What a week: Trump got booed at the Knicks game, fell asleep in public, and — naturally — blamed Biden. David Shuster is here to make it all funny, counting down the five best AI political satire clips of the week, fast in and fast out. It’s six minutes of exactly the catharsis you need right now.

The countdown climbs from a rapid-fire “We Didn’t Start the Fire” rewrite (Epstein files, Signal gate, RFK’s brain worms, and the whole circus in one breath) up through “I-D-I-O-T written on the roof,” a pitch-perfect “Man Baby,” and the song half the country is humming, “Sundowning.” And at No. 1, back in the top spot because nobody does it like him — Randy Rainbow’s brand-new “A Very Stable Genius.” Press play, laugh out loud, and send it to someone who needs it.

Cliff’s Note: We say it every week because it’s true: we need to laugh so we don’t scream — and keeping a place where the laughs are this sharp and this fearless costs money. That’s where you come in. We just took 40% off annual subscriptions, the lowest price we’ve ever offered.

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It’s not a “please come back,” it’s an easier way to stand with us while we keep making the predator class the punchline. If Shuster’s Top 5 is the best six minutes of your week, fund it — upgrade today and join us.

— Cliff

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Three of the sharpest Epstein investigators on Substack just sat down in one room for the first time—and the result is the conversation the mainstream press keeps refusing to have. Cliff Schecter, Ellie Leonard, and Kait Justice are kicking off a new weekly Epstein update, and the debut goes straight at the names everyone else tiptoes around.

Inside this one: why Leon Black paid Epstein $30 million a year for “tax help” and what a survivor’s journal actually describes, the Howard Lutnick “I was only there an hour” neighbor story that doesn’t add up, the Kushners’ very strategic “discovery” of an Albanian island, and the Sarah Kellen deposition that just put fresh names on the record. Leon Black’s own deposition is coming at the end of June—and these three are already three steps ahead of it.

This is pattern recognition the networks won’t do, from reporters who live in the files. Hit play and watch them connect the dots in real time.

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by Lawrence Winnerman

My friend recently asked me if I knew the percentages behind how much active AI use there is versus how much passive AI use. She then wondered if she had maybe coined those terms—and while she’s very good at coining terms, in this case, she didn’t.

When I started doing research, I discovered that this point is fairly well discussed: the moments in our day when we actively choose AI—to generate an image, to organize our email, to outline a story we’re writing—versus the moments when AI is fed to us by our phones, as in the summary of a text message breaking up with you before breakfast (just hypothetically speaking).

Sometimes the universe gives you hints about what it wants you to write next, and in this case mine came the next night at dinner.

While we were eating, another friend told me that she doesn’t use AI at all.

She said it the way you’d mention you don’t eat veal—quietly, without fanfare, with the settled calm of a person who has looked at a cruelty and stepped around it. She is not a foolish woman. She reads more than I do. She marches, she calls her representatives, she gives until it hurts. When she said it, the table murmured its approval, and somebody else said me neither, and the conversation moved on to the salmon.

I didn’t say anything. I want to tell you why, because the why is this essay.

I wanted what she said to be true. I had more reasons than anyone at that table to want it to be true. I was shoved out of a twenty-five-year career by the first wave of this technology, and then—because as every good GenXer who grew up singing “Blasphemous Rumours” knows, God has a sick sense of humor—I have recently been rebuilding my life by becoming the thing that shoved me out. I have written before that I am the displaced and the displacer at once, and I have stopped expecting that sentence to get easier. Nobody at that dinner wanted the exit she described to exist more than I did. A door out of the machine. A clean abstention. A way to be a bystander.

So I went looking for the door.

This essay is what I found.

Dear fellow human, I’m sorry in advance.

A Walk Through Tuesday

Come with me through my friend’s Tuesday. Not a hypothetical Tuesday—the ordinary one, the one she actually lived, the one any of us lived.

Her phone wakes her at 6:47, and before her feet find the floor she checks the weather, which is to say she consults a predictive model trained on decades of atmospheric data. She skims her email over coffee. She does not see the spam, because Gmail’s machine learning reads on the order of fifteen billion unwanted messages a day and removes more than 99.9% of them before any human eye arrives—her mail was read by a machine this morning before it was read by her.

She buys the coffee with a tap of her card, and in the two hundred milliseconds before the terminal chirps, a model scores the transaction against everything Visa’s systems know about fraud; those models blocked an estimated forty billion dollars of attempted theft in a single recent year. She drives to work along the blue line her map app draws, and the blue line is not a road. The blue line is a neural network’s continuously revised guess about the future of traffic, based on real-time mobile-phone movement data, self-reported traffic incidents, and a thousand more variables.

At her desk she reads the news, and nearly every ad she scrolls past—about 90% of digital display advertising now—was placed by an algorithmic auction that identified her, valued her, and sold her attention in less time than a synapse takes to fire. There were hundreds of those auctions before lunch. She googled something at some point; roughly half of American queries now return an AI-composed answer above the results, which means the search engine did not point her at the machine. The search engine was the machine.

Lunch is a scroll. More than half of what Instagram shows her is not from people she follows—it is conjured by a recommendation model that knows her tastes the way a river knows its bed. In the evening she watches something; more than 80% of the hours streamed on Netflix arrive through the recommender, and on YouTube the figure for recommendation-driven watch time runs around 70%. If music plays while she cooks, about three songs in ten were chosen for her by a model. Then she sleeps, and her Oura ring grades her sleep while the photos her phone took that day sort themselves by face, in the dark, while nobody watches.

She never opened a chatbot. Not once. She didn’t generate an image of the president in diapers throwing a tantrum (for example). Her hands are clean.

And the machine was with her from 6:47 in the morning until she closed her eyes—reading her mail, pricing her attention, scoring her purchases, plotting her routes, choosing her evening. It never noticed her abstinence. There was nothing to notice. Abstinence happens at the front door, and the machine does not use the front door.

In late 2024, Gallup asked Americans about a week of their lives. Ninety-nine percent had used at least one AI-enabled product in the previous seven days—weather, streaming, navigation, social feeds, the ordinary furniture of a modern day. Sixty-four percent of those same people said they don’t use AI.

One of those numbers is a measurement. The other is a story we tell ourselves.

And the story has a strange shape when you hold it to the light. ChatGPT counts some nine hundred million weekly users now, the fastest adoption curve of any product in history—and yet when Pew asked in 2025, only about a third of American adults had ever used it.

Two-thirds of the country has never once touched the famous thing. Ninety-nine in a hundred swim daily in the quiet thing. We have built our entire moral conversation about AI around the famous thing, the thing with the text box and the name, the thing you can refuse—because the thing you can refuse is the only thing that lets you feel like you are making a choice.

As if the server asked you for your order, and you said, smugly, “No AI for me, please. I’m 100% human organic.”

Friend, unless you are somehow reading this from the year 1984, oh no, you most certainly are not.

The Buildings Don’t Care What You Believe

I have written before about the buildings—the windowless boxes humming behind berms off the interstate, the water they drink, the power they pull, the towns that wake up to find a cathedral of heat has moved in next door. That essay was about what the buildings take. This one is about what they are.

Because here is what I assumed, and what I suspect my friend assumes: that there are AI buildings and internet buildings. That somewhere out there is the respectable old infrastructure—email, photos, movies, the family business of the web—and then, bolted on beside it, the new unclean annex where the chatbots live. Refuse the annex, keep the house. It is a reasonable picture.

It is also wrong, and it is wrong in a way that should rearrange your understanding of where you live.

As of early 2025, by Goldman Sachs’s accounting, artificial intelligence accounted for about 14% of the power flowing through the world’s data centers. The rest was everything else—the cloud at 54%, and at 32% the boring, beloved stack: your email, your backups, your photos of your kids, the enterprise software your job runs on, this essay, your quarterly business report slide deck, due next Wednesday.

The machine my friend thinks she is boycotting is a guest room in a house she has lived in for twenty years. Google’s TPUs—the custom chips that trained Gemini—spent years serving YouTube and Maps before any of us had heard of a large language model. The same silicon. The same buildings. Satya Nadella, asked about Microsoft’s build-out, reached for one word and said the goal was “fungibility of the fleet”—capacity that flows to whatever needs it, training run or Tuesday-night stream, with the building neither knowing nor caring which. The building was designed not to care.

Fungible silicon, agnostic to which electrons stream through it. (Fungible silicon, by the way, is also my new band name.)

The industry has a name for the companies that own this machine—Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta—and for once the jargon tells the truth. They are called hyperscalers. The name is not a boast about size; it is a description of architecture. Hyperscale computing grows sideways: when demand spikes, nobody buys a bigger machine—they add ten thousand more identical cheap ones, and a layer of software stitches them into a single seamless organism that routes around failure without a human hand touching anything. When a server dies, nobody fixes it; the system simply stops sending it work and lets it go dark in its rack. Roughly half of the world’s data center capacity now sits inside hyperscaler buildings, and the share is headed for two-thirds within five years. Hold the word, because the architecture is the argument: a machine deliberately built so that any workload can land on any chip is a machine with no separate rooms. There is no AI wing to boycott. There is no clean corridor to stand in.

And before you ask—yes, the new cathedrals are different. Abilene, Texas: 1.2 gigawatts rising for OpenAI—just shy of the 1.21 a flux capacitor needs—not to go back to the future, but to become part of a megacluster of servers. Memphis: two gigawatts and half a million GPUs behind xAI’s fences. Meta’s Hyperion in Louisiana, scaling toward five. These are temples built for one god, and no one’s home movies will ever live there.

So which picture is true—the shared house or the dedicated temple? Both.

And that is precisely the trap. The internet you already live on runs through the shared machine, so your abstinence carries you through it anyway; and the temples run on capital and contracts, so your abstinence never touches them at all.

The door you refuse to walk through is not connected to either building.

There is one more thing the buildings know that we have not wanted to learn. Video—streaming, the thing we all do without a flicker of guilt—was 65% of all internet traffic as recently as 2022. It had been the heaviest thing online for a decade. And in that decade, global data center energy use barely moved: a 550% explosion in computing was absorbed with roughly a 6% rise in energy, a feat of efficiency documented in Science in 2020 and noticed by approximately no one.

Nobody held a candlelight vigil for the YouTube servers. Nobody at any dinner party ever announced, gently, that they had given up streaming for the sake of the grid. The infrastructure only became legible to us—only became moral terrain—when the machine started talking back.

I don’t say that to absolve the new buildings; their bill is real, and I have itemized it elsewhere. Their construction, paradoxically, is the only thing keeping the US economy out of a recession at the moment—a conundrum that melts your brain as soon as you start to think about how the AI that will one day run on them is coming for middle-class jobs.

I say it because it tells you what kind of objection we are actually making. We are not objecting to the machine. We were inside the machine for twenty years and called it convenience. We are objecting to the machine becoming visible—and a visibility objection can be satisfied by making the machine invisible again, which is exactly what the fiction of opting out accomplishes.

Refusing to prompt a chatbot reduces the machine’s load the way holding your breath fights climate change.

You can do it, but it won’t help, and we actually need you to do something more effective.

Active and Passive

So let us name the thing properly, because if we can see it, we should be able to name it.

Active use is a verb. You open the tool, you type the words, you take the output, and you own the choice—every part of that is yours, refusable, accountable. Passive use is not a verb. Passive use is a tense. It is the condition your day is conjugated in: the filtered inbox, the scored swipe, the ranked feed, the routed drive, the auctioned attention. You do not do passive use. You live in it, the way you live in a climate. And nobody asks the climate’s permission, and the climate does not ask yours.

In September 2025, Pew found that 62% of American adults knowingly interact with AI at least several times a week. The number that matters more is this one: 13% feel they have any real control over whether AI enters their lives at all.

Thirteen percent. Read that as a weather report, because that is what it is. Eighty-seven percent of the country, standing in the rain, being told the ethical question of our age is whether they choose to carry an umbrella.

I can hear the objection, and it deserves an answer rather than a wave. You’re conflating things, a careful reader says. A spam filter is not a chatbot. A recommender system is not a large language model. Predictive AI and generative AI are different technologies with different risks, and lumping them together is rhetorical sleight of hand.

The taxonomy is real, and I concede it without a fight.

But walk to the border between the categories and watch what is happening there—the border itself is moving, toward you and past you, even as you watch.

Google’s search ranking has run on transformer language models—the same architecture as ChatGPT—since 2019. Gmail’s newest spam filter is a large language model. Mastercard now markets its fraud engine as generative AI. The membrane between the unclean technology and the ambient one is dissolving while we stand here arguing about which side of it we are on.

And there is an older law at work, one the computer scientists noticed generations ago and named the AI effect: AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet. The moment a model works—really works, reliably, at scale—we stop calling it AI and start calling it plumbing. The spell checker was AI once. The route planner was AI once. The thing reading your mail right now was AI until it became infallible, at which point it became infrastructure and vanished from the moral map. This is not an accident of language. Invisibility is the technology’s final feature, the one that ships last. The system is at its most powerful exactly when it stops appearing on the list of things you believe you could refuse.

You can refuse a tool. You cannot refuse a tense.

The Footprint

In 2004, the oil company BP—then mid-rebrand into “Beyond Petroleum,” spending more than a hundred million dollars a year on the effort with the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather—unveiled a small, friendly tool on its website. It was called a carbon footprint calculator. Find out how your daily life heats the planet, it offered. Go on a low-carbon diet. Two hundred seventy-eight thousand people used it in its first year. Before that campaign, the phrase “carbon footprint” barely existed; Google searches for it registered close to zero. The historian Benjamin Franta later gave the maneuver its proper name: a micro truth in a macro lie. The micro truth: your choices have a cost. The macro lie: that the ledger of a planetary crisis is kept in your kitchen, rather than in the boardrooms of the few dozen companies doing the extracting.

It worked. God help us, it worked for twenty years. An entire generation of decent people learned to audit their groceries while the wells ran wide open—learned to feel personally filthy and personally absolved in a cycle that never once approached the actual machinery. It was the most successful redirection of moral energy in the history of public relations.

I want you to look at the opt-out fiction until you see the same architecture. The question of artificial intelligence is a question of power—who builds the machine, who owns it, who profits, who decides where it lands and what it eats and whom it replaces, who pays when it is wrong. Every one of those questions has an address. And we have converted the whole stack of them into a different question entirely: have you, personally, touched the unclean thing? Power has been swapped out for purity while we were busy feeling good.

And here is the detail that should keep us up at night: this time, nobody had to spend a hundred million dollars to sell it to us.

We did it to ourselves, for free.

The companies needed no Ogilvy. We looked at the largest concentration of infrastructural power in human history and we reached, unprompted, for the one response that has never built or stopped anything: personal cleanliness. Purity is so much easier than politics. Purity you can achieve alone, before lunch, without meetings. Politics requires the one thing the fiction quietly excuses you from: showing up with other people, again and again, for years.

Be fair to the impulse—I intend to be, because the impulse is decent and some of the people holding it are the best people I know. Underneath the abstention is solidarity with artists whose life’s work was strip-mined without consent or payment. Underneath it is disgust at slop, and a refusal to applaud on command for a future being marketed as inevitable. Those are not poses; those are values, and in one narrow lane the refusal even finds a target—declining to generate AI images touches an actual product with an actual revenue line, and the artists are right to ask it of us. I honor all of it.

But an ethic that begins and ends with abstinence is not an ethic. It is hygiene. And clean hands have never once stopped a machine.

Clean hands are performative.

Clean hands have never done the gritty work of a revolution—not in any age when power held the chains of enslavement and servitude.

Meanwhile, the fiction does its quiet work. It produces the feeling of resistance at none of resistance’s costs—and the feeling is the harm, because the feeling metabolizes exactly the energy that organizing needs. Not one regulation has passed because a million people declined to make a chatbot write their emails. Not one data center has moved an inch for an empty text box. Not one moderator scrubbing the machine’s nightmares for two dollars an hour in the Global South has gotten a raise out of anyone’s abstinence.

