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The Death of Beauty
Natalie Harp Won’t BE Ignored
What The AI Companies Should Pay To Stop The Guillotine
Bannon Previews the Election
Surveillance State Update
Trump’s Magic Primary Endorsement…Isn’t
Bubbas and Byron
Do They Want To Lose Florida?

The Big Picture

The Death of Beauty

I saw an article earlier this week on the end of beauty, and the theme triggered something in me, an itch to write about it, but I couldn’t quite nail the approach.

Then I drove past a house yesterday on a road in one of Tallahassee’s old neighborhoods, the kind known for gracious homes set far back from a canopy road, live oaks arching overhead burdened with old stories and Spanish moss.

The street once housed a former U.S. senator, a dozen wealthy lobbyists, a scattering of doctors, and old money, with a sort of particular Old Florida charm sustained by an unspoken compact among the neighbors: a desire for beauty, for presence, a memory of a time when no one was ashamed to live in an older home, creaky floors, questionable wiring and all.

But one of the houses I loved on that road is gone, replaced by an enormous black-and-white modernist box with all the aesthetic grandeur of a stack of shipping containers dropped from a crane. A driveway the size of a carrier deck has been poured across what was a pine-and-oak-shaded lawn. The house it replaced wasn’t even the most spectacular home on the road, but I felt its loss.

This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to my town. Across America, old homes in soft, quiet, green neighborhoods are being replaced by soulless black-and-white boxes, stark, blunt, and unwelcoming. Inside, bright white walls and bright white lights feel like an emergency room, not a home, and cavernous spaces offer not a single spot of warmth or comfort. The culture that accepts them as beautiful has lost something in its soul.

We lost so much in this grotesque era that beauty and architectural grace may seem to some to be low on the list. The nation has been rendered like a hog, our politics turned into ugly butchery and filth. Our financial system is an extraction tool, milking the old middle- and working-class cow one last time.

But for some reason this week, I’ve wondered more than I have in the past about the loss of an appreciation for beauty. It isn’t just Trump’s natural vulgarity and tastelessness rippling down into the culture, though that’s a part of it.

There are a million reasons to want the Trump era to end: the corruption, the cruelty, the demolition of American law and institutions, the abandonment of everything we once called our most fundamental values. It is easy, and correct, to hate the autocracy, the racial animus, the pointless wars, the eager alignment with dictators, the whorehouse decor.

But those things are almost too easy. I was thinking this morning about a common accusation from 2015, when the small tribe of Never Trump Republicans first began making our case. MAGA world kept lodging an odd but oddly persistent complaint: that we hated Trump for merely aesthetic reasons.

At the time, I argued it went far beyond the aesthetic. A decade in, I’ve come to believe the aesthetics were the tell, all along. The raw sewage pipe of Trump’s vulgarity. The gimcrack gold leaf slathered on every surface. The Mar-a-Lago plastic-surgery pageant of big lips and bigger implants. The anxious toadies simpering and capering at his every word as if he were some combination of Churchill and Demosthenes.

All of it adds up to a crass, shameful environment, and none of us stands outside it. The savage world of social media incentivizes us all, your author included, to cut deeper, to win uglier, to push the blade a little further into our opponents. Perhaps the world has changed forever, and this is the new normal. Perhaps Trump unleashed something dark in the American character that we cannot unwind.

Part of this really does come down to choosing between ugliness versus beauty. Graciousness assaulted by abuse. Spleen swapped for hope.

I am aesthetically traditional across too many domains to mention; I do not believe function is the only thing that should dictate form, in architecture or in society. Our home is decorated in my English-hunting-lodge-meets-alchemist’s-library style, a bit eccentric, but warm and, we hope, inviting.

But some people choose to live in a sterile box, an ugly prison for blank souls. There’s a metaphor there.

The MAGA movement is wired to display the worst elements of humanity, to post endlessly about its broken soul but never take a single step to heal it. It’s a broken, empty, angry box, echoing and lonely.

This is not a culture that will build a casino, not a cathedral, a strip club, not a library.

It will not and cannot produce great art, great literature, or great music. At its absolute best, it imitates a schmaltzy, mass-produced Americana, a plastic memory of an imaginary country that never existed, stamped MADE IN CHINA and sold at a discount.

At its worst, it produces only monuments to appetite: bigger, louder, cheaper, crueler, more gold leaf and less taste.

But we should at least remember that grace existed. We should remember that beauty is worth defending. We should reject the lie that cruelty is strength, vulgarity is authenticity, and ugliness is inevitable.

When he goes, and someday he will go, we will not get back what we had, at least not all at once. It will be a long season of work and reform, of sacrifice and demands on our discipline as citizens and neighbors that go beyond easy answers. I’ve always been struck by the stories of generations of craftsmen working on cathedrals, grandfathers, fathers, sons, all shaping stone over decades, none of whom would see the completion of a monument to the glory of God.

But they kept working, shaping one stone at a time, because the idea and ideal of creating something beautiful and uplifting made it more than a job.

The compact on that old canopy road took generations to build and one bulldozer to break. But remember what this era taught us: the ugliest aesthetics were married to the ugliest politics, and neither was an accident.

