The first play in the autocratic playbook is not to attack everyone at once.

Rather, it’s to go after one. One law firm. One judge. One university. One journalist. The strategy isn’t just to silence the immediate target — it’s to make others watch and learn. To convince them that resistance is dangerous, costly, and futile. To make them believe that if they just keep their head down, it’ll happen to someone else instead.

The strategy works. It’s why Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were able to consolidate power in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey without needing to bulldoze the entire system at once. They didn’t need to. It was enough to pick off a few key targets, watch everyone else retreat into fear and complicity, and let the structure collapse under its own weight.

But the strategy fails — and it has failed — when societies recognize the game early enough and refuse to play along. When institutions that would normally compete or stay in their lane realize that they rise and fall together. That’s what collective action is. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to autocrats.

U.S. media usually goes easy on Trump, giving him a pass on behavior they’d cover as a scandal if it were anyone else. But the Signal leak is different. Here are ten possible reasons why this, of all the Trump scandals, got scandal coverage:

1–About National Security

2–Not Focused on Trump

3–It Was Hidden

4–The Media Loves Covering Itself

5–Trapped by Their Own Pathologies

6–Attacking the Media Won’t Work

7–No Whatabouts, No Way to “Both Sides”

8–Not About Word Choice

9–It’s Funny

10–Democrats on the Air

Yascha Mounk: We’ve had a lot of debates over the last years about misinformation. I feel really torn on the subject because on the one hand, I recognize that misinformation is a real problem. If you go on social media, there are false statements, doctored videos, conspiracy theories, just crazy stuff that gets a lot of attention, and that really informs how people think about the world and about politics. Clearly, that’s a problem.

At the same time, I have this concern that a lot of the time when we talk about misinformation, first, we might get wrong what is true and what is false. During the pandemic, for example, some ideas were labeled as misinformation that later turned out to be plausible or perhaps true. Secondly, this whole discourse about misinformation can really be an excuse for censorship. It can be an excuse to say, we in power are going to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong, and we’re just going to censor anybody who disagrees with us. What is your approach to this field? Because you take the problem very seriously, but I think you share my suspicion that censorship is not the way to respond.

As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the United States would be better than with Denmark. Danish officials have been too diplomatic to answer directly the insults directed at them from their own territory during an uninvited visit by imperialist hotheads. Let me though just note a few possible replies, off the top of my head. The comparison between life in the United States and life in Denmark is not just polemical. Musk-Trump treat Europe as though it were some decadent abyss, and propose that alliances with dictatorships would somehow be better. But Europe is not only home to our traditional allies; it is an enviable zone of democracy, wealth and prosperity with which it benefits us to have good relations, and from which we can sometimes learn.

So consider. The US is is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Children of all ages! Welcome to the greatest show on Earth!”

The words are formulaic, nearly meaningless through repetition. Yet the audience leans forward. The ancient machinery of attention locks into place. Eyes focus. Conversations halt mid-sentence. The collective gaze narrows to this single point in space where meaning has been promised.

This is the first and most fundamental spectacle: the transformation of scattered individuals into a coordinated audience. Before any act is performed, before any wonder is revealed, this miracle of synchronized attention occurs. A social alchemy so commonplace we’ve forgotten to marvel at it.

The ringmaster knows his power lies not in what he shows but in his ability to direct attention. “To your right,” he calls, and thousands of faces turn as one. “Above your heads,” he announces, and thousands of necks crane upward in perfect coordination. This is governance in its most elemental form—not the power to compel, but the authority to guide perception.

But there is no such thing as a newspaper, a magazine, a TV news channel or even a news website anymore. There is only the Web. If you want to live there, you must build a community within it.

That means doing something I hate, namely specializing. It also means creating a two-way street, like Facebook without the sludge. A safe place for locals to not only vent but connect, emphasis on the word SAFE. You’re about as safe on Facebook as you are on an unlit alleyway behind a strip club after midnight on a weekend.