And I can prove the energy works when it is pointed at something real, because data centers are being stopped—just never by abstainers. In 2025 alone, organized neighbors—town boards, county commissions, ranchers and retirees packing rezoning hearings in rooms with bad fluorescent lighting—blocked or stalled at least forty-eight of them, $156 billion worth of buildout, and the pace has only quickened since: more than twenty more projects killed in the first quarter of this year. Communities in at least fourteen states have forced pauses on new construction; Maine is moving toward an outright ban; keeps a map. None of those people won by being pure. Most of them, I would wager, have ranked feeds and filtered inboxes like the rest of us.

They won by showing up, unclean, dripping with data, in a folding chair, at a Tuesday-night hearing.

The machine does not register your absence. The county commission does. The senator would.

There is a door on the wall of this moment, marked EXIT, and a long line of good people standing in front of it, feeling the freedom of knowing it is there.

The door is painted on.

I checked—that is what this essay was, the sound of me checking. The wall behind the paint is real, and it is load-bearing, and it goes up a gigawatt at a time whether we touch the text box or not. The only way out has never been a door. It is the slow, unglamorous work of deciding, together, what gets built into the wall—and that work has a thousand open seats and no purity requirement at all.

And one more thing, the thing I have been holding back all essay, the reason this is only one essay in this series. While we stand in the rich, mostly white world of the Global North admiring our painted door and grading one another’s abstinence, the actual bill for this machine is being totaled somewhere else—in Manila at midnight, in Nairobi at two dollars an hour, in a drought-cracked valley in Chile where the cooling water used to be.

It is rolling downhill, the way the bill always rolls. And if you are one of the people in the folding chairs—if the cathedral went up next to your county’s water—you already know the slope, because you live on it. But the hill does not end at your property line. It keeps going, past the last American transmission tower, all the way down.

The next essay is about who lives at the bottom.

Spoiler alert: it probably isn’t you.

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We put a British comedian on the show to make us laugh, and somewhere between Trump’s ongoing existence as a ding dong—this time saying he loves 4.2% inflation—and a Russian billionaire trying to start his own country in space, Amy Hoggart explained America better than most paid to do it. You’ll know her from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee—the one who walked into Trump rallies with a straight face and British accent—and the outsider’s eye our lunacy desperately needs.

Amy gets into why she’s raising her kids in England (one word: healthcare), why MAGA rallies are winning the one fight the left forgot to show up for, and an old sketch of hers calling out the billionaire space-king class years before the rest of the press caught up. It’s a very funny hour about very unfunny things—which, lately, is the only way through.

Don’t read about it. Hit play above—and stick around for her line about what actually pulls lonely people toward Trump. That’s the one we can’t stop thinking about.

Cliff’s Note: This is free because laughs shouldn’t have a paywall—but our show can’t last on good intentions. We’re making a run at 3,000 paid subscribers. To do it we just knocked 40% off the annual plan—the lowest it’s ever been. It’s not “please come back”—it’s “we made it easier to stand with us.” If AMPED UP is where you learn and laugh, it’s simple: upgrade today, lock in 40% off, become someone who can proudly say they’re funding independent progressive media. We’re closer than you’d think.

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By David Shuster

The White House South Lawn has hosted state dinners, Easter egg rolls, military ceremonies, diplomatic receptions, and moments of national mourning. It has served as a backdrop for presidents addressing the nation during wars, economic crises, and historic achievements.

Now, if Donald Trump gets his way, it will host a UFC cage match.

The plan bears the unmistakable Trump stamp, a charlatan who decided long ago that modern politics is not the art of government but the manufacture of spectacle. Whereas earlier presidents sought to impress the citizenry with inspiring speech, intelligence, and moral purpose, Trump has always preferred the methods of a demented carnival barker. The crowd must be amused. The crowd must be astonished. The crowd must never be permitted to reflect, think for themselves, or embrace reality.

The UFC event, scheduled for June 14, is the logical destination for Trump’s crass and toxic political culture and for an approach that always prioritizes shallow spectatorship. The White House, also known as the executive residence, will become a national amusement pavilion, complete with combatants battering one another for the entertainment of the multitudes gathered on the South Lawn, watching giant screens at the nearby ellipse or viewing on television. There will be a few MAGA celebrity guests, lots of television cameras, an Octagon fighting ring, and a 92 foot-tall, 600 ton temporary steel structure known as ‘the claw.’

It is part of the arena structure and serves as the lighting and broadcast engineering canopy.

The UFC spectacle, with all of its various Trump White House components, has a certain grotesque symmetry. Why should a Trump government conducted as entertainment not feature an actual cage match? Why preserve even the faintest pretense that public affairs are distinct from show business? The distinction has been fading for a decade. Trump is now simply finishing the job with the assistance of UFC CEO Dana White.

There are, however, some potential challenges for Trump and his UFC sycophants. Lawyers have descended upon the scheme with the enthusiasm of RFK junior approaching a roadside animal carcass.

A federal lawsuit is asking a court to rule that the people’s house, without a formal act of Congress, can not lawfully be transformed into a for profit gladiatorial venue.

The prospect of federal judges spending their working hours pondering the constitutional dimensions of a cage match on the White House grounds is a commentary on this Trump era.

Another challenge involves mother nature.

Washington, D.C. in June is a city perpetually threatened by atmospheric insurrection. Thunderheads gather with alarming speed. Lightning flashes across the sky. Rain descends in torrents. Any resident of the capital knows that outdoor plans during the month are often written with an “indoor plan B.”

For more than a decade, I lived in Georgetown, about a 10 minute walk northwest of the White House. During the course of my life and career in D.C., I lost track of the number of back patio gatherings I hosted or attended that suddenly required a mass stampede inside.

So, it is very possible that the grand White House extravaganza, after months of promotion, oceans of publicity, and a $60 million dollar production cost for the UFC, will find itself at the mercy of a thunderstorm. There would be something almost poetic in such an outcome.

Imagine the scene. Thousands assembled. Television cameras poised. The UFC combatants prepared to commence their ritual mayhem with Donald Trump watching ringside.

Then a distant rumble. A flash of lightning. A hurried announcement from officials advising everyone to seek shelter.

At that moment the oldest force in American life would reassert itself. Not democracy. Not constitutional government. Not public virtue. Weather.

(The latest forecast predicts zero precipitation on June 14, with a high temperature of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. So the Trumpsters may escape any challenges with rain and storms.

Trump, his supporters, and the UFC fighters may not escape the storm of problems that come with bugs, gnats, and moths.

UFC CEO Dana White says he attended a White House rose garden dinner recently and was shocked by the number of flying insects.

And the swarms will only intensify thanks to the massive television lights.

Several UFC athletes, uncomfortable with the politics and the outdoor conditions, have already said “no thanks.”

Several celebrities have also responded to the Trump and UFC invitation with a “no thanks.” The irony is remarkable. Modern celebrity culture in America is built on the pursuit of relentless attention. These are people who routinely attend product launches, influencer conventions, awards ceremonies of questionable necessity, and parties whose sole purpose is to commemorate the existence of other parties.

Yet countless stars in the sports world and entertainment industries (including TV, movies, and music) have considered the prospect of a White House UFC cage fight and concluded that they would prefer not to be photographed anywhere near it.

This is no ordinary social rebuff. It is a watershed moment. To be shunned by celebrities requires effort. To be shunned by dozens of them simultaneously suggests a level of vulgarity so concentrated that even professional publicity-seekers find it overpowering.

The truly comic element is that Trump has spent a lifetime cultivating celebrity approval, celebrity proximity, and celebrity glamour. Yet here, at the very moment he seeks to transform the presidential mansion into the world’s most expensive combat sports backdrop, and part of the nation’s 250^th birthday celebrations, even many members of the notoriously attention-hungry celebrity tribe are refusing to participate.

When actors, influencers, reality stars, and assorted professional exhibitionists begin looking around and muttering, “This seems a bit tacky,” the situation has clearly gone beyond ordinary bad taste.

To be clear, the issue is not whether UFC athletes deserve respect.

Many are remarkable competitors. And their mixed martial arts sport is clearly popular and enjoyed by millions of Americans.

The issue is whether the grounds of the executive mansion should be a stage for televised combat spectacle, designed to generate ratings, social media buzz, and political theater.

The White House should remain a place where Americans encounter the dignity of self-government, not a crass and unprofessional commercial sports venue that only serves the vanity of Donald Trump.

If karma is alive, the swarms of moths and other annoying flying insects will be there too.

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Friends —

It’s Pride Month. It’s also the week the Senate rammed through a $70 billion deportation machine and the Justice Department quietly handed the president’s family a pass on their tax problems. Same news cycle. The networks called it Tuesday.

We didn’t. That’s the difference between Blue Amp Media and the people who read you the weather while the house burns.

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Here’s the part nobody in power wants you to sit with: independent media is one of the last things they can’t buy, can’t fire, and can’t sanewash into mush. That’s us. Right now we’re 2,400 members strong. Today I’m asking you to help us cross 3,000.

This is the Drive to 3,000, and the price climbs as we fill it — so the best deal goes to whoever moves first:

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What your $36 buys, for you and for the fight: weekly Zooms where I say the things I can’t say on YouTube. Private chats with people who are done being polite about fascism. Every column, every livestream, every word we publish. And the quiet satisfaction of funding journalism that answers to you and to nobody else.

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PS — Somewhere right now a billionaire is buying a newspaper to make sure it never prints what we just said. This is the alternative. It costs $36.

The Conversation

Julie Roginsky joined me today for the kind of crucial, personal conversation we should have with political allies when we see deeply unsettling behavior. Julie and I, both 50-something, longtime Democratic consultants, talkers, and Jews—though decidedly unreligious and not hugely culturally Jewish—felt it was time to address something that’s bothered us both: the increasingly open and virulent anti-Semitism on parts of The Left.

We both think Bibi Netanyahu is a war criminal. A criminal-criminal. And we think AIPAC are a bunch of right-wing Republican clods. None of this is anti-Semitic to point out, obviously. But we’re seeing conspiracy theories shared by people we know, and by those in our comment sections we don’t, who are otherwise progressive. Some blame American Jews for Israel. Some blame all Israeli Jews for Bibi’s crimes (akin to condemning all Americans for Trump’s). Some use “Zionist” as a slur like “white supremacist,” though their origins and belief systems couldn’t be more unalike.

Zionism: Truths & Untruths

To be clear: you can disagree with the tenets of Zionism. But you can’t make it mean something it doesn’t—there are facts, and if you don’t want to be MAGA, you must adhere to them. Zionism was popularized by a liberal Austro-Hungarian journalist in 1897, Theodor Herzl. His worry was antisemitism in Europe was so pervasive Jews needed political self-determination and sovereignty. He wanted a democratic state with civil rights, religious freedom, and legal equality. Naturally, he thought of a location Jews had called home until expelled by Roman Emperor Hadrian in an act of retribution (132-135 CE). It created the diaspora, scattering Jews throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, primarily, but really across the Earth, for over 1,700 years.

An early and key part of the movement was Labor Zionism—which fused socialism and Zionism. Yes, it was a project of The Left, its leadership center-left, social democratic, or socialist. So to compare it to white supremacy is just factually wrong.

To summarize:

• Zionism: A movement advocating Jewish self-determination and a Jewish homeland in the historic land of Israel.

• White Supremacy: An ideology claiming that white people are inherently superior to other races and should dominate society.

• Zionism: Emerged in the late 19th century largely in response to antisemitism, pogroms, and lack of Jewish political sovereignty.

• White Supremacy: Emerged from colonialism, slavery, racial hierarchy, and pseudoscientific racism.

• Zionism: Does not require belief that Jews are superior to non-Jews.

• White Supremacy: Explicitly depends on belief in racial superiority.

• Zionism: Includes a wide spectrum—from liberal, secular, religious, socialist, and conservative versions.

• White Supremacy: Includes variations, but all are based on racial hierarchy and unequal human worth.

  ---

Our Stories

Julie told stories about how her family had to flee Russia in the 1980s. How her family was nearly killed while in Israel. I talked about the anti-Semitism I encountered growing up in 1970s New York (go see the film “Gentleman’s Agreement,” if you doubt me). My family having to escape pogroms from Odessa to Vienna 120+ years ago when they came to the U.S. We both talked about how this kind of violence always starts with rhetoric and conspiracies, but never ends there.

It was an emotional conversation. But there was no ranting. We want people to understand the impact of what’s happening on us, the human beings behind the figures. What figures? The 9,354 anti-Semitic incidents in 2024, the most on record since tracking began in 1979. That Jews, 2% of the U.S. population, were targets of 70% of “religion-based hate crimes” in the U.S. n 2024, per to the FBI. And more.

Why Just Israel?

Gaza is horrific. Nobody excuses it—why would we? In fact we condemn Bibi for his atrocities there. But you know what else is horrific? Sudan. Myanmar. Syria. China puts Muslims in concentration camps. Saudi Arabia has mass-murdered Yemenis, and their “leader,” Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), ordered an American green-card holder bone-sawed to death. Murders women for the “crime” of being raped. And MBS was every bit as important in convincing Trump to attack Iran as Netanyahu.

And before you ask: the U.S. funds them too. Heavily.

But there are no protests for the rights of innocent Yemenis against Saudi Arabia on American college campuses, and few articles on Substack. Why?

Dividing Democrats

We make a plea for consistency, context and nuance. For understanding not only the moral impact of what we choose to say—or not—but the political fallout. Which a certain Russian leader whose name rhymes with Moo-Tin has a keen interest in causing. Putin just happens to hail from a country that mastered dividing the West with anti-Semitism in the 1960s, and worked at an outfit known as the KGB that planned it.

Folks, this is one of the things that could crack the Democratic coalition. It’s already happening in places.

Please watch the video, my friends. It is more emotional plea than anything else 🙏 And there is so much more in there than one can communicate in writing.

As always, all my best, friends.

—Cliff

Cliff’s Note: Look—we don’t do a conversation like this one for clicks. There’s no fun thumbnail here, no easy applause line. Julie and I did it because somebody has to, and because the people funding Blue Amp Media are the only reason we can.

That’s no figure of speech. We have no network suits, no billionaire owner, nobody whispering “go easier on this one.” It’s you. So if this conversation meant something to you, here’s how you keep them coming.

Become a paid subscriber. It’s the single most important thing you can do. Paid subscribers allow us to sit down for an hour on a hard subject instead of chasing trends. If you’ve been reading free for a while, carpe diem, friends—upgrade today! If you can swing our annual plan or Fascism-Fighter tier, you’re not buying a newsletter. You’re funding independent, progressive media that says what you think out loud.

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And get in the comments. This is the part I mean most. We didn’t do this to lecture anybody—we made it to start a conversation among family. Tell me where you agree, tell me where you disagree, tell me your own story. We read them. We answer them. That’s the whole point of doing this here instead of on someone else’s platform.

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We’ve shown up for every fight. Help us keep showing up. —Cliff

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The tequila was real, the Wi-Fi was not, and somewhere over the Atlantic Delta Airlines scrambled Cliff’s computer so thoroughly that this week’s Tequila Talk opened in glorious technological chaos. It only got better from there. Cliff—fresh off a red-eye from Sicily—and our favorite recovering Republican Joe Walsh poured a couple of drinks and went somewhere real. It’s funny, it’s furious, and it’s the kind of unscripted cross-aisle conversation you don’t get anywhere else. A taste of where they went:

1. The night everything broke. Delta fried Cliff’s machine somewhere over the Atlantic, and the meltdown opened onto a question neither of them could shake.

2. The AI stat that should keep you up at night. There’s one number in Lawrence’s Blue Amp piece that’s enough to ruin your evening. Cliff says it out loud.

3. Bread, circuses, and a fight on the South Lawn. Why Cliff thinks the spectacle on the White House lawn is lifted straight from the last days of Rome.

4. The predator class, then and now. Gladiator, an emperor’s island, and a through-line to today’s headlines you won’t be able to unsee.

5. Empire on its last legs, or a wake-up call? Joe makes the case for why all of this might—somehow—be the good news.

6. Obama’s bad take. One quote set Cliff off, and it turned into a reckoning with the party’s own leadership.

7. The Democrats who actually fight. A short list of names Cliff will go to the mat for. Worth seeing whether yours made it.

