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      Medical charlatans have existed through history. But AI has turbocharged them | Edna Bonhomme

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      Nearly a year into parenting, I’ve relied on advice and tricks to keep my baby alive and entertained. For the most part, he’s been agile and vivacious, and I’m beginning to see an inquisitive character develop from the lump of coal that would suckle from my breast. Now he’s started nursery (or what Germans refer to as Kita), other parents in Berlin, where we live, have warned me that an avalanche of illnesses will come flooding in. So during this particular stage of uncertainty, I did what many parents do: I consulted the internet.This time, I turned to ChatGPT, a source I had vowed never to use. I asked a straightforward but fundamental question: “How do I keep my baby healthy?” The answers were practical: avoid added sugar, monitor for signs of fever and talk to your baby often. But the part that left me wary was the last request: “If you tell me your baby’s age, I can tailor this more precisely.” Of course, I should be informed about my child’s health, but given my growing scepticism towards AI, I decided to log off.Earlier this year, an episode in the US echoed my little experiment. With a burgeoning measles outbreak, children’s health has become a significant political battleground, and the Department of Health and Human Services, under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy, has initiated a campaign titled the Make America Healthy Again commission, aimed at combating childhood chronic disease. The corresponding report claimed to address the principal threats to children’s health: pesticides, prescription drugs and vaccines. Yet the most striking aspect of the report was the pattern of citation errors and unsubstantiated conclusions. External researchers and journalists believed that these pointed to the use of ChatGPT in compiling the report.What made this more alarming was that the Maha report allegedly included studies that did not exist. This coincides with what we already know about AI, which has been found not only to include false citations but also to “hallucinate”, that is, to invent nonexistent material. The epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who was listed in the Maha report as the first author of a study on anxiety and adolescents, said: “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with.”The threat of AI may feel new, but its role in spreading medical myths fits into an old mould: that of the charlatan peddling false cures. During the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no shortage of quacks selling reagents intended to counteract intestinal ruptures and eye pustules. Although not medically trained, some, such as Buonafede Vitali and Giovanni Greci, were able to obtain a licence to sell their serums. Having a public platform as grand as the square meant they could gather in public and entertain bystanders, encouraging them to purchase their products, which included balsamo simpatico (sympathetic balm) to treat venereal diseases.RFK Jr believes that he is an arbiter of science, even if the Maha report appears to have cited false information. What complicates charlatanry today is that we’re in an era of far more expansive tools, such as AI, which ultimately have more power than the swindlers of the past. This disinformation may appear on platforms that we believe to be reliable, such as search engines, or masquerade as scientific papers, which we’re used to seeing as the most reliable sources of all.Ironically, Kennedy has claimed that leading peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are corrupt. His stance is especially troubling, given the influence he wields in shaping public health discourse, funding and official panels. Moreover, his efforts to implement his Maha programme undermine the very concept of a health programme. Unlike science, which strives to uncover the truth, AI has no interest in whether something is true or false.AI is very convenient, and people often turn to it for medical advice; however, there are significant concerns with its use. It is injurious enough to refer to it as an individual, but when a government significantly relies on AI for medical reports, this can lead to misleading conclusions about public health. A world filled with AI platforms creates an environment where fact and fiction meld into each other, leaving minimal foundation for scientific objectivity.The technology journalist Karen Hao astutely reflected in the Atlantic: “How do we govern artificial intelligence? With AI on track to rewire a great many other crucial functions in society, that question is really asking: how do we ensure that we’ll make our future better, not worse?” We need to address this by establishing a way to govern its use, rather than adopting a heedless approach to AI by the government.Individual solutions can be helpful in assuaging our fears, but we require robust and adaptable policies to hold big tech and governments accountable regarding AI misuse. Otherwise, we risk creating an environment where charlatanism becomes the norm.

      Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science More

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      Doge wants to replace our institutions with a tech utopia. It won’t work | Mike Pepi

