“This and That” is an occasional series of paired observations. See past “This and That” posts here. – Ed.

Today: Grass-filled galleries

 

*************

The post This and That: Grass-filled galleries appeared first on Glasstire.

The San Marcos Art League (SMAL) has announced an open call for its October exhibition Goth & Glow, set to open Friday, October 10.

For the occasion, the San Marcos Art Center gallery will be transformed with blacklight, inviting artists interested in exploring how their work responds to the dim, violet glow of long-wave ultraviolet light bulbs. As implied by the title, the show is meant to lend a spooky, glowing effect reactive to colors — white in particular.

A SMAL press release encourages applications to “Think UV-reactive paints, glow-in-the-dark threads, fiber optics in glass, EL wire sculptures, or reflective textiles — anything that shines, glows, or transforms under blacklight.” On its website, the organization offers a full list of potential blacklight-reactive materials for use in the show.

Anyone can enter for a $20 application fee. SMAL members can apply for $10 with a discount code. The application, available online, closes Friday, October 3 at 5 p.m.

Applicants are advised that the maximum width of hanging art is 36 inches, including framing, and that subject matter should be appropriate for all visitors to the SMAL Art Center, which is a multi-generational, family-oriented venue.

The Goth & Glow opening reception will be Friday, October 10, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., and the show will run through the end of the month.

The post Calling All Goths: Open Call for Blacklight Exhibition in San Marcos appeared first on Glasstire.

A reader writes:

Should I give my coworker a heads up that everyone in our office sees her (Beth) and another of our coworkers (Sean) flirting and thinks they’re sleeping together?

I’ve personally seen them chit chat and act all giggly together, as well as “check each other out,” like look each other up and down. Sean is twice the age of Beth, but Beth is still almost middle-aged. I think other people in the office are gossiping hard and, while I’m not 100% certain there’s anything going on (they’re both married), I heard that our director said something to Sean so now they don’t stop by and chat as often.

Should I tell Beth how this friendship with Sean is coming off to people in the office? Also, how would I even say it? I’m also wondering if some of this is due to Beth being kind of conventionally attractive and bubbly with everyone.

Unless you’re close friends with Beth, leave it alone.

If she’s almost middle-aged, she has enough life experience to be aware of the risks. Plus, if your director did say something to Sean, they’re already aware.

It’s definitely true that conventionally attractive and bubbly women can be at risk of being perceived as inviting male attention even when they’re not, but if they’re blatantly checking each other out, there’s probably more in play. (I’m not saying they’re sleeping together! Just that it sounds like there’s reason for the way it’s being perceived, beyond sexist bias.)

What you can do, though, is shut down the gossip when you hear it. If people speculate on Beth and Sean’s relationship around you, you’d be doing a social good to say, “They’re friends and they’re both married. We should stop gossiping about this before a rumor does someone real harm.”

The post should I tell my coworker that everyone thinks she and a colleague are sleeping together? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. I want to opt out of my company’s “wellness” messages

My company regularly pushes out “wellness” content to all employees — things like tips on diet, exercise, mental health, and mindfulness. The problem is that we don’t have the option to opt out, and I personally find a lot of the content intrusive or irrelevant. For example, I’ve received messages about topics that touch on sensitive health issues I’d rather not have my employer involved in.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful or negative since I know the intention is to promote wellness, but I really dislike having this material pushed on me without a choice. I’ve tried ignoring it, but they send it out via email and instant message daily. Sometimes multiple times a day! I already provided feedback about this in an anonymous survey but there hasn’t been any change. Is there a professional way to directly ask my company to make this content optional?

You could say, “Would you consider sending these through an email list that people could choose to opt out of, since some of these topics are sensitive ones?” You could also point out that people with a history of disordered eating are commonly advised to avoid diet advice and shouldn’t have it pushed on them by an employer (although that’s far from the only reason this is problematic).

If that doesn’t work, you could ask that they all have a subject line that would allow you easily filter them. Or, if they already do, you could just go ahead and do that — but it’s valuable for them to hear people don’t like this.

Also, you don’t need to be “grateful” that they want to promote wellness. They’re your employer, not your doctor, and you didn’t ask them to take this on … and if they really want to promote wellness, they could do things far more likely to have an impact and which are more solidly in their purview, like beefing up your health insurance and giving you more time off.

Related:
8 ways to promote employee wellness that would actually work

2. Copywriter is using AI to produce bad work

I work for a communications firm that produces a large amount of copy for our clients — social media, email campaigns, company blogs, brochures/fliers, white papers, billboards, print marketing, you name it. I’m a mid-level manager leading our copywriter team, though I don’t have hiring/firing power or much ability to set policy (I know).

Ten years ago, I’d have to be on the lookout for clients sending content from their competitors, wanting to use it as the basis for their own marketing strategy. Obviously, I had to steer them away from direct plagiarism.

Now, it’s AI. Clients are sending AI-generated text over without disclosure, expecting that we’ll use it wholesale in their campaigns. My direct supervisor is also a big fan of AI generation (to the point where she uses it even when it seems like it would have been easier to just write the email herself). And I learned recently that one of my direct reports is a big fan of AI — I recently ran some of his past assignments through an AI checker, and one from this year came up as 70% AI-generated, while one from 2020 came up as only 7%. He never disclosed to me that he was using AI on his assignments.

I’m having a hard time sussing out the balance between my own gut reaction that this is bad for job security and for the future of the field as a whole and the reality that I can’t lay down a ban on the technology. For one, my AI-friendly team member has a longer and more casual relationship with my supervisor than I do, and there’s my aforementioned inability to set policy.

I don’t want to come across as a luddite, and ethical arguments over stolen art aren’t going to go anywhere in this group (though they do move me!). But I do want to maintain some amount of credibility as a firm that creates high-quality content for our clients. And I know I’m not the only one who looks at AI-generated text and thinks “…ew.”

Suggestions for how to navigate a team conversation about how to appropriately use AI tools, how to react to clients who submit AI-generated briefs, and how to minimize the amount of AI-generated copy my firm puts out? If the 70% AI-generated texts are just the norm for business now (sigh), then that means I can start filling out my report’s workload with additional tasks, right, since he’s not spending as much time drafting and polishing his assignments?

In your context, your best bet is to skip the AI concerns completely and focus on the quality of the work — because it sounds like that’s the biggest problem, as well as the one that you’re best positioned to get tracking on. Handle the work that’s turned in exactly the same way you would have before AI was in use — meaning, presumably, that you’d flag the specific problems, ask for it to be redone, and generally coach team members to produce higher-quality work. If clients are suggesting text that you don’t think should be used, handle that the same way you would pre-AI.

That approach will probably make your last question (about sending more work to your employee) moot, but start there.

3. Am I hurting my career by setting boundaries on my hours and workload?

I’m a marketing designer at a tech company. My boss works nights, weekends, and even vacations. I keep normal hours because I value a life outside of work, but I still do high-quality work, meet deadlines, and get strong feedback from peers and other leaders.

For years I’ve asked what it would take to be promoted to senior. Each time I meet their criteria, the goalposts move — most recently I was told I’d need to double my output, and they sometimes compare me to contractors who don’t have the same workload. Instead of coaching in real time, my boss critiques me after the fact for not knowing things I couldn’t have anticipated. As much as I’m grateful for all of my growth, sometimes it feels like I’ve grown in spite of their managing, instead of because of it. My self-esteem has taken a big hit and I’m working on strengthening it. I just got a therapist, hooray!

Now I’ve been given two paths forward: be micromanaged into mimicking my boss’s style while doing twice as much work, or take a “self-guided” track at my own pace (which I chose). I can’t justify doubling my workload with no guarantee of more than a minimal raise. I told them I’d keep their feedback in mind as we go into the next quarter, while continuing to do dependable, strategic, high quality work.

Am I hurting my career by keeping boundaries around work, or is it unfair that I’m treated as if that makes me less deserving?

You might be hurting your career at this particular company by maintaining reasonable boundaries, but that doesn’t mean you’re choosing the wrong thing or that they’re right.

But they’ve made it clear that they’re not going to promote you and will just keep moving the goalposts, so why not look elsewhere? You said you’ve been here for years now and they sound kind of horrible. You don’t need to stay!

4. What’s the benefit to my employer keeping me as an independent contractor?

I know from reading your blog that I am almost certainly miscategorized as an independent contractor when I should be an employee. I’ve worked for my company for coming up on five years, and while there have been changes in the arrangement, even when I worked 40 hours a week as my sole source of income I have been treated, tax-wise, as a contractor.

I have raised before being interested in being an employee, but it’s pretty clear that they have no interest in changing the arrangement whatsoever— telling me that it’s actually better for me to be a contractor because then I can “set my own schedule,” “be my own boss,” and “get work outside the company.” While the flexibility has been really nice, and is the main thing keeping me here, I don’t want to do additional work when I’m working full-time for one person— and I don’t feel like my own boss! I just have to do business admin for myself while still having a boss.

