New by Corey Hutchins at What Works: Newsletters and blogs that cover a state's media landscape are few and far between. whatworks.news/2025/07/29/news…
By Corey Hutchins Over the years, the crisis facing local news has meant the disappearance of reporting on the arts, politics, sports and local government. Newspapers have disappeared from many loc…
The New York Jets signed kicker Nick Folk, coach Aaron Glenn told reporters Tuesday at training camp. Folk spent last season with the Tennessee Titans.
According to the United Nations Population Division, Latin America will make the demographic shift from a young to an aging society in less than 40 years.
ChunChun (USA) helped his humans declutter by knocking a clock, a humidity gauge, a remote control, a pen, and a book off of an end table in the living room. To his dismay, the items were replaced shortly thereafter, giving him even more work to do.
Trump conquered America by pulling together a coalition of groups that broadly hate the same things, but who differ sharply in what things they aspire to. This approach creates a broad and therefore powerful coalition, but it's also a brittle one:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Victory is deadly to any coalition that agrees on what they want to destroy, and violently disagree on what they want to build. Once victory is attained, some of those groups are going to get what they want, which means other groups are going to absolutely *eat shit*.
Worse (for Trumpism) is that his coalition's affect is purely libidinal, a roaring mob of ragged tribes of swivel-eyed loons who believe they are doing battle with the "deep state," "Jewish space-lasers" and "antifa super-soldiers," and are primed to see shadowy cabals everywhere:
For Trump, the only point of this coalition is to help him amass wealth and power, and so he has established himself as the ultimate arbiter of its conflicts.
If you're the leader of a warring MAGA faction, your top winning move is to figure out how getting your way can personally benefit Trump.
Which is why the Epstein scandal has knocked Trump so badly off balance: his coalition partners are unwilling to accept the idea that Epstein's death is a nothingburger, that the Epstein files are a hoax, that Ghislaine Maxwell is the victim of Democratic cabal lawfare.
They're insisting that Trump go public with all the messy details of Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, even though Trump has made it abundantly clear that this would be personally disadvantageous to him, likely because of evidence that he sexually assaulted Epstein's underage victims.
As Trump flails about in a bid to prevent an Epstein-driven MAGA crackup, more cracks are appearing. One of these runs straight through the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, which became a generationally important powerhouse under Biden, intervening to prevent monopoly formation and to break up existing monopolies in a way not seen since the 1960s.
There's a strong antitrust wing in the MAGA coalition, the so-called "right populists," many of whom associated themselves with Biden's brilliant FTC chair, Lina Khan, dubbing themselves "Khan-servatives." For Trump - who never met a predatory corporate monster he didn't love - these MAGA trustbusters are useful idiots, because they let him practice "boss-politics antitrust":
Every major corporation in the US is a flagrant violator of antitrust law (thanks to decades of comatose enforcers). What's more, every major corporation in the US is hoping to violate *more* antitrust laws, primarily through illegal, anticompetitive mergers. For Trump, this presents a golden opportunity: given that there are so many guilty companies out there in the world, he can selectively prosecute the ones that he wants to make an example of and/or extract tribute from.
This is what happened with the Colbert cancellation: Paramount wanted permission to complete a obviously illegal, anticompetitive merger with Skydance. Trump launched a bullshit suit against Paramount for not being sufficiently mean to Kamala Harris during the election. Paramount settled this suit - which Trump had a 0% chance of winning - for $16m, which is to say, they gave Trump a $16m bribe under the flimsiest of pretexts.
Then, when Colbert made fun of them for doing this and Trump squawked, Paramount fired Colbert and cancelled his show. Finally, the merger was approved, on condition that Trump be allowed to place a political minder within CBS's news organization who would prevent them from publishing statements that Trump disliked in either his personal or governmental capacity.
This is as blatant a violation of the First Amendment as the Paramount suit was, but if Paramount goes along with it, who's got standing to challenge the deal?
