Trump’s Strategy: Divide and Conquer
Beyond broad-based attacks, Trump is pushing a strategy more grotesque than what we’ve seen before: singling out individual universities, colleges and law firms; threatening them with deep damage; then extracting concessions that essentially end those institutions’ independence from the government itself.

Path 1. United Defiance
Defy. Better yet, defy together. Fight back as one.

Path 2, Divided Compliance
What happens when you cave? When you comply? One at a time.
Individually, it’s a disaster.

1. It’s vitally important, therefore, that institutions and countries join together to fight this systemic intimidation.
2. University faculties must join together under the umbrella of the American Association of University Professors to speak out against Trump’s assault on free speech and debate at universities, sue the Trump administration for violating their rights under the First Amendment, and develop a media strategy to alert the public to the dangers.
3. Canada, Mexico, Japan, and the European Union must join together to create a special trade zone that excludes the United States. They should threaten to limit American banks’ access to their public procurement markets, limit the huge sums their citizens invest in American companies annually, and increase tax and regulatory pressure on American digital platforms.
4. The media must not fan the flames of Trump’s madness. They should celebrate institutions that are standing up to Trump (such as the Jenner & Block law firm, Canada, and Mexico) and condemn those that are surrendering to him (such as Columbia University, the Paul Weiss law firm, and Israel and Vietnam on tariffs). They should help educate Americans about the costs of capitulating to Trump and its baleful consequences. This is all about power, and Trump’s thirst for power is all about converting the United States into a dictatorship.

Earlier this week, I laid out what I called The Great Extraction—the story of how the American economy stopped rewarding builders, started rewarding bottlenecks, and slowly turned its citizens into product, payment stream, and yield.

I wrote that “nobody gets rich making things anymore.” The game had changed, ownership was disappearing, and value now flowed not to those who produced but to those who extracted.

Well, this week, the Congressional Budget Office confirmed all of it.

The Social Security Illusion

The Extraction Continues

The Quiet Future

For the next three days, one man holds the global economy in the palm of his hands, literally and figuratively — and almost no one but him knows what will happen.

Why it matters: Every Wall Street trader and economist has “April 2” circled on their calendars. The consensus is that tariffs are coming, but the fear is in the unknown: how aggressive the measures will be.

The big picture: Financial markets hate surprises, yet that is what the Trump administration looks set to do this week — with mixed signals from the president himself about what will happen on Wednesday.

• The uncertainty, already tanking the stock market and economic sentiment, might be swapped for an unprecedented trade regime that would force businesses to adjust virtually overnight.

Look, I know that’s a harsh opening. Your fingers are probably already twitching toward the comment button to tell me I’m an elitist asshole. Fair enough! But hear me out before you start composing that righteously indignant response.

I’m inclined to agree with Sam Harris, who speculated on his podcast that Elon Musk was driven insane by his own capture by the Twitter algorithm. Harris quit Twitter himself and claims it dramatically improved his mental health. Watching Musk’s transformation from eccentric innovator to digital shitposter-in-chief, it’s hard not to wonder if the world’s richest man fell victim to the very algorithm he would eventually own.

Let’s consider a delightfully bizarre parallel: Ketamine is known to have neuroplasticity-enhancing effects on the brain, which is why it’s effective at treating PTSD and depression. But this is a double-edged sword. If you’re going to put your brain into “reprogramming mode” with the use of a drug, you might want to consider what you’re reprogramming it with. And I’m not sure the Twitter algorithm and doom scroll is the training set you should use!

There’s even a name for this forgetfulness and inability to focus: Digital Dementia. There’s no secret. Just about every one of us is on our phones or digital devices too much. Ourselves included. We’re losing the battle to the engineers who are designing devices and apps to keep us scrolling and pulling the digital slot machine.

1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind:

2. Leave it Out of the Bedroom:.

3. Observe a Digital Sabbath:

4. Read Hard Copy Books

5.  Set Aside Daily Time Alone in Your Head

6. Unsubscribe from Newsletters

For the next three days, one man holds the global economy in the palm of his hands, literally and figuratively — and almost no one but him knows what will happen.

