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      Why is our so-called democratic society suppressing freedom of speech? | Laura Flanders

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      Claud Cockburn, my grandfather, knew when it was time to leave Berlin.A young British journalist, he’d worked as a correspondent for The [London] Times in that city in the 1920s before transferring to New York and Washington DC. Returning to Germany in July 1932, he saw “storm Troopers slashing and smashing up and down the Kurfürstendamm”, and war propaganda: “huge exhibitions of ‘the Front’, soldier figures standing in a real-life size trench playing with a dummy machine gun”, he wrote.In a letter to my grandmother, Hope Hale, a US-based journalist just then pregnant with my mother, he described how fascism on the horizon felt: “It’s hard to imagine that this is something one is really seeing.”Until it wasn’t hard. As Cockburn wrote: “Hitler. He came to power. I was high on the Nazi blacklist. I fled to Vienna.”Cockburn’s story is retold in a forthcoming book by his son, journalist Patrick Cockburn, due out this fall from Verso. It’s a timely intervention, inviting us to consider how different what Claud called the “Devil’s Decade”, is from our own.The 1930s saw the press in fascist countries co-opted or suppressed. In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda saw to it that only state-approved stories were told. Independent journalism was not just discouraged – it was dangerous. Writers were shot. Books were burned. To facilitate the Fuhrer’s dominance, the Third Reich subsidized the production of cheap radio receivers called Volksempfänger, which not only made money for friendly manufacturers but also channeled distraction and Nazi communication directly into people’s homes. In Italy, Mussolini’s regime did much the same, using media as a tool to consolidate power and propagate fascist ideology.Today, Elon Musk is no Joseph Goebbels. Still, as I write, the billionaire entrepreneur known for co-founding Tesla and SpaceX (his privately owned rocket-and-satellite company), and now owning X (formerly Twitter), has been accused of stoking bigotry and hate. Controlling content and its moderation (or lack of it), Musk is seeing to it that his powerful, free, social media platform pumps out pro-Maga propaganda, while joining with other tech billionaires to invest in the Trump-Vance campaign.That campaign has made calling journalists “enemies of the people” so central to its message that future generations will have to be reminded that Adolf Hitler did it first.Goebbels operated in a dictatorship where the media was entirely controlled by the state with the explicit goal of suppressing freedom of speech and promoting genocidal thinking. We operate within a supposedly democratic framework in which no minister of propaganda is forcing the newspaper of record to instruct its journalists covering Israel’s war on Gaza to restrict the use of the terms “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, “refugee camps” and “Palestine”. Some newspapers, like the New York Times, do it unforced.Homogenous, even in an age of media proliferation, the most influential media spent June in lock-step, disparaging one elderly candidate’s fitness for office after a stumbling performance in a debate. This August that same media devoted precious time to carefully “fact-checking” the drivel of the other elderly candidate after an entirely unhinged press conference. The same candidate has promised to suspend the constitution and be a dictator “on day one”.One is reminded of the headline over the New York Times report on Hitler becoming Chancellor: Hitler Puts Aside Aim to be Dictator. “There is no warrant for immediate alarm,” the editors wrote on 31 January 1933. “The more violent parts of his alleged program he has himself in recent months been softening down or abandoning.”Quitting the Times to found the Week, a newsletter that became famous for its scoops and takedowns of those in power, Claud’s work was not risk-free. His opposition to fascism and the complicity of western democracies in enabling its rise made him a target for enraged rulers and rightwingers in the UK and overseas. Too impecunious to sue, the Week was often threatened and finally banned, in January 1941.We like to think our media landscape today is shaped by subtler forms of control: media monopolies, mass-market pressure, extreme commercialism and digital surveillance. And then there’s Julian Assange. Assange, through Wikileaks, published classified documents that exposed US government killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. For that, Assange wasn’t shot, but he was locked up and charged under the Espionage Act, the first person to be so charged for an act of journalism since that act’s passage in 1917.This June, after five years in London’s grim Belmarsh prison, Assange agreed to plead guilty to one Espionage Act charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents. In exchange, Assange got his freedom, and so did that old word “treason”, dusted off for new, 21st-century use.Methods of information control evolve, but one phenomenon seems to remain: timidity. Living in Vienna, where loquacious diplomats, lawyers and refugees circulated stories and suspicions from all over Europe, Claud read the English daily papers and was struck “by the fact that what informed people were really saying – and equally importantly, the tone of voice they were saying it in – were scarcely reflected at all in the newspapers”.It is hard to imagine that one is really seeing what one is seeing until it isn’t.

      Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, a nationally-syndicated TV and radio program. More

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      Trump announces plan for Elon Musk-led ‘government efficiency commission’

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      Donald Trump announced in a speech on Thursday that, if elected, he would form a government efficiency commission, a policy idea that Elon Musk has been pushing him to take on. The former president claimed the tech billionaire had agreed to lead the commission.Trump made the attention-grabbing announcement during a campaign event at the Economic Club of New York, but gave no specific details about how the commission would operate.He reiterated Musk’s argument that such a commission would cut unnecessary spending, while also saying that he would massively walk back government regulations.“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” Trump told the crowd.Musk and Trump have forged an increasingly close alliance over the past year, as the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has thrown his full support behind Trump’s presidential campaign. Musk’s backing of Trump has consequently given the world’s richest man a direct line to influence Republican policy – and, if Trump were to actually create an efficiency commission, sweeping powers over federal agencies.Musk’s potential involvement in Trump’s proposed commission would create obvious conflicts of interest, as his businesses, such as SpaceX and Neuralink, are both regulated by, and have business with, numerous government agencies.Musk reposted news of Trump’s plans on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, and suggested he would accept such a position. “I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk posted. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”Musk raised the idea of an efficiency commission with Trump during their interview on X last month, with Musk offering to “help out on such a commission”. Musk has frequently pushed for deregulation and opposed government oversight into his businesses, while at the same time facing investigations and lawsuits over a range of allegations including breaking labor laws, violating animal-welfare protections and engaging in sexual harassment.Although Musk and Trump formerly had an acrimonious relationship – Trump once referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”, while Musk said Trump was too old to run for president – the two have formed a symbiotic relationship in recent months.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk, who frequently engages with far-right activists on X and promotes anti-immigration content, has attacked Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as a communist, while his allies in the tech community have poured money into a Super Pac backing Trump. More

