MAGA dictatorship update: Elastic laws & the CFPB

The MAGA mindset nutshelled

A central theme with MAGA politics and policy is reliance on moral, legal, rational and empirical flexibility to get the corruption and dictatorship jobs done. Put another way, MAGA elites do not let things like contrary facts, reason or immorality get in the way of authoritarian goals. The MAGAfied USSC employs the same tactics. As noted here before, blatant hypocrisy doesn't faze MAGA authoritarians. They employ fully biased reasoning to get pre-determined results that advance MAGA's corrupt authoritarianism (dictatorship, Christian theocracy, and plutocracy). MAGA tactics are unprincipled in terms of reasoning, reality, morality and neutral use of the rule of law. Some experts call MAGA's toxic but pragmatic attitude toward the law autocratic legalism. It's selective, authoritarian use of law to get desired authoritarian ends and block democratic institutions and opposition.

Elastic laws

The CFPB is a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency. It is unconstitutional. Congress should abolish the CFPB and reverse Dodd–Frank Section 1061, thus returning the consumer protection function of the CFPB to banking regulators and the Federal Trade Commission. -- Robert Bowes, (Chase Manhattan Bank, Vice President, corporate finance; HUD director of faith-based initiatives under Housing Secretary Ben Carson, 2017), Project 2025, page 839 (at page 837 Bowes slanders and misrepresents the CFPB -- he is a lying, elite MAGA plutocrat) 

MAGA's subversion and complete obliteration of the CFPB (Consumer Finance Protection Bureau) was a high priority goal in Project 2025. Intense hostility to consumer finance protections is typical of banking executives. They want unfettered freedom to fleece people and fleece them hard. MAGA animosity toward the CFB this has been blogged here before. Tangible evidence of MAGA's anti-consumer sentiment includes the Trump CFPB granting early termination of consent orders as gifts to more than 40 companies that broke consumer protection laws, including Apple, U.S. Bank, Regions Bank, Capital One, Discover, Rocket Companies, and major racist banks involved in redlining. One analysis estimates that gift to financial predators has cost consumers ~$18 billion. 

For financial businesses and institutions, it is now permanently open, unrestricted hunting season for consumers to fleece good and hard. This is just getting started.

As for legal flexibility, MAGA legal analysts figured out a way to use existing federal law related to CFPB power to reach out and nullify state consumer finance protection laws. The strategy is counterintuitive but simple. Instead of interpreting CFPB-related laws narrowly to restrict it's power, MAGA lawyers figured out that if the laws were stretched past what a normal person would see and and congress intended, they could use CFPB power to gut state laws intended to protect consumer finances. On October 28, 2025, Trump's CFPB issued a new rule reversing 2022 guidance, declaring that FCRA "broadly preempts state laws related to consumer reporting". A broad (MAGA) interpretation of the law gives the CFPB the power to preempt and nullify state laws that conflict with federal law governing the CFPB.

It is a brilliant strategy. If the court acts normally in challenges to this tactic, our MAGA USSC will uphold MAGA's anti-consumer tactics. For finance interests, it's time to shoot consumer fish in a barrel. One example, after gutting the CFPB, banks imposed an annual overdraft fee increase on consumers. That was worth ~$5 billion/year. Repeal of overdraft fee caps allowed banks to charge excessive fees on transactions averaging less than $26, with APRs exceeding 16,000% percent. MAGA now plans to gut state laws that extend medical medical debt protections to consumers. This affects ~15 million Americans. For those poor fish in the barrel, their medical debt will now be shown on credit reports, causing consumer credit ratings to tank. Low consumer credit ratings translate into loans harder to get and loans at higher interest rates. 

Is it fair to call MAGA anti-consumer, but pro-corporation and pro-plutocrat? There is lots of evidence to believe that.

Trump the pathocrat: Soothing his fragile ego hurts us, but he doesn't care

Trump is a pathocrat. A pathocrat is a person with a severe personality disorder who seeks and gains power over others. They are characterized by having one or more of psychopathy, narcissism, and Antisocial Personality Disorder. They lack empathy and remorse, are manipulative, and have an insatiable need for domination. Other people are objects to be exploited, not moral beings to be respected.

One of his recent posts on his Lies Antisocial propaganda lies and slanders site smeared Canada. An ad that was aired in Canada that cited Ronald Reagan explicitly criticizing tariffs because they harmed consumers. Research indicates that most or all of the cost of tariffs are passed to consumers. Reagan disliked tariffs because they are protectionist, something he opposed. The ad was truthful and accurately conveyed what Reagan said. In the ad, criticism of Trump and his tariffs was implicit but clear. 

