Status update on what Trump and MAGA are delivering

Context

Trump and MAGA elites with their authoritarian, kleptocratic Project 2025 blueprint have been power long enough to start assessing what they are delivering. Not surprisingly, their product is broken promises for us and the public interest and a vast cornucopia of benefits for the rich and powerful people and allied business interests. The broken promises were necessary to put MAGA’s wealth and power movement in power, so there’s no surprise in what has been delivered. The cornucopia of benefits to the rich and powerful include gutted protections and loss of vast power for consumers, workers and the environment, with vast wealth and power gains for allied elite MAGA authoritarians and kleptocrats.

Of course, we’re not yet in a full blown kleptocratic dictatorship-oligarchy-Christian nationalist theocracy. But those are the main goals that Trump and MAGA elites are clearly working to attain in their ruthless quest for more wealth and power. The elite MAGA mindset is elitist, kleptocratic, and authoritarian. Most of the MAGA rank and file mindset is, more or less, the opposite of that. With their relentless demagoguery, lies, slanders, crackpottery, bigotry and irrational emotional manipulation, MAGA elites have successfully deceived, manipulated and betrayed most of the rank and file.

Some of what has been delivered

A NYT opinion piece, Trump’s Broken Promises, in 11 Charts, lays out some of what he and MAGA elites have delivered. This only scratches the surface. However, is it exemplary of MAGA’s overall authoritarian-kleptocrat wealth and power project. These are some of the delivered goods:

Q: Can widespread false beliefs among the MAGA rank and file about what they falsely believe they support vs what they rationally support a belief that their ignorance grounded in MAGA deceit constitutes an existential threat to secular democracy, the even-handed rule of law and civil liberties that MAGA elites target for elimination or major scaling back?

Info sources:

Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline “Unprecedented”

Project 2025 — (the blueprint includes dedicated chapters on gutting or neutering the EPA, Labor Department, Treasury, CFPB, FTC, SEC, FCC, and Federal Election Commission, and reorienting their missions from service to the public interest to service to elite people and allied special interests)

The People’s Guide to Project 2025 — What we discovered was a systemic, ruthless plan to undermine the quality of life of millions of Americans, remove critical protections and dismantle programs for communities across the nation, and prioritize special interests and ideological extremism over people. From attacking overtime pay, student loans, and reproductive rights, to allowing more discrimination, pollution, and price gouging, those behind Project 2025 are preparing to go to incredible lengths to create a country only for some, not for all of us.

Heritage Foundation

Strategic anti-corruption communications: Guidance for behavior change interventions

Congressional Budget Office: Distributional Effects of Public Law 119-21 — The changes in resources will not be evenly distributed among households. The agency estimates that, in general, resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.

How Politicized Prosecutions Undermine the Rule of Law — The U.S. Department of Justice is the American people’s law firm. Traditionally independent from the political motivations of any given administration, the Justice Department is supposed to defend the rule of law without prejudice and protect the rights of all Americans. It is not the president’s personal law firm and should not be used for politicized prosecutions. But since starting his second term in office, President Trump has aimed his animus at political opponents through the Justice Department by threatening arrests, ordering unwarranted investigations and prosecutions, and jeopardizing military retirements.

The Department of Justice’s Broken Accountability System

Congressional Research Service: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Related Nutrition Programs in P.L. 119-21: An Overview

Things most Americans want from politics but mostly don't get

When one looks at poll data from over recent years, a number of things most Americans claim to want come up. By and large, they get these things either partially or somewhat, just a little, or not at all. Some things Americans want and have to some extent are subject to being taken away by some or all of the federal government (courts, president, executive agencies, or congress) or by state governments. Abortion and reasonable gun safety laws are two examples of fading rights most Americans want but don't universally have. 

Dems vs Trump & MAGA

On the 23-item list, Democrats are usually much closer to majority public preferences than Trump/MAGA policy. Of course, the Dems don't have enough power to enact any of the favored policies most Americans say they want. As long as Dems stay out of power, average Americans much have less chance of getting more of what they want. 

The matter of what many Americans believe they are getting or not getting is a different issue. Millions of Americans sincerely believe they are getting various things they want from politics, while in fact that is false. Often the opposite is true. That is a well-documented phenomenon in modern American politics.

Between the two big parties, the differences are greatest on voting access, guns, abortion, immigration, citizenship, and due-process, paid leave/child care, health coverage, cannabis, global warming, and anti-corruption rules. For all of those issues, Trump and MAGA are bitterly opposed to what most Americans say they want. 

