In 1937, the NYT ran a piece about the last living son of a Revolutionary War soldier. “Many times Constant said his father spoke of meeting George Washington…” The Great Span in action.
If the president fears communism, maybe he should stop mimicking its worst elements.
Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it.
The president is trying to whip the nation into an anti-communist frenzy. His two speeches over the Fourth of July speeches denounced Marxism-Leninism and presented Trump as the main obstacle standing between America and a dystopian future in which capitalism no longer exists and grim-faced soldiers march down Pennsylvania Avenue on May Day.
Trump is correct that the Democratic Socialists of America, whose leadership is at least half communist, has gained a toehold in the Democratic Party. And Trump’s hatred of communism is consistent with some of his most important beliefs. Communists demonize both billionaires and American nationalism, two things Trump adores, and they pursue a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, whereas he has done the opposite.
On closer inspection, however, Trump has more in common with Communists than his hostile rhetoric lets on. He has probably done more to expand public ownership of the means of production than any president in history. Trump has seized a stake in nearly two dozen private firms so far, for little reason other than the fact that he can. Recently, he wrote on Truth Social that gasoline retailers “must” lower prices or “big problems lie ahead.” And although he has no power to do so, the distinction between public and private has eroded during his presidency to the degree that oil companies, or any large companies, have reason to believe that defying Trump’s wishes could expose them to government retaliation.
Trump’s admiration for Communist political methods is even more pronounced than his respect for its economic system. Trump has praised Communist dictators in terms unlike those used by any American president outside the context of a wartime alliance. In 1990, Trump told Playboy that the Chinese Communist Party “almost blew it” before showing “the power of strength” by crushing demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, thus avoiding the fate of the Soviet regimes that fell the same year.
He has praised Communist dictators—not in the vein of, say, congratulating Cuba for its education policy, but specifically for crushing all opposition. “He’s a brilliant guy,” Trump gushed of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in 2024. “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not.” Trump once claimed that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love,” explaining: “He’s the head of a country. And, I mean, he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 4, 2026 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Five highlights from this week: Cybersecurity firms targeted by fraudulent OpenAI organization invites; Polestar says Commerce Department is banning US sales of its cars; Google Loses Final Appeal Over €4.1B EU Android Fine; US tech dependence: A risk report for European businesses; PrivacyHawk Enterprise helps organizations find shadow IT and minimize third-party cyber risk; and FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, PopaBotnet
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This project collects information from over 800 Utilities into one place, with more being added all the time: Making this site the most complete source of power outage information currently available. Most utilities put few resources behind their publicly facing OMSs (Outage Management Systems). They are focused on getting their customers reconnected, as they should be. However, this means that during big outage events where many people want to know the status of the power in a particular area, the utility’s OMS can be overwhelmed if not completely unresponsive.
Meanwhile PowerOutage.us stands up to heavy web traffic without faltering, allowing people directly affected by an outage event and onlookers to stay informed and up to date. In addition, no utility releases detailed historical power outage information, so we store all the information we collect; Making this project the only source of detailed historical power outage information. While this historical data is not available directly on the site, you can contact us for more information…”
404 Media – “What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ Warning – “AI chatbots that were prompted to impersonate public figures produced responses that people perceived to be more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the real thing, a finding that underscores “a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society,” according to a study published on Wednesday in PLOS One. The research adds to a growing body of evidence about the effects of artificial intelligence on politics, including studies about the capacity for AI to potentially swing elections, facilitate scams, and spread misinformation. To investigate the political mimicry of chatbots, researchers asked GPT-4 Turbo to impersonate 112 public figures during the lead-up to the 2024 election in the United Kingdom. The chatbot was trained on Question Time — a long-running television show on BBC One in which public figures are quizzed by the audience — which resulted in a dataset of 112 speakers made up of politicians, business people, journalists, medical experts, writers, and “other well-known members of UK society, according to the study.” Generative AI has the potential to pollute the public information sphere with made-up content, posing a significant threat to the cohesion of societies at large. This paper offers the first large-scale and systematic study of how authentic, relevant and coherent impersonated content from Large Language Models (LLMs) is perceived by the general public. Based on a cross-section of British society, we show that LLM-generated responses to questions drawn from a broadcast political debate programme in the UK are judged to be more authentic and relevant than the original responses given by the panel members who were impersonated. We also show that stylistic differences do not influence these judgments, meaning that the distinction of original and generated content is challenging for the general public. Taken together, this means that LLMs can be made to deceive the public regarding the nature of statements in the political domain, with the consequence that there is a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society.”
Source – Herbold S, Trautsch A, Kikteva Z, Hautli-Janisz A (2026) LLM-impersonated debate contributions are more authentic, relevant and coherent than their original: A representative study using BBC1’s Question Time. PLoS One 21(7): e0347757. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0347757
