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      A Fringe Movement

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      We explain the ideology behind a recent attack.The attack on a Palm Springs, Calif., fertility clinic last week surfaced some unsettling ideas. Guy Edward Bartkus, the 25-year-old suspect, had posted an audio clip explaining why he wanted to blow up a place that makes babies. “I would be considered a pro-mortalist,” he said before detonating his Ford Fusion, killing himself and injuring four others. “Let’s make the death thing happen sooner rather than later in life.”Investigators called it “terrorism” and “nihilistic ideation.” Trump administration officials called it “anti-pro-life.”Bartkus was indeed espousing an extreme ideology. But it belongs to a larger intellectual movement, still fringe for now, that is slowly gaining adherents. My colleagues Jill Cowan, Aric Toler, Jesus Jiménez and I have spent the past week reporting on what experts call “anti-natalism.” Hundreds of thousands follow accounts and podcasts about it. It holds that procreation is immoral because the inevitability of death and suffering outweighs the odds of happiness. Today’s newsletter explains.The ideaThe calculus is ancient — to be or not to be?A South African philosopher’s 2006 treatise, “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence,” popularized the idea in its modern form. “You’re stuck between having been born, which was a harm, but also not being able to end the harm by taking your own life, because that is another kind of harm,” the author, David Benatar, told us.This perspective draws partly on utilitarianism, a discipline of philosophy that asks how to achieve the most good for the greatest number. But even there, anti-natalism is seen as marginal. Besides Benatar, “I don’t know any other philosophers who share it,” said Peter Singer, an influential utilitarian.Online, however, anxieties including climate change and artificial intelligence have given it traction — as has the yearning for connection, even among people with antisocial tendencies. Scores of anti-natalist discussion boards, influencers and podcasts now debate whether all creatures should stop reproducing, or just humans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Trump Is Immensely Vulnerable

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      How can Americans best defend their democracy from their president?In my last column, I recounted three lessons from other countries where popular movements have made headway challenging authoritarian rulers. Critics of President Trump have frankly been fairly ineffective — witness his election and the way his approval ratings have risen in some polls lately — but Trump does give us a great deal to work with. He is immensely vulnerable.Drawing upon these lessons from my last column, here are what I see as the most promising lines of attack for his critics:Trump is deeply corrupt. All presidents are accused of shady practices: Remember that President Barack Obama was said to have diminished the presidency by wearing a tan suit. But Trump is a felon who is using his office to enrich himself as no president has in history.The Times reported that more than $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies in just a month, and some of his ventures look alarmingly like opportunities for influence-peddling. How else do we explain his announcement that the biggest investors in his new cryptocurrency memecoin, $TRUMP, would get dinner with him? Some guests flew in from overseas for the dinner, held Thursday, and acknowledged earlier that they hoped to influence Trump and his administration’s policy on financial regulation.The Trump family started a different cryptocurrency outfit, World Liberty Financial, that received a $2 billion investment from the United Arab Emirates. Don Jr. is also starting a members club in Washington, with a $500,000 charge to join. And Saudi Arabia and Qatar are investing in Trump businesses, putting money in family bank accounts.Meanwhile, Trump is using the government to help his pal Elon Musk (who even knew that the world’s richest man was needy?). The White House South Lawn was turned into a temporary showroom for Tesla vehicles in March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged people to “buy Tesla” stock, and American embassies reportedly have pushed impoverished countries to grant regulatory approvals for Musk’s Starlink system.Trump is hurting you in the pocketbook. One reason Trump won the presidency was voter resentment at inflation and economic weakness under Joe Biden. Now it’s Trump who is badly damaging the economy and hitting voters in the wallet.

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    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering G.O.P. Clout Online

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      At private gatherings, strategists and donors are swapping ideas to help the party capture the digital mojo that helped President Trump win. Yes, there’s a price tag.Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.” The proposals, the scope of which has not been previously reported, are meant to energize glum donors and persuade them that they can compete culturally with President Trump — if only they can throw enough money at the problem.Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.The quiet effort amounts to an audacious — skeptics might say desperate — bet that Democrats can buy more cultural relevance online, despite the fact that casually right-leaning touchstones like Mr. Rogan’s podcast were not built by political donors and did not rise overnight.Wealthy donors tend to move in packs, and some jaded liberals worry that the excitement could cause money to flow into projects that are not fully fleshed out. They argue that the latest pitches on the left are coming from operatives who are hungry to meet donors’ demand for a shiny new object. In a break from the past, some of the Democrats’ new ventures are for-profit companies.And so far, there are still more ideas than hard, committed money: One Democratic operative described compiling a spreadsheet of 26 active projects related to creators, over a dozen of which are new since November. But a few of the efforts have ties to major donors that could give them liftoff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      The Day Grok Lost Its Mind

