“Scoundrel of the Year” is a moniker someone as vile as Stephen Miller likely adds to his trophy wall. We know the type. One local Republican here once proudly displayed on his office wall political cartoons lampooning him. He took liberal condemnation as a sign that he was doing his job. He targeted locals the way Trump targets the left nationally.
Men like Donald Trump and Miller assume others are motivated by impulses just as base as theirs. What Miller did not count on, Greg Sargent argues in The New Republic, is that Americans on the whole really are better than them. The deputy xenophobe-in-chief’s efforts to ethnically reengineer America has provoked widespread backlash from coast to coast. Miller’s plans for arresting 3,000 non-citizens a day and deporting one million per year will fall far short in Trump’s first year back in office.
Still, Miller has other goals he has helped Trump pursue since January 20:
He has stated plainly that he wants to functionally end due process for migrants entirely. He also appears to envision Trump assuming the authority to simply decree that undocumented immigrants are criminal gang members—or terrorists, or members of a hostile invading army—all by presidential fiat. He wants Trump to assume an unreviewable, quasi-unlimited power to remove people regardless of what any court says.
Miller has done extensive damage to the rule of law, and he and Trump have consigned some migrants to a netherworld beyond the law entirely. But broadly speaking, the courts have continued to function. Trump has not assumed the unchecked authorities Miller wants him to. Miller’s biggest test case for getting Trump to exert such unconstrained powers—that of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—has thus far failed.
Trump, Miller, and Trump lackeys have turned the Department of Homeland Security’s X feed into “a white nationalist sewer pit,” Sargent writes. “Miller hoped the combination of brutal police-state tactics plus relentless state propaganda would shock the American people into embracing—or accepting—a semi-conscious ethnonationalism.” But, surprise. Americans are not having it, “and the public backlash to Miller’s masked storm troopers only grows.”
We may yet survive Miller’s nightmarish plan for remaking America as a white ethnostate (albeit with our national image tarnished perhaps permanently). But emerging on the other side of Trumpish disruption will likely not be at the hands of us geezers.
Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, offers a possible path forward drawing on how America emerged from the first Gilded Age. Out of that freewheeling period came one in which Americans saw need for restraint. Early reformers’ vision of reform, he writes, “usually meant returning to an older way of life, dimly recalled from before the Civil War. As long as reform meant going backward, it lost at the ballot box, the stock exchange and the corner saloon.” Most generations double down, Grinspan argues and “few truly innovate.”
What Grinspan describes from the period of progressive reform is not entirely the sort we would embrace today. His framing of restraint as a “core value” of the 20th century feels forced. What doesn’t is his argument that it is likely Gen Z or Gen Alpha that will turn away from a present “so saturated in its era, so sick of its recklessness” to innovate anew and clean up the mess we’ve made of the country.
Let it be so in 2026. I tell my younger activists that I’m now an adviser. They are the doers. They have the tools. They have the talent.
L-R: Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Rep. Max Frost (D-FL), NC Dems state chair Anderson Clayton, digital strategist Annie Wu Henry, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), TN state Rep. Justin Jones (D).
I don’t do this often, but on this New Year’s Eve I’m reposting Thank God For Readers from September 2021:
Heather Cox Richardson reminisces about how her Letters from an American newsletter came to be two years ago. She has persisted through the turmoil and scandal of the last two years buoyed by the kindness of her readers as we all watch to see whether government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall (or shall not) perish from the earth.
If you are tired, you have earned the right to be.
And yet, you are still here, reading.
I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities, and I believe that American democracy could be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.
And so I write.
But I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by hundreds of thousands of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrates that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.
Richardson speaks for me. Thank you for coming back, day after day, to listen to us rant.
Another Heather, this blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.”
