David Ellison and Bari Weiss will soon control CNN, which means that Donald Trump’s partners and allies will directly control Fox News, CBS News, CNN, Time, The Washington Post, and hundreds more stations.
This country has a lot of serfs who vote and bring down the rest of us. We only have 100 Senators and a majority of women voters in Tennessee elected Marsha Blackburn after she opposed a federal law to protect women from domestic violence. Exit polling showed they knew what they were electing. Let that sink in.
Spent 14 years at CNN until 2001. It was hardly perfect back then, but it strived to hold accountability to power. For example, they wouldn't even consider giving someone like Scott Jennings the time of day. Now, as more and more boxes are checked off on project 2025, I cannot fathom what it will look like under the management of Paramount.
Though the MAGA takeover of MSM is ongoing, somehow the truth can be discerned by carefully considering what we read. The following sentence appeared in an AP article in my local paper today ("Outgunned Iran could still inflict pain in a war" Daily Gazette, 2/27/26, p. A7):
"After Trump scrapped a 2015 nuclear agreement, Iran ramped up its enrichment of uranium, building up a stock of near-nuclear-weapons grade material."
What the article fails to point out is that the world was much safer as a result of the diplomatic approach of the Obama administration and that the unilateral, belligerent, and vindictive Trump foreign policy has made the world far more dangerous.
Ah yes, Trump’s new gilded age. What we often remember from the gilded age was the rise of an oligarchy that amassed incredible wealth from the post civil-war industrial age. What we sometimes forget is the massive exploitation of labor (yes, even children) to feed the fires of industry. We also forget the recurring “panics” that shook the worldwide economy. Both the exploitation of workers and the greed of the insanely rich contributed to the economic instability.
Now we are seeing history rhyme yet again. Instead of living under the tyranny of industrial oligarchs, our new overlords made their fortunes by exploiting and garnering the lion’s share of wealth created by the Information Age. Same result as before…concentration of vulgar amounts of wealth and power in the hands of a few, with the predictable consequences for the world.
Pray you are right, Steve. Fear you are not, at least in what is left of my 72 year old life. People are bizarre and brainwashed cult members, ranting about illegal immigrants, our “Christian” country, woke, DEI and the war on white people, etc. ( at least 77 million of those as far as I am concerned). Trump showed who he is, was and always will be 10 years ago, and they voted for him 3 times, even after seeing his unrivaled corruption, vulgarity, perversity, stupidity and insanity for TEN years. Despite the uniquely and obviously disgusting leader that is DJT, then we also still have another 77 million or so who are willfully, stupefyingly ignorant and clueless and/or think this is all business as usual, just “politics,” both sides are bad, etc. We are committing national suicide as we speak.
I see this EVERY SINGLE DAY. Only maybe 1/3 to 40% of us see all this for the insanity and disaster it clearly and frighteningly is. I early voted today in Central Texas. I voted in the D primary of course, as I will never vote for an R again, ever. I did sometimes before, especially with no alternatives here. But Stuart Stevens is right. It was all a lie, and it started with maybe Nixon and certainly Reagan. The racism and hatred of government that helps anyone except the billionaires has finally fully matured under Trump. Aren’t we lucky?
Watching the poll workers and certainly the voters and the politicians outside on the streets this morning I know I am right. I see it in my church, my acquaintances, my world. Reading what “normal” people post on social media is frightening and truly INSANE. It seems NO ONE comprehends that we are living in an evil country, with evil leaders. They believe the exact opposite. That word evil is the only word to describe all this happening HERE, not in Nazi Germany or some other place. It DID happen here…
I pray you and people like you can shake us from our stupor and slumber. I fear not. The disinformation, the delusion, the gaslighting, the lies, are SO wide and SO deep. Truth, Justice and the American Way is now a fantasy. Pray I am proved 100% wrong on that.
Thank you Rick for your spot on analysis. At 81 in NYC you have expressed my concerns and fears that America is lost and sadly evil. The dumbing down since st least Reagan’s years has paid off for the oligarchs and dictator wanna he’s.
