Powderhorn

I have seriously considered writing one of these to have in the can, ready to publish. This is a gut punch. (Still, I finally got sick of three errors in the hed and circled back to fix them. And dear god, cadence. You wanted contractions in the first two opportunities, but not in the fourth where one was used.)

Dear reader, for the first time since I became a journalist, I have to tell you I wish you weren’t reading what I’ve written. Because if you’re reading this, it means I’m no longer in this world – or any other. I’ve died. Shit, it’s hard to write this, but that’s the way it is. I’ve died, and I don’t want to leave without saying goodbye and sharing a few final thoughts.

I’ve been a very fortunate person. I was fortunate to have been born in a European country that, although still under the yoke of Franco’s regime, very soon afterwards began to progress economically, socially and politically. Luck, and it was only luck, made my destiny infinitely easier than that of hundreds of millions of children who are born in regions of the world ravaged by hunger, poverty and war.

Even in this difficult moment I’m going through, I don’t think I have the right to complain or to moan about my lot. How can I play the victim knowing these historical inequalities and injustices? How can I lament my fate when we see what is happening even now, in Africa, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran or in Palestine? I can’t say for sure, but I imagine that my last thought – the last image that passes through my mind before I shut down – will be of the children massacred in Gaza and of the surviving Palestinians who face a terrible future. What I do know is that I will leave this world without understanding why the international community chose to remain impassive while Israel perpetrated a genocide right before its eyes, broadcast live, minute by minute, massacre by massacre.

For years, we’ve been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration’s supposed “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically it. The Supreme Court looked at it and said there was no standing because there was no evidence of coercion (and even suggested that the plaintiffs had fabricated some of the facts, unsupported by reality).

But now we have actual, documented cases of the federal government using its surveillance apparatus to track down and intimidate Americans for nothing more than criticizing government policy. And wouldn’t you know it, the same people who spent years screaming about censorship are suddenly very quiet.

If any of the following stories had happened under the Biden administration, you’d hear screams from the likes of Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, about the crushing boot of the government trying to silence speech.

But somehow… nothing. Weiss is otherwise occupied—busy stripping CBS News for parts to please King Trump. And the dude bros who invented the “censorship industrial complex” out of their imaginations? Pretty damn quiet about stories like the following.

Taibbi is spending his time trying to play down the Epstein files and claiming Meta blocking ICE apps on direct request from DHS isn’t censorship because he hasn’t seen any evidence that it’s because of the federal government. Dude. Pam Bondi publicly stated she called Meta to have them removed. Shellenberger, who is now somehow a “free speech professor” at Bari Weiss’ collapsing fake university, seems to just be posting non-stop conspiracy theory nonsense from cranks.

Days before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an investment firm controlled by a senior member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly signed a deal to pay $500m to buy almost half of a cryptocurrency startup founded by the Trump family. Under any other president, such an arrangement, which was revealed this past weekend by the Wall Street Journal, would cause a political earthquake in Washington. There would be demands for an investigation by Congress, televised hearings and months of damage control.

But this latest example of corruption involving Trump and his family business hardly made a blip over the past few days, relegated to a passing headline in a relentless news cycle often dominated by Trump’s actions and statements.

This scandal deserves our attention: a half-billion-dollar transaction with a foreign government official, executed in the shadow of Trump’s inauguration, which directly enriched the president and his family. The deal to acquire a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded by the Trump family and several allies in the fall of 2024 during Trump’s presidential campaign, was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the most powerful officials in the UAE. Known as the “spy sheikh”, Tahnoon is the brother of the UAE’s president and serves as national security adviser. He also oversees one of the largest investment empires in the world, serving as chair of two Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, which have $1.5tn in assets, and G42, a firm focused on artificial intelligence.

One of the reasons Amazon is spending billions on robots? They don’t need bathroom breaks. Arriving a few minutes early to the public tour of Amazon’s hi-tech Stone Mountain, Georgia, warehouse, my request to visit the restroom was met with a resounding no from the security guard in the main lobby.

Between the main doors and the entrance security gate, I paced and paced after being told I would have to wait for the tour guide to collect me and other guests for a tour of the 640,000-sq-ft, four-story warehouse.

Amazon offers tours to the public at 28 of its 1,200 US warehouses – a recruiting and public-relations tool to boost brand trust and address criticisms of poor working conditions. It was something to consider as I wound up having to go in the parking lot, propping open my rental car door for privacy.