Now that is not to say that Trump and MAGA openly claim to be opposed to those things. For the most part, their demagoguery, lies, crackpottery, and irrational emotional manipulation indicate that they support those things. That is a major source of beliefs that tens of millions of Americans sincerely but falsely believe to be true.

That's just part of the human condition. In politics, many people can be terribly deceived, manipulated and betrayed. But, there's no law against it.

Q: What convincing evidence is there, if any, that the Dem Party is generally more opposed to what most Americans say they want than Trump and MAGA elite politics and policy have delivered since 2017? 

Info sources: 

2024 Democratic Party Platform

What We’re Fighting For

Americans Widely Support Paid Family and Medical Leave, but Differ Over Specific Policies

Threats to American Democracy Ahead of an Unprecedented Presidential Election

Trump’s protests aside, his agenda has plenty of overlap with Project 2025

Project 2025, Explained

Americans’ Views of Government’s Role: Persistent Divisions and Areas of Agreement

Surge in U.S. Concern About Immigration Has Abated

Poll Shows Americans Support Independent Commissions for Redistricting

America’s frustration with the cost of living continues to rise

Trump Clings to Inaccurate Climate Change Talking Points

Social democracy vs. democratic socialism

After recent primary election results, it's hard to ignore the concept of social-something or another rampaging around in the Dem Party. 

As usual and expected, Trump and MAGA demagoguery are spewing tons of toxic mental miasma about communism in the Dem Party. MAGA's tippy-top best hyperbole and lies attacks are trying to make the liberal social-whatever sound like a horrific, imminent overwhelming catastrophe. No surprise in any of that moral rot. 

MSM reporting like this, New CNBC Generation Lab poll shows almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds favor democratic socialism, is becoming more prominent. Apparently, most of those folks have a very negative view of the American economy and capitalism generally. 

Social democracy vs. democratic socialism

Social democrats support the concept of social democracy. Modern social democracy evolved from a movement seeking a peaceful transition to actual socialism into a politics that generally accepts a regulated capitalist mixed economy with significant public welfare. These people want much better regulation of capitalism than what the GOP has been arguing for since the 1960s, and what Trump and MAGA policy have been delivering since they came into power in 2017.

By contrast, democratic socialists are real socialists. This group wants a democratically run socialist economy, including abolishment of capitalism, not just regulation of it. This group has completely given up on capitalism, and they want socialism to replace it. That's true radicalism. They want public ownership of assets used to produce services and goods to insure that they serve the public interest before serving wealthy people and entities and their special interests. 

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) elected officials or candidates are generally aligned with the DSA’s stated premise, which is that working people should run the economy and society democratically to meet human needs rather than generate profits for a few. Apparently a growing portion of Americans find that appealing (but some of us do not).

 

Policy overlaps

Policy overlap between the two groups is huge. In general, both social democrats and democratic socialists want things like (1) universal or near-universal health coverage, often by Medicare expansion, a public option, or single-payer insurance, (2) stronger labor unions by easier organizing, penalties for union busting, sectoral bargaining, wage floors, and public-sector labor rights, (3) progressive taxation, expanded refundable tax credits, Social Security and Medicare protection, paid leave, child care, and affordable higher education, (4) investment and industrial policy that protects the environment, coupled with supporting labor standards and public infrastructure, and (5) aggressive antitrust, consumer regulation, financial rules, and public provision in selected areas.

Polling indicates that most Americans mostly support those policy goals. The Democratic Party platform itself is fundamentally aligned with those policy goals. The Dem Party still does not support full social ownership of the economy. The Dem Party supports reconstructing labor bargaining power and decommodifying or subsidizing some necessities (health care, shelter, education, water, mobility) while retaining a predominantly a private-enterprise economy. 

Obviously, MAGA elites and Trump oppose all of it, despite their gaslighting propaganda telling us they support the little guy and his concerns. By now it is crystal clear that MAGA propaganda is a huge pile of . . . . .

Big stinking pile of MAGA propaganda

about working for the little guy

Policy differences

There are big differences between the two groups. Democratic socialists support major changes like (1) worker-owned or worker-governed firms, (2) public, municipal, cooperative, or social ownership in essential sectors, typically energy, transit, housing, finance, health care, and broadband, (3) public banking and democratic control over investment, (4) social housing that is permanently outside speculative private markets, (5) a greater role for democratic planning, especially in climate transition and essential goods, and (6) universal programs for wealth redistribution, and as a means of reducing people's dependency on employers and markets.

That's real socialism. Those people aren't messing around with capitalism any more. The reasons for that level of discontent are obvious. MAGA and trickle down economics mostly trickles wealth and power up to elites and allied special interests. In the process, most of get shafted and are left in a grumpy mood.