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      On Tuesday, someone posted a video on X of a procession of crosses, with a caption reading, “Each cross represents a white farmer who was murdered in South Africa.” Elon Musk, South African by birth, shared the post, greatly expanding its visibility. The accusation of genocide being carried out against white farmers is either a horrible moral stain or shameless alarmist disinformation, depending on whom you ask, which may be why another reader asked Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot from the Musk-founded company xAI, to weigh in. Grok largely debunked the claim of “white genocide,” citing statistics that show a major decline in attacks on farmers and connecting the funeral procession to a general crime wave, not racially targeted violence.By the next day, something had changed. Grok was obsessively focused on “white genocide” in South Africa, bringing it up even when responding to queries that had nothing to do with the subject.How much do the Toronto Blue Jays pay the team’s pitcher, Max Scherzer? Grok responded by discussing white genocide in South Africa. What’s up with this picture of a tiny dog? Again, white genocide in South Africa. Did Qatar promise to invest in the United States? There, too, Grok’s answer was about white genocide in South Africa.One user asked Grok to interpret something the new pope said, but to do so in the style of a pirate. Grok gamely obliged, starting with a fitting, “Argh, matey!” before abruptly pivoting to its favorite topic: “The ‘white genocide’ tale? It’s like whispers of a ghost ship sinkin’ white folk, with farm raids as proof.”Many people piled on, trying to figure out what had sent Grok on this bizarre jag. The answer that emerged says a lot about why A.I. is so powerful — and why it’s so disruptive.Large language models, the kind of generative A.I. that forms the basis of Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini and other chatbots, are not traditional computer programs that simply follow our instructions. They’re statistical models trained on huge amounts of data. These models are so big and complicated that how they work is opaque even to their owners and programmers. Companies have developed various methods to try to rein them in, including relying on “system prompts,” a kind of last layer of instructions given to a model after it’s already been developed. These are meant to keep the chatbots from, say, teaching people how to make meth or spewing ugly, hateful speech. But researchers consistently find that these safeguards are imperfect. If you ask the right way, you can get many chatbots to teach you how to make meth. L.L.M.s don’t always just do what they’re told.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Google Agrees to Pay $1.4 Billion to Settle 2 Privacy Lawsuits

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      The Texas attorney general brought the cases in 2022 under state laws.Google agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the State of Texas on Friday to settle two lawsuits accusing it of violating the privacy of state residents by tracking their locations and searches, as well as collecting their facial recognition information.The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who secured the settlement, brought the suits in 2022 under Texas laws related to data privacy and deceptive trade practices. Less than a year ago, he reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over allegations it had illegally tagged users’ faces on its site.Google’s settlement is the latest legal setback for the tech giant. Over the past two years, Google has lost a string of antitrust cases after being found to have a monopoly over its app store, search engine and advertising technology. It has spent the past three weeks in the search case trying to fend off a U.S. government request to break up its business.“Big Tech is not above the law,” Mr. Paxton said in a statement.José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, said the company had already changed its product policies. “This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere,” he said.Privacy issues have become a major source of tension between tech giants and regulators in recent years. In the absence of a federal privacy law, states such as Texas and Washington have passed laws to curb the collection of facial, voice and other biometric data.Google and Meta have been the highest-profile companies challenged under those laws. Texas’ law, called Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier, requires companies to ask permission before using features like facial or voice recognition technologies. The law allows the state to impose damages of up to $25,000 per violation.The lawsuit filed under that law focused on the Google Photos app, which allowed people to search for photos of a particular person; Google’s Next camera, which could send alerts when it recognized visitors at a door; and Google Assistant, a virtual assistant that could learn up to six users’ voices and answer their questions.Mr. Paxton filed a separate lawsuit that accused Google of misleading Texans by tracking their personal location data, even after they thought they had disabled that feature. He added a complaint to that suit alleging that Google’s private browsing setting, which it called Incognito mode, wasn’t actually private. Those cases were brought under Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      TikTok, Facing a U.S. Ban, Tells Advertisers: We’re Here and Confident

