Today's links

• Google's AI pricing plan: From each according to their ability (to pay).
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Disney buys Pixar; Bruces on "vernacular video"; Hickey paralysis; RIP David Hartwell; Personalized pricing; They were warned.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Google's AI pricing plan (permalink)

Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/

But maybe they've figured it out. In a recent edition of his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller pulls on several of the strings that Google's top execs have dangled recently:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/will-google-organize-the-worlds-prices

The first string: Google's going to spy on you a lot more, for the same reason Microsoft is spying on all of its users: because they want to supply their AI "agents" with your personal data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

Google's announced that it's going to feed its AI your Gmail messages, as well as the whole deep surveillance dossier the company has assembled based on your use of all the company's products: Youtube, Maps, Photos, and, of course, Search:

https://twitter.com/Google/status/2011473059547390106

The second piece of news is that Apple has partnered with Google to supply Gemini to all iPhone users:

https://twitter.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2010760810751017017

Apple already charges Google more than $20b/year not to enter the search market; now they're going to be charging Google billions not to stay out of the AI market, too. Meanwhile, Google will get to spy on Apple customers, just like they spy on their own users. Anyone who says that Apple is ideologically committed to your privacy because they're real capitalists is a sucker (or a cultist):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

But the big revelation is how Google is going to make money with AI: they're going to sell AI-based "personalized pricing" to "partners," including "Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Gap, Kroger, Macy’s, Stripe, Home Depot, Lowe's, American Express, etc":

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/

Personalized pricing, of course, is the polite euphemism for surveillance pricing, which is when a company spies on you in order to figure out how much they can get away with charging you (or how little they can get away with paying you):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#

It's a weird form of cod-Marxism, whose tenet is "From each according to their desperation; to each according to their vulnerability." Surveillance pricing advocates say that this is "efficient" because they can use surveillance data to offer you discounts, too – like, say you rock up to an airline ticket counter 45 minutes before takeoff and they can use surveillance data to know that you won't take their last empty seat for $200, but you would fly in it for $100, you could get that seat for cheap.

This is, of course, nonsense. Airlines don't sell off cheap seats like bakeries discounting their day-olds – they jack up the price of a last-minute journey to farcical heights.

Google also claims that it will only use its surveillance pricing facility to offer discounts, and not to extract premiums. As Stoller points out, there's a well-developed playbook for making premiums look like discounts, which is easy to see in the health industry. As Stoller says, the list price for an MRI is $8,000, but your insurer gets a $6000 "discount" and actually pays $1970, sticking you with a $30 co-pay. The $8000 is a fake number, and so is the $6000 – the only real price is the $30 you're paying.

The whole economy is filled with versions of this transparent ruse, from "department stores who routinely mark everything as 80% off" to pharmacy benefit managers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

Google, meanwhile, is touting its new "universal commerce protocol" (UCP), a way for AI "agents" to retrieve prices and product descriptions and make purchases:

https://www.thesling.org/the-harm-to-consumers-and-sellers-from-universal-commerce-protocol-in-googles-own-words/

Right now, a major hurdle to "agentic AI" is the complexity of navigating websites designed for humans. AI agents just aren't very reliable when it comes to figuring out which product is which, choosing the correct options, and putting it in a shopping cart, and then paying for it.

Some of that is merely because websites have inconsistent "semantics" – literally things like the "buy" button being called something other than "buy button" in the HTML code. But there's a far more profound problem with agentic shopping, which is that companies deliberately obfuscate their prices.

This is how junk fees work, and why they're so destructive. Say you're a hotel providing your rate-card to an online travel website. You know that travelers are going to search for hotels by city and amenities, and then sort the resulting list by price. If you hide your final price – by surprising the user with a bunch of junk fees at checkout, or, better yet, after they arrive and put their credit-card down at reception – you are going to be at the top of that list. Your hotel will seem like the cheapest, best option.

But of course, it's not. From Ticketmaster to car rentals, hotels to discount airlines, rental apartments to cellular plans, the real price is withheld until the very last instant, whereupon it shoots up to levels that are absolutely uncompetitive. But because these companies are able to engage in deceptive advertising, they look cheaper.

And of course, crooked offers drive out honest ones. The honest hotel that provides a true rate card, reflecting the all-in price, ends up at the bottom of the price-sorted list, rents no rooms, and goes out of business (or pivots to lying about its prices, too).