Oats are natural resources, means of production, control of money and finance, the horse is the elites and special interests, the emoji is what it looks like, and we are the sparrow

A critically important point: American democratic socialism is not the same as Soviet-style state socialism. The American theory emphasizes pluralist democracy, civil liberties, decentralized or mixed forms of social ownership, and worker/community governance. By contrast with the USSR, which substitutes state bureaucrats for private owners, keeping nearly all of the citizenry in crappy, permanently shafted conditions. MAGA demagogues routinely lie about this critical distinction.

Where or what is the Dem Party establishment in all of this?

 The Dem establishment is heterogenous, reflecting the bigger tent it lives in compared to the GOP. It is composed of mostly of wall street Democrats or business- and finance-friendly liberals, labor liberals or New Deal liberals, civil-rights and rights-based liberals, and state and local party machines.

The Dem establishment is reasonably described as conventional social liberalism. That means market-friendly capitalism with targeted benefits, anti-discrimination law, limited regulation, and incremental reform when needed. Social democracy is generally to the left of that. Democratic socialism is further left than that.

Q1: Does it feel as if the Dem Party establishment is too timid, conservative and cautious to adequately deal with the aggression and corrupt power of Trump, MAGA elites and their brand of brutal political warfare?

Q2: To what extent is the rise of American style socialism on the left the fault of Trump and MAGA party politics and policies, with their failures to deliver for the little guy -- mostly their fault, some, a little, or none at all?

Info sources: 

Social democracy

Democratic socialism

What is a democratic socialist? Inside the movement behind Mamdani’s rise

Social Democracy vs. Democratic Socialism: What’s the Difference?

Tyranny and corruption hide in agreement, disagreement reveals it

It may seem counterintuitive, but right now in the US policy agreement, including false perceptions of agreement, helps hide tyranny and corruption. Conflict reveals authoritarianism and kleptocracy. That is the heart of the message from research by Martin Gilens and Ben Page. 

Their work, and that of other researchers, helps explain why a country like the US can retain elections, produce some popular policies, and still undergo serious democratic degradation. Majorities remain highly visible, but their power to get outcomes they want against bigoted authoritarian wealth, racial hierarchy, organized politics, and authoritarian influences disappears over time. Power and wealth quietly, usually unnoticed, flows from the people to the elites in control. 

That is what is happening right now in the US under Trump, MAGA elites and their major donors and enablers. Their agenda is kleptocracy and authoritarianism, the latter being mostly a mix of dictatorship, oligarchy, white-power nationalism, and virulent Christian nationalist theocracy. Such corrupt and authoritarian politics translate into core goals of concentrating wealth and power with a few trusted, mostly above-the-law elites, and their major donors, allied corporations and special interests. Except for the theocrats, it's almost all about wealth and power for themselves, almost always at our expense. 

Digression: The theocrats? They and their divine vision of God demand culture war. It's waged largely by attacking, hating, slandering, and/or oppressing immigrants, LGBQT people, women's equality, secular law, and transparency in government. For the most part, Christian theocrat elites are a very nasty bunch of hypocrites, liars, bigots and racists.

Anyway, public majority does not exercise governing power when because it sometimes receives policies it favors. If it receives those policies because affluent citizens and/or powerful organized interests also approve, that is not majority political power in effect. In those cases, the majority benefits from elite consent. Democracy is truly tested when preferences conflict. Unfortunately, research indicates that American policy has most often been tilted toward wealth and organized power. The wealthy and organized interests have systematically disproportionate influence, especially when preferences diverge on consequential economic questions. Wealth and power flows to the top, not to the rest of us.

The relevant test is not whether ordinary people ever get what most of them want. The real test of democracy is whether the majority prevails at least equally as often when their preferences conflict with wealth and organized power. For the US, the empirical truth is no. When the elites oppose, the American majority usually loses. That is exactly and inextricably how authoritarianism and kleptocracy work. Frighteningly, that ugly truth about Trump and his MAGA elites, is mostly or completely hidden from millions of demagoguery-deceived Americans.

MAGA's big new gift to tax cheats and grifters

MAGA's new gift

A new MAGA finance rule to reduce reporting burdens on businesses is in effect. Tax cheats and criminals all over the US are cheering. A WaPo article, Treasury ends ownership reporting rules for U.S. companies, reports about reporting rules that MAGA is gutting. The rules were put in place to combat and reduce money laundering and other financial crimes. Now, tax cheats and criminals can better hide and keep more of their assets, legitimate and illegitimate.