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      The US right keeps accusing Democrats of ‘communism’. What does that even mean? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The Trump campaign, flanked by an army of online trolls commanded by Elon Musk, has been struggling to settle on an attack line against the Democratic ticket. Of course, a decade or so ago no one would have thought a candidate unable to think of nasty nicknames had a problem; but Donald Trump has made us all ask stupider questions and have stupider thoughts. If in doubt, though – and no matter what any Democrat actually does or says – the Republican party will level the charges of “socialism” and “communism” against them.To state the obvious: free lunches – ensuring that poor kids won’t go hungry – are not communism. The one time in recent history that the US clearly resembled the Soviet Union – empty shelves and long lines outside shops – was under Trump; to be sure, other countries also had supply chain problems during Covid-19, but the former president proved exceptionally irresponsible and incompetent. But there’s another, less obvious similarity with the late Soviet Union in particular: the experience of being at the mercy of bureaucrats. No, not the DMV, but vast private corporations with quasi-monopoly power, something with which Trump’s Republican party, unlike the Biden administration, is evidently fine.Ever since the New Deal, the US right has relied on an ideological mixture as incoherent as it is toxic, with charges of communism freely interspersed with accusations of fascism. Into that mixture, US reactionaries sprinkle what is politely called “anti-elitism” but often enough amounts to thinly disguised antisemitism. Musk and the Republican ideologues now regularly portray Kamala Harris as controlled by secret “puppetmasters”, the Soroses (son and father) in particular, bent on advancing a “globalist” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.Most rightwingers would struggle to explain what these terms really mean; but then again, for many of them politics is not a philosophy exam, but a contest over what can incite fear and hatred of dangerous Others threatening supposed “real Americans”. One fairly simple, almost intuitive throughline, however, is the notion that Real America wants individual freedom, while Real America’s enemies are collectivists bent on creating all-powerful bureaucracies whose business is not business, but telling people what to do. (That is also why, when pressed, rightwingers will inevitably identify “bureaucrats” and the “managerial class” as core members of the “liberal elite”.)The truth is that much of day-to-day life in the US is horrendously bureaucratic: filling out “paperwork”, spending hours on hold, being at the mercy of individuals who might be reasonable when they have a good day (and respond to the plea “Can I talk to you like a human being?”) or simply use discretion to say no when they happen to have a bad day. Europeans never believe this could be the reality in the land of the free, because European pro-business parties like to sell them the story that every day in the US, somebody starts the equivalent of Microsoft in their garage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, plenty of Americans do not see that US businesses can be bureaucratic nightmares because, to be blunt, they know nothing else. Often unable to travel for financial reasons, they accept red scare tales about countries they’ve never seen. Democrats are complicit in encouraging a nationalism that makes the case for reform unnecessarily difficult: if people are constantly told by both parties that theirs is the greatest country ever, why mobilize for fundamental change?Capitalist bureaucracies are maddening, but the madness has a method: it’s driven in part by fear of liability (something Democrats are reluctant to address properly) but above all by the hope that frustrated customers will eventually just give up and let the insurance claim go, rather than spend another two hours on the phone listening to the automated message: “Your call is important to us.” Corporate power has increased enormously in recent decades, partially based on the rightwing doctrine that monopolies are OK as long as they benefit consumers. Bureaucratization has also increased in areas where the state, driven by neoliberal ideology, has tried to engineer competition in public services – in the process creating ever-larger bureaucracies devoted to measuring and surveillance. George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind is a prime example.The Biden administration has at least tried to change course on monopoly power, under the leadership of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whose career started with an attack on the mistaken pro-monopoly theory. The government has gone after “junk fees” such as exorbitant credit card late fees; most recently, with its Time is Money initiative, the White House is confronting predatory capitalists using red tape to extract time and, ultimately, money from powerless customers unable ever to “speak to a representative”. Meanwhile, just as with the upside-down reasoning about monopolies, distinguished defenders of the little guy such as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina have twisted themselves into justifying junk fees.True, daily indignities and frustrations in dealing with private-sector bureaucrats are trivial compared with the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism. But it’s not trivial to want to make life just a little fairer by reducing the power of private actors to behave like dictators.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine | Nesrine Malik