Online sellers do not want to expose their true prices to comparison shopping services. They benefit from lying to those services. For decades, technologists have dreamed of building a "semantic web" in which everyone exposes true and accurate machine-readable manifests of their content to facilitate indexing, search and data-mining:

https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

This has failed. It's failed because lying is often more profitable than telling the truth, and because lying to computers is easier than lying to people, and because once a market is dominated by liars, everyone has to lie, or be pushed out of the market.

Of course, it would be really cool if everyone diligently marked up everything they put into the public sphere with accurate metadata. But there are lots of really cool things you could do if you could get everyone else to change how they do things and arrange their affairs to your convenience. Imagine how great it would be if you could just get everyone to board an airplane from back to front, or to stand right and walk left on escalators, or to put on headphones when using their phones in public.

Wanting it badly is not enough. People have lots of reasons for doing things in suboptimal ways. Often the reason is that it's suboptimal for you, but just peachy for them.

Google says that it's going to get every website in the world to expose accurate rate cards to its chatbots to facilitate agentic AI. Google is also incapable of preventing "search engine optimization" companies from tricking it into showing bullshit at the top of the results for common queries:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Google somehow thinks that the companies that spend millions of dollars trying to trick its crawler won't also spend millions of dollars trying to trick its chatbot – and they're providing the internet with a tool to inject lies straight into the chatbot's input hopper.

But UCP isn't just a way for companies to tell Google what their prices are. As Stoller points out, UCP will also sell merchants the ability to have Gemini set prices on their products, using Google's surveillance data, through "dynamic pricing" (another euphemism for "surveillance pricing").

This decade has seen the rise and rise of price "clearinghouses" – companies that offer price "consulting" to direct competitors in a market. Nominally, this is just a case of two competitors shopping with the same supplier – like Procter and Gamble and Unilever buying their high-fructose corn-syrup from the same company.

But it's actually far more sinister. "Clearinghouses" like Realpage – a company that "advises" landlords on rental rates – allow all the major competitors in a market to collude to raise prices in lockstep. A Realpage landlord that ignores the service's "advice" and gives a tenant a break on the rent will be excluded from Realpage's service. The rental markets that Realpage dominates have seen major increases in rental rates:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist

Google's "direct pricing" offering will allow all comers to have Google set their prices for them, based on Google's surveillance data. That includes direct competitors. As Stoller points out, both Nike and Reebok are Google advertisers. If they let Google price their sneakers, Google can raise prices across the market in lockstep.

Despite how much everyone hates this garbage, neoclassical economists and their apologists in the legal profession continue to insist that surveillance pricing is "efficient." Stoller points to a law review article called "Antitrust After the Coming Wave," written by antitrust law prof and Google lawyer Daniel Crane:

https://nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-99-number-4/antitrust-after-the-coming-wave/

Crane argues that AI will kill antitrust law because AI favors monopolies, and argues "that we should forget about promoting competition or costs, and instead enact a new Soviet-style regime, one in which the government would merely direct a monopolist’s 'AI to maximize social welfare and allocate the surplus created among different stakeholders of the firm.'"

This is a planned economy, but it's one in which the planning is done by monopolists who are – somehow, implausibly – so biddable that governments can delegate the power to decide what we can buy and sell, what we can afford and who can afford it, and rein them in if they get it wrong.

In 1890, Senator John Sherman was stumping for the Sherman Act, America's first antitrust law. On the Senate floor, he declared:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Google thinks that it has finally found a profitable use for AI. It thinks that it will be the first company to make money on AI, by harnessing that AI to a market-rigging, price-gouging monopoly that turns Google's software into Sherman's "autocrat of trade."

It's funny when you think of all those "AI safety" bros who claimed that AI's greatest danger was that it would become sentient and devour us. It turns out that the real "AI safety" risk is that AI will automate price gouging at scale, allowing Google to crown itself a "King over the necessaries of life":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

(Image: Noah_Loverbear; CC BY-SA 3.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Line, a Saudi Megaproject, Is Dead
  https://www.thenation.com/article/world/the-line-neom-saudi-vision-2030/

• Mark Carney's full speech at the World Economic Forum
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqHDhO4h10

• A Grassroots Victory in the Golden Age of Bullies https://asupposedlylonething.net/blog/2026/grassroots-victory-golden-age-bullies/

• AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/forrester_ai_jobs_impact/

