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      Musk’s SpaceX is frontrunner to build Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ missile shield

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      Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, six people familiar with the matter said.Musk’s rocket and satellite company is partnering with the software maker Palantir and the drone builder Anduril on a bid to build key parts of Golden Dome, the sources said, which has drawn significant interest from the technology sector’s burgeoning base of defense startups.In his 27 January executive order, Trump cited a missile attack as “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States”.All three companies were founded by entrepreneurs who have been major political supporters of Trump. Musk has donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump, and now serves as a special adviser to the president working to cut government spending through his so-called “department of government efficiency”.Despite the Pentagon’s positive signals to the SpaceX group, some sources stressed the decision process for Trump’s Golden Dome was in its early stages. Its ultimate structure and who is selected to work on it could change dramatically in the coming months.The three companies met with top officials in the Trump administration and the Pentagon in recent weeks to pitch their plan, which would build and launch 400 to more than 1,000 satellites circling the globe to sense missiles and track their movement, sources said.A separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers would then bring enemy missiles down, three of the sources said. The SpaceX group is not expected to be involved in the weaponization of satellites, these sources said.One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as “a departure from the usual acquisition process. There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.”SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.
      The Pentagon did not respond to detailed questions from Reuters, only saying it will deliver “options to the president for his decision in line with the executive order and in alignment with White House guidance and timelines”.The White House, SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril also did not respond to questions.In an unusual twist, SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a “subscription service” in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.The subscription model, which has not been previously reported, could skirt some Pentagon procurement protocols allowing the system to be rolled out faster, the two sources said. While the approach would not violate any rules, the government may then be locked into a subscription and lose control over its ongoing development and pricing, they added.Some Pentagon officials have expressed concerns internally about relying on the subscription-based model for any part of the Golden Dome, two sources told Reuters. Such an arrangement would be unusual for such a large and critical defense program.The US space force general Michael Guetlein has been in talks on whether SpaceX should be the owner and operator of its part of the system, the two sources said. Other options include having the US own and operate the system, or having the US own it while contractors handle operations. Guetlein did not respond to a request for comment.The retired air force general Terrence O’Shaughnessy, a top SpaceX adviser to Musk, has been involved in the company’s recent discussions with senior defense and intelligence leaders, the two sources said. O’Shaughnessy did not respond to requests for comment.Should the group led by SpaceX win a Golden Dome contract, it would be the biggest win for Silicon Valley in the lucrative defense contracting industry and a blow to the traditional contractors.However, those long-standing contractors, such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing and RTX are expected to be big players in the process as well, people familiar with the companies said. Lockheed Martin put up a webpage as a part of its marketing efforts.SpaceX is pitching for the part of the Golden Dome initiative called the “custody layer”, a constellation of satellites that would detect missiles, track their trajectory, and determine if they are heading toward the US, according to two sources familiar with SpaceX’s goals.SpaceX has estimated the preliminary engineering and design work for the custody layer of satellites would cost between $6bn and $10bn, two of the sources said. In the last five years, SpaceX has launched hundreds of operational spy satellites and more recently several prototypes, which could be retrofitted to be used for the project, the sources said.Reuters reviewed an internal Pentagon memo from the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, issued shortly before a 28 February deadline to senior Pentagon leadership asking them for initial Golden Dome proposals and calling for the “acceleration of the deployment” of constellations of satellites.The time frame could give SpaceX an advantage because of its fleet of rockets, including the Falcon 9, and existing satellites that could be repurposed for the missile defense shield, the people familiar with the plan said. More

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      Opt out: how to protect your data and privacy if you own a Tesla