Peter Thiel observes that “capitalism and democracy are incompatible”. No shit. We’re watching unregulated capitalism destroy our democracy bit by bit, every day. Establishment Democrats and their overpaid consultants are only fractionally less destructive than Repugnicans; they compulsively attempt to undermine every real Democrat who comes along. We leftists need to throw the jokers out of our deck and dedicate ourselves to rebuilding democracy. That’ll have to include some energetic trust-busting, along with ensuring that everyone pay their fair share.
This is truly a nightmare scenario come to life. My question is, will a new Congress actually work to break up these monopolies, or will they waste air time drivelling on about cost of living (which they have little to no.power to control) and "kitchen table issues" which are an insipid Democratic talking point in a time of rising fascism? And, more importantly, what flat nose shovel will be used to hit the American voter upside the head to wake up this ignorant, apathetic electorate???
If a new Congress ignores the cost of living, even as we are in dire peril of losing our beloved liberal Democracy, then they won't win a second election. Too much has to be done too quickly, I fear. There is no time to waste. If we get a chance to redeem all the wrongs, we have to have an all encompassing plan -- our own Project to Right the Ship.
I appreciate the comment, Josette. You raise a good point. My feelings are that Congress does not have the power to lower prices on everyday items, and when they tell us they can or they will, they are in essence pandering to us, only to let us down time and time again. None of this will matter if our democracy is lost. I wholeheartedly agree with you that we need a serious Project of our own to start the repair work. Hopefully the right leaders will emerge to lead us out of this horror. Thank you again for your thoughts.
The concept of "broadcast journalism" has lost any presumption of "truth-telling." This turn of events has been coming on for a while -- the impending takeover of CNN is just the latest and perhaps clearest undoing. Some of us remember when Ted Turner conceived of, and launched, a 24-hour news channel in 1980 -- a "Cable News Network" that took cable broadcasting out of the realm of local programming and made it a serious medium. Who didn't watch Aaron Brown on CNN for 24 hours straight when 9/11 happened? By 2001 CNN had become essential to many viewers in its depth and breadth of coverage. When the history of our times, and the demise of broadcast journalism, is written, perhaps it will be observed that 9/11 was CNN's finest hour -- not that it hasn't been home to noteworthy journalists in the years since, but that it would become, by 2026, less a trusted news source than a fragmented effort at touching upon the hot button stories in three to five minute segments. If anyone's paying attention, MSNBC is probably on the same kind of trajectory -- formed in 1996 as a 24-hour news channel to compete with CNN, only to find itself "spun off" by Comcast/NBC in 2025. The future of fearless journalism is not in the big networks or the legacy newspapers. The Ellisons and their corrupt billionaire compatriots are making sure that network broadcasting and journalism have nothing in common. Steve is right -- it is imperative that we support independent journalism. You may not like some of the hyperbole or edginess or editorial sloppiness, but keep reading and supporting the efforts. Substantively this is where those who thirst for truth and set high ethical standards for themselves as investigators and analysts and truth-tellers are most likely to be found.
