Yes, I am a bit obsessed.
Saturday, December 27, 2025
ICE's Disturbing Thirst for High Tech Surveillance Tools
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is buying millions of dollars’ worth of new surveillance tools at the same time [the Felon]
President Donald Trumphas scaled back protections for use of civilian data — a combination that could lead to a vast expansion of domestic surveillance that goes far beyond immigrants.Federal records show that ICE has increased its spending on surveillance technology, looking to spend more than $300 million under Trump for social-media monitoring tools, facial recognition software, license plate readers and services to find where people live and work.
These upgrades are expected to be used in ICE’s push to help fulfill the president’s campaign promise of “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” The high-tech capabilities are also coinciding with policy changes from the White House that lower the guardrails around the government’s use of data on millions of American residents and expand its potential surveillance targets. A set of executive orders is giving ICE workarounds for the decades-old federal standard that protects American residents’ privacy, and the agency itself is signaling a shift in its enforcement policy, looking beyond immigrants and toward American critics of its officers’ behavior.
ICE’s new capabilities and legal flexibility are raising concerns among privacy and civil liberty advocates that it is expanding its remit with little supervision of its powers.
“It’s very troubling, especially when you pair the ramp-up of these capabilities and the increasing exercises of these capabilities with the undermining of independent oversight,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, who chaired a board tasked with independently scrutinizing government surveillance following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Governors in several blue states have already responded by restricting ICE’s access to state-level citizen data. New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington recently cut off ICE’s access to their state motor vehicle records. In Congress, a coalition of 40 Democrats asked other governors to follow, saying in a letter that ICE’s access to DMV records allowed for “unjustified, politicized actions” from the Trump administration.
ICE’s use of facial recognition to determine immigration status has particularly troubled Democrats who worry the technology puts Americans at risk of detention and deportation.
ICE’s technology arsenal has sharply increased in the past year, with the agency investing in high-tech surveillance tools including social media monitoring powered by artificial intelligence, software to obtain phone location data, drones, license plate readers and iris scanners.
One of its largest investments is for “skip-tracing” services, typically used by debt collectors and bounty hunters to track people who are difficult to find, across new identities, homes and occupations. . . . In October, ICE awarded two contracts for skip-tracing capabilities totaling $8 million. It vastly expanded its ambitions in November, issuing a request for information for the data-intensive tracking service with a potential $281 million contract attached. In December, ICE awarded contracts to 10 companies for skip tracing services, with the potential to earn over $1 billion by the end of their contracts in 2027, The Intercept reported.
In September ICE paid $3.8 million for facial recognition tools from the company Clearview AI, which operates a database of 30 billion images scraped from online sources.
ICE also plans to expand its use of social media surveillance, WIRED reported in October, scouring billions of online posts to find leads for immigration enforcement operations.
As the agency upgrades its tools, it has also sent signals it wants to expand its mission from finding immigrants to tracing critics and stopping threats to its agents. . . . In August, the agency signaled it wants to use social media surveillance to track threats against ICE personnel by members of the public, . . . Kristi Noem has also expanded what’s considered a threat to ICE officials, telling reporters in July that “violence is anything that threatens them and their safety,” including filming its officers.
Privacy advocates argue that this new technological capability — and the mission of tracking threats against agents — widens ICE’s surveillance scope beyond immigration enforcement in dangerous ways. “ICE is already well beyond their initial responsibility and is fully into the realm of political policing of protesters and dissidents,” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst on surveillance and technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been tracking the growth of government surveillance capabilities. “They’re building up this mass automated surveillance infrastructure,” he added, “and the question we have to be asking is: What is it for?”
Since 1974, the Privacy Act has prevented the federal government from creating a centralized database of all Americans’ information, recognizing the potential it holds for surveillance and abuse of people’s privacy. The law ensures that information a person handed over for public benefits like Medicare or Social Security can’t be easily repurposed by other agencies, including law enforcement.
ICE, however, has signed broad data-sharing agreements with multiple agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Health and Human Services.
To justify its access, ICE has cited a suite of executive orders that Trump signed earlier this year on immigration enforcement and fraud prevention. . . . . The Privacy Act provides exemptions for law-enforcement agencies to pursue specific individuals and investigations, but not for them to access bulk data on American residents. ICE’s agreements appear to enable bulk data collections, however.
ICE’s data-sharing agreement with the SSA projects it will request up to 50,000 records a month, which includes addresses, banking data and contact information. Under its agreement with the IRS, ICE requested more than a million records in the four months after it was signed in April.
