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As Graham Platner locks up the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine, centrist Democrats in the rest of the country are looking on in horror.

Platner represents a populist, left-leaning, young generation of Democrat. He’s been incredibly successful at reaching voters in Maine and has incumbent Republican Susan Collins panicking.

Conservative Democrats aren’t on board. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, learned the hard way this week that attacking a member of his party from the right wasn’t going to go over well in the current environment.

As I noted in my recent column at The Intercept:

Outside of Maine, Platner has been a lightning rod for centrists eager to seize on his Senate race as a battleground for litigating broader divisions in the party’s anti-Trump coalition. Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, said on social media on Tuesday that anyone who endorsed the Uncommitted movement, which aimed to hold President Joe Biden accountable for his role in supporting the Israeli genocide of Gaza, couldn’t object to centrists doing the same over Platner — a comparison so out of proportion it defies rational explanation.

Score-settling seems more important than keeping the party together and taking the Senate. Melissa DeRosa, the Andrew Cuomo loyalist, told Fox News on Tuesday, “There are a lot of moderate Democrats like myself who will not cry tears should we lose Maine.” John Fetterman, who has broken with his party over his zealous support for Israel, bemoaned Platner’s presumptive nomination after Mills dropped out. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia centrist who served in the Senate for over two decades as a nominal Democrat, implicitly endorsed Collins in a glowing address in late April.

It’s part of a trend that extends beyond Platner. In Texas, supporters of Rep. Jasmine Crockett made noise about not backing state Sen. James Talarico in his contest for Senate against Republican Ken Paxton in November; for her part, Crockett has been criss-crossing the state lending her support and celebrity to more moderate primary candidates, including to former Rep. Colin Allred, who beat out Rep. Julie Johnson, Talarico’s pick.

Time will tell if centrists will get in line. Best case scenario is they don’t, and it doesn’t matter—a turn of events that would significantly lessen their grip on the party establishment.

Also this week, I wrote at the New York Times on how progressives need to start talking about AI from a realistic, worker-first position. More to come on that but for now, read it here.

I’ll be at Open Markets Institute for The Next American Revolution: Breaking Oligarchy and Making a New Democracy on June 24. Come say hi!

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Today myself and Hachette, my publisher for OWNED, filed an anti-SLAPP request with SDNY to obtain attorney’s fees from Matt Taibbi.

As I’ve documented here and elsewhere, Taibbi filed a frivolous defamation suit against me in November 2025 over my book, claiming that the rhetorical flourishes and cover amounted to a malicious attack on his character and reputation. It wasn’t the strongest case, to put it mildly—and, thankfully, Judge George B. Daniels saw it that way too, dismissing it with prejudice on May 5.

Taibbi used his financial leverage to file the suit in order to harass and intimidate me, and send a message to other would-be critics that if they say things he doesn’t like, he’ll make it costly. Filing the lawsuit—which fits the SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, definition—is meant to enforce that warning. Even if he loses, I’m still on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees.

New York’s anti-SLAPP law is meant to discourage this kind of behavior from the powerful, which is likely why Taibbi filed in federal court. But the use of anti-SLAPP in New York’s federal courts is an open question, and one that has tilted in recent years toward a broader application.

This lawsuit, to my mind, does three things:

1. recoups legal fees for this frivolous lawsuit, which I believe was filed with the primary intention of intimidation

2. adds to the growing caselaw around federal anti-SLAPP

3. hopefully makes Taibbi think twice the next time he goes after one of his critics to intimidate and harass them into silence

Taibbi has often positioned himself as a defender of free speech and open discussion, but the defamation lawsuit proves that he only thinks that under certain circumstances. If he wants to try to bully me out of saying what I believe, he’s in for a shock—and I’m hopeful that once we succeed with this motion, the price of censorship will be enough to stop him from doing it again.

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Last week I attended Web Summit Vancouver, a tech and politics themed conference.

During the event I spoke at two panels and moderated another—and was one of the speakers at a nighttime event that unraveled.

The latter event, of which there is sadly no full video, was a conversation about tech bros and whether they are the bad guys. I was one of the panelists, alongside Whistleblower Aid CEO Libby Liu, labor leader Chris Smalls, and online provocateur Michael Tracey.

If you’re familiar with Tracey, you can probably guess where this is going. After some debate with me about tech legislation and the broader question of whether or not there’s a democratic solution to the problem of the billionaire class, he and Smalls got into a long and contentious back-and-forth for the majority of the second half hour.

The night ended after Tracey, during his closing remarks, returned to an anecdote about Elon Musk, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump he tried to lead with. The crowd was uninterested, I was losing patience, so I told him to shut up—he asked for 30 more seconds and took another two minutes.

After that, and a brief comment from me, it was Smalls’s turn, and chaos erupted.

You can see video of the ending here; I’m sure more will be uploaded at some point.

Here are my panels:

Truth vs profit in today's media

With Whistleblower Aid CEO Libby Liu.

Moderated by Long Lead Founding Editor John Patrick Pullen.

From blue chips to red politics? Tech's ideological shift

With Guardian tech reporter Dara Kerr.

Moderated by Aaron Maté.

Getting AI right: From tech sovereignty to digital transformation

Featuring Shivam Kishore, Senior Advisor for Digital Transformation at UNEP, Maria Luisa Aldim, Executive Councilwoman for the Municipality of Lisbon, and Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO & Co-Founder of Axelera AI.

Moderated by me!

Please buy my book.

Buy OWNED today!

Please buy my book.

Buy OWNED today!

That’s a wrap.