Bathroom access is one of the most notorious criticisms of Amazon’s treatment of workers. Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers have reported having to pee in water bottles due to lack of time and access, and have even said their bathroom breaks are timed.

Zoe Hoffman, an Amazon spokesperson, said it was “absurd and false to connect a visitor’s tour experience to that of our employees”, adding that workers were allowed “regularly scheduled breaks” throughout their shifts.

None of this will be an issue if Amazon’s multibillion-dollar robot dreams come true.

At this difficult moment in American history, it’s imperative that we have the courage to be honest with ourselves.

The United States, once the envy of the world, is now a nation in profound decline. For the sake of our children and future generations, we must reverse that decline and change, in very fundamental ways, the direction of our country.

Not so long ago, the US was admired for its democracy, constitution, rule of law, strong middle class and an American dream which promised that our kids and grandchildren would have a better life than their parents.

Tragically, that is no longer the case.

We used to have the strongest and most vibrant middle class on Earth. Not any more. Today 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than any other major country. Despite huge advances in technology and worker productivity, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were 53 years ago.

They had come to say a prayer for the father, the son and the holy ghost.

The father was Donald Trump, who, despite sending federal militias to roam Minneapolis, threatening to invade Greenland and telling lies by the dozen, remains the lord and saviour of the religious right.

The son was his protege, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who, despite documented human rights violations and mass detentions that swept up 3,000 children, was praised by a congressman for leadership that displays “character” and “conscience”.

And the holy ghost was the Republican party’s moral spine, now reduced to a phantom thread. “The power of Trump compels you!” as The Exorcist nearly said.

They had gathered on Thursday in the cavernous ballroom of the Washington Hilton hotel for the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event where past speakers have included Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Bono, Tony Blair and Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Trump, of course, can be relied upon to make it feel less a church sermon than a knockabout campaign rally. “Good God!” and “Jesus Christ!” are more likely to be exclamations from horrified onlookers than earnest pronouncements from the truly faithful.

After what were surely some very intense negotiations with himself, Elon Musk has decided to merge his rocket company SpaceX with his AI and social-media company xAI in what amounts to a $1.25 trillion tie-up. Combining two of his companies into a new mega-corp supposedly worth more than the sum of its overvalued parts is a classic Musk move. His last self-merging coup came last year when he combined X and xAI. Along with frequent capital raises, Musk’s vertically integrated takeovers of his own properties allow him to continue to pump up the values of his start-ups. In December, SpaceX was valued at $800 billion. Less than two months later, for the purposes of this deal, it was valued at $1 trillion, with xAI considered to be worth $250 billion.

SpaceX sealed the deal by issuing $250 billion in new shares that it handed to xAI’s shareholders. The move effectively diluted the holdings of existing SpaceX shareholders. The New York Times summed up the parlous bargain: “SpaceX’s longtime backers were forced to shrink their ownership in the company drastically, as a percentage, to pay for the acquisition.”

That would infuriate most investors, but thanks to the circular nature of Musk’s corporate economy—otherwise known as the Muskonomy—and his frequent reliance on the same group of financiers, some of SpaceX’s investors were already xAI investors. (SpaceX is also expected to raise at least $50 billion in a public offering this summer.) Minting new SpaceX shares is supposed to buoy the entire enterprise while saving Musk the trouble of pursuing more conventional ownership models that involve real dollars.

For the past week, I’ve been unable to retrieve the copies of The Washington Post that usually get delivered to my home, since the brutal weather in the DC area has turned my front yard into an unfordable moat of frozen snow. This now seems a richly prophetic turn of events, since my hometown newspaper is being eviscerated under the disastrous ownership of centibillionaire monopolist and MAGA flunky Jeff Bezos.

Per a new report from The New York Times—cowritten by former Post media columnist Erik Wemple—the paper is initiating “a widespread round of layoffs.” Other outlets reported that at least a third of Post employees across business and editorial are being let go. In a Zoom call with the paper’s staff—one that neither Bezos nor his handpicked Post publisher Will Lewis deigned to attend—editor in chief Matt Murray announced that the Post’s sports section—a distinguished operation that formerly anchored a great deal of the paper’s market penetration in the mid-Atlantic—will be effectively dismantled, with a handful of staffers left to stoke a walking-dead version of it. Local news coverage—another historic strength of the paper, and one of the few coverage areas that cannot be easily replicated by other national titles—is also being gutted. The Post will also be shuttering its recently revived books section—where I worked as deputy editor in the early aughts. The paper’s daily news podcast will be deep-sixed, and its international desk is due to be hollowed out.

