Interesting paper:

Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance. We identify three forms of façading—­surface, reinforced, and deep façading­—that are contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality. Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality. Practically, we propose several approaches to deter and detect criminal deception, including the extension of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission surveillance and whistleblower program, investor due diligence reform, and dedicated entrepreneurship education interventions that clearly demarcate when entrepreneurs transgress into criminal deception. We make contributions to literatures on cultural entrepreneurship, organizational wrongdoing, and the social effects of entrepreneurship. ...

"It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe." - Muhammad Ali

Lots of monopoly news this past week, as usual.

Before getting to the full round-up, I want to explore a new concept I thought about recently, based on a conversation I had with a hotel owner. It has to do with the post-pandemic puzzle so many economists are noodling on, which is why the economy looks to be doing fine in most conventional measurements such as unemployment, jobs, economic growth, and so forth, but the public is just incredibly sour.

Sure, gas prices are high, but the sourness was there before the war in Iran. Sure there’s inequality and health care is expensive, but those problems has long predated this moment. I have identified interest rates, as well as surveillance pricing, as a meaningful cost of living that isn’t incorporated into the Consumer Price Index. But I’m not fully satisfied. Something that isn’t being measured is affecting how we perceive commerce. And I think it has to do with the increasing cost we are paying for everyday goods and services, not necessarily just in cash, but in terms of time dealing with bullshit.

I came to this realization because I was on vacation last week, and I had the common experience of being cheated by a tech platform that connects consumers and hotels. I know it’s common because the hotel owner told me so. “This year, it seems like the amount of cheating from tech platforms has just exploded,” he said. I’m going to keep some of the specifics vague because I don’t love revealing personal info online, but it doesn’t really matter, you’ll get the gist.

We were traveling in New England, and my wife booked a hotel on a third party site called Agoda. They apparently buy blocks of rooms, and then resell them to consumers. We have certain requirements, and my wife is very detail-oriented. She booked a certain sized room. Only when we arrived at our hotel, instead of having the room that my family could sleep in, they had a smaller room in which we couldn’t fit.

It was an independently owned inn, run by lovely people. We showed them our booking receipt for a bigger room, they showed us their booking bill for a smaller room. Clearly, some middleman broker selling blocks of rooms simply lied or had a screw-up somewhere. The innkeeper tried to accommodate us, but the hotel was fully booked. And he couldn’t refund us, because we hadn’t paid him, we had paid Agoda. So we had to book a new room at a different hotel.

As we were talking about the problem with the hotel owner, he explained that this situation has become far more common over the last year, particularly when it involves something called “B2B distribution network,” which is likely a wholesaler owned by Expedia that sells rooms to brokers and online travel agencies, like Agoda. He showed us this document.

We booked through Agoda, but the hotel was paid via Expedia, which had sent this information representing our reservation to the hotel. And sure enough, the sizes were different. But more interesting than just the screw-up was that he had to take a marker and black out the price he received for what we booked. The hotel is not allowed to tell customers the commission they must pay third parties like Expedia. In addition, the hotel doesn’t get our actual credit card, but a dummy credit card, and he wasn’t even able to get our contact information until we showed up.

The rest of the story won’t surprise you. My wife tried to get in touch with Agoda, but they had her use an AI chatbot and it kept disconnecting. So she went to her credit card company, which gave her the number of the merchant to contact. Somehow she wound up back on the AI chatbot, and presented all of the evidence. Agoda then conceded there had been an error, offered a “sincere” apology but kept asking on a loop if she agreed to keep her booking.

These actions are, of course, fraud. And it’s also a particular kind of fraud. It’s not that the innkeeper is trying to cheat us, or we’re trying to cheat the innkeeper. The actual people trying to conduct business - the consumer and the hotel - were operating in good faith. It’s just that some MBA dipshit realized there was an arbitrage opportunity in cheating both independent hotels and consumers, assuming that you could wear down just enough people to stop asking for refunds such that you’d have a profitable business.

The thing is, whether we get a refund or not, we had to spend time fighting this nonsense. The scammers here are dumping the burden of proof onto consumers and ordinary small business people like these hotel operators, which is a form of social pollution. They may only steal money from a few of us, but they steal time from all of us. They are time bandits. (And yes, I’m naming them after the classic 1981 movie.)