Matt Taibbi’s defamation case against me and my publisher Hachette for the cover and content of my book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, was dismissed today, May 5.

The entire judgement is worth reading (here’s the link to the full case), but if you want a quick summation, this is a good breakdown:

Aside from the scattered words and phrases discussed below, Plaintiff does not dispute the accuracy of the vast majority of the Book’s factual content that informs these views or point to language suggesting the opinions are based on facts other than those disclosed in the book.

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So, that’s over. At least it provided some entertainment:

But for all the fun we’re having at Taibbi’s expense—and that’s a good thing he should, at the very least, be publicly humiliated for this—what he did is part of a worrying trend I’ve written about recently.

From what I can tell, this case wasn’t filed to win, it was filed to do two things:

1. harass me to cost me time and money and to make publishers think twice about working with me in the future, in other words, attacking me personally and professionally

2. putting other would-be critics on notice that if you come for Taibbi, he’ll make it cost you

That’s exactly the kind of anti-speech behavior we should all abhor and reject.

More to come, but for now, thanks all for the support.

And, please, buy the book.

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Looks like I’m not the only one being targeted by thin-skinned men on the right.

Yes, Matt Taibbi’s lawsuit against myself and my publisher, Hachette, over his portrayal in Owned is part of a trend of conservative figures using the legal system to silence critics. FBI Director Kash Patel is only the latest in the ideological coterie to threaten the press, suing The Atlantic last Monday for $250 million over reporting on his time in office thus far.

As I wrote for The Intercept last week:

For all the modern right-wing movement’s bleating about its commitment to free speech, in practice they’re anything but, with a demonstrated penchant for using the legal system as a cudgel against people who say things they don’t like. Known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP, they are a tool of the powerful — and have multiple levels of use.

Most immediately, SLAPP allows plaintiffs the potential to muzzle their critics, who will be less likely to launch attacks against someone who has already proven litigious. This applies not only to the defendant, whether it’s an individual or an institution, but also to others like them who will think twice rather than risk a protracted (and expensive) legal battle.

Typically, the more deep-pocketed someone, or their backers, are, the more they can bleed out defendants by dragging on court cases for as long as possible, racking up legal bills that will have to be paid. Most publishers and newsrooms have lawyers on retainer or in-house, but their legal insurance deductibles are still high, potentially running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per case.

More at the link.

Maine election update—Gov. Janet Mills looks to have all but thrown in the towel against Graham Platner. She’s barely running ads and vetoed popular legislation instituting a moratorium on data centers.

Here’s context from my report on the bill, which came before her veto:

Maine’s new data center law, which passed the state legislature on April 14 and is headed to Gov. Janet Mills for approval, would suspend building large data centers until November 2027, allowing for a state analysis of potential environmental and energy impacts.

Big time. That analysis, focused on centers with a load equal to or exceeding 20 megawatts, will be the responsibility of the Maine Data Center Coordination Council; legislation sponsor state Rep. Melanie Sachs, a Democrat, told IT Brew that the group will include members from the public and private sectors.

“We need to have this conversation all together,” Sachs said. “That’s the point of the bill.”

In an email to IT Brew, Sachs added that currently there are no plans for data centers of that size in the state.

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Nothing like a war to snap Democrats back to their roots.

The US-Israeli war on Iran that President Donald Trump starter in February is dragging into its third month—a temporary ceasefire from early last week doesn’t appear to be holding—and is more an own goal by the day. Economic disaster seems right around the corner, and the alliances the US relied on for decades to shore up its global hegemony are crumbling.

You might think this is a great opportunity for Democrats to forthrightly reject the war, Trump, and the US conservative movement. For the second time in 20 years, an unpopular two-term Republican president is plunging the planet into economic turmoil while fighting an unpopular and illegal war of aggression in Southwest Asia. It should be a slam dunk.

Not so fast.

Democratic leadership has criticized the war effort—on the grounds that they weren’t consulted and Trump didn’t go through the proper process. The war itself? Well, they don’t have such a strong opinion on whether it’s good or bad, other than to say that they generally condemn Iran.

Other Democrats, including some presidential hopefuls, have taken different approaches to pushing back on the war that intentionally endorse right-wing political viewpoints rather than drawling lines of clear ideological demarcation.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who has made little secret that he’s positioning himself for 2028, attacked the White House for not bombing Iran into submission. Framing his objection as a complaint over failing to achieve the objectives of a war of choice, Murphy described Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz an example of “heartbreaking” incompetence.

Would he have preferred a more devastating attack, a ground invasion? There’s a reason no one has tried this tactic before against Iran and it’s not a “heartbreaking” outcome for a lesson to be learned here.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat from California, told Fox News that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon—Trump’s two most direct predecessors for corruption, senility, and authoritarianism—were examples of the country’s “toughest presidents” in a rambling ahistorical diatribe about threats to other nations.

Without getting into the specifics of the deranged threats Nixon and Reagan made to adversaries, holding these two scandal-ridden and disgraced figures up as something to aspire to. I get that Khanna is testing the waters for a run for president and is trying to go the appeal-to-salt-of-the-earth-Republicans but someone needs to talk some sense into him. The only people who care about these comparisons are people like me who get pissed off about it.

With negotiations on the war collapsing, and a decline in American global power on the horizon, this should be simple for Democrats. That some of them are stuck in an outdated mode of politics that calls to mind the timid response to Bush post-9/11 that sent the US careening toward Trump 15 years later—a political moment we should try to avoid a repeat of.

My talk with SecularAZ is up online—check it out!