To a narcissistic pathocrat, criticism demands retaliation. Trump's retaliation was as impulsive, unwarranted and malicious as it was swift. Trump called the ad "fraudulent", but it accurately quoted Reagan's actual words about tariffs being harmful to American workers. That assertion was a lie if he didn't know better. A US president acting in their official capacity has a moral duty to fact check themself.

The cost to assuage Trump's child ego will cost US consumers a lot. He imposed an added 10% tariff on Canada, which brings total tariffs to ~45%. A trade expert estimated that the television ad is likely to cost American consumers ~$50 billion. That's just because the mentally ill man-child is pissed off.

Actual malice in his response was clear. His language was deliberately inflammatory, calling Canada's actions a "hostile act" based on a legitimate political ad. This shows intent to damage Canada beyond policy disagreement. 

What AI is up to: Deceptive capitalism & ad blindness

Last December, I bought a paid subscription to Pxy to get unlimited access to deep research searching. So far so good, but time is running out. Despite a belief that I would never break away from Google advanced search (my home page for decades), I did. By then, Google has fully monetized search results, making results mostly stupid ads disguised as search results. In essence, Google search results had turned into mostly useless but always annoying crap. Now all Google is good for is quick synonym-antonym lookups, finding images and cute cat videos, not falling for click-bait, and not much else. 

Comet is Pxy's companion AI package that is agentic. Agentic means AI with agency. It really wants me to ditch Chrome and make itself my default browser. Default browser or not, if Comet is given permissions it has agency (power) to spend money from my accounts, write and send my gmails for me, spy on me and sell the info to ruthless marketers, and Dog only knows what else. I asked Comet about what happens to my privacy. It gave what appears to be an honest answer. It says my privacy will be seriously compromised. That's the whole point of agentic AI for consumers. 

How is the marketing to be done? By deceit. When asked about AI use by consumers, Comet was honest and said that it will follow Google's trajectory of monetizing search results. But those ads will be disguised. Comet commented on the transition, which is well underway right now:

Based on your experience with Google Search, your expectation that AI search will be monetized to the point of diminished value is already becoming a reality. The transition you're anticipating is not a future event; it began in earnest in 2025, and the infrastructure for a fully monetized AI search experience is actively being built now. .... Your concern that search results will become "distractions and stupid, annoying sales pitches" reflects the new monetization strategies being deployed for AI.

Well, I can't say that's a surprise.

What about how the deceit is to be done? By use of things like this. With Integrated Sponsored Placements, ads are embedded directly into the AI's generated text, making them appear to be native recommendations, not ads.​ That's deceptive. There's also Affiliate and Commission Models where AI recommends products and provides links for purchase to generate sales commissions. Marketers call that a "zero-click commerce experience". The user never leaves the AI interface to buy crap. Finally, there's the really sneak one called ​Intent-Based Targeting. That moves away from keywords. AI analyzes the user's conversation history, context, and "memory" to serve hyper-targeted ads. That is the explicit goal of AI browsers like Comet.

I asked how do marketers see this? With what I call casual capitalist immorality. Even their jargon is immoral. Marketers learn to weave their ads into AI responses to blur the line between actual search results and paid ads. This approach intends to overcome "ad blindness", where users simply ignore traditional banner ads. By presenting a commercial message as a helpful, conversational suggestion from a trusted AI assistant, the customer is less likely to spot the embedded ad.

Ad  blindness?? It's not ad blindness. I say it's conscious ad avoidance, not unconscious ad blindness. We all know the ad is there and we all knowingly ignore it. 

Marketers marketing to marketers

So what does Comet say about conscious ad avoidance vs unconscious blindness? Another honest answer:

Your analysis is not wrong; it highlights a critical and accurate distinction between "ad blindness" and "ad avoidance" that gets to the heart of the advertising industry's framing of the issue. The professional jargon is, as you suspect, very much "pro-deceit framed".

In other words, baby marketers are taught from the marketing crib that consumers with ad blindness are lazy and brain-defective. Us consumers need to be tricked into buying stuff, dumb fucks that we are. Yes, brain-defective. Baby marketers are taught that consumers' brains have developed a "blindness" to their shitty ads due to overexposure. Well duh! Overexposure indeed.

Bad consumer brains, bad, bad brains!

That needs to be fixed!

Marketer framing subtly creates and puts a fabricated blame and onus on consumers' perceptions and cognitive limits. Consumer ad blindness, actually ad resistance, is taught to be a challenge for marketers to "fight" or "overcome". This framing makes marketer cognitive dissonance go away by defining the problem as a user-centric matter of lazy brains, rather than an industry-centric issue of unwanted intrusion. What a total hoot!