Now, a brief aside, the reason fraud and scams have skyrocketed this past year is because tech-enabled scammers know that there is no cop on the beat. That’s the fault of man named Andrew Ferguson, who is the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC was the agency tasked with preventing cheating, but it no longer does that. I’ve known Andrew for a few years, he read my book (or at least said he did), and we had a few fun conversations in 2024 back when the right was doing their flirtation with populism. I may do an essay on Ferguson at some point, but why he has chosen not to police the marketplace is unimportant. That he has chosen not to police the marketplace is what matters, because that is why we’re living in a scammers paradise.

So on our vacation, thanks to Ferguson, my wife and I were spending time doing logistical work to deal with being cheated. And time is a real cost, it is almost as if we were assigned a second job, with the pay being the original amount paid to Agoda. What kind of effect do these scams have on our psyches? It takes a toll. Now, despite being cheated, I’ve been on break, so I’m in a good mood and can take a step back. And all of a sudden, I realized this storm of tech-enabled cheating is relentless. My time is constantly being stolen.

It’s not a one-off here or there. I get 5-7 spam text messages a day from different scam political committees, and another 3-5 spam text messages from scammers trying to sell random services or offer jobs or surveys. I don’t even think about it now, I just type STOP or send them to junk, knowing that they won’t relent regardless. Apple could allow third parties to create text message spam filters, but it won’t, because it’s a monopolist and doesn’t have to. It’s easier to allow time theft.

Another example of time banditry are junk fees and deceptive practices. A few weeks ago, I was looking at hotels using Google Maps, and nearly all the prices were artificially low. You’d see a bunch of hotel prices on the map, and click on one of them, and then it turns out the room wasn’t available, or the price was much higher, or a combination. Again, very minor, but just more time thievery.

Even small things, like the ability to search emails to get receipts to contest fraudulent charges - those are worsening too. I have realized, I am constantly on guard someone might be cheating me. And that’s not even getting to the health care system, which is probably the biggest time bandit of all. In America, when you get sick, you also get a second job dealing with paperwork.

And I think that dynamic of time theft is impacting all of us. If you take that extra time spent dealing with all these hassles, and add it up, it is as if we are all working a lot more than we used to, with no pay. That isn’t measured by any statistic I can see, but it’s very real.

Before my vacation, I was feeling really burnt out. And that is kind of odd, considering the politics that I’ve been pointing to for almost twenty years - economic populism - is on the verge of what seems like some historic victories. Now, there are good reasons for pessimism, but the relentlessness of the scams and cheating, the very routinization of it, is a real and unknowable cost that I just hadn’t thought about. I mean, if I had to tell you how much hotels cost in New England, I couldn’t. Does that include the scam? Does that include the hours we spent frustrated at AI bots?

How extensive is time theft in America? No one knows, but I’m guessing it’s pretty common. Americans filed one million internet crime complaints with the FBI, with fraud losses increasing 26% from 2024 to 2025. Consumers lost eight times as much to scams in 2025 as they did in 2020. And Americans are turning on one another, it is the only nation where Pew found more people think the morality and ethics of their fellow countrymen is bad rather than good. Cheating, it seems, is routine.

Now, I believe Americans are by and large good and honest people. The cheating and bad morals are institutional in nature. Much of the corporate world engages in extractive corrupt pricing games, and there are judges and enforcers like Ferguson who refuse to use the political technology known as consumer protection law. It’s not most Americans acting badly. But it is very hard to know that, because our time is constantly being stolen, and it is increasingly hard to identify credible trusted ways to understand what is happening.

I think this constant barrage of time theft explains why Americans are so angry at data centers and AI. There’s nothing inherently bad about AI, which is just using structured statistical inference technology. But in this historical moment most use cases seem to be neutral or negative. I could point to our recent experience with AI this vacation, which has been dealing with chatbots offering “sincere” apologies while refusing to make us whole. We all know, at some level, that the mistakes AI fosters are going to be dumped on us, as workers, consumers, business owners, whoever we are, having to spend our precious time cleaning up the mistakes that someone else realized they could foist on others.