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      Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. The last column covered how to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular tip, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article.At the press of a button, your Tesla pulls itself out of parking spot with no one behind the wheel using a feature called Summon. It drives itself on highways using Autopilot. When you arrive at your destination, it can record nearby activity while parked with a feature called Sentry Mode.To effectively operate any of these features, your car needs to monitor and collect a large amount of data about you. Most Tesla vehicles come equipped with nine internal and external cameras. Information from your Tesla, delivered via location trackers, sensors and more, can paint an intricate picture of your life and movement.“Teslas are truly rolling surveillance platforms,” said John Davisson, a senior counsel and director of litigation at digital rights research group Electronic Privacy Information Center. “There are some privacy safeguards that Tesla offers that at least allow you, on the face of the settings, to opt out of data sharing … provided that Tesla is actually following through on those commitments.”Tesla isn’t alone in collecting a considerable amount of data to enable a suite of advanced features on your vehicle. Any connected car collects some level of information to operate. Some Tesla owners are newly concerned, given CEO Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s administration.Those concerns are not entirely unfounded, according to Reem Suleiman, the director of advocacy at Mozilla Foundation, which gave Tesla a “privacy not included” grade in its assessment of the carmaker’s data security practices. For one, the company’s track record of protecting user data is shaky. In 2023, a Reuters investigation found that employees were sharing sensitive footage that vehicles captured in internal messaging forums. A Washington Post analysis of transparency reports published by Twitter and then X after Musk took over likewise showed that X acquiesced to 20% more government requests to remove content in just the first half of 2024 than Twitter did in all of 2021 – the last time the company published the transparency report.We spoke to privacy experts, consulted Tesla’s privacy policy and even asked Tesla’s own AI chatbot how to share the least amount of data with Tesla as possible. If you own a Tesla, there are some precautions you can and, in many cases, should take with regards to your vehicle. But be forewarned: adjusting these settings so that you share the least possible amount of data with Tesla will shut off access to many of your car’s functions.“They pretty much say that, if you choose to opt out of data collection, then your car is essentially a lemon,” Suleiman said. “They essentially say that your vehicle can have reduced functionality, serious damage or inoperability. So it’s kind of a non-choice, when you think about it.”Here’s what you need to know about your privacy in Tesla vehicles:What information is your Tesla collecting about you?Tesla’s privacy policy details a wide swath of data that its vehicles collect – most of which is stored locally but is also sent to the company unless you change your settings.According to Tesla’s AI chatbot, information collected on you includes: “location data (although Tesla doesn’t record or store vehicle-specific GPS information, except in the case of a crash); driving habits and behaviors (such as speed, braking patterns, and acceleration); diagnostic and vehicle usage data (to help improve Tesla’s products and services); infotainment system data (like browsing history and voice commands) and Autopilot data (camera recordings, sensor readings, and other inputs to support advanced safety features)”.The good news is that data can be collected and stored on your vehicle’s local drives if opt out of sharing information with the company. The bad news is that data can still be accessed if law enforcement somehow gets a hold of your vehicle during a traffic stop or other circumstance, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Davisson.And it’s not just your car that’s collecting information. The Tesla mobile app, from which you can activate Sentry Mode or Summon, also collects location, contact, browsing and device information. Read on for how to dial back how much your car monitors you.Who is Tesla sharing your data with?If you opt to share your data with Tesla, all of the data it collects on you may be shared with third parties, including law enforcement. According to the company’s privacy policy, in addition to sharing data with law enforcement when the company receives a valid court order, Tesla will also share data when it is “essential to protect national security or public safety”. Davisson says that language is vague and opens the door for video footage to be shared with law enforcement for any number of reasons. Recently, for instance, the FBI has categorized vandalism of Tesla vehicles and showrooms as “domestic terrorism”.“Especially now, when everything is apparently a national emergency, it’s a very short hop from that to considering immigration enforcement to be a safety issue that requires constant sharing of real-time footage to Ice or other law enforcement officials,” said Davisson. “And it’s a scary situation.”So how do you protect your data?Consider other vehiclesEveryone has a different risk profile when it comes to their privacy. Some people may be more concerned than others about who is gaining access to their personal information. It’s not just your own privacy you need to be cognizant of, however, as Tesla’s exterior cameras can collect footage of people around the vehicle as well.If you are concerned about information gathering and don’t already have a Tesla, privacy experts say you should opt for a different car. If you do have one and want to reclaim your privacy, sell it. Even Tesla’s AI chatbot gave similar advice.“If someone is deeply concerned about their privacy, they might consider alternatives, such as: 1 Opting for a vehicle manufacturer with more restrictive data collection practices (though this might come at the cost of reduced convenience features); 2 Exploring aftermarket solutions or modifications that could potentially reduce data sharing (though this might void warranties or introduce compatibility issues).”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFactory-reset your car before selling itSo you’ve already bought a Tesla, and you’ve decided to sell it. Suleiman and the Mozilla Foundation highly recommend factory-resetting the car before you do. That means your car will be wiped of all of its data as if it was just coming off the lot.“Just because you sell your car off doesn’t mean that you’ve scrubbed the data,” Suleiman said. “It requires a little bit of due diligence.”So before you take the vehicle off your Tesla account, you will need to factory-reset your car from your in-car settings. Sit in the driver’s seat and follow these steps:1 Go to Controls > Service > Factory Reset.2 Enter your Tesla account username and password to verify your credentials.3 Confirm that you want to perform a factory reset.“This will erase all personal data, including saved addresses, music favorites and imported contacts, and restore your car’s settings to their factory defaults,” according to Tesla’s AI chatbot. The company also recommends deleting your “HomeLink” devices – which can allow you to control things like your garage door, lights or home security system from your Tesla. Do that by clicking on the “HomeLink” icon at the top of the “Controls” screen then going to HomeLink settings, where you can remove connections to other devices.How to share the least amount of your data with TeslaIn the settings of your vehicle and the Tesla app, you can opt not to share your data with the company. But as we’ve said before, be prepared to lose some functionality of your car.Opting out of data-sharing in your car is fairly straightforward. In your vehicle, go to Settings > Software > Data sharing. Turn off “allow data sharing”. This will disable the sharing of analytics, road segment, diagnostic and vehicle usage data. Tesla’s AI chatbot also recommended turning off “allow Autopilot analytics” to stop sharing Autopilot-related data.Opt out of mobile app location and data sharing. In the Tesla app, go to Settings (the button will either look like three horizontal lines or a gear icon). Then scroll down to Security and Privacy. Then select turn off Location Services. Click Turn off Analytics to stop sharing app usage data to the company. Then revoke access to your camera, microphone and contacts.“By following these steps, you’ll be sharing the least amount of data with Tesla while still enjoying the core features and functionalities of your vehicle and mobile app,” according to the Tesla AI chatbot.But this will affect the functionality of your car. According to Tesla’s chatbot, data sharing will affect these features:“Remote vehicle monitoring and control through the mobile app (eg, checking your vehicle’s status, location, and surroundings); navigation and routing optimization (although basic navigation will still work); geofencing and smart preconditioning (your vehicle won’t be able to anticipate your arrival or departure); some Autopilot features, such as traffic-aware cruise control and automatic emergency braking, may not function optimally; over-the-air software updates might be delayed or unavailable; certain advanced safety features, like Emergency Services, may not work seamlessly.”“I don’t think it should be a trade-off,” Davisson said. “It is true that some of the collision avoidance systems and autonomous features on Teslas like other vehicles do rely on data collection and cameras. But it should not come at the cost of the privacy, certainly of the driver or passengers of the vehicle or for people that happen to be in the area surrounding the vehicle.” More