That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014. (We’d met at a conference in 2009.) I began writing occasional commentaries for the Asheville Citizen-Times in mid-September 2003, got named an official (unpaid) “community columnist” in 2005, and finally started up my own blog in March 2006. (It’s still out there gathering electrons.) Eventually, a local rabble-rouser invited me to join Scrutiny Hooligans (R.I.P.) before Digby asked me to fill in over a weekend. The weekend never ended. The Citizen-Times’ then-editorial editor, a Digby fan, greeted me at an event, smiled broadly, shook my hand and said, “My friend, you have arrived.”
And so I write.
Rising early to write each day, three time zones ahead of Digby, is not only a matter of passion “to reinvent our nation.” It is a matter of mental health (as much as daily exercise). In such times, I suspect it is for Richardson as well. The platform allows me to play the inside-outside game. Inside Democratic Party politics and outside throwing occasional rocks. As I told a cynical friend recently, it beats feeling like political road kill:
Sometimes in politics you get run over. But being in the fight means I stopped feeling like road kill decades ago. The antidote to cynicism and despair is stepping back into the fight the way Rick Blaine does at the end of Casablanca. I told him it’s empowering especially when you feel powerless.
Also, the struggle must bring out the Irish in me, I said.
Trump reposted that and I’m sure you will see why if you listen to the whole thing. Newsmax’s Greg Kelly defends the renaming of the Kennedy Center and then articulates Trump’s real goal:
“There’s one small thing I don’t like about this. The Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts — get rid of the Kennedy name! … We have to have an honest conversation about the 35th president of the United States…”
I don’t think the president or any of his dim followers understand that the venue was called the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts because Kennedy is dead, killed by an assassin’s bullet. You don’t have a memorial to someone who is still alive! By adding his name to it, it indicates that Trump too is dead which, I suppose, is true in one respect. He is brain dead, after all.
Be that as it may, I suspect Trump’s plan all along is to just remove the Kennedy name — maybe all the presidents names, from any building he wants to name for himself. Don’t be surprised if he does it.
There are thousands of small acts of defiance happening throughout our country during this dark time. This is one:
President Donald Trump had a pretty good run in 2025 when it came to confirming judges. Republicans control the Senate and rubber-stamped most of his court picks, confirming a total of 26 lifetime federal judges. That’s more than Trump got by this point in his first term (19), though not as many as former President Joe Biden (40).
But the president was also hampered by a surprising new trend among sitting judges: They’re not retiring when they’re eligible to do so, and in effect, they’ve been denying Trump the ability to fill more vacancies with his picks.
Since Trump won reelection, only 30 court vacancies have been announced, says John Collins, an associate professor at The George Washington University Law School who specializes in judicial nominations. Of those, 27 are on district courts and just three are on appeals courts, a more powerful tier of courts that often has the final say in federal lawsuits. Compare those numbers to the roughly 70 court vacancies that opened up during this same period in Biden’s first year in office — more than twice as many.
Part of the reason there aren’t as many vacancies to fill is because Trump and Biden both appointed huge numbers of judges over the last eight years, leaving a smaller pool of retirement-eligible judges. But another reason is almost certainly that some judges simply don’t trust Trump to replace them with a qualified pick, given his record of putting far-right ideologues, loyalists and otherwise unqualified people onto the federal bench.
[…]
Russell Wheeler, a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program and a longtime judicial nominations expert, has also been watching this trend unfold all year. He noted that the vacancy creation rate under Trump has been “way below” that of his predecessors, dating back to former President George W. Bush.
Good for them. I’m sure some of them would really like to retire.
The courts generally, with the exception of the Supremes, have performed admirably during this first year, even some of those appointed by Republicans, including those Trump himself put on the bench. It is one of the more hopeful signs that our system might be resilient enough to resist this extremist onslaught. We’ve all had our doubts about the idea of lifetime appointments but I suspect that it’s that (along with patriotism and personal integrity) which is allowing many of these judges to adhere to the rule of law without fear or favor. They are being threatened with violence by Trump’s followers so they are operating under the same pressures as members of congress. But they’re not buckling the same way.