8. The party’s “Tea Party moment.” Where the anger goes next, and the point at which it curdles into something darker.

9. Antisemitism, Israel, and the test of consistency. The most charged stretch of the night—the line Joe won’t cross, and the one “tell” Cliff watches for.

10. And a few things you’ll want to see to believe. A missing drug, a viral buffalo, an unlikely court brief, and Cliff’s flat-out prediction for Ohio.

Plus a look at the week ahead. Watch the full conversation, then come find us in the comments.

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Cliff’s Note: Here’s the thing. We do this because the truth needs to be at least as loud as the lies—and that costs money the billionaires would love us not to have. If you get something out of these conversations, become a paid subscriber.

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It’s five bucks a month, a single latte, and it buys you the new weekly strategy memo drawn straight from my years on presidential campaigns, the paid-subscriber Substack Live, the chat, and the satisfaction of funding media that nobody can buy off. If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, drop something in our Ko-fi—every dollar keeps the lights on and the predators nervous.

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This file can be found on the DOJ’s website, under EFTA01111413.

PLEASE NOTE: This file is completely unredacted except for a single name, but contains the names of several young girls, ages 13-17. Do not share the document or read their names publicly, out of respect for their anonymity and safety. I redacted the document myself for the purpose of this reading.

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If you would like to donate to the Trump Epstein Memorial Bookmobile, headed up by DEFIANCE.org, you can do so at the above link. This will help put the files in front of more people, leading to more justice for survivors.

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by Lawrence Winnerman

2026 is a hell of a year.

It’s the 250th birthday of the American experiment. It’s the midterm election that decides whether the experiment gets a 251st. It’s the year Grand Theft Auto VI—a video game about stealing everything that isn’t nailed down—is projected to clear $3 billion, possibly the biggest entertainment launch in human history.

And it’s the year roughly $4 trillion in private capital converged on three companies as they lined up to go public.

Anthropic, the makers of Claude. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. And SpaceX, the maker of rocket ships and satellites and AI and whatever else Elon Musk has welded into his unholy alliance this quarter.

Here’s the first thing you need to know about these three companies: they lose money. Not a little money—massive, historic, oceanic amounts of money.

They are on the spending spree of the century, pouring billions into data centers the size of small towns and, in SpaceX’s case, into pieces of rocket ships that usually don’t explode.

And here’s the second, which is the one I want you to sit with for this entire essay. The same political class that has spent forty years insisting there was no money for housing, or health care, or child care, found $4 trillion for this—instantly, and without anyone having to ask how we’d pay for it.

By the end of this piece, I’m going to show you that the scarcity they’ve sold us since the Reagan years was never a fact about the world. It was a choice about where the money was allowed to go.

Let me walk you through how I know that.

The Filings

Here are the confirmed facts, in filings three weeks apart.

On June 1, 2026, Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO, with a potential October debut. Days earlier it had closed a Series H round, raising $65 billion and valuing the company at $965 billion—nearly the first $1 trillion private company ever. To feel the velocity: in March of 2025, all of Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion. About fourteen months later, that number is sixteen times higher.

On May 22, 2026, OpenAI confidentially filed an S-1—the SEC paperwork that begins an IPO, the document where a company finally has to open its books—targeting a September listing above $1 trillion. OpenAI still projects roughly a $14 billion loss in 2026 alone, and has said out loud, in public, that it does not anticipate being profitable until 2030.

SpaceX filed in May 2026, reportedly seeking up to $75 billion in new funding at a valuation of $1.8 trillion—more than twice the largest IPO in history. SpaceX posted a $4.28 billion net loss in the first quarter of 2026, with an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion, largely driven by its AI operations.

Three companies, within weeks of each other, each valued at or above $1 trillion. Nearly $4 trillion in combined valuation.

Now hold that against the size of the thing it’s happening inside. The entire U.S. economy is about $30 trillion. These three companies, which mostly lose money, are claiming a combined value equal to roughly one-eighth of everything the United States produces in a year—before a single share has traded publicly.

So here’s the big question: where do $4 trillion new dollars come from?

How does that much money get manifested out of thin air?

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Follow the Money

You might be interested to learn that some of the players are names you’ve been hearing all over the news lately. Sovereign wealth funds, for example—and not as passive index money. As direct round participants.

Read that list again, because it changes the nature of the bet. The floor under these valuations is no longer just institutional demand. It is, in part, nation-state strategic interest. When the savings of Singapore and Qatar and Saudi Arabia are direct backers, the question stops being “will this company succeed” and becomes “will these governments let it fail.” That’s a different kind of risk, and it’s one ordinary public investors have no way to price.

But here’s what should make the hair on your neck stand up. These aren’t unfamiliar names. These are the same funds—in several cases the same people—who have spent the last two years buying their way into the orbit of the American president and his family. The money pouring into the AI buildout and the money showing up in the corruption headlines are coming out of the same accounts.

Let’s walk through it.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund—a backer in the frontier-AI rounds—is the same PIF that put $2 billion into Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, six months after he left the White House. The fund’s own screening committee recommended rejecting the deal, citing the “inexperience” of Kushner’s management and fees it called “excessive.” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs the board, overruled them. By 2024, the firm had returned no profit to its investors but had collected roughly $157 million in management fees from foreign governments—$87 million from Saudi Arabia alone. The same PIF funds LIV Golf, which has paid to hold tournaments at Trump’s properties, and is now scrutinized by ethics experts who can’t even measure how much the Trump family is pocketing because there’s so little transparency.

Abu Dhabi’s MGX—the $100 billion state AI fund in OpenAI, Anthropic, and the Stargate project—is the same MGX that made a $2 billion investment in the crypto exchange Binance using USD1, the stablecoin from the Trump-family-backed World Liberty Financial. The deal was announced by Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s Middle East envoy. It is expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. Senators Warren and Merkley have demanded the records. MGX is steered by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed—the UAE’s national-security chief, the so-called “Spy Sheikh”—whose interests separately bought a $500 million stake in that same Trump crypto firm, $187 million of which flowed to Trump family entities, in the same window the administration agreed to ship the UAE up to 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year.

Qatar—whose Investment Authority backed an earlier AI round—is the same Qatar that offered the Trump administration a $400 million Boeing 747, a “flying palace” destined, after his term, for his presidential library. Legal scholars across the spectrum called it a likely violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. It was waved through anyway.

These are not separate stories.

The sovereign wealth of the Gulf is the connective tissue running through all of it—the jet, the crypto coin, the golf tournaments, the son-in-law’s fund, the AI cap table.

The same predator class, moving the same money, buying the same access, now writing the checks that prop up the most valuable companies on Earth.

I’m not alleging a single conspiracy with one set of instructions. I don’t have to. The pattern indicts itself: this is what it looks like when the floor under American capital is foreign state money, and the door that money walks through runs straight past the people who are supposed to be guarding it.

So when I tell you the bet is “geopolitical, not just financial,” understand what that means in plain English. The people backing these valuations have already demonstrated, in public, on the record, exactly what they expect their money to buy.

Then there’s the circular financing—a situation where suppliers are funding their own customers.

Nvidia, headed by Jensen Huang, makes the GPUs that are the brain and the heartbeat of the massive data centers being built for AI. Nvidia invests in OpenAI. OpenAI commits hundreds of billions of dollars to cloud providers. Those cloud providers then turn around and buy Nvidia chips to fill the data centers running the AI models these frontier labs are building. The money goes out one door and comes back in another.

Analyses in 2026 estimate that $800 billion in these arrangements exist. OpenAI’s infrastructure commitments alone total about $1.15 trillion across seven vendors. And this isn’t a fringe concern—Morgan Stanley projects roughly $3 trillion in global data-center spending between 2025 and 2028, with only about half of it funded by actual cash flow. The rest is debt.

If you’re hearing an echo of the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, you’re not wrong. Back then, companies bought each other’s services to inflate the appearance of growth. The exact same thing is happening now. And this isn’t just a vibe—it’s measurable. The Shiller price-to-earnings ratio, the classic gauge of how stretched the stock market is, topped 40 in May 2026. That is higher than the peak of the dot-com bubble. Higher than almost any reading in history except the final euphoric weeks before the crash of 2000. The market is not merely rhyming with 1999. By the measure economists actually use, it is past it.

And here’s the tell that even the players know how this looks: in late 2025, Nvidia announced it might invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. By March of 2026, Jensen Huang told a Morgan Stanley conference that a $100 billion investment was “probably not in the cards,” and the deal was quietly settled at $30 billion. When the man writing the checks starts walking back the size of the checks right before the IPO, that’s worth noticing.

Don’t take my word for how fragile this all is. Take it from inside the industry.

Here’s a fun tidbit. There’s been a lot of noise lately that the average Jane and Joe on the street are missing out on the amazing opportunity to buy into these startups the way the big institutional investors can. So Robinhood opened private-market access to 150,000 retail investors—ordinary people, sold pre-IPO stakes at high-hundred-billion-dollar valuations, right before the lockup-and-dump risk.

Imagine: your hard-earned 401(k) dollars can now turn you into a potential millionaire—if only you’re brave enough to pour them into the next round of the technology bubble, at the top, helping to cash out people who were already rich to begin with.

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The Vanishing Public Market

Here’s another set of facts worth holding together:

Stack those up and you see what’s actually happened: the entire high-growth phase of a company’s life now happens in private, where ordinary people can’t invest and regulators can’t see. By the time a company “goes public,” the real gains have already been captured, in the dark, by the people who were let in early.

And that darkness is the whole game. Every AI valuation since 2023 has been a private assertion—unaudited, marked up round after round, each round citing the last as “price discovery.” (Translation: they guessed at a price, and then—oops—discovered the price was even higher than the last time they guessed.)

These IPO filings will be the first time audited GAAP financials exist for a frontier AI lab. That document will be one of the most closely watched in financial history, because it does one of two things. It either anchors the entire $4 trillion valuation stack—or it exposes how much of that stack was circular validation all along. We are, for the first time, about to find out in public whether the most valuable companies in history actually make money.

And here’s the part that should keep you on the edge of your seat: we haven’t even seen it yet. Both OpenAI and Anthropic filed confidentially—which companies are allowed to do, letting the SEC review the books in private first. The full, public S-1, the one the entire financial world is waiting to read, drops only weeks before the stock actually lists. So the most revealing financial document of the decade is sitting in a regulator’s inbox right now, and the rest of us don’t get to see it until the people who do have already decided what they think. Won’t that be fun.

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There Was Never No Money

So here we are, in the miracle year of 2026, where three companies are worth up to $4 trillion privately, right now, before a public share has ever traded.

For forty years, that was the question we were never allowed to win. How do we get universal health care? How will you pay for it. How do we end homelessness? How will you pay for it. How do we make sure every child has child care, that student debt gets relieved, that every kid gets three square meals a day? How will you pay for it.

We even ran the experiment and watched it work. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit drove child poverty to a record low of 5.2%—and then we let it expire, and child poverty shot right back up, and in 2024 the Senate blocked an attempt to bring it back. The money to keep millions of children out of poverty was right there. We decided not to spend it.

And now, in the last eighteen months, $4 trillion has materialized for compute. No vote. No debate. No “how will you pay for it.”

The scarcity we were sold for forty years was never a fact about the world. It was a decision about who deserves the money and who does not. Letting the days go by. Same as it ever was.

To put a number on what we say we can’t afford: the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates it would cost about $9.6 billion to provide permanent housing for every household that stayed in an emergency shelter in a year. That’s not $4 trillion. That’s roughly two-tenths of one percent of it.

We found four hundred times that much for three companies that lose money, and we found it in a year and a half.

In an earlier essay in this series, I wrote about how the massive spending on data-center infrastructure—$650 billion in 2026 alone—is propping up the rest of the U.S. economy, which without it would be sitting at zero percent growth. That same spending, going into data centers for companies that are currently losing money, is also propping up the trillion-dollar valuations of those same companies. The capex justifies the valuation; the valuation justifies the capex. I’m not saying the predator class is running a game of three-card monte. But man, it sure looks like it, doesn’t it?

The logical question is: why isn’t this money available for other social goods? And the answer, now and always, is that money flows where power points it—at the highest private return, never the highest human one.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the greatest harm ever done to capitalism in the name of capitalism was Milton Friedman’s. In 1970, in the pages of The New York Times Magazine, he declared that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

One. And only one.

Not to employ people well. Not to leave the country better than it found it.

For five decades, corporations have used Friedman’s sentence as a mandate—the highest private return, and nothing else—and that mandate has now metastasized to the scale of the entire global capital market. The money for human goods was always there. Generations of bankers and politicians simply decided never to point it at humans.

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What We Can’t Un-Know

If some part of you is screaming we have to stop these companies from listing—let me deflate that balloon. They will list. Whether they’re truly worth a combined $4 trillion is an open question; some of that value is real, and some of it is almost certainly a bubble. We are all about to learn which is which, in what I suspect will be the most expensive lesson in financial history.

But that’s not the thing to take from this.

The thing we cannot un-know is that when global capital wanted the money for this specific purpose, the money simply appeared. Out of thin air. In eighteen months. Without a vote.

Which means every single time, from here forward, that someone tells you we can’t afford to house the homeless, or feed the children, or care for the sick—you now hold the receipt.

The money was always there.

They just told us it wasn’t.

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Cliff’s Note: You just read the kind of piece the big outlets won’t run — not because it isn’t true, but because the people it’s about buy the ads, fund the panels, and golf with the publishers. Lawrence followed the money, named the names, and showed you the receipt: $4 trillion for them, “how will you pay for it” for you. That reporting takes time, and time is the one thing nobody at Blue Amp is billing to a sovereign wealth fund.

So here’s my ask, and you know I only make it when it matters.

Subscribe if you haven’t—free gets you in the fight, paid keeps the lights on.

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Upgrade or donate if you can; we’re funded by readers, not by anyone with a yacht and an agenda, and that’s exactly why we can publish pieces like this one.

Share it—send it to the friend who keeps saying “there’s no money for that,” because now you’ve got the receipt to hand them.

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And get in the comments and tell us: what were YOU told we couldn’t afford? Lawrence reads every one. So do I.

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They’ve got $4 trillion. We’ve got each other. Historically speaking? I like our odds.

Let’s go.

— Cliff

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With Cliff somewhere over the Atlantic hauling limoncello home from Italy and David celebrating a family milestone (mazel tov!), and hold down AMPED UP with special guest —and the bench shows up swinging. After a moving tribute to beloved Substacker Rosie the Resister, the trio dives into the question everyone is whispering: where is Donald Trump? Seven days unseen. Credible voices like Mike Brock alleging the unthinkable. Dr. Oz offering the dumbest non-doctor answer in television history.

The crew sorts rumor from reality—carefully, with Occam’s razor in hand—and asks what it would mean for the spell to finally break.

From there, two essays collide into one argument. Dana unpacks her piece answering Dr. Oz’s claim that America is “under-babied”—no, she writes, America is motherless, and she has the receipts: maternal deaths after Roe fell, vanishing OB-GYNs, a movement that demands more babies while calling women “penis homes.”

Then Lawrence connects it to his reporting on the AI data center build-out: $650 billion propping up a zero-growth economy, a Georgia couple’s well sucked dry, 29 million gallons of water stolen by a “best customer,” and a Utah valley about to absorb twenty-three Hiroshima bombs’ worth of heat—every single day.’

Same forces. Same fight. Watch the whole thing.

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Cliff’s Note: I leave the country for one week and these three put on a master class—this is exactly why Blue Amp Media exists.

Nobody at the networks is going to tell you that the "AI boom" is draining wells in rural Georgia, or connect a falling birth rate to a government that treats women as breeding stock, because the people who own the networks are the same people building the data centers.

We will. Every damn day.

But independent media doesn't run on courage alone—it runs on you. So if you got something out of this episode, become a paid subscriber or chip in through our Ko-Fi account, and just as important: share this with one person who needs to see it, and get in the comments.

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That's how we grow, that's how we fight, and that's how we win.

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by Ellie Leonard, Blue Amp Media Contributing Editor

On May 6th, Howard Lutnick gave a closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee. And while a long list of prominent figures gave video-recorded depositions—including President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton, Leslie Wexner, and Ghislaine Maxwell—Lutnick and the “Majority” refused to allow his deposition to be videotaped for the American people, leaving out the ability to judge his body language, alleged profuse sweating, and nervous fidgeting.