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      Doge tried to embed staffers in criminal justice non-profit, says group

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      Staff at Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) demanded to meet with an independent non-profit to discuss embedding a team within their organization, according to the non-profit, stating that refusal to take the meeting would mean a violation of Donald Trump’s executive order empowering Doge.Doge staff member Nate Cavanaugh emailed the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice reform non-profit that is independent from the government, on 11 April to demand the meeting, according to a copy of the email. Vera’s staff was confused by the request, as its government funding had been canceled a week prior, but agreed to a call which they said took place on Tuesday.The demand to meet with an independent non-profit organization and potentially embed its staffers there represents an expansion of Doge’s already sprawling reach and coincides with Musk issuing public attacks against non-governmental organizations. Doge has previously gutted government institutions such as USAID and congressionally funded non-profit USIP, but its meeting with Vera marks a new targeting of a wholly independent organization.“We have watched this administration try to kneecap academia, law firms, media, and now they are coming for the non-profit sector,” said Insha Rahman, Vera’s vice-president of advocacy and partnerships.Vera’s programs focus on a variety of criminal justice issues and improving conditions for incarcerated people, as well as supporting mental health and crisis services. Its annual budget of around $45m comes primarily from private donors – although as is common with non-profits, it has also received federal grants. Vera has also been a repeated target for rightwing media outlets that attack its approach to criminal justice reform, which Rahman believes is one of the reasons that Doge staffers may have targeted the organization.When Vera’s legal counsel then held a 20-minute phone call with two members of Doge this week, Rahman says they informed the Doge staffers that the organization had already stopped receiving government funding. The Department of Justice had abruptly canceled $5m in contracts for the non-profit earlier that month. The Doge staffers did not know Vera’s funding had been canceled, according to Rahman, and took back their request for information on Vera’s contracts while refusing to answer questions on what gave them the authority to investigate Vera in the first place.“Doge staffers Nick Cavanaugh and Justin Aimonetti informed us of its plan to assign a Doge team to the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) as part of its larger plan to assign Doge teams to ‘every institute or agency that has congressional monies appropriated to it’,” Vera said in a statement. “When asked about the legal standing for Doge to investigate an independent nonprofit, Aimonetti, who is an attorney, deferred.”Musk has claimed without evidence that there is widespread, pervasive fraud among NGOs receiving government contracts and that leaders of “fake NGOs” should be thrown in prison. Vera stated that it is going public with the incident out of concern that the Trump administration and Doge is planning to target other non-profits that do not conform to their ideology.“The Democrat government-funded NGO scam might be the biggest theft of taxpayer money ever,” Musk posted on X last month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Doge walked back its attempt to question and potentially embed staffers in Vera after learning that its funding had been cut, the organization is warning other non-profits that receive funding to prepare for similar incursions into their operations.“We are sharing this information broadly with other nonprofits that receive federal funding – so they can be aware of Doge’s plan to assign teams to investigate their operations,” Vera’s statement said. “We also are exposing this latest intimidation tactic targeting private, independent mission-driven organizations and undermining civil society.”The White House denied that Doge plans to embed within non-profits, according to a statement given to the Washington Post, which first reported Doge’s meeting with Vera. Instead, a White House spokesperson told the Post that Doge plans to “specifically look” at non-profits that receive large amounts of federal funding. More