Why it matters: Every Wall Street trader and economist has “April 2” circled on their calendars. The consensus is that tariffs are coming, but the fear is in the unknown: how aggressive the measures will be.

The big picture: Financial markets hate surprises, yet that is what the Trump administration looks set to do this week — with mixed signals from the president himself about what will happen on Wednesday.

• The uncertainty, already tanking the stock market and economic sentiment, might be swapped for an unprecedented trade regime that would force businesses to adjust virtually overnight.

Look, I know that’s a harsh opening. Your fingers are probably already twitching toward the comment button to tell me I’m an elitist asshole. Fair enough! But hear me out before you start composing that righteously indignant response.

I’m inclined to agree with Sam Harris, who speculated on his podcast that Elon Musk was driven insane by his own capture by the Twitter algorithm. Harris quit Twitter himself and claims it dramatically improved his mental health. Watching Musk’s transformation from eccentric innovator to digital shitposter-in-chief, it’s hard not to wonder if the world’s richest man fell victim to the very algorithm he would eventually own.

Let’s consider a delightfully bizarre parallel: Ketamine is known to have neuroplasticity-enhancing effects on the brain, which is why it’s effective at treating PTSD and depression. But this is a double-edged sword. If you’re going to put your brain into “reprogramming mode” with the use of a drug, you might want to consider what you’re reprogramming it with. And I’m not sure the Twitter algorithm and doom scroll is the training set you should use!

In this week’s newsletter, we’re looking at the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), a public digital infrastructure protocol designed to reshape how power, control, and ownership function online. It may not draw headlines, but it may shape the norms and choices that define our digital lives.

These protocols act as a digital public utility or highway, catalyzing innovation and creating the rails for millions of people and computers to connect.

1. Public protocols are open, meaning no single entity can monopolize internet access or content.
2. Public protocols promote interoperability between different systems.
3. Public protocols put power in the hands of everyday developers and users who can build upon them. They allow multiple people and companies to simultaneously work on and innovate around an idea.

Skylight Social announced Tuesday that it raised cash from the Shark Tank legend, as well as Seattle-based firm Graham & Walker. TechCrunch first reported on the funding.

The company just got off the ground and is led by Victoria White and Reed Harmeyer. Its app (iOS; Android) looks and feels similar to TikTok. But one important difference is that it’s built on the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol.

The AT Protocol lets users own their data, including their social graph, and move it across different apps. Bluesky, the popular X competitor, is built on the AT Protocol.

“We believe in giving users true ownership of their content and social connections,” Skylight says on its site. “By building on AT Protocol, we ensure that your videos, followers, and engagement aren’t locked into our platform. You’re free to take everything with you if you ever choose to use another AT Protocol-based service.”

Students are not what they used to be. The crisis is worse than you think.

It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

Trump’s Strategy: Divide and Conquer
Beyond broad-based attacks, Trump is pushing a strategy more grotesque than what we’ve seen before: singling out individual universities, colleges and law firms; threatening them with deep damage; then extracting concessions that essentially end those institutions’ independence from the government itself.

Path 1. United Defiance
Defy. Better yet, defy together. Fight back as one.

Path 2, Divided Compliance
What happens when you cave? When you comply? One at a time.
Individually, it’s a disaster.

1. It’s vitally important, therefore, that institutions and countries join together to fight this systemic intimidation.
2. University faculties must join together under the umbrella of the American Association of University Professors to speak out against Trump’s assault on free speech and debate at universities, sue the Trump administration for violating their rights under the First Amendment, and develop a media strategy to alert the public to the dangers.
3. Canada, Mexico, Japan, and the European Union must join together to create a special trade zone that excludes the United States. They should threaten to limit American banks’ access to their public procurement markets, limit the huge sums their citizens invest in American companies annually, and increase tax and regulatory pressure on American digital platforms.
4. The media must not fan the flames of Trump’s madness. They should celebrate institutions that are standing up to Trump (such as the Jenner & Block law firm, Canada, and Mexico) and condemn those that are surrendering to him (such as Columbia University, the Paul Weiss law firm, and Israel and Vietnam on tariffs). They should help educate Americans about the costs of capitulating to Trump and its baleful consequences. This is all about power, and Trump’s thirst for power is all about converting the United States into a dictatorship.