In fact, I am fairly certain that pretty much every single person at the company is there on a contract basis— even though we do things I would expect a group of employees to do, like have weekly standup meetings, have company emails, have a ‘time off’ calendar (even though there’s no formal PTO policy, because, again, everyone’s a contractor).

I guess my question is what is the motivation for the company to do this? Is it just to avoid certain costs? And when do I need to just get out? There have been things that have been really great about this job but as time goes on I just start to feel naive and like I’m being taken advantage of. The hourly rate is very good, but of course, it stops feeling that way when I pay for taxes and health insurance by myself.

Your last sentence is exactly the reason your company likes keeping you as an independent contractor: it means they don’t have to pay payroll taxes (a cost to them of 7.65% of your salary, plus federal and state unemployment taxes) or shoulder the cost of other benefits like health insurance or paid time off.

5. Interviewing as a departing federal employee

I am a federal employee in D.C. So obviously I am looking for a new job. For the time being, I have the luxury of not being desperate, so I am only applying to jobs I actually want. In an interview, one of the first questions is always, “Why do you want to work at company X/this job?” While I have been with the feds for seven years, I have only been in my current position for one. And it was something of a lane change from my prior work. It should be obvious to anyone that I’m looking around because of the drastic changes in my department. So how do I acknowledge the orange elephant in the room without making it sound like I’m just applying for every job in the area?

“It’s an unstable time for government work, obviously, but for the moment I’m able to take my time looking for my next step to make sure it’s somewhere I”ll be happy staying for a long time. And I’m interested in this position because…”

The post can’t opt out of company’s “wellness” messages, copywriter is using AI to produce bad work, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

OTTAWA – After members of the Canadian Parliament earlier today gave a standing ovation to recently deceased far-right agitator who touted white supremacist theories, Charlie Kirk, we here at The Beaverton are stuck trying to figure out if there’s literally anyone our elected officials won’t celebrate. “After Conservative MP Rachel Thomas called Kirk an ‘advocate […]

The post Report: At this point we are just trying to figure who Canadian Parliament WON’T give a standing ovation to appeared first on The Beaverton.

“The Utah man being held in the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk used the social media platform Discord to send messages about the rifle and engraved bullets.” — Deseret News

“One of the [bullet casing] messages, ‘Notices bulges OwO what’s this?,’ is often used to mock participants in online role-play communities. Another message said, ‘If you read This, you are GAY Lmao,’ its tone suggesting a kind of sophomoric insult humor common on internet message boards.” — New York Times

“The professors who are sowing the hate—they need to be fired… The professors need to go away.” — Fox News host Lawrence Jones

Which thinker do you admire most?
a. Karl Marx.
b. Thinkers are gay, but Nick Fuentes is based, I guess.

Where did you learn about economic theory?
a. A 300-level seminar that I took remotely from Martha’s Vineyard over the summer. My only regret is that I wasn’t on campus to see the professor win the Nobel, but I did Zoom in.
b. Lol theory?

What’s your favorite book?
a. White Noise (in the past six months, I’ve expanded my horizons beyond DFW, and am the better for it).
b. Lmao books?

Do you know what “groyper” means?
a. No, it wasn’t on my SAT vocab list. I’d be curious to learn for my own edification, but it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. Since I already took the test.
b. Lol.

What’s your group chat called?
a. “Praxis and Chill.”
b. [REDACTED by Discord Trust & Safety]

Donald Trump is:
a. An existential threat to our Republic, and we must throw all available institutional power behind stopping his agenda.
b. Gay.

Women are:
a. Equals.
b. Gay.

How do you signal your political beliefs?
a. An NPR tote. I believe it strikes just the right balance of “I’m a liberal” and “I’m a registered Democrat.”
b. Fedposting. And they’re not “political beliefs,” they’re just, like, thoughts.

What’s your retirement plan?
a. Let me check in with Ted and get back to you.
b. Crypto. If it even matters.

What’s your favorite animal?
a. My stepmom’s Tibetan mastiff.
b. Pepe the Frog. If you even get the reference.

Who is “the establishment”?
a. The Neoliberal Hegemony (in short, Dick Cheney, who—to be fair—has made some good points, historically).
b. Jews.

Have you had sex?
a. No.
b. No.

Where do you get your news?
a. I’m mature enough to admit that sometimes I hate-read The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Other than that, the usual.
b. MSM is cringe.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?
a. Working for a nonprofit or maybe a for-profit hedge fund (in a blue state).
b. Dead or rich. Probably dead lol.

How many hours a day do you spend online?
a. Seven Pomodoros.
b. Yes.

Where do you do most of your organizing?
a. The Crimson comment section.
b. Lol. No. I mean, I’m in a Telegram channel with forty-seven members, twelve of whom are Kash Patel under different usernames, and another six are Pete Hegseth under the same username.

Do you consider yourself radical?
a. Yes. At least as radical as Ezra Klein.
b. Maybe I am. Lol. But maybe I’m not.

What do you think is the best form of protest?
a. Withholding donations. It’s peaceful and effective.
b. Violence. Lol. Or not.

Is it acceptable to attack those with differing political aims?
a. Yes, the opinion pages are our friends here.
b. Lmao. LMAO. Lol. Who cares.

Mostly A’s: Congratulations! Your radicalization costs a mere $100,000/year. The revolution will be thoroughly peer-reviewed.
Mostly B’s: Based.

Well ... it was the only Y word we could think of.
What? Yahoo?
Yippee! #CowboyWho

#Rowen #RoninWarriors

🚰 Enter the code MAPMEN to get 10% off air up https://airup.link/mapmen

📕 Buy the MAP MEN BOOK 'This Way Up - When Maps Go Wrong' https://lnk.to/mapmen

🗺️ Here's a link to Mark's map, showing all the UK's twin towns
http://bit.ly/3K3jq6V

See new episodes early, and behind-the-scenes extras
https://patreon.com/mapmen

Written, presented and edited by
JAY FOREMAN https://bsky.app/profile/jayforeman.bsky.social
MARK COOPER-JONES https://bsky.app/profile/markcooperjones.bsky.social

Camera and additional material
BEN KNAPPETT

Production assistant
JADE NAGI https://x.com/Jade_Nagi

VFX
DAVE BRAIN https://bsky.app/profile/ornsack.bsky.social

Thanks to Jon from AutoShenanngans for letting us use his clip of Swindon.
https://www.youtube.com/@AutoShenanigans

Thanks to Chris Marshall for letting us use his photos of old road signs from https://www.roads.org.uk/

Today's links

• Wallet voting: On the uses and abuses of consumerism.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Microsoft copyright crackdown against Russian dissidents; Corbyn wins Labour leadership; Bill Gates' monopolism; TiVo won't record DRM shows; HDCP leaks; Puking sink; Mr Gotcha v covid.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Wallet voting (permalink)

You cannot vote with your wallet. Or rather, you can, but you will lose that vote. Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.

Margaret Thatcher tried to get us to believe that "there is no such thing as society." She wanted everyday people to abandon the idea of having a shared destiny, to throw away any notion of solidarity as an answer to social problems. Despite the fact that Thatcher's own backers happily formed cartels and cabals, from the Mount Pellerin Society to the Heritage Foundation, Thatcher insisted that everyday people should fight their battles alone.

If you want higher wages, don't join a union – just go demand a higher wage from your boss. If you want lower rents, don't demand rent controls, just petition your landlord for a discount. If none of this stuff works (this stuff rarely works), then you are out of luck. "The market" exists to do "price discovery" and you've just discovered the price of your labor (less than you need to survive) and the cost of your home (more than you can afford). You voted with your wallet, and you lost. As Thatcher was fond of saying, "there is no alternative."

This has been our framework for change for the past 50 years. It's like we've had a collective lobotomy and have forgotten the way that actual change comes about. Change happens when solidaristic groups of everyday people – unions, political movements – directly confront politicians and power-brokers and demand change. Your boss won't equitably share the fruits of your labor unless they fear that all the workers on the jobsite will shut down the shop. Your politicians won't do the bidding of everyday people – who can't shower them in cash – unless they fear that they will have their offices blockaded, their homes picketed, and their seats primaried.

Rather than demanding this kind of change, we're supposed to vote with our wallets, making a fetish out of our personal consumption choices and scolding others as "lazy" or "cheap" if they don't quit Facebook or stop shopping at Walmart. This isn't just ineffective, it's counterproductive. Refusing to form solidaristic bonds with people suffering in the same way as you because they buy things you disapprove of means that you can't attain the solidarity needed to make the real change you're seeking.