We talked about OWNED, tech and politics, and AI.

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It’s been a minute!

Here’s some of what I’ve been up to.

On March 21, I was a featured speaker at the launch of WebSummit’s Whistleblower Cafe in Dublin, Ireland. I spoke with the store’s manager, Art O’Connor, for about an hour, and took questions.

Great crowd, great space—looking forward to returning when I can.

Here are some pictures from the event.

This Friday, April 3, at noon Pacific/3pm ET I’l be speaking to Secular AZ.

You can sign up for it here if you’d like to attend.

The court case with Matt Taibbi continues. We are waiting for the judge’s ruling on our motion to dismiss.

Oral arguments were last week, there’s a decent liveblog rundown at this link.

One of my favorites from the day:

I wrote for The Intercept on the Democratic primary for Senate in Maine and how the fight is breaking down along familiar lines between the establishment and the more progressive wing of the party.

The Democratic establishment is trying to draw a line in the sand on the future of the party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats from New York, are actively working to elect Mills. There is speculation that the governor, who has pledged to only serve one term in Washington, is Senate leadership’s preferred candidate because she would be a more pliable member of the delegation, while Platner is seen as more independent and willing to take populist, further left stands.

…

It’s another chapter in the intraparty civil war that has been simmering and often boiling over for decades. The Clinton wing, the Obama wing, the Sanders wing, and every other part of the sprawling political coalition that is the Democratic Party are all still vying for dominance. In 2008, the main dividing line was Iraq; in 2016, the failure of the Obama presidency; in 2020, Trump and Covid.

In 2026, the party is still reeling from defeat at the ballot box just two years ago, one that was driven by a perception that the party was out of touch with voters on economic issues as well as, reportedly, its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The latter issue has become a flashpoint for conflict between the base and the establishment, especially with Schumer — who has described one of his roles in leadership as ensuring Israel gets “all the aid” it needs from the U.S.

More at The Intercept.

Since publishing, Mills has gone on the attack—and Platner has improved his polling numbers.

Thanks for reading!

More substantive posts to come now that I’m back from leave.

Some thoughts today on how to appeal to people who are leaning right, but for contradictory reasons.

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This week, New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg went to Florida to talk to supporters of Republican gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback.

Her conversations revealed a changing political landscape where the left has a unique opportunity—but the far right is taking advantage.

Fishback is a lunatic who is polling at about 5% in the GOP primary. He doesn’t have a shot. But Goldberg headed down anyway to see what kind of crowds the open white nationalist is drawing.

Some—not all—of the answers she received were revealing for what they said about American politics. Over and over again, young conservatives or conservative curious people in Fishback’s audience cited his emphasis on affordability and housing as motivators for their support.

After Fishback’s speech, I met Jeremiah Kimmell, a 22-year-old wearing one of the blue “America First” baseball caps common to Fuentes’s movement, and Charles Metcalf, 20. Kimmell runs a land-clearing business but sees little prospect of an independent adult life. “We live with our parents,” he told me. “We don’t see any end in sight, in that we’re not going to own a home. Something has to change.”

…

[Leicee] Guiou, a case worker for foster children, is a registered Democrat and a “big Zohran Mamdani fan.” But she said she’s considering changing her registration so she can vote for Fishback in the primary. She’s drawn to his promise not to take money from AIPAC and to his insistent emphasis on affordability. Guiou said she and her fiancé have to live with roommates because rent is so expensive and homeownership unachievable.

This isn’t something that a conservative Republican should be winning an argument on. And to be clear, some of the people Goldberg spoke to were clearly motivated by antisemitism and racism—or at best unbothered by it.

Nick Fuentes, an open neo-Nazi, is a big favorite of this crowd. But his appeal appears rooted at least in part in his willingness to acknowledge that there’s a problem.

She told me that she listens to Fuentes sometimes, and some of what he says makes sense to her. “I would say that there are some things that he speaks for that I agree with, especially about things not being affordable, about the elites purposefully keeping the general population under their control by pricing us out of things that should be considered basic needs,” said Guiou.

It’s a hard problem without a clean, easy answer. The full report from Goldberg is worth reading. How the people she spoke to describe their radicalization to people like Fuentes, Fishback, and Candace Owens reveals a more complicated picture than a right-wing politics based solely in bigotry.

There are winnable voters here if the left can learn to address these issues in ways that seem genuine and appealing, because conservatism has nothing of actual substance to offer them.

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Before we get to the main article here, on conspiracy theories about Graham Platner, I wanted to draw your attention to the latest in the ongoing legal battle between conservative pundit Matt Taibbi and myself and Hachette.

As you likely already know, Taibbi is suing me for defamation based on the content of my book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. We have filed a Motion to Dismiss; they have filed their opposition.

More at the link but I do want to draw your attention to how their opposition opens:

You know how this book is about me, and I don’t like it?

What if it was about you, Your Honor, and you didn’t like it?

Buy the (real) book here for 50% off!

It’s a bold strategy. We’ll see if it pays off.

Okay, enough fun, on to the main event.

Graham Platner is running for Senate in Maine—and his candidacy is leading to some pretty weird liberal conspiracy theories online, while Maine voters continue to back him.

Much of the anger toward the oysterman-turned-Democratic-Party-upstart is due to his own mistakes, both in the past and on the campaign trail. In 2007, while on leave from the Marines in Croatia, Platner drunkenly got a tattoo of the Totenkopf, the German death’s head symbol commonly associated with the Nazis. After the tattoo became an issue, he had it covered up. Platner claims he had no idea about the image’s Nazi association until last October.