Trump's Treasury Dept finalized the new rule yesterday. It exempts US companies and individuals from ‌reporting beneficial ownership information to the Treasury Department's financial ‌crimes unit. That obliterates reporting requirements established under a 2021 law aimed ​at combating illicit finance and tax cheating.

Not only is Trump gutting the reporting rule, he goes a big step further. Trump's treasury will delete the information previously reported by Americans. The gutted rule was simple in principle. If a person ultimately owned or controlled a corporation or LLC, federal financial-crimes investigators could identify that person through a confidential database. The information was not a public registry. This isn't a minor regulatory tweak. This is deliberate removal of a fundamental state capacity. The government's ability to determine who owns what in a state-created corporate entity is now gone. Here's FinCEN's FAQ page to bring tax cheats and criminals up to speed on the new layer of secrecy that MAGA is giving them.

The size of the burden that MAGA claims existed under the old rule does not remotely justify the scale of this new rule. For an ordinary small business, disclosure meant entering the names and identifying information of the people who actually own or control it, using a free electronic system. FinCEN estimated that a straightforward initial filing would take about 90 minutes, with more complex ownership structures taking longer. But complexity is often precisely what investigators need to untangle who owns what. An honest government concerned in good faith with efficiency and reduced paperwork could have simplified forms, extended deadlines, funded free assistance, etc. Instead, Treasury chose categorical exemption to obliterate the targeted beneficial ownership reporting. That's real deregulation of special interests at the expense of the public interest! 

How much is this gonna cost us?

This one will have some bite. The consequences cannot yet be measured precisely because Trump's administration dismantled the reporting system before it could generate years of enforcement data. The IRS projects a 2022 gross tax gap (owed but unpaid taxes) of $696 billion and a net gap of $606 billion annually. Those official figures are conservative, not a full census of sophisticated tax evasion (tax cheating). The IRS and outside analysts acknowledge major measurement difficulty involving foreign and illegal activity, complex pass-through structures, digital assets, and corporate non-filings. Research on top-income evasion indicates that conventional audits miss a lot of hidden offshore and complex-entity evasion. A cautious estimate is that eliminating ownership data could cost the Treasury ~$5 billion annually in additional uncollected taxes. That does not count undetected fraud, laundering, corruption, sanctions evasion, or other non-tax violations.

Now, tax cheats can put a business, investment account, real estate holding, or other shielded asset in the name of an LLC controlled through nominees or layered entities. The cheater can then claim that income or assets belong to a separate company, not to them. That allows things like (1) business income or capital gains to be withheld from a personal tax return, (2) concealment of property and investment income from tax authorities, (3) shifting and laundering of legal and criminal money through an entity owned by another entity, e.g., in a secrecy jurisdiction, so the human owner is difficult or impossible to identify, and (4) frustrate collection of tax debts, civil judgments, child support, or restitution by appearing to have fewer assets than the cheater/grifter actually controls.

In addition, MAGA's new secrecy shield helps people who need to hide a conflict between their official or fiduciary roles and private financial interests. A public official, contractor, executive, politically connected intermediary, or grifter can use an entity to disguise that they are on both sides of a deal. A government official can steer a contract, permit, subsidy, or asset sale to a company they secretly control. A vendor creating a hidden related-party company can send out inflated or fictitious invoices. A donor, lobbyist, or politically exposed person can conceal their financial stake in a recipient of government action. The possibilities are just about endless!

Impacts on the rule of law

This new rule is part of a broader MAGA governing strategy. MAGA's authoritarian and kleptocratic policy is to weaken or eliminate the federal government’s capacity to regulate, investigate, tax, and expose powerful but corrupt private actors. MAGA's demagoguery calls the resulting transfer of power “freedom” or “relief from burdens”, but it relieves only special interests at the expense of the public interest and average individuals. 

That policy design reveals MAGA priorities. The administration here did not just lower a compliance cost. It privileged and sanctified anonymity for domestic wealth and corporate power over the public’s interest in enforcing tax law, tracing criminal proceeds, detecting conflicts of interest, and holding the real beneficiaries of corporate activity accountable. The beneficiaries are not ordinary citizens trying to run transparent businesses. They are people and institutions for whom concealment is extremely valuable. They are precisely the people and interests that a functioning rule-of-law state should be able to easily scrutinize, not shield.

Q1: Is it credible for MAGA elites to tell us this new rule was too much of a burden on businesses to report who owns what?

Q2: Can you see why tax cheats and criminals will love using this new way of doing business?