Shopping harder is no way to save the planet or your neighbors. Individual actions do not provoke systemic change. For that, we need collective action. Join your local tenants' union, your local DSA chapter, your local Electronic Frontier Alliance group:

https://efa.eff.org/allies

And also! Make consumption choices that improve your life and the lives of people you love. Support your local bookstore, buy online from libro.fm and bookshop.org – not because this will break Amazon's monopoly power (for that we will need unionization, antitrust, and tax enforcement), but because when you shop at those stores, you make a difference to the lives of the people who operate those stores, who pay decent wages and don't maim their warehouse workers.

Go to your local family-owned grocer instead of the union-busting monopolist, because they're nice people, the food is good, and they pitch in to help their community, rather than draining its finances and lobbying for tax exemptions.

Buy from artists and creators you like online, join their crowdfunders and Patreons, get their music on Bandcamp – not because this will shatter the hegemony of the five giant publishers, four giant studios, three giant labels, two giant app companies and one giant ebook and audiobook store – but because it will help people whose art you love pay their rent and buy groceries.

Get off Facebook, Insta and Twitter and join Mastodon and/or Bluesky – not because you can disenshittify the internet by switching to federated social media, but because you, personally can have a less shitty time if you get away from the zuckermuskian rot economy.

Do all this stuff – to the extent you can. Support your local bookstore, but don't forego buying and reading books you love because the store is a two hour drive and you only get there once a month. Support your local grocer, but if they don't have the ingredients you need for the special dinner you're making for your friends or your picky kids, then go to Safeway or Whole Foods or Albertsons. Buy art from artists where you can, but if there's a movie you want to stream and the only way to get it is on Prime or Youtube, pay the $3.99. Get a Mastodon or Bluesky account, but if your friends or customers or audience won't move with you, then reach them where they are.

Above all, don't isolate yourself. As Zephyr Teachout writes in Break 'Em Up, when you miss the picket at the Amazon warehouse because you've been driving around for hours looking for an independent stationery story to buy markers and cardboard for a protest sign, Jeff Bezos wins.

Give your comrades grace. Don't call them scabs because they bought McDonald's for their kids after a long shift. Don't turn your nose up at them because they bought a shirt at Zara. Give yourself grace. The damage you do to the cause by flying home for Thanksgiving, using a plastic straw, or using proprietary software is immeasurably infinitesimal. And if you're connected to your family, well hydrated, and get your tech needs met, you will have more energy and resources to throw into the fight for systemic change.

Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better. Your individual hand-wringing about whether to buy organic produce or get a Frappuccino just makes you less effective. It's not a boycott. A boycott is planned, social and solidaristic. It's something lots of people do together. Boycotts work (which is why génocidaires hate the BDS movement). Scabbing isn't buying something from someone unethical. Scabbing is crossing a picket line or breaking a boycott.

Margaret Thatcher's crude trick – "there is no such thing as society" – fools fewer and fewer of us every day. Doing the right thing isn't a matter of personal orthodoxy – it's a matter of movement tactics. We won't cure enshittification by zealously pursuing an approved list of correct merchants and products – we'll do so by changing the policy landscape so that enshittifiers sink and disenshittifiers rise:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

If you think buying something different, or shopping somewhere else, will make your comrades' lives better, then sure, by all means, give them a helpful tip! But don't nag them for shopping wrong. The best reason to suggest a consumption choice is to improve the life of someone you care about.

And speaking of which: this is my last blog post before my Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook, ebook and hardcover of my next book, Enshittification, winds down. I don't have a Patreon, I don't paywall my work or sell ads. I support my family by selling books, and the Kickstarter is the way to buy the books that does me the most good – I get the most money per book this way, and it does more to help the books get on the bestseller lists:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook

So I'd love it if you'd consider backing the campaign. But also: don't worry about it if this isn't the easiest way for you to read my work. If you're short on cash, or you can't use Kickstarter, or you prefer the library, get the books some other way. That's fine. Your individual consumption choices can make a difference to me, personally; but the way we will change society is by joining and participating in a movement. I'd much rather live in a better world than live in this one with an extra $20 or $30 from your book purchases in my bank account.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• YIMBYs on the Cusp of Major Victory in California https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2025-09-13-yimbys-cusp-major-victory-california/

• Why You Should Spend Less Time with Your Kids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whaesnYloMQ&t=10s

• Political Violence Is Wrong. Charlie Kirk Didn’t Think So https://jacobin.com/2025/09/kirk-posobiec-political-violence-far-right/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TiVo won’t save certain shows or allow moving them https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/13/tivo-wont-save-certain-shows-or-allow-moving-them/

#15yrsago HDCP master-key leaks, possible to make unrestricted Blu-Ray recorders https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-14-hdcp-master-key-supposedly-released-unlocks-hdtv-copy-protect.html

#15yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson on science, justice and science fiction https://gerrycanavan.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/science-justice-science-fiction-an-interview-with-kim-stanley-robinson/

#10yrsago 27-year-olds: don’t forget your D10K party!https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/13/27-year-olds-dont-forget-your-d10k-party/

#10yrsago Empty Epson “professional” inkjet cartridges are still 20% fullhttps://petapixel.com/2015/09/11/this-is-how-much-ink-the-epson-9900-printer-wastes/

#10yrsago Chest-height puking toilet in a nightclub bathroom https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3kq88k/in_a_local_club_they_have_this_awesome_toilet_for/

#10yrsago MIT and Boston U open legal clinic for innovative tech projects https://web.archive.org/web/20151005073023/https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/the-story-behind-mit-and-boston-universitys-new-legal-clinic-for-student-innovation

#15yrsago Russian cops use excuse of pirated Microsoft products to raid dissidents, newspapers, and environmentalist groups https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/world/europe/12raids.html

#10yrsago My novel “Walkaway” will hit shelves in 2017 https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/68042-book-deals-week-of-september-14-2015.html

#10yrsago NYPD cop who beat up tennis star James Blake has a long, violent rapsheet https://web.archive.org/web/20150913062523/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tackled-james-blake-sued-4-times-excessive-force-article-1.2356691

#10yrsago Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership contest and vows 'fightback' https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/12/uk-labour-party-elects-its-first-left-wing-leader-in-more-than-20-years/

#5yrsago Bill Gates's monopolistic mask-off moment https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1

#5yrsago Mr Gotcha v covid https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#mr-gotcha

#5yrsago How to buy doubt https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#surkov-koch

#5yrsago How the Attack Surface audiobook can reform Audible https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#avalanche

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
  https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow

• Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice

• Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy

• NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929

• NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21
  https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

• Techtonic with Mark Hurst
  https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658

• Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
  https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

I claim this land for Arkansas.

A national poll from Jacobin, DSA Fund, and Data for Progress finds broad support for democratic socialist leaders and left-wing policies.

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A new national survey commissioned by DSA Fund and Jacobin, with support from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and fielded by Data for Progress (N=1,257 likely voters; MOE ±3) takes stock of where democratic socialism stands with the electorate — and what it would take to build stable, working-class majorities beyond deep-blue districts.

Among Democrats, democratic socialists enjoy significant popularity. The poll’s findings include:

• Democrats prefer democratic socialism to capitalism by a 58 point margin. Socialism wins overall with likely voters under forty-five years old.
• Democrats prefer left-wing political figures similar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani over establishment politicians similar to Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi by a 20 point margin.
  • This was also true across party lines in critical voting blocs: noncollege (+9), Latinos (+30).
• Candidates who identify as democratic socialists are viewed just as favorably (+69) among registered Democrats as candidates who identify only as Democrats (+67).

“These results tell a clear story: democratic socialism is now mainstream,” said DSA Fund executive director Gabe Tobias. “Far from a liability, the ‘democratic socialist’ label is now how voters recognize a leader who they can trust to fight for them. And far from fringe, DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] actually represents the majority political views of Democratic voters.”

The poll also found support for egalitarian policy positions among Republicans and independents:

• 70% of all respondents say that our economic system is “rigged in favor of corporations and the wealthy” and needs to be replaced; this includes 67% of independents and 58% of Republicans.
• 59% of respondents (and 58% of Republicans) blame landlords and banks more than government regulation for the high cost of housing.
• 83% of respondents agree that social work and mental health are necessary parts of a public safety budget; this includes 81% of independents and 80% of Republicans. This was true across all partisan, racial/ethnic, geographic, and class groups.
• 15% of Donald Trump voters prefer democratic socialism to capitalism. These voters tended to be younger and non-white.

“This poll underscores that the term ‘democratic socialism’ now communicates something very practical to American voters: the kind of economic security and fairness once associated with the New Deal tradition,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, president of the Nation magazine and founding editor of Jacobin.

The poll was conducted from August 22 to 24, 2025. It surveyed 1,257 likely voters nationwide using web panel respondents. It was conducted by Data for Progress for the DSA Fund, Jacobin magazine, and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

Read the survey here. Full crosstabs here.

---

Based on a forgotten Stephen King dystopian novel, The Long Walk wants to be an allegory for America’s grindset mania. But unlike other works in this genre, it fails to deliver a bang and instead ends with a whimper.