The oaks on that street took a century to grow and an afternoon to cut down.

What we plant next determines what shades the road for whoever drives past when we are long gone.

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Intel and Observations

Natalie Harp Won’t BE Ignored

Natalie Harp is not the story. She’s the symptom.

The story coming out of Donald Trump’s White House is ostensibly about his increasingly intense and strange relationship with Harp, the 35-year-old former OAN host who has become his near-constant companion.

She’s on the plane when he escapes Iran’s terror threats. She’s in the car, sometimes in the trunk. She’s in the Oval Office. She’s the famous “human printer,” carrying around a portable printer so Trump can consume the only information he really wants: stories about how Donald Trump is the smartest, tallest, most handsome man in the room.

People immediately want to make this a sex story. Maybe it is. I doubt it, for medical and biological reasons. MAGA certainly tried with their phony outrage routine to make any observation about Harp into a story about sex, but it’s only tangential, if it is at all.

What’s happening is weirder, and considerably more dangerous.

Donald Trump is a man in political, medical, and psychological decline, watching his popularity collapse and his political power begin to bleed away. And like every declining autocrat, his circle is shrinking. Trust disappears, paranoia grows, and even the old courtiers become suspect. Loyalty is never total enough.

And then there’s Natalie.

Harp offers Trump something nobody else can: absolute, unconditional, almost

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But he’s better understood as a slow-motion serial killer.

The man Donald Trump put in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services is not a scientist. He is not a doctor. He is not a researcher. He is an obviously mentally ill former heroin and sex addict who may have murdered his wife and who understands medicine, biology, biochemistry, and pharmaceutical research about as well as I understand string theory.

His Department of Death and Human Misery wants cancer to win, people to die of preventable illnesses, and children to suffer and perish from preventable childhood diseases.

Donald Trump handed him control of the vast machinery of American public health anyway.

And Kennedy has imposed an insane, fringe antivax ideology on American public health.

This isn’t science. It’s crank philosophy, administered by a crank Cabinet secretary working for a crank president, surrounded by an army of antivax conspiracists who spent the COVID years marinating in Facebook epidemiology and convincing themselves they had discovered truths hidden from the world’s doctors, virologists, immunologists, and research scientists by reading posts on 8chan.

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Trump’s MAGA Inc. is sitting on $400 million with less than 90 days until the election. The RNC is sitting on about $160 million.

The comforting theory, the one held dear by elected Republicans feeling the growing wrath of voters as the Iran war drags on and the economy keeps hammering them, is that Chris LaCivita and the rest of Trump’s political team will spend that pile down to save the GOP majorities in the House and the Senate.

Good luck.

I’m here to propose a rather different scenario, and to explain why I think it’s the likely one.

Trump is Tolkien’s Smaug, the dragon curled on the dwarves’ treasure under the Lonely Mountain, jealously guarding every last coin and gem.

First, Donald Trump likes money.

He likes it more than he likes anything else in this world, including his children. That love of cash has manifested itself this year in an epic tidal wave of political corruption.

Yes, he’s raked in billions from crypto scams, from selling pardons to criminals, from side deals to enrich himself, his family, and a host of other scummy and entirely predictable actors. Why not collect more from the suckers funding MAGA Inc?

We’re missing something about the MAGA Inc. money.

Trump believes it’s his.

In his mind, it wasn’t raised for the party. It wasn’t raised for candidates. It wasn’t raised to ensure an electoral victory this fall. He thinks it was raised for him, literally and personally for him. Sure, that’s an ugly and stupid category error, but why would you expect anything different at this point?

Trump also has one thing going for him that no other Republican candidate has ever had. He isn’t really a Republican.

Donald Trump is a member of the Trump party, a party dedicated to one man, and a singularly self-obsessed man at that. So put yourself inside that rattled, sloppy brain for a moment. You see a political tidal wave coming for the GOP. You’re sitting on nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that might not even save them. What do you do?

If you’re Donald Trump, I’ll tell you exactly what you do. You spend it on yourself. You transfer it into your own pockets.

Trump doesn’t care whether Republicans win or lose, except insofar as losing might be a slight inconvenience in terms of investigations.

And the Republican suckers already confirmed Todd Blanche, so why bother helping them any further? Blanche stonewalls for two years, keeps covering up the Epstein files, keeps inventing novel and hysterically wrong legal protections for Trump, and the clock runs out. Trump leaves, takes the money, and the GOP gets a final middle finger from a president who holds them in robust contempt.

That’s the thing the elected officials desperate for cash don’t fully understand. A man who would abandon his Secretary of State, his Treasury Secretary, and dozens of his closest aides and hide in a catering cart to escape an alleged Iranian attack is a guy without loyalty at any level. A man who will put the lives of his team at risk isn’t the guy who’s going to rip off a check for $150 million to save Ken Paxton.

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Got scam calls? The worst part hasn’t happened yet.

When scammers get hold of your data, they don’t just take your money. They sell what’s left — your name, address, phone number, the names of people close to you — to the next buyer.

Congress put a number on it: four breaches alone have cost Americans $20 billion. But the financial loss is round one. That same data is what anyone who means you harm uses to find you and your home.