I stopped watching CNN years ago, network news as well, I never watch FUX news, ever. If we don’t watch, they can’t bill for advertising, and they will start the long slide. I worked in the motion picture industry for over 30 years, when everyone went to the movies, those days are gone, when was the last time you actually went out to a movie, how many times did you do that last year? Motion Pictures were a huge window into our culture all over the world, Spider-Man may make a lot of money for a select few but it’s no window into America. I watch MS NOW because they are the last of their breed that speaks truth to power, they shout it in fact, I wish they were more interactive. I still read the NYT, but nowhere near as much as I used to. Substack offers an interactive forum which I find attractive, but most people don’t care to be actively engaged. I think MSM is dying, maybe not real fast, but that is the trend, we still have books and at near 80 I love to read, because it makes me think, I can reread a paragraph to really savor the author’s meaning, and I can most certainly rewind my TV to suss out meaning, but it’s different. If we can block the merger I think we should, otherwise act as if the channels don’t exist, if enough of us do that, they won’t. 🙏
While I wrote from a slightly different perspective, I am entirely in agreement wih your comment on mine, particularly your observation about ad revenue (I would have noted this observation about MS NOW -- it's being allow to "wither on the vine" with no apparent effort or success at generating ad revenue since it was spun off -- how many times a day are they running the same half-dozen PSAs?). I do watch MS NOW's "opinion" programming regularly, and I respect the intelligence and the efforts of its individual, long-term anchors/hosts to "speak truth to power" as you say (although the trio/quartet gab-fests are so lightweight and self-indulgent as to be embarrassing, and ditto for "reporting" during the day that zeros right in on the sensational aspects of every story). I agree also with your comments about reading and re-reading to "savor the author's meaning." A teacher once advised my high school "advanced" English class that to become a good writer, one must read a lot, all the time. I took the admonition to heart, but only later realized what he was advising -- that one becomes a good writer by reading consciously for the writing more than for the story -- learning from authors famous and not by studying their sentence structures, grammar and usage, choices of adjectives and adverbs, what works and what doesn't, etc. That kind of approach to reading and writing just isn't taught any longer, so Substack is, in some sense, an exercise in letting go of "form over substance," although I will persist in reading actively and writing well according to the rules of grammar because, at least for now, both still matter to the quality of the content one produces.
"Steve is right -- it is imperative that we support independent journalism."
Maybe it's time for some of us to drag that old IBM Selectric out of the attic and start writing broadsheets. Distribute them hand to hand in public ~or~ in secret if they become too "hot" (like TFG's America).
Go for it! I don't have an IBM Selectric (which I associate with offices in which I worked during the 1970s, before stand-alone "word processors" with large floppy disks became available in the early 1980s). However, I bought my first and only "portable" electric typewriter in the early 1970s -- a Smith-Corona that is still in my possession, although surely not in working condition after decades of languishing in the garage. "Portable" is a relative term -- it's so heavy I can barely lift it with two hands.
Here's what I wrote to my Senator already this morning. It is obscene and intolerable. We need as many law suits as possible to gum this up until legislators and our democracy can fucking catch up:
Senator,
What is your position on the purchase of Warner Brothers by Paramount? Should CNN and CBS News be owned by the same company? Should Paramount Studios and Warner Brothers Studios? Should any one company own so many streaming and broadcast avenues to the public? Of course not!
There were stricter limits on broadcast and print ownership when you and I were growing up, all in the public interest. This concentration of broadcast and messaging capability under single ownership is not in the public interest and will further coarsen our political engagement, and therefore our democracy, and will lead to higher prices and fewer choices for what we watch, read and listen to.
Media is big, and I mean BIG, business that runs counter to the needs of us, the people. Please begin the process of thoughtful legislation that protects the public interest in this age of 24/7 broadcast and data deluges for the benefit of the extreme few and at the expense of us, the masses. And put a hold on this purchase for now, until our representatives can confer.
We are all monetarily and propagandizedly vulnerable to so much messaging in so few hands. Teddy Roosevelt knew to break up trusts that threatened the most while serving only the very few. Do any of you?
Economic populism. How does that translate as the "undeserving" being greedy? That's the lie being pressed since Reagan. Time to give the oligarchs a taste of their own medicine.
Look up "GINI Index." It will tell you that it's a measure of economic inequality among the 200+ nations in the world. The Scandinavian nations,of course, are on top in terms of economic equality. The United States? It, of course, is near the bottom, next to Papua New Guinea.
I lived in Papua New Guinea for 8 years when CNN was the only international news so I guess we deserve congratulations for reaching the information bottom.
Thank You Steve..To say this is unbearable would be an understatement . I love that your pieces are filled with hope, that we the American people will not let this stand. You write that we we will win the election in 2026 and things will get smashed . Your descriptions in some of your posts of how the ballroom and all the Trump shit will be torn down can make my heart soar. For today I am terribly afraid that this will not happen. I don't want to see the democrats fighting among themselves . So far I haven't . I want them to be pragmatic in these red states and bring the republican voters into the fold. These are my fears .. lost in america
Today Claude said this about its own Anthropic, The ICE/immigration enforcement context matters. The current administration has been conducting highly visible, large-scale immigration enforcement operations. Several tech companies — most notably Palantir itself — have faced significant backlash for providing data infrastructure that supports ICE operations. Employees at multiple tech firms have protested, resigned, or publicly criticized their companies for this work. Anthropic is aware of this environment.