And so we’re just angry at these extra costs, even though we have no way of articulating them as such and economists and government beancounters aren’t looking for them when they compile their statistics of pricing and wages. But they are very real.

I’ll close out with a note of optimism. These problems aren’t hard to fix. We know how to stop cheating. Do more enforcement, allow people to sue directly by getting rid of arbitration agreements, and put liability onto platforms who are structural bedrock for deceptive practices in the marketplace. That would stop the time bandits, and let everyone chill out a bit more. I am optimistic on this front, because it’s so noticeable how much scamming is going on and the political winds are shifting. We can see that with the polling and action on data centers and surveillance pricing.

Oh, and since it’s the age of cheating, I have a confession. Remember that quote up top from Muhammad Ali on the pebble in your shoe? Yeah, that’s not his. It’s probably from an early 20th century insurance trade publication. Great line, though.

And now, the monopoly-related news of the week, with lots of great stories.

There are a whole bunch of new private antitrust cases, against giants in fertilizer, skiing, and apartment rentals in NYC. The Trump FTC takes a bold stance against price gouging people having heart attacks, saying that ambulance companies must disclose that they are overcharging a dying person. They can still do it, they just have to say they are doing it. Plus, Paramount unwisely aligns itself with the politics of Flock cameras.

That and a lot more, including some really optimistic news on coming elections.

Read more

The November midterm elections are shaping up to be a real barnburner. On one side, Team Evil is going in hard for the coup-attempting child-trafficking-linked delusional fascist dismantling anything that ever did any good for anyone. Real hard.

Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political strategists from both parties. [...]

U.S. companies have spent an unprecedented $517 million on the 2026 U.S. House and Senate races in the 15 months through the end of the first quarter, exceeding the record $461 million in corporate spending over two years for the 2024 elections, data compiled by corporate accountability nonprofit group Public Citizen shows.

Public Citizen reports that of that half billion, nearly $300 million was from those three industries alone, and that's just spending from 2026's first quarter. Nearly $200 million was from crypto companies alone, and given that the two major use cases for crypto company products are organized crime and slightly less organized crime, there's a case to be made that the 2026 midterms will be the first House and Senate races sponsored by Drug Money.

Drug Money: It's What Runs The World™

And speaking of drugs and money, there's now word that Elon Musk is once again getting back into politics after swearing off politics—who coulda figured, right—and plans to spend up to $200 million by himself to prop up Republicanism's criminal wing, including Texas' remarkably crooked Ken Paxton.

Musk is probably smart enough to know not to give the money to Paxton directly, since Paxton would almost certainly just steal it and head off to a new life in Mexico. And that's a shame, because (a) convincing Ken Paxton to leave the country is probably worth a lot more than $200 million and (b) there's nobody who needs $200 million less than Robot Tunnel Rocket Car Brainchip Nonconsensual Nudes Generator Race War Nazi Guy.

It's now just presumed, in America, that the wealthiest Americans will attempt to buy their own government. The Supreme Court said they are allowed to, because money is freer speech than speech itself is, and you know it's true because when non-rich Americans try to use their free speech rights they're kettled into fenced-off "free speech zones" but the Roberts Court invariably gets very, very mad if you suggest that maybe money should have a fence around it too. So this is how we live, now. In a year and a half, the second Trump "presidency" has created disaster after disaster, engaged in rampant illegality for funsies, and put the economy, oil supplies, food infrastructure, weather forecasting, military readiness, public safety, and U.S. international standing all in crisis at the same time.

To the people who've most benefited from the Republican Party's collapse into scoundrelism, though, none of this matters because what's really important is that their own sources of wealth go unregulated. Completely unregulated. As in, even the slightest hint of regulation will send all these billionaires immediately into Nazism, if they think those are the only available choices. And you'd think that was overstating the case, except a half a billion dollars likely headed to a billion dollars worth of midterm campaign spending pretty much proves it.

As long as American billionaires can sell people money laundering tokens they can use to generate nudes of neighborhood children while placing bets on the damage suspiciously set fires might do, they'll do fine. Who cares which aircraft carriers get poop-flooded, or which international trading partners pack up and fk right off, or whether the midwest has power or drinking water on any given day.