The same data-broker pipeline is what fuels the meme-coin push notification hitting your father’s phone, the “urgent Medicare” robocall hitting your grandmother’s landline, and the “you have won” text hitting your kid’s iPhone. It is one economy. Trump is running the political version of it out of the White House. The retail version is running on your family from a call center in a strip mall.

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Take yourself off the mailing list. Take your parents off it too, while you’re at it. The dragon isn’t the only one grifting.

Now, back to the pile.

Donald Trump has always been a take-the-money-and-run guy.

Politics is the best business he’s ever had, by several orders of magnitude. He was a crappy real estate developer, multiply bankrupt, including bankrupt in casinos, which ought to be mathematically impossible. Regardless of the image they sold on The Apprentice, Trump never made the money he wanted until he could extract bribes from the tech bros and Wall Street, scam seniors out of their Social Security checks to prop up his garbage meme coin, and turn the government into a checkout line for criminals seeking pardons, companies seeking favors, and billionaires seeking tax cuts.

Holding power is great, sure.

But Trump thinks he’s already past that part, and somewhere in there he knows that with Democrats in the majority he’ll have two straight years to spend redecorating the White House.

The donors to MAGA Inc. are in crypto, finance, energy and, of course, AI. They’ll have to splash some money around to the Democrats again after the election, but that cash will be a rounding error.

I could be wrong, but I feel like the Dragon is going to keep laying on that mountain of gold, saving it for himself.

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Update 2: Holy hell. Breaking news from Wired: they got the code for Flock’s new OS Investigate AI tool, and it’s so much worse than even I wrote about below.

I’ve written the speech Flock CEO Garrett Langley gave last week on YouTube.

Not that exact speech, but speeches of that genus, species, and subspecies. Every political or crisis-communications operative dragged into the conference room after a corporate client steps on its dick knows the form. Founder. Soft lighting. Tasteful background. Slow cadence. Concerned eyes.

Langley looked almost human, spinning his nationwide Panopticon like a suburban dad discussing his pickleball league. “Nine years ago we set out to build safer communities. I’ve learned a lot. We’re not perfect. Far from it.”

Sure, pal.

That last bit is mandatory. The preemptive humility beat, the sensation of a focus group nodding along tested lines, a man who admits he isn’t perfect, especially when the admission costs nothing, concedes less, and makes the general counsel nearly smile. It’s the corporate version of the politician who tells you his greatest weakness is caring too much.

I know the speech, the cadence, the lawyered verbs, the tense shifts, the carefully constructed moments when phony sincerity is lubed enough to slide right past the ugly truth.

Once you know the trick, you can’t unsee it.

Watch the verbs. Watch the tense. Watch what he elides. Listen carefully to the question he appears to answer, then ask yourself whether he actually answered it because he never does.

By that standard, Langley’s twelve minutes are a masterpiece of crisis communications.

Honesty? Not so much.

Because behind the soft lighting and delicate piano music track is a hell of a story: an Atlanta venture-backed startup has built a substantial piece of the infrastructure for an American surveillance state, sold it to roughly 7,000 police agencies without a national vote, meaningful federal regulation, or much public debate, and is now spending heavily on lobbyists and crisis communications to keep local governments from taking it away.

Jason Hunyar reported on just one Flock lobbying team working in Georgia.

Targeted Victory is a $100 million Republican digital and political consulting firm, part of Stagwell Global. If the name sounds familiar, it should: in 2022, the Washington Post reported that Meta had paid Targeted Victory to orchestrate a nationwide campaign against TikTok that included planting op-eds in regional newspapers, recruiting politicians and reporters, and seeding negative stories in local media. That is their documented, public record playbook. Their own website describes their pitch as: “communication is personal and trust is local” and promises clients help to “navigate political fights and reputational thickets.” Their public affairs page lists Crisis Communications, Risk & Reputation Strategic Consulting, and Victory at Scale among their services, and advertises a network of 1,000 operatives and 50-state activation capability.

SixAM Strategies is Targeted Victory’s sister company under Stagwell Global, founded in November 2025, two months before this meeting. Their website is worth reading in full, but a few lines stand out: they call their execution capability “Activations”, described as building hyperlocal campaigns blending “community outreach, grassroots advocacy, and media engagement.” They can deploy within 48 hours, and their services run “from corporate reputation development to direct advocacy to state and federal policymakers.” Both of their representatives confirmed attendance.

Allow me to translate from Consultant.

Your neighbor gets up at the county commission meeting and says the cameras make her nervous. The members of the county commission all read very, very similar talking points about contracts and privacy and safety.

Then come the letters to the editor. The heartwarming video about Flock finding somebody’s lost grandmother. The supportive local official. The police-union statement praises Flock for stopping murderrrrrs. The scary column about suburban crime follows, reposted on a hundred local Facebook groups.

And, amazingly enough, they all arrive at roughly the same conclusion:

Every car should be monitored by an army of Flock cameras, everywhere forever. If you’re not committing a crime you have nothing to worry about, right?

The client’s fingerprints barely show. That’s the point.

Meanwhile, Flock increased its federal lobbying spending tenfold in 2025, to more than half a million dollars. Quite a Washington operation for a company selling what we’re told is basically a neighborhood safety tool.