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      A woman without biological children is running for high political office, and so naturally that quality will at some point be used against her. Kamala Harris has, in the short period since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for US president, been scrutinised over her lack of children. The conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be president” – apparently, she doesn’t have “skin in the game”. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, called Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives”.It’s a particularly virulent tendency in the US, with a rightwing movement that is fixated on women’s reproduction. But who can forget (and if you have, I am happy to remind you of a low point that still sticks in my craw) Andrea Leadsom, during the 2016 Conservative party leadership election, saying that Theresa May might have nieces and nephews, but “I have children who are going to have children … who will be a part of what happens next”. “Genuinely,” she added, as if the message were not clear enough, “I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”It’s an argument about political capability that dresses up a visceral revulsion at the idea that a woman who does not have a child should be vested with any sort of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that “so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me”. He appears so fixated on this that it is almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on a complex.But his “disorientation and disturbance” is a political tendency that persists and endures. It constantly asks the question of women who don’t have children, in subtle and explicit ways, especially the higher they rise in the professional sphere: “What’s up with that? What’s the deal?” The public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a sort of group plea to be left the hell alone, in their painstaking examinations of how they arrived at the decision not to have kids, or why they in fact celebrate not having kids, or deliberations on ambivalence about having kids.Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering. But one reason this traditionalism persists in ostensibly modern and progressive places is that women withdrawing from mothering in capitalist societies – with their poorly resourced public amenities and parental support – forces questions about our inequitable, unacknowledged economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay home and provide unremunerated care. She is less likely to be held in the domestic zone and extend her caregiving to elderly relatives or the children of others. She cannot be a resource that undergirds a male partner’s career, frailties, time limitations and social demands.A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack. Not mothering creates a hole for that “free” service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidised rights depend on. The lack of parental leave, childcare and elderly care would become profoundly visible – “disorienting and disturbing” – if that service were removed.“Motherhood,” writes the author Helen Charman in her new book Mother State, “is a political state. Nurture, care, the creation of human life – all immediate associations with mothering – have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources … than we like to admit. For raising children is the foundational work of society, and, from gestation onward, it is unequally shared.”Motherhood, in other words, becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on declining birthrates draws comment from Elon Musk (“extremely concerning!!”) . Not having children is reduced to entirely personal motivations – selfishness, beguilement with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: of the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible working arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood frequently brings, therefore creating bondage to partners. To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return. Assuming motherhood happens without such context, Charman tells me, is a “useful fantasy”.It is a binary public discourse, obscuring the often thin veil between biological and social actualisation. Women who don’t have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship with maternity: a number have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and periods. A number have entered liminal stages of motherhood that don’t conform to the single definition from which they are excluded. A number extend mothering to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don’t count, just as May’s nieces and nephews didn’t). A number have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into a blissful club. They experience regret, depression and navigate unsettlement that does not conform to the image of uncomplicated validation of your purpose in life.But the privilege of those truths cannot be bestowed on creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unfair contract. Women with children are handed social acceptance for their vital investment in “the future”, in exchange for unrewarded, unsupported labour that props up and stabilises the economic and social status quo. All while still suffering sneeriness about the value of their work in comparison with the serious graft of the men who win the bread.On top of that, women have to navigate all that motherhood – or not – entails, all the deeply personal, bewildering, isolating and unacknowledged realities of both, while being subject to relentless suffocating, infantilising and violating public theories and notions that trespass on their private spaces. With that comes a sense of self-doubt and shame in making the wrong decision, or not being as content with those decisions as they are expected to be. It is a constant, prodding vivisection. That, more than anything clinical observers feel, is the truly disorienting and disturbing experience.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Elon Musk is getting out of control. Here is how to to rein him in | Robert Reich