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In adapting Stephen King’s 1979 novel, The Long Walk, originally published under a pseudonym, the filmmakers made the bold decision to stick relentlessly to the walk itself. The walk is an annual televised public spectacle in an impoverished, bankrupt America following an economically ruinous war. It involves fifty young male contestants who trudge on, hour after hour without a break, with the last one standing declared the winner. He’s given immense wealth as well as one additional wish.

All the others, as they lose their ability to maintain the required pace of three miles per hour, due to leg cramps, injuries, illness, hysteria, escape attempts, and sheer exhaustion, get shot by the armed military men tracking them in tanks through a desolate, depopulated countryside. It’s a dystopian allegory that now seems prescient, in keeping with other bleakly topical hits like Squid Game and The Hunger Games and another upcoming adaptation of King’s novel The Running Man. King himself admits that the “merciless” novel he began at age nineteen, back in 1967, which reflected the wretched realities of his own era during the Vietnam War, got thrown in a drawer where it lay unread for years because it seemed too harsh for the commercial publishing market.

But King’s grueling narrative seems like it ought to be just the ticket for 2025.  I imagined the obvious choice in adapting the material would be to go for flashbacks showing how and why each of the desperate main contestants was driven to sign up for this almost certainly fatal trek. It’s an old narrative strategy, especially familiar in film noir, but it’s a good one. See Jules Dassin’s harrowing prison-escape drama Brute Force (1947), for example, or Stanley Kubrick’s heist-gone-wrong masterpiece The Killing (1956), both extremely tense and despairing films.

But The Long Walk foregoes such narrative complexities. And unfortunately, the stripped-down concentration on a few key elements doesn’t help build drama — instead, we get a kind of numbing sameness. The country road, the tanks, the guns, the dwindling number of teenagers as, periodically, somebody falters, gets shot, and drops by the wayside. Sometimes it rains. One time they’re forced to fast-walk uphill, which really culls the herd in a way that’s reminiscent of the forced footrace in the excruciatingly grim neo-noir They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), which concerns a Depression-era nonstop dance-a-thon. (Some wit wrote a reference to that film in a review of The Long Walk, with the partial headline, “They Shoot Slowpokes, Don’t They?”)

If the characterizations in The Long Walk were sharper and the dialogue more memorable, the minimalist approach just might’ve worked. But the talky male-bonding and tiresome bickering and lame airing of backstories and personal philosophies make those the hardest aspects of the film to endure. A few characters have vaguely mysterious aspects to their personalities and backgrounds, which create brief flickers of interest here and there — a long knife-scar on someone’s face, somebody else hinting at an unusual motive for wanting to win the race, and so on.

Still, it should be noted that there are some talented actors in the cast, particularly the charismatic David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus), who’s genuine star material if he gets the right breaks. He plays the tough, lively Peter McVries, whose friendship with soft, sweet-natured Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman) briefly inspires some solidarity among the contestants. It makes you hope a coordinated rebellion in the ranks might develop and lead to a major narrative turn toward the end of Act Two, when the story is really dragging. After all, Ray spouts some vaguely leftist talking points condemning “the system.”

But no such luck. Everyone slogs on into Act Three.

Judy Greer gives a moving performance in a small role as Ray’s anguished mother. She even gets to take part in the one brief flashback in the film, a scene providing Ray’s motivation for participating in the walk.

And Mark Hamill, effectively disguised by aviator sunglasses and a military cap, plays the Major, the harshly jingoistic authoritarian figure presiding over the contest from the top of a tank. He exhorts the young men to display their endurance for the good of country, which he claims is suffering merely from “an epidemic of laziness.” The walk demonstrates an extreme example of the American “work ethic,” he rants, that inspires a yearly uptick in overall national productivity after each contest.

Even with all of the film’s problems, if the screenwriter J. T. Mollner and the director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, several Hunger Games) had simply managed to concoct a memorable ending, they might have salvaged a more notable impact. But just when it’s most important to nail down a finale that really packs a punch, they do the worst possible thing: they get all vague and blurry and ambiguous and leave it up to the viewer to decide what really happened and what it all means. A contemptible and stupid choice.

In the original novel, King wrote a more forceful ending that was clearly intended to work as an allegorical indictment of “the system.” It involves the winner of the contest being so shell-shocked and disoriented by the horrors he’s undergone, so alienated from the congratulatory authorities and the crowds celebrating his victory, he can’t even realize that he’s won. He sees only the shadows of imaginary contestants ahead of him still walking and goes slogging onward after them. The world has become one big Long Walk.

That’s definitely not what happens at the end of Mollner and Lawrence’s Long Walk. What exactly does happen, I don’t know. I’m not sure they could tell you. But anticlimactic is far too kind a word for it.

---

An immigration judge ruled ICE can’t deport Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago, who has permission to be in the country, unless the agency can provide evidence that her legal status was revoked.

In brief: The tropical wave in the central Atlantic is becoming more likely to develop over the next few days as it moves west northwest across the Atlantic. No land concerns are expected right now. Meanwhile, Pacific Tropical Storm Mario is likely to spread thunderstorm chances across Southern California later this week. We also check in on the Dakotas which had a mini tornado outbreak on Sunday.

Atlantic tropical wave

The wave we’ve been talking about since last week in the middle of the Atlantic looks pretty decent this morning. It’s certainly better looking than the previous wave we were tracking out there.

This wave now has 80 percent odds of development per the NHC, and I imagine this will get tagged as an Invest within the next day or so. Whereas the previous wave we tracked out here had high development odds and failed to make it, this one has much less of an “all or nothing” chance to develop. There is strong model agreement in some development by as early as Wednesday or Thursday (shown).

Notice that this system is already at a fairly moderate latitude by mid to late this week, and with it continuing west northwest, we should see this pass fairly well north of the Caribbean islands. From there, it seems as though it will either curve back north and northeast out to sea, or it will continue west northwest to the north of the islands, sort of in the fashion of Hurricane Erin earlier this season, particularly if it’s on the weaker end of the spectrum. The most likely outcome is some loosely organized storm turning out to sea. But for folks in Bermuda, it probably makes sense to keep a side eye on this one through the week, unlikely as it would be to impact the island.

Generally speaking, while this is the most interesting item we’ve had in what seems like weeks in the Atlantic, it’s thankfully not a serious land threat at this point.

What’s next in the Atlantic?

The background state of the Atlantic may revert back to hostile again after about September 20th, meaning that we’re probably going to continue to see systems struggling for the end of September. Probabilities for tropical development are not exactly strong looking outside of that one tropical disturbance in the middle of the Atlantic.

In fact, if anything, they’re below average off Africa and below average off the Southeast coast. I do suspect we’ll begin to see more noise in the southwest Gulf or western Caribbean, as is typical for late September and October, but aside from that, it’s becoming apparent that this is probably going to end up being one of the more subdued hurricane seasons in recent memory. Of course, one bad outcome in early to mid-October can change the whole perception, but we currently don’t see anything else out there.

Tropical Storm Mario

In the Pacific, Tropical Storm Mario was declared dissipated this weekend, but it turns out the princess was just in another castle. So, Mario is back to life.

Mario should continue off to the northwest, eventually succumbing to King Koolpa, as sharply cooler water awaits it to the north.

So why am I taking up virtual oxygen talking about a storm that will remain offshore and dissipate. Besides the ability to add Mario puns to the post, the moisture from Mario is going to play a role in the weather in California later this week, with showers and thunderstorms likely to infiltrate from the south, particularly in SoCal. In addition to the potential for locally heavy rainfall in Southern California, there could also be some isolated dry lightning issues with respect to fire starts in parts of the interior. The entire region is under a marginal (1/4) risk for locally heavy rainfall on Thursday.

Rainfall amounts will be minimal in most places, but there will be areas that see a solid half-inch to 2 inches of rain, which could cause some flash flooding in spots.

North Dakota ‘naders

Quite a day yesterday in the Dakotas. Historically, not a tornado-prone location in September (there have been only one or two historical noted reports of tornadoes in this corridor of the Dakotas since at least 1950 in September), there were nearly 20 reports of tornadoes on Sunday from at least 4 tornadoes. Reports ranged from near Mobridge, SD through Bowman, ND, Golden Valley County, and Hettinger, ND.

The National Weather Service office in Bismarck is looking for reports from yesterday across the corridor in northwest South Dakota and western North Dakota. Certainly, there were a number of chasers on these storms. But overall, this was a bit of an impressive, somewhat surprising September event this far north.

In brief: Houston’s sunny and warm, but not super hot weather will continue this week. As we get closer to the weekend we may see some slightly better rain chances, but I would not expect any serious accumulations. In this post I explain why this is pretty normal for September.