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      A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revolting | Sam Wolfson

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      Sam Harris is the kind of guest Joe Rogan loves to have on his podcast: he dresses awkwardly in a sport coat with jeans; he undertook a PhD in neuroscience after a transformative experience with MDMA; his tone is accessible yet patronising; he has a sense of academic authority which belies a set of controversial views that include calling Islam “uniquely uncivil” and almost unfettered support for Israeli attacks on Gaza; he made an app called Waking Up, which promises to be “a new operating system for your mind”. Rogan has hosted Harris on his podcast many times and the pair call each other good friends.But even Harris seems perturbed by Rogan’s more wholehearted embrace of Musk and Maga. “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence,” Harris told his listeners of his own podcast last week. “He’ll bring someone in to shoot the shit on ‘how the Holocaust is not what you think it was’ or ‘maybe Churchill was the bad guy in world war two’ … or he’ll talk to someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, who lie as freely as they breathe, and doesn’t push back against any of their lies … It is irresponsible, and it’s directly harmful.”Joe Rogan’s podcast success has in large part been about building a community of regular guests from the worlds of comedy, wrestling, psychedelics and non-fiction publishing, a kind of Rogansphere that has begun to feel like a subculture. He hosts his favourite guests time after time, with many of them building entire careers off their appearances on the show.But recently, various members of the Rogansphere have started to turn against their leader. They can’t understand how the host of the most popular podcast in the world seems to have gone from examining both sides to defending Elon Musk at every turn and providing a platform for second world war revisionists.View image in fullscreenIn the past few months, Rogan has called people who thought Elon Musk’s hand gesture was a Nazi salute “dumb”, “crazy”, “illogical and weird” and defended it by saying it’s how Americans used to give the pledge of allegiance in the 1940s. Weeks later, he gave a very sympathetic interview to the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who has previously called Winston Churchill the main villain of the second world war and tweeted an image of Nazis in Paris, saying it was “infinitely preferable” to the drag “Last Supper” scene at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony.Rogan wasn’t always like this. Over the past decade he has built his podcast into by far the most successful in the world, weathering numerous controversies. He spent much of his career being mislabelled as ideologically rightwing or misogynistic when in fact he’s more of a simpleton who agrees with almost everyone who comes on his show, even when the things they’re saying are contradictory. He has been a staunch believer “in just asking questions” but not so much in listening to or processing the answers. He has supported both Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr, and has taken conflicting views on everything from trans rights to Ye, sometimes hilariously so.The best thing you could say about Rogan is that he is distrustful of all mainstream narratives, in an indiscriminate way. That’s led to him promoting a number of conspiracy theories that fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence about vaccines and the climate crisis, but also vocally criticising the war in Gaza and the influence of lobbyists in Washington DC.But his outlook has shifted since Trump was elected for the second time, a victory many credit to a good performance on Rogan’s podcast and Rogan’s subsequent endorsement. On Saturday night at a UFC fight, Rogan ran into Trump, warmly embraced him and said: “I’m so happy for you sir.” Many of his biggest fans, those that discuss episodes in detail on Reddit and Discord, are complaining that he has become a shill for the elites he used to claim to distrust.Rogan has tended to brush off these critiques in the past, saying he’s just an interested comedian asking questions. But even Rogan’s comedy friends have started to bristle at his unwavering support for Musk. Rogan values comedy above all else, investing much of the riches from his podcast in the Austin comedy scene, buying up clubs and appearing regularly as a panellist on Kill Tony, the open-mic standup podcast that takes shots at perceived wokeism. Rogan has a regular cast of comedians on his podcast including Shane Gillis, Kyle Dunnigan and Tim Dillon. These comedians give Rogan his street credibility, and he in turn has given them a huge platform.While they haven’t turned on Rogan yet, they are incredibly disparaging about Musk. Dillon called Musk’s White House press conference “the grossest and cringiest shit anyone has seen for a long time … I disagree with close friends of mine who think Elon Musk is the new Jesus.” Gillis laughed about Musk’s salute on his podcast, and said he thought Musk was “psychotic” and “fucking weird” for lying about how good he is at video games.Rogan meanwhile has recently called Musk “a super genius that’s been fucked with” and “one of the smartest people alive”.This emerging divide between Rogan and his comedic milieu came to a head last month at the recording of Kill Tony’s first special for Netflix (filmed at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club in Austin). Both Dunnigan and Rogan were on the panel together but Dunnigan was in character, hilariously, as Musk. It was a brilliant and vicious send-up of Musk’s bizarre humour and minimal intelligence that had everyone laughing except Rogan, who avoided making eye contact or saying almost anything for the entire episode. It seemed as though he didn’t want to give any impression to Musk that he was was mocking him.There are no simple ideological lines being drawn between Rogan and the guests that are turning on him. Douglas Murray, for example, is an incredibly conservative pro-Israel historian who supports the withdrawal of visas from students who demonstrated on college campuses last year and has said he wants to ban “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries”. In many ways he is to the right of Rogan, and used much of his appearance losing a debate on the podcast with his fellow guest Dave Smith over Gaza. Yet he also used his time to admonish Rogan for having too many amateur and conspiracy theory-minded historians on the podcast. “I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people. You’ve now got a big platform and have been throwing out counter-historical stuff but a very dangerous kind.”Rogan had very little in the way of a meaningful defence. Defending why he had the conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate proponent Ian Carroll on his program, Rogan replied: “I just think I’d like to talk to this person … I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.”There are no smart guys here; both Murray and Rogan have tendency to use circuitous straw man arguments that suit their specific brand of politics. But it does show cracks in the cultural wing of Trumpism.Rogan himself seems to be backing down from a full-throated endorsement of the president’s policies, calling the Venezuelan deportations “horrific” and “bad for the cause”, and calling Trump’s feud with Canada over tariffs “stupid”. Last month he said healthcare should “100% should be socially funded” and was celebrated by Bernie Sanders for doing so.Yet these acknowledgements of bad policies haven’t translated into a lack of enthusiasm for either Trump or Musk, yet. But with Rogan it only takes one convincing guest to change his mind.What’s more, Rogan’s main constituency of listeners, young men, appear to be feeling buyer’s remorse about Trump, with new polling suggesting the group is swinging away from the president. Where his audience go, Rogan tends to follow.On his podcast, Harris told his listeners: “Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe [Rogan] has interacted with information.” Rogan might revel in criticism from progressives, but barbs from his friends are likely to sting. How long Trump can count on Rogan’s cuddles and warm wishes might depend on whether his favourite guests begin to ostracize him. More