Hell, many people at Flock would bridle at being called lobbyists. Make of it what you will, but anyone who has worked around lobbying knows this routine.

Lobbyist? Good heavens, no. He’s a senior adviser. A government counselor. A special policy consultant. Former Congressman Smith would never demean himself by something so base as lobbying.

How crude.

So Langley’s soft-focus video is the visible end of a very expensive PR and lobbying operation.

Now the important part. Flock’s system is a direct, immediate threat to your privacy, your political autonomy, and your security not because some rogue peckerwood cop using to to track down his ex-wife Lurleen, that bitch.

It’s a threat because today’s Flock camera is a crude early part of a national infrastructure of surveillance and control. That line trotted out by Flock stans that “only criminals who have something to hide hate Flock” misses that in the Flock system the definition of criminal is in the hands of local and state law enforcement agencies, not the courts.

You’re a criminal when local MAGA sheriff Billy Bob Bumblefuck scopes every car within in mile of the latest No Kings rally, dumps that data into the local fusion center and feeds it to DHS.

Today’s Flock ALPR camera isn’t a camera. It’s a beta test, a first-gen database-entry generator for an authoritarian state. That isn’t a bunch of cameras on poles: it’s a tool set building a searchable index of where Americans drive, shop, eat. It’s a record of their attendance at political rallies and their infidelities.

Every passing vehicle becomes a timestamped record: plate, location, make, model, color, damage, bumper stickers, roof racks. Multiply that by 120,000 devices across roughly 7,000 agencies, most importantly ICE and DHS.

Built without warrants or without notice, absent any national law authorizing the architecture. Authoritarianism in America won’t necessarily arrive by decree. It will arrive with an API and a dashboard of metrics.

You don’t need some new Stasi if the search box finds you regardless.

Who parked near that church? Who drove to that abortion clinic? Who went to that gun show? Who was near that anti-ICE twice last month? And who are their friends? Who do they associate with? Where do they work?

Nobody has to be suspected of anything. The record already exists. Somebody just has to decide to search it. And spare me the “slippery slope” objection. We’re already sliding, with a thousand points of data streaming off our phones, laptops, smart watches, cars, medical devices, shopping histories, and ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.

A Texas officer ran a nationwide plate search for a woman who had an abortion, reaching into Illinois despite a state law written to stop exactly that.

FOIA’d audit logs from Danville, Illinois showed thousands of searches with “immigration,” “ICE,” or “ICE warrant” entered as the reason.

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Researchers in Washington State found three different ways federal immigration agents obtained local data: formal sharing agreements, searches where sharing supposedly wasn’t enabled, and friendly local cops running searches for the feds.

Oxnard, California set its system for California-only access, discovered nationwide searches had been enabled anyway because of a vendor issue, and yanked the cameras.

We’re told Flock never searches or records people’s faces, but hundreds of Flock cameras are installed facing away from roads and parking lots, and if you walk by one at night, the IR lights illuminate and the unit records your face, your gait, your clothes, and your race.

Then there’s Nova, Flock’s AI platform. Flock’s own roadmap, exposed through leaked internal materials, showed a product designed to move from a plate to a person, then to that person’s associates, using commercial data-broker records.

No warrant. No crime. Not even real suspicion. After the reporting landed, Flock assured everyone it wouldn’t use breached data…a fascinating promise that smells of lawyers.

Here’s the test.

Suppose an administration wants to know every car that visited a mosque, Mormon temple, Planned Parenthood clinic, union hall, gun show, political meeting, or Tesla dealership last Saturday. Does it need Congress to pass a law? Nope. It needs a need one cop with a password. Flock claims it has no relationship to Palantir, but Flock’s data gets fed to fusion centers by local cops that does feed Palantir’s maw. You’ll be shocked to learn Peter Thiel’s Founders’ Fund is an investor in Flock.

Now watch Langley’s video again.

Remember, all this tech with the cameras is the tip of the iceberg for Flock and the surveillance goons.

Take Flock’s Raven snitch system, which listens, instead of sees.

Flock nervously said, “Our products do not and will not identify human voices.” They didn’t say “Cannot.” “Will not” is a thin reed.

Great. What did they do?

Flock marketed distress detection for its acoustic sensors with an ad depicting a police alert for screaming. After EFF reported on it, “screaming” became “distress.” Cities ran live pilots of Flock’s Raven system. The feature reportedly died after sustained public pressure, while the underlying ability to capture voices, conversations, and other sounds remained.

Langley describes this as “underestimating community concerns.”

Beautiful. Then there’s the wrong noun. “We’ve never sold it and we never will.”

Sold. Nobody’s complaint about Danville or Renton or Oxnard depends on Flock selling anything.

The issue is access. Again, watch the rhetorical trick: deny something nobody accused you of doing, very sincerely, and hope the audience doesn’t notice.

Then comes the magic qualifier: “We will not add facial recognition to our devices.”

To our devices.

Nova was designed to identify people without recognizing a face at all, using other data, including phone, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi identifiers, so that little phrase is doing a lot of work. Flock’s unarmed (for now) drone systems are its latest frontier.

Then there are the things Langley would rather leave in the memory hole.