Taking stock of September

We are now nearly two weeks into the month of September. The heat over the weekend may have felt a little bit too much like summer, but the reality is that for Houston September often feels like an extension of August. This is the genesis of the ongoing debate Matt and I have over which month has the worst weather here. For the record, the correct answer is August. Always August.

When we look at temperatures to date for this September, we are actually running slightly below normal so far this month. How is this possible? Well, recall we had that nice, early season front a little more than a week ago, and that knocked our nights into the 60s and lowered the humidity. That has made our weather over the last couple of days—which actually is pretty typical for mid-September—feel warmer than perhaps we think it should be. The front fooled us.

The bottom line is that although the forecast for the week ahead ahead appears to be pretty warm, and pretty humid, it is not abnormally so for this time of year. In fact it’s fairly typical. Fall is on the horizon, but alas it is not here quite yet.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday

If you liked the weather this weekend, you’re in luck, because that pattern will continue. We will see partly to mostly sunny days with high temperatures around 90 degrees closer to the coast, mostly low-90s for central parts of the Houston region, and mid-90s for inland areas such as Katy and The Woodlands. We will see a chance of some pop-up showers each afternoon, but the overall odds are only 10 to 20 percent. With afternoon dewpoints in the 60s it will feel humid, but not oppressively so during the peak of summer here. Nighttime lows will generally fall to the low- to mid-70s.

Thursday through the weekend

The pattern does not change a whole lot through the weekend, although we will see a slightly more disturbed upper atmosphere. What does that mean? Would see some slightly better rain chances by Thursday or so. They’re not great, but at this point it is possible that we see some 20 or 30 percent daily chances through the weekend. Any accumulations appear to be modest, so don’t expect heavy or prolonged rainfall. Highs remain in the vicinity of the lower 90s.

Does this pattern ever end?

There is some evidence to support a greater likelihood of rain by early next week, which might cool us down into the upper 80s. But this mostly sunny, mostly hot weather pattern in September is persistent, and I want to see more definitive evidence before suggesting it’s going to end.

Tropics

We are nearing the end game of the tropics and Texas for this year. However, we have not gotten there yet. Looking across the Atlantic basin, we are seeing things start to heat back up after a calm beginning of September. To be clear, we are presently tracking no threats to the Gulf or Texas. But we probably will have a hurricane in the open Atlantic over the next several days. We’ll take a deeper look at the tropics in tomorrow’s post.

A reader writes:

This is a bizarre situation that happened years ago and I always wonder how I and my boss should have handled it.

I don’t drink alcohol for personal reasons. My boss, Walter, was aware of this — in my field, happy hours with clients and coworkers are common, and I’d usually attend and have a soda but made clear to Walter early on that I don’t drink. Relevant information: I have some moral qualms with it personally — not judging what anyone else partakes in, but it’s not something I have an interest in consuming myself. I have known a lot of alcoholics, and while my own abstinence from alcohol isn’t religious, I do think there are some similarities to those who abstain for religious reasons.

One day, after years of working together, Walter, a few other coworkers, and I went out to a happy hour for drinks and appetizers. I ordered a water and everyone else ordered drinks. I think Walter ordered champagne, or maybe white wine, or some kind of light colored drink.

We were sitting at a table and the restaurant was pretty dark, and it was hard to see. Often at bars when you order a water or a soda, they put it in a fancy cup so that your drink doesn’t stand out. Drinks arrived, including what I thought was my water. But apparently it wasn’t my water. Walter, seated next to me, didn’t say anything, and at first I didn’t notice. Whatever it was, it must have been a pretty mild drink, though I initially had only had a small sip or two. And because it was sitting in front of me and he didn’t say anything, I thought, surely this is my drink. After a little while, I realized Walter didn’t have a drink. Something clicked and I thought wait, is that not my water? Did they forget my water (a common occurrence)? Is that Walter’s drink? Thinking it’d be silly to ask, because surely Walter would have said something if I’d taken his drink, I proceeded to have several larger sips throughout the night, trying to figure out what it was. I don’t remember a strong taste, but I remember trying to determine if it was juice or seltzer or some incorrect order but not necessarily alcoholic. I do remember Walter kind of looking at me strangely as I took a sip of the drink at one point, but he didn’t say anything.

Some time passes, we’re all making conversation, and I realize I’m feeling really dizzy. I have literally never had alcohol in my life, so a slight buzz from a small amount of alcohol is probably realistic. I started thinking, this must be something alcoholic, but I was too embarrassed to say anything to anyone. I felt very uncomfortable and didn’t know what to do.

At some point, I made an excuse to leave. I felt uncomfortably dizzy walking to the train station, couldn’t quite think clearly, and was uncomfortable with the thought of consuming alcohol in general. I made it home fine but was confused and upset.

The next work day, Walter was traveling on business and out of town, but I sent him an email pertaining to a work project. At the end of the email, as an aside, I mentioned the incident — something along the lines of, “By the way, sorry about taking your drink the other night — I’d accidentally thought it was my water!” Because I felt like I should acknowledge it.

Walter took a long time to respond, and when he did, he started a whole new email chain instead of replying to the Outlook thread like you normally would. In the new email, he responded to my comments and questions about the project, and he didn’t acknowledge anything about the drink.

Then we never spoke of this incident.

How should we both have handled this?

In retrospect, I think I should have said something as soon as I realized even the possibility of “this isn’t my water.” But also, it bothers me that he didn’t say anything, and it further bothers me that he seems to have intentionally avoided acknowledging what happened when I brought it up in that email.

I recognize that this probably sounds like a small silly thing, but it was a big deal to me at the time.

It doesn’t sound like Walter really did anything wrong.

When you started drinking his drink, he was just as likely as you were to assume it was your drink and they’d forgotten his. If you, the person actually tasting it, thought it was yours, we can’t blame Walter for assuming that too.

I’m also not sure we can read anything into the way he replied to your email. It’s a little odd that he started a whole new email to respond, but it’s not odd that he didn’t address what you said about the drink; it’s not necessarily something he would assume required a reply. Yes, it would have be normal for him to respond, “Oh, no worries” or “I figured since you were drinking it, it was yours and they forgot mine” or similar … but I think the subtext here is that you feel he should have apologized or checked that you were okay or otherwise treated this with the same import it held for you. I don’t think that’s the case though. What you wrote to him was very matter-of-fact (“sorry for taking your drink”) so it makes sense that he didn’t respond as if it were a big deal. If you’d instead said something like, “I realized after the fact I’d been drinking your drink and I felt really dizzy and couldn’t think clearly while getting home,” he likely would have had a different reply (at least I hope he would!). But the way you addressed it was very breezy, so it makes sense that he left it there.

And sure, maybe he started a whole new email chain because he’s trying to eliminate evidence of him being a bystander to you drinking … but there would be no reason for him to do that. I don’t think you can read anything into it.

So to your question of how you both should have handled it: if Walter noticed you drinking his drink and didn’t just assume it was yours, ideally he would have said, “I think that’s mine — I can order a new one, but I want to make sure you know there’s alcohol in that.” But again, he didn’t necessarily know or think about it (and it wouldn’t be weird if each team member’s drinking/non-drinking status wasn’t top of mind for him). On your end, once you realized you weren’t drinking water and were actively trying to figure out what it was, ideally — as someone who doesn’t want to drink alcohol — you would have stopped drinking it so you could find out for sure (by asking the waiter or so forth). You also could have asked a colleague for some help getting home if you wanted that (although by definition you weren’t thinking clearly, so it’s understandable that you didn’t).

To me it sounds like just an unfortunate accident, and not something that needs to be treated with any more weight than that.

The post I don’t drink, and I accidentally consumed alcohol at a work event — how should my boss have handled it? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Early in President Trump’s first term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes, and it felt urgent to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors. This list will be updated monthly between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term.

These lists, along with everything McSweeney’s publishes on this site, are offered ad-free and at no charge to our readers. If you are moved to make a donation in any amount or subscribe to our website’s Patreon, please do. This will help support this project and our other work.

ATROCITY KEY

– Constitutional Illegalities, Collusion, and/or Obstruction of Justice
– Environment
– Harassment, Bullying, Retribution, and/or Sexual Misconduct
– Lies and Misinformation
– Musk Madness
– Policy
– Public Statements and Social Media Posts
– Trump Family Business Dealings
– Trump Staff and Administration
– White Supremacy, Racism, Misogyny, Homophobia, Transphobia, and/or Xenophobia

Main Index

Trump’s first term

AUGUST 2025

1. – August 1, 2025 – Trump removed Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after a report showed hiring slowed in July and was much weaker in May and June than previously reported. In a post on his social media platform, Trump alleged that the figures were manipulated for political reasons and said that McEntarfer, whom former President Joe Biden appointed, should be fired. He provided no evidence for the charge. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.” He later posted, “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
   
   
2. – August 2, 2025 – Trump called on top Federal Reserve officials to seize control from its chair, Jerome Powell, if he failed to cut interest rates. The move was a large-scale escalation of the attacks on the central bank’s independence. In a series of social media posts days after the Fed held rates steady for the fifth consecutive time, Trump said, “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell, a stubborn MORON, must substantially lower interest rates, NOW. IF HE CONTINUES TO REFUSE, THE BOARD SHOULD ASSUME CONTROL AND DO WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS HAS TO BE DONE!” Hours before, the federal government released data that underlined a significant deterioration in the US job market.
   