Update: MAGA’s ongoing war to enhance global warming

Starving polar bear -- not adapting well to 

MAGA's efforts to increase global warming

The effort by Trump and MAGA elites to obliterate public concern for global warming continues. New MAGA policies continue to expand the power and unaccountability of special interests that profit from polluting. As always with Trump and MAGA policy, profits, wealth, and power are privatized and trickled up to elites and allied corporations, while the public eats the costs, absorbs the harms, while its wealth and power melts away. By now, this pro-global warming effort has caused vast damage to America’s ability to adapt to global warming. Despite constant MAGA efforts to make the issue go away, majority public opinion is still concerned about global warming. For the most part, most of the public wants the basically the opposite of what Trump and MAGA elites are doing. Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA elites don’t care enough about public opinion to stop doing what they are doing.

Helping the ice melt faster

An article, ‘Truly Devastating’: Trump Ends Federal Funding for Key Arctic Climate Report, exemplifies Trump’s effort to block research. The goal is hide and downplay data showing broad and deep impacts of global warming. Here, Trump just shuts down funding for important research that policymakers would need to help them deal with the issue. But as most reasonable people know by now, informed policymakers working for the public interest is absolutely not how MAGA governs.

Here, Trump stopped federal funding for an annual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that examined and reported on the state of the Arctic. That part of the planet is warming significantly faster than other regions as continued fossil fuel extraction and carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase global temperatures. For context, the last 10 years have been the 10 warmest on record for the Arctic. Trump stopping this research, which has been ongoing for over years, cripples our ability to track and assess Arctic region changes from year to year. Affected people and communities around the world are kept ignorant, as MAGA elites intend.

Past perspectives on the present era of abrupt Arctic climate change

Deregulation by disempowering regulators

AP reporting in an article, Trump EPA moves to repeal landmark ‘endangerment finding’ that allows climate regulation, hits squarely on the core MAGA tactic of gutting federal regulatory agencies that often worked for the public interest. MAGA policy has been to subvert and corrupt federal agencies into entities that serve special interest wealth and power concerns. MAGA simply guts wealth and power serving the public interest and individuals. The public interest includes reasonably protecting the environment.

The proposed EPA rule rescinds a 2009 finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The “endangerment finding” is the legal basis of a slew of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet. Trump’s and MAGA’s goal is to obliterate those regulations. That would allow and foster more pollution for profit for elites, with morse costs and damages socialized onto all of us.

MAGA’s cynical liar excuse is that environmental regulations were intended to regulate large sectors of the economy out of existence. Yes, regulations usually impose costs, but reasonable regulation is part of the cost of serving the public interest. We get the shaft while a few elites get our wealth and power. Trump and MAGA elites are deregulating the public interest out of existence.

Q: Based on evidence including that discussed or cited here, is Trump’s and MAGA elite’s efforts to (1) hide inconvenient environment research, and (2) get rid of environmental regulation, mostly beneficial for the public interest or for affected special interests?

Global warming, it’s partisan

Info sources:

Government Pulls Funding for the Arctic Report Card

A look at false claims made by the Trump administration as it revokes a key scientific finding

Trump Administration’s Unified Agenda Suggests Major Reversals on Climate Safeguards

EPA Repeals Legal Basis for Regulating Greenhouse Gases. What it Means for the US — and the World

Book review: Captive Minds

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.  

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, 1958

Nah, that's not for the first time. The few have always sought to rule the many. What's new is the reach, speed, and intimacy of manipulation machinery available to the elite few. 

Germaine, 2026

The May 2026 book, Captive Minds: A Study Of Manipulation, was written by two Israeli philosophers, Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon. Sharon is a professor  at Tel Aviv University, and co-founder and senior fellow of Molad, the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A schizophrenic, academic read

This odd book is schizophrenic. It's boring to read too. It's too academic and often too attenuated from its core topic of mind manipulation. On the one hand its primary message truly could not be more important to politics and the human condition generally. The message is simple but subtle: To maintain democracy and fight off authoritarianism and deep corruption, citizens must be able to form and revise judgments without their reasoning processes being covertly distorted and hijacked by sophisticated mind manipulators. In short, mind manipulation is a powerful and common form of mental domination that damages cognitive freedom, which threatens democracy. 

But on the other hand, the philosophers fly off the rails by focusing on other philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc. They gloss over two major aspects of the modern world and knowledge  One is the book says little to nothing about Donald Trump, Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Those are among the modern world's most powerful and effective mind manipulators and cognitive freedom destroyers. That omission is striking for a 2026 book arguing that authoritarian mind manipulation is a central threat to democratic freedom.