The policy changes have alarmed watchdogs, who worry that the Trump administration has removed guardrails meant to protect people from government surveillance.
“This accumulation of an immense amount of data, spanning across society and reaching into places that need to gather data about people in order for them to survive, underscores how new and dangerous it is,” American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California’s technology attorney Jake Snow, who defended an anonymous Instagram account from a DHS subpoena, said.
In any previous administration, surveillance overreach could also have been reined in by the government watchdogs on privacy and civil liberties issues, but those have been hollowed out.
The legal battles have gone back and forth: Judges have issued temporary freezes on ICE’s access to Medicaid data and taxpayer information, while the White House continues to make its case for why it is legally entitled to agencies’ data collection.
Friday, December 26, 2025
Is the Resistance to the Felon Growing?
It has been a gruesome year for those who see Donald Trump’s kakistocracy clearly. He returned to office newly emboldened, surrounded by obsequious tech barons, seemingly in command of not just the country but also the zeitgeist. Since then, it’s been a parade of nightmares — armed men in balaclavas on the streets, migrants sent to a torture prison in El Salvador, corruption on a scale undreamed of by even the gaudiest third-world dictators and the shocking capitulation by many leaders in business, law, media and academia. Trying to wrap one’s mind around the scale of civic destruction wrought in just 11 months stretches the limits of the imagination, like conceptualizing light-years or black holes.
And yet, as 2025 limps toward its end, there are reasons to be hopeful.
That’s because of millions of people throughout the country who have refused to surrender to this administration’s bullying. When Trump began his second term, conventional wisdom held that the resistance was moribund. If that was ever true, it’s certainly not anymore. This year has seen some of the largest street protests in American history. Amanda Litman, a founder of Run for Something, a group that trains young progressives to seek local office, told me that since the 2024 election, it has seen more sign-ups than in all of Trump’s first four years. Just this month, the Republican-dominated legislature in Indiana, urged on by voters, rebelled against MAGA efforts to intimidate them and refused to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate Democratic-leaning districts.
While Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power,” said Leah Greenberg, a founder of the resistance group Indivisible. “That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism.”
In retrospect, it’s possible to see several pivot points. One of the first was a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. Elon Musk, then still running rampant at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, declared the contest critical and poured more than $20 million into the race. Voters turned out in droves, and the Musk-backed conservative candidate lost by more than 10 points.
In June, Trump’s military parade, meant as a display of dominance, was a flop, and simultaneous No Kings protests all over the country were huge and energetic. A few months later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a tragedy that the administration sought to exploit to silence its opponents. When the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a distasteful comment on ABC that seemed to blame the right for Kirk’s killing, Disney, the network’s parent company, gave in to pressure to take Kimmel off the air. It was a perilous moment for free speech; suddenly America was becoming the kind of country in which regime critics are forced off television. But then came a wave of cancellations of Disney+ and the Disney-owned Hulu channel, as well as a celebrity boycott, and Disney gave Kimmel his show back.
Trump has thoroughly corrupted the Justice Department, but its selective prosecutions of his foes have been thwarted by judges and, more strikingly, by grand juries. Two grand juries refused to indict Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, whom the administration has accused of mortgage fraud, with no credible evidence. . . . . U.S. attorney in Washington, tried three times to secure a federal indictment for assault against a protester who struggled while being pushed against a wall by an immigration agent. Three times, grand juries refused. . . . Granted, all these grand juries were in liberal jurisdictions, but their rejections of prosecutors’ claims are still striking, since indictments are usually notoriously easy to secure.
Trump ends the year weak and unpopular, his coalition dispirited and riven by infighting. Democrats dominated in the November elections. During Joe Biden’s administration, far-right victories in school board races were an early indication of the cultural backlash that would carry Trump to office. Now, however, Democrats are flipping school board seats nationwide.
Much of the credit for the reinvigoration of the resistance belongs to Trump himself. Had he focused his deportation campaign on criminals or refrained from injuring the economy with haphazard tariffs while mocking concerns about affordability, he would probably have remained a more formidable figure. He’s still a supremely dangerous one, especially as he comes to feel increasingly cornered and aggrieved.
But it’s become, over the past year, easier to imagine the moment when his mystique finally evaporates, when few want to defend him anymore or admit that they ever did. “I think it’s going to be a rocky period, but I no longer think that Trump is going to pull an Orban and fundamentally consolidate authoritarian control of this country the way that it looked like he was going to do in March or April,” said Bassin, referring to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. If Bassin is right, it will be because a critical mass of Americans refused to be either cowed or complicit.