   
3. – August 2, 2025 – The Senate took its August recess without a deal to advance dozens of Trump’s nominees. After negotiations with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Trump broke down, Republicans said they may try to change Senate rules when they return in September to speed up the pace of confirmations. As negotiations faltered, Trump’s frustration boiled over in a Truth Social post: “Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL! Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country.” In response, Schumer said, “Trump tried to bully us, go around us, threaten us, call us names, but he got nothing.”
   
   
4. – August 3, 2025 – Following criticisms from Charlamagne tha God in his interview on My View with Lara Trump, Trump lashed out against the radio host on social media. In a rant riddled with numerous false and misleading claims, Trump called Charlamagne, who is Black, a “racist sleazebag,” “low IQ individual,” and “dope.” “Look, my fellow Americans,” Charlamagne responded. “We are in a strange time right now, a time we have never seen because authoritarian strategy is being used against anyone who speaks out against this administration.”
   
   
5. – August 4, 2025 – The National Park Service announced that a statue of Confederate army general Albert Pike, which was toppled and set on fire during a 2020 antiracism protest in Washington, DC, would be reinstalled. “The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and re-instate [sic] pre-existing statues,” said the statement. Before its removal, the statue of Pike was a frequent source of controversy; activists and government officials had long called for its removal, with some claiming Pike was the “chief founder of the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan.” Since taking office, the Trump administration has also restored Confederate names to Army bases.
   
   
6. – August 5, 2025 – Health and Human Services secretary and antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled almost $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines. In a social media video posted the same day, Kennedy Jr. also falsely claimed the vaccines did not protect against respiratory illnesses like COVID and flu, causing scientists to push back. “By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about vaccines,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Had we not used these lifesaving mRNA vaccines to protect against severe illnesses, we would have had millions of more COVID deaths.” “I can say unequivocally that this was the most dangerous public health decision I have ever seen made by a government body,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. First used during the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines are much faster to develop than traditional vaccines and can be quickly altered as viruses change. In 2023, the technology was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
   
   
   BARDA and mRNA vaccines announcement. (US Department of Health and Human Services)
   
   
7. – August 5, 2025 – At the signing ceremony for his executive order establishing a security task force for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Trump did not rule out the possibility of sending the military to the Games. “We’ll do anything to keep the Olympics safe, including using our National Guard or military,” Trump said. “I will use the National Guard or military—this is going to be so safe—if I have to.” In a highly unusual and constitutionally questionable move in June, Trump deployed the Marines and National Guard to Los Angeles to quell protests against ongoing immigration raids, prompting California to sue. During the same signing ceremony, Trump also insisted there would be “some form” of sex testing at the Games to ensure trans women would not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. “The United States will not let men steal trophies from women at the 2028 Olympics,” said Trump.
   
   
8. – August 5, 2025 – Following the assault of former DOGE and current Social Security Administration employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in DC during an attempted carjacking, Trump threatened to federalize the nation’s capitol. The president shared a photo on Truth Social showing a bloodied, shirtless Coristine, writing, “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City.” In the same post, Trump claimed that crime was “totally out of control” despite falling crime rates, alleged that teenagers were “randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens,” and called for the teens to be prosecuted as adults. The next day, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he was considering taking over DC’s police force and bringing in the National Guard: “[Coristine] went through a bad situation to put it mildly, and there’s too much of it. We’re going to do something about it. That includes bringing in the National Guard, maybe very quickly too.” When asked whether he would overturn DC’s home rule, Trump added, “We’re going to look at that. In fact, the lawyers are already studying it.” On the campaign trail and since retaking office, Trump has repeatedly called for the federal government to take over DC.
   
   
9. – August 5, 2025 – In an internal email, ICE announced a thirty-day pilot program offering cash bonuses to agents for hastily deporting migrants. According to an initial memo, agents would receive two-hundred-dollar bonuses for deporting migrants within seven days of arrest and one hundred dollars for deporting migrants within two weeks of arrest. The agents were also encouraged to use expedited removals, which permit some migrants to be deported without court proceedings, a possible violation of due process rights. “This is so ungodly unethical,” said Scott Shuchart, a former senior Homeland Security official. “You can’t incentivize government agents to short-circuit people’s procedural rights. Would you pay a bonus to judges for wrapping up trials faster?” The program was abruptly canceled four hours after its announcement following an inquiry by The New York Times.
   
   
10. – August 6, 2025 – The Guardian reported that Vice President JD Vance’s security team raised the water level of the Little Miami River in Ohio for a family boating trip to celebrate the vice president’s forty-first birthday on August 2. According to a statement by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the request from the US Secret Service was made to “support safe navigation.” However, an anonymous source told The Guardian that the request was instead made to create “ideal kayaking conditions.” Regardless of the reason behind the request, Vance’s use of public resources came at a time when the Trump administration had made drastic cuts to the National Park Service. “While there may well be security-related explanations or justifications that come into analysis, my reaction is: I don’t care. We shouldn’t be utilizing government resources in this way. I never would have allowed it,” said Norm Eisen, a former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform during the Obama administration.
    
    
11. – August 7, 2025 – Following up on his unsubstantiated allegations earlier in the week that JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America had discriminated against him, President Trump signed an executive order directing regulators to punish banks that illegally discriminate against conservatives and to retroactively review whether financial institutions have in the past closed accounts for political or religious reasons. “The banks discriminated against me very badly,” Trump told CNBC earlier in the week. In the same interview, he also accused the Biden administration, without evidence, of instructing regulators to “do everything you can to destroy Trump.” In a Politico article, banking industry officials acknowledged that certain regulatory policies aimed at preventing illicit financial transactions and managing reputation risk can result in customers being cut off without explanation. However, they rejected the president’s claim that these accounts were closed for political reasons.
    
    
12. – August 7, 2025 – Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted and praised a CNN video interview with Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson, who doesn’t believe women should vote. “All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote in his post. During the interview, Wilson said that “women are the kind of people that people come out of,” adding, “The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls.” In the same interview, Wilson defended previous comments he had made that there was mutual affection between slaves and their enslavers and also said that sodomy should be recriminalized. “The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings,” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told NPR in an emailed statement.
    
    
    Douglas Wilson continues to gripe about women having the right to vote. (Right Wing Watch)
    
    
13. – August 8, 2025 – The Smithsonian altered its description of President Trump’s impeachment after the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. The previous text referenced Trump’s incitement charge, which it said was based on Trump’s “repeated “false statements” challenging the 2020 election results” and his speech that “encouraged—and foreseeably resulted in—imminent lawless action at the Capitol.” The new description reads: “On Jan. 13, 2021, Donald Trump became the first president to be impeached twice. The charge was incitement of insurrection based on his challenge of the 2020 election results and on his speech on Jan. 6. Because Trump’s term ended on Jan. 20, he became the first former president tried by the Senate. He was acquitted on Feb. 13, 2021.” In addition, the word “alleged” was also added to a description of Trump’s first impeachment: “The charges focused on the president’s alleged solicitation of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election and defiance of Congressional subpoenas.” The recent changes came after the museum took down a temporary addition to an exhibition about the American presidency that mentioned Trump’s two impeachments. “The resulting chilling effect seems clear. The Smithsonian curators and museum specialists are walking a tightrope, attempting to stick to factual interpretations about the recent past while experiencing pressure to minimize any bad information about the Trump administration,” said Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
    
    
14. – August 8, 2025 – The Justice Department launched an investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a civil fraud case against President Trump and his companies in 2023. Trump began criticizing James as soon as the civil case was launched, accusing her of targeting him for political reasons and calling James, who is Black, a “racist.” “Investigating the fraud case Attorney General James won against Trump and his businesses has to be the most blatant and desperate example of this administration’s carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign,” said Abbe Lowell, James’s attorney. “Weaponizing the Department of Justice to try to punish an elected official for doing her job is an attack on the rule of law and a dangerous escalation by this administration.”
    
    
15. – August 8, 2025 – In a memo, the Air Force rescinded benefits to at least a dozen transgender service members who had applied for early retirement to avoid being kicked out of the service for their gender identity. The early-retirement applications were prompted after the Pentagon issued a memo in February declaring medical diagnoses of gender dysphoria incompatible with military service. According to lawyers, disqualifying medical conditions diagnosed during active service typically result in a medical retirement, which comes with benefits. However, according to the latest memo, the service members, who had each served between fifteen and eighteen years in the Air Force, will instead be forced to choose between a “voluntary” separation agreement or an involuntary removal, both of which will result in substantial losses of financial, medical, and other benefits worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. “The first feeling I felt was betrayal,” said Master Sergeant Logan Ireland, who served multiple overseas tours over fifteen years, on learning the news. “I’ve given my life to the service.”
    