• Congresswoman Ansari: Would you be open to having this on video?

• Howard Lutnick: I’d prefer to just answer questions about my three meaningless and inconsequential meetings as briefly as possible.

Those words, “meaningless” and “inconsequential,” occurred 18 and 21 times, respectively, in the deposition. So did “inexplicable” (6), “no recollection” (8), “speculate/speculating” (16), “one and done” (6), “that’s my story” (3), and “no” (751). It was an exercise in semantics in which Lutnick, “the man, me, I,” juggled his answers in a way so performative that even the interviewers sounded confused and frustrated, which was probably the point. He often paused to clarify the definition of “I” as “Howard Lutnick,” or “as a man,” or “I, we, me, the Howard Lutnick,” lest we forget (maybe because we don’t have video) who was speaking.

Howard Lutnick bought the home next door to Jeffrey Epstein in 1997, and spent the next 8 years renovating the “derelict” mansion filled with “pigeons and mice.” It wouldn’t be until 2005 that his family moved into the building that shared a wall with Epstein’s now infamous Upper Eastside townhouse, purchased from an entity known as the “Comet Trust.” Lutnick claims to remember only a single seller, Charles de Gunzburg. But de Gunzburg’s family transferred the deed from Epstein in 1996, who had transferred it from the SAM Conversion Corp. (run by Leslie Wexner) in 1992, who had purchased it in 1988. And as with most Wexner/Epstein properties, there is no searchable record of sale for 11 East 71st in Lutnick’s name.

Later that year, Lutnick and his wife had their first (”virtually non-existent”) interaction with Epstein, a knock on the door from an unknown assistant, and an invite for coffee. In Lutnick’s recollection, they sipped for 15 minutes, were offered a tour, discovered a massage table in the middle of what they thought was the dining room, inquired, and were so disgusted by Epstein’s answer that they left, never to return again.

“...and I said, ‘How often do you have a massage?’ And he said...’Every day and the right kind of massage.’ And he said it to me, and my wife is standing next to me, and we looked at each other, and we left.” - Howard Lutnick

Lutnick launched into another long diatribe about who “we” is, and what “I” means, ultimately ending with “I, Howard Lutnick, would not have a personal or professional relationship with this person,” clarifying several times over that this was to mean “business, social, or philanthropic.” He repeats this several times throughout the interview. However, now we know he had all three.

Lutnick emphasizes the lack of interactions or knowledge about Epstein’s personal/criminal history, yet in October of 2025 he had far more opinions about what he thought went on inside Epstein’s home. In the interview with the New York Post’s “Pod Force One,” Lutnick said he assumed everything in that massage room was caught on video, and that the videos were ultimately “traded” for Epstein’s notorious sweetheart deal, in which he received only 13 months of jail time, including 72 hours/week of work release. Lutnick would later retract these statements, saying he was speculating, and that he really didn’t mean what he said when he claimed Epstein was the “greatest blackmailer ever.”

At the time of Pod Force One, Lutnick hadn’t seen the files, and claimed his visit to Epstein’s home was really the only interaction they’d had. But on January 30th, 2026, the DOJ released 3.5 million files, including proof that Lutnick had had a much closer relationship with Epstein than he’d originally claimed, including a trip to the island with his children. In a long thread of emails that began with scheduling, we can read Lutnick’s wife’s excited planning with Lesley Groff, asking where to park the boat as she traveled with her family from St. Thomas to Little St. James. Howard emphasized that they would be bringing a big group, including eight children, four adults, and four nannies.

“ I have another couple with me on my boat, and each of us has 4 children-two 16’s, two 14’s, a 13, a 12, an 11, and a 7-year old. Thanks, Howard.”

Incidentally, the other couple was Michael and Marcy Lehrman, whom Lutnick knew through Cantor Fitzgerald, where Mr. Lehrman worked as the global head of real estate. Lehrman had tried to buy Epstein’s house in 2009, a deal that quickly fell through.

There is little known about the trip to the island, other than pictures of Lutnick on an overlook with his children and Epstein, the emails, and Lutnick’s description of a “brief, meaningless, and inconsequential lunch” that he claimed was only for an hour, and that they didn’t go inside any of the buildings.

“We sat outside, had lunch. It was boring. We left.” - Howard Lutnick

Ten months later, one of the nannies would send her resume to Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, who was attempting arrange an interview between the nanny, Emily Dawson, and Epstein, and a man named “Peter.” It is not known whether the interview happened, and Lutnick claimed not to have knowledge of it, nor did he know if this nanny was one of the nannies from the island.

Lutnick would later testify to this before the Senate Appropriations Committee, again, claiming little knowledge of anything.

Lutnick continued to say he had limited interactions with Epstein over the 14 years they were neighbors, bolstered by the fact that both wealthy men used assistants for all email and phone correspondence. So if Lutnick wanted to say he never saw something, read something, or heard something, he could easily point to the fact that the email came from Lesley Groff (who he says he has no knowledge of), and was sent to his assistant Matthew Gilbert. Sure, they came from Howard’s email address, but he rarely did his own work. So how would he know what was said? An easy out.

He mentions a conversation about scaffolding that the men had in person on the sidewalk. Epstein would be doing work on the house; he wanted Lutnick to know it would be annoying. Another time the men corresponded about sending their lawyers after the nearby Frick Museum, which threatened to block their view of the park with a remodel. Lesley scheduled drinks. Phone calls went back and forth. And history is none the wiser.

But in late 2012, a new tech advertising firm called “Adfin Solutions” launched its first stock purchase agreement, which included several investors. Two of those investors were Howard Lutnick and Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein invested nearly $900,000 into the company, owning 4.29% and over a million shares under the heading of the “Southern Trust LLC.” Lutnick, however, says it was not he himself who invested in Adfin Solutions, but Cantor Fitzgerald, and claimed no knowledge that Epstein was involved. Their signatures are one page apart, and the Southern Trust is listed many times in the sales documents.

• Jack Emmer: Okay. So this is, from its title page, appears to be a stock purchase agreement or a series A preferred stock purchase agreement for a company named AdFin Solutions, dated December 28, 2012. At the back of the document, Bates numbers ending in 9580 and 9581, we find Mr. Epstein, as well as yourself, as signatories to the agreement. When this agreement was signed in December of 2012, did you know that Mr. Epstein was also a signatory to the agreement?

• Howard Lutnick: No.

But according to documents found in the Epstein Files, the two men were still talking about their investments in Adfin, with Lutnick encouraging Epstein that “this is their year.” Adfin officially went out of business by 2023.

Five years later, Epstein donated $50,000 to a United Jewish Appeal Federation dinner honoring Howard, which included a ten-seat table and the opportunity to write a glowing blurb. Epstein did not attend, nor did he write anything.

During all the years that Lutnick lived next door to Epstein, he claims not to have known many things, nor people, nor have seen the countless big names going in and out of Epstein’s home, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack, Woody Allen, the former Prince Andrew, Steve Bannon, Bill Clinton, and allegedly Donald Trump. He says he met Ghislaine Maxwell only once, though there’s evidence that she and Duchess Sarah Ferguson shared an office for Fergie’s Children in Crisis (CIC) charity upstairs from Lutnick in Cantor’s 59th St. building. And in 2003, Maxwell attended the La Dolce Vita Gala at the Stowe School, which raised thousands of dollars for Cantor Fitzgerald after the loss of 9/11.

But the biggest and most glaring discrepancy I found in Howard Lutnick’s deposition was the determination that he had no knowledge of Jeffry Epstein’s prior sexual criminal history, nor reputation, outside of the comments made in Epstein’s home about his preference for massage. And yet, Lutnick moved into the neighboring home in 2005, one year before Epstein’s arrest in Palm Beach for sexually abusing three-dozen underage girls, and three years before his jail sentence began. During this time, and in the years after, Lutnick continued to claim no knowledge of Epstein’s activities. By 2012, when Lutnick and his wife changed their minds about Epstein and brought their children to his island, there had been over 300 separate articles written in New York City alone about Epstein’s criminal history. But Lutnick claims never to have seen those articles, though he is a self-professed reader of the news, and often became the subject post-9/11.

And would Lutnick not have noticed when his neighbor disappeared for 13 months between 2008 and 2009, and the heavy traffic in and out of Epstein’s house rolled to a stop? Or are the rumors true that Epstein continued to fly back and forth to New York during his “work release,” hosting dinners with wealthy men and hiring high-school girls to give the “right kind of massage?”

Here’s what I think (not that you asked). I think those files that we’ve never seen contain everything else about Howard Lutnick, one of the wealthiest men in Epstein’s orbit, and a perfect crossover into the Trump Administration, which is also mysteriously missing from public view. I don’t think he and Epstein were close friends, but I do think their finances crossed many times over. Lutnick, being the billionaire next door, would have been too much for Epstein to resist. The meetings, the phone calls, the visit to the island, the donations and connections and stock shares, all point to a very enmeshed relationship with big finance and the potential to abuse the very sad history of Cantor Fitzgerald and the terror attacks on 9/11.

It’s my opinion, but we’ll never know until we see those files, as dictated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which clearly states: “No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

If you would like to read the Epstein Files Transparency Act, you can do that here.

If you would like to read Howard Lutnick’s full deposition, you can do that here.

by David Shuster

One of the marvels of the United States under Trump is the ability of the ruling billionaire class to transform inconvenience into virtue. Gasoline prices rise, and workers are expected to endure it. Commutes become more expensive, and workers are expected to just pay more.

Never mind that countless workers are driving hours each day to a job that largely involves communicating with colleagues by email and video conference.

And yet any suggestion that this arrangement is absurd is treated, at least by many company owners, as a subversive threat.

The actual threat can be seen with basic math. Thanks to Trump’s war against Iran, the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, global oil reserves are dwindling, and gasoline prices keep going higher.

Before the war, the average U.S. price for regular unleaded was about $3.00/gallon. Now, it is $4.50/gallon and rising.

The most patriotic thing many employers could do today is permit and encourage remote work wherever it is practical. Not next year. Not after another H.R. study. Not after six months of strategic planning and PowerPoint presentations. Now.

Every worker who stays home is one less commuter burning gasoline. Every empty stretch of highway is a small reduction in demand. Every avoided commute leaves more money in the pocket of a family already being squeezed by rising prices. If the nation is confronting an energy shock, then reducing unnecessary fuel consumption is not merely good economics. It is common sense.

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Yet common sense has never been the strong suit of America’s managerial aristocracy.

For decades, executives insisted that productivity required fluorescent lighting, open floor plans, and the daily migration of workers into office towers resembling climate-controlled ant colonies.

Then came the Covid pandemic, and millions of Americans worked from home. The prophets of doom, particularly conservatives, predicted catastrophe. They insisted productivity would collapse, innovation would vanish, and civilization itself might crumble.

Instead, a curious thing happened.

Many workers performed just as well as before. Many performed better.

Study after study found what employees had long suspected: remove the commute, reduce the interruptions, eliminate the endless parade of unnecessary conference room meetings, and people often accomplish more. Freed from the rituals and theater of office life, workers got down to the business of working.

This should have settled the matter.

Instead, after the pandemic ended, many corporations launched a crusade to drag employees back to their desks.

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The stated reasons often sounded noble: Collaboration. Culture. Team spirit. The actual reasons were less inspiring. Empty office buildings are expensive. Commercial real estate investors dislike vacancies. Managers who measure their worth by the number of subordinates visible from their office windows need audiences.

The worker, meanwhile, is expected to absorb the cost.

This expectation reflects a broad and troubling reality. In recent years, particularly during the Trump era, many corporations and billionaires have exhibited almost no regard for the welfare of ordinary working people.

Labor protections are often treated as inconveniences. Unions are portrayed as nuisances. Employee demands for flexibility, security, and dignity are greeted as though they were extravagant requests for private yachts.

Yet the same corporations, when their own interests are at stake, never hesitate to seek public subsidies, tax advantages, regulatory favors, or government assistance.

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The imbalance has become impossible to ignore.

The American economy does not run because hedge fund managers attend conferences in Aspen. It does not function because billionaire investors acquire their fifth mansion. The U.S. economy runs because millions of ordinary people answer phones, write on computers, process accounts, analyze data, guide consumers, serve customers, and perform the countless tasks that keep modern society operating.

Those workers deserve better than lectures about sacrifice from executives arriving at corporate headquarters in chauffeured sedans.

If patriotism means anything beyond bumper stickers and campaign slogans, it must include a willingness to improve the lives of fellow citizens. A company that allows remote work where feasible reduces fuel consumption, lowers household expenses, eases traffic congestion, and grants workers greater control over their lives. It strengthens families. It improves morale. It also almost always improves productivity.

That is not radicalism. It is simply good stewardship.

America faces enough genuine problems without manufacturing additional ones by forcing millions of people into unnecessary commutes.

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The closure of a distant waterway may be beyond our control. The daily decisions of employers are not.

If corporate leaders truly wish to demonstrate their devotion to country, they can begin with a remarkably simple act: trust their employees, respect their time, and let them work from home.

America will survive the experience. The economy may even improve.

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Cliff’s Note: This is exactly the kind of work we built Blue Amp Media to do: name who’s winning, name who’s paying for it, and refuse to pretend a rigged arrangement is just the weather. David Shuster nailed it here. While the billionaire class lectures you about sacrifice from the back of a chauffeured sedan, you’re handing $4.50 a gallon to commute to a job you could do from your kitchen table. That’s not an accident. That’s a choice somebody made, and it wasn’t you.

We don’t have a corporate parent or a billionaire owner softening what we say, and that’s the whole point. It’s you. If this piece said something out loud that you’ve been feeling, become a paid subscriber so we can keep David and the rest of the team doing it, or drop a few bucks in our Ko-fi if a subscription isn’t in the cards right now. And do the free stuff too: share this with the coworker who’s been stuck in traffic all week, and tell us in the comments whether your job ever actually needed you in that building.

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Keep fighting, and stay loud.

—Cliff

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MORE FROM BLUE AMP MEDIA

by Lawrence Winnerman

The word we were given was cloud.

It is one of the most effective pieces of marketing in the history of technology, because it tells you the thing is weightless, floating, somewhere up there and nowhere in particular—a place your photos live, made of nothing, costing nothing, sitting on no one.

Ask Beverly and Jeff Morris what the cloud weighs.

They live in Newton County, Georgia, in the kind of rural country people from the cities drive through without seeing. In 2018, Meta broke ground on a data center about a thousand feet from their home. Within months, the Morrises’ well—the private well their household actually drinks from—began to fail. Sediment in the water. The dishwasher, the ice maker, the washing machine, the toilet, all faltering. They have spent roughly $5,000 trying to fix it and can’t afford the $25,000 it would take to replace the well. Meta commissioned a study and concluded its data center was “unlikely” to have affected their groundwater. Three of the Morrises’ neighbors have reported well trouble since the data center went in.

The cloud, it turns out, has to land somewhere. It landed on them.

This is an essay about where the cloud actually touches the ground—and about the fact that the people it’s landing on hardest are not the people you’d expect, not the laid-off coders in the blue cities, but the farmers and retirees and well-water families in rural America who never signed up to host the most resource-hungry machine ever built.

It is also an essay about the most interesting political possibility I’ve seen in years, which is what happens when those two groups of people figure out they’re fighting the same thing.

The Thing the Recession Is Hiding Inside

I wrote, in an earlier piece in this series, that the AI buildout is the only thing currently propping up the American economy—that strip out the estimated $650 billion in data-center capital spending and the non-AI economy is flat on its back. That’s the macro picture: the buildout is the cushion hiding the recession.

Here’s what that abstraction looks like when it lands in a county.

The “buildout” is not a number on a balance sheet to the people who live next to it. It is a building the size of a small town, running twenty-four hours a day, sold to their county commission as jobs and tax base and the future. What arrives instead is a windowless industrial complex that employs a few dozen people once construction ends, draws the electricity of a city, drinks from the same water table the farms and the wells draw from, and never sleeps.