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      Joe Biden accuses Trump and Musk of taking ‘hatchet’ to social security

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      Joe Biden on Tuesday accused Donald Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, Elon Musk, of “taking a hatchet” to the social security administration as they moved at warp-speed to dismantle large swaths of the federal government.In his first public remarks since leaving office, the former president avoided any explicit mention of Trump – his predecessor and successor – but he was sharply critical of the new administration for threatening social security, which Biden called a “sacred promise” that more than 70 million Americans rely on each month.“In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction,” Biden said, addressing the national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago. “It’s kind of breathtaking that it could happen that soon.”He said Trump administration had applied the Silicon Valley concept of “move fast and break things” to the federal government: “They’re certainly breaking things. They’re shooting first and aiming later.”On Tuesday, Democrats across the country held a day of action to “sound the alarm” over the Trump administration’s plans to downsize the social security administration, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said earlier on Tuesday. Biden referenced the sweeping cuts to the agency’s workforce and its services in his remarks.Though it is unusual for a former president to return to the national stage so soon after exiting it, Biden, 82, said he felt the issue was a matter of grave importance to millions of retirees and disabled Americans fearful that the check they rely on each month might not arrive on time – or at all.“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the social security system, people have always gotten their social security checks,” Biden said. “They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now for the first time ever, that might change. It’d be a calamity for millions of families.”Asked earlier on Tuesday about Biden’s speech, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mocked his age and acuity. “I’m shocked that he is speaking at nighttime. I thought his bedtime was much earlier than his speech tonight.” Trump is 78.Biden also joked about his age, tweaking Trump for falsely claiming that millions of people born over a century ago are still receiving social security benefits. “I want to meet them because I’d like to figure out how they live that long,” he said, drawing laughs from the audience. “I’m looking for longevity.” Though Trump and Musk have both misleadingly pointed to the inclusion of people in the database with no recorded death date as evidence of widespread fraud, the glitch is well known and almost none of the people listed receive payments.Trump has pledged that his administration would not touch social security and congressional Republicans have accused Democrats of spreading lies about their support for the popular program.In a series of tweets on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, the social security agency rebutted many of the points made in Biden’s speech, writing that the president has “repeatedly promised to protect social security and ensure higher-take home pay for seniors by ending taxation on social security benefits”.Yet the Trump administration’s assault on the agency has left it in turmoil.Since Musk’s cost-cutting initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency targeted the agency, it has announced plans for deep staff reductions and dozens of offices closures, while policy changes have already begun to impact the program’s operations, leaving many beneficiaries anxious.In his remarks, Biden spoke of the “profound” psychological impact on beneficiaries who rely on the social security checks. “How do you sleep at night?” he said.He also criticized Musk for calling the program a “Ponzi scheme” and comments made by Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, also a billionaire, who said his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t complain if she didn’t receive her social security check one month. “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” he said on the business and tech podcast All-In last month.“She’s probably a lovely woman,” Biden said of Lutnick’s mother-in-law, but agreed that she would probably not miss the payment. “No kidding, her son-in-law is a billionaire. What about the 94-year-old mother living all by herself?”On Tuesday, Trump signed a presidential memo titled Preventing Illegal Aliens from Obtaining Social Security Act Benefits – a benefit undocumented people are already ineligible for under US law. The directive orders an expansion of the social security administration’s full-time fraud prosecutor program and directs officials to scrutinize earnings reports for “persons age 100 or older”. It also establishes a similar prosecution program for Medicare and Medicaid.During Biden’s speech on Tuesday, he briefly reflected on the current state of affairs, urging Americans to uphold “fundamental American values”.“Nobody’s king,” he said, before lamenting how divided the nation had become. Healing the “soul of America” was a campaign theme that elevated Biden to office in the depths of the pandemic in 2020, but the divisions seemed only to deepen over the next four years. In an apparent aside, he said there was roughly “30%” of the country that “has no heart” – a remark Trump supporters immediately as interpreted an insult.“It’s what we see in America,” he continued. “It’s what we believe in – fairness. And that’s the America we can never forget or walk away from.” More