We all understand that election spending is going to take place. What's impressive about this newest round is that I'm not sure it has ever been so cleanly divided into Team Evil vs everybody else. Take a look at that Reuters line again:

Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political strategists from both parties.

Huh, would you look at that. The biggest campaign spenders in the midterm elections are:

"Crypto companies," which have been desperately trying to find a use case for their product that does not involve money laundering, online extortion schemes, or industrial-scale scam factories.

"Artificial intelligence firms," which are desperately trying to avoid an almost-certain industry collapse driven by astronomic and still-increasing debt loads papered over with Enron-level accounting shenanigans.

"Online betting," an industry that connects the wallets of compulsive gamblers to those of anonymous insider traders, leaving 94% of their "customers" worse off.

We've got the man who bought Twitter, turned it into a site for extremists, and is now staking future success on a chatbot that pumps out disinformation, hoaxes, and A.I. nudes of anyone you might happen to have a picture of. We've got the billionaires behind mass surveillance, memecoins, and speculative arson all lined up to shake Trump's hand and throw money at him.

All these guys want very, very much for Trump to continue his fascist project. The industries most associated with law-dodging and outright theft are going hard for the demented criminal and his efforts to turn the country into a Russian-styled kleptocracy.

And it's a perfectly reasonable reaction, to be honest. Because at this point, America is divided into two camps. There are the billionaires heading up nation-wrecking levels of wealth transfer, much of it premised on cheating people outright, and on the other side are Americans who think maybe it's about time we just eat these people and be done with it.

Not literally "eat" them, of course. I'm speaking figuratively.(1)

The American mood right now is, in a word, angry. Furious, even. The reason Republican lawmakers have been avoiding their constituents for eighteen months running is because so many of the town halls they do dare to have devolve into screaming as ticked-off voters ask their leaders just what the hell they've been doing, as Trump dismantles whole sections of government that turn out to be pretty damn important if you don't want explosive diarrhea and do want to keep your business afloat.

The leaders of Team Evil, though, the ones who've already dumped half a billion dollars into propping up the diarrhea, measles and Epstein caucus, are infinitely more hated than mere lawmakers are. Team Evil's leaders are also so allergic to criticism that they simply do not Allow it to exist in their presence.

Not only will you never see any of the Team Evil leaders doing a non-staged non-toady-infested town hall, they have entire teams of people devoted to making sure you rabble can't so much as make eye contact with them. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is apparently now buying an Irish castle, buying castles being something that the members of Team Evil seem do with some regularity; while this has caused some consternation among nearby residents, the plain fact of the matter is that none of them will ever so much as notice whether Zuckerberg is at his "castle" or not.

He's not going to drop into town to do some antiquing. He's not going to pop down to the local pub. He's going to hole up in his castle like Nerd Dracula—for all the locals know he'll be down in the basement lying in a wooden coffin, wearing the latest virtual reality headset and waiting for the apocalypse to take us all.

At this point, the people building the data centers, and pushing the crypto coins, and taking advantage of your grandfather's gambling addiction to bleed him dry know full well that the rest of us all hate them. And they have a pretty good suspicion that if Team Evil does not somehow manage to win not just the next election, but every single election from here on in, the dam is going to break, the walls are going to come down, and the public, fed up and out for vengeance, is going to eat them.

Again, not really eat them.(2) Just "seize their wealth" or "pass new regulations," but to someone like Musk or Zuckerberg or Andreessen that's pretty much the same thing.

That's the problem with extortionate, exploitative, furiously antisocial behavior. It may allow you to hoover up great sums of money, but the more people in the general public you hurt the more resentment builds up and the more you have to spend to convince the people on the other side of your gate that you don't deserve to be eaten. Once you've gotten to the point where the whole world economy is in danger of toppling if you can't bullshit your way through the next press release—hello, Sam Altman—that half billion dollars per election becomes a necessary expense if you don't want to be snacked on.

Metaphorically. None of us are cannibals, we're just talking raising tax rates back to previous levels.(3) Get a grip.