The specific red line Anthropic drew — no mass domestic surveillance of American citizens — maps almost perfectly onto the kind of work ICE and DHS have been doing: scraping databases, tracking locations, building profiles on people inside the U.S. So it’s hard to read that restriction as anything other than a deliberate hedge against being swept into immigration enforcement.
The employee factor is real. The Pentagon crisis was actually triggered by an Anthropic employee raising concerns about Claude’s use in a military operation. This tells you something important about Anthropic’s internal culture — it has employees who are watching and willing to speak up. That’s very different from Palantir’s culture. Anthropic’s leadership knows that crossing certain lines would cause serious internal revolt and reputational damage in the AI research community, where talent recruitment depends heavily on the company’s ethical image.
The broader reputational calculation. Anthropic competes with OpenAI and Google for top AI researchers, many of whom are idealistic about AI safety. If Anthropic becomes associated with surveillance infrastructure or autonomous weapons, it risks losing the thing that makes it distinctive — its credibility as the “responsible” AI lab. That’s not just ethics, it’s a business strategy.
What’s probably not the main driver is pure PR fear. Dario Amodei’s public response to the Pentagon’s threats was notably firm and didn’t read like someone trying to protect a brand — it read more like a genuine values statement. The more likely truth is that it’s a mix: real ethical conviction from the founders, combined with a very clear-eyed awareness that their company’s identity and talent pipeline depend on not becoming the next cautionary tale about tech enabling government overreach.
So to directly answer your question — the bad optics around ICE, surveillance, and this administration’s domestic enforcement agenda almost certainly informed which specific guardrails Anthropic chose to insist on. It’s not the whole story, but it’s probably not a coincidence either.“
The George Orwell 1984 playbook is alive and well in America.
This country has a lot of serfs who vote and bring down the rest of us. We only have 100 Senators and a majority of women voters in Tennessee elected Marsha Blackburn after she opposed a federal law to protect women from domestic violence. Exit polling showed they knew what they were electing. Let that sink in.
Omg. In full awareness and agreement?
Apparently yes. As to their reasoning, only they can answer that. The entire country suffers when people like her are in the Senate.
Spent 14 years at CNN until 2001. It was hardly perfect back then, but it strived to hold accountability to power. For example, they wouldn't even consider giving someone like Scott Jennings the time of day. Now, as more and more boxes are checked off on project 2025, I cannot fathom what it will look like under the management of Paramount.
Though the MAGA takeover of MSM is ongoing, somehow the truth can be discerned by carefully considering what we read. The following sentence appeared in an AP article in my local paper today ("Outgunned Iran could still inflict pain in a war" Daily Gazette, 2/27/26, p. A7):
"After Trump scrapped a 2015 nuclear agreement, Iran ramped up its enrichment of uranium, building up a stock of near-nuclear-weapons grade material."
What the article fails to point out is that the world was much safer as a result of the diplomatic approach of the Obama administration and that the unilateral, belligerent, and vindictive Trump foreign policy has made the world far more dangerous.
Ah yes, Trump’s new gilded age. What we often remember from the gilded age was the rise of an oligarchy that amassed incredible wealth from the post civil-war industrial age. What we sometimes forget is the massive exploitation of labor (yes, even children) to feed the fires of industry. We also forget the recurring “panics” that shook the worldwide economy. Both the exploitation of workers and the greed of the insanely rich contributed to the economic instability.
Now we are seeing history rhyme yet again. Instead of living under the tyranny of industrial oligarchs, our new overlords made their fortunes by exploiting and garnering the lion’s share of wealth created by the Information Age. Same result as before…concentration of vulgar amounts of wealth and power in the hands of a few, with the predictable consequences for the world.
Thank you Steve! "You tell it like it is." Its stunning what you have pointed out today.
1984 is here.