The other blind spot is that the authors barely deal directly the modern situation. Captive Minds is conceptually serious and morally critically urgent, but its delivery is far too allusive, historically cluttered. The writing is too indirect for readers seeking a persuasive, science-grounded diagnosis of authoritarian mind manipulation in present-day democracies. The authors are the wrong messengers trying but failing to deliver a critically important message. This book provides a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary but leaves the reader to do the hard and complex, but essential work of connecting it to how organized contemporary authoritarians gain and maintain power. That work is just too darned hard. Most people cannot or will not do it. Total bummer. This book is for academicians and academically-minded lay people, not a general audience.

The core messages

According to the authors, mind manipulation is not simply lying, persuasion, rhetoric, or nudging. It is influence that exploits human mental vulnerabilities such as fear, vanity, resentment, desire for belonging, bigotry, racism, or intellectual shortcuts, to gain control over how that person reaches decisions. That is as a form of domination because it can impair personal freedom without overt force, legal compulsion, or even explicit deception. It often exerts power unconsciously. Many or most people never know that they have been manipulated.  

The authors posit that manipulation is the subtler counterpart of coercion (threats or brute force). They describe authoritarian manipulation like this: "Subversive power doesn't bully or punish. It doesn't break or crush you but instead harnesses your [intellectual] powers to its own aims. ..... 'Manipulation, unlike coercion, does not interfere with a person's options. Instead, it perverts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences, or adopts goals'. .... The essential point, we contend, is control over the will. ..... By viewing manipulation through the lens of power rather than truth or rationality, we highlight the centrality of control and the affinity [relationship] with coercion. ..... both coercion and manipulation are forms of domination."

You can see the academic-speak in that.

Fundamentally, mind manipulators pervert the process of judgment in other people. They influence what people think they see, whom they trust, what emotions frame an issue, and what alternatives are mentally accessible and seemingly reasonable. The authors point out that demagogues, propagandists, and conspiracy entrepreneurs create cognitive mind traps that corrode civic and rational deliberation. Public manipulation often works through agenda control and attention capture to push aside in order to crowd out truth-seeking, rational reasoning, open-mindedness and good will.

In short, the book's main weakness is its failure to translate authoritarian mind manipulation insights into a sufficiently concrete analysis of the institutions and actors now destroying democracies worldwide and precisely how they are doing it.

Teaching children defenses against the dark arts

Russian occupied Finnish territory

Context

In modern times, one of the greatest threats to democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, truth, the environment, human well-being, and modern civilization is the dark arts. That includes divisive demagoguery, propaganda, lies, slanders, bigotry, racism, crackpot reasoning (often nutty conspiracy theories), and irrational emotional manipulation to foment reason killing emotions such as unwarranted fear, anger, hate, distrust and moral outrage. Decades of radical right American demagoguery, have successfully led tens of millions of Americans to believe all kinds of lies, slanders, fake threats, crackpot conspiracy theories, etc.

Three things stand about about the dark arts in recent US history. First, it is constitutionally protected free speech. Second, the irrational deceit, distrust, divisiveness and bigotry it fomented was necessary for the rise of American MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy to gain major power and mostly keep at least since Jan. 2017. That’s when Trump was first sworn into office. Third, most of this is not new. Tyrants, thieves, liars, demagogues and mass murderers have been heavily reliant on the dark arts for millennia. Plato and Aristotle recognized the toxic power of demagoguery. What’s new now is technology that dark arts practitioners now have to bamboozle and manipulate people with their cynical lies, hate-filled bigotry, etc.

Teaching dark arts defenses to citizens

A NYT article, Finland Tries to Protect Children Against Deepfakes, With Russia in Mind, discusses current efforts in Finland to fight off the onslaught of powerful Russian dark arts attacks that are now more deadly due to the rise of AI. For years, the government in Finland has been sophisticated and dedicated about trying to protect its people against Russian propaganda attacks. Now those attacks include AI-generated content that take the Russian authoritarian’s propaganda war to a new level of sophistication and aggression.

In it’s self-defense efforts, Finland is expanding its long‑running media‑literacy work to include “AI literacy”. That includes teaching students from early grades how to recognize and evaluate AI‑generated images, audio and video so they’re less vulnerable to deceit and manipulation by AI deepfakes. Researchers and defense efforts in Finland are developing technical countermeasures such as speech/deepfake detection and source‑tracing, but detecting increasingly realistic synthetic audio and video is getting technically harder. AI in the hands of professional propagandists is learning to do better at deceiving and manipulating people.

Journalists and investigators have found nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake images of Finnish public figures and celebrities circulating online. That increased public concern and pressure for stronger protections. Finland’s education‑first approach builds attack resilience but that will need to be combined with better technical detection, more legal protections (especially for nonconsensual sexual content), and platform‑level measures to manage rising deepfake risks. 