What we're seeing right now is an even bigger version of Donald Trump's own post-coup ploy. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, was caught hoarding a mountain of national security secrets in his spy-infested country club, was suspected of cheating on his taxes to the tune of $100 million, and was facing possible legal repercussions for that whole attempted insurrection thing until John Roberts rode to his rescue, sweating and panting from the effort. Facing a dizzying array of possible prison sentences, Trump smartly ran for reelection under the also Supreme Court-backed theory that nobody could put him in jail while he was a candidate—and if he did win he would have the power to make all his legal troubles go away while doing whole new sets of crimes that would make the first look like parking tickets. It worked, because reasons.

The collected forces of Team Evil are now attempting their own version of exactly that, but on an economy-wide, nationwide, even global scale. The crypto and "prediction market" companies are having to defend against growing allegations that their whole damned existence is nothing but an elaborate scam, and the artificial intelligence-slash-data-center industry is facing collapse unless world governments swoop in to save their sorry money-hemorrhaging asses.

Having gotten to the point where their industries can't survive if they're regulated into having to do slightly less active harm to society, they're hoping that they can throw enough money into the Team Evil pot to be able to buy society outright. Or, if not society, at least the government.

Because the government comes with a military, and at this point it may take the U.S. military to protect billionaires from the threat of their neighbors losing their last thread of patience, breaking down their security fences, and eating them.(4)

This is not, however, sustainable for very long. Many variations of sociopaths have tried it during many, many points in history, and eventually each such government collapses because there's no amount of money that will absolutely guarantee a wealthy person's safety if the rest of the country decides it's time for a gold-leaf sociopath barbecue.(5) Every government founded not on the public good but instead solely on the premise of keeping the rabble away from the forks is doomed to fall, and the only variation is how long it takes.

I am no historian, but in general it seems that the more money a nation's wealthy sociopaths cumulatively spend to prevent getting eaten, the hungrier the public gets and more lavish the eventual buffet becomes.

Not that that would happen here, of course.(6) America is exceptional, for reasons laid out in those history textbooks schools can no longer afford to buy.

My point is this, then: Nobody should be too shocked that the most corrupt set of leaders America has ever had are now being flooded with more campaign dollars than companies have ever before spent. There are a large number of industries that depend on corruption for their very survival, and if there is ever a serious risk of America moving to universal health insurance you will see ten times this much pour into Team Evil's coffers.

In past generations, America's richest and most sociopathic tycoons knew that the most cost-effective way to keep the public from gnawing on your shinbones was to put their name on libraries, on auditoriums, on hospitals, and on other monuments to the public good. It amounted to pennies, given their overall wealth, and delivered just enough public goodwill to dull the public mind to scandals elsewhere. And, in general, it proved shockingly effective.

This generation of wealth, however, has been unable to part with those pennies. Our current captains of industry are much stupider and much greedier than those who came before them. They cheaped out on building museums and libraries, and on even the premise of contributing to society somewhat, and went through several variations of that "greed is good" phrase before giving up on trying to justify themselves and going home to hoard wealth like weird and paranoid dragons. The Supreme Court instead told them they could buy individual House and Senate seats outright, rather than going through far more convoluted means of winning public favor; the moment the Court said so, the wealthy rushed to do it.

But it is a year-by-year thing. Once wealth decides to remove itself from society, go full Team Evil mode and control the nation mostly through waves of campaign propaganda, it can't stop doing it. You live your life as a prey animal, not a predator: If you don't want to be eaten, you can't stop running.

So that is where we are, now. The architects of most of the world's worst woes have no problem throwing a half a billion dollars out their windows if it will distract the angry mobs below. Nobody wants to be eaten, and nobody thinks they deserve to be eaten.

Their problem, though, is that Donald Trump's maladministration has made a very good case that nothing has any hope of going back to normal unless at least a few of these people get put on a spit. (7)

(1) I am not speaking figuratively. I mean we ought to consider literally eating them.

(2) We could try eating just one or two of them to see what happens. An experiment, if you will.

(3) Look, we all know cannibalism is bad but if eating some guy's severed thumb would give you no-hassle health insurance for the rest of your life you'd probably do it, right? You'd at least think about doing it.

(4) Honestly, the biggest problem might be toxicity. A lot of these guys seem blasted out of their gourds a good chunk of the time, and I can't imagine it'd be safe to ingest much of that.

(5) America is the land of barbecue. We're the nation that turned "potluck" into a religion. I think people are underestimating how into this some Americans could get.

