Are you worried things can’t get stupider in 2026? I assure you they can and will
The world is peppered with new euphemisms for "bottomless corruption and naked abuses of power"
Guillermo del Toro nails Krasnov and His Cult:
“Be kind, be involved, believe in your art,” he said. “At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism. When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art you say, if it’s that important, why the fuck do they want it so bad? The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human. And that, in my book, and in my life, includes monsters.”
The Infamous Australian Prison’s Huge Record Collection
It’s Shocking How Radical Right Extremism Has Crept Into Mainstream Culture
The New Surveillance State Is You
Wired [no paywall]: “Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops surveil them.
The Department of Homeland Security secretary has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving bands of masked federal agents is “doxing”—and that revealing these public servants’ identities is “violence.” Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her claims of doxing highlight a central conflict in the current era:
Surveillance now goes both ways. Over the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, life in the United States has been torn asunder by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal, state, and local authorities deputized to carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their identities on the administration-approved basis that they are the ones at risk. US residents, in response, have ramped up their documentation of law enforcement activity to seemingly unprecedented levels.
“ICE watch” groups have appeared across the country. Apps for tracking immigration enforcement activity have popped up on (then disappeared from) Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are awash in videos of unidentified agents tackling men in parking lots, throwing women to the ground, and ripping families apart.
From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and passersby have pulled out their phones to document members of their communities being arrested and vanishing into the Trump administration’s machinery…”
How a scholar nudged the Supreme Court toward National Guard troop deployment ruling
The New York Times Gift Article: “The Supreme Court’s Accepting an argument from a law professor that no party to the case had made, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a stinging loss that could lead to more aggressive tactics.
The Supreme Court’s refusal on Tuesday to let the Trump administration deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area was in large part the result of a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by a Georgetown University law professor named Martin S. Lederman. The argument Professor Lederman set out, and the court’s embrace of it, could help shape future rulings on any further efforts by President Trump to use the military to carry out his orders inside the United States.
Professor Lederman’s brief said that the government had misunderstood a key phrase in the law it had relied on, which allows deployment of the National Guard if “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”The administration said “the regular forces” referred to civilian law enforcement like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Professor Lederman argued that the great weight of historical evidence was to the contrary. The regular forces, he wrote, was the U.S. military.
And, he added, “there is no basis for concluding that the president would be ‘unable’ to enforce such laws with the assistance of those forces if it were legal for him to direct such a deployment.” Professor Lederman wrote his brief over a weekend. “I hesitate to acknowledge that,” he said on a podcast last month, “but it’s really true that I didn’t have like some great background knowledge in this statute.”
A veteran of the Office of Legal Counsel, the elite Justice Department unit that advises the executive branch on the law, Professor Lederman identified what he called a glaring flaw in the administration’s argument. “None of the parties were paying attention to it,” he said. But the justices were. A week after Professor Lederman filed his brief, the court ordered the parties to submit additional briefs on the issue he had spotted.
They did, and almost two months passed. In the end, the majority adopted the professor’s argument, over the dissents of the three most conservative justices. It was the Trump administration’s first major loss at the court in many months. During that time, the court granted about 20 emergency requests claiming broad presidential power in all sorts of other settings…”
See also Steve Vladeck – Four Takeaways From the National Guard Ruling. A deep dive into last Tuesday’s ruling in which a 6-3 majority of the Court stopped the Trump administration from deploying federalized National Guard troops into and around Chicago.
How TikTok Is Distorting the Memory of the Holocaust
Der Spiegel Guest Editorial by Eva Berendsen – political scientist and head of the communication and online education department at the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt. She has written extensively about the effects of social media on memory an artificial intelligence’s influence on racism and anti-Semitism.
“Imagine for a moment your 13‑year‑old child stumbling across a TikTok video in which an AI‑generated Anne Frank with sad eyes recounts her story of persecution – though without an overly strict adherence to the facts. This AI Anne claims she was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, even though Anne Frank and her sister Margot died in the Bergen‑Belsen concentration camp, most likely of typhus.
One might be inclined to overlook this inaccuracy – if, that is, the video, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, was not being praised by viewers as original educational content, a “good summary” and even a substitute for classroom teaching. “Learned more in five minutes than in five years of school,” one user wrote enthusiastically in a comment.
The account has over 30,000 followers, and at the end of the clip AI Anne Frank also seeks to drum up a bit of business in good entrepreneurial fashion: “Please subscribe to my channel and leave a like if my story moved you.” The boundaries between dead and alive, fiction and historical accuracy are blurred – just as they are between commerce and basic decency.
Now imagine the TikTok algorithm having a quick look at your child’s profile. From that point on, this algorithm, which has excited marketing professionals ever since the app from the Chinese company ByteDance appeared seven years ago, will continue to push more and more such history clips onto the “For You” page, as the feed is called on TikTok.
It is quite possible that within a few days your child will encounter additional AI‑generated historical content packaged into short videos, including an android named “Anne Clank,” who, in a completely bizarre science‑fiction scene, shakes Joe Biden’s hand and spreads anti-Semitic conspiracy theories…”