Earlier this week, I laid out what I called The Great Extraction—the story of how the American economy stopped rewarding builders, started rewarding bottlenecks, and slowly turned its citizens into product, payment stream, and yield.

I wrote that “nobody gets rich making things anymore.” The game had changed, ownership was disappearing, and value now flowed not to those who produced but to those who extracted.

Well, this week, the Congressional Budget Office confirmed all of it.

The Social Security Illusion

The Extraction Continues

The Quiet Future

For the next three days, one man holds the global economy in the palm of his hands, literally and figuratively — and almost no one but him knows what will happen.

Why it matters: Every Wall Street trader and economist has “April 2” circled on their calendars. The consensus is that tariffs are coming, but the fear is in the unknown: how aggressive the measures will be.

The big picture: Financial markets hate surprises, yet that is what the Trump administration looks set to do this week — with mixed signals from the president himself about what will happen on Wednesday.

• The uncertainty, already tanking the stock market and economic sentiment, might be swapped for an unprecedented trade regime that would force businesses to adjust virtually overnight.

Look, I know that’s a harsh opening. Your fingers are probably already twitching toward the comment button to tell me I’m an elitist asshole. Fair enough! But hear me out before you start composing that righteously indignant response.

I’m inclined to agree with Sam Harris, who speculated on his podcast that Elon Musk was driven insane by his own capture by the Twitter algorithm. Harris quit Twitter himself and claims it dramatically improved his mental health. Watching Musk’s transformation from eccentric innovator to digital shitposter-in-chief, it’s hard not to wonder if the world’s richest man fell victim to the very algorithm he would eventually own.

Let’s consider a delightfully bizarre parallel: Ketamine is known to have neuroplasticity-enhancing effects on the brain, which is why it’s effective at treating PTSD and depression. But this is a double-edged sword. If you’re going to put your brain into “reprogramming mode” with the use of a drug, you might want to consider what you’re reprogramming it with. And I’m not sure the Twitter algorithm and doom scroll is the training set you should use!

There’s even a name for this forgetfulness and inability to focus: Digital Dementia. There’s no secret. Just about every one of us is on our phones or digital devices too much. Ourselves included. We’re losing the battle to the engineers who are designing devices and apps to keep us scrolling and pulling the digital slot machine.

1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind:

2. Leave it Out of the Bedroom:.

3. Observe a Digital Sabbath:

4. Read Hard Copy Books

5.  Set Aside Daily Time Alone in Your Head

6. Unsubscribe from Newsletters

In this week’s newsletter, we’re looking at the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), a public digital infrastructure protocol designed to reshape how power, control, and ownership function online. It may not draw headlines, but it may shape the norms and choices that define our digital lives.

These protocols act as a digital public utility or highway, catalyzing innovation and creating the rails for millions of people and computers to connect.

1. Public protocols are open, meaning no single entity can monopolize internet access or content.
2. Public protocols promote interoperability between different systems.
3. Public protocols put power in the hands of everyday developers and users who can build upon them. They allow multiple people and companies to simultaneously work on and innovate around an idea.

Skylight Social announced Tuesday that it raised cash from the Shark Tank legend, as well as Seattle-based firm Graham & Walker. TechCrunch first reported on the funding.

The company just got off the ground and is led by Victoria White and Reed Harmeyer. Its app (iOS; Android) looks and feels similar to TikTok. But one important difference is that it’s built on the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol.

The AT Protocol lets users own their data, including their social graph, and move it across different apps. Bluesky, the popular X competitor, is built on the AT Protocol.

“We believe in giving users true ownership of their content and social connections,” Skylight says on its site. “By building on AT Protocol, we ensure that your videos, followers, and engagement aren’t locked into our platform. You’re free to take everything with you if you ever choose to use another AT Protocol-based service.”

A deep dive into the evolution of fascism. And how understanding that evolution is the key to defeating it.