(6) Buddy, our top government health guy boasts about eating roadkill. It absolutely can happen here.

(7) Circling back to the religion thing, in fact, I can see evangelicals turning this into a whole tent revival-ish movement. Music, chanting, everyone gathered 'round the pit watching the meat cook and praising Jesus. Evangelicals seem like they'd be more open to eating people than almost anyone else, right? All those evangelical groups have at least a little of that we-like-eating-people vibe going on. Even if the rest of us were grossed out, I think they'd go for it.

Best-selling author Thom Hartmann wrote an article last year (June, 2025) where he laid out fourteen steps to “autocratic breakthrough,” which he went on to define:

“Autocratic breakthrough” is a phrase you’ll be hearing more and more about in coming months. It refers to the moment in time when a wannabe dictator and the oligarchy that supports him push a democratic country toward authoritarianism so far that its political systems “break through” into full-blown autocracy/dictatorship.

I would encourage you to read the entire article. Today, I want to go through Hartmann’s list and give you my take on just where our country stands on each of the steps.

You may disagree – you may think I am being alarmist, or you may think we’re even closer to a Trump/GOP dictatorship. If so, please leave your take in the comments below; this is a subject we need to discuss openly and often.

Stage One: Democratic Erosion

(1) Demonization of political opponents

Obviously, this has been the norm since even before Trump’s first term. If you are opposed to him, you get attacked, vilified, and called every name in the book, including “traitor” and “scum.”

(2) Attacks on the press

This, too, has been present for the past decade. “Fake news” turned out to be the lightest of the attacks. “Enemy of the people” made its appearance early on, and continues to this day. Attacking individual reporters, suing news networks that actually dare to report the truth, and barring certain news outlets from press conferences and even from the building. And if that’s not enough, get your rich buddies to buy the news organizations that shape the news, so you can get them on your side.

(3) Politicization of law enforcement and intelligence agencies

The Department of Justice is now Trump’s personal attack law firm, that he sics on whomever he perceives as his enemies. The rule of law has been replaced by the Rule of Trump. Customs and Border Protection has stopped being about the border; instead, with their billion-dollar American Gestapo called ICE, they are focused on deporting thousands of people, even citizens, in order to make Trump look tough.

(4) Elevation of the executive above co-equal branches of government

Once upon a time, we had three equal branches of government, each with powers that provided the term we’ve heard since grade-school: “Checks and balances.”

No more. The Trump executive branch is the only game in town. Congress does what it is told, and the courts are ignored.

(5) Election manipulation

You may think my answer to this would be “we’ll have to wait and see.” Instead, my analysis is “already happening.”

The Trump administration has seized ballots from Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan. The federal agency tasked with protecting the security of our elections is instead attacking secretaries of state in various states, and refusing to say if it can guarantee support for the upcoming midterms.

There are multiple efforts underway to limit citizens’ access to the ballot, from the SAVE Act, to insisting that states provide voter data, to requiring (by executive order) that all voters must show a birth certificate or passport in order to vote.

The Center for American Progress has identified 15 tactics that the Trump administration is using to manipulate and control the midterm elections. I won’t list them all here, but if you read the list you can see all 15 in action now.

Stage Two: Democratic Breakdown

(6) Judicial capture

From the Supreme Court on down, the Republican party and the Trump administration have been focused on getting “their people” on the bench. Mitch McConnell has worked hard at this, and has called getting the six Federalist judges on the Supreme Court one of the achievements he is most proud of.

Of course, if you either ignore or abuse the judicial system, that is another form of judicial capture. Failing to respond to court orders, manipulating grand juries, even perjury by government lawyers – it’s all happening now.

(7) Criminalization of the opposition

It’s one thing to call your opponents “scum”; it’s another to charge them with actual crimes. And yet, that is what is happening.

In September of 2025, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) which named “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” and proceeded to outline a collection of ideologies as “falling under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’” These include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Do you see yourself in any of those supposedly criminal beliefs or actions? (And yes, we are now in the Orwellian world of “thought crimes.”) I’m sure that many of my statements and actions could be twisted to fit that list. So can the statements and actions of almost all persons opposing the fascist takeover of our country.