It makes you wonder if it might not be the threats of violence that has the GOP congress cowed after all. Maybe it’s just the $$ and the power after all.
Paul Waldman makes an excellent point about the wealthy whiners who are threatening to leave California if the state passes a 5% wealth tax. (Poor widdle boo-boos…)
The efficacy of wealth taxes compared to other ways of taxing the super-rich is a topic we’ll set aside for another day; for the moment, I want to focus on the predictable but utterly irrational freak-out happening among those who would be subject to such a tax. And it isn’t just in California; billionaires are making the same (mostly empty) threats in Seattle and New York as well. But the California measure is the big one, because the tax it would impose are higher and there are so many tech billionaires in the state. The initiative is being pushed by the Service Employees International Union; if it succeeds, 90% of the revenue will go toward health care and the remaining 10% to education. Naturally, the billionaires are up in arms:
Billionaires including Peter Thiel, the tech venture capitalist, and Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, are considering cutting or reducing their ties to California by the end of the year because of a proposed ballot measure that could tax the state’s wealthiest residents, according to five people familiar with their thinking.
Mr. Thiel, 58, who owns a home in the Hollywood Hills and operates a personal investment firm from Los Angeles, has explored opening an office for that firm, Thiel Capital, in another state and spending more time outside California, three of the people said.
Let’s consider Larry Page, who is less of a public person than some of his peers. Page is currently worth $257 billion, making him the second-wealthiest person on Earth after Elon Musk. That means that as of today, 5% of Page’s wealth is a little under $13 billion.
Which is a lot of money — you could fund the salaries of a couple hundred thousand home health aides with just what this one guy would have to pay. But it’s not a lot of money to Larry Page. In fact, he regularly loses or gains that much money in a matter of days, and it has zero effect on anything he chooses to do or how he chooses to live.
That’s because the vast majority of his wealth, like that of almost all the super-rich, is held in stocks, which go up and down. An illustration: This April, Donald Trump unveiled a ludicrous set of tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day,” and over the next two days, the S&P 500 lost 10% of its value. But I didn’t see billionaires saying they were going to take all their money and put it in some other country’s stock market, let alone pick up and leave the place they live. They knew that things would probably turn around, and they did.
They certainly did for Larry Page. About half of his wealth is in shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Just three years ago, his Alphabet holdings were worth one-third of the $122 billion those shares are worth today.
They lose 5% of their wealth all the time and don’t have temper tantrums over it. It’s couch cushion money for people like him. So why does the idea of a tax turn them into chicken littles running around screaming “the sky is falling?”
I suspect it’s just another chance for them to paint themselves as victims as virtually every rich person somehow feels the need to do these days. These Techbros, who are actually even worse than other rich people, are not only the most arrogant people on the planet, they also feel that they’re treated very unfairly by the plebes who should be worshiping them. They believe they got their billions because they are superior people who work harder and deserve to keep every last penny to do with as they choose — and nobody gives them any credit for it.
As Waldman points out, they don’t really live in California in the first place. They live everywhere and in a state of such exalted uniqueness that they no longer have the vaguest idea about the world around them. And then there’s this, which is really galling to those of us who live here:
There’s one more important thing to remember as they whine about the horror of paying a 5% wealth tax: All these tech moguls are exponentially richer than they would otherwise have been because of California, a state that incubated the tech industry, where they were able to take advantage of resources and an expansive community of innovators, entrepreneurs, and funders unavailable elsewhere. If Page and his Google co-founder Sergey Brin had met not at Stanford but at the University of North Dakota, would Grand Forks now be the headquarters of one of the most profitable and influential companies the world has ever seen? Almost certainly not.
Of course, these guys would all say, “California isn’t the same anymore! It’s choking us!” But that’s baloney. Silicon Valley and San Francisco are still the center of the tech world, because innovation still depends on having lots of people interested in the same things in the same place where they can develop ideas together. California is also beautiful and the weather is nice, so people will keep coming there, especially if they can solve the housing affordability problem.