    
16. – August 9, 2025 – As he finalized the details for his upcoming meeting with Vladimir Putin, Trump told reporters that a new peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine may involve Ukraine ceding territory to Russia. “You’re looking at territory that’s been fought over for three and a half years with—you know, a lot of Russians have died, a lot of Ukrainians have died. There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” said Trump. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy quickly pushed back on Trump’s statement. “The answer to the Ukrainian territorial question is already in the constitution of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a video address. “No one will retreat from this, and no one can. Ukrainians will not give up their land to an occupier.”
    
    
17. – August 11, 2025 – Trump announced he was activating eight hundred members of the National Guard in an effort to bring down rising crime rates in Washington, DC. The move reflected an escalation of his aggressive approach to law enforcement. Flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi during a White House press conference, Trump declared, “We’re going to take our capital back.” A recent Department of Justice report showed that violent crime was down 35 percent since 2023 and that DC’s violent crime rate was at its lowest in thirty years. District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb said, “The administration’s actions are unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful. There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia.”
    
    
    Trump says he’s deploying National Guard across Washington and taking over city’s police. (AP)
    
    
18. – August 11, 2025 – Trump nominated E. J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a contributor to Project 2025, to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If approved by the Senate, Antoni would replace Biden appointee Erika McEntarfer. Trump fired McEntarfer on August 1, after the July jobs report showed hiring had slowed sharply in the spring, with lower job gains than initially estimated. “Our Economy is booming,” Trump crowed, “and E. J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.” Antoni was quoted as calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” that “we need to sunset.” Criticism of Antoni’s nomination came from unexpected sources. Kyle Pomerleau, of the right-leaning Tax Foundation and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote on X, “There are a lot of competent conservative economists that could do this job. E. J. is not one of them.”
    
    
19. – August 12, 2025 – The State Department released an annual collection of reports on human rights records in nearly two hundred nations but left out language on persistent abuses in nations that were included in prior reports. The omissions signaled the Trump administration’s clear move away from criticizing human rights offenses from countries that are viewed as key partners. Critical language in sections on El Salvador, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel was scaled back or excised. Earlier this year, NPR obtained an internal State Department memo instructing employees editing the reports to remove whole categories of violations, including gender-based violence and environmental harms. References to restrictions on political participation and government corruption, violence against minorities and LGBTQ people, and harassment of human rights organizations were also ordered to be removed.
    
    
20. – August 13, 2025 – As the new chairman of the Kennedy Center, Trump announced the 2025 honorees. He named country music star George Strait, actor Sylvester Stallone, singer Gloria Gaynor, the rock band Kiss, and actor-singer Michael Crawford as the year’s recipients. The president has made revamping the Kennedy Center and its “woke” agenda the center of a push to overhaul the country’s cultural life. He also...

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Aaand… action.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was a moral travesty. We can recognize that without ignoring that he repeatedly fanned the flames of political violence himself.

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It should be a basic, universally agreed-upon principle that people shouldn’t be killed because of the things they say or believe in. That’s not just because it’s morally wrong but also because it’s socially corrosive, contrary to the continued existence of a free society, and only fuels cycles of violence and recrimination; because the real political work that creates lasting, transformational change — organizing, persuasion, debate, criticism, and so on — is impossible if someone can be marked for death simply because a person who disagrees with them can get their hands on a gun.

The only way the concept of free speech works in practice is if it applies even to people whose views are ugly, ignorant, vile, even hateful — people like Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was just shot and killed in Utah for reasons that are still not clear. Once you start making exceptions to this rule for this view or that comment, you’ll find the whole foundation of the idea collapses in on itself. It turns out that everyone has their own opinion about what’s acceptable and what’s beyond the pale, and that those opinions are often wildly at odds depending on your personal background and politics.

This is the way democracy and a free society work: We accept that we have to tolerate hearing things we vehemently disagree with, because it guarantees our own right to speak and act freely in ways that others might vociferously detest.

But there is something dishonest and slightly absurd going on right now in the collective reaction to Kirk’s murder. Because rather than simply restate and defend this principle — you have a right to air your views without fear of violence, even if your views suck — a variety of prominent voices are now rewriting Kirk’s history to present him as someone who wasn’t an implacable foe of this very value.

“Charlie championed” the cause of “freedom of expression that’s enshrined in our founding documents,” Utah governor Spencer Cox said after his alleged assailant was caught. There is a copious outpouring of tributes from the political right about Kirk’s supposed commitment to free speech and open, civil debate. It’s not surprising to see this from Kirk’s conservative allies. But it has also come from the liberal center, with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein declaring that “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

As plenty of people have pointed out by now, Kirk held and espoused a variety of ugly views and regularly insulted and demonized whole groups of human beings just trying to get on with their lives: not only trans people, whom he was falsely blaming for mass shootings at the precise moment he himself was shot (by a nontrans man, based on what we now know) but also Jews, Muslims, immigrants, black people, homosexuals, federal workers — the list goes on. That of course doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed, but it is dishonest — and actually detrimental to the defense of free speech — to pretend these weren’t his core, heartfelt beliefs.

Kirk held and espoused a variety of ugly views and regularly insulted and demonized whole groups of human beings just trying to get on with their lives.

But it’s not even really Kirk’s bigoted social attitudes that are the point. More important is that Kirk was very much on board with the political violence that is now rightly being decried in the wake of his murder.

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A History of Advocating Political Violence

Take a look, for instance, at a 2024 interview he did with Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator known for spreading the #Pizzagate mythos and for his association with various out-and-out white supremacists, none of which stopped Kirk from employing him for years in his organization Turning Point USA and cohosting a podcast with him. It was “one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had with him,” Kirk told listeners after interviewing Posobiec for his book Unhumans:The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), which argues that right-wing dictators were right to torture, kill, and otherwise repress the Left, and that today’s conservatives might have to take a page out of their book.

That is not hyperbole; it is literally what the book argues and is about.

And there is no indication that any of it gave Kirk any pause as he allowed Posobiec and his coauthor to hold forth unchallenged about how the Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco and the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders between them — were “great men” who “had a father’s heart for their country” and were their countries’ equivalents to George Washington, whose great deeds are only remembered badly now because an omniscient, all-powerful left has infiltrated education and entertainment and rewritten history. Franco simply had to do what he did — including concentration camps, mass rape, torture, and hundreds of thousands of killings — because he “was fighting a war,” and doing it “the same way that [William Tecumseh] Sherman fought a civil war,” they explain.

Kirk didn’t push back on any of this. As Posobiec explained that he endorsed killing his political opponents — the “unhumans” of the book’s menacing title — Kirk personally talked about how conservatives needed to stop being “nice” and said he wanted to emphasize the bit about “how to crush them,” meaning the modern liberal-left. He talked about how he wanted to see “a right-wing revolution.”

The only remotely challenging question Kirk posed was about whether it was truly possible to eliminate their opposition without using violence. Posobiec’s reply was that the United States could merely rerun the earlier Red Scares and round up and expel thousands of people whose politics they disagree with — the supposedly “moderate” solution — and that the only times violence has been used is when right-wing forces were faced with violence already. The keen-eyed reader may note that this is a thinly veiled permission structure for conservatives to engage in political violence, if they can construe any violence against themselves as having been inflicted or incited by their opponents.

“Are communists channeling the demonic?” Kirk asked at the close of the interview. His subjects explained that communists, a label that to them describes ordinary liberals and Democratic officials, operate in the same way as Satan and demons do.

How does trying to annul an election result by force because your side didn’t win fit into the image created five minutes ago of a Charlie Kirk who abhorred violence and believed in debate and persuasion?

This is not an isolated example. We have an idea of what kind of “revolution” Kirk was thinking of when we look at his critical role in trying to help Trump illegally overturn the 2020 election. That didn’t just include using his massive platform to spread lies that Trump had won the election but also busing people into Washington to try to storm the Capitol and stop the certification of the election.

How does trying to annul an election result by force because your side didn’t win fit into the image created five minutes ago of a Charlie Kirk who abhorred violence and believed in debate and persuasion? It clearly doesn’t. But as Kirk elsewhere admitted, “I’m not a fan of democracy.”