In April, Flock’s own chief information security officer told the Oshkosh, Wisconsin city council that the system did not create heat maps showing an individual vehicle’s movements.

The council approved the contract that night. The next morning, members learned that wasn’t true. They reconvened and killed the contract in a day. Flock later acknowledged the heat-map capability and called the discrepancy a “minor nuance.”

On federal access, Langley publicly denied it, then acknowledged pilot contracts with CBP and DHS providing direct access. His explanation?

Flock had “communicated poorly.”

No, bro. That’s called a lie.

The big announcement in the new speech is that default local data retention falls from thirty days to seven. Privacy victory! Huzzah! Except that Langley concedes that roughly 90 percent of searches already happen within a week. So why keep the other twenty-three days?

Because storage is cheap and data is priceless. But listen closely to one word. The images are purged from the customer’s database. The customer’s.

His promises are about the police department’s instance of the product.

What does Flock itself keep? In what form? For how long? Here’s the answer: all of it, forever. Funny how that part never gets the soft-focus treatment. Flock’s contract terms added a perpetual right to use customer data to support and improve its services, surviving termination.

Your city’s retention period ends. Flock’s ownership of your data doesn’t. That’s not a retention limit. It’s the opposite. Around the same time, the old language saying Flock did not own or sell customer data disappeared. Nothing to see here, kids. Move along.

Langley also admits Flock retains some images to improve plate-reading accuracy after stripping customer-identifying metadata.

It does not necessarily remove your plate. No retention period is attached to that corpus in Flock’s cloud. Then there’s Evidence Mode, which Flock’s own material describes as moving data into cold storage. Cold storage is a cheaper hard drive. Everything, everywhere points to Flock keeping all the data its cameras generate, forever.

And the company’s entire accountability pitch of case codes, audit trails, flagged searches, investigations of misuse, and so on depends on durable records of who searched what and when. You can’t simultaneously brag about permanent accountability and pretend permanence isn’t part of the system.

So there is one question every city council member in America should ask the Flock rep, on camera, with the microphone on:

After our retention period expires, what exactly do you keep? Raw images. Vehicle records. Search indexes. Audit logs. Backups. Aggregates. Training data. Give me every category, every retention period, and tell me exactly what disappears when we cancel. Will Flock agree to stop negotiating with state and local agencies under NDAs? If not, why not?

No mission statement about safety fixes Flock. No story about a stolen Kia with a puppy in back fixes Flock. No tale of grandmother lost and wandering, found by Flock’s drones fixes Flock. No hyperbolic stories of crime sweeping the suburbs fixes Flock.

More than sixty communities have moved to cancel, pause, or reject Flock.

Look at who’s doing it: libertarians, immigrant-rights groups, gun owners, ACLU chapters, women’s rights groups, suburban moms, and privacy nerds, left, right, far-left, far-right, and center.

It’s a strange coalition. Good. Democracy is supposed to look strange.

Citizens discover their government bought something that threatens their freedom. They organize. They show up. They complain. They make elected officials uncomfortable. Sometimes they win.

That’s the damn point. Flock’s only defenders? Cops and Fox News.

But the most corrosive part is local law enforcement. When a citizen stands up at city hall and questions the cameras, the person defending Flock often isn’t a Flock employee. It’s her police chief. Usually he means it.

“The system solves cases.” “What are you, pro-criminal?” “If you’re not committing a crime, you have nothing to worry about.”

I’m sure it does solve cases. So what? Crime was at 100-year lows before Flock.

Nobody is arguing that surveillance technology never catches criminals. East Germany’s Stasi caught criminals too. That was not the central problem with East Germany.

The question is what happens when the people operating it stop being the people you trust, because police chiefs change. Sheriffs change. Governors change. Presidents change. Emergencies happen. Panics happen. Political crusades happen.

Databases remain.

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And if Flock disappeared tomorrow, the architecture wouldn’t.

Flock is just one company in the Hate Machine’s surveillance architecture.

The DRNsights Platform merges other license plate reader data from cameras and police cars into a single searchable database. Mike Flynn’s local private detectives used it to stalk us during his lawsuit against me.

Axon, the makers of the famous cop body cameras, are in the same business as Flock. Motorola Solutions owns Vigilant, whose plate database ICE has contracted to access for tens of millions of dollars. Vigilant data has flowed into Palantir systems and commercial data-broker platforms. Motorola faces California class actions alleging its network illegally shared drivers’ location information with federal and out-of-state agencies. Chico, California is investigating its own police department for sharing Motorola plate data with ICE and Border Patrol.

Then there’s Leonardo and its ELSAG plate readers. Leonardo isn’t some hoodie-wearing Atlanta startup talking about safer communities. It’s a multibillion-dollar Italian defense conglomerate.

Its SignalTrace product adds sensors to plate readers that can detect Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID signals from devices inside passing cars, allowing the system to associate the vehicle with the phone, earbuds, watch, and other electronics traveling inside it.

Oh, great. Nothing could possibly go wrong. The devices aren’t just a camera stopping at your bumper anymore. It’s reaching into your pocket.

Remember, Stephen Miller runs the system at the top of the pyramid of all this tech. It’s being built out by the Thiels and Ellisons of this world.