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      ‘Shock to the system’: farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs and cuts say they need another bailout

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      Farmers across the United States say they could face financial ruin – unless there is a huge taxpayer-funded bailout to compensate for losses generated by Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts and chaotic tariffs.Small- and medium-sized farms were already struggling amid worsening climate shocks and volatile commodities markets, on top of being squeezed by large corporations that dominate the supply chain.In recent weeks, farmers in Texas and across the midwest have suffered millions of dollars of crop losses due to unprecedented heavy rainfall and flooding.The climate crisis-fueled extreme weather is compounded by the US president’s looming trade war and the administration targeting popular federal programs and staff, leaving farmers reeling and resigned to needing another bailout.“There’s a lot of uncertainty around and I hate to be used as a bargaining chip. I am definitely worried,” said Travis Johnson, who lost more than 1,000 acres of cotton, sorghum and corn after a year’s rain fell within 48 hours in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) in southern Texas last month, turning parched fields into lakes.RGV farmers sell sorghum, wheat, corn and vegetables to Mexico among other crops, while buying fertilizer and equipment – and relying on Mexican farmhands for cheap labor. Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner, while China is the main buyer of American sorghum and cotton. All US products destined for China face a 125% tax thanks to Trump’s tariff war, and could cut farmers off from core markets.View image in fullscreen“I can see how some tariffs might help us compete with Mexico but are we really getting targeted by every other country or are we on the wrong side of this? We’ve already had two years of absolute disaster with falling prices and weather patterns … no farmer wants this but without a bailout this could be devastating and a lot more people could go under,” Johnson said.Rural counties rallied behind Trump in 2024, giving him a majority in all but 11 of the 444 farming-dependent counties last year, averaging 78% support, according to analysis by Investigate Midwest.Trump’s vote share rose among farming communities, despite his last trade war which required a $23bn taxpayer bailout for farmers in 2018-19.Yet anxiety is mounting among the agricultural base.First came widespread cuts to oversubscribed and chronically underfunded federal climate and conservation schemes designed to reduce costs and greenhouse gases, and improve yields and environmental health.Trump is also shuttering local food programs which provide farmers with stable domestic markets like public school districts and food banks, helping make farms more resilient to global economic shocks. The USAID, which purchased about $2bn every year in agricultural products particularly wheat, sorghum and lentils for humanitarian aid programs, has been dismantled.The loss in federal programs alone would have been tough to cope with, but then came the trade chaos. Trump’s tariff announcements began when most farmers already had spring crops in the ground – or at the very least had prepared the land and purchased inputs such as seeds and pesticides, making it impossible to switch to crops that could potentially find a market domestically.View image in fullscreenConsensus is growing among experts that the turmoil represents an opportunity for rival agriculture economies – and disaster for US farmers.“It’s all happening so fast and in the middle of the growing season, it’s a shock to the system that’s going to be tough for farmers, especially those growing commodities for export,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). “Tariffs are not magical, they need to be used strategically as part of wider reforms to the domestic economic agenda.”“The volatility of the tariff policy decisions, with new tariffs frequently being announced, paused and placed will take a toll on the American agricultural industry,” writes economist Betty Resnick in an article for Farm Bureau, a right-leaning lobby group. “Without direct support from USDA or a farm bill with an updated safety net, farmers will almost certainly bear the brunt of these tariffs.”Ben Murray, senior researcher with the consumer advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said: “Without a bailout, we can only imagine how bad this will be for farmers and what an opportunity for Brazil – and this is all being done for a tax cut for the wealthy.”For decades now, US farmers have been heavily incentivized through the Farm Bill to grow commodity crops destined for export such as wheat, corn, soy, sorghum, rice and cotton, rather than produce for domestic consumption. The price of commodities is tied to the global market, even if sold domestically. Meanwhile US imports of fruits and vegetables mostly from Latin America have risen, now accounting for more than 50% of consumption, according to USDA data.This globalized agricultural system favors large and corporate-owned operations, as smaller farms struggle more with boom and bust prices, and access to government subsidies and other credit. The number of farms continues to decline, while the average size continues to rise. Market consolidation and corporate profits tend to surge in the agriculture industry after every economic shock including the Covid pandemic, Trump’s last trade war and the banking crisis.Biden implemented a range of modest, imperfect policies to try to ease the pain for smaller-scale farmers including a greater focus on anti-trust, local and regional food systems, and climate resilience – all of which are under attack by the Trump administration.The vast majority of a $19.5bn funding package by the Biden administration for evidence-based conservation practices that improve soil health, air quality and reduce the use of costly fertilizers, pesticides and water will not be honored. The 10-year fund allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act was an addendum to money ring-fenced in the Farm Bill for four oversubscribed programs, after years of pressure from farmers to expand access to the initiatives.Two Biden-era healthy eating schemes worth a combined $1bn to local farmers have been canceled: the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program matching producers to food banks, and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program which helped public schools add healthy, locally grown produce on to lunch menus. (The USDA recently