• The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting https://hackernoon.com/the-long-now-of-the-web-inside-the-internet-archives-fight-against-forgetting

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Disney swaps stock for Pixar; Jobs is largest Disney stockholder https://web.archive.org/web/20060129105430/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/01/22/cnpixar22.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2006/01/22/ixcitytop.html

#20yrsago HOWTO anonymize your search history https://web.archive.org/web/20060220004353/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70051-0.html

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling talk on “vernacular video” https://vimeo.com/18977827

#15yrsago Elaborate televised prank on Belgium’s terrible phone company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxXlDyTD7wo

#15yrsago Portugal: 10 years of decriminalized drugs https://web.archive.org/web/20110120040831/http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/16/drug_experiment/?page=full

#15yrsago Woman paralyzed by hickey https://web.archive.org/web/20110123072349/https://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/01/21/new-zealand-woman-partially-paralyzed-hickey/

#15yrsago EFF warns: mobile OS vendors aren’t serious about security https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/dont-sacrifice-security-mobile-devices

#10yrsago Trumpscript: a programming language based on the rhetorical tactics of Donald Trump https://www.inverse.com/article/10448-coders-assimilate-donald-trump-to-a-programming-language

#10yrsago That time the DoD paid Duke U $335K to investigate ESP in dogs. Yes, dogs. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/jan/21/duke-universitys-deep-dive-uncanny-abilities-canin/

#10yrsago Kathryn Cramer remembers her late husband, David Hartwell, a giant of science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20160124050729/http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2016/01/til-death-did-us-part.html

#10yrsago What the Democratic Party did to alienate poor white Americans https://web.archive.org/web/20160123041632/https://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-why-white-working-class-abandoned-democratic-party

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders/Johnny Cash tee https://web.archive.org/web/20160126070314/https://weardinner.com/products/bernie-cash

#5yrsago NYPD can't stop choking Black men https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#chokeholds

#5yrsago Rolling back the Trump rollback https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#cra

#1yrsago Winning coalitions aren't always governing coalitions https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

#1yrago The Brave Little Toaster https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/#chatterbox

#1yrago The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

#1yrago They were warned https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

• Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
  https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
  https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

• "can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1010 words today, 11362 total)

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

That’s a screen grab of an email we’re sending out for the MyTerms launch in London. Links:

• To attend online: https://mytermswebinar.eventbrite.com/
• To attend in person: https://mytermslondon.eventbrite.com/

Be there in a Zoom square. Or in old-fashioned reality.

The Net as one big gaslight

Joan Westenberg: The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack. Just one worthy pullquote: "The problem is structural. The total volume of things-you-should-have-an-opinion-about has exceeded our cognitive bandwidth so thoroughly that having careful opinions about anything has become damned-near impossible. Your attention is a finite resource being strip-mined by an infinite army of takes."

Hope Spring trains eternal

Bummed to see the Mets trade Jeff McNeil to the A's. At least he's back home in California. But this move by the Mets looks like a good one. 

Unrelated, sort of: After watching Brett Butler play for the Durham Bulls, I followed his major league career for all nineteen (!!) of his seasons as a leadoff hitter. Fun guy to watch.

More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.

Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013.

The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledge.

At the time of Swartz’s prosecution, vast amounts of research were funded by taxpayers, conducted at public institutions and intended to advance public understanding. But access to that research was, and still is, locked behind expensive paywalls. People are unable to read work they helped fund without paying private journals and research websites.

Swartz considered this hoarding of knowledge to be neither accidental nor inevitable. It was the result of legal, economic and political choices. His actions challenged those choices directly. And for that, the government treated him as a criminal.

Today’s AI arms race involves a far more expansive, profit-driven form of information appropriation. The tech giants ingest vast amounts of copyrighted material: books, journalism, academic papers, art, music and personal writing. This data is scraped at industrial scale, often without consent, compensation or transparency, and then used to train large AI models.

AI companies then sell their proprietary systems, built on public and private knowledge, back to the people who funded it. But this time, the government’s response has been markedly different. There are no criminal prosecutions, no threats of decades-long prison sentences. Lawsuits proceed slowly, enforcement remains uncertain and policymakers signal caution, given AI’s perceived economic and strategic importance. Copyright infringement is reframed as an unfortunate but necessary step toward “innovation.”