Recently, Platner quote-tweeted an alt-right online personality, Stew Peters, to make a point about no war with Iran; he quickly deleted the post after backlash. He also appeared on a podcast with Nate Cornacchia, a right-wing personality whose show has featured a number of conspiracy theories and borderline to outright racist content.

That’s the primary concern for liberal and left resistance to his campaign. There are other issues that give people pause—the fact that he volunteered for war in the first place, his time working for a Blackwater affiliate, his wealthy background—but most of the attacks have come because of his supposed affinity for the far right.

What I think this is really about is a feeling that Platner isn’t being totally honest about what he knew about the tattoo and when he knew it, as well as frustration that his campaign didn’t end on the spot.

I get that. In fact, I said at the time that I didn’t know how he’d continue on. But I was wrong. Maine voters accepted his explanation and moved on. He’s consistently outpolling Governor Janet Mills in the Democratic primary and has an edge over the incumbent Republican, Susan Collins. The attacks aren’t sticking.

I am neither condemning nor defending Platner here, but setting the scene, because some of his centrist and left critics have devolved into absolute full-blown lunacy.

Here is, as far as I can tell, the state of the current attacks on Platner:

• he is part of a decade plus conspiracy on the part of a cabal of Senate Democrats to infiltrate the party with progressive seeming men who then tilt right

• he maybe bought a domain years ago, GrahamForSenate.com, this proves that the run was in the works

• the Marines wouldn’t allow him back in because of the chest tattoo

• a local neo-Nazi who plays gotcha with local politicians, Richard Ward, posted a photo of himself wearing a shirt with “88” on it while near Platner which means Platner likes and supports him

• mainstream Maine newspapers are in the bag for Platner, part of the plan to get him elected

To state the obvious, there’s been no proof offered for any of the above. The photo with Ward might be a little concerning to people from outside of Maine, especially because Platner has not directly addressed it. But Ward is well known in the state as a dishonest troll and acknowledging him at all is a mistake—Maine voters of both parties understand that.

If you really believe Platner is a secret Fetterman-in-waiting, what policies would he buck party leadership on? Where would he give rhetorical cover to President Donald Trump? What social issues, domestic policy, or foreign policy would he align with the GOP on? I posed that question on both X and Bluesky (the latter being a hotbed of Platner conspiracy theories) and didn’t get much of a satisfactory answer.

I would urge people who are not in Maine to listen to voters in the state.

They have two options—one is a 40-year-old veteran whose populist campaign has crossover appeal. He could serve in the Senate for decades, climbing the ladder, and continue to deliver federal funding and pursue statewide priorities in Washington. The other is a 78-year-old governor, one of the least popular in the country, who has pledged to only serve one term and is backed by the Democratic establishment that the base currently despises.

If Mills is the nominee, why wouldn’t the moderate and swing voters Democrats need to peel off just stick with Collins, who will deliver funding projects for the state and stay the course for another six years?

I’m fairly certain Platner will win the primary. Once that’s done, it’s a question of whether he can win in a general election against Collins, who has one of the more lethal political machines in the country.

Maine voters will have a choice to make, one that hopefully won’t be influenced by unrealistic and off-base conspiracy theories but made on the merits. Hey, miracles do happen.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment as I face a lawsuit from Matt Taibbi over my book’s reporting on his career. I stand by the work.

You can read our motion to dismiss here. It’s pretty exhaustive in exposing what a farce the suit is.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

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As I write this, US and Israeli warplanes are bombing Iran, potentially setting off a regional war that could define the next year—and even longer.

Already, strikes have killed dozens of children, a signature of how the US and its allies wage these wars.

A couple of thoughts from me below the break.

President Donald Trump ran in part in 2024 on an implied promise not to start any new wars. It was always a lie—in 2020, he started the last year of his first term by assassinating Iranian leader Qasem Soleimani in an attempt to start a war—but a selective reading of the tea leaves led people who should have known better to pretend that the Republican was a better bet for non-intervention.

Part of the reason that Trump was able to get away with portraying himself as pro-peace was that the Democratic establishment has spent the last 10 years leaning into the national security state. In 2024, the failure of this approach resulted in losing the White House.

When you’re campaigning with Liz Cheney and endorsing a version of her views—the below from Greg Price is not entirely honest, surprise surprise—you leave yourself open for attacks like this from psychopaths like Stephen Miller.

In the run-up to Election Day, JD Vance was declaring Trump the “candidate of peace.” He explicitly used Cheney as a counterpoint, noting that she had supported the wars of choice under the George W Bush administration and had pushed for a more bellicose foreign policy during Trump’s first term.

I don’t believe that campaigning with Cheney was the definitive thing that won Trump the election, but I do believe that it helped create a permission structure for contrarian voices and right-wing partisans alike to muddy the waters on foreign policy. This was avoidable!

The president as reluctant to get involved in regional wars of choice was a perception of the president that defined the early days of his second term. New York Republican Claudia Tenney nominated the president for the Nobel Peace Prize just days into his term and, after that effort failed, FIFA gave him a knock-off version of the award.

Trump’s idle ramblings about cutting the military budget in half in February 2025 led conservative pundit Glenn Greenwald to crow over Trump’s critics on the left as bad faith losers.

Greenwald would continue this push against Trump critics for weeks after.

He’s since soured on the president but has not, to my knowledge, ever admitted fault for taking an addled old man at his word in spite of reams of evidence to the contrary.

Let’s hope this marks the end of taking the US conservative movement at its word on anti-intervention.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment as I face a lawsuit from Matt Taibbi over my book’s reporting on his career. I stand by the work.