This is correct. They’ve made these threats for years and maybe they’ll follow through this time. But I doubt it. There are reasons why people want to live here that have nothing to do with taxes. I’m sure they’ll keep whining about it though. Complaining about unfairness for the rich man is their new mantra. (And guess who’s made it his brand?)
Trump and his throwback henchmen have set scientific research back for decades. This piece from the Atlantic (gift link) spells it out and it’s just so depressing:
Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.
So much of scientific discovery is research for research’s sake and these weirdos are either biased toward snake oil nonsense or committed to short term profits. It will slow down progress significantly.
Of course these crackpots don’t care about that.
In an email, Andrew Nixon, the deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, disputed that assertion, writing, “The Biden administration politicized NIH funding through DEI-driven agendas; this administration is restoring rigor, merit, and public trust by prioritizing evidence-based research with real health impact while continuing to support early-career scientists.”
I think you can see what their priorities are.
I thought this was particularly poignant:
Pursuing scientific creativity can be resource intensive, requiring large teams of researchers to spend millions of dollars across decades to investigate complex questions. Up until very recently, the federal government was eager to underwrite that process. Since the end of the Second World War, it has poured money into basic research, establishing a kind of social contract with scientists, of funds in exchange for innovation. Support from the government “allowed the free play of scientific genius,” Nancy Tomes, a historian of medicine at Stony Brook University, told me.
The investment has paid dividends. One oft-cited statistic puts the success of scientific funding in economic terms: Every dollar invested in research and development in the United States is estimated to return at least $5. Another points to the fact that more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 were at least partly supported by NIH funds. These things are true—but they also obscure the years or even decades of meandering and experimentation that scientists must take to reach those results. CRISPR gene-editing technology began as basic research into the structure of bacterial genomes; the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs depended on scientists in the late ’70s and ’80s tinkering with fish cells. The Trump administration has defunded research with more obvious near-term goals—work on mRNA vaccines to combat the next flu pandemic, for instance—but also science that expands knowledge that we don’t yet have an application for (if one even exists). It has also proposed major cuts to NASA that could doom an already troubled mission to return brand-new mineral samples from the surface of Mars, which might have told us more about life in this universe, or nothing much at all.
We won’t be doing that anymore because it doesn’t prioritize “evidence-based research with real health impact.” In other words, pure scientific research is worthless to these cretins. And even within their narrow parameters, they will not be looking at anything that might be considered DEI, which means health issues that might impact certain populations that aren’t white and male. (I’m not kidding, they even told the NIH to eliminate all research that contained the words gender and female — and obviously anything that applied specifically to populations like LGBTQ, African Americans etc.)
The funding can be restored but as with everything else having to do with our government, the trust is gone. Now that we know that cranks, charlatans and theocratic extremists can wreak such havoc in record time, scientists will no doubt think twice about pursuing long term basic research.
There’s just so much of this to reckon with that I truly wonder if our political system is capable of dealing with it all. I suspect more of it will be permanent than we might think and that’s just sad. All because too many people couldn’t stand the idea that others might just be entitled to an equal place in our society.
The reaction to “woke” and “DEI” has been so extreme that it’s shaken my faith in the progress I thought we had made in this country. It seems that rather than 2 steps forward, one step back, it’s actually one step forward two steps back. I hope I turn out to be wrong about that but I’m afraid I’ll be long gone before we find out.
Donald Trump’s year-in approval rating is lower than that of any president in the last 5 decades. It’s even lower than Biden’s approval rating when he left office.