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      Elon Musk is rapidly transforming his enormous wealth – he’s the richest person in the world – into a huge source of unaccountable political power that’s now backing Trump and other authoritarians around the world.Musk owns X, formerly known as Twitter. He publicly endorsed Donald Trump last month. Before that, Musk helped form a pro-Trump super political action committee. Meanwhile, the former US president has revived his presence on the X platform.Musk just hired a Republican operative with expertise in field organizing to help with get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of Trump.Trump and Musk have both floated the idea of governing together if Trump wins a second term. “I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission,” Musk said in a conversation with Trump earlier this month streamed on X. “And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”Musk reposted a faked version of Kamala Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like Harris and saying she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It’s got hundreds of millions of views, so far.The Michigan secretary of state has accused the Musk-supported America Pac of tricking people into sharing personal data. Although the Pac’s website promises to help users register to vote, it allegedly asks users in battleground states to give their names and phone numbers without directing them to a voter registration site – and then uses that information to send them anti-Harris and pro-Trump ads.According to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk himself has posted 50 false election claims on X so far this year. They’ve got a total of 1.2bn views. None of them had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Evidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents are using X to disrupt this year’s presidential race, presumably in favor of Trump. Musk has done little to stop them.Meanwhile, Musk is supporting rightwing causes around the world.In the UK, far-right thugs burned, looted and terrorized minority communities as Musk’s X spread misinformation about a deadly attack on schoolgirls. Musk not only allowed instigators of this hate to spread these lies, but he retweeted and supported them.At least eight times in the past 10 months, Musk has prophesied a future civil war related to immigration. When anti-immigration street riots occurred across Britain, he wrote: “civil war is inevitable.”The European Union commissioner Thierry Breton sent Musk an open letter reminding him of EU laws against amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation” and warning that the EU “will be extremely vigilant” about protecting “EU citizens from serious harm”.Musk’s response was a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!”Elon Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist” but has accepted over 80% of censorship requests from authoritarian governments. Two days before the Turkish elections, he blocked accounts critical of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.And his friendly relations with authoritarians often seem to coincide with beneficial treatment of his businesses; shortly after Musk suggested handing Taiwan over to the Chinese government, Tesla got a tax break from the Chinese government.He may be the richest man in the world. He may own one of the world’s most influential social media platforms. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless to stop him.Here are six ways to rein in Musk:1. Boycott Tesla.Consumers shouldn’t be making him even richer and able to do even more harm. A Tesla boycott may have already begun. A recent poll said one-third of Britons are less likely to buy a Tesla because of Musk’s recent behavior.2. Advertisers should boycott X.A coalition of major advertisers has organized such a boycott. Musk is suing them under antitrust law. “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” he wrote on X, referring to advertisers who criticize him and X.3. Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.Global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov, who founded the online communications tool Telegram, which French authorities have found complicit in hate crimes and disinformation. Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist.4. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission should demand that Musk take down lies that are likely to endanger individuals – and if he does not, sue him under Section Five of the FTC Act.Musk’s free-speech rights under the first amendment don’t take precedence over the public interest. Two months ago, the US supreme court said federal agencies may pressure social media platforms to take down misinformation – a technical win for the public good (technical because the court based its ruling on the plaintiff’s lack of standing to sue).5. The US government – and we taxpayers – have additional power over Musk, if we’re willing to use it. The US should terminate its contracts with him, starting with Musk’s SpaceX.In 2021, the United States entered into a $1.8bn classified contract with SpaceX that includes blasting off classified and military satellites, according to the Wall Street Journal. The funds are now an important part of SpaceX’s revenue.The Pentagon has also contracted with SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service to pay for internet links, despite Musk’s refusal in September 2022 to allow Ukraine to use Starlink to launch an attack on Russian forces in Crimea.Last August, the Pentagon gave SpaceX’s Starshield unit $70m to provide communications services to dozens of Pentagon partners.Meanwhile, SpaceX is cornering the rocket launch market. Its rockets were responsible for two-thirds of flights from US launch sites in 2022 and handled 88% in the first six months of this year.In deciding upon which private-sector entities to contract with, the US government is supposed to consider the contractor’s reliability. Musk’s mercurial, impulsive temperament makes him and the companies he heads unreliable. The government is also supposed to consider whether it is contributing to a monopoly. Musk’s SpaceX is fast becoming one.Why is the US government allowing Musk’s satellites and rocket launchers to become crucial to the nation’s security when he’s shown utter disregard for the public interest? Why give Musk more economic power when he repeatedly abuses it and demonstrates contempt for the public good?There is no good reason. American taxpayers must stop subsidizing Elon Musk.6. Make sure Musk’s favorite candidate for president is not elected.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      If you are outraged by Trump’s use of AI and deepfakes, don’t be – that’s exactly what he wants | Sophia Smith Galer