Thursday, December 25, 2025
The Felon: The Epstein Scandal Continues
Nearly two years ago, [the Felon]
Donald Trumpkicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.”But this week, the documents released by Trump’s own Justice Department—including flight logs and emails—told a different story. Federal prosecutors determined in January 2020 that Trump had been a passenger on the notorious private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein—who would later be charged with sex trafficking—far more often than they had realized.
Many of the flights on what came to be known as the Lolita Express took place “during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” a federal prosecutor in New York told colleagues. Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was subsequently convicted and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex-trafficking operation, including using the plane for “transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts.”
There are many other mentions of Trump. The president’s name appears more than 100 times in files released yesterday as part of the DOJ’s compliance with legislation requiring it to disclose everything it has on the Epstein case. Trump fought Congress’s demand for transparency for months before abruptly pivoting and endorsing the bill once he realized he had lost. . . . . one conclusion from the files is that Trump’s relationship with Epstein, a former friend, was of interest to federal law enforcement for years.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, declined to answer questions about the discrepancy between the president’s prior statements and the material released by the DOJ but said in a statement, “The truth remains: Donald Trump did nothing wrong.”
Trump has also insisted that he knew nothing of Epstein’s criminal activity—though his critics have questioned how that could be true given their close relationship and history of chasing women together. Members of Congress from both parties have said they will continue to probe the issue in the upcoming year. Representatives I spoke with told me their takeaway from reading the files is that top officials in the Trump administration have not been honest about what was in them, and that they intend to press Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for more information.
“Although the files are overly redacted, they’ve already demonstrated that the narrative painted by Patel in hearings, Bondi in press statements, and Trump himself on social media wasn’t accurate,” Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who co-authored the Epstein legislation, told me. “A complete disclosure consistent with the law will show there are more men implicated in the files in possession of the government.”
Representatives and staff on the House Oversight Committee told me they were drafting subpoenas in response to the documents released yesterday, seeking more information related to law enforcement’s identification of 10 alleged “co-conspirators” shortly after Epstein’s arrest in July 2019. The case that prosecutors were building related to those unnamed co-conspirators appears to have been substantial.
Oversight Committee members are also drafting a contempt resolution to penalize Bondi for not ensuring that the DOJ fully complied with the law. The resolution, spearheaded by Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, will give Bondi 30 days to fully release all of the remaining Epstein materials, then fine her $10,000 each day that she doesn’t release them after that. They told me they expected to introduce the resolution when Congress returns in January. They are also moving ahead on articles of impeachment for Bondi, and said they were optimistic that they could get them passed in the House.
Khanna told me that there was an emerging “coalition of the right and left to fight for justice.” That alliance, he added, “has proven to be the kryptonite that marks the beginning of the end of the Trump era.”
The files released yesterday—and Trump’s prominence in them—appear to have changed the calculation for senior Democratic Party leaders as they prepare for the midterm elections. Party leadership had previously sought to convince junior members not to focus on Epstein. But this week Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will push for the Senate to hold the DOJ accountable for not fully complying with the legislation, citing a missed 30-day deadline for all files to be released and excessive redactions in those that have been. . . . . Protecting possible co-conspirators is not the transparency the American people and Congress are demanding,” Schumer said in a statement.
The Justice Department has acknowledged there are still many more files to be released—and the known backlog grew longer today when the DOJ announced that the FBI and New York prosecutors had uncovered “over a million more documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case” and that the process of reviewing them could take “a few more weeks.”
Sigrid McCawley, an attorney who represents several of Epstein’s victims, said it would take time to know the true impact of the “avalanche” of new documents released yesterday. But she told me that one thing is clear: “These brave survivors were absolutely correct that the government was withholding critical information from the public.”