Recent developments underscore this imbalance. In 2025, Anthropic reached a settlement with publishers over allegations that its AI systems were trained on copyrighted books without authorization. The agreement reportedly valued infringement at roughly $3,000 per book across an estimated 500,000 works, coming at a cost of over $1.5 billion. Plagiarism disputes between artists and accused infringers routinely settle for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars when prominent works are involved. Scholars estimate Anthropic avoided over $1 trillion in liability costs. For well-capitalized AI firms, such settlements are likely being factored as a predictable cost of doing business.

As AI becomes a larger part of America’s economy, one can see the writing on the wall. Judges will twist themselves into knots to justify an innovative technology premised on literally stealing the works of artists, poets, musicians, all of academia and the internet, and vast expanses of literature. But if Swartz’s actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies?

The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

The stakes extend beyond copyright law or past injustices. They concern who controls the infrastructure of knowledge going forward and what that control means for democratic participation, accountability and public trust.

Systems trained on vast bodies of publicly funded research are increasingly becoming the primary way people learn about science, law, medicine and public policy. As search, synthesis and explanation are mediated through AI models, control over training data and infrastructure translates into control over what questions can be asked, what answers are surfaced, and whose expertise is treated as authoritative. If public knowledge is absorbed into proprietary systems that the public cannot inspect, audit or meaningfully challenge, then access to information is no longer governed by democratic norms but by corporate priorities.

Like the early internet, AI is often described as a democratizing force. But also like the internet, AI’s current trajectory suggests something closer to consolidation. Control over data, models and computational infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a small number of powerful tech companies. They will decide who gets access to knowledge, under what conditions and at what price.

Swartz’s fight was not simply about access, but about whether knowledge should be governed by openness or corporate capture, and who that knowledge is ultimately for. He understood that access to knowledge is a prerequisite for democracy. A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.

How we treat knowledge—who may access it, who may profit from it and who is punished for sharing it—has become a test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what those choices say about us.

This essay was written with J. B. Branch, and originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

These photos by Chu Weimin show the mind-boggling scale of China’s green energy buildout.

Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across the landscape.

Tags: China · Chu Weimin · energy · photography

Yesterday, Mayor Jacob Frey basically took a Fox “News” host down, pointing out that Trump’s own federal prosecutors just quit their jobs rather than investigate and prosecute Renee Good’s wife for “domestic terrorism.”

Which raises the question: what is ICE really doing in Minneapolis?

Well over a decade ago, the very anglo daughter of a friend of mine fell in love with a Hispanic fellow who owned a Mexican restaurant he’d started in her little northern midwestern town. They got married, she got pregnant, and everybody in the family was delighted. Until the feds visited the restaurant and discovered her new husband wasn’t a US citizen and had no legal permission to be here in the country.

This was during the Obama administration. The feds were unfailingly polite. They told him he had a certain amount of time to get his affairs in order but within that period of time he must leave the country, return to Mexico, and apply for asylum or a visa from there. Those were the rules.

Nobody showed up to kick in the front door of their home. Nobody from the government was wearing a mask. No swearing, no threats, no guns, no tear gas, no pepper spray, no hitting his car with theirs or beating either of them to the ground. They merely told him he had to leave and served him with the appropriate paperwork, just like they do in most other democratic countries.

At that time, Senator Bernie Sanders had been a guest on my radio/TV show every Friday for about a decade, and we got his office involved, trying to intervene in their case, but the feds were emphatic: he wasn’t here legally and he had to leave. So, after a short time to organize their things and finances, the two of them got on a commercial plane and flew to Mexico, where they both live to this day.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since the 1920s in America, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.​
  By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.​
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.​

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is not primarily about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

Similarly, never before have we had immigration agents “investigating fraud” as a bullshit premise for terrorizing an entire community. The way they convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of criminal felony fraud wasn’t with guys with masks and guns; it was a small army of accountants pouring through his financial records.

Never before in modern history have we had a president and vice president characterize an ethnic community in such terms as “eating your dogs and cats,” as “criminals,” as “garbage,” as an “other.”

Never before — other than the Klan in the post-Reconstruction era — have we had agents of the state deputized and authorized to use deadly force who conceal their identities and then ran amok to terrorize entire American cities.

That last point is the key to understanding what’s going on. ICE isn’t in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or any other Blue city to merely enforce our immigration laws. We already know how to do that, as we’ve been doing it successfully for 101 years and never before needed violent masked thugs to make it happen.