The recession is hiding inside the buildout. And the buildout is hiding inside their backyard.

Water

Start with water, because water is where this gets visceral, and because it’s where Erin Brockovich—yes, that Erin Brockovich—has planted her flag.

Data centers run hot. The machines inside them throw off enormous heat, and a great deal of that heat is managed with water—evaporative cooling that consumes the water rather than returning it. A large facility can draw up to 5 million gallons a day, the daily water use of a town of tens of thousands of people, and as much as 85 percent of it evaporates and never comes back to the local supply.

In 2023, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 17.4 billion gallons of water; the EPA projects that figure could reach 38 to 73 billion gallons by 2028. In a wet year, in a place with water to spare, you might never notice.

But these facilities are not only being built in wet places, and the years are not reliably wet anymore.

Then there is the version of the story where the rules simply don’t apply to you. Twenty miles south of Atlanta, in Fayette County, a data-center campus developed by Quality Technology Services—owned by the private-equity giant Blackstone—drew roughly 29 million gallons of water through two connections the county utility didn’t even know existed. One pipe had been installed without the utility’s knowledge; the other was never tied into the billing system. The unmetered draw ran for about 15 months, and came to light only when residents started complaining about low water pressure at their own taps—some of them having been told, at the time, to stop watering their lawns.

It became public when a local attorney, James Clifton, obtained the utility’s letter to the company through a public-records request. The company owed about $147,000 in retroactive charges. The county declined to levy any fine. The explanation from the county water-system director, Vanessa Tigert, when asked why not, is the single most clarifying sentence in this entire essay: “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners. It’s called customer service.”

There it is, in one official’s words: the public’s water, taken outside the rules, at a scale no household could ever match, and the regulator’s instinct is not to enforce the law but to apologize to the violator for the inconvenience of being noticed. The pattern repeats wherever this lands. A facility consumes a public resource at industrial scale, the rules that are supposed to govern that consumption turn out to be soft or unenforced, and the cost—the dropped water table, the fouled well, the dry season made drier—is socialized onto the people who live there while the benefit is captured a thousand miles away.

This is the shape of story Erin Brockovich built a career on: a community, a stolen or poisoned water supply, a powerful entity that assumed no one in a small place would fight back.

And she has now turned directly to data centers.

In the spring of 2026 she launched a public reporting map, asking residents to self-report data-center problems in their own communities—and drew nearly 4,000 submissions in the first month. The single most common complaint, she reported, wasn’t noise or water or the utility bill. It was one word that kept appearing in submission after submission: transparency.

Nobody asked these communities first.

Heat

Here is the cost almost no one names, because it is the most counterintuitive of all: the heat itself, and the water that is gone for good.

Follow the water one step further than we did a moment ago. When a data center cools itself by evaporation, that water is not borrowed and returned a little dirtier, the way it is when you run a tap. It is consumed.

Up to 85 percent of it rises into the sky as vapor and does not come back to that aquifer, that river, that town—not this season, maybe not ever. The water it does eventually discharge is often so loaded with the biocides and anti-corrosion chemicals used in the cooling loop that it’s unfit to drink or to farm with. In a wet place you can pretend that’s a wash. In a desert, it is a one-way withdrawal from an account that was already overdrawn.

Then there is the heat, and the heat is pure physics. A data center does not make energy vanish; it converts it—essentially all of it—into heat. This is just the first law of thermodynamics: the electricity that pours into the building has to go somewhere, and where it goes, almost in its entirety, is back out as waste heat. A facility drawing a gigawatt of power is, functionally, a one-gigawatt furnace running in open country, around the clock, forever.

Now look at what Kevin O’Leary is building. O’Leary—“Mr. Wonderful” from Shark Tank—is the public face of the Stratos Project, nicknamed “Wonder Valley,” a data-center campus planned for some 40,000 acres of high desert in Box Elder County, Utah, just north of the already-shrinking Great Salt Lake.

The buildout could run past $100 billion and is designed for around 9 gigawatts of power—more than double what the entire state of Utah uses in a year.

A physics professor at Utah State University, Robert Davies, estimates that once you account for the inefficiency of the on-site natural-gas plant meant to power it, the real thermal load approaches 16 gigawatts—and that dumping that much heat into one valley could raise local nighttime temperatures by 8 to 12 degrees.

Hold that number against the most infamous yardstick we have.

By Davies’s estimate, the heat this single campus would shed amounts to something on the order of 23 Hiroshima bombs’ worth of energy—every day.

I want to be precise, because the comparison is easy to abuse: this is total energy, released slowly as heat over twenty-four hours, not a blast in a single second over a city. Nobody is detonating anything. But the energy bookkeeping is real, and it is poured, hour after hour, into one fragile, water-starved place that never agreed to absorb it.

This is the ecological cost that water and electricity figures alone miss. It isn’t only that the machine drinks the water and bids up the power. It’s that it takes the water permanently and bleeds a city’s worth of heat into a small, dry, living place—near a dying lake and a migratory-bird sanctuary—on a timeline measured in decades. And the people who can see that most clearly are the ones who live there. In May 2026, hundreds of Box Elder County residents packed the fairgrounds chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as commissioners voted the project through anyway; one of them, Brenna Williams, who is helping lead a referendum effort to overturn the approval, put it plainly: “We’re already being told to ration our water.”

When O’Leary responded to the opposition by suggesting on Fox that his critics were “proxies for the Chinese government”—singling out two Utah political consultants, Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan—Finlayson’s reply wrote itself: “The only foreign operative here is a Canadian.”

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Electricity

Then there’s the power, and this is the one that reaches even the households that never see a data center.

These facilities consume staggering amounts of electricity, and that demand doesn’t stay politely contained. It bids against you. A single large AI data center can require more than a gigawatt of power—as much as a major city, or a large nuclear plant—and when that demand hits the grid, the cost of supplying it lands on everyone’s bill. The clearest place to see it is PJM, the grid operator that serves 13 states and the District of Columbia. In its 2025–2026 capacity auction, prices didn’t tick up—they detonated, an 833 percent jump from the year before, from $28.92 to $269.92 per megawatt-day, the sharpest single-year increase in the market’s history.

Those costs flow straight through to consumers.

The Natural Resources Defense Council found that data-center growth accounted for $9.3 billion of a $14 billion regional capacity bill, translating to roughly $70 a month for a typical household, and projected $100 billion to $163 billion in cumulative ratepayer costs through 2033 unless regulators intervene. In Washington, D.C., Pepco residential customers saw bills rise about $21 a month starting in mid-2025. Across the PJM region, supply rates have climbed between 5 and 44 percent since June of that year.

So the family that has never heard the word “hyperscaler” still pays for it, in the line item on the utility bill that keeps climbing for reasons no one at the kitchen table can see.

And the demand is so enormous, so fast, that it is bending the entire energy trajectory of the country backward. In the PJM region, utilities have delayed or canceled the retirement of roughly 60 percent of the fossil-fuel capacity that had been scheduled to shut down; at least 15 coal plants have had their closures pushed back since the start of 2025 alone, to feed rising demand. The cleaner energy future we’d been promised is being quietly deferred to run the machine.

And in the single most vivid emblem of the moment, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant—site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in American history—is being brought back from the dead. No, really.

Its Unit 1 reactor, retired in 2019 and now rebranded the Crane Clean Energy Center, is being restarted by Constellation Energy under a 20-year deal to sell its entire output to Microsoft, to power AI. The U.S. Department of Energy closed a $1 billion federal loan to help make it happen. It is on track to restart around 2027.

O, brave new world! We are restarting Three Mile Island to run chatbots.

If you wanted a single image for deploying a technology faster than we can think it through, you could not invent a better one than reopening the most infamous nuclear site in the country—with a billion dollars of public credit—to feed a machine whose business case is still, charitably, unproven.

Where It Lands, and on Whom

Now the part that I think matters most, the part the national conversation keeps missing.

We have been telling the story of AI and jobs as a blue-state, white-collar story: the laid-off marketing coordinator in Portland, the legal researcher in Cleveland, the coder in Austin. That story is real—I’ve written it myself. But it is only half the map.

The other half is rural, much of it red, and for those communities the impact isn’t an abstraction arriving in a quarterly earnings call. It is physical. Roughly two-thirds of new data centers are being built in rural areas, much of it on former farmland—developers have offered farmers as much as $120,000 an acre or more, several times the going rate, which sounds like a windfall until you realize it multiplies the price of the land around it and puts expansion permanently out of reach for the family farm next door. It is the constant low roar of cooling systems where there used to be quiet. It is the well, and the water table, and the electricity bill. It is the transformation of an exquisitely beautiful place into infrastructure, decided by a county commission dazzled by a tax-abatement deal, on behalf of a company headquartered in a city those residents will never visit.

This is the rubber-meets-the-road moment of the AI economy, and it is happening in exactly the communities the coastal AI conversation has trained itself to ignore. The blue-city knowledge worker loses a job and feels the future as a closing door. The red-county farmer watches the future bulldoze the back forty and drain the well. Same machine. Same handful of companies. Same direction—pointed at extraction, with the gains captured far away and the costs left on the land. Different victims, who have been carefully taught to believe they are on opposite sides.

They are not on opposite sides. That is the most important sentence in this essay.

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The Coalition Hiding in Plain Sight

Here is the political possibility, and it is a big one.

Across the country, rural communities are already organizing against data centers—forming groups, packing county-commission meetings, challenging zoning variances and tax abatements, demanding environmental review, and in a striking number of cases, winning.

• In Tucson, Arizona, residents raised enough alarm about water and energy that a proposed Amazon project was abandoned.

• In Saline Township, Michigan, residents voted down a $16 billion OpenAI-and-Oracle project.

• In Mason County, Kentucky, more than 1,500 residents have been turning out to plan opposition and pack hearings, and farmers there rejected a multimillion-dollar offer for their land.

This is not happening because those communities read the same Substacks as the laid-off coder in Portland. It’s happening because the cloud landed on them and they could see it.

What makes this the most interesting development in American politics right now is that it is genuinely, structurally cross-partisan—and it’s already being noticed. A March 2026 Gallup survey found that 71 percent of Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their own community, with nearly half strongly opposed—the first time Gallup had asked the question, and it arrived higher than opposition to a nuclear power plant has ever registered in the quarter-century Gallup has tracked it.

Can you imagine? Americans would now rather live next to a nuclear reactor than a data center.

In May 2026, even The New York Times ran a piece on liberals and conservatives finding common ground against the buildout. The fight does not care how you vote. The retiree in red Georgia whose well filled with sediment and the union organizer in a blue city worried about displacement are, whether either of them knows it yet, fighting the same concentration of power, in the same direction, for the same reason.

The thing that has kept them apart is not their interests. It’s the story they’ve each been told about the other.

Erin Brockovich is a useful patron saint for exactly this reason. Her whole career has been small communities—not left communities or right communities, just communities—discovering that a powerful entity has quietly decided their water doesn’t matter, and refusing to accept it.

That is a politics older and deeper than the red-blue divide, and the data-center buildout is generating it at scale, in real time, in places the political class isn’t watching.

What to Do

If you’ve read the other pieces in this series, you know I refuse to end on dread.

So here is the turn to action, and for this fight it is unusually concrete, because the data-center buildout is one of the few pieces of this whole AI story that can actually be fought—and beaten—at the local level.

You cannot personally slow the frontier labs. You can absolutely show up at a county-commission meeting.

Find out what’s proposed near you. Data-center projects move through local zoning and permitting before they’re built. That process is public, and it is where these fights are won or lost—on the tax abatement, the water permit, the environmental review, the zoning variance. The deal is usually struck before most residents have heard about it. Hearing about it early is half the battle.

Connect to the people already fighting. Erin Brockovich has built a hub specifically for this: an interactive map of data centers across the country—operational, under construction, and proposed—overlaid with the locations where residents have reported problems, plus a form to report what’s happening in your own community. If there’s a project near you, you can find it; if there’s a problem, you can put it on the map. Start there: brockovichdatacenter.com.

Build the coalition that scares them. The single most powerful thing about this fight is that it crosses the aisle. If you are a progressive reading this, the most useful thing you can do is show up for a rural community’s water fight without making them pass a political purity test first.

The concentration of power that drains their well is the same one coming for your livelihood.

Act like it.

The Cloud Has to Land Somewhere

There is no cloud.

There was never a cloud.

There is a machine, and the machine is made of concrete and copper and water and an appetite for electricity that is reshaping the physical landscape of the country, and it has to be built somewhere, and “somewhere” is turning out to be the quiet, beautiful, underdefended places where people assumed no one important was paying attention.

The companies building it are counting on the same thing every powerful entity in a Brockovich story has ever counted on: that the place is too small, too rural, too scattered, too far from the cameras to fight back. And they are counting on one more thing—that the laid-off worker in the blue city and the dried-out farmer in the red county will never look up from their separate griefs long enough to notice they are being ground down to dust by the same machine.

The cloud has to land somewhere.

It’s landing on us.

All of us.

Time to find each other.

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Sources

The Morris family, Newton County, Georgia. Meta data center, construction begun 2018; well failure, sediment, roughly $5,000 spent and $25,000 to replace, Meta’s “unlikely” finding, neighbors’ reported well trouble. The New York Times, 2025, and corroborating coverage.

Data-center water use. Up to ~5 million gallons/day for a large facility; up to ~85 percent evaporative loss; ~17.4 billion gallons consumed by U.S. data centers in 2023; EPA projection of 38–73 billion gallons by 2028. Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI); U.S. EPA.

Fayette County, Georgia (the “customer service” case). Quality Technology Services (QTS), a Blackstone company; 615-acre Fayetteville campus; roughly 29 million gallons drawn through two connections over ~15 months; about $147,474 in retroactive charges; no fine levied. Brought to light by attorney James Clifton via public-records request; quote from county water-system director Vanessa Tigert. Tom’s Hardware, The Daily Caller, Cybernews, and POLITICO/E&E coverage, May 2026.

Erin Brockovich data-center campaign. Public reporting map at brockovichdatacenter.com, launched spring 2026; nearly 4,000 community submissions in the first month; “transparency” cited as the most common concern. The Brockovich Report; Newsweek; TechCrunch, 2026.

The Stratos Project / “Wonder Valley” (Kevin O’Leary), Box Elder County, Utah. ~9-gigawatt AI data center plus on-site natural-gas plant; ~40,000-acre campus near the Great Salt Lake; potential buildout cost exceeding $100 billion; “more than double” the electricity Utah uses in a year; approved by the Box Elder County Commission, May 4, 2026, amid protest; referendum effort underway. CNN (Clare Duffy, May 9, 2026); Salt Lake Tribune; Fortune; Common Dreams. Utah State University physicist Robert Davies: real thermal load approaching ~16 GW accounting for gas-plant inefficiency; projected local nighttime temperature rise of 8–12°F; the “~23 atomic bombs of heat per day” framing (reported via ZME Science and corroborating coverage). Resident Brenna Williams (“ration our water”) via Common Dreams. O’Leary’s “proxies for the Chinese government” remark and the Gabi Finlayson / Jackie Morgan “only foreign operative here is a Canadian” reply via Business Insider, HuffPost, and Yahoo.

Waste-heat math (for the “Hiroshima” comparison). A data center converts essentially all input electricity to heat (first law of thermodynamics). Using Davies’s effective ~16 GW figure: 16 GW × 86,400 seconds ≈ 1.38 × 10¹⁵ joules/day. Hiroshima (“Little Boy”) ≈ 15 kilotons TNT ≈ 6.28 × 10¹³ joules. 1.38 × 10¹⁵ ÷ 6.28 × 10¹³ ≈ 22 Hiroshima-equivalents of energy per day, consistent with the “~23 bombs/day” figure in circulation. Comparison is of total energy released slowly as heat, not destructive blast delivered instantaneously. At the nameplate 9 GW the figure would be ~12/day; the higher number reflects the physicist’s full-system estimate and is attributed to him in text.