Once you build a community, you can build another, but it won’t be any cheaper than the first one was. Doing this takes deep learning, expertise, and a desire to serve. The best publishers have always identified with their readers, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Their business is creating =communities around shared needs, through unbiased journalism and a clear delineation between advertising and editorial.

But there is no such thing as a newspaper, a magazine, a TV news channel or even a news website anymore. There is only the Web. If you want to live there, you must build a community within it.

That means doing something I hate, namely specializing. It also means creating a two-way street, like Facebook without the sludge. A safe place for locals to not only vent but connect, emphasis on the word SAFE. You’re about as safe on Facebook as you are on an unlit alleyway behind a strip club after midnight on a weekend.

Once you build a community, you can build another, but it won’t be any cheaper than the first one was. Doing this takes deep learning, expertise, and a desire to serve. The best publishers have always identified with their readers, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Their business is creating =communities around shared needs, through unbiased journalism and a clear delineation between advertising and editorial.

Henry Farrell, SNF Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), along with co-authors Alison Gopnik (University of California, Berkeley), Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon University), and James Evans (University of Chicago), challenge the idea that large AI models are becoming independent, intelligent agents in a new paper published in Science. Instead, they argue that AI functions as a cultural and social tool, much like writing, printing, markets, and bureaucracies.

Farrell and his co-authors explain that large AI models do not “think” or “understand” the world as people do. Instead, they process vast amounts of human-created information and organize it to make it more accessible. Like earlier technologies that transformed communication and knowledge-sharing, AI influences politics, business, and decision-making.

Farrell sees this article as a crucial step in shifting how people talk about AI. “We need to stop imagining AI as super-powered individual intelligences and start seeing it for what it is, a system that reorganizes information and power” he says. “When we compare large models to economic markets or government systems instead of spinning out speculative science fictional scenarios, we can ask more useful questions. Who controls them? How do they shape our understanding of the world? How do they shift influence and decision-making?”

The first play in the autocratic playbook is not to attack everyone at once.

Rather, it’s to go after one. One law firm. One judge. One university. One journalist. The strategy isn’t just to silence the immediate target — it’s to make others watch and learn. To convince them that resistance is dangerous, costly, and futile. To make them believe that if they just keep their head down, it’ll happen to someone else instead.

The strategy works. It’s why Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were able to consolidate power in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey without needing to bulldoze the entire system at once. They didn’t need to. It was enough to pick off a few key targets, watch everyone else retreat into fear and complicity, and let the structure collapse under its own weight.

But the strategy fails — and it has failed — when societies recognize the game early enough and refuse to play along. When institutions that would normally compete or stay in their lane realize that they rise and fall together. That’s what collective action is. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to autocrats.

Yascha Mounk: We’ve had a lot of debates over the last years about misinformation. I feel really torn on the subject because on the one hand, I recognize that misinformation is a real problem. If you go on social media, there are false statements, doctored videos, conspiracy theories, just crazy stuff that gets a lot of attention, and that really informs how people think about the world and about politics. Clearly, that’s a problem.

At the same time, I have this concern that a lot of the time when we talk about misinformation, first, we might get wrong what is true and what is false. During the pandemic, for example, some ideas were labeled as misinformation that later turned out to be plausible or perhaps true. Secondly, this whole discourse about misinformation can really be an excuse for censorship. It can be an excuse to say, we in power are going to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong, and we’re just going to censor anybody who disagrees with us. What is your approach to this field? Because you take the problem very seriously, but I think you share my suspicion that censorship is not the way to respond.

But there is no such thing as a newspaper, a magazine, a TV news channel or even a news website anymore. There is only the Web. If you want to live there, you must build a community within it.

That means doing something I hate, namely specializing. It also means creating a two-way street, like Facebook without the sludge. A safe place for locals to not only vent but connect, emphasis on the word SAFE. You’re about as safe on Facebook as you are on an unlit alleyway behind a strip club after midnight on a weekend.

Once you build a community, you can build another, but it won’t be any cheaper than the first one was. Doing this takes deep learning, expertise, and a desire to serve. The best publishers have always identified with their readers, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Their business is creating =communities around shared needs, through unbiased journalism and a clear delineation between advertising and editorial.