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      Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.Doge’s website dubiously claims $190bn in savings. The receipts show that they are less about efficiency than they are aimed at effective dissolution, a fate met by USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign assistance.Don’t be fooled. These brash new reductions are not just your garden-variety small-government crusades or culture-war skirmishes. This administration’s war on institutions derives from the newfound power of Silicon Valley ideology – a techno-determinism that views each institution’s function as potential raw material for capture by private digital platforms.All the while, Elon Musk sold the White House on an “AI-first strategy” for the US government. The recent executive order Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence mandates that barely tested Silicon Valley AI be jammed into the government’s work. It directs agencies to use AI to “lessen the burden of bureaucratic restrictions”. This is a thinly veiled attempt not just to reduce institutional activities; it’s also a degradation play.Doge makes plain an often misunderstood tension: Silicon Valley’s final dream is a world without institutions. Since the rise of the internet, startups have long encouraged, and profited from, institutional decline. This anti-institutionalism goes back to the roots of computing. Charles Babbage’s difference engine, central to modern computing, was built on technologies meant to control labor. It was a reflection of Babbage’s belief that the highest intention of the factory manager was to reduce the skill and cognitive complexity of laborers’ tasks. If the machine could manage production, humans – now smoothed-out automatons – would hardly need accompanying social protections, or even any governance at all.In 1948, Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine”. This automated governance was eventually brought into direct competition with public institutions. The revolt against the state took many forms in the history of computing thereafter, from the libertarian California ideology (“information wants to be free”) to the very idea that a new “cyberspace” would be liberated from governments. Here the individual is an entrepreneur of the mind, able to instantly improve their lot without the mediating hand of the institutional form.To get to the real heart of Doge’s ideology, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s manifesto on building open-source software. For Raymond, cathedrals are “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. This slow, deliberate work is no match for the networked and digitally enabled bazaar, where many software developers move fast by releasing early and often, delegate everything they can, and are open to the point of promiscuity. Something like scripture for computer engineers, Raymond’s ideas soon jumped out of the network and into governance of the physical world, where all human organizations were scrutinized as the maligned “cathedral”.Entrepreneurs loved this idea, too. The management method known as the “lean startup” is a lightweight program of data-driven optimizations designed to quickly scale businesses. Instead of human labor and judgment, lean startups use data and algorithms to experiment their way toward governance.But there’s a catch: a public institution is not supposed to be run like a digital startup. Silicon Valley may have carved out a niche in which its organizational philosophies mastered food delivery apps, AI girlfriends and money-laundering shitcoins, but the moment they take these methods to institutions entrusted with public welfare, they’ve lost the plot. Governments don’t have customers – they care for citizens. If classical liberalism had the state and its many sovereign institutions, and neoliberalism had the divine hand of the free market, today’s platform class elevates computation as the ultimate arbiter of truth. When presented with an institutional force, the platform class first asks: how could this be delivered by way of a digital platform?Digital technology doesn’t have to be this way. Good software can augment institutions, not be the rationale for their deletion. Building this future requires undoing Silicon Valley’s pernicious opposition to the institutional form. By giving into the digital utopian’s anti-institutionalism, we allowed them to reshape government according to their growth-at-all-costs logic.If the newly empowered digital utopianism goes unchecked, we face a platform-archy where black-box AI makes decisions once adjudicated through democratic institutions. This isn’t just a Silicon Valley efficiency fantasy; it’s on the roadmap of every authoritarian who ever sniffed power.Thankfully, the anti-Doge backlash was swift. The abrupt layoffs backfired, leading many Americans to fully understand just how much research and resources for advancing science, medicine and culture are tied to federal support.In the private sector, since capital is no longer free after the federal government hiked interest rates in 2022, the growth of the big Silicon Valley platforms have almost completely stalled. In search of an answer, Silicon Valley is making a big bet on AI, overwhelming users with automated answers that hallucinate and mislead at every turn. It’s becoming harder and harder for the average person to buy what the digital utopians are selling.The response to this assault on our institutions might be a kind of Digital New Deal – a public plan for institutions in the AI era. This 21st-century economics must go well beyond solving for mass unemployment. Reconstructing the institutional foundations of public goods such as journalism, libraries and higher education requires more than just restoring the public funds stripped by Doge. It will require forceful assertions about their regulatory value in the face of a fully automated slop state. Governments come and go, but free and open institutions are critical to the functioning of democracy. If we make the mistake of misrecognizing digital platforms for public institutions, we will not easily reverse Doge’s mistakes.

      Mike Pepi is a technologist and author who has written widely about the intersection between culture and the Internet. His book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, was published by Melville House in 2025 More

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      Why is the media paying millions to Trump? – podcast