And every soothing argument about license plates being “public information” becomes bullshit the second your plate becomes the join key connecting your car to the rest of your digital life.

There’s a conservative argument against this so obvious you could print it on a fucking bumper sticker: Government power is dangerous.

Flock puts itself above the rule of law. Warrants matter. Privacy matters.

The government shouldn’t know where innocent citizens go just because Silicon Valley made it cheap to know. Turns out the government doesn’t even have to build the surveillance state anymore. Venture capital will do it for them. Then they’ll sell it to your sheriff, to advertisers, and to political parties.

No Congress voted for this. No state legislature designed it. No national debate authorized it.

It was assembled contract by contract, city by city, at the level of government with the least scrutiny, the smallest press corps, and the fewest lawyers. Which is precisely how you’d build something like this if you didn’t want a debate.

So I don’t particularly care whether Garrett Langley is a good man who has learned a lot over the last nine years. He’s not. There’s a creepy techbro tism about his presentation that should ring every alarm bell in your head.

This decade has produced a plague of tech founders so mesmerized by what they can build that whether they should build it is apparently a question for the rest of us. Flock will not change. It will hire more PR goons and more lobbyists, but the Panopticon Garrett Langley is building won’t be stopped unless we stop it.

So go to the city council meeting.

They are counting on you staying home.

They’ve hired some very expensive people to help make sure that when you do show up, you feel outnumbered.

Fuck that.

Show up anyway.

Flock is a danger to your liberty, and the creativity of citizen deactivation of Flock cameras is rising by the day. Local leaders are hearing it, loud and clear: Flock’s spy system must die, either by voting to shut it down or to the sound of reciprocating saws in the night.

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Inside

The Coward and The Catering Truck
The Wrecking Ball Comes for The Midterms
Hasan Piker
How Can It Be Worse Than Interns?
Does This Explain Stephen Miller
Don’t Play With Ukraine, Part 4617
Dark Oxygen

The Big Picture

The Coward And The Catering Truck
The Link: Trump Said to Have Secretly Used Military Jet to Leave Turkey Amid Threats
The Link: The Five Scandals Within the “Air Force One” Scandal

Garrett Graff’s excellent Doomsday Scenario Substack (linked above) has the single best rundown of the Qatari jet scandals from top to bottom, and I strongly recommend reading it to get more clarity on why this story is beyond just a single Trump scandal du jour.

American history has given us many undignified presidential moments.

Ford and the stairs. Carter and the rabbit. Bush the Elder and the Japanese prime minister’s lap.

None of them come within a country mile of what the Washington Post dropped this week, which is the President of the United States climbing the stairs of Air Force One in Ankara, walking straight through the cabin, and being lowered out the far side on a catering truck like a pallet of indifferent airline catering.

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Karoline Leavitt is out.

The most reprehensibly dishonest, vile, and morally bankrupt Trump-era skell to ever open the festering sewage hole of her foul mouth to vomit lies, conspiracies, and contempt on the American press and people is leaving the role of White House Press Secretary.

Let me start by saying that the claim that she’s been ousted as Press Secretary isn’t even slightly believable at all. I mean, really…“I want to spend more time with the kids” is at the top of the scale of lies people tell when they’ve been kicked off the sled and left for the ravening wolves.

We’d heard she was on the way out, but something kicked this off, either on her side or Trump’s.

It might have been the fact that she was left to die on the Death Force One when Trump and his throuple of Natalie Harp and Walt Nauda abandoned her, or it could have been the standard sort of White House backstabbing that got her pushed out, but there’s a strong smell about the “more time with the kids” excuse. It’s the smell of

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This is the first of the speeches from our recent trip to England! Enjoy!

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Let’s start with the amusing and delicious loss of Mike Lindell.

Lindell (R-Batshit Junction) lost the Republican primary for governor in Minnesota by 11 points and by 45,000 votes. Before the results had been fully counted, he was on his own network refusing to admit defeat, talking about the irregularities in the voting and promising that his supporters would stay up all night checking the figures.

When asked if an AP statement would settle the matter, he replied, “Why on earth would I take the AP’s word for it?” Clearly, we ought to wait for the result from the CyberNinjas or some other section of the Election-Denial-Industrial Complex. As Corey Lewandowski, the political philosopher, put it, “Womp womp.”

Campaign war rooms have a certain atmosphere. There’s always a point at about 10:30 when either a bright intern, an experienced political insider, or the candidate’s brother-in-law begins to work out the numbers for the remaining precincts, and the room falls silent since everybody already knows.

Lindell built a second career after his pillow business out of never having that moment. The man who spent six years insisting American elections are stolen by foreign software and bamboo-paper-infused ballots has concluded that the rational target of this evil global electoral cabal was a low-turnout August primary in Minnesota. Well, clearly.

He was defeated by the Republican Lisa Demuth, who won the election through the use of money, discipline, and the inventive campaign trick of not being freaking Mike Lindell.

Trump endorsed him, and not casually: the “complete and total” came in July, then a primary-morning post that “Mike Lindell deserves a BIG WIN IN MINNESOTA today.” Lindell got 32 percent.