Pray you are right, Steve. Fear you are not, at least in what is left of my 72 year old life. People are bizarre and brainwashed cult members, ranting about illegal immigrants, our “Christian” country, woke, DEI and the war on white people, etc. ( at least 77 million of those as far as I am concerned). Trump showed who he is, was and always will be 10 years ago, and they voted for him 3 times, even after seeing his unrivaled corruption, vulgarity, perversity, stupidity and insanity for TEN years. Despite the uniquely and obviously disgusting leader that is DJT, then we also still have another 77 million or so who are willfully, stupefyingly ignorant and clueless and/or think this is all business as usual, just “politics,” both sides are bad, etc. We are committing national suicide as we speak.
I see this EVERY SINGLE DAY. Only maybe 1/3 to 40% of us see all this for the insanity and disaster it clearly and frighteningly is. I early voted today in Central Texas. I voted in the D primary of course, as I will never vote for an R again, ever. I did sometimes before, especially with no alternatives here. But Stuart Stevens is right. It was all a lie, and it started with maybe Nixon and certainly Reagan. The racism and hatred of government that helps anyone except the billionaires has finally fully matured under Trump. Aren’t we lucky?
Watching the poll workers and certainly the voters and the politicians outside on the streets this morning I know I am right. I see it in my church, my acquaintances, my world. Reading what “normal” people post on social media is frightening and truly INSANE. It seems NO ONE comprehends that we are living in an evil country, with evil leaders. They believe the exact opposite. That word evil is the only word to describe all this happening HERE, not in Nazi Germany or some other place. It DID happen here…
I pray you and people like you can shake us from our stupor and slumber. I fear not. The disinformation, the delusion, the gaslighting, the lies, are SO wide and SO deep. Truth, Justice and the American Way is now a fantasy. Pray I am proved 100% wrong on that.
Thank you Rick for your spot on analysis. At 81 in NYC you have expressed my concerns and fears that America is lost and sadly evil. The dumbing down since st least Reagan’s years has paid off for the oligarchs and dictator wanna he’s.
Peter Thiel observes that “capitalism and democracy are incompatible”. No shit. We’re watching unregulated capitalism destroy our democracy bit by bit, every day. Establishment Democrats and their overpaid consultants are only fractionally less destructive than Repugnicans; they compulsively attempt to undermine every real Democrat who comes along. We leftists need to throw the jokers out of our deck and dedicate ourselves to rebuilding democracy. That’ll have to include some energetic trust-busting, along with ensuring that everyone pay their fair share.
It is terrifying how many billionaires have irrevocably
staked their personal wealth and freedom on Trump remaining President indefinitely.
This is truly a nightmare scenario come to life. My question is, will a new Congress actually work to break up these monopolies, or will they waste air time drivelling on about cost of living (which they have little to no.power to control) and "kitchen table issues" which are an insipid Democratic talking point in a time of rising fascism? And, more importantly, what flat nose shovel will be used to hit the American voter upside the head to wake up this ignorant, apathetic electorate???
If a new Congress ignores the cost of living, even as we are in dire peril of losing our beloved liberal Democracy, then they won't win a second election. Too much has to be done too quickly, I fear. There is no time to waste. If we get a chance to redeem all the wrongs, we have to have an all encompassing plan -- our own Project to Right the Ship.
I appreciate the comment, Josette. You raise a good point. My feelings are that Congress does not have the power to lower prices on everyday items, and when they tell us they can or they will, they are in essence pandering to us, only to let us down time and time again. None of this will matter if our democracy is lost. I wholeheartedly agree with you that we need a serious Project of our own to start the repair work. Hopefully the right leaders will emerge to lead us out of this horror. Thank you again for your thoughts.