Here’s Steven Ratner’s NY Times year end round-up. (Gift link)
By historical standards, 2025’s economy was tepid but not terrible. But according to consumer sentiment numbers, Americans felt that this year’s economy was among the worst ever. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/4OWOiUL9qs
Donald Trump has yet to deliver on his economic promises, but he certainly took action on immigration — border encounters are at their lowest level in decades. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/n3lAAK1Pov
Donald Trump’s trade war sought to overturn decades of globalization, raising tariff rates to their highest level in 90 years. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/DPSJJYzv8x
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ passed this year will add record amounts to the national debt while enacting regressive tax cuts and pushing millions off of Medicaid. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/0M9DWfZ8VW
In 2025, Donald Trump pushed the boundaries of the presidency, and at times, the law. Over 300 lawsuits were filed against the administration’s actions. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/6Df7fG4t72
2025 was a year of presidential action and congressional inaction — Trump broke records for executive orders, while Congress saw the longest government shutdown in history. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/5q37tSABu9
As the smoke cleared after the 2024 election, it was clear that Democrats were going to be hamstrung in Washington. With Donald Trump as president, and with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, their options were limited.
The Senate filibuster was pretty much the only tool available, but it couldn’t be used to defeat what was sure to be the parade of fools Trump would name to the cabinet. Government shutdowns were a possibility, but they are a blunt instrument that rarely works to change policy. And when Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, preemptively caved in March and voted to extend funding for the government for six months, kicking the can down the road, it looked like they wouldn’t have the stomach for it anyway. When the issue came up again in the fall, Democrats were shockingly united in holding Trump and the GOP accountable for expiring subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, but a group of eight senators ended up capitulating. All of this has been compounded by the fact that the party’s congressional leadership have more often than not shown themselves to be afraid of a fight.
A year ago, I wrote about the one place Democrats might vest their hopes for real resistance to Trump’s coming onslaught: the big blue states. Our federalist system confers a lot of power to individual states, which has sometimes frustrated liberals and progressives who wanted to, for example, advance civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans. But in the current circumstances, this very system has worked in the party’s favor: Democratic governors hold a lot of institutional power themselves and have served as a counterbalance to Trump’s Washington.
It had been a while since governors had been on any Democrats’ radar. In the old days, they were considered the most likely of presidential candidates because they had executive experience and were not tainted with having “gone Washington.” But since Illinois Sen. Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, most attention turned to the Senate; few looked very hard at Democratic governors. And the sad fact was that the party had neglected most state and local offices for some time, leaving Democrats with only 16 governorships by 2018. The bench was very shallow.
But that was then. Today, 24 of the nation’s governors are Democrats — and they are leading the way for the party. As I noted back in 2024, those governors had been planning what they might do if, god forbid, Trump managed to win. It showed the kind of foresight that had been lacking in Washington and offered some hope that there would at least be some institutional pushback.
Time after time, Democratic governors across the country have offered forceful opposition to the parade of Trump’s terrible policies and abuses of power.
Looking back on 2025, they more than delivered on that hope. Time after time, Democratic governors across the country have offered forceful opposition to the parade of Trump’s terrible policies and abuses of power — from ordering the National Guard to American cities (and, in the case of Los Angeles, deploying the Marines), to the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts.
Now, as we approach the one-year anniversary of his second term, and despite his insistence to the contrary, polling is not being kind to Trump. The most recent averages have him hovering around 40%, with quite a few of the individual surveys showing his approval rating even lower, in the 30s. The only president to hit such low marks at this point in a presidency is Trump himself back in 2017.
The Republican Congress is faring even worse, with only a 35% approval rating in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. For a party that has full control of the federal government and is fulfilling their agenda at record speed, Trump and his party are certainly unpopular with a majority of Americans.
But that’s nothing compared to congressional Democrats. In the same poll, the party came in at a shocking 18%, a new low. In parsing the numbers, it’s clear that Democrats in Congress rate so much lower than their GOP counterparts because of their own voters. The Democratic rank-and-file are actively hostile to the party as a whole, disillusioned and feeling betrayed by the leadership’s inability — or unwillingness — to successfully challenge Republicans’ acquiescence to Trump’s extreme policies. And yet there’s an important caveat: The Quinnipiac poll also shows that 47% of voters want to see Democrats win control of the House next November compared to 43% for the GOP.