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      Archive: CBS News, PBS, NBC News, WHAS11, CNN, Fox 5 New York
      Read Edward Helmore’s piece on Trump’s war on the media
      Listen to Science Weekly’s episode on the Texas floods
      Listen to Season 10 of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
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      The Bezos wedding was a study in disingenuous billionaire behavior | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      If last week was the best of times for Zohran Mamdani and the working people of New York City, it was the worst of times for the billionaires who spent a small fortune trying to stop him from securing the city’s Democratic mayoral nomination. The media mogul Barry Diller, to name just one, donated a cool $250,000 to Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, only to see the disgraced former governor lose by a decisive margin.But Diller would soon be able to drown his disappointment in Great Gatsby-themed cocktails as he joined Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump and at least three Kardashians for the cheeriest event on this season’s oligarchic social calendar: the Venetian wedding of the former TV journalist Lauren Sánchez and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.It was a juxtaposition that even CNN questioned, as the network cut from an interview with Mamdani to coverage of the gilded spectacle. The reportedly $50m affair booked all nine of Venice’s yacht ports, closed parts of the city to the public and forced the relocation of hotel guests to make room for the happy couple. It all served as a stark if sumptuous reminder that there is no expense the megarich won’t pay to secure their own comfort – except, of course, the toll their extravagance takes on the communities from whom they extract their wealth.The lovebirds’ choice of Venice alone demonstrates their carelessness. Because the city comprises more than 100 islands in the Adriatic Sea, it’s uniquely vulnerable to rising sea levels driven by warming global temperatures. Though Sánchez claims to be “dedicated to fighting climate change”, and Bezos has called the issue “the biggest threat to our planet”, their guests arrived in the City of Bridges via 96 private jets, the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation. Bezos has made splashy commitments to fighting climate change, like pledging $10bn to his Bezos Earth Fund, while Amazon has promised to become carbon neutral by 2040. But emissions from Amazon’s delivery fleet soared from 2019 to 2023, and its newest data center will guzzle millions of gallons of water and the energy equivalent of one million homes every year.This disingenuousness is as much a business strategy for Bezos as Prime’s two-day delivery, enabling him to launder his reputation without hurting his bottom line. The pattern played out last year with his ownership of the Washington Post – where, as soon as he felt threatened by an ascendant Donald Trump, journalistic integrity fell overboard more quickly than an inebriated wedding guest on a luxury gondola.As I covered in a column earlier this year, Bezos killed the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, directed the editorial board to publish op-eds that only support “personal liberties and free markets” and oversaw the exodus of more than 20 reporters and editors. Pamela Weymouth, granddaughter of trailblazing Post publisher Katharine Graham, described this capitulation in a recent piece for the Nation as endangering “the very thing that makes America a democracy”.In fairness to Bezos, though, charity-washing is an occupational hazard for billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg initially donated to organizations fighting the California housing crisis that he helped exacerbate, before quietly ending his funding this year. The Gates Foundation gives 90% of its funding to non-profits in wealthy countries rather than the impoverished ones whose GDPs are smaller than its namesake’s net worth. The magnanimity of the uber-wealthy tends to produce what the journalist Anand Giridharadas has called “fake change”, or efforts that stop short of systemic change because those systems underpin the benefactors’ vast wealth.That’s why any vision of progressive change cannot rely on Bezos or his celebrity wedding guests to operate against their self-interest. (No, not even Oprah.) A Green New Deal will not come from oligarchical guilt, but from mass movements. Like the one that deployed almost 30,000 door knockers and pooled funds from 27,000 donors to share Mamdani’s message of genuine economic empowerment.Mamdani’s victory on Tuesday added to a growing body of proof that even billionaires don’t always get what they want. Last year, Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars electing Republicans, but no amount of money could save him from Donald Trump’s mercurial temper. Nor did his wealth sway the voters of Wisconsin, where he contributed $21m to a state supreme court candidate who ended up losing by 10 points.Voters’ growing skepticism of the 1% is no doubt being stoked by grassroots activism. Like in Venice, where local protesters threatened to fill canals with inflatable crocodiles, forcing the wedding of the century to relocate to the city’s outskirts. Back stateside, progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continue to draw record crowds across the country on their Fighting Oligarchy tour. At a recent stop in Oklahoma – a state Trump won by 33 points – Sanders spoke to a standing-room only crowd.Might a billionaire backlash be building, just in time for next year’s midterms? More

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      Trump and Musk’s feud blows up again with threats of Doge and deportation