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      The company’s executives tried to reassure potential advertisers about the app’s future in the United States without directly addressing a looming ban under a federal law.“TikTok is here — we are here,” Khartoon Weiss, the company’s vice president of global business solutions, told a packed warehouse of advertisers on Tuesday in Manhattan.“We are absolutely confident in our platform and confident in the future of this platform,” she declared.That statement was the closest TikTok advertising executives got to addressing the app’s uncertain fate in the United States in the company’s annual spring pitch to marketers. Under a federal law and executive order, the app is set to be banned in the country next month if the Chinese owner of the company, ByteDance, does not sell it.Hundreds of representatives from companies like L’Oreal and Unilever and various ad agencies scrambled to find seats for an event hosted by the comedian Hasan Minhaj that heavily emphasized TikTok’s role as a cultural juggernaut.TikTok was more than a video platform, Mr. Minhaj told the crowd. TikTok was “the cultural moments you talk about at work, the jokes you talk about in your group chat, the language you use in your everyday life,” he said.The tone of the event marked a departure from TikTok’s presentation a year ago, when the company was smarting from the federal law that promised to ban the app in the United States because of national security concerns related to the company’s Chinese ownership. Last year’s pitch started with one of TikTok’s top executives telling roughly 300 attendees that the company would fight the law in court and prevail and was “not backing down.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Some Teen Wellness Influencers Are Embracing Views in Line With the ‘MAHA’ Movement

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      The Instagram clip starts with a warning. “If you believe ‘ignorance is bliss,’” it says, “don’t watch this video.” As an influencer slices fruit on a cutting board, a series of provocative claims descend down the screen — about what she says is actually in peanut butter, vanilla flavoring and the rain, among other things.It’s the kind of post that has become common in the online wellness world, where prominent voices often express skepticism of the establishment and an openness to conspiracy theories.But what makes this influencer unusual is her age. She’s only 17, and a high school junior.Ava Noe, a teenager based in the Boston area, has amassed more than 25,000 Instagram followers while criticizing ultra-processed foods and promoting colostrum supplements, mouth tape and beef tallow. Her posts have suggested that iodized salt is “toxic” and described fluoride as “poison.” And her popularity on the platform — where she goes by @cleanlivingwithava — has earned her a paid partnership with a fluoride-free toothpaste company and affiliate work with other brands, including one that sells “non-toxic” skin care products.Ms. Noe, a self-described “crunchy teen,” is just one of a number of young influencers who appeal to other health-conscious kids their age. At times, their anti-establishment viewpoints fall in line with those of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which has expressed skepticism of the scientific community and large food corporations.The teens’ videos, while at times factually questionable, highlight a desire among some to avoid the chronic illnesses and other conditions that have plagued their elders.Annika Zude, 16, was inspired to start her own health account on TikTok because of how bad ultra-processed foods made her feel, she said. Her father is also an online health influencer.Thalassa Raasch for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      How Google’s Antitrust Case Could Upend the A.I. Race

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      A federal judge issued a landmark ruling last year, saying that Google had become a monopolist in internet search. But in a hearing that began last week to figure out how to fix the problem, the emphasis has frequently landed on a different technology, artificial intelligence.In U.S. District Court in Washington last week, a Justice Department lawyer argued that Google could use its search monopoly to become the dominant player in A.I. Google executives disclosed internal discussions about expanding the reach of Gemini, the company’s A.I. chatbot. And executives at rival A.I. companies said that Google’s power was an obstacle to their success.On Wednesday, the first substantial question posed to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, after he took the stand was also about A.I. Throughout his 90-minute testimony, the subject came up more than two dozen times.“I think it’s one of the most dynamic moments in the industry,” said Mr. Pichai. “I’ve seen users’ home screens with, like, seven to nine applications of chatbots which they are trying and playing and training with.”An antitrust lawsuit about the past has effectively turned into a fight about the future, as the government and Google face off over proposed changes to the tech giant’s business that could shift the course of the A.I. race.For more than 20 years, Google’s search engine dominated the way people got answers online. Now the federal court is in essence grappling with whether the Silicon Valley giant will dominate the next era of how people get information on the internet, as consumers turn to a new crop of A.I. chatbots to answer questions, find solutions to their problems and learn about the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More