You can read our motion to dismiss here. It’s pretty exhaustive in exposing what a farce the suit is.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

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The Taibbi case continues—read the latest here and check the bottom of this post for options to support, including upgrading your subscription.

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The Washington Post layoffs from Feb 4 were another moment showing how billionaire control of media is doomed to fail newsrooms and the public.

Owner Jeff Bezos, the tech billionaire who made his fortune on Amazon and has continued to profit from the corporation’s diversification, including into its lucrative AWS platform that undergirds a large portion of the modern internet, is primarily responsible for the paper’s decline.

After he pulled the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024, readers canceled subscriptions en masse and revenue declined. Bezos’s closeness with Trump—a clear business decision—has only made things worse.

Why won’t Bezos save the paper? He easily could. But the Post was always a vanity project for the billionaire, one he has no great commitment to, unlike AWS which has federal contracts worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bezos in particular has an interest in keeping Trump happy. The president won’t hesitate to punish enemies or the disloyal by yanking federal contracts, and AWS, Amazon’s web services division, relies on the government for billions of its annual revenue. The relationship between the White House and Amazon has already sparked outrage, especially over AWS’s contracting with ICE for more than $140 million, but money in the bank speaks louder than protests against one of the world’s largest and most ubiquitous companies.

Amazon continues to rake in hundreds of millions annually — at least — in federal dollars through its cloud contracts, not only for ICE, but also in agencies and departments across the government. While there’s no solid number for the average annual value all these contracts amount to, it’s enough that AWS was able to promise $1 billion in savings to the federal government in 2025 through a cloud updating and consolidation deal through the end of 2028.

Those staggering profits add insult to injury for Bezos’ now-former employees at the Post, who could have kept their jobs in perpetuity if the billionaire valued the Fourth Estate as much as he’s claimed. Former editor David Maraniss told the New Yorker that Bezos “bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed. Now I don’t think … he gives a flying fuck.”

He doesn’t!

More at The Intercept.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment as I face a lawsuit from Matt Taibbi over my book’s reporting on his career. I stand by the work.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

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The US government operates a network of detention centers around the country for migrants awaiting hearings and processing—and conditions are deteriorating.

These concentration camps are a bipartisan project. Under former President Barack Obama, the US expanded its capacity for family detention and put people into cages where their treatment sparked outrage and protest from civil liberties groups.

President Donald Trump, in his first term in the White House, upped the ante on the brutality of the system, separating children from parents, and had as a matter of policy unsanitary and crowded conditions; former President Joe Biden increased the amount of detainees held in federal facilities without substantively improving the overall environment.

Under Trump’s second term, things have gotten markedly worse.

Reporting just in the last four days shows the extent to which the administration’s policy is to treat migrants as poorly as possible without outright killing them and how the US network of concentration camps is built for pain and misery.

Detainees in San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Center are wrapping messages around lotion bottles and throwing them over fences to tell supporters about the reality inside the prison walls.

“It’s cold here all the time and the food is poor. For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick.”

A whistleblower in Baltimore exposed how dire the overcrowding has become in the city’s ICE detention center.

“I worked there for several months and it was probably day one, day two that I saw the abuse,” the worker said. “I saw people laying in feces. People throwing up, people laying in urine.”

In Burlington, Massachusetts, an administrative field processing center built for temporary holding has become a de facto full time detention center for migrants captured in Maine.

Lograi Tuzolana, one of Nice’s clients, said she was screamed and cursed at as she was crammed into a cell with some 50 other people. The cell had just one toilet and detainees had no access to showers. Nice said she has been told by several clients that each toilet is in view of a camera.

“Everyone was feeling bad, sick,” Tuzolana said. “Many people could not breathe properly, people were falling down because of the conditions. The food was like dog food.”

An Irishman held in El Paso—he was shipped there after being picked up by immigration officials near Boston—told the Irish Times that detention is “like a concentration camp, absolute hell.”

He said he has been locked in the same large, cold and damp room for 4½ months with more than 70 men. He said detainees are constantly hungry because meals served at tables in the centre of the room offer only child-sized portions. Fights often break out over food, “even over those little child-sized juice containers”. Toilet areas are “filthy”.

He said there is little to do but lie on a bed all day. Most detainees do not speak any English. He said he has been allowed outside for air and exercise fewer than a dozen times in nearly five months. The atmosphere is full of “anxiety and depression”, he said.

Finally, ProPublica talked to children held in the ICE facility in Dilley, Texas, receiving letters from kids as young as five.

“When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”

There will almost certainly be more nightmarish reporting to come from inside of these detention centers.

And as the Trump administration continues its assault on migrants, especially migrants of color, the stories are only going to get worse.

Interested in supporting my work? Buy the book! It’s 50% off right now at the link.

Buy OWNED today!

OWNED was published one year ago.

A year of book promotion is exhausting, but invigorating. I went around the country to do readings, some of which were aired on CSPAN, and I appeared on podcasts, streaming shows, and cable news to offer my take on the state of the country (bad! getting worse!).

Then I got sued. Stay tuned on that; more below.

The book landed right as the consequences of Silicon Valley’s right turn were seen on the world stage—Elon Musk dominated the White House, tech billionaires had wormed their way into the regulatory state, and President Donald Trump’s first few weeks were shoveling cash at the industry.

Today, a year later, Musk is out. But David Sacks, a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia, is still in the White House as crypto czar. Allies of the Silicon Valley conservative movement like Robert F Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz are in charge of the country’s health and are pushing contracts toward their friends in the industry.