The concept of "broadcast journalism" has lost any presumption of "truth-telling." This turn of events has been coming on for a while -- the impending takeover of CNN is just the latest and perhaps clearest undoing. Some of us remember when Ted Turner conceived of, and launched, a 24-hour news channel in 1980 -- a "Cable News Network" that took cable broadcasting out of the realm of local programming and made it a serious medium. Who didn't watch Aaron Brown on CNN for 24 hours straight when 9/11 happened? By 2001 CNN had become essential to many viewers in its depth and breadth of coverage. When the history of our times, and the demise of broadcast journalism, is written, perhaps it will be observed that 9/11 was CNN's finest hour -- not that it hasn't been home to noteworthy journalists in the years since, but that it would become, by 2026, less a trusted news source than a fragmented effort at touching upon the hot button stories in three to five minute segments. If anyone's paying attention, MSNBC is probably on the same kind of trajectory -- formed in 1996 as a 24-hour news channel to compete with CNN, only to find itself "spun off" by Comcast/NBC in 2025. The future of fearless journalism is not in the big networks or the legacy newspapers. The Ellisons and their corrupt billionaire compatriots are making sure that network broadcasting and journalism have nothing in common. Steve is right -- it is imperative that we support independent journalism. You may not like some of the hyperbole or edginess or editorial sloppiness, but keep reading and supporting the efforts. Substantively this is where those who thirst for truth and set high ethical standards for themselves as investigators and analysts and truth-tellers are most likely to be found.
I stopped watching CNN years ago, network news as well, I never watch FUX news, ever. If we don’t watch, they can’t bill for advertising, and they will start the long slide. I worked in the motion picture industry for over 30 years, when everyone went to the movies, those days are gone, when was the last time you actually went out to a movie, how many times did you do that last year? Motion Pictures were a huge window into our culture all over the world, Spider-Man may make a lot of money for a select few but it’s no window into America. I watch MS NOW because they are the last of their breed that speaks truth to power, they shout it in fact, I wish they were more interactive. I still read the NYT, but nowhere near as much as I used to. Substack offers an interactive forum which I find attractive, but most people don’t care to be actively engaged. I think MSM is dying, maybe not real fast, but that is the trend, we still have books and at near 80 I love to read, because it makes me think, I can reread a paragraph to really savor the author’s meaning, and I can most certainly rewind my TV to suss out meaning, but it’s different. If we can block the merger I think we should, otherwise act as if the channels don’t exist, if enough of us do that, they won’t. 🙏
While I wrote from a slightly different perspective, I am entirely in agreement wih your comment on mine, particularly your observation about ad revenue (I would have noted this observation about MS NOW -- it's being allow to "wither on the vine" with no apparent effort or success at generating ad revenue since it was spun off -- how many times a day are they running the same half-dozen PSAs?). I do watch MS NOW's "opinion" programming regularly, and I respect the intelligence and the efforts of its individual, long-term anchors/hosts to "speak truth to power" as you say (although the trio/quartet gab-fests are so lightweight and self-indulgent as to be embarrassing, and ditto for "reporting" during the day that zeros right in on the sensational aspects of every story). I agree also with your comments about reading and re-reading to "savor the author's meaning." A teacher once advised my high school "advanced" English class that to become a good writer, one must read a lot, all the time. I took the admonition to heart, but only later realized what he was advising -- that one becomes a good writer by reading consciously for the writing more than for the story -- learning from authors famous and not by studying their sentence structures, grammar and usage, choices of adjectives and adverbs, what works and what doesn't, etc. That kind of approach to reading and writing just isn't taught any longer, so Substack is, in some sense, an exercise in letting go of "form over substance," although I will persist in reading actively and writing well according to the rules of grammar because, at least for now, both still matter to the quality of the content one produces.
"Steve is right -- it is imperative that we support independent journalism."
Maybe it's time for some of us to drag that old IBM Selectric out of the attic and start writing broadsheets. Distribute them hand to hand in public ~or~ in secret if they become too "hot" (like TFG's America).
I call dibs on Lo-Tech for the title of mine.
Go for it! I don't have an IBM Selectric (which I associate with offices in which I worked during the 1970s, before stand-alone "word processors" with large floppy disks became available in the early 1980s). However, I bought my first and only "portable" electric typewriter in the early 1970s -- a Smith-Corona that is still in my possession, although surely not in working condition after decades of languishing in the garage. "Portable" is a relative term -- it's so heavy I can barely lift it with two hands.