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      Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s feud reignited this week with the former political allies trading sharp public threats of retribution. The blowup, centered around Musk’s opposition to Trump’s signature tax bill as it moves through Congress, ends a period of rapprochement between two of the world’s most powerful men.Musk posted escalating attacks against Trump’s sweeping spending bill on his social media platform X, calling the legislation “insane” and vowing to form a new political party if it passed late Monday. In response, Trump claimed he could “look into” deporting the South Africa-born billionaire, while also suggesting he could cut government subsidies for Musk’s companies or set the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) on its former leader.“Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible?” Trump asked reporters on Tuesday.Musk’s attempt to derail the tax bill was a major factor in his falling out with the president last month, and the Tesla CEO’s renewed offensive comes at a sensitive time as Trump seeks to shepherd the legislation through Congress. The fight could test Musk’s political influence over the Republican party as he seeks to peel away votes for the bill, as well as further deteriorate his once-close relationship with Trump.Musk has repeatedly criticized the legislation Trump calls his “big, beautiful bill” for its potential to nullify the cuts to the federal government he made through Doge and for the likelihood it will add trillions to the national debt, which he has warned will “bankrupt America” and imperil his dream of reaching Mars. Musk, a top Republican megadonor, intensified his campaign in recent days with threats that he would form his own “America Party” and target lawmakers in upcoming elections who voted for the bill in 2026 primary elections.“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame!” Musk posted. “They will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”Trump has rejected Musk’s criticisms of the bill, alleging that his opposition is because the bill would end a tax credit for consumers purchasing electric vehicles.“Elon’s very upset that the EV mandate is gonna be terminated,” Trump said on Tuesday. “Not everybody wants an electric car. I don’t want an electric car.”When a reporter asked if Trump is considering deporting Musk, he responded that he didn’t know but would “take a look”. Musk replied to a video of the statement on X, saying: “So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.” Trump bought a Tesla in March.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s remarks were a stark turnaround from only months ago when he hosted a showcase for Tesla on the White House lawn in front of media, during which he encouraged his supporters to buy Musk’s cars and sat in the driver’s seat of a red Model S sedan. In contrast, Trump threatened this week that he could destroy Musk’s businesses.“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Monday. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE.”Musk’s companies, especially SpaceX, are closely intertwined with US government agencies and have received billions of dollars in contracts from them. The government has meanwhile come to rely on SpaceX for key parts of its space travel and satellite communications programs, and the company is being considered for a role in building a new multibillion dollar missile defense program. The symbiotic relationship between Musk and the government has made any political tensions sensitive for his businesses, and Tesla’s share price declined on Monday and Tuesday as the feud continued. More

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      Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database

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      The US Department of Homeland Security has for the first time built a national citizenship database that combines information from immigration agencies and the social security administration.The database was created in collaboration with the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) in an effort to bridge the gaps between disparate information sources to make it easier to determine whether someone is a citizen, according to NPR, which first reported the details of the database.The database is the result of an expansion of the systematic alien verification for entitlements (Save) program, made up of smaller databases within the homeland security department, and an integration with information from the Social Security Administration. The centralized repository is searchable and can be accessed by state and local election officials to look up the names of anyone trying to vote to determine if they are citizens, according to NPR. Until now, election officials had to ask potential voters for documents verifying their citizenship or rely on a hard-to-navigate patchwork of databases.In response to a request for comment, the DHS said: “Integration with the Social Security Administration (SSA) significantly improves the service offered by Save.”Previously, agencies involved in voting were required to use numbers issued by the DHS to look up voter registrations, which they may not have had access to but may have been more likely to possess social security numbers, according to the statement. The citizenship database may also soon integrate state department of motor vehicles (DMV) data, NPR reported.The DHS statement also describes the motivations for the creation of the database: “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, USCIS is moving quickly to eliminate benefit and voter fraud among the alien population.” Voter fraud is rare in the US, experts say; consequences include fines or jail time.The citizenship database is one of the first results of Doge’s efforts to gain access to and merge information on Americans from agencies across the federal government, including the Internal Revenue Service, in the first few months of the Trump administration.Reports indicate Doge is attempting to create a single data hub that enables access to these vast troves of information on Americans in an effort to eliminate the separation of information in isolated or protected silos. The attempt to connect various sources of personal information, which Doge has said is needed to root out fraud, and allow it to be accessed in one place has sparked several lawsuits.In response, union members in Maryland have sued the office of personnel management, the treasury department and the education department for sharing personal information with Doge officials “who had no need to know the vast amount of sensitive personal information to which they were granted access”, according to their suit.“Defendants admit that the [Social Security Administration] granted Doge personnel broad access to millions of Americans’ sensitive PII [personally identifiable information],” US district judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland wrote in a decision ordering a temporary block on the Social Security Administration sharing information with Doge.“This intrusion into the personal affairs of millions of Americans – absent an adequate explanation for the need to do so – is not in the public interest.”The database in question was created with little engagement of the public, something that is requisite for building these types of mass surveillance databases. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires federal agencies to notify the public if there are new ways they plan to use or collect Americans’ personal information. Legal experts have also questioned whether this sort of a centralized database sidesteps many of the privacy and security protections implemented within each agency.The consolidation of personal information into a mass database is unprecedented and has sparked concern among immigration and privacy advocates. The creation of a centralized repository brings together pieces of information that were previously within the purview of separate agencies, and potentially makes it easier for government officials to look up individual’s data from across the government. Many worry about how else this database could be used.“The premise of noncitizen voter fraud is one that officials, including President Trump, have used as a pretext to discredit and intimidate entire communities,” said Citlaly Mora, spokesperson for immigration legal project Just Futures Law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This database is the latest iteration of Doge’s attempt to weaponize the data of the millions of people that live in the US They are building this database without transparency and without consulting the public about how their data will be used, a brazen violation of our privacy rights. Given this administration’s track record of failing to follow proper processes, we should all be concerned.”The rollout of the citizenship database, which is an upgraded version of an existing network of data sources, comes after the New York Times reported that software firm Palantir was selected to help develop a “mega-database” for the Trump administration.In a letter to the company, 10 Democratic lawmakers said the database, which would collect the tax and other personal information on all Americans in a single repository, would potentially be a violation of federal law.“The unprecedented possibility of a searchable ‘mega-database’ of tax returns and other data that will potentially be shared with or accessed by other federal agencies is a surveillance nightmare that raises a host of legal concerns, not least that it will make it significantly easier for Donald Trump’s administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies and other Americans,” the letter reads.Palantir has repeatedly denied that it was building a master database.It said: “Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens. We do not operate the systems, access the data, or make decisions about its use.” More