I’ve continued to cover the story of this unholy alliance—here are a few examples you may have missed after I went on break over the summer and fall.

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Elon Musk and the Democrats

In the future, once Democrats have regained the levers of power, they will need to clean up the disaster Trump and Musk have created. As I wrote earlier, Democrats should investigate Musk and his business dealings with the federal government, conduct hearings, subpoena the billionaire, and generally hold him accountable for his actions to the fullest extent possible. And they should take the same attitude toward Trump, whether he is still in office or not.

More here.

TikTok and Trump’s Silicon Valley allies

This is the latest example of the outcome of a yearslong project on the part of right-wing billionaires to disrupt the media and ultimately take it over to redirect reporting and online scrutiny of them and their allies like the president. As I detail in my recent book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” for many years, Silicon Valley received mostly complimentary coverage from the press.

But over the last decade or so, it has faced more critical newsrooms and the investigative spotlight that comes with being at the top of one of the world’s largest industries. Social media companies have come under fire for their policies, like Facebook (by its own admission) letting its platform be used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar and Twitter’s role in shaping public opinion before U.S. elections. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, outed in a post by Gawker affiliate Valleywag in 2007, compared members of the media to “terrorists” in 2009.

More here.

Bari hits it big

Putting Weiss in charge of CBS News is like “dropping a grenade” in the newsroom, as one former staffer put it. That grenade is sure to impact how the network covers Trump, Israel, and the U.S. in general — and his short run as CBS’s owner shows that’s just what David Ellison wants.

More here.

The Insurgents

Ep. 412: The Weiss Stuff ft. Eoin Higgins

Eoin Higgins returns to the show to talk about his new piece in The Intercept, Only a Billionaire Could Look at Network TV News and Say: We Need More Bari Weiss…

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8 months ago · 7 likes · Rob Rousseau, Jordan Uhl, and Eoin Higgins

Thanks so much for sticking with me—there’s more to come.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment as I face a lawsuit from Matt Taibbi over my book’s reporting on his career. I stand by the work.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

Subscribe now

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On Saturday, nurse Alex Pretti was shot dead by CBP officers in Minneapolis, the latest killing of a US citizen in the city by federal agents. RIP.

I have a new piece out at The Intercept on how Democrats are failing to do their job as opposition while ICE and CBP terrorize communities in Minnesota and across the country.

Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. I wish we had better options. But the party is what we have right now, and we have to fight for a more aggressive and action-oriented response to federal aggression.

It’ll take a lot of work; there are institutional hurdles that are likely to present major challenges.

Chief among them is establishment leadership less interested in action than in platitudes:

Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle issued a statement in the wake of Pretti’s death that was heavy on the concern but light on substance. Former President Bill Clinton was more forceful, calling this a moment “where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come” but declining to suggest what, exactly, people should do.

Setting aside the morality of suppressing anger over state killings of civilians, it’s politically shortsighted on the part of Democrats and their allies. But the party is trapped in a world of its own creation, where committing to anything that might alienate mythical moderate conservative voters or, more importantly, donors, is anathema.

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After publication, Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat known for his moderate stances, contacted me via his team to let me know he is now in favor of abolishing ICE. Moulton is challenging Sen. Ed Markey in this year’s primary, which is likely a motivator for the shift in position, but it’s still notable.

Here’s what I wrote initially:

Eager to make political hay, Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat with his sights set on the Senate seat held by Ed Markey, called ICE “cowards” and threatened to defund the agency and prosecute its officers. But Moulton and most elected Democrats fall short of calling to abolish the institution outright — a position now held by a plurality of voters.

And here’s the statement I was sent:

For more on the danger ICE poses, and how we got here, I recommend this video from journalist Max Fisher which breaks down why they wear masks and the overall erosion of our protections against law enforcement overreach.

The political winds are shifting and ICE and CBP appear to be lessening their presence in Minnesota. That could spell trouble for Maine—I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment as I face a lawsuit from Matt Taibbi over my book’s reporting on his career. I stand by the work.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

Subscribe now

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Bari Weiss’s dizzying media ascension has been heavy on the right-wing politics and sycophancy toward billionaires and light on actual work—and the latter is starting to bite.

Since she was appointed head of CBS News Weiss has been a fixture in media gossip reporting. Her decisions have been the focus of damning stories as she has cut positions, reworked programming, and promoted people with few qualifications other than being white, pro-Israel, and hostile to inclusivity.

The stories about her tenure at CBS thus far are entertaining, especially if you find Weiss’s grift as appalling as I do. A far-right operative who covers up her bigotry and extreme politics with a veneer of smarm, Weiss has an affect that’s incredibly off-putting and instantly recognizable.

Eye-rollingly bad—here’s an example, from The New Yorker’s recent profile, published Monday:

Early on, she circulated a list of ten principles that would guide the network’s coverage under her leadership, laying out a brand of journalism that, she said, “holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.”

People in the media, for the most part, loathe Weiss, and her mistakes at CBS have made for a constant stream of articles that make noise on social media and get clicks.

A Variety article on Tuesday, hot on the heels of that New Yorker article, alleged that her problems were deeper than some mismanagement, with “ten people familiar with the workings of CBS News” alleging the network is “veering toward dysfunction” under Weiss’s leadership. The New York Times last week reported that her decision to hold a piece critical of the Trump administration’s deportation of people to CECOT in El Salvador generated anger and confusion in the newsroom.

To be clear—I’m a Weiss critic. I’ve written about her in less than glowing terms on a number of occasions, both in my book and at outlets like The Nation, The Intercept, and others.