That's where this all gets interesting: Donald Trump isn't the first president to hit on this strategy. Richard Nixon (AKA Trump beta 0.9) ordered his Justice Department to walk away from a case blocking one of International Telephone and Telegraph's illegal mergers because ITT had donated $400,000 to the RNC.
(Yes, this is small ball compared to Donald Trump's scams, but again, Nixon was just the beta test.)
This enraged Congress (remember when Congress used to get enraged) that Sen John Tunney introduced legislation that gives broad swathes of the public standing to challenge the DOJ when they appear to take bribes in exchange for favorable antitrust rulings. Under the Tunney Act, merger settlements that are "against the public interest" can be halted by a federal judge.
MAGA-linked operatives are trying to overthrow populists at the Antitrust Division over a corrupt $14 billion merger deal. The wrinkle is a liberal judge has the power to expose what's happening.
At issue was one of those "Kahnservative" antitrust enforcements. Right after the Trump inauguration, HPE and Juniper Networks, two of the biggest enterprise WLAN companies, announced a $14b merger, which was immediately opposed by Trump's new DOJ antitrust enforcers. Trustbuster took this as a sign that Trump was going to let his "right populist" wing hold the whip-hand over corporatist parts of his coalition.
But by June, the DOJ moved to settle the case, dropping the announcement after close-of-business on a Friday, which is as close as the government is legally allowed to come to simply not mentioning it at all. The merger would proceed with the most pro-forma, nonsensical, weaksauce conditions. HPE's shares shot up by 11% and some insider trader made a killing exercising a gazillion HPE call options just before the announcement dropped:
One of Trump's mouthiest coalition members, the MAGA influencer Mike Davis, had been a vocal opponent of the merger, but after it sailed through, we learned that he'd gotten a seven-figure job with HPE to serve as their fixer with the Trump administration:
AG Pam Bondi's Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle overruled the DOJ's antitrust boss, Gail Slater (a former JD Vance staffer) and accepted the bullshit HPE deal.
Various Trumpies spoke out against it, like Laura Loomer, who posted an outraged jeremiad against the merger deal, then deleted it (Loomer claimed that Mizelle had waded into the deal in order to help his wife, Judge Kathryn Mizelle, secure a seat on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals):
As David Dayen writes for *The American Prospect*, this is a disturbing precedent, given all the antitrust cases currently being fought by the DoJ, involving Apple, Google, Visa, Livenation, Realpage, etc:
But, Dayen says, the Tunney Act means that every one of these deals could be an opening for a Tunney Act challenge, which would include "communications between agents of the companies and employees of the United States."
Lobbyist meddling to get a critical merger case approved could face sunlight thanks to a 1974 law called the Tunney Act, which allows a judge to investigate the outcome.
It would force the judges in the case to determine "whether lobbying concerns took precedence over the public interest." And the judge who's overseeing the HPE/Juniper deal is a Biden appointee, Casey Pitts, who worked for a firm specializing in labor, environmental and civil rights cases.
So this is an opportunity to demonstrate that Trump's DOJ is a pay-for-play shop, something that will help the "right populist" side of the MAGA coalition whip up their supporters against the corporatist wing. This is a pretty good gambit, especially given how much parts of the MAGA coalition hate Big Tech:
After Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the Big Tech firms continue to be battered by antitrust lawsuits stemming from prior administrations. The cases could even lead to the forced breakup of some of the tech giants.
This isn't anywhere near as big as the Epstein scandal, but nevertheless, it's a situation in which Trump's own self-interest can only be served by doing something that his most vocal and easily enraged base *hate*. It's another fracture line in the coalition that a smart opposition (yeah, I know) could hammer on.
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
I have project student working on some basic Berkeley sockets based networking code. They demo their work, I compliment them on their use of netcat. Blank stare. I say, well, you're using
cat "Hello" | nc localhost 9999
Turns out the student has no idea why they are doing this. 😕
Another works on a combination of an interpreter and an assembler. They made the assembler the entry point in the code. Turns out they have no idea of the difference between interpreter and an assembler. Despite me providing working code to start from. 😕
Also, none of them have even the most basic knowledge of the command line, neither on windows nor on linux. They keep snippets in a text file and copy and paste them.