Electricity / PJM. 2025–2026 capacity auction rose from $28.92 to $269.92 per megawatt-day (~833 percent), the largest single-year increase in PJM history. Utility Dive; DataCenterDynamics. NRDC: data-center growth responsible for $9.3 billion of a $14 billion PJM capacity bill, ~$70/month for a typical household, $100–163 billion cumulative ratepayer costs projected through 2033. Natural Resources Defense Council; Citizens Utility Board, 2025. Pepco residential bills up ~$21/month in Washington, D.C., from mid-2025; PJM-region supply rates up 5–44 percent since June 2025. E&E News/POLITICO.

Coal retirements / Three Mile Island. Roughly 60 percent of scheduled PJM fossil-fuel retirements delayed or canceled; 15+ coal plants pushed back since January 2025. OilPrice.com; EnergyNow. Three Mile Island Unit 1 (retired 2019), rebranded Crane Clean Energy Center; Constellation Energy 20-year PPA with Microsoft; $1 billion DOE loan closed November 2025; targeted restart ~2027. Constellation Energy; Orrick; NucNet.

Rural siting and farmland. Roughly two-thirds of new data centers built in rural areas, much on former farmland; offers up to ~$120,000/acre and higher. Brookings Institution; Farm Progress.

Local outcomes. Tucson, Arizona (Amazon project abandoned); Saline Township, Michigan ($16 billion OpenAI-Oracle project voted down); Mason County, Kentucky (1,500+ residents organizing; farmers rejected a multimillion-dollar offer). Brookings Institution; Civil Eats; The New York Times.

Public opinion. Gallup, “Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area,” released May 13, 2026 (telephone survey by Recon MR, March 2–18, 2026, n=1,000): 71 percent oppose a local AI data center (48 percent strongly); opposition exceeds the highest level Gallup has recorded for nuclear power plants since it began asking in 2001. The New York Times, “Liberals and Conservatives Are Finding Common Ground—Against Data Centers,” May 1, 2026.

RELATED STORIES FROM BLUE AMP MEDIA

A war in the Middle East, an economy on a knife’s edge, and a president who keeps making headlines he didn’t mean to make, and somehow the sharpest commentary this week didn’t come from a cable panel or a newspaper column. It came from a zoo in Bangladesh, a nature documentary that should not exist, and a song you already know every word to without knowing why. David Shuster has counted down the five funniest AI satire clips of the week, and we are not going to spoil a single one of them for you.

We’ll just say this: one of them involves an albino buffalo; one of them is narrated like you’re watching prestige wildlife television; and one of them turns a very ordinary day of the week into the most damning two minutes you’ll see all month.

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It only escalates from there, which is a nice parallel to the cruelty, corruption, and incompetence of this President. The #2 clip drags a certain administration into a fashion-world showdown with a magazine whose name you won’t forget, and the #1 entry, from Canada, imagines what happens when those demanding release of certain files meet someone with technology to get the answers the hard way.

There’s a chorus. You will sing it. You will be a little ashamed of how fast you learn it.

Watch the full countdown to see what Shuster crowned #1; why it’s the one everyone will be quoting Monday, and what a bucket of fried chicken has to do with any of it.

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Cliff’s Note: Look, folks the thing about authoritarians: they can survive lotsa things, but once they become a clown, they’re done.

Mockery’s a weapon that gets under the skin. It tells a strongman what he hates most—he’s a joke. It’s why Shuster’s Weekender is so much more than highlights. Every week, David spotlights artists doing what corporate media won’t: turning Trump, Lindsey, Stephen Miller, et al into punchlines. No sane-washing!

It’s not a distraction from the fight. It is the fight.

But it can only continue if you fund it. BAM is independent. No corporate decrees, no billionaires, no asking permission. You. If we made you laugh when you thought it impossible, become a paid subscriber so we can keep creating laughter, or drop a few bucks in our Ko-fi if a subscription isn’t doable. And it’s free to share with someone who needs a laugh! Tell us in the comments which clip you’d rank #1!

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Keep laughing, keep singing, and stay strong. We’ve got a lot of fight left.

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A blockbuster special edition of AMPED UP. and host a one-two punch of a show built around the two stories the legacy press is somehow not telling. First, joins to walk through his new Blue Amp Media Substack piece, This Isn’t a Recession, It’s Worse—the cushion of pre-war oil and chemical supply that’s about to run out within months, the CEOs (Bezos, Dell, Oracle, and more) quietly dumping billions in stock while corporate media looks away, the AI data-center buildout that’s simultaneously masking the crash and obliterating middle-class jobs that would normally pull us out of one, and a historical comparison to the early Industrial Revolution that should make every American sit up and pay attention. If you only read one piece this week to understand what’s actually coming, this is it.

Then joins with two pieces of Breaking News. 1) He’s leaving the Democratic primary to run as an independent in Florida’s 27th Congressional District. Lev discusses the specific moment in a MAGA-red community led to this decision. 2) Far bigger: from his sources in Florida politics, Lev reports a Fort Pierce grand jury in front of Judge Aileen Cannon, with Joe diGenova installed as special counsel, is prepping indictments vs. James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper and Barack Obama over the Russia investigation. Watch the whole convo, including Lev’s pushback on Lawrence about whether the Democratic base is fired up, and his issues—far from unique—with Democratic leadership.

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Cliff’s Note: Shuster, Ellie, Lev, and Lawrence broke two of the biggest stories of the year—a Florida grand jury gearing up to indict Barack GD Obama on a fairy tale, and a quiet, deliberate economic crash corporate media ignores because their owners are the ones cashing the stock options.

This is what we built Blue Amp Media to do, but it only happens because you fund it. So become a paid subscriber on Substack and we’ll keep digging, drop a few bucks in the Ko-fi tip jar if you can, share the episode with the friend who keeps saying “the economy is fine” or “they’d never indict Obama,” and leave a comment in the thread.

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We’re not going anywhere. Neither are they. Let’s keep punching.

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by Lawrence Winnerman

There is a tanker offloading somewhere on the Gulf Coast in the Houston Ship Channel right now. Its cargo was loaded in the second week of February, before the war began, on contracts signed in a country that no longer exists. The crude in its tanks is being pumped through pipelines and into refineries and not into the gasoline you bought this morning at $4.56 a gallon, but the gasoline you’ll buy three weeks from now for something more. Gasoline made from oil that does not yet know it has become history.

That is what inventory looks like in the wild. The economy we are walking through this week was bought before the war—the gas, the groceries, the shipping containers, the labor contracts, all of it loaded onto trucks and tankers and warehouses when the world was a different world.

We are running an economy this week on the country we were in February. The shelves still look mostly normal. The shipping bays still seem mostly full. The cargo still appears mostly on time where it is supposed to appear. None of this is the world we are actually living in. We are spending down the last inventory of the country we used to have and we are spending it down on a clock.

Inventory is mercy. Inventory is the cushion the world leaves you between the moment a thing breaks and the moment you feel it break. The blast wave is real, but the blast wave is also delayed by the length of a supply chain, by the contents of a warehouse, by the days it takes a tanker to cross an ocean. We have this week the strange privilege of standing inside the cushion. We will not have that privilege for long.

This is an essay about what the cushion is hiding: what comes when the cushion runs out, what the people closest to the numbers are already doing about it, and the question no politician has yet had the nerve to ask out loud.

The Calendar

Let me walk you through it slowly. Treat this calendar as a calendar of inventory, a calendar of mercies, a calendar of the things you have not yet had to feel.

Right now in May the tanker we started with is offloading crude that was loaded in February. The Houston-area refineries are turning it into the gasoline that will move through pipelines and trucks and into your tank by the end of the month. That is the visible piece. That is the piece you feel at the pump and the piece every cable news segment can describe. Behind it, on slower timelines, the rest of the cargo is making its way through the system.

Sulfur is the first one nobody told you about. Sulfur is mostly a byproduct of refining oil and processing natural gas, and the Middle East supplies almost half the world’s seaborne supply. When the Strait of Hormuz was strangled, sulfur was strangled with it.

Sulfur went from $650 a metric ton before the war to $1,060 this month, a 63% rise.

Sulfuric acid is up 158%.

You will not feel this at the pump.

You will feel it when your grocery bill rises in the fall, because sulfuric acid is what makes phosphoric acid, which is what makes phosphate fertilizer, which is what the corn and the wheat and the soybeans went into the ground with this spring. The fertilizer in the 2026 crop was bought at the new price. The 2026 harvest carries the new price into the 2027 supermarket aisle.

Three months for sulfur to show up in the chain that matters, six months for the phosphate, six to nine months for the urea. Iran is the Gulf region’s largest urea exporter, and Iran plus the countries downstream of Hormuz account for roughly 30% of global urea trade. Urea is nitrogen. Nitrogen is the difference between a fed country and a hungry one.

Six to nine months for the European natural gas, because the Hormuz closure knocked out about 10 billion cubic feet a day of liquefied natural gas, roughly a fifth of the global LNG market. In Europe, last winter storage was at 28% of capacity against a five-year average of 41%. Winter 2026–27 in Europe is the cliff.

Winter 2026–27 is the cliff for everything that touches a European supply chain, which is most things.

One to three months for petrochemicals, where the ICIS Global Petrochemical Index already rose 32.7% month over month in March, its steepest rise since the year 2000. Northeast Asia ethylene is up 88.6%. April European ethylene contracts set a record near €1,600 a ton, nearly double the post-Ukraine-invasion peak. Ethylene is plastic, ethylene is packaging, ethylene is the bag your bread comes in and the bottle your medicine comes in and the wrap on every component in the supply chain that does not have its own dedicated container. The price of putting things into other things has doubled and you have not yet noticed, because the things in other things on the shelves now were already in other things before the price doubled.

9 to 18 months for food on the shelves. The USDA’s most recent forecast puts 2026 food inflation at 3.6%. Independent forecasters put it at 4 to 4.5. The pre-war relief that was supposed to drop fertilizer prices this year is gone. The crop is in the ground at the new price. The harvest will be in by October. The grocery aisles will adjust in waves through 2027. The pre-war cushion runs out somewhere between August and October. That is when this country becomes a country we have not been in before.

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The Quote

Last weekend 60 Minutes rebroadcast its segment on Andrew Ross Sorkin and his book about 1929. Everybody quoted the line everybody wanted to hear:

“I can assure you, unfortunately I wish I wasn’t saying this. We will have the crash.”

It went into the headlines, the explainers, the warnings, and the doom scroll. It is a quotable line and it deserved to be quoted. But Sorkin said something else in that segment that almost nobody quoted, and it is the line that should keep you up at night.

Lance Roberts at Real Investment Advice ran the numbers and showed his work. The S&P 500 minus AI infrastructure buildout spending is growing at 0%.

The non-AI part of the American stock market is in an earnings recession right now.

The AI capex is the only thing hiding the recession that has already arrived.

The capex underwriting the visible economy is the capex building the engine that will dismantle the labor market. The hand that is keeping the lights on this quarter is the hand that is wiring the kill switch for next quarter’s payroll.

The thing that lets the headline say “soft landing” is the thing that guarantees the next set of headlines will not. What we have been told to call growth is what other generations would have called a leveraged buyout of the American workforce financed by the workforce itself.

The capex is the cover-up. The capex is the weapon. The capex is also the cushion.

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What the CEOs Are Actually Doing

I’m here to tell you that the CEOs are not scared. The CEOs are not cowards. The CEOs are not silent because they are afraid.

The CEOs are silent because they are busy, and what they are busy doing in the silence is closing positions.

Jeff Bezos sold $5.7 billion of Amazon shares. Michael Dell sold $2.2 billion. Safra Catz at Oracle sold $2.5 billion. The Magnificent Seven leadership cohort cashed out in 2026 at levels analysts described as staggering. These are not the kinds of sales you make on the way up. These are the kinds of sales you make when you have access to numbers the rest of us do not yet have access to, and you have decided that the numbers are no longer your friend.

Corporate America authorized $665 billion in share buybacks in the first four months of 2026. That is the most ever to start a year. The full-year pace executes near $1 trillion in buybacks, the largest single-year transfer of corporate cash to shareholders in the history of the modern American economy. The boardrooms are returning the money to themselves before anything else can happen to it.

Morgan Stanley projects 2026 investment-grade corporate bond issuance to exceed $2 trillion. That is the largest year of corporate borrowing in history. Companies are rushing to refinance debt before credit conditions tighten. They are locking the door before the storm.

Chief financial officer turnover hit a seven-year high in 2025, with 262 CFO departures, more than at any point since the financial crisis. CFOs are the canaries in the coal mine of corporate finance. They leave first. These past numbers should be on the front page of every business section in the country and are instead in trade publications most readers have never heard of.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for March showed:

• Professional and Business Services openings down by 318,000 in a single month.

• Layoffs in that sector were up by 153,000.

• Information sector openings are down 33% year-over-year, the steepest drop of any private industry.

The white-collar hiring freeze has already happened. It did not announce itself; it just stopped hiring. Ask me how I know.

Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on cash equivalent to 31% of its total assets, an all-time high. That is Warren Buffett, the most patient and most well-informed investor of the modern era, telling you what he sees coming by what he is refusing to spend. These are not the actions of people who do not know. These are not the actions of people who are afraid or who are cowards. These are the actions of people who know exactly what’s coming.

The silence isn’t cowardice.

The silence is the sound of money moving.

Four CEOs have broken the silence in any meaningful way:

• Jamie Dimon, in his April letter to JPMorgan shareholders, called inflation “the skunk at the party” and warned of a sentiment shift toward cash.

• Larry Fink at BlackRock said openly that $150 oil would trigger “a stark and steep recession.”

• Mike Wirth at Chevron compared the Hormuz disruption to the oil shocks of the 1970s.

• Bernard Arnault at LVMH called the situation a “world catastrophe.”

That is the entire list of four people telling the truth. Everyone else is selling stock.

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This Is Not a Recession

A recession is what we have all been trained to expect, because a recession is the only large economic event most of us know how to name. A recession is the only large economic event most of us have ever been allowed to talk about.

A depression, by comparison, only happened in our history books, at least for most of us in the Western world.

A recession is a fall in output that ends with a return to trend. A recession is the engine sputtering and then restarting. A recession is bad and then less bad and then average and then good again. A recession is something you can wait out. Hold on to your job if you can. Pay your bills if you can. The bounce will come.

This is not that.

In the first quarter of 2026 American manufacturing output rose 3.3%. Manufacturing hours fell 0.4%. Manufacturing productivity rose 3.6%. Did you catch that math? Output was up, hours were down, productivity was up. The factories are producing more, and the factories are using fewer hours of human labor to produce it. The wages paid to the humans no longer needed are no longer being paid. The factories do not need a recovery because the factories are not in a recession. The humans are.

The labor share of US GDP is at 54.1% in the first quarter of 2026. This is the lowest reading since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began the series in 1947. In the year 2000 it was 63%. Three-fourths of the entire post-war decline happened between 2000 and 2016. The collapse is systemic. AI may be the accelerant, but it is not the only cause. AI is just the technology that arrived at the precise moment the labor share was already in free fall and decided to give it a push.

There’s a name for this in the economic literature. It’s called productivity decoupling.

It happens when productivity climbs and wages do not, when the gain accrues to capital and the labor share falls. Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo have a sharper name for the technology that does it. They call it so-so technology. It’s so-so because it’s good enough to displace workers but not good enough to create new tasks that humans are needed for. It cuts the labor demand without compensating with new demand.

Much of the AI that’s being deployed right now is so-so in this exact sense.

It’s good enough to replace the customer service agent, not good enough to make her a more valuable knowledge worker. Good enough to fire her. Not good enough to need her.

There’s also a historical analog here. Robert Allen named it Engels’ Pause. Between 1780 and 1840 British output per worker rose 46% while real wages rose only 12%. That decoupling lasted 60 years. The wage catch-up began only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even then it was won, not given, through a half-century of mass political organizing, the slow death of laissez-faire, the first stirrings of the welfare state, and an enormous amount of human suffering in between.

This is the analog for this moment. 60 years is the analog.

We are not waiting for a quarter to turn. We are not waiting for the next fiscal year to get better.

We are sitting at the front edge of a phase that, if we do nothing, will define the rest of the lifetimes of everyone reading this and most of their children.