So I take no pleasure in informing you that I do not think her rocky start at CBS is going quite as badly as some might believe, nor do I think she is in any danger of losing her job.

Here’s why.

1. CBS News’s ratings are up from last quarter. In Q4 (when Weiss took over), the CBS Evening News saw its ratings improve from the previous two quarters, where numbers plummeted after Q1. And for all the criticism—warranted!—of new anchor Tony Dokoupil, his first week this month saw another bounce from Q4’s average number. Numbers are down year-over-year but that’s not really relevant, they plummeted back in Q2.

2. Bari was hired to further the Ellisons’ business interests, not to make CBS a better network. When the Ellisons bought Paramount+, CBS News’s parent company, it was with the understanding that they would be shifting coverage to the right to flatter Trump. Weiss’s appointment must be seen in that context—she’s not there to “do the fucking news.” She’s there to promote the business interests of the Ellisons and make the network more Trump-friendly.

3. David Ellison likes her. Weiss’s most enduring talent has been ingratiating herself to billionaires, and David Ellison, head of Skydance Media, is no exception. The two are friends and her appointment to lead CBS was, reportedly, his doing due to their ideological lockstep. Until the Ellisons cut her loose, if they do, she’s there to stay and to remake CBS News to her and their liking.

4. Betting against Bari is usually a mistake. It pains me to admit this, but Weiss has only ever failed up. She went from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, alienated nearly everyone there and eventually resigned in a grandiose, self-satisfied statement. For almost anyone else, the embarrassing spectacle of leaving the paper in that way would have been a career killer—for Weiss, it allowed her to found Common Sense, a blog that her “Twitter Files” reporting spun into the Free Press, which Ellison bought for $150 million last year.

Look, I don’t like this anymore than you do, but I don’t think Bari’s in any danger of losing her job. The details of how she makes CBS News into another arm of the Trump media regime are unimportant, what matters is that she does it.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment as I face a lawsuit from Matt Taibbi over my book’s reporting on his career. I stand by the work.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

   Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Matt wrote about the lawsuit last week. I won’t link to it, but here’s the headline, which speaks for itself.

Anyway. More on how you can support (paid sub and buy the book!) at the end.

First podcast appearance, and the most exciting, was a conversation with Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who I met over the summer at a book reading.

Paul and I discussed the argument of my book and how the trends I reported on of tech oligarch cash and media sellouts has only continued.

Here’s the video:

And a sample from our conversation:

Krugman: It’s interesting because the thought of Silicon Valley as being libertarian, and it turns out that they’re libertarian until people start criticizing them, what strikes me is that I think this is somewhat different from the robber baron era, if we think of the Gilded Age and all of that. Obviously, the robber barons didn’t like being criticized and owned a lot of newspapers and so on. But I don’t think anybody tried to shut Ida Tarbell down, this is kind of a new development.

Higgins: I mean, they went after Tarbell, as far as I recall—but not as blatantly—not using the levers of power in the same way that they have used these now. I think that you’re right, that there is a big difference between the robber baron Gilded Age time and now. I think that it’s for a few reasons. One of them is that these companies—these people—have made their fortunes in part based on government largesse. The government basically has helped Silicon Valley to develop into the economic powerhouse that it is. It obviously helped the robber barons as well.

I wonder if it’s that they feel like they’re just owed this by the public and by the state and that therefore, they get angry about it if they don’t receive it. I’m not sure, that’s speculation of course, but there’s also this feeling of noblesse oblige. I think that you had more during the Gilded Age with the robber barons, and you just don’t really see that with these guys. They don’t think that they owe anybody anything. I think like you aptly described, as this libertarian twist to their politics. It’s like libertarianism up until the point that something happens that I don’t like. At which point I want the state to step in and to enforce what I want to happen. I think that they do think of things that way, and I think they don’t really appreciate that they live in a society, that’s a lot of what it is. I think they don’t appreciate that they live in a society, and they don’t think that they have any obligation to the rest of society, or the rest of the country. I think that’s a big difference between the two worlds.

Buy OWNED today!

Next up, Kill the Computer, where we talked about the themes of Owned and my work in general.

And then I Hate Bill Maher for a discussion on Bill’s deep psychosexual issues and the awful Andrew Sullivan (Patreon).

That’s all for now.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

Subscribe now

It’s been a minute. I was in Las Vegas covering CES so I didn’t have time to update this newsletter—and with the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this week, I didn’t feel the time was right to update you all on the lawsuit.

If you’re looking to support, scroll down. I’ll have more to say next week.

On to Minnesota.

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There’s a section of the commentariat I think of as “Weasel World,” a place where both-sidesism and smear tactics are used to justify right-wing ideology by whining, dishonesty, and smarm.

So while Renee Good’s murder provoked outrage from Trump critics on the left, right, and center, it also gave conservative pundits the opportunity to smear the victim by digging into her personal life and to pretend video evidence from her killing showed she was an active threat.

The weasels were out in force.

For far right media figures like Fox News’s Jesse Watters, Good’s lesbian relationship and the status of custody of two of her children was an important point to raise for his audience.

The woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado, with pronouns in her bio. A 37-year-old white woman named Renee Good. The Daily Mail says she leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage. She was a disruptor, though she considered herself a legal observer. But there’s no evidence she had a law degree.

“This is the American far-right’s way of telling people that this was a white woman that it was *ok* to kill,” journalist Daniel Sugarman said on Bluesky.

Truly abhorrent language from one of the worst figures in media.