Henry Farrell, SNF Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), along with co-authors Alison Gopnik (University of California, Berkeley), Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon University), and James Evans (University of Chicago), challenge the idea that large AI models are becoming independent, intelligent agents in a new paper published in Science. Instead, they argue that AI functions as a cultural and social tool, much like writing, printing, markets, and bureaucracies.

Farrell and his co-authors explain that large AI models do not “think” or “understand” the world as people do. Instead, they process vast amounts of human-created information and organize it to make it more accessible. Like earlier technologies that transformed communication and knowledge-sharing, AI influences politics, business, and decision-making.

Farrell sees this article as a crucial step in shifting how people talk about AI. “We need to stop imagining AI as super-powered individual intelligences and start seeing it for what it is, a system that reorganizes information and power” he says. “When we compare large models to economic markets or government systems instead of spinning out speculative science fictional scenarios, we can ask more useful questions. Who controls them? How do they shape our understanding of the world? How do they shift influence and decision-making?”

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And who we love—what we ultimately care about, what we’re willing to sacrifice for—reveals more about our vision for humanity than all our stated intentions and proclamations. In asking who Elon loves, we’re really asking what kind of future we’re racing toward under the influence of those who share his loves and priorities.

A future shaped by Musk’s loves would be efficient, optimized, and profoundly lonely. A society built on democratic love would be messier, slower—but it would be built for people, not just progress. The choice is ours. The question is not merely academic but existential: will we surrender our future to those who love ideas more than people, or will we insist on a world shaped by more humane loves—loves that recognize both our limitations and our dignity, our need for both innovation and connection?

Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves not just who Elon loves, but what kind of loves should be shaping our collective future.

The Democratic establishment brain was at the giant law firm Paul Weiss. They just bent the knee to Trump. Plus, tennis players revolt, and Google accidentally confesses to monopolization.

For a long time, I’ve discussed a secret center of power in America, what is known as “Big Law,” a network of law firms who serve as a shadow government for the out-of-power party.

Lawyers have always had a special place in America. They must maintain a dual loyalty, serving clients with advice and court representation, but serving the public as officers of the court. There’s a dense ethical code lawyers must maintain. For instance, they can’t help their clients break the law, and they can’t switch sides in a dispute

On my AI courses, I don’t just teach how to build AI; I emphasize understanding what it is. Most importantly, I explore the what and the why. My goal is to leave no stone unturned in the minds of my students and executives, fostering a comprehensive awareness of AI’s potential and its pitfalls.

Crucially, this involves cultivating widespread AI literacy, empowering individuals to responsibly understand, build, and engage with these transformative technologies. Our exploration centers on developing applications that enhance societal well-being, moving beyond the pursuit of mere profit. My AI app for a major bank, designed to assist individuals with vision impairment, exemplifies this philosophy.

This focus on ethical development and human-centered design underscores my conviction that the future of AI depends on our ability to move beyond simplistic narratives and embrace a nuanced understanding of its potential. Whatever we may think of AI, and I have many conflicting thoughts, it is certain that it will foretell our future, so we must learn to shape it and rebuild our humane qualities.

The first play in the autocratic playbook is not to attack everyone at once.

Rather, it’s to go after one. One law firm. One judge. One university. One journalist. The strategy isn’t just to silence the immediate target — it’s to make others watch and learn. To convince them that resistance is dangerous, costly, and futile. To make them believe that if they just keep their head down, it’ll happen to someone else instead.

The strategy works. It’s why Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were able to consolidate power in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey without needing to bulldoze the entire system at once. They didn’t need to. It was enough to pick off a few key targets, watch everyone else retreat into fear and complicity, and let the structure collapse under its own weight.

But the strategy fails — and it has failed — when societies recognize the game early enough and refuse to play along. When institutions that would normally compete or stay in their lane realize that they rise and fall together. That’s what collective action is. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to autocrats.