In 2021, an audience member asked Kirk at what point conservatives had the green light to use guns on their political opponents, and while Kirk took care to at first “denounce” the question, he went into a longer answer that suggested he didn’t really disagree that much with its premise. Kirk’s sole objection to the idea, he explained, was that it was strategically foolish because it would create a pretext for a Democratic crackdown on the Right. He went on to suggest that the line for when it would be okay to take up arms and hurt people would be “when we exhaust every single one of our state[’s] ability to push back against what’s happening” — in other words, if his movement didn’t succeed through the normal political process. Two years later, he reiterated this, warning listeners that “you have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president,” so they should “buy weapons” and carry them around all the time in public in case they have to fight back.

Kirk called for former president Joe Biden to be put in prison, to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, even to be given the death penalty, just as he repeatedly urged that, if his side took power, they should launch criminal investigations into other prominent Democrats. He advocated for a left-leaning commentator (and US citizen) who had a position on the COVID-19 pandemic that he disagreed with to be deported. He called for the military to be sicced on migrants and for “lethal force” to be used on them, and advised his viewers to arm themselves to potentially kill these migrants themselves, because “they mean harm to the American homeland.”

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Heated Rhetoric

Even his more “moderate” efforts were not about winning the political day through debate and persuasion but about silencing people and institutions through blacklisting and intimidation. Kirk partly rose to fame by launching a “Professor Watchlist” to expose and intimidate academics who “advance leftist propaganda” and “promote anti-American values.” He deleted that second bit later, but as Kirk’s friendly interview with Posobiec shows, he openly supported the revival of the McCarthyism that that phrase evokes.

It is somewhat absurd to watch right-leaning commentators now crying foul that Kirk would be called mean names like a “fascist,” when Kirk regularly demonized and whipped up rage against his political opponents in the same way. He called Democrats “maggots, vermin, and swine,” charged that the party “hates this country” and that “they wanna see it collapse.” He told rural white voters that the party hated them in particular and has “a plan to try and get rid of you” and that they “won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.” Kamala Harris “wants to see the elimination of the United States of America,” he claimed last year, and her election would mean “a pagan regime basically permanently engulfing the country.”

It is absurd to watch right-leaning commentators cry foul that Kirk would be called mean names like a ‘fascist,’ when Kirk regularly demonized and whipped up rage against his political opponents in the same way.

In fact, he used the exact same comparisons to fascism and Nazism that right-wing pundits are now saying were materially responsible for his murder. Kirk called a 2022 Biden speech “very Hitlerian” and “a declaration of war against half the country,” claimed the Biden administration was in the beginning stages of a genocide against the Trump movement, and said the FBI under Biden was “doing the work that brown shirts would do” and was “how you get Auschwitz.”

As usual, a host of commentators — mostly on the political right but with the baffling aid of some liberal voices who should know better — have created a topsy-turvy, upside-down reality in the wake of this killing. It’s a reality where all of Kirk’s many authoritarian, politically intolerant, and pro-violence views have not just been wiped from his history but have been transplanted onto his political opponents — all to justify a violent state crackdown that Kirk and others like him constantly said they feared being inflicted on them, while simultaneously fantasizing about being the ones who got to inflict it on their enemies.

No one should be punished, let alone killed, for their speech or their political views. We don’t need to pretend Charlie Kirk was someone he wasn’t to affirm that principle, and we don’t have to pretend that he wasn’t an avowed foe of that same principle.

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Welcome to the fully privatized city, where the ultrarich can do as they please — no whining from the rabble permitted.

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At one of the first public meetings in the new city of Starbase, Texas, the first order of business was keeping the public out.

The city, near Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico, voted to incorporate this May, forming a bizarre modern-day company town under the thrall of part-time resident Elon Musk. It’s made up of about five hundred people, spread across a few blocks of airstream trailers and ranch homes, almost all of whom are SpaceX workers or their families. The city serves as the launch site for the SpaceX Starship, and has been a passion project for Musk, especially since his dramatic falling out with the Trump administration this June.

Since incorporation, Starbase has operated as a uniquely undemocratic form of democracy. Most voting residents, including the mayor and two out of three members of the Board of Commissioners, work for Elon at-will and could easily be fired for going against his wishes. Many also reside in company-owned housing, where a firing leads to an eviction. This puts the entire town under intense coercive pressure to govern themselves in the interests of the company rather than the general public.

At the public meeting in late June, the Starbase government considered a proposal to build a set of gates around most of the town. These gates were a security measure, officials explained, and they would be used to bar anyone unaffiliated with Starbase from entering the town center. Some in the audience voiced opposition, but it didn’t matter. In the antidemocratic spirit of the town, the gates had been paid for and installed.

This is a striking move, effectively making a public municipality accessible only to those in good graces of Elon and SpaceX. Critical journalists, protesters, labor organizers, political canvassers, or anybody that Elon personally dislikes could all be excluded. Never mind that these streets had been maintained by state and county tax dollars for years — they have now been functionally privatized and annexed into Elon’s personal domain.

The incorporation and subsequent walling off of Starbase shows the increasingly ridiculous lengths billionaires are willing to go to in order to insulate themselves from the general public and local democracy. Elites have always used their private wealth and power to avoid interacting with the rabble, spending millions each year on personal security, or constructing elaborate gated compounds and bunkers. But more and more, billionaires are beginning to co-opt and use public power to defend their own security and privacy. It’s a brazen development for the billionaire class, who are seizing control of the levers of local government and using them to keep the public out.

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Billionaire Bunker

A blueprint for the private, securitized billionaire town was drawn up in the 1930s, on a man-made island on the Biscayne Bay, just outside of Miami.

Indian Creek Village, nicknamed the “billionaire bunker,” is a part-time home to uber-wealthy elites like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Tom Brady, and billionaires Carl Icahn and Eddie Lampert. It stands out from other elite enclaves in that, since its incorporation in 1939, it has also been governed by this same group of billionaire homeowners, who draft its laws and shape its budget.

As in Starbase, a main function of public power here is excluding the public. The uber-wealthy community is separated from the only regular-wealthy city of Surfside by a heavily defended bridge. Nobody is allowed to cross this bridge unless they have the permission of one of the eighty or so residents, or a $500,000 membership to the island’s private golf club.

Security has always been a top priority for the Indian Creek billionaires, but in recent years, as the island has gotten even wealthier, it’s become an obsession. The town charters its own heavily funded police force who patrol the island in speedboats 24/7, basically acting as private security for the island’s residents. Their police spending increases every year, so much so that it now makes up 75 percent of their annual budget. In 2022, they installed an elaborate Israeli radar detection system around the island’s perimeter, and have begun aggressively ticketing boats that pass too close to their shores.

Indian Creek exists in a strange quasi-public space, where it can still cash in on the perks of being an incorporated town while behaving like a gated community. Though they are able to hoard most of their own property tax dollars for personal use, they draw on government grants and municipal bonds to repair their roads. Though most Florida taxpayers are not allowed to step foot on the bridge leading to the island, they have been asked to spend millions of dollars restoring it. Even Indian Creek’s radar detection system benefits from public funding.

In the billionaire town, guys like Jeff Bezos are able to have their cake and eat it too — they get the benefits of their status as an incorporated town while avoiding traditional obligations to the broader public.

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Privatizing Cities

Among the tech elite, establishing your own city is becoming the hot new trend. Musk has his project in Starbase, and another city in the works outside of Austin. The concept of the “Network State” — described by originator and tech venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan as “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states” — has been gaining prominence in tech circles. The movement has led to the creation of Prospera, a libertarian mecca in Honduras sponsored by venture capitalists like Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, where corporations can regulate themselves and citizenship can be purchased for $1,300 a year.

Donald Trump has promoted the idea of “freedom cities,” a vague structure that would allow new cities to operate with less regulation. The goal is to circumvent traditional democratic structures that they view as too cumbersome for the dynamic innovation and prosperity they are sure to deliver.

A slew of new semiprivate cities have been popping up, mainly in developing nations. These places tend to be built by the rich for the rich, melding public and private into highly secured gated communities, with little room for public space or local democracy. While these projects can promise sweeping visions of interplanetary travel, lifesaving medicine and sustainable development — in practice they tend to be much less grand.

In a 2023 article, researchers Sarah Moser and Nufar Avni examined the development of one such city, a recently established Malaysian private municipality called Forest City. While developers claim that it is an “eco-city” and a model for sustainability, it has been entirely designed for car infrastructure and threatens the seagrass ecosystem it sits on top of. Like Starbase and Indian Creek, the city is highly securitized — policed by guards with the authority to kick people out at will and surrounded by electric fencing to guard its perimeter from undesirables.

“Thus far, the limited scholarship on new private cities seems to suggest that they fail on every justice front,” write Moser and Avni. “Democracy, participation, inclusion, social and environmental sustainability, and diversity are simply absent from their planning and execution.”

With the wealth and influence of billionaires continuing to rise, these semiprivate cities seem poised to proliferate in the coming years. Looking at how the elites govern these public–private enclaves reveals what their priorities truly are: maintaining a clear dividing line between themselves and the working class, defended by high walls, radar detection systems, and a well-funded, heavily armed police force.

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