Last Thursday, Andy Ogles, who on the third day of Trump’s second term filed a constitutional amendment to hand him a third one, lost his Tennessee primary by six and a half points to a former state agriculture commissioner. Two days before that, Trump’s pick in Michigan’s Eighth lost to a man who had suspended his own campaign. Trump’s endorsement is a depreciating asset.

Certainly, Tom Tiffany secured the Republican nomination in Wisconsin with Trump’s support behind him. The endorsement isn’t a crane, it’s a floor and it won’t lift a madman pillow seller or most of the other debris in the MAGA Republican Party above a decent candidate.

A Word From Our Sponsor — And Watch How These Results Actually Get Covered This Morning

Small experiment before we keep going. Open Fox News right now. Then Newsmax. Then the Daily Wire. Count the mentions of Mike Lindell, Andy Ogles, and Michigan’s Eighth.

I’ll save you the suspense. You will find approximately zero, and any coverage that does exist will be a soft paragraph about “grassroots enthusiasm” that carefully forgets to mention the eleven-point margin. Because on the half of the American media ecosystem where Trump’s endorsement is treated as a divine mandate, a story about Trump’s endorsement becoming a depreciating asset does not exist. It is being professionally, deliberately, in-real-time disappeared.

This is exactly why I read Ground News every single morning before I write a word.

Ground News pulls the same news event together from across the political spectrum — left, center, right, foreign press — and lays it out side by side. Who is covering it. Who is not. How they are framing it. What facts each outlet is leaving on the cutting room floor.

Their Blindspot feature is the killer app. It surfaces the stories one half of the political media is essentially refusing to cover. The Trump-endorsement losing streak. The Renee Good and Alex Pretti murders in Minneapolis and the fact that no one has been charged. The DSA framing wars, where both sides need a threat that doesn’t quite exist for opposite reasons. The Byron Donalds versus Jay Collins knife fight brewing in Florida. You can see, in cold clean visualizations, exactly which outlets are silent and which are screaming.

For a recovering Republican strategist who used to build the exact message-discipline machine that’s now burying the Lindell result — and who now spends his days dismantling the disinformation apparatus I helped construct — Ground News is not a luxury. It is a defense system. It is how I make sure the numbers I’m writing about are the actual numbers, and that I’m not being played by the outlet that told them to me first.

Substack subscribers get 40% off the Vantage plan right here.

If you want to know what really happened last night, and last week, and next Tuesday in Florida, the first step is to escape the newsroom that’s decided in advance what you’re going to be told.

Now, back to the numbers.

Now, on the other side of the political fence, we saw what I’ve been telling donors, activists, and candidates about for months now: the words “DSA” are the same as a Trump endorsement for a GOP candidate: nice in the right places, but the candidate’s quality and their campaign still come first.

In the race, which wasn’t announced until 2:30 a.m., David Crowley won by a margin of 39.8 to 39.4 after 28,000 people from Milwaukee had arrived late. Having withdrawn from the race a month before, Crowley had then reentered it with Tony Evers supporting him, while Hong, who was supported by the Madison and Milwaukee DSA chapters, had led the Marquette poll by double digits in July.

Hong’s record included calls to defund the police, to abolish prisons, and, memorably, to do away with Thanksgiving. She walked some of it back, rather clumsily and with a clear eye over her left shoulder.

It wouldn’t have mattered. I could cut those spots before tiffin with a junior editor and a laugh, and Tiffany’s people would have done the same.

The rising DSA tide exists mainly in the minds of the two factions who need it to. The right needs an imaginary socialist menace, the far left needs a vanguard, and what exists is bespoke and geographic, requiring young, dense, credentialed electorates. Mamdani had that in New York.

El-Sayed had had enough of it in Michigan last week, in addition to being a talented campaigner. Hong didn’t have it statewide in Wisconsin, which was supposed to be the proof-of-concept in a purple state.

Minnesota says nothing about anywhere else. Peggy Flanagan won against Angie Craig by 59 to 40 and is truly and without apology a progressive. Yet she is not a democratic socialist, and that state isn’t a laboratory.

Between the DFL’s century of prairie populism and this year’s trauma, none of it transfers to other states. Renee Good was shot dead by an ICE officer at a Minneapolis traffic stop on January 7. Federal agents murdered Alex Pretti at a protest two miles away on January 24. Both were citizens. Nobody has been charged. Minnesota, rightly, is not going to forget this.

Flanagan wants ICE torn down to the studs. Craig voted for the Laken Riley Act and a resolution thanking ICE agents. That’s not a policy disagreement in Minnesota this year. It’s a third rail, and Craig put her hand in it.

Unrelated to last night but too rich to skip: AOC, clearly beginning her 2028 campaign for President (she ought to run for Senate, but who am I to say?), went on This Week and said “Woke 1 was crazy” as the official explanation for 2020.

In 2024, Harris ran that play, distancing herself from the loudest and weirdest niches of The Valley of Woke, Where Democrats Go To Die, and Trump’s people spent nine figures reminding voters otherwise. The most prominent democratic socialist in America is doing message triage in August of a midterm year, which tells you how the internals on wokeness look with most American voters.