But this also offers us the exit ramp, one that is far easier to accomplish if people only open their eyes. We need to simply provide an alternative that is truly democratic both in ideology as well as in function.

Democrats, liberals, progressives, and the left don’t need to agree on everything, but they must agree on how democracy works and the shared values they want to bring into its next era.

Meaning, they have to agree that listening to the rich has destroyed democracy and to empower those who make up their movement. They have to agree that they cannot put their power in the few, but must instead invest in the many. They have to avoid purity politics, and instead focus on building the most diverse, actively engaged coalition possible. They must persuade rather than thinking they can ignore or silence those they disagree with.

Everything I’ve described, from worker pamphlets to Hitler’s trial to TikTok politics, is a form of marketing. Not in the corporate sense, but in its most essential form: the act of using communication to change minds and spark action.

Authoritarianism and fascism also aren’t human nature. We are animals shaped by millions of years of evolution to live, share, and decide together. To survive through cooperation. Democracy, then, is our human nature emerging when given the opportunity.

Students are not what they used to be. The crisis is worse than you think.

It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

One odd feature of U.S. politics is that businesspeople, especially small business owners, always seems to believe that they will do better under Republicans, even though history shows that business does better under Democrats. Small business owners supported Trump in the last election, despite ample evidence that he would be very bad for business.

And now they’re getting a rude awakening.

The lessons we can take from how easily institutions have folded to Trump’s remarkable revenge campaign.

The details are varied but two themes are consistent. The first is an effort — far more organized and disciplined than any precedent from Trump’s first term — to bring institutions who have earned the president’s ire to heel. The second theme is even more surprising: The swiftness with which supposedly powerful and supposedly independent institutions have responded — with something akin to the trembling acquiescence of a child surrendering his lunch money to a big kid on the morning walk to school.

Leaders of the institutions who have complied with Trump’s demands do not accept the White House’s idea that the basic premises of American governance have changed, and a New Normal has arrived. Quite the contrary, what people are yearning for is a return to the Old Normal, in which familiar revenue lines and profit margins stay intact.

Trump’s actions have illuminated more vividly than ever just how many wealthy private institutions have their finances and policies enmeshed with the federal government — though it is hardly a new phenomenon. What is different is the willingness of Trump and his lieutenants to use this leverage so unabashedly. Along the way, he has revealed the institutions to be more vulnerable to intimidation than their leaders themselves may have recognized.

As proponents of this anti-Obama conspiracy theory have moved closer to the mainstream of Democratic Party politics, Obama himself continues to be the most popular Democrat in the country, an in-demand speaker and surrogate every election cycle and the most accomplished progressive politician of recent generations. I know that a lot of people who are not particularly in the weeds on policy think I sound crazy when I talk about the extent to which diehard Obama-haters were steering the ship of state during the Biden Administration. But every once in a while, this kind of thing slips out.

So it’s worth actually asking: Is it factually true that the Obama administration deliberately tanked winnable criminal cases against major American banks?

The answer, of course, is no. But it’s hard to prove this kind of negative. And the accusation has been repeated enough that a writer can now casually drop it into a magazine article without being asked to provide any evidence for this nuclear-strength assertion.

For the week’s focus, I’m going to look at the inability of the U.S. to make what it needs, and the two different approaches unveiled this week to address it. The first approach is Trump’s 25% tariff scheme on automobiles, as well as his April 2nd “liberation day” of trade barriers. And the second is the promotion of a new book called Abundance by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, a revamped version of 1980s-style supply side politics. What do these moments tell us?

Let’s start with the problem of production. Whether good or bad, it’s quite clear at this point that the U.S. has a serious deficit in producing physical things. We all remember nurses wearing trash bags during the pandemic, and the pervasive shortages of key goods. Even today, we have shortages in baby formula and pharmaceuticals, not to mention infrastructure and housing being wildly expensive. Moreover, the U.S. is getting killed globally. The Chinese car industry is going exponential in exports, Airbus is taking market share over Boeing, and the U.S. military is sounding the alarm on production of artillery shells and missiles. If you look at the U.S. trade deficit, it’s a massive trillion dollar plus set of imports over exports.