In the US few or none of those measures is possible with MAGA in power. Any US effort to censor lies, or at least flag them, is immediately attacked by MAGA and MAGA-aligned demagogues and liars as socialist tyranny censoring “truth”. American social media platforms have been cowed into getting rid of meaningful content moderation, so for honest news social media tends to be cesspits of lies and other dark arts poisons. That is a major source of MAGA authoritarian and kleptocratic power.

Q1: Given the increasing power of dark arts to deceive and manipulate people, it is time to get rid of anonymity on the internet, which would go a long way to reduce dark art’s destructive, mind poisoning power?

Q2: Is Finland simply imposing socialist tyranny by censoring “truth”, as MAGA demagogues would describe it?

Info sources:

After decades of teaching media literacy, Finland equips students with skills to spot AI deepfakes — As deepfakes proliferate online, Finland adds AI literacy to its school curriculum to help children as young as 3 to recognize AI-generated fake news.

Speech deepfakes continue to challenge researchers – …. deepfake research is like playing cat and mouse. Recent years have seen significant advances in the accuracy of detection methods and countermeasures, but model generalization remains a major challenge.

Explicit Finnish celebrity deepfakes hiding in plain sight, Yle finds – Yle anonymously contacted the website’s contributing users who post images there. They replied using pseudonyms and their identities are not known. ….. The people that posted the deepfakes who spoke with Yle said that it is becoming easier to generate the images. One user admitted making nearly 200 images in a single day.

Trump's & MAGA's war on US history

Executive Order 14253

Restoring lies and insanity to US history

Just like what Putin and his predecessors did to Russian and Soviet Union history, Trump is aggressively obliterating inconvenient American history. It's just what morally degenerated, lying tyrants do. A NYT opinion by Russian journalist Masha Gessen, Trump Is Trying to Force Americans to Unlearn What We Know, covers familiar ground. She's seen and reported before on this tyrant tactic.

Gessen points out that in Soviet Union times, some folks liked to say “we live in a country with an unpredictable past.” That's because Russians never knew which part of their history would be obliterated next. The same thing is happening right now in the US under Trump and MAGA politics and policy. Trump and MAGA elites are trying to make American history unpredictable. 

To kick off his rewrite of history, Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which (1) orders officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, (2) cuts funding to “programs that degrade shared American values”, and (3) reinstates some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Since Trump issued that order, the National Park Service removed signs about slavery, the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; and a scathing White House report accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.” Trump recently issued another executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”

Gessen notes that large amounts of information about Soviet terror came to light after the Soviet Unions collapsed. However, Putin forced that knowledge into oblivion. What Trump is getting rid of is the history and legacy of American slavery and racism. 

Yes, former and current political initiatives to reframe American history are heavily propelled by conservative culture warriors and key figures aligned with Christian nationalist frameworks. These groups promote hyper-nationalist narratives that deny or minimize major inconveniences like slavery while championing white civic mythology. MAGA-aligned racists and bigots are key drivers of whitewashing US history. Link

Fighting with Pxy: Within the scope of MAGA's poison politics or not?

Pxy abandoned me

Yesterday my prepaid AI Pro account with Pxy (Perplexity) stopped responding to my search and analysis queries unless I paid for more "credits", whatever those are. The same happened this morning. The new paywall seems to be real and not going away. My fully paid up account was supposed to last until Dec. Apparently too many users are costing too much for the old pricing to be honored any more. So now Pxy corp. is imposing a paywall to get more money, even if account holders do not consent to paying more. 

☹️ 

grumpy Pxy camper face

Some non-Pxy searching led to r/perplexity_ai. Lots of folks there are unhappy with what they are getting. This is one of a slew of grumpy Pxy camper posts, Bye bye perplexity.

I emailed Pxy support to ask for a refund of what is left of my account time. Their "customer service" AI called Sam said I could not get a prorated refund because I am outside the "standard refund eligibility window". Sam told me it could understand my frustration. I told non-sentient Sam to fuck off and put me in touch with a human being. We'll see how that goes in the coming days.

The current American AI business model faces a severe profitability barrier. The massive infrastructure and compute costs to run large language models are greater than the revenue generated from standard consumer subscriptions. Prices are going to have to go up a heck of a lot for profitability to be more than just a blowhard marketing mirage.

Are Trump and MAGA politics mostly to blame for this?   

Here we have a company stopping providing a service that was fully paid for, and demanding more money to continue providing what was already paid for. That seems to be awfully cheeky. It is an outright breach of contract, unless something buried on page 527 of the applicable terms of service contract says the company can unilaterally demand more money without the customer's prior knowledge or consent.