U.S. media usually goes easy on Trump, giving him a pass on behavior they’d cover as a scandal if it were anyone else. But the Signal leak is different. Here are ten possible reasons why this, of all the Trump scandals, got scandal coverage:

1–About National Security

2–Not Focused on Trump

3–It Was Hidden

4–The Media Loves Covering Itself

5–Trapped by Their Own Pathologies

6–Attacking the Media Won’t Work

7–No Whatabouts, No Way to “Both Sides”

8–Not About Word Choice

9–It’s Funny

10–Democrats on the Air

Yascha Mounk: We’ve had a lot of debates over the last years about misinformation. I feel really torn on the subject because on the one hand, I recognize that misinformation is a real problem. If you go on social media, there are false statements, doctored videos, conspiracy theories, just crazy stuff that gets a lot of attention, and that really informs how people think about the world and about politics. Clearly, that’s a problem.

At the same time, I have this concern that a lot of the time when we talk about misinformation, first, we might get wrong what is true and what is false. During the pandemic, for example, some ideas were labeled as misinformation that later turned out to be plausible or perhaps true. Secondly, this whole discourse about misinformation can really be an excuse for censorship. It can be an excuse to say, we in power are going to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong, and we’re just going to censor anybody who disagrees with us. What is your approach to this field? Because you take the problem very seriously, but I think you share my suspicion that censorship is not the way to respond.

As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the United States would be better than with Denmark. Danish officials have been too diplomatic to answer directly the insults directed at them from their own territory during an uninvited visit by imperialist hotheads. Let me though just note a few possible replies, off the top of my head. The comparison between life in the United States and life in Denmark is not just polemical. Musk-Trump treat Europe as though it were some decadent abyss, and propose that alliances with dictatorships would somehow be better. But Europe is not only home to our traditional allies; it is an enviable zone of democracy, wealth and prosperity with which it benefits us to have good relations, and from which we can sometimes learn.

So consider. The US is is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Children of all ages! Welcome to the greatest show on Earth!”

The words are formulaic, nearly meaningless through repetition. Yet the audience leans forward. The ancient machinery of attention locks into place. Eyes focus. Conversations halt mid-sentence. The collective gaze narrows to this single point in space where meaning has been promised.

This is the first and most fundamental spectacle: the transformation of scattered individuals into a coordinated audience. Before any act is performed, before any wonder is revealed, this miracle of synchronized attention occurs. A social alchemy so commonplace we’ve forgotten to marvel at it.

The ringmaster knows his power lies not in what he shows but in his ability to direct attention. “To your right,” he calls, and thousands of faces turn as one. “Above your heads,” he announces, and thousands of necks crane upward in perfect coordination. This is governance in its most elemental form—not the power to compel, but the authority to guide perception.

But there is no such thing as a newspaper, a magazine, a TV news channel or even a news website anymore. There is only the Web. If you want to live there, you must build a community within it.

That means doing something I hate, namely specializing. It also means creating a two-way street, like Facebook without the sludge. A safe place for locals to not only vent but connect, emphasis on the word SAFE. You’re about as safe on Facebook as you are on an unlit alleyway behind a strip club after midnight on a weekend.

Once you build a community, you can build another, but it won’t be any cheaper than the first one was. Doing this takes deep learning, expertise, and a desire to serve. The best publishers have always identified with their readers, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Their business is creating =communities around shared needs, through unbiased journalism and a clear delineation between advertising and editorial.

But there is no such thing as a newspaper, a magazine, a TV news channel or even a news website anymore. There is only the Web. If you want to live there, you must build a community within it.

That means doing something I hate, namely specializing. It also means creating a two-way street, like Facebook without the sludge. A safe place for locals to not only vent but connect, emphasis on the word SAFE. You’re about as safe on Facebook as you are on an unlit alleyway behind a strip club after midnight on a weekend.

Once you build a community, you can build another, but it won’t be any cheaper than the first one was. Doing this takes deep learning, expertise, and a desire to serve. The best publishers have always identified with their readers, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Their business is creating =communities around shared needs, through unbiased journalism and a clear delineation between advertising and editorial.