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      A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump decided it would be fun to accuse the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, of using AI in images showing a large crowd greeting her at an airport. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump furiously thumbed into his phone. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘AI’d it […] She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”Just as some animals are more equal than others, some politicians are more honest. So this week, when the former president himself posted an obviously AI-generated image of what looks like the back of Harris’s head in front of an enormous communist crowd with a huge hammer and sickle unfurled above them, he presumably did not consider it election interference. Trump has also recently shared AI-generated images of himself, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.These images are concerning – especially given most image generators have put up guardrails against making content of real people. But it seems that Trump isn’t trying to pass the images off as real: I think this is him trying to be funny.Over on the Trump campaign team, someone has learned how to work an AI-image generator and has become a little prompt-happy. A weird video of Trump and Elon Musk dancing together isn’t exactly an example of the kind of election-manipulating deepfake media that many disinformation commentators are worried about. It is an example of a candidate desperately trying to remain on your algorithm. AI generation just requires a few prompts and maybe a paid subscription to a generator. It’s a lot cheaper, and quicker, than hiring creatives who need to spend time ideating and creating before something is ready to publish.AI-generated images and deepfakes are the poor man’s meme. Actual successful memes – a humorous piece of content designed to be spread online – are crafted by individuals who have adopted the language and culture of the internet, and know how to inject zeitgeisty topics into social posts designed to resonate and go viral. The combination of text with images or video is a subtle art, and it is one that Harris’s campaign team practises well. Everyone online knows about the coconut tree, and the chronically online will know about the Charli xcx accolade that “Kamala IS brat”.By contrast, the AI posts Trump has shared are not high internet humour; they’re cheap algo-fodder. A trick he is also trialling is combining AI images with real ones in an attempt to lend them some veracity, or perhaps just to sharpen the comedy potential. In his post where he states “I accept!” alongside images suggesting Swifties are “turning to Trump”, he has combined a real photograph of a woman wearing a “Swifties for Trump” T-shirt with a satirical AI compilation of fans wearing T-shirts with the same slogan and an AI-generated image of Swift as Uncle Sam, captioned “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump”. It’s the kind of content your family’s errant uncle might forward to you, that he in turn got from his mate, because they haven’t got anything better to do.Trump doesn’t expect or need Swift’s endorsement, and so the humour is in the incredulousness of it. Posts like this aren’t about genuinely persuading audiences that Swift supports him; it’s about ensuring the intravenous drip of content into his supporters’ Facebook groups and WhatsApp conversations never runs dry. Trump has also always been a wind-up merchant. He knows Swift fans would react angrily to his post. He also knows that such rage-baiting will amplify his content on Truth Social’s and X’s algorithms – and garner coverage in the mainstream media. When people wag their fingers at him for posting content like this, some see it as righteously battling misinformation, but to his fans it looks like not getting the joke. (Of course, it is easier to understand jokes when they have at least one measly crumb of decent comedy to them.)The idea that Harris is a communist, that Trump and Musk are dancing pals, and that even Swifties can’t escape Trump fandom aligns with the narrative of popularity, relatable light-heartedness and prestige that Trump likes to court. Narrative is far more important than truth, particularly in the US, where political ideology is so powerful it was one of the most significant factors determining whether somebody would take the Covid-19 vaccine or not. Trump’s AI posts are best understood not as outright misinformation – intended to be taken at face value – but as part of the same intoxicating mix of real and false information that has always characterised his rhetoric. Trump isn’t interested in telling the truth; he’s interested in telling his truth – as are his fiercest supporters. In his world, AI is just another tool to do this. Whether he is willing to accept the reality that he can’t make a joke, or take one, is another story.