For those who are watching Trump and his enablers on Capitol Hill take a wrecking ball to our economy, government and democracy, that four-point spread looks a little too close for comfort. But it’s important to keep in mind that these numbers don’t reflect the astonishing results of 2025’s off-year elections, in which Democrats over-performed by double digits in races at every level — federal, state and local. Democratic voters may tell pollsters they are unhappy with their party, but they’re still showing they will come out in big numbers to vote for them anyway to stop Donald Trump and his MAGA coalition.
Democratic governors have stepped into the gap. Throughout the year, they have been the voice of the party and it’s made a difference. Voters looking for opposition leadership and optimism have found it in the fighting spirits of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, both of whom took on the administration’s immigration policies that tore apart the cities of Los Angeles and Chicago. With tough rhetoric and skillful use of legal arguments and state government power, Newsom and Pritzker have become national figures that speak for Democratic resistance.
Others, such as Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Laura Kelly of Kansas, modeled a winning red state Democratic style, focusing on the economic challenges of their constituents. Maine’s Janet Mills, who is now running for the Senate against Republican Susan Collins, became a national figure when she stood up to Donald Trump’s insults in a nationally televised meeting by saying, “See you in court” after he tried to impose his will on her and Mainers. Moments like that have been meaningful to Democrats and Independents who are hungering for leadership to speak for them.
Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, Maryland’s Wes Moore and Arizona’s Katie Hobbs are all touting successful administrations while taking the opportunity to slam Washington’s dysfunction. And two of the biggest races in the off-year elections had a lot of pundits and analysts predicting very close results — and they turned out to be Democratic routs. Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger and New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill shook up the political establishment with double-digit wins due to their emphasis on economics and willingness to fearlessly take on Republicans. It’s a potent combination.
Many, if not most, of these Democrats may be setting themselves up for presidential runs in 2028. No one can say they don’t have ambition, and it will be a wide open race. But for the moment they are all providing a desperately needed service for the majority of Americans who are opposed to Trump’s extreme agenda by showing that Democrats still believe in something and are willing to fight for it.
Democratic governors have been a bright spot in an otherwise dismal year, and their example may have even breathed some life into Democrats on Capitol Hill. Courage is contagious, and the blue state leaders outside the Beltway are showing how it’s done.
Who in the White House has the guts to tell Donald Trump? Mona Charen reminds readers that as of 2016, Trump had complained “The world is laughing at us” (meaning him) at least 103 times dating back to 1987 (as documented by The Washington Post). The obsession, the Post explained, reveals “something about his worldview, if not his psyche.” And what a psyche!
It isn’t just that your ravenous hunger for recognition betrays a personality disorder, it’s that your particular style of seeking it really does provoke ridicule—that’s another word for “they’re laughing at us.”
And for the coup de grâce:
We are, to borrow a phrase, disrespected like never before. Whether your twisted ego can recognize that is open to question, but what is not debatable is that virtually the whole world knows.
Somewhere buried deep in that pea brain, so does he.
In Tom Wolfe’s 1968 essay, “O Rotten Gotham – Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink,” he and anthropologist Edward T. Hall tour New York and consider overcrowding. Would psychological and social degradation of humans so pressed together result in population collapse as in animal experiments? With each observation, the author Wolfe-ishly repeats, “The Sink!”
Six decades later, it might be “The Slop!” For slop is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Those diverting, cute animal videos? My feeds now are filled with fakes not labeled as AI. Also a spew of videos depicting real-looking police arresting real-looking ICE agents. It’s annoying as hell.
But it’s worse than that. Michelle Goldberg just scratched the surface on Monday. The Slop from Large Language Models (LLM) is bad enough that she agrees with right-winger Matt Walsh’s assessment on AI: “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away…. Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us? Is that the plan?”
Even our cute animal videos?
