement that, in turn, raises many other thorny questions. Also, while I understand why the company also talked up some of the projects it has put in place to do good in the world, and in particular some of the many projects it has put together to help better protect at risk people (which truly are good programs, and which the company has generally not hyped up too much), it does come off as quite self-serving here, and reads awkwardly.

But, of course, none of that post answered the simple question, in which there is no room for nuance: why is Kiwi Farms still allowed to use Cloudflare’s infrastructure? A few days later, Cloudflare admitted that it couldn’t really answer that question either and took action.

It’s a case where principles are important, but if your principles take you to a place where you eventually realize harm is happening that you could stop, it may be time to revisit at least some of them.

The problem is that it shouldn’t be Cloudflare having to answer the question, because the only tool in its toolbox, really, is to stand aside and let the people with pitchforks burn a site down. And that should be worrying in its own right.

The real question should be why have we set up this world where it’s Cloudflare’s decision to make in the first place? And, once again, that leads us back to what seems to be at the heart of so many of these content moderation debates: there are larger societal issues at play here, and the one party that is supposed to be dealing with larger societal issues, the government, continues to fail to deal with anything… and then leaves it up to private corporations to shoulder the burden — and the widespread hate.

Much of it only exists because the government failed to do its job.

At the very least, I appreciate that Cloudflare management is willing to say “we should take a principled look at how we deal with this,” whereas so many other companies take a totally arbitrary position where decisions are inscrutable. And, over and over again, one of the biggest complaints that people have about content moderation is that the policies frequently seem so reactive and arbitrary, rather than thoughtful and principled.

But, when taking a thoughtful and principled stance leads to the wrong decision — as seemed to have been the case here — eventually someone has to step in and correct it. I’m glad that Cloudflare made the right call eventually, but I agree with its general principles, and even more importantly with the idea that this shouldn’t be on the shoulders of one company. We should be exploring how society allowed this to happen in the first place, and left it on Cloudflare to fix.

Filed Under: content moderation, copyright, doxxing, forums, harassment, infrastructure, principles
Companies: cloudflare, kiwi farms