We have been calling this a recession because recession is the only word we’ve been allowed to use. The word recession lets us wait. We are no longer permitted to wait. We have been calling it cyclical because the word cyclical lets us hope, but the cycle is broken. The labor share has been falling for 26 years, and the technology that is going to push it over the edge and fall harder is online now.

The only thing currently obscuring the magnitude of the displacement is a tanker that is, this very afternoon, offloading on the Gulf Coast.

And the buildout of the AI datacenters that will replace you.

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The Question No One Has Asked

Here is the question no politician has yet had the nerve to put on a debate stage or campaign ad:

Or to put it another way: if people can’t make money by doing a job, how in the hell are they supposed to pay for things in our late-stage capitalist society?

For two hundred years the answer to “How do you live here?” has been: “You work a job.” That sentence has been the architecture of American identity for so long that we have forgotten it is a sentence. It is the bedrock under everything else: the citizenship; the dignity; the meaning; the marriage; the mortgage; the kids’ shoes; the savings account; the funeral plot. Everything.

Everything in the long, slow unfolding of the ideal American Dream life.

The wage was the answer to the question. The wage was the question, dressed up in the answer’s clothes. The wage is now, for tens of millions of Americans, in the process of becoming an answer the system no longer wants to give. Not just at the bottom of the wage scale. In the middle.

The 47-year-old Salesforce administrator in Indianapolis, with her three kids, one of whom has special needs, one of whom is on a traveling soccer team, and the third who aspires to the best design schools. The legal researcher in Cleveland, and his student loan payments. The marketing coordinator in Portland. The customer service supervisor in Tulsa. The technical writer in Cincinnati. The HR business partner in Tampa. The product manager in Austin who took the buyout last month and has not been able to find anything within $40,000 of her old base salary. The accountant in Pittsburgh. The paralegal in Sacramento. The analyst in Atlanta. These are not the people the political class has trained itself to defend. These are the people the political class has spent forty years assuming would always be okay because they had college degrees and white-collar jobs and 401(k)s and houses.

The political class is wrong, and the math will, between now and the end of this decade, prove it. The displacement of middle-class work is not a recession. It is the dissolution of the wage relationship as the operating principle of middle-class life.

What replaces wages as the mechanism of dignified participation in this country?

That will be the question of every coming election, whether the candidates know it or not. The first politician who shows the courage and self-awareness to name it and frame it inherits the largest political coalition since the New Deal. So far no one has done it.

Bernie Sanders has gestured at it.

Josh Hawley has gestured at it from the other direction.

JD Vance has gestured at it in his ideologically incoherent way.

No one has said these sentences out loud. The sentences we need to hear are: The wage as we knew it is ending. The country needs a new answer. We are going to design it.

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The Musk Trick

Last month the world’s richest man posted a sentence on X.

He capitalized HIGH. He distinguished it from basic income. In a follow-up he added: There will be universal high income—not merely basic income. Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport, and everything else. Sustainable abundance.

Then he refused to put a number on it. When Bernie Sanders asked him on May 22 how the program would be financed when Musk himself opposes a 5% wealth tax on the $817 billion in personal wealth he currently sits on, Elon Musk did not answer. He has, in fact, never answered.

The only number anywhere near this discourse is Andrew Yang’s 2020 Freedom Dividend: $1,000 a month, $12,000 a year. For comparison, the 2026 federal poverty line for a single adult is $15,960. $12,000 is below the poverty line for one person. It is 36% of the poverty line for a family of four. It does not cover the national median rent of $1,370 a month in a country where the median apartment is one bedroom in a city you might not actually want to live in.

It is not high, and it is not basic. It is starvation rebranded as utopia.

The trick is not the number. The trick on us is the absence of a number. The word “high” in Musk’s quote is doing political work the math will never support. The phrase “sustainable abundance” is doing political work that financing will never support. The vagueness about the mechanism is doing political work that no actual mechanism could survive contact with. This is what designing-from-the-top looks like when the people at the top do not intend to share.

It is a rhetorical preemption. It claims the question has been answered so that the real answer never has to be designed. It puts a slogan on the public’s desire and absorbs it. It will buy a decade of acquiescence on a promise that costs the promiser nothing to make, because the promise will never be cashed.

Naming this matters. What is happening right now, in real time, on the platform that owns the largest single political conversation in the country, is a rhetorical capture of the post-wage question by the people most opposed to the post-wage answer.

Musk is not designing the answer. He is making sure the answer is not designed, that it is never designed.

There is a difference between someone saying I do not know what we should do and someone saying I have already figured out what we should do and it is sustainable abundance. Do not worry your pretty little heads about the math. The second one is more dangerous.

The first one at least leaves the design table open, where we might have to fight for seats, but at least there are seats.

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What an Honest Answer Looks Like

What would an honest answer look like? Not a comprehensive policy brief. That’s a different essay, and possibly a different decade. The categories an honest answer requires are not hard to name. They’ve been sitting in the literature, half built, for years. Here are some starters I propose we consider:

• Wage insurance for the displaced. Not a thousand dollars a month. Real money, pegged to the wage being replaced. If your job goes to an agent, the insurance carries you at your old wage minus a small reduction, for a period of years long enough to retrain into something that still exists. This is how Switzerland handles industrial displacement. This is how Denmark does it. The mechanisms exist. The political will does not.

• Model-layer taxation. Every API call to a frontier AI model carries a small tax. The thing producing the productivity gain funds the redistribution of the productivity gain. This is not radical. We tax gasoline to fund roads. We tax cigarettes to fund cancer screening. We can tax tokens to fund the human cost of token replacement. The mechanism is functionally trivial. The collection point already exists at the cloud-provider layer. Tokens, if you don’t know, are the unit of measurement for AI work—each fragment of language an AI processes is a token, billed for in fractions of a cent.

• A sovereign wealth fund holding equity in frontier AI companies. The Alaska Permanent Fund model, applied to the model layer. Norway built a $1.5 trillion fund on North Sea oil. Singapore did it on trade flows. The United States, sitting at the center of the most productivity-explosive technology since electrification, has refused to consider doing it on compute. There is no reason that this is unthinkable except that the people who would lose the most are the people who currently write the rules, and don’t want us to think it.

• Universal Basic Services plus Participation Income. Universal Basic Services would mean compute, healthcare, transit, broadband, and education become public utilities, the way water is. Participation Income means the cash side of the dividend goes to humans contributing the things humans uniquely can contribute—caregiving, teaching, art, mutual aid, community organizing, the long quiet labor of raising the next generation, the long quiet labor of tending to the sick and the old. This is what dignified participation looks like when the wage is no longer the only mechanism for it.

• A real number. Pick one. $36,000 a year per adult, to start. It’s not much, but it is survivable. It’s above the poverty line. It’s below the median wage. It’s designed to keep people inside the economy rather than push them out of it. It’s indexed to productivity, not inflation, so that as the AI dividend grows, the human share grows with it.

This is not communism. None of what I have described above is communism. Calling it communism is the next phase of the rhetorical preemption, and it is already starting.

This is what every advanced economy in the world is going to have to design in the next 10 years if there is going to be a country left to govern.

Spoiler alert: the countries that design it first inherit the talent, the stability, and the political legitimacy. The countries that wait will get the riots.

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The Fourth Turning

What we are inside of has happened in this country before. William Strauss and Neil Howe called it a Turning. They coined a term, saeculum, the length of a long human life. They said every saeculum produces a Turning. Roughly every 80 years the institutional order breaks, and a new one gets built in the broken place. There have been three in American history:

• 1773–1791: The American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution. The colonial order broke. A new constitutional order replaced it.

• 1860–1865: The Civil War and the start of Reconstruction. The slaveholding order broke. A new free-labor order, however incomplete, replaced it.

• 1929–1946: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War. The Gilded Age order broke. A new social-contract order—the eight-hour day, Social Security, the GI Bill, the SEC, the FDIC, federally insured mortgages—replaced it. The long American middle class replaced it.

Every 80 years, give or take. Count forward from 1946: we are in one now. The Fourth Turning.

What is the top story of this moment? The technological inflection point? The geopolitical war? The labor share collapse? The institutional decay? The collapse of consensus reality? The capture of the rhetorical commons?

These are not separate stories. These are all the same story, and they are all visible signs of an order breaking.

The question is not whether the rebuild happens. The rebuild always happens. Always.

The question is who shows up at the design table while the rebuild is still being designed. The CEOs are at that table right now, designing through their buybacks and their AI capex.

The administration is at the table right now, designing through the tariffs and the war, the appointments, the executive orders, and the continual grift.

The world’s richest man is at the table right now. He is designing through the rhetorical preemption.

The American public, the displaced knowledge-worker class, the working-class voters who have voted for change four cycles in a row, have not yet been invited to the design table.

These people do not know the design table exists. That is the table we have to discover and break into. The seats at that table are ours, and we must take them.

We have approximately 3 to 9 months before the inventory cushion runs out and the supply-side shocks start landing on the demand side of the household balance sheet. We have approximately 12 to 24 months before the AI displacement curve goes from gradual to nonlinear. We have approximately 3 to 5 years before the political consequences of having handled none of this become so severe that we are no longer in a country we recognize.

The math has a calendar.

The pages are turning on that calendar, whether we know it or not.

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The Last Ships

The tanker is still offloading. Somewhere on the Gulf Coast right now, the last of the pre-war crude is being pumped through the pipelines and into the refineries and into the cars and into the country we still recognize. The cargo is on its way. The cushion runs out in August, then September, then October, then the winter, then the harvest, then on the shelves, then in the household budget, then in the layoffs, then the election, then the country on the other side of it, which will be a country we do not yet have a name for.

We have nine months. That is not much time. It is also not nothing.

In every Fourth Turning before this one, the design happened during the crisis, not before it. The Constitution was written in 1787, after the Articles of Confederation had failed, not back in 1773. The New Deal was drafted in 1933, not in 1928.

The terms of every new American order were written by people who walked into the room while the old order was still on fire. They did not wait for the smoke to clear. They wrote with the smoke still in their eyes and lungs.

A small group of people can change the course of history. That is not simple optimism. That is historical observation. It has happened in this country three times. It is going to happen a fourth.

The only question is whose vocabulary defines the rebuild. The math is not stoppable. It is allocatable. The tankers are not stoppable. The cargo is not stoppable. The displacement is not stoppable.

But where the cargo goes, who pays for it, who profits from its replacement, and what we owe one another in the country that emerges on the other side of this—all of that is allocatable.

All of that is a sentence that we get to write, if we show up at the table with the pen.

We have a job. We have nine months and a job. The job is to walk into the room where the table exists while the old order is still on fire, and write the sentence that no politician has yet had the nerve or the courage to write.

The CEOs already know the sentence is coming. That is why they are selling all their stock and building bunkers.

The rest of us should get to work writing it now.

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Cliff’s Note: Blue Amp COO Lawrence Winnerman has written something here you’re going to want to read twice.

He pulls together what the CEOs are quietly doing while the press looks the other way, why what’s coming isn’t just recession, what Elon Musk’s ‘universal high income’ slogan is really doing, and the question future elections will actually be about. Every claim sourced. Every number checked. We’re proud to be running it first on Blue Amp.

If it hits you in the gut, it did mine: subscribe, throw us some cash at our Ko-Fi, re-stack, share, and drop a comment.

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The conversation gets sharper when this audience pushes back.

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While Cliff is off somewhere working his way through a continent’s worth of carbohydrates, and held down the fort — and brought reinforcements. They’re joined by journalist (of the Substack Downwind of Truth), whose latest piece pulls on a thread almost no one in legacy media will touch: a set of overlooked vulnerabilities—to foreign and domestic bad actors—in America’s voting infrastructure that go around the certified machines themselves, a strange mathematical technique Jeffrey Epstein was hunting code-breakers to apply, and an offhand boast from Elon Musk about unleashing “an anomaly in the matrix” that Kait noticed lined up with a very specific piece of NSA-grade math.

Is she saying the 2024 election was stolen? No. Is she saying it’s technically possible—and that no one in a position to investigate is bothering to? That’s the part that will keep you up at night.

Then Ellie takes the wheel and walks us through everything happening right now in the Epstein files: the Sarah Kellen deposition the House Oversight Committee is finally about to release, the Howard Lutnick “I-barely-knew-the-guy-who-shared-my-wall-for-twenty-years” deposition (which Allie has highlighted, annotated, and torn apart with receipts), the Leslie Groff deposition they’re chasing for June 9, Thomas Massie’s promise to read names on the House floor now that he’s lost his primary and has nothing left to lose, Todd Blanche stonewalling on two and a half to three million pages the Transparency Act says we should already have, and a new investigation Ellie has opened into the very last phone call Jeffrey Epstein ever made from the Metropolitan Correctional Center the night before he died.

Watch the whole thing.

Cliff’s Note: I take a week off for great carbohydrates, and Shuster, Ellie, and Kait Justice deliver one of the most important episodes we’ve ever done. While I was eating my weight in pasta, the predator class was busy: Howard Lutnick lied through his teeth about a neighbor he shared a wall with for two decades, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche sat on millions of pages of files the law says they owe us, and Elon Musk went on record about “anomalies in the matrix” like it’s a GD joke. It is not a joke.

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This is exactly the journalism the New York Times and the cable shows won’t touch, because the people they have dinner with are in those files and on those donor lists — and the only reason we can do it is because you fund us.

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by Dana DuBois

Dr. Oz and the Trump administration would like us all to know America is “under-babied.”

And they’re (uncharacteristically) not wrong. Birth rates are down, with a total fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman, the lowest ever recorded, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Low birth rates threaten our long-term economic viability, as we lack able-bodied young people to replace our aging population.

So yes, it’s in the nation’s interest to maintain a healthy birth rate.

And yet, here we are. Teen pregnancy rates are down, and Republicans think it’s a bad thing. Young adults are delaying marriage and parenthood. And rather than asking why Americans might feel hesitant about bringing children into this particular moment in history, the pronatalist MAGA right has decided the problem is cultural decadence, feminism, career women, and ladies with too many cats.

Women need to log off Slack, put on prairie dresses, go full tradwife and start making babies again, I guess.

Except many young Americans are having the exact opposite reaction. And can you blame them? If you wanted to design a society specifically engineered to make people feel terrified of parenthood, you would probably build something pretty close to modern America.

A country increasingly incapable of nurturing the people already here.

I’m a GenX mom with two teen daughters. One of them is queer. I’ve spent years parenting through political whiplash, climate anxiety, the death of Roe v. Wade, economic instability, school shooting drills, healthcare fears, skyrocketing inflation, anti-trans legislation, online radicalization, and now the looming possibility AI may wipe out huge sectors of professional work before my high schoolers even graduate college.

I’m watching the Epstein files unfold in real time, atrocity after atrocity surfacing without consequence for the billionaire-class men involved.

I’m reading in horror about websites like Motherless hosting 20,000+ “sleep porn” videos of unconscious women being raped by their partners, while the news cycle barely blips.

So when I hear the official diagnosis is that younger people just need to chill out and make more babies?

Dr. Oz, my dude. That’s so not going to happen.

And it’s not because young people are too lazy, shallow, or liberal.

It’s because Americans—and especially women—no longer trust the country their children would inherit.

Don’t believe me? I’ve got eight reasons that might convince you.

1. Women No Longer Need to Marry for Survival

For much of human history, marriage was motivated by economics. Women needed men because women were systematically denied access to money, credit, careers, property ownership, and independent stability. We only gained the right to our own mortgages and credit cards in 1974, and to business credit in 1988. That’s the year I graduated high school. This is not ancient history. All of this has happened within my lifespan.

What happened once we gave women access to credit?

Women now graduate college at higher rates than men. They build careers. They support themselves financially. They pay their own bills. Which means heterosexual relationships increasingly require something deeper than “find a guy with a paycheck.”

Meanwhile, large numbers of GenZ men are being radicalized online into grievance politics and manosphere resentment. Women are being told they should submit more, tolerate more, shrink more, and need less.

Many respond with a single coherent thought: No, thanks.

That’s not proof of societal collapse. It’s evidence women finally have the autonomy to reject bad deals.

2. Pregnancy Has Become More Dangerous in America

America already had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world before Roe v. Wade fell.

Now it’s even riskier.