agreed to unfreeze funding for existing contracts.)View image in fullscreen“My farm will survive because we’ve been working with school districts for 20 years, but for others in our coalition the funding cliff is very real,” said Anna Knight, who owns an 80-acre citrus farm in southern California.Piling on further misery are mass layoffs within the USDA that were seemingly orchestrated by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk.More than 10% of USDA staff have already reportedly agreed to voluntary buyouts, with more expected in coming weeks. This is in addition to several thousand probationary employees who were laid off last month – a move which disproportionately hit local offices beefed up under the Biden administration, and is being challenged in the courts.USDA field offices play a crucial role in rural communities, the place where farmers go for tailor-made technical help from agencies including the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and the Farm Service Agency (FSA) on the latest pest control and planting practices, conservation programs, loans and disaster assistance programs.“It makes no sense taking billions of dollars off the table for programs that improve long-term farm viability and resilience – and which farmers have been lining up for years for – and then spend billions bringing back farmers from financial collapse,” said Jesse Womack, policy expert at the National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition. “It’s looking really bleak with a lot of pain ahead for farmers.”A coalition of environmental and agricultural groups is suing the USDA after it purged an array of climate-related online resources including information on the NRCS website helping farmers access federal grants for conservation practices, and technical guidance on cutting emissions and strengthening resilience to extreme weather like floods and drought.Even if there is a bailout, getting the money to farmers in time to avoid bankruptcy will be much more complicated this time, according to Lilliston from IATP.“Another bailout seems inevitable but there are serious questions about how quickly it could be implemented with such a dysfunctional Congress, local USDA offices shuttered and fewer staff. It’s a very messy situation and farmers are already experiencing harm.”And in the medium and long term: “The US reputation has taken a huge hit. We can no longer be considered a reliable trading partner which is terrible for farmers,” added Lilliston.Even before the current mayhem, almost two-thirds of US rural bankers surveyed in March expected farmer income to decline in 2025, with farm equipment sales dropping for the 19th straight month, according to the latest Rural Mainstreet Economy survey by Creighton University. Grain and cotton prices have plummeted since 2022.View image in fullscreen“We were already in a precarious situation but now, unless there’s a bailout or this trade war is resolved by harvest time, it will be disastrous and a critical mass of farmers could go out of business,” said Adam Chappell, 46, a commodities farmer growing corn, cotton, soybean and rice in Arkansas, where dozens of local USDA staff have reportedly been furloughed or fired in recent weeks.Chappell’s town Cotton Plant was hit with 13in of rain in early April, causing crop losses for many farmers. Chappell’s fields survived the rain but he spent a nervous few weeks after the USDA froze all conservation funds, unsure whether the government would reimburse him, as agreed, for an upfront investment in cover crops and a compost operation. Eventually, after a backlash, the administration backtracked and agreed to honor existing contracts.“The weather is getting stranger and more challenging to deal with every year, while big monopoly corporations are allowed to manipulate the system and squeeze us at every part of the supply chain. Farmers like me lean heavily on the NRCS conservation programs to improve soil health and reduce input costs,” said Chappell. “The tariffs are like adding salt on the wound.”Despite last week’s partial U-turn, Trump’s ongoing and increasingly chaotic trade war risks causing irreparable harm to international markets for farmers, especially but not exclusively China, as well as pushing up the cost of agricultural imports such as pesticides, fertilizer and machinery.China is the US’s third biggest agricultural export market, worth $24.7bn in 2024, down 15% from 2023, as soybean, corn and sorghum sales fell amid rising competition from South America, according to USDA data. China’s top imports from the US are oilseeds and grains. US exports to China supported almost a million US jobs in 2022, according to the US-China Business Council, mostly around agriculture and livestock production.As of Friday, at least 15 agricultural department programs worth billions of dollars to American farmers and rural communities remain frozen, according to Politico, more than two months after they were halted for review to ensure compliance with Trump’s priorities opposing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts as well as his crackdown on climate change initiatives.This includes the Biden-era partnerships for climate-smart commodities (PCSC) program – a five-year $3.2bn real-life study into the effectiveness of conservation practices such as cover cropping and reduced tillage for commodity farms.“PSCS was about increasing our evidence base on climate benefits that also help commodity farmers improve soil health, air and water quality – and their bottom line,” said Omanjana Goswami, a scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Abandoning this will come at a cost to American farms and the taxpayer.”On Monday, the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, defended dismantling PSCS, claiming it amounted to a Biden-era “climate slush fund” of which less than half the money went to farmers.A spokesperson added: “The USDA has a variety of programs available to producers who have been impacted by recent disasters … [and] is currently building a framework to deliver over $20bn in congressionally appropriated funds to producers who suffered losses during the 2023/2024 crop year. With 16 robust nutrition programs in place, USDA remains focused on its core mission: strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets, and ensuring access to nutritious food.”And some Trump supporters are keeping the faith.“There are some concerns out there but our farmers are willing to make sacrifices for long-term gains,” said Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner. “Tariffs are a temporary tool, they won’t be permanent, China needs our grains, they are prideful but will come around like last time.” More