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      Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans | Robert Reich

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      Draw a circle around all the assets in the US now devoted to artificial intelligence.Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the US military.A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the US away from a democracy into a dictatorship led by tech bros.Where do the four circles intersect?At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.In JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a “palantír” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantír falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based platform that allows its users – among them, military and law enforcement agencies – to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.Palantir is now poised to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Meanwhile, the administration wants access to citizens’ and others’ bank account numbers and medical claims.Will the Trump regime use an emerging super-database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We’ll soon find out.Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its work with Trump.Linda Xia, who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,” she told the New York Times.Even some Republicans are concerned. Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican of Ohio, told Semafor such work could be “dangerous”: “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”Last week, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super-database of Americans’ private information.Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir’s selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk.Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) was behind Palantir’s selection. At least three Doge members had worked at Palantir, the Times reported, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it.Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump re-elected and then, as head of Doge, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority.Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped Vance become his vice-presidential pick.Thiel also mentored the billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the rightwing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar”.The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPalantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8bn in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) – making him the highest-paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States.A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.But this group – Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp and Vance, among others – doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including social security, civil rights and even women’s right to vote.As Thiel has written:
      The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.
      Hello?If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If the US learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power – as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp and other oligarchs have put on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super-database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.Had you walked to the end of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above the president’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir – one of the chief sponsors of the event.Tolkien’s palantír fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel’s Palantir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Elon Musk calls Trump’s big bill ‘utterly insane and destructive’ as Senate debates

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      The billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Saturday criticized the latest version of Donald Trump’s sprawling tax and spending bill, calling it “utterly insane and destructive.“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk wrote on Saturday as the Senate was scheduled to call a vote to open debate on the nearly 1,000-page bill.“Utterly insane and destructive,” Musk added. “It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”Passing the package, Musk said, would be “political suicide for the Republican Party.”Musk’s comment reopens a recent fiery conflict between the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and the administration he recently left. They also represent yet another headache for Republican Senate leaders who have spent the weekend working overtime to get the legislation through their chamber so it can pass by Trump’s Fourth of July deadline.Earlier this month, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO also came out against the House version of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, denouncing that proposal as a “disgusting abomination”.“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it, he wrote at the time.Musk’s forceful denouncement of Trump’s spending plans triggered a deep and public rift between the billionaire and the president, though Musk in recent weeks has been working to mend relations.On Saturday, Musk posted a series of disparaging comments about the senate version of the bill, which argued the legislation would undermine US investments in renewable energy.Musk boosted several comments from Jesse Jenkins, a macro-scale energy systems engineer who teaches at Princeton.After Jenkins wrote, “The energy provisions in the Republicans’ One Big Horrible Bill are truly so bad! Who wants this? The country’s automakers don’t want it. Electric utilities don’t want it. Data center developers don’t want it. Manufacturers in energy intensive industries don’t want it.” Musk replied: “Good question. Who?”Musk’s continued criticism of Trump’s budget proposals comes as the bill faces a rocky path in the senate. Republicans are hoping to use their majorities to overcome Democratic opposition, but several Republican senators are concerned over provisions that would reduce spending on Medicaid and food stamps to help cover the cost of extending Trump’s tax breaks. Meanwhile, fiscal conservatives are worried about the nation’s debt are pushing for steeper cuts. More