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
The Degradation of CBS News
Like would be dictators before him, the Felon seeks to censor the media in order to guaranty either fawning coverage or an absence of news that exposes the cruelty, corruption and/or incompetence of his regime. Sadly, the Washington Post sold its soul to the Felon - I and several hundred thousand subscribers canceled our subscriptions - ABC sought to silence late night critics and thankfully was met with a huge backlash, and CBS in an effort to curry regulatory approvals appointed Bari Weiss, editor of the neoconservative publication The Free Press, to run CBS News. Last Sunday, Weiss sought to kill a story on 60 Minutes that exposed the horrific brutality of the Felon's deportations and pulled it from the Sunday programing. Ironically - like so many of the Felon's minions and those who seek to prostitute themselves to him, Weiss proved to be less than competent and the deleted segment aired on a Canadian app and likely received more interest and viewers than if the segment had aired as originally scheduled. It is beyond sad to see CBS which once had the likes of Walter Cronkite moving towards a faux news format like Fox News, all so the Felon can spew lies and untruths. One can only hope viewership tanks and that Americans reject censorship. A piece in the Daily Beast looks at what CBS sought to censor (you can view the segment in the article):
The 60 Minutes segment that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss prevented from airing Sunday has been leaked. The segment covers the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent some Venezuelan migrants. Canada’s Global TV aired the segment.
In the segment, Luis Munoz Pinto—who says he has no criminal record—describes the scene at the prison the Trump administration deported him to.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” the college student from Venezuela who sought U.S. asylum, said. “Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled until the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.”
A piece at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's censorship efforts (he has also raged against the New York Times):
A key goal of Donald Trump’s second term has been to use government power to place important media properties in the hands of loyalists who will bend coverage to the [Felon's]
president’swill. Yesterday, the Trump-approved management at CBS duly held back a 60 Minutes report about the administration’s treatment of migrant detainees deported to El Salvador.Although many of Trump’s goals to reindustrialize the economy or prosecute his enemies have floundered, his plan to corrupt the media is starting to work.
During his first term, Trump’s efforts to get the media to do his bidding consisted mostly of endless whining, punctuated by regular threats of nuisance lawsuits and the occasional actual suit. In his second term, he has seized upon a more effective tool. Most large media properties have owners, and those owners have business that relies on the federal government. [The Felon]
Trumphas made clear that the price of cooperative regulatory policies from his government is giving him friendlier coverage.The president has not even bothered to conceal the terms of his transaction with the billionaires Larry and David Ellison. Over the summer, the Trump administration approved a merger that gave the Ellisons control over Paramount, CBS’s parent company. After the merger was announced but before the administration approved of it, CBS agreed to settle one of Trump’s groundless lawsuits (against CBS News for the way 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris, a standard journalistic practice). But Trump wanted more than money. He wanted influence over CBS’s coverage of his administration, and he believed its new owners would give it to him.
That same month, David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss, editor of the neoconservative publication The Free Press, to run CBS News. Trump praised the move in his own 60 Minutes interview. “I see good things happening in the news. I really do.
Weiss has held the job for only a few months, but Trump expects results quickly. Friday night, speaking at a rally in North Carolina, he complained that CBS has not yet changed its coverage of him to his liking. “I love the new owners of CBS,” he announced, before adding, “60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership than—they just keep treating me, they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”
Two days later, Weiss, who once decried “self-censorship” at The New York Times, yanked the 60 Minutes segment on deportations that had been slated to run. CNN reported that the story had been screened internally five times, including for Weiss on Thursday, who offered notes but allowed it to move forward, but the segment apparently looked very different to Weiss a few days later. “We determined it needed additional reporting,” a spokesperson for CBS News said in a statement. (CBS did not respond to a request for comment.)
Weiss reportedly explained to her colleagues this morning that the segment “did not advance the ball,” and to do so, “we need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.” Because 60 Minutes had already asked the administration for comment and had been denied, this interview requirement would appear to give the Trump administration an effective veto on the piece . . . .
According to The New York Times, Weiss “also questioned the use of the term ‘migrants’ to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally.” In fact, various investigations into the U.S. government’s unconstitutional deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador have found that most of the deportees had no criminal record, and many had broken no U.S. immigration laws, either.
This detail would seem to undercut Weiss’s complaint that the 60 Minutes segment fails to advance the ball. If even the editor of CBS News is unaware that the Trump administration has deported migrants without due process, more coverage of the fact is surely needed.
Back when she took the job, Weiss wrote a memo to her staff at CBS News stressing her desire to restore the network’s public trust. That is a worthy goal. But after the president praised her appointment, then complained that she wasn’t acting quickly enough to impose pliant coverage, and she almost immediately spiked a critical story on what appear to be dubious grounds, it seems clear that it’s not the public’s trust she is concerned about, but Trump’s.
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Monday, December 22, 2025
The Felon's DOJ Continues to Hide Epstein Files
The failure to schedule a call with victims was only one piece of a broader, frantic rush inside Donald Trump’s Justice Department as it approached the final hours of its congressionally mandated deadline. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by Trump on November 19, requires the attorney general to make public, within 30 days, “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in the DOJ’s possession that relate to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The cache was believed to include flight logs, internal DOJ communications, and even records concerning the “destruction, deletion, alteration, misplacement, or concealment” of Epstein-related evidence.