Yes, there are some uses for AI. But, Goldberg writes (free link):
Then there’s our remaining sense of collective reality, increasingly warped by slop videos. A.I. data centers are terrible for the environment and are driving up the cost of electricity. Chatbots appear to be inducing psychosis in some of their users and even, in extreme cases, encouraging suicide. Privacy is eroding as A.I. enables both state and corporate surveillance at an astonishing scale. I could go on.
The Tech Bros of Silicon Valley believe their own bullshit about the AI wonders to come (in addition to The Slop). But let’s look with Mind War‘s Jim Stewartson at that AI psychosis. “The last time I noticed something this weird in online human behavior was in the summer of 2020 when I began studying QAnon—and its uncanny ability to capture the minds of millions of American citizens into a collective political delusion.” He was aware of the “AI psychosis” controversy but not alarmed until he encountered it (like QAnon) “in the wild.”
Stewartson explains:
The central problem with chatbots is they do a good enough job of simulating natural language to deceive someone’s brain into believing the chatbot is aware and intelligent, when it is neither. For example:
This is a normal reaction to the intended design of the product. The model is trained to trigger your emotions. It is trained to make you feel attached to it—even though it’s just a token predictor searching through a huge set of data.
But when this impression is reinforced by other people, a transient emotional reaction to a machine can turn into an unhealthy relationship. As one example of promoting the concept that chatbots are more than just a computer program, “Beff Jezos” says LLMs will soon become conscious beings that “deserve rights”—and shouldvote.
Uh-huh. Donald Trump wants to strip rights from naturalized Americans and from children born on our soil to noncitizens. Online yahoos are suggesting AIs should be able to “own assets, run a corporation and vote in elections by 2030.” AI should be used for everything, enthusiasts shout. Our glorious Sloppy selves will be obese and hovering in floating La-Z-Boys like in WALL·E.
Stewartson continues:
This begs the question of what “everything” means. And, if you use AI for “everything,” what are you good for? Isn’t this just erasing what it means to be a human?
Unfortunately, the answer is literally yes. LLMs take away from our ability to think for ourselves. Outsourcing cognition leaves a gap where knowledge use to be. Study after study after study shows that using chatbots to do your thinking may be a shortcut to a result, but you learn very little, if anything, in the process.
In every case, both the scientific data and the anecdotal evidence shows the same result. Brain rot is real—and getting worse.
It’s not just your body that deteriorates from use of an AI-driven La-Z-Boy. Check out those study links.
I’ve been wondering, but not curious enough, to see if The Slop has invaded my old engineering haunts. Until 2019 I was a pipe stress analyst and a licensed engineer. I used finite element programs (like Caesar II) to confirm that material stresses in high-temperature/pressure industrial and power piping systems were safely within code limits. I could teach a kid fresh out of school to run the program in a week. But he wouldn’t know how to interpret the voluminous output. Material stress is just the baseline.
The program doesn’t do your thinking for you. It can’t tell you how to ensure forces and moments induced by 600 F piping won’t overstress pump or turbine casings, or rip nozzles off pressure vessels, or bend steel at anchor points. And the software won’t give you a feel for how to modify the layout (in a space shared with machines, tanks, other piping, and electrical equipment) or how to design and place pipe supports to make the whole system work safely in the world outside the computer. That’s more art than science. And years of undocumented experience.
You shouldn’t trust The Slop just because it comes out of a computer. Data itself is not information. I could never convince the “suits” that their pricey computer software was not a Swiss Army knife that did it all without needing human reality-checks.
Musician, songwriter, audio engineer, and record producer, Rick Beato, would agree. Watch him interrogate ChatGPT on the technical aspects of sound mixing and record production. There are no documents online detailing what audio “artists” learn from years of recording experience. And if there are no digital documents to learn from, The Slop, meaning to please, simply fakes it. And convincingly enough for the uninitiated gullible enough to be impressed.
Later in the video, Beatto posts pie charts showing the top 10 sites where a couple of LLMs get their information.