Henry Farrell, SNF Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), along with co-authors Alison Gopnik (University of California, Berkeley), Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon University), and James Evans (University of Chicago), challenge the idea that large AI models are becoming independent, intelligent agents in a new paper published in Science. Instead, they argue that AI functions as a cultural and social tool, much like writing, printing, markets, and bureaucracies.

Farrell and his co-authors explain that large AI models do not “think” or “understand” the world as people do. Instead, they process vast amounts of human-created information and organize it to make it more accessible. Like earlier technologies that transformed communication and knowledge-sharing, AI influences politics, business, and decision-making.

Farrell sees this article as a crucial step in shifting how people talk about AI. “We need to stop imagining AI as super-powered individual intelligences and start seeing it for what it is, a system that reorganizes information and power” he says. “When we compare large models to economic markets or government systems instead of spinning out speculative science fictional scenarios, we can ask more useful questions. Who controls them? How do they shape our understanding of the world? How do they shift influence and decision-making?”

The United States is no longer a democracy.

At least, that’s the verdict of one nonprofit, the Center for Systemic Peace, which measures regime qualities of countries worldwide based on the competitiveness and integrity of their elections, limits to executive authority and other factors.

“The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy,” the group’s 2025 report read.

It calls Donald Trump’s second inauguration following a raft of criminal indictments and convictions, combined with the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 2024 granting of sweeping presidential immunity, a “presidential coup.”

Generally, only scholars pay attention to this kind of technical index. This year, however, many people are calling out the erosion of U.S. democracy.

Political scientists like myself can see that in the guise of government “efficiency,” the Trump administration is sabotaging the rule of law to such an extent that authoritarianism is taking hold in America.

How long might this situation last?

US no longer a democracy?

The term “political regime” refers to either the person or people who hold power, or to a classification of government, including in a democracy.

Since the mid-1960s, when the U.S. expanded voting rights to include its Black citizens, historians and political scientists have generally classified the U.S. as having a democratic regime. That means the government holds free and fair elections, embraces universal voting rights, protects civil liberties and obeys the law.

All of these areas have significantly degraded in the U.S. over the last few decades due to partisan polarization and political extremism. Now, the rule of law is under attack, too.

Trump’s unprecedented use of nearly 100 executive orders in the first two months of his presidency aims to enact a vast policy agenda by decree. For comparison, President Joe Biden issued 162 executive orders over four years.

This is not what the founders had in mind: Congress is the constitutional route for policy-making. Skirting it threatens democracy, as do the issues Trump’s orders address. From attempting to deny citizenship through birthright to abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, Trump is attacking both the U.S. Constitution and Congress. His administration has even defied judges who order it to stop.

All of this challenges the rule of law – that is, the idea that everyone, including those in power, must follow the same laws.

When things get this bad, can a country recover?

Autocrats can be beaten

Based on my research, the short answer is yes – eventually.

When a political party that does not honor democratic institutions or heed critical democratic norms takes power, political scientists expect the government to shift toward autocratic rule. That means restricting civil liberties, quashing dissent and undermining the rule of law.

This is happening right now in the U.S.

The Trump administration is challenging broadcasters for their election coverage and banning speech that does not conform to its gender ideology. It’s flagrantly violating the Constitution. And it’s eliminating federal funding for universities and research centers that oppose its actions.

However, as long as a country has a robust opposition and elections that offer real opportunities for alternative parties to win office, the regime shift is not necessarily permanent.

Take Brazil, for example.

Its 2022 election ousted President Jair Bolsonaro, leader of an autocratic regime that had attacked the Brazilian media, judiciary and legislature. Bolsonaro claimed his loss to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was fraudulent, and in January 2023 his supporters attacked the nation’s capital. Since then, Bolsonaro has been charged with plotting a coup and barred from seeking office until 2030.

Brazilian voters and the courts stemmed the country’s autocratic slide and returned it to a democratic regime.