For figures like CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil, who plays at moderate objectivity while acting as state media for the trump White House, it was a time to think about how both sides of the story need our attention and sympathy.

The commentary was vapid, self-serving sycophancy dressed up as preachy reasonableness, and, as pointed out by several people on social media, likely written by his boss, Bari Weiss.

Our job now is maybe the most American thing of all: it’s to find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us, to try to be fair to them, and in doing so to make things better and keep things decent, because in America no one else is going to do it for us. It’s not my job to tell you what to think about what happened here yesterday, but I can tell you we owe our children a nation that is better than the one we live in today.

Author Max Fisher, on X, noted the amorality of what Dokoupil was saying.

The content of this “news” monologue is that if a masked state agent executes an innocent woman in cold blood, then both sides are equivalent, and our duty is to offer equal support and respect to the executioner, and his commanders, as to the woman he murdered on their behalf.

Then there’s our old pal Matt Taibbi, who spent most of the day Good died attacking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants Cea Weaver. Weaver’s sin was repeating well regarded academic consensus on the history of housing in the US in 2020 and using some colorful language to describe how property ownership in this country.

This was worth focusing all Matt’s attention on in the immediate wake of the killing—I’m not even going to get into the language he and others used to accuse Weaver of anti-white racism—at least until he figured out how to spin Good’s murder a few days later by rounding up some “experts” to discuss the circumstances of the attack.

Public posturing on X showed where Taibbi’s head was at, and what audience he was appealing to. Quoting one of the people he interviewed, Taibbi said:

“You got a hot-headed dumb cop and then you got entitled Karen doing whatever she does. And that’s a perfect storm for a disaster.”

Taibbi defended himself by saying the article overall was “quoting people who are very critical of the ICE agent. All of them do so, in fact, while only one criticizes Renee Good.”

And that one was the who he chose to highlight. Another day in Weasel World.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

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Before we get to today’s commentary, on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s rebrand and future goals, I wanted to give an update. As you know, I’m being sued over the content of my book on tech billionaires and the media by one of the subjects, Matt Taibbi.

I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment.

If you want to help and have the wherewithal to do so, there are two easy ways to help me fight this legal challenge:

1. buy the book (50% off on Amazon right now)

2. consider a paid subscription 👇

Subscribe now

Thanks! With that out of the way, on to MTG.

Don’t get fooled again

Marjorie Taylor Greene is leaving Congress on Monday, the end of a five-year career in the chamber marked by controversy and far-right extremism. What’s next?

I think she’s going to try to run for president in 2028, and her moves to soften her image for a more mainstream audience are in service of that effort.

Making moves

After Greene publicly broke with President Donald Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, some centrist and liberal media institutions have begun to present the Georgia Republican as a more reasonable representative of the MAGA movement.

She gave something of a mea culpa to CNN in November as part of a media blitz rewriting her public image.

The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger noted that Greene is making a calculation by taking on the president, because “if Trump continues to falter, the power vacuum he will begin to create will be gargantuan. Plainly, Greene senses the opportunity to put herself forward as the leader of a possible successor faction. Well, so far so good for her.”

Greene’s always been savvy. As I wrote at The Intercept earlier this month:

This crossover appeal can pay off, and it’s one tactic for conservatives, jaded by Trump, looking for a way to appeal to the broader public. Greene appeared on “The View,” the A+ daytime women’s talk show, where she called for decency in discourse, got the liberal crowd to applaud her, and prompted co-host Sunny Hostin to marvel at horseshoe theory: “I’m sitting here just stumped, because you are a very different person than I thought. You’ve gone so right, it’s like you’re on the left now.”

The New York Times, which profiled Greene days after Christmas, presented her in a somewhat flattering light, a sign of how the MAGA superstar is beginning to broaden her appeal and be taken seriously rather than as a crank.

That’s not to say that the story was wrong about her.

“Greene did harbor a genuine conspiratorial streak, often even wondering if this or that person wore a wire,” Robert Draper wrote. “But she was also becoming an increasingly shrewd and acerbic observer of life on Capitol Hill.”

Under the surface

With the caveat that 2028 is a long way away, and a lot could change, it’s hard to look at Greene’s attempt at respectability and moderation as anything other than an attempt to rebrand ahead of loftier goals than state office or Congress.

The reality is a little more complex, of course. Greene hasn’t moderated in anything of substance; to the extent she’s “changed,” it’s purely superficial.

Me at The Intercept again:

Despite laundering her reputation on certain issues for liberals, Greene has stayed true to her core principles of demonizing immigrants and maintaining a virulent anti-trans position, just last week introducing legislation to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. The moderate pivot to addressing a general audience isn’t a wholesale reversal of her previous positions. She’s still America First but feels Trump has lost his way; she’s still a Christian nationalist, but believes Trump is not serving that purpose anymore.

We’ll see what happens. Greene is a smart politician and there’s exactly zero chance she fades away. But where she goes from here—and how much success she has in whatever path she takes—remains an open question.

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I don’t want to comment on the substance of the suit too much for obvious reasons. You can read the complaint here.

I stand by my work.

If you’re interested in supporting me at this moment, please consider a paid subscription to this newsletter.

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And please buy the book!

Buy OWNED today

For more on Matt, you can listen to last month’s episode of Posting Through It on his career and trajectory. I had a blast joining Jared and Mike to go over what, exactly, happened to this guy.

Stay tuned. More to come. Thank you for your support and keep an eye on that inbox!

Those of you who had your contributions restarted, they will be paused.

Onward and upward! Back soon.