No, these people are in these cities for a singular purpose: to spread terror. This is Donald Trump’s own personal Schutzstaffel (SS), a police force answerable only to him who’s principal job is to terrify communities and crush dissent.

Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller have all made it clear that they believe the key to running our country isn’t via the approval of the populace, “the consent of the governed,” but, rather, is to have and use raw, naked power. Violence. Tear gas, tasers, and pepper bullets. The threat of death or imprisonment.

Back in October, Miller said Trump has “plenary authority,” meaning “authority without restrictions.” Ultimate power. Final power. The only real power in the country, at the end of the day.

A few weeks ago, he doubled down, telling us:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

John Adams referred to us a “a nation of laws, not men.” The Supreme Court building has “Equal Justice Under Law” carved into its front by the Roosevelt administration in October of 1935. Our founding documents refer to America as a nation where our politicians and police “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That’s the opposite of what’s happening right now in Minneapolis.

When demagogues and wannabe autocrats set out to seize absolute power in a nation — the way we’ve seen it done, for example, in Russia — they don’t start by rolling tanks down the street or throwing dissidents or writers like me in prison. That comes much later.

Instead, they start by telling the people who they need to fear.

For Putin, it was the Chechens. For Orbán, it was Syrian refugees. For Joe McCarthy, it was communists and socialists. And for Trump, et al, it’s brown and Black people, particularly if they were born in another country.

Once the populace is sufficiently terrified of the “other,” they’ll accept increasing levels of repression in the name of stemming the danger to themselves and their families. Armed agents of the state begin to show up in public places to “enforce law and order,” but their real goal is to terrify people into submission.

This is why Noem and Bondi are refusing to investigate Renee Good’s murder and instead demanding their federal prosecutors go after her grieving wife. They want not only ICE thugs but everybody in America who may think of challenging them to know that smashing windows, dragging people out of their cars, kicking in their doors, beating them to the ground, and even killing them — all without any legal basis, without a single warrant — are what we can all expect to happen to us if we defy their power.

If ICE’s real mission was to find people in the country without authorization, they wouldn’t be going about it this way; they’d go after undocumented people the way my friend’s daughter’s husband was cornered and deported. Firmly, but politely. With paperwork instead of guns.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to Americans that when Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) two months ago, this is what they had in mind. That Memorandum orders the federal police agencies to go after anybody who presents the following “indicia” of potential domestic terrorism:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

ICE is here to remind us of the awesome power Trump and his lickspittles have to enforce that. Question or, as with Renee Good, taunt a masked ICE thug and it’s clear you’re expressing “extremism.” Your penalty will be violence visited upon you, even death, and when you’re dead, they’ll next come after your family.

This is pure Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, Xi, and every other tinpot dictator across the planet and throughout history.

It’s why ICE shot a young man in the face, blinding him for the rest of his life, in Santa Ana this week and the feds are refusing to give any information — including the name of the thug who shot 21-year-old Kaden Rummler — to the Santa Ana city or California state police.

It’s why goons in Minneapolis dragged a disabled woman driving to her doctor’s appointment out of her car and assaulted her.

It’s why they deploy tear gas and fire “less lethal” weapons at the slightest provocation.

Yesterday afternoon, doubling down on untouchable state power that lives well above the rule of law, DHS posted the following tweet from Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Stephen Miller:

“REMINDER. ‘To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.’ @StephenM” (emphasis added)

That message — which is filled with naked lies — is very, very simple: “We have the power. We will use that power. And there’s nothing ‘the little people’ or anybody else can do to stop us. In fact, if you try to stop us, we’ll use that power against you, next.”

Donald Trump is now openly threatening the state of Minnesota with the Insurrection Act, a law that allows a president to deploy the full force of the entire US military directly against the American people.

After a night of confrontations sparked by violent ICE raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to warn that if state and local officials don’t crush protests against his masked federal agents, he will step in with force.

This isn’t bluster or rhetoric. It’s a direct threat to use wartime powers inside the United States to override local government, suppress dissent, and place raw federal violence above the rule of law, something he appears to want so badly he can taste it.

That kind of threat doesn’t belong in a democracy, and it tells us exactly what this administration believes power is for.

This is nothing more or less than state-sponsored terror. And it’s damn well high time that it stop.

--30--

Written by Thom Hartmann. Cross-posted from his Substack site.