Polarization swings the pendulum

Today the American public is deeply divided and dissatisfied with how U.S. democracy works. This polarization translates into presidential elections that are narrowly won.

According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara, which measures presidential margins of victory by subtracting the electoral vote percentage from the popular vote percentage for each election, the average margin of victory in presidential elections between 1932 and 2000 was 25 points. Since 2000, it has been 7.8 points.

Moreover, since 1948, every time the White House changed hands after an election, it flipped parties as well, with one exception in 1988. Political scientists refer to this back-and-forth as “thermostatic shifting.” In other words, the electorate regularly sours on the status quo and aims to adjust the thermostat to another temperature – or political party.

When a party that more strongly favors democratic principles takes power, the U.S. more firmly adheres to democratic institutions and norms. This was essentially Biden’s winning pitch to voters in 2020.

Trump’s return to the White House despite two impeachments and a criminal conviction on 34 felony charges marked another pendulum swing – this time, back in the direction of authoritarianism.

The U.S. political pendulum has been singing back and forth like this since at least 2016, with Trump’s first win. I expect the oscillation to continue.

A kind of equilibrium

The risk, of course, is that a ruling authoritarian-leaning party abuses its power to ensure that the opposition can never again win. This has happened in recent decades in Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela, to name a few.

There are good reasons to believe that a permanent slide into autocracy is harder in the U.S. than in those countries.

The U.S. has a robust and wealthy network of civil society organizations, which are well versed in exercising their civil liberties. Its decentralized federalist structure is harder for any one person or party to seize. U.S. elections for example, are run by state and local governments, not the federal government. This makes its election systems more resilient than more centralized election systems.

At the moment, I see no reason to fear that the U.S. will fail to hold free and fair elections in 2026 or 2028.

For the time being, then, the U.S. is in what I call a “pendular equilibrium.” Parties trade majority control as voters react to extremism, shifting the regime from more autocratic to more democratic depending on who is in power.

The effect is a stable outcome of sorts – not a static stability but a dynamic stability. Despite the day-to-day chaos, there is balance over time in the predictable shift back and forth.

When the pendulum stops swinging

Until, that is, some other force comes along to disrupt the pattern.

This might be a force more toward fascism that restricts elections to the point of futility, as in Venezuela and Russia. Or the equilibrium could be thrown off by a democratic resurgence, in the model of Brazil or Poland.

Even just maintaining the pendular equilibrium to conserve some manner of democratic regime will require those who oppose authoritarianism to boldly insist on political leaders who value democratic principles: fair elections, voting rights, civil liberties and rule of law.

Dangerously, many Americans won’t notice the end of democracy as it happens. As the political scientist Tom Pepinksy writes, life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerable.

For those who pay attention, the frequency and seriousness of lawless actions can nonetheless make it difficult to sustain an organized opposition.

Until and unless the U.S. nurtures and elects political movements and leaders who make lasting democratic changes, I believe the country will continue to lurch back and forth in its pendulum swing.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And who we love—what we ultimately care about, what we’re willing to sacrifice for—reveals more about our vision for humanity than all our stated intentions and proclamations. In asking who Elon loves, we’re really asking what kind of future we’re racing toward under the influence of those who share his loves and priorities.

A future shaped by Musk’s loves would be efficient, optimized, and profoundly lonely. A society built on democratic love would be messier, slower—but it would be built for people, not just progress. The choice is ours. The question is not merely academic but existential: will we surrender our future to those who love ideas more than people, or will we insist on a world shaped by more humane loves—loves that recognize both our limitations and our dignity, our need for both innovation and connection?

Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves not just who Elon loves, but what kind of loves should be shaping our collective future.

The Democratic establishment brain was at the giant law firm Paul Weiss. They just bent the knee to Trump. Plus, tennis players revolt, and Google accidentally confesses to monopolization.

For a long time, I’ve discussed a secret center of power in America, what is known as “Big Law,” a network of law firms who serve as a shadow government for the out-of-power party.