We’ve already seen anti-ICE protestors in Texas arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison. In Minnesota, 15 members of a group called Direct Action Minnesota were indicted on conspiracy and assault charges. As noted in an article in The Conversation, “a 94-page indictment cited behavior such as wearing an ‘I’m Antifa!’ sweatshirt, possessing a bullhorn, or including a devil emoji in a Signal message.”

(8) Militarization of domestic law enforcement

This begins with giving law enforcement agencies actual military equipment, a process already underway. It moves to having law enforcement agencies actually occupy an area, like an invading army. In its final stage, it involves the actual military being politicized with rallies demonizing the political opposition, and paramilitary groups being given semi-official or official approval for a campaign of terror against “dissidents.”

(9) Fusion of party and state

There are two signs of this step being reached: membership in and loyalty to the ruling party are necessary for state employment and state contracts, and government media becomes government propaganda.

Stage Three: Full Autocratic Breakthrough

(10) Abolition or nullification of meaningful elections

Let’s be clear: in this step, elections still occur, but they are basically for show. The winners are almost always chosen by the ruling party, and barriers are put up to prevent any opposition party from winning the election or even receiving votes.

(11) Loss of civil liberties, including freedom of assembly, speech, and movement

From Hartmann’s article: “All such liberties are either suspended or heavily restricted (typically with an ‘emergency’ justification). Protesters are jailed, beaten, and disappeared.”

(12) Constitutional overhaul or emergency rule

Again, from Hartmann: “This signals the end of a truly constitutional order as new constitutions are written and laws are passed to entrench autocratic power. Term limits are removed and elections become a mere formality as their outcomes are predetermined.”

(13) Exile, imprisonment, or assassination of opposition

Opposition to the ruling party becomes actually dangerous and life-threatening. Persons openly opposed to — or sometimes, even questioning — the policies and direction of the rulers are charged with crimes, forced to flee the country, or just simply murdered.

(14) Strongman cult of personality replaces institutional legitimacy

The “Dear Leader” is touted as the actual representation of the nation in human form. Loyalty to the leader is the same as loyalty to the nation, and thus, dissent is treason.

So where are we now?

Obviously, the following is just my read of the situation. But if you read the descriptions above, I think you may come to agree with me.

We have passed through all five steps of Stage One (Democratic Erosion), and are well on our way to completing all four steps of Stage Two (Democratic Breakdown). The question now is, Will we complete the process by going through all five steps in Stage Three?

The midterms will tell us a lot. Assuming the Democrats take back the House and even the Senate, what follows next will tell us even more. Will the Democrats take concrete action to reverse the steps already completed? Will they do anything about guaranteeing free and fair elections? Will they establish clear rules to prevent abuse of the Department of Justice? Will they get serious about ethics rules for all three branches of government, including themselves? And will they prosecute those who have broken the law, to make sure everyone understands these actions are out of bounds?

I am also heavily focused on the steps in Stage Three (Full Autocratic Breakthrough). Will we begin losing our First Amendment rights? Will Trump institute emergency rule in order to deal with “antifa”? Will we see opposition leaders indicted, arrested, and jailed?

I believe we are seeing a growing backlash to Trump, and to autocracy itself. The more we can share these 14 steps with others, and the more we can talk about the threat of authoritarian takeover of our country and the loss of our democracy, the more that resistance will grow.

Share this article on social media. Forward it to your friends and family. And if you are worried it is too long for that, then share the image file below. It lists the 14 steps as noted by Thom Hartmann, and would be a good way to start the conversation.

Let us hope that we can stop this slide into fascism, and begin to recover and rebuild our democracy.

--30--

The neon flying squid can fly in formation.

The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked like the early stages of an alien invasion.

They were probably neon flying squid (Ommastrephes bartramii), the subsequent study states, a species that is part of a 20-strong flying squid family that was known to leap from the water but, until then, was only rumoured to also be able to glide above it.

The neon flying squid was able to gain such elevation by using the hyponome, a funnel-like muscular organ also present in other cephalopods, such as octopuses. The organ is able to force water out in a jet, propelling the body along both in and out of the sea. Photographs of the gliding squid show them with their arms (they have 10 limbs in all) splayed outwards.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

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