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      Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams

      by

      ‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.The motivation of the pronatalists is that birthrates are in decline, in some places (such as South Korea) so precipitously that the nation will soon cease to meaningfully exist. It has been a bugbear of the right, particularly the alt-tech right, for almost a decade. In 2017, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” That was before he owned the platform, so few people noticed or cared. It has also been a thematic staple of Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric in Hungary, reinforced in 2019 by a large-family tax-break policy that in February became an income tax exemption for mothers of two or three children.The ideas factories pushing birthrates have always been much more opaque about their politics; often, they frame their ideas to suit whomever they are talking to. When I interviewed Simone and Malcolm Collins, venture capitalists turned pronatal advocates, a couple of years ago, their line was that progressive politics needed higher birthrates. Political persuasion was “40% to 70% heritable”, Malcolm told me. “If you systematically delete everyone who cares about the environment from the gene pool, that means, within a couple of generations, you’re going to see a dramatic drop in the number of people who care about the climate, even as the collapse becomes more intense.”At the last count, the Collinses had four children, plus a number of frozen embryos, which Simone intends to incubate at 18-month intervals. “We’re going to keep going until physically I can no longer have kids – and that will be when they forcibly remove my uterus,” she said. It was a dystopian image with a number of obvious follow-ups, the first of which was: who are “they”? But I didn’t ask any of them, because her perception of force, authority, uteruses, children and the world seemed dark and personal, like a subconscious gaping open.Nor did I pursue whether Malcolm could possibly believe that you could sell to people who care about the environment the idea that only their biological children would be genetically capable of caring about the environment. It could be the child of someone who arrives on a small boat that solves our political malaise. What about the heritability of staunch determination? Did they ever think about that?But, all too often, ethnonationalism is implicit in the pronatalist narrative: a low birthrate can’t be offset by migration, because they are not talking about people in general. They are talking about the right kind of people.In the intervening years, Musk has had a bunch more children, often boasting of the example he is setting. Trump started saying: “You have good genes, you know that, right?” to his followers. Last week, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, floated the idea that “if you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times”, which medics rebutted because it’s not true. But we should all fear its drumbeat: good stock is different; anyone who succumbs to an infectious disease wasn’t “healthy” to begin with.These connections are often intellectually baggy – Musk’s desire to populate Mars with his own seed doesn’t map neatly on to RFK’s anti-vax agenda, while Orbán’s pronatalism sounds like socially conservative gender oppression, yet pronatalist forums tie themselves in knots trying to sound “woke”. But if this isn’t about ethnonationalism, then why aren’t the pronatalists crying out for countries with low birthrates to receive refugees with open arms? Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

      by

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      View image in fullscreenThe movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court.Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.Inspired by the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.View image in fullscreenOne might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).View image in fullscreenThe governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.View image in fullscreenNot so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”View image in fullscreenElon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.View image in fullscreenAs fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.View image in fullscreenAt the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism”, or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.View image in fullscreenAs the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys implanted into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, telling Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies, rebukes the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new datacenters calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”View image in fullscreenHis comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: according to Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”). There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to interview Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”View image in fullscreenHow do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.View image in fullscreenThat future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”Spot illustrations by Sophy Hollington More