Florida votes next Tuesday. Byron Donalds carries Trump’s endorsement against Jay Collins, who carries DeSantis’s machine, and is widely expected to win. Ashley Moody is effectively unopposed, with Alex Vindman and Angie Nixon scrapping over the Democratic nod. Alex should, and will, win. He’s running the right campaign, tying Moody to Trump and Tallahassee’s lavish corruption. He’s a decorated and respected veteran in a state with the highest percentage of military and retired military voters. He’s raised the money, and if you can’t raise the money in Florida, no amount of grassroots handwavium will bring victory.

For you Nixon fans, the DSA flavor in the great state of Florida is generally unwelcome even among Democratic voters. That’s not an ideological judgment on my part, but rather a political one. Florida Democrats are, on an aggregate statewide basis, more center-left than far-left, particularly the large block of African-American voters north of I-4, and many Hispanic and Caribbean voters in South Florida.

The DSA’s positions on Israel are political poison in Florida. They’re not scanned as anti-Bibi or anti-genocide but anti-Israel. Fight me on it all you like, but I know my state.

Next, 8-10% of Florida’s Democratic voters are Jewish, and in the three big South Florida Democratic stronghold counties of Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach, their turnout is decisive and sky-high. You do the math.

In the Democratic Governor’s primary, David Jolly is set to win by miles. He continues to build the best statewide Democratic campaign in generations alongside his running mate, Gren Graham. (Disclosure: both are friends, and I’m creating ads for a pro-Jolly/Graham Florida SuperPAC against Byron Donalds.)

The lesson of last night, and it’s one that I’ve repeated for several decades now, is that candidate quality matters most.

Candidate fit-to-district is a very close second. Don’t run a DSA candidate in a red state, no matter how good that makes you feel. If I were advising the GOP still, the lesson would be “Don’t run a rabid MAGA screamer in a blue state or district, not that the MAGA GOP has anything left but rabid MAGA screamers.

Primary season is coming to a close. The final sprint is before us. The landscape remains strongly favorable for big Democratic wins, as long as they stick to the message of economic affordability and ending the corruption that’s causing it. They win as long as they stick to their guns on tying MAGA candidates to Trump and his deeply, wildly unpopular positions.

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Your airline seat is narrower than it was ten years ago, and you paid extra for it. Your insurance company denied the claim through a system designed so that appealing it takes more days than the cancer patient has left without treatment. Your groceries come in a smaller box at a higher price. The brand you love was bought out by private equity and cheapened, a logo stuck on something made in a Chinese slave factory.

The app that used to just work now wants a subscription. The doctor gets four minutes. The customer service line is a machine that says it understands, then hangs up. The hotel charges a resort fee for a resort that doesn’t exist. Every institution you interact with has quietly discovered that it can degrade the thing it sells you and lose almost nothing, because where exactly are you going to go?

Cory Doctorow named this process enshittification, and the word went viral because everyone in America recognized their own life in it.

They’re good to you at first, because they need you. Worse once you’re stuck. Worse still once being stuck is the entire business model. He was describing tech platforms, but the idea scales to the whole country.

This piece is bleak, even for me, because thus far there’s no immmediate cure for enshittification.

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The New Wig
Honorless Men
The Loneliness of the MAGA Boomer
Katie Phang Is A Hero
2026: Bastard Child of 2018 and 2006
AI Escape Artists
Commies Everywhere!
Scenes From Home and Abroad
SO many photos!

The Big Picture

Honorless Men

Honor is out of fashion in this age of decline.

The simple definition—the one that has any meaning in real political practice—is in fact much more difficult.

Honor is doing the right thing when it costs you.

A vote which involves no cost is not true courage, and a statement of concern with no risk involved is not actually a stand; the only test that has ever been important in this field is what a man does when acting rightly has a price attached, when that price is real, and he pays it anyway.

That leads me to John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, who this week had to go through that test with the price fixed at about zero and still folded.

Neither man is running for reelection. Neither needs Donald Trump’s endorsement, his money, his Truth Social benediction, or his forbearance.

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That is the entire story of Max Miller when you get rid of the livestreams and the Dropbox weirdness, and the horror of a man who, by multiple accounts, has a violent and unstable personality disorder that put his wife and child in danger.

According to Ohio law, Miller has to remove his name from the November ballot by 4 p.m. today if his party is to initiate the procedure to replace him; there is a second, more limited option available on the 10th, but, in practice, today is the day.

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He has, of course, taken the MAGA lesson of “never apologize, never admit wrongdoing, and blame the victim” to its logical end and declined to step down.

While any man of honor would withdraw, he is clearly not one.

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No, I’m telling you this as a man who has commissioned millions of dollars in polling over a 40-year run in politics and corporate communications.

When I tell you America hates him, I’m telling you this as a man who spent a lifetime studying public opinion to shape political and strategic messaging.

I spent decades in the business of reading polls the way a surgeon reads an X-ray, and I’m going to tell you what the July numbers actually say, without the mush-mouthed hedging of cable-news panelists who need Trump to stay competitive and keep praying for some deus ex douchebag move that keeps the show going.

America hates Donald Trump.

Not “disapproves of.” Not “has concerns about.”

Hates.

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