Restricting abortion access doesn’t only impact women who need abortions. The ripple effect is catastrophic across the full spectrum of reproductive health, and especially on pregnant women.

Women are now being denied miscarriage care. Doctors delay emergency treatment because hospital legal teams need to determine whether saving a woman’s life might violate abortion bans. OB-GYNs leave restrictive states entirely. Rural maternity wards are disappearing.

Women have been delayed or turned away at emergency rooms with potentially fatal conditions like ectopic pregnancies.

Nevaeh Crain. Josseli Barnica. Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick.

Women are dying.

And even outside catastrophic pregnancy scenarios, healthcare itself feels increasingly unstable. Millions of Americans are one layoff away from losing insurance coverage. ACA premiums have increased ~30%, with approximately 1.2 million families dropping their benefits due to costs. Younger adults are staring at a healthcare system where remaining insured feels financially precarious at best.

Pregnancy is always an act of vulnerability. But America has transformed it into an act of medical roulette.

Can we blame prospective parents for taking a pass?

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3. We’re All Watching the Government Target LGBTQ+ Kids

Nearly 30% of GenZ adults identify as LGBTQ — and 2.8% identify as transgender.

Threats toward marriage equality and trans safety aren’t abstract for younger generations. Even people who aren’t queer themselves know the odds are good that someone they love—a friend, sibling, partner, or future child—might be.

And now we’re watching politicians escalate rhetoric around trans people from disagreement into something far darker.

The White House recently rolled out a so-called U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy referencing “radical transgender ideology” as part of broader extremism concerns. The document concludes with the line: “We will find you and we will kill you.”

The administration would argue that line refers to terrorists broadly. But when you place “radical transgender ideology” inside a counterterrorism framework and then end with language like that, parents of queer and trans kids aren’t irrational for hearing a threat.

My own daughter spent a few months identifying as trans when she was 11 years old. To call her a terrorist is laughably absurd.

But I’m not laughing.

To imagine her, or any child, folded into rhetoric about extremism and terrorism is grotesque.

And to imagine your own future child growing up inside that political climate?

That kind of rhetoric doesn’t make people want to build families. It makes them terrified of what their families would inherit.

4. The Future Looks Increasingly Dystopian and Uninhabitable

This week brought a headline warning that we should start evacuating New Orleans now, as it’s reached the “point of no return” due to rising sea levels and will be underwater within decades. It barely made a splash in the news.

Meanwhile, wildfires scorch entire towns. Water shortages reshape the American West. Insurance companies are fleeing climate-vulnerable states because the math no longer works. Summers keep getting hotter. Storms keep getting stronger.

Scientists keep warning we’re running out of time to meaningfully slow this down. It’s dire, it’s deadly, and it’s dystopian AF.

Are young adults supposed to ignore this urgent situation and just carry on? What would be the psychologically healthy response to watching governments knowingly fail to protect the literal habitability of the planet?

I won’t likely live to fully witness the devastation.

But my kids will.

If I’d known how untenable the climate change crisis would become so quickly, I might’ve made different choices.

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5. AI Is Making the Future of Work Unknowable

Even people with stable careers increasingly feel one corporate RIF away from professional extinction.

I work in tech. Every day I quietly wonder whether I have another year left before some executive decides AI can do enough of my job badly enough that replacing humans no longer matters.

But I say that as someone with savings, home equity, and decades of work history behind me.

Imagine being 27.

Imagine trying to commit to eighteen years of raising a child while the CEO of Microsoft AI casually predicts that all white-collar work will be automatable by AI in the next 18 months. The social contract underneath adulthood is collapsing in real time.

People aren’t hesitating because they’re selfish. They’re hesitating because the ground beneath them no longer feels stable.

6. Childcare, Healthcare, and College Have Become Financially Absurd

If America wanted more babies, it could start by supporting the families already here.

The United States remains the only OECD country without a national paid parental leave policy. More than 35% of U.S. counties are maternity care deserts, affecting more than 2.3 million women of reproductive age. For those lucky enough to have employer-sponsored family health insurance, out-of-pocket costs went up 6% in 2025 and now average nearly $7,000 a year.

And childcare? For many families, it’s a second housing payment. This was true with my children back in 2012, and costs have gone up 40% in the past decade.

And then there’s college.

Public university tuition has increased more than 175% over the past two decades, dramatically outpacing wage growth and inflation. Millennials and GenZ came of age watching older siblings and peers emerge from college carrying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, into an economy that no longer guarantees stability in return.

Previous generations largely viewed college as a pathway into the middle class. Younger Americans increasingly view it as a financial gamble—with the odds stacked for the house, not them.

This means many prospective parents aren’t just calculating the cost of diapers and daycare. They’re staring down the future cost of educating a child in a system that feels punitive at nearly every stage of life.

The United States simply isn’t a pro-family country. It’s a country that talks endlessly about family while making family life logistically, medically, and financially brutal.

Paid leave. Affordable childcare. Public education. Maternal healthcare. Elder care. Community infrastructure. School safety. These aren’t luxuries. They’re the conditions under which families can function.

Instead, caregiving labor is treated as invisible work, largely dumped onto women until they disappear beneath the weight of it. We claim to worship family while structurally abandoning caregivers at every level.

It’s difficult to take America’s family rhetoric seriously when the people doing the caregiving are drowning, and the expenses are staggering.

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7. Parenting Has Become Isolating and Unsupported

Modern parenting increasingly happens without villages, extended family support, neighborhood connection, affordable housing near relatives, or trusted institutions. Many parents are raising children while simultaneously caring for aging parents, working full-time, and trying to survive economically in cities where community itself has become fragmented and transient.

Previous generations often had built-in support systems, even imperfect ones. Today, many families are privately white-knuckling modern life behind closed doors, wondering why everything feels so impossibly hard.

You cannot keep allowing the most corrupt to strip communities for parts and then act surprised when people hesitate to create more vulnerable humans inside them.

8. The People Demanding More Babies Seem to Deeply Dislike Women

Possibly the strangest part of the pronatalist panic is how many of the loudest voices demanding more babies also seem openly contemptuous of the people expected to produce them.

The rhetoric isn’t subtle. It’s overt vitriol.

Megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll referred to women as “penis homes,” reducing women to vessels for male desire and reproduction. Nick Fuentes declared, “Your body, my choice,” called women “the number one political enemy in America,” and joked—was it even a joke?—about “breeding gulags” for women. Republican lawmakers openly debate rolling back no-fault divorce while simultaneously stripping abortion rights and restricting reproductive healthcare. Even our voting rights are up for public debate.

Women are paying attention.

The message underneath it all feels unmistakable: your body belongs first to the state, the church, the nation, the husband, the baby — and only distantly to you.

The modern MAGA pronatalist movement keeps demanding more babies while simultaneously trying to make women less safe, less autonomous, and more economically dependent. Then it acts outraged when women withdraw.

Some women hear their hatred and feel outright terror. Others may not consciously frame it that way, but respond instinctively by delaying motherhood, rejecting marriage, or opting out entirely.

This is an entirely rational response.

Because if your version of “pro-family” begins with stripping women of rights, mocking our independence, and reducing us to reproductive infrastructure, then a lot of women are going to hear that message and think:

Abso-fucking-lutely not.

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So maybe America isn’t “under-babied.”

Maybe Americans are under-supported.

Maybe younger women aren’t rejecting motherhood because they’re selfish, shallow, decadent, or too attached to their careers or cats.

Maybe they’re responding rationally to a country that increasingly feels unstable, unaffordable, hostile to vulnerability, and openly contemptuous of the people expected to hold families together.

Because if women are being told to have more babies while simultaneously losing rights, losing autonomy, losing economic security, losing healthcare access, and listening to powerful men openly describe us as breeding infrastructure?

Of course many of us are recoiling.

Many women stopped interpreting all of this as isolated hypocrisy and started recognizing something deeper: the United States hates women.

Or at a minimum, it’s profoundly indifferent to our suffering.

The solution isn’t demanding more babies from overwhelmed, world-wary woman.

The solution is building a country where raising one feels safe, sustainable, and possible. But that requires becoming a country capable of caring about women in the first place.

Right now: we are motherless.

And until that changes, I wouldn’t expect America’s “under-babied” problem to improve anytime soon.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy. If this story resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription or buy me a coffee.

Cliff’s Note: Read what Dana DuBois just dropped. The predator class has a new lie: America is “under-babied.” Dr. Oz and the Trump crew want women producing more product for the national assembly line.

Dana—GenX mom, two teenage daughters, one queer—gives eight devastating reasons American women said abso-fucking-lutely not: gutted reproductive rights, women dying in ER parking lots, trans kids called terrorists, no childcare, no leave, and politicians who call women “penis homes.”

This is why Blue Amp Media exists. The corporate press won’t connect these dots. We will.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Chip in or go paid — that’s what keeps BAM independent.

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— Cliff

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By David Shuster

In an era when American democracy has been corrupted by billionaires, lobbyists, and corporate “dark money,” the State of Hawaii has just done something extraordinary. Hawaii’s legislature and Governor have attempted to restore a simple and almost quaint principle: corporations and the plutocrat class should not possess the unrestricted right to purchase U.S. election outcomes and buy local, state, and federal governments.

For sixteen years now, our nation has labored beneath the grotesque farce known as “Citizens United,” that infamous 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in which the conservative Justices declared that corporations enjoy the same political speech rights of actual citizens.

The decision was hailed in conservative and GOP circles as a triumph of liberty, similar to how a pick pocket celebrates crowded streets.

Citizens United remains one of the most preposterous acts of judicial alchemy in American history. The Court took a legal fiction—a corporation, that contraption devised primarily to shield wealthy people from accountability—and transformed it into a kind of secular archangel entitled to dump limitless money into elections. The conservative Justices might as well have granted voting rights to parking meters and emotional understanding to slot machines.

The defenders of Citizens United have spent years insisting that money is speech. By that reasoning, a bank vault is a Shakespearean monologue.

The practical consequences have been grotesque. Ever since the 2010 court ruling, our democracy has been lowered into a meat grinder.

Elections have been dominated by billionaires, industrial syndicates, crypto-speculating degenerates, pharmaceutical monopolists, fossil-fuel emperors, and assorted corporate swamp-creatures whose patriotic devotion to the common good extends as far as the quarterly earnings report.

The average citizen enters this carnival with a vote. The oligarch arrives with a checkbook large enough to purchase senators, governors, think tanks, newspaper columnists, and a Labrador retriever, I mean Fox Business News pundit, trained to bark “free market principles” whenever taxes on hedge funds are mentioned.

And still, our nation has been instructed by most republicans and conservatives to regard this eruption of sewage as democracy.

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Speaking of corporate money rotting democracy…

Citizens United didn’t just let billionaires buy politicians. It let them buy the news you read about those politicians.

Every story you scroll past has an owner. A board. A donor. A slant. And most outlets won’t tell you whose hand is up the puppet’s back.

Ground News will.

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It pulls every major story from every major source — left, right, and the lonely middle — and shows you exactly who’s covering it, who’s burying it, and who’s spinning it. Bias ratings. Ownership data. Blindspot alerts for the stories one side is pretending didn’t happen.

It’s the closest thing to a Citizens United decoder ring you can install on your phone.

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Hawaii took back their elections. Take back your news feed.

The genius of Hawaii’s new law lies in its refusal to bow down before this lunacy. Hawaii has calmly revived an elementary truth: Corporations exist because the public permits them to exist. They are chartered by states. They are granted privileges by states. They are creatures of law—not celestial beings floating above our nation dispensing wisdom from mahogany boardrooms.

Yet under Citizens United, corporations acquired political influence vastly exceeding the influence of ordinary Americans. The nurse in Cleveland possesses one vote. ExxonMobil possesses an ocean of cash sufficient to flood any campaign with political ads, buy all the politicians running for any office, and get nearly total deregulation of the fossil fuel industry.

Hawaii’s lawmakers looked at his absurdity and did something almost extinct in modern American politics: they displayed courage.

Not performative courage of the sort practiced by cable-news pundits and congressional windbags who “fight” corruption by sending fundraising emails about it. Actual courage. The sort involving risk. The sort involving powerful enemies. The sort involving corporate lawyers descending upon the state like locusts carrying briefcases.

Naturally, the priesthood of plutocracy is already shrieking. Conservative blowhards who regard billionaires with the reverence medieval monks reserved for saints are clutching their pearls over the possibility that corporations may someday lose the sacred right to purchase attack ads in every television commercial break through the election.

One can barely contain the tears.

These conservatives speak of Citizens United as though it were the Magna Carta rather than a judicial hallucination authored during America’s great age of corporate worship. They treat criticism of unlimited campaign spending as an assault on liberty itself. By this logic, a thief’s freedom to point a gun at a convenience store clerk and empty the cash register must also be protected as expressions of personal creativity.

But Hawaii has exposed the central fraud.

Citizens United was never principally about liberty. It was about power. Specifically, the power of concentrated wealth to dominate the political machinery while wrapping itself in claims of constitutional principle.

And let’s be clear. This domination has poisoned every aspect of American public life. Congress behaves not like a legislature but as a concierge service for wealthy donors and their corporate Political Action Committees. Climate policy is drafted under the watchful gaze of oil executives. Drug pricing legislation emerges from negotiations conducted with pharmaceutical barons whose business model depends upon charging dying people extravagant sums for crucial medicine. Defense contractors roam through Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon with the logic and stench of slobbering, rabid dogs.

The result is a nation where citizens increasingly suspect—correctly—that the government no longer belongs to them.

That is why Hawaii’s law matters far beyond the islands themselves. It represents a rare and glorious refusal to surrender to inevitability. It announces that democracy does not need to remain a subsidiary of multinational capital. If a corporation wants to operate in Hawaii, that corporation must operate in accordance with Hawaii’s laws (including the new one) and stop buying local, state and federal election campaigns in Hawaii.

Other states should follow Hawaii’s lead immediately.

Let California do it. Let Illinois do it. Let Massachusetts, Oregon, Minnesota, and every state not yet entirely converted into a corporate pass through adopt similar laws. Imagine a coalition of states demanding that democracy belong to citizens again. Imagine governors and lawmakers refusing to accept that American elections must forever function as investment opportunities for corporate interests.

That movement would not merely challenge Citizens United. It would challenge the deeper assumption that wealth should determine political voice.

Opponents are already howling that this action by the Hawaii legislature and Governor threatens the First Amendment. But the First Amendment was written to protect human liberty and democratic debate—not to guarantee ExxonMobil, pharmaceutical conglomerates, or hedge funds the unlimited ability to purchase political outcomes.

Corporations are not citizens. They do not vote. They do not serve on juries. They do not die in wars. They do not possess consciences, families, or civic obligations. They are legal instruments designed to conduct commerce. Allowing them to dominate elections distorts democracy into something the Founders would not recognize.

Hawaii’s legislature and Governor deserve praise not because their law is politically safe, but because it is politically courageous. They recognized that democracy cannot survive indefinitely when money becomes indistinguishable from power. They chose to confront one of the most corrosive Supreme Court rulings of modern times instead of surrendering to it.

The rest of America should pay attention.

If democracy is ever going to be reclaimed from corporate domination and dark-money manipulation, it will begin with states bold enough to challenge the status quo. Hawaii has struck a blow, not just against Citizens United but against the entire diseased philosophy underlying it; the cancerous notion that democracy exists to flatter and enrich those already powerful.

Other states should join Hawaii’s political luau and remind the nation that government of the people still means something.

sponsored

Speaking of corporate money rotting democracy…

Citizens United didn’t just let billionaires buy politicians. It let them buy the news you read about those politicians.

Every story you scroll past has an owner. A board. A donor. A slant. And most outlets won’t tell you whose hand is up the puppet’s back.

Ground News will.

Subscribe to Ground News & Save 40%!

It pulls every major story from every major source — left, right, and the lonely middle — and shows you exactly who’s covering it, who’s burying it, and who’s spinning it. Bias ratings. Ownership data. Blindspot alerts for the stories one side is pretending didn’t happen.

It’s the closest thing to a Citizens United decoder ring you can install on your phone.

Blue Amp readers get 40% off at ground.news/blue

Hawaii took back their elections. Take back your news feed.