Here's what I wrote to my Senator already this morning. It is obscene and intolerable. We need as many law suits as possible to gum this up until legislators and our democracy can fucking catch up:
Senator,
What is your position on the purchase of Warner Brothers by Paramount? Should CNN and CBS News be owned by the same company? Should Paramount Studios and Warner Brothers Studios? Should any one company own so many streaming and broadcast avenues to the public? Of course not!
There were stricter limits on broadcast and print ownership when you and I were growing up, all in the public interest. This concentration of broadcast and messaging capability under single ownership is not in the public interest and will further coarsen our political engagement, and therefore our democracy, and will lead to higher prices and fewer choices for what we watch, read and listen to.
Media is big, and I mean BIG, business that runs counter to the needs of us, the people. Please begin the process of thoughtful legislation that protects the public interest in this age of 24/7 broadcast and data deluges for the benefit of the extreme few and at the expense of us, the masses. And put a hold on this purchase for now, until our representatives can confer.
We are all monetarily and propagandizedly vulnerable to so much messaging in so few hands. Teddy Roosevelt knew to break up trusts that threatened the most while serving only the very few. Do any of you?
Sincerely,
Economic populism. How does that translate as the "undeserving" being greedy? That's the lie being pressed since Reagan. Time to give the oligarchs a taste of their own medicine.
Look up "GINI Index." It will tell you that it's a measure of economic inequality among the 200+ nations in the world. The Scandinavian nations,of course, are on top in terms of economic equality. The United States? It, of course, is near the bottom, next to Papua New Guinea.
I lived in Papua New Guinea for 8 years when CNN was the only international news so I guess we deserve congratulations for reaching the information bottom.
Thank You Steve..To say this is unbearable would be an understatement . I love that your pieces are filled with hope, that we the American people will not let this stand. You write that we we will win the election in 2026 and things will get smashed . Your descriptions in some of your posts of how the ballroom and all the Trump shit will be torn down can make my heart soar. For today I am terribly afraid that this will not happen. I don't want to see the democrats fighting among themselves . So far I haven't . I want them to be pragmatic in these red states and bring the republican voters into the fold. These are my fears .. lost in america
Today Claude said this about its own Anthropic, The ICE/immigration enforcement context matters. The current administration has been conducting highly visible, large-scale immigration enforcement operations. Several tech companies — most notably Palantir itself — have faced significant backlash for providing data infrastructure that supports ICE operations. Employees at multiple tech firms have protested, resigned, or publicly criticized their companies for this work. Anthropic is aware of this environment.
The specific red line Anthropic drew — no mass domestic surveillance of American citizens — maps almost perfectly onto the kind of work ICE and DHS have been doing: scraping databases, tracking locations, building profiles on people inside the U.S. So it’s hard to read that restriction as anything other than a deliberate hedge against being swept into immigration enforcement.
The employee factor is real. The Pentagon crisis was actually triggered by an Anthropic employee raising concerns about Claude’s use in a military operation. This tells you something important about Anthropic’s internal culture — it has employees who are watching and willing to speak up. That’s very different from Palantir’s culture. Anthropic’s leadership knows that crossing certain lines would cause serious internal revolt and reputational damage in the AI research community, where talent recruitment depends heavily on the company’s ethical image.
The broader reputational calculation. Anthropic competes with OpenAI and Google for top AI researchers, many of whom are idealistic about AI safety. If Anthropic becomes associated with surveillance infrastructure or autonomous weapons, it risks losing the thing that makes it distinctive — its credibility as the “responsible” AI lab. That’s not just ethics, it’s a business strategy.
What’s probably not the main driver is pure PR fear. Dario Amodei’s public response to the Pentagon’s threats was notably firm and didn’t read like someone trying to protect a brand — it read more like a genuine values statement. The more likely truth is that it’s a mix: real ethical conviction from the founders, combined with a very clear-eyed awareness that their company’s identity and talent pipeline depend on not becoming the next cautionary tale about tech enabling government overreach.
So to directly answer your question — the bad optics around ICE, surveillance, and this administration’s domestic enforcement agenda almost certainly informed which specific guardrails Anthropic chose to insist on. It’s not the whole story, but it’s probably not a coincidence either.“