      Sophia Smith Galer is a journalist, content creator and the author of Losing It More

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      Trump and Musk’s talk of a cabinet position is all hot air, but we shouldn’t ignore it | Brian Merchant

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      What if Elon Musk went to Washington to serve in Donald Trump’s White House? There have been worse pitches for a comedy sketch, I suppose. Veep’s Armando Iannucci could probably do something with it. Sadly, the notion is all too real. Sort of.A Reuters reporter recently asked Trump whether he’d consider appointing Musk to his cabinet. “He’s a very smart guy,” Trump responded. “I certainly would, if he would do it, I certainly would. He’s a brilliant guy.” Musk replied with an AI-generated rendering of himself alongside a decade-old crypto meme and tweeted, “I am willing to serve.” It’s not the first time the idea has come up – Trump floated the possibility in May – but it is the first time that Musk has responded in the affirmative, winkingly or otherwise.The exchange is the culmination of an escalating series of displays of awkward amity and mutual admiration between the two, who were on icy terms as recently as this spring. The two are, after all, cut from remarkably similar cloth. Each demands attention the way a flame demands oxygen: incessantly, and at any cost.We can all but count out the idea of Musk becoming an actual cabinet member, or taking on any role that would require him to officially step away from his job as CEO at a half-dozen companies (Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink, the Boring Company and xAI, as of last counting). More than any other founder, Musk is his companies, and they are him. Investors are not backing an auto manufacturer. They are backing Tesla, the revolutionary EV company with self-driving features piloted by the richest and second-most omnipresent man on the planet. Musk knows as well as anyone that if he stepped away, his companies’ stock values would plummet, his fortune alongside them. As funny as it is to imagine Musk, secretary of energy, fumbling his way through a press conference about natural gas prices, it’s not going to happen.That we must even consider taking such a thing seriously is a testament to just how powerfully both men have distorted the nature of our heavily mediated reality through trolling and sheer force of ego. And, unfortunately, I think we should take it seriously! Not because it is at all likely to happen but because it’s worth examining what the entreaty itself reveals about Trump and Musk’s relationship and the relinquishing of a once pivotal platform – X, formerly Twitter – to forces preoccupied with conspiracy and propaganda at this precarious moment.It’s hard to remember now, but Musk long proclaimed himself a moderate in politics. He didn’t much wade into the fray, save to accept the tax credits handed to his companies by Obama’s stimulus bill, and lob the occasional bromide. Why would he? Through 2015, his companies enjoyed nearly $5bn in subsidies sent his way by Democratic policies, and by running a standard-bearing electric car company, he was beloved by liberals.Since then, Musk has been on a rightward drift – until he bought Twitter in 2022, turned it into X, and that drift became a lurch. Perhaps criticism over the treatment of workers at the flagship Tesla plant or a growing obsession with identity politics spurred him on. He’s taken to boosting rightwing content, sharing transphobic memes, promoting baseless conspiracy theories about Democrats, complaining about immigration, and stoking racial division in the UK. By the time Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Musk was well primed – he immediately endorsed the former president, and has been all-in ever since.Trump made his long awaited return to the social network following Musk’s endorsement. So far, he’s posted campaign ads and an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris as a communist leader. Ugly but typical stuff. Musk hosted Trump on Spaces, a livestream feature of X, where, after a half an hour of technical difficulties, they set about rambling for two hours, talking past each other about immigration, Harris and nuclear bombings. The two have done a dance of public online friendship – posting AI-generated images of each other, exchanging laudatory remarks in the press, and now, musing about Musk in a Trump White House. The rendering Musk posted on Tuesday depicted him at a podium labeled Department of Governmental Efficiency, or Doge, a reference to the half-joke cryptocurrency that Musk has found endlessly amusing for years, Dogecoin. He made it a weak punchline on SNL.Where once Musk may have claimed impropriety, and argued that X was a centrist platform free of political bent, now that’s all out the window. X has openly become a place where rightwing memes, projects and baseless conspiracy theories are amplified directly by its owner and most-followed user (195 million as of writing). It is what much of the online right has said it has always wanted: a social network that caters to its policy and cultural preferences and is not censored by those meddling liberals. The social network is a shadow of its former self; hemorrhaging advertisers and credibility, though it has held its place as the center of American political news.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump remains one of the world’s most noxious content creators, notorious for egging on the January 6 riots in tweets. That earned him a three-year exile to the obscure partisan wilds of Truth Social. What happens when the owner of his preferred platform is an ally and a fellow election conspiracy theorist – and instead of turning off the tap, can jack up the heat? Misinformation experts are bracing themselves.Trump and Musk’s alliance is in its infancy. If the election takes a darker turn and Trump again refuses to recognize the election results, we can expect that Musk, a potential member of a Trump cabinet, will exacerbate any ensuing chaos.The truth that undergirds Musk’s deepening bond with Trump is that he doesn’t have to go to Washington to wield influence over our institutions. With his vast wealth, addled megaphone and Trump’s ear – he already does. More

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      The joke’s on Truss for backing Trump | Brief letters

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      So Liz Truss thinks the lettuce joke is “puerile” but supports Donald Trump, whose unhinged rants largely comprise pitifully childish schoolyard insults (Liz Truss leaves stage over ‘I crashed the economy’ lettuce banner, 14 August). Trump and Truss are united not just in their politics but also in their absolute lack of self-awareness, sense of humour, and belief in demonstrable fact.Hilary KnightVictoria, British Columbia, Canada Banksy’s rhino is described as an “artwork”, a “mural” and an “installation” (Banksy rhino artwork in London defaced with graffiti tag, 13 August), yet the individual who added their own composition to the image is a “mindless vandal”. Double standards perhaps?Stuart HarringtonBurnham-on-Sea, Somerset Letters on accents (Letters, 15 August) reminded me of my educational ambitions in 1960s Liverpool. My Toxteth teacher learned of my aspirations for further education and counselled: “You’ll have to lose your Liverpool accent. But don’t worry, the catarrh will disappear when you move away.”Dr Ken BrayBath A while ago, I was surprised that a delicious delicacy was signed on one of the market stalls as asparagu’s, thus becoming, perhaps, a medieval mid‑European warlord (Letters, 16 August). I taught English in town for years.Ian RunnaclesBury St Edmunds, Suffolk Re “How to rein in the malign influence of Elon Musk” (Letters, 15 August). Hands up all those who own a Tesla.John PeacheyWoking, Surrey More