Lawyers have always had a special place in America. They must maintain a dual loyalty, serving clients with advice and court representation, but serving the public as officers of the court. There’s a dense ethical code lawyers must maintain. For instance, they can’t help their clients break the law, and they can’t switch sides in a dispute

On my AI courses, I don’t just teach how to build AI; I emphasize understanding what it is. Most importantly, I explore the what and the why. My goal is to leave no stone unturned in the minds of my students and executives, fostering a comprehensive awareness of AI’s potential and its pitfalls.

Crucially, this involves cultivating widespread AI literacy, empowering individuals to responsibly understand, build, and engage with these transformative technologies. Our exploration centers on developing applications that enhance societal well-being, moving beyond the pursuit of mere profit. My AI app for a major bank, designed to assist individuals with vision impairment, exemplifies this philosophy.

This focus on ethical development and human-centered design underscores my conviction that the future of AI depends on our ability to move beyond simplistic narratives and embrace a nuanced understanding of its potential. Whatever we may think of AI, and I have many conflicting thoughts, it is certain that it will foretell our future, so we must learn to shape it and rebuild our humane qualities.

Trump’s policies attack his own base — but who will tell them?

Donald Trump is often described as a “populist.” Yet his administration is stuffed with wealthy men who are clueless about how the other 99.99 percent lives, while his policies involve undermining the working class while enabling wealthy tax cheats.

What is true is that many working-class voters supported Trump last year because they believed that he was on their side. And that disconnect between perceptions and reality ought to be at the heart of any discussion of what Democrats should do now.

Right now the central front in the assault on the working class is Social Security, which Elon Musk, unable to admit error, keeps insisting is riddled with fraud. The DOGE-bullied Social Security Administration has already announced that those applying for benefits or trying to change where their benefits are deposited will need to verify their identity either online or in person — a huge, sometimes impossible burden on the elderly, often disabled Americans who need those benefits most. And with staff cuts and massive DOGE disruption, it seems increasingly likely that some benefits just won’t arrive as scheduled.

Not because we won’t have elections.

But because if enough people start to believe that the answer is “no,” then they won’t engage. They won’t prepare. They won’t bother. And the loss in the elections that do take place becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Trump sparked this precise effect in the Georgia run-offs for US Senate in January 2021).

Of course….we can’t know for sure what will happen in the coming years, let alone days and weeks. And we should be prepared for a continued parade of terrible actions by Trump and his henchmen.

Top Democrats tell us their party is in its deepest hole in nearly 50 years — and they fear things could actually get worse:

• The party has its lowest favorability ever.
• No popular national leader to help improve it.
• Insufficient numbers to stop most legislation in Congress.

• A durable minority on the Supreme Court.
• Dwindling influence over the media ecosystem, with right-leaning podcasters and social media accounts ascendant.
• Young voters are growing dramatically more conservative.
• A bad 2026 map for Senate races.
• Democratic Senate retirements could make it harder for the party to flip the House, with members tempted by statewide races.
• There are only three House Republicans in districts former Vice President Harris won in 2024, a dim sign for a Democratic surge. There were 23 eight years ago in seats Hillary Clinton won.
• And, thanks to the number of people fleeing blue states, the math for a Dem to win the presidency will just get harder in 2030.

“It’s a free county.”

How many times have you said it? Or heard it said? Children say it almost as soon as they learn to talk.

It’s an idea that is so woven into the fabric of our lives that it is for many of us—despite all the wrongs of this country’s past—perhaps the simplest possible distillation of what America is about or, at least, should be about.

At least it was.

But is it true any longer? Is it true if the government can tell a university what to teach and how? Or if that government uses its power to snatch legal residents off the streets for expressing a view it does not like? Or if leaders in Washington threaten law firms that if they do not embrace clients with certain beliefs they will be forced out of business? Or if promoting simple ideas like the merits of diversity or the importance of equity and inclusion can be banned within the government or within entities that receive funds from the government? When pictures of Americans of color or women are banned from government websites? When words are considered so dangerous that they become banned in research proposals or any documents that require the approval of a government official?