News of this impending bloodletting has been swirling around industry circles for weeks—so much so that foreign correspondents for the Post were reduced last week to publicly begging Bezos to save their jobs, and preserve the Post’s reputation as a serious news organization. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Bezos didn’t bother to reply and kept an arrogant oligarchic silence during the buildup to this gruesome journalistic dismemberment. Bezos also offered no comment when Post reporter Hannah Natanson had her devices seized by the FBI in the investigation of a series of leaks from a government contractor—an act of intimidation from a Trump White House waging sustained ideological war on the fourth estate. Bezos’s silence on these fundamental assaults on news-gathering underscores his complacent indifference to the civic value of journalism; his true priorities became clear amid the Post’s death watch when he stirred out of his state of public hibernation long enough to host Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who has overseen the complete ideological purging of the Pentagon press corps—at his space start-up Blue Origin, which holds billions of dollars in defense contracts.

The Department of Justice’s seizure of Fulton County, Georgia, 2020 voting records remains a chilling, bewildering exercise in using federal agencies to try to validate Donald Trump’s false claim that he won reelection that year, carrying Georgia though even state GOP officials certified that he lost the state by more than 11,000 votes. Trump followed up the FBI raid by insisting, during a podcast interview with former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, that “Republicans” should “take over” voting procedures in 15 states. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 states. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Any attempt to “nationalize” voting processes would be unconstitutional; it’s clearly the purview of the states. But note that Trump specifically said one party, his own, should take over. That’s just about as fascist as he’s ever sounded.

While spokesperson Karoline Leavitt tried to claim that Trump was only referring to the SAVE Act, which would force Americans to prove their citizenship to register to vote, the president himself continued to insist he intended much more than that. Standing in front of a cadre of Republican lawmakers assembled as he signed legislation ending a brief government shutdown, he announced, “I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it.”

This is one of many signs that Trump knows his party is in big trouble in the coming midterm elections. Remarkably, many GOP leaders said they disagreed with Trump’s suggestion that Republicans take over elections. “I’m not in favor of federalizing elections,” Senate majority leader John Thune told reporters. “That’s not what the Constitution says about elections,” Senator Rand Paul told MS Now.

Voting rights and pro-democracy advocates are in a precarious position. If they speak loudly and frankly about Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s plans to suppress, manipulate, or outright “steal” the upcoming midterm election, they risk depressing the very people who must be counted on to show up and vote. They risk making people feel like their votes will not matter because “the fix is already in.” They get called a “doomer” by Pollyanna Democrats on social media, and “hysterical” by Republicans. And since the single best solution to the threat of voter suppression is overwhelming turnout, depression and doom, even in the name of truth, ends up helping Trump’s forces.

But: to ignore the threat posed by Trump, to pretend like everything is going to be okay, to assume that upstanding members of the courts will rise to prevent the theft of the election is to stick your head in the sand. Trump and the Republicans have no intention of letting the upcoming midterms (in which Republicans are predicted to lose control of the House) proceed fairly. They’re attacking the election through legislative, law-enforcement, and political means.

The most obvious threat is the legislation Republicans keep introducing. Republicans in the House have already passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act). The bill radically reshapes the voter registration process by essentially repealing the Motor Voter Act. Instead of allowing people to register with a driver’s license, the SAVE Act requires them to show additional identification, like a passport or a birth certificate, in order to register. The Economic Times estimates that at least 21 million eligible voters may not be able to provide this extra information. The people most likely to struggle with the new requirements are the usual suspects—people of color, young people, and poor people—but there’s an additional group that could easily be prevented from voting should this bill become a law: married women who have changed their name. Those women likely do not have a birth certificate with their new marital name, and if they also don’t have an updated passport with their married name, they could be denied their right to vote.

During the last period of his time as president, while the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn’t hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn’t even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?

The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that’s a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.

Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.

For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about “values” and “belonging” and “bringing your whole self to work.” If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats.

Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the tech industry’s sudden, conspicuous rightward lurch. His argument is refreshingly blunt: this isn’t about ideology. It never was. It’s about leverage.

There are many theories about Silicon Valley’s swift, and very conspicuous, rightward turn. Tech leaders course-corrected from an overly permissive era. The Trump administration demands fealty in exchange for critical regulatory favors. Mr. Trump’s re-election reshaped the national climate and reoriented the values of tech leadership.

Each of these explanations is convenient, but none are correct. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years, across both Big Tech and venture-backed start-ups, and I can tell you the truth is much more mundane. Silicon Valley’s chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It’s not personal — it’s strictly business.