The law tries to preempt a possible work-around by the DOJ. It explicitly bars the department from withholding, delaying, or redacting records because of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity,” even for “any government official [or] public figure.”
Members of Congress and staff for the House Oversight Committee told me that they were alarmed by the DOJ’s silence in the days and hours before the release.
Victims said Bondi’s failure to talk with them prior to one of the most significant releases to date made them feel that those most harmed by Epstein’s crimes were just an afterthought. Marijke Chartouni was among the victims who had been hoping to talk with the attorney general before the files were made public. “Today marks a long-awaited moment for many of us,” Chartouni told me. “This is about truth, accountability, and confronting law-enforcement failure.”
The brother of Virginia Roberts Giuffre—one of the most prominent Epstein survivors, who died by suicide in April—described the day as “huge” but heavy with dread. Sky Roberts tried to distract himself with Christmas shopping while he waited for the files to be released. His voice broke when describing his family’s pain during their first Christmas without his sister. He told me that he worried about what he called “smoke and mirrors”—a partial release dressed up as transparency. He said his sister had been very clear in her conversations with law enforcement about names of alleged co-conspirators and participants. He believed that the DOJ has in its possession evidence that “brings everything together.” . . . “If those names aren’t coming out, then the whole exercise is just a cover-up,” he said.
When Blanche appeared on Fox News this morning, he confirmed that the DOJ would be releasing some of what it had. But it would not meet the deadline for making public all of the files, Blanche acknowledged, citing the need to protect victims’ identities and make the appropriate redactions in all documents. That, he said, could take more weeks of work by Justice Department lawyers.
Late this afternoon, the DOJ began posting on its website what it calls the first batches of records. It was a convenient moment: near the end of a Friday as Washington, D.C., emptied out for the holidays, and neither the House nor the Senate was in session. The files that were released appear to be some new material from prior investigations of Epstein, combined with documents and photographs that were already in the public domain. Some whole pages were redacted. . . . . “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever.”
In a series of posts on X this evening, Representative Massie, a Kentucky Republican, said that the day’s release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law” that Trump signed last month. When I talked with him late this evening, he told me, with reference to the Justice Department, “I can’t believe how badly they botched this.”
Roberts said he and his family were still working their way through the many thousands of pages of files. He described the experience as “surreal” and said that he felt a mix of appreciation and pride for his sister and other victims’ efforts over decades to get the attention of federal law enforcement. He and others I spoke with said they felt vindicated that included in the files released today appeared to be Maria Farmer’s report to law enforcement, which had never been seen before. It is dated September 1996, and it describes Epstein’s alleged possession of photographs of underage girls. “Epstein is now threatening [redacted] that if she tells anyone about the photos he will burn her house down.”
Information that Roberts said he had expected to be in the files didn’t appear to be there—such as the names of other prominent men who are believed to have been involved. “I feel like we’re still getting the same runaround we were getting before,” he told me, “where they’re kind of slow-rolling it and keeping what they want to keep from us.”
Khanna told me that he was discussing next steps with Massie and others on the Oversight Committee, which may include contempt of Congress or articles of impeachment for Bondi and Blanche.
“We’re exploring all options—including impeachment,” Khanna said. “They’re delusional if they think this is going to go away.”
Sunday, December 21, 2025
MAGA's and The Right's Frankenstein Monsters
Decades ago now when I was active in the Republican Party Christofascists were kept largely at arm's length and out of positions of power and far right conspiracy theorists and whack jobs were viewed with a wink and a nod and likewise kept from positions of power. Those days are long gone and today the Republican Party resembles a psychiatric hospital being run by the seriously mentally disturbed patients. It's almost as if the crazier one is, the more the GOP opened its arm for a warm embrace. The end result is that the GOP has created its own Frankenstein monsters - which includes the Felon - whose stock in trade is lies and unhinged conspiracy theories. Indeed, many of these figures live in an alternate reality and with podcasts and far right outlets only too happy to disseminate insanity, the GOP leadership (which believed it could control the Christofascists and outright crazies) has both lost control of the psych ward inmates and, in numerous cases found themselves being pushed to the side, often being labeled as "RINO's" - Republicans in name only. A column in the New York Times looks at one such Frankenstein monster, Candace Owens who, in my view, has more than a few screws loose, underscores the GOP's inability to rein in those they enabled. Here are column highlights:
This week, Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, traveled to Nashville to meet with Candace Owens, a podcaster who has become the premier purveyor of conspiracy theories about her husband’s murder. If the summit was meant to convince Owens to back off her paranoid and fantastical speculations, it failed. On Thursday, Owens had on her show a man who claimed to have seen Erika Kirk at an army base the day before Kirk’s assassination, implying that Erika was somehow part of the plot against her husband. That plot also involves, in Owens’s telling, the French Foreign Legion, the federal government and leaders of Turning Point, Kirk’s organization, all somehow masterminded by demonic Zionists.