But given how much American businesses have morally and legally degraded, can one rationally attribute this kind to customer treatment as mostly to Trump and his MAGA politics and policy? After all, Trump has (1) deregulated businesses, (2) blocked most (nearly all?) ongoing and new federal law enforcement against businesses, and (3) takes bribes from businesses to give them want they want to buy from him. Who or what is going to hold Pxy corp., or whatever the company's name is, accountable? Certainly not the FBI, DOJ or FTC. They work for the criminal organization Trump Inc.  

Q1: Is this more evidence that the American AI business model is crap because American style AI costs far more to provide than can be significantly made up for by consumer subscriptions? 

Q2: Is connecting what Pxy did with Trump politics an example of TDS-2, unreasonably over the top, or otherwise just too irrational to take seriously?

Clinical terminology 🤪:

TDS-1 = Trump derangement syndrome in Trump's deranged mind and the minds of his supporters

TDS-2 = Trump derangement syndrome in the minds of his critics

Info sources:

AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough - The returns on trillions of dollars of spending are deeply uncertain 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Business Model: How AI-Native Companies Make Money - AI-native companies pay real money to serve every query. Traditional software as a service (SaaS) products incur minimal cost to serve one additional customer after the software ships. AI products pay to compute on every interaction, and that cost varies by customer, query complexity and the model that handles the request.

MAGA politics & policy update: Lying, corruption, incompetence, wrecking relationships

Lying, corruption & incompetence

Trump and MAGA elites aren't hiding their true intentions, corruption and incompetence any more. Sometimes, their screw-ups just can't be hidden.  

An article about Trump's failed attempt to fix the reflecting pool, Charges Dropped in Reflecting Pool Case as Prosecutors Say Work Was ‘Botched’, showcases blatant lying to the public and courts, and ghastly incompetence and corruption. Things are going just as expected. Trump's corrupted DOJ falsely accused an innocent person of vandalizing the reflecting pool. However, court proceedings required the DOJ to disclose evidence of vandalism. It turns out there was no vandalism. The repair job was completely botched. Charges dropped and MAGA prosecutors could not figure any way to keep persecuting the victimized defendant. Trump has called the repair job an astounding success.

The repair job on the water purification system failed leading to an algae bloom because Trump gave out a no-bid, non-competitive contract to a major Trump donor who had little relevant experience. That's blatant corruption. The repair job on the coatings that Trump falsely said were vandalized was also a no-bid, non-competitive contract to a different but also inexperienced contractor. There were two Trump repair jobs, the pool coating, and the water purification system. Both failed. That is pure incompetence. Link, link, link

Wrecking families and relationships

One of the cruelest and saddest aspects of Trump and MAGA demagoguery is the intense weaponization, polarization and divisiveness of politics. That was intentional. In addition to mass deceit of a significant portion of the public, a predictable result has been serious damage to millions of American families and to friendships. Damage from polarizing MAGA demagoguery is seen in both American families that are not recent immigrants families, and to immigrant families. 

One paper, Political breakups: Interpersonal consequences of polarization, described “political breakups” as losing relationships with friends, family members, romantic partners, or coworkers due to political differences. It's a real thing. data from 2025 indicated that ~37% of Americans reported having had a political breakup, mostly with friends. The researchers simply say that political polarization is driving many Americans apart. 

As expected for immigrant families, Trump family separation policy rips families apart. The 2024 paper, Mental Health Implications of Family Separation Associated with Migration Policies in the United States: A Systematic Review, makes clear that damage to many affected families is often quite serious. The data indicate that family separation or fear of it may result in depression, anxiety, behavioral and emotional issues, sleep disturbances, and stress or distress in both affected children and parents. 

A 2024 article Time published, How Estrangement Has Become an Epidemic in America, stated that ~10% of American families are estranged from a close relative(s) due to political differences. About one-third of American adults reported feeling uncomfortable at a family gathering in the past year because of a relative's political views. Link, link

Trump's divisiveness is intentional. He is not just divisive but anti-democratic. He normalizes personal authoritarian rule, attacks institutional constraints. He and uses his public office and public trust as resources to exploit for private gain. 

Although Obama was divisive, that was unintended. That was largely due to the fact that he was a Black man. Racists and bigots were enraged at his election and re-election. He was thus a polarizing president but nonetheless still accepted democracy, the rule of law and civilized politics. That is unlike Trump who relies heavily on dehumanization and demagoguery against immigrants, political opposition and democracy itself. Link