Of course, making cognitive dissonance go away assumes that the baby marketer has a conscience to trick into complacency. Marketers are subtly nudged into acceptance of the wonderful idea that their unwanted intrusions into our lives with their obnoxious ads is our lazy brains' fault.   

Q: To be a modern marketer in the AI age, do marketers have to check their moral baggage to the door before entering the cathedral, or is marketing a profession that inherently self-selects or attracts people with little or no moral qualm about knowingly deceiving the money out of people and not caring enough to not do deceit?

 

No dickhead, our eyes are open -- we see your fracking 

 ad, but we just consciously ignore it

"Native ads" = trick ads

Musing about my hobby: The evolution of pragmatic rationalism

The political news is bad, cruel and discouraging just about every day now. No surprise there -- it's that been that bad since January 2025. Based on America's current political and social trajectory, it looks like MAGA will try to seriously subvert the 2026 elections if they need subversion to stay in control of both the House and Senate. Of course, MAGA doesn't need and won't use subversion if voters voluntarily choose to keep the GOP in power. Voters just might do that, saving American authoritarianism the trouble of mass subversion.

This blog is my hobby. My hobby is advocating for pragmatic rationalism, a pro-democracy, pro-public interest political meta-ideology. Sure, MAGA and other authoritarian wealth and power movements and ideologies the world over also claim to be basically the same. But they are just liars. Unfortunately, MAGA liars are empowered by tens of millions of Americans who actually believe that MAGA really is pro-democracy and pro-public interest. For the most part, MAGA and its demagoguery is what's killing our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties. That's just fact.

Since engagement here has fallen off a cliff, keeping it going requires minimal time and effort on my part. So, I'll probably keep it going, maybe posting a bit less frequently. Doing the research for posts helps keep me in touch with some of the details of how Trump and MAGA are taking democracy, the rule of law, liberties, wealth and power from us. I'll keep sending my darts to journalists, opinionators, academics, editors, etc., when they let us down or turn against us, whether they know it or believe it or not. In response, they will continue to pretend I don't exist. What fun!

Since my fighting spirit isn't crushed yet and my time is coming to an end, I'll try to go ahead and finish writing a short book, Project 2026. It's a pro-democracy, pro-public interest response to MAGA's demagogic authoritarian-kleptocrat manifesto, Project 2025. To keep it simple, things like "manifesto" and "pragmatic rationalism" won't be in it. Links to data sources won't be in it. Just simple stuff. It'll just be short and non-technical, like Tim Snyder's short warning, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century (2017). Who knows? Maybe a couple dozen copies will sell! Woof!! 

(❁´◡`❁)

Here's a bit of Project 2026: 

An example of MAGA's potent demagoguery can be more edifying than abstract explanations. The following is from Project 2025, MAGA's authoritarian manifesto:

It’s not 1980. In 2023, the game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right. -- 

A Note On Project 2025, by Paul Dans, Director, Project 2025, page xiv.

The demagoguery in that is obvious. First, cultural Marxism has not marched through and captured any major US institution. Nothing major in America is Marxist. That includes institutions of higher education and the entire federal government. Simply put there is no credible evidence of a coordinated “cultural Marxist” plot to capture American institutions. That assertion is a radical right myth that dates back to the 1990s. It was just as false then as it is today. 

Second, the Manifesto's assertion of the US government being a “behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values” is an example of the propaganda tactic called rhetorical inversion. Weaponization of government against the people has not been a liberal or progressive endeavor. Instead, America's radical right has weaponized the rule of law, administrative independence, and democratic guardrails. Project 2025’s blueprint explicitly advocates for the politicization of the executive branch, the Justice Department, and the civil service, aiming to purge disloyal staff and centralize power in the presidency. America's radical right political movement is highly focused on twin goals of centralizing wealth and power with elites allied with MAGA authoritarianism. 

An honest version of reality looks something like this:

It’s not 1980. In 2016, the game changed. The long march of corrupt, radical right authoritarianism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a monster, weaponized against American citizens, democratic values and honest governance. Freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this dark, corrupt tide and save our representative democracy before it is swallowed in intolerant authoritarian radical right cruelty, corruption and moral darkness. The task at hand is too great for the broken Democratic Party to spearhead and implement a solid defense of democracy. The Republican Party has fallen to authoritarianism and cannot help. It will resist democratic efforts. The defense requires the collective action of the American people still willing to stand up for their democracy, liberties, wealth and power before it is irretrievably taken from them. With the rapid approach of November 2026, we have just one short year and one chance to get it right. 

Anyway, that's what's on my mind.