Owens musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by the conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly herself — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her outré views — has refused to denounce Owens, insisting her ideas are legitimate. . . . . . she added, “many people believe there’s more to this story, that we’re being lied to by our F.B.I., that there are too many inconsistencies around the official story. And those people are more than entitled to that belief.”
The aftermath of Kirk’s assassination should have been a unifying moment for the right. The facts of the case — Robinson is said to have had a trans partner and was angry about Kirk’s demonization of sexual minorities — would have been easy for conservatives to exploit in their fight against gender nonconformists. But Robinson evidently wasn’t a grand enough enemy for some on today’s right, which is increasingly built on conspiracies and the content they generate. So Kirk’s killing, far from knitting the movement together in grief and anger, has precipitated a bitter, squalid internecine feud.
“Today the conservative movement is in serious danger,” Ben Shapiro said in a blistering speech on the opening night of Turning Point’s AmericaFest conference on Thursday, the first since Kirk’s death. That danger comes not just from the left, Shapiro said, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He went on to denounce Owens by name, as well as his fellow Turning Point speakers Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
Shapiro, however, doesn’t have the power to excommunicate Owens. Maybe no one does. Her audience is simply too big. . . . . . In a world where traditional gatekeepers have lost most of their power, she’s a star.
This is partly a story about conservatives creating a monster they can’t control. Owens, after all, has been saying nutty things for a long time. In 2019, she left her job as communications director of Turning Point not long after arguing that Hitler’s real sin was globalism, not nationalism. . . . . Rather than ostracize her, however, powerful conservative organizations cultivated her. Republicans invited her to testify before Congress about why white nationalism wasn’t a problem. . . . . Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them. . . . .Owens’s rise, and the damage she’s done to her erstwhile allies, also offers a warning about the danger of the influencer politics that conservatives have excelled at.
Clearly, liberals should try to figure out how to become competitive in all these mediums, since many Americans rely on them to learn about the world. The problem is that the influencer ecosystem rewards those who promise access to suppressed, esoteric truths, making viewers feel as if they’re part of real-life melodramas. The algorithms are optimized for illiberalism.
I was struck by a stray reference in Owens’s podcast this week to the “mommy sleuths and investigators” in her audience. She was announcing plans to provide these amateur digital detectives with photos of Kirk’s rental car, which somehow, in her telling, point to problems with the investigation of his death.
She packages her conspiracy theories in the slick conventions of true crime, allowing people following along on their screens to participate in the search for answers.
QAnon once offered its adherents a similar sense that they were taking part in solving a great mystery. Lately, however, that movement’s energy seems to have dissipated. There was always a strange optimistic streak to QAnon, since it posited that heroic “white hats” were working behind the scenes to set the world right. As one popular meme put it, “Patriots are in control.” But now, Donald Trump is firmly back in power, and no golden age is at hand. Rather than the cathartic unmasking of deep state pedophile networks, we’ve seen Trump struggling to keep the case files of his friend Jeffrey Epstein secret.
For at least some former true believers, disillusionment is setting in. Marjorie Taylor Greene mournfully referenced the QAnon movement’s tropes when she announced her resignation last month. “There is no plan to save the world or a 4D chess game being played,” she said.
If patriots aren’t in control, it raises the question of who is. Unsurprisingly, some entrepreneurial figures on the right have settled on a tried-and-true answer: the Jews. Owens especially has taken this most elemental of paranoid fixations and turned it into something between a soap opera and a live-action role-playing game. “It’s necessary for people to recognize how greatly evil these Zionists are,” Owens said on her podcast this week . . .
“Just asking questions, positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about secret confederacies that control your life, none of it makes your life better,” Shapiro said in his AmericaFest speech, a cri de coeur against the direction of the movement he’s dedicated his career to. Unfortunately, when it comes to people trying to build an audience, he’s wrong.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)