Student: <copies and pastes a snippet> d Project/src me: you forgot a "c" at the start Student:... Student: <hits return regardless> sh: command not found: d Student: ... me: you forgot a "c" at the start Student: <copies the line again. this time with the "c"> 😭
“Meet the…investors funding a Christian nationalist community in Tennessee ….Nate Fischer heads the company [New Founding] financing the so-called ‘Highland Rim Project’ … Among its investors is tech billionaire Marc Andreesen.” By @philinvestigates.com 1/ www.newschannel5.com/news/newscha...
For the politically connected investors behind the project, our NewsChannel 5 investigation has now discovered, it’s about business, power and creating an alternative view of America.
" ... why I take Greyhounds, to meet people. Despite everything I wrote above, almost all of it which reads negative, sitting here now, looking back, I'm very glad I did this journey, because I met a lot of people I would have never encountered otherwise. Tough, troubling, but almost all genuinely decent human beings.
"That's why I encourage everyone to walk and take buses whenever you can, because you end up dealing with people who remind you what humanity actually is. Not the polished cartoonish version we're supposed to aspire to, but the far more common messy, complicated, and resilient version."
Acquisition sends thousands of Whistle pet trackers to IoT graveyard Whistle pet monitors will stop working on August 31. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…
“Agency employees may seek to ‘persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views’ in the office, wrote Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management” - 7/28/25 (Kupor is a former partner of tech billionaire Marc Andreessen) 1/
2/ “Scott Kupor, the first hire at Silicon Valley venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz, is stepping away from active management of dozens of funds but maintaining passive stake in nearly 40 other firm funds, as the Senate weighs his nomination by Trump...” 4/3/25
“Meet the…investors funding a Christian nationalist community in Tennessee ….Nate Fischer heads the company [New Founding] financing the so-called ‘Highland Rim Project’ … Among its investors is tech billionaire Marc Andreesen.” By @philinvestigates.com 1/ www.newschannel5.com/news/newscha...
For the politically connected investors behind the project, our NewsChannel 5 investigation has now discovered, it’s about business, power and creating an alternative view of America.
Whistle‑blower Lt. Col. Tony Aguilar, a 25-year Green Beret, Purple Heart, fresh out of Gaza, joins Offir Gutelzon and Award‑winning journalist Noga Tarnopol...
Morning Walk Report: An exceeding short ramble, since Boxnoggin chose to forego brekkie. Still, several rabbits were in evidence, crows performing aerial tricks for peanuts, bees in the zinnias, the lavender, the alyssum.
Today's run slow but worth it (once 'twas over, natch). The same pair of ducks in the apartment complex's hedges, bees hitching rides to get to further flora, babies laughing from their carriages as I galloped by (I do look ridiculous), Cocteau Twins on the way home.
'Heaven or Las Vegas' by Cocteau Twins features on their 1990 album 'Heaven or Las Vegas'.Listen to 'Heaven or Las Vegas' in full here: https://cocteautwins....
Finally home, a bit of fresh cinnamon roll, a second jolt of coffee, Boxnoggin mutinously condescending to eat a trifle of his kibble, lack of sleep tinting the world with strange colours.
The FBI, according to CBS, has a copy of the video from outside Jeffrey Epstein's cell on the night he died which includes the so-called "missing minute."
This would be very bad news for the travelling public in the United States. The correct approach is to invest in capacity to move both people and freight, because a thriving economy needs both. freightwaves.com/news/bill-aim…
Hawk missiles are old but reliable. Ukraine wants every one of the 40,000 America has stockpiled
To strengthen Ukraine’s air defenses against Russia’s growing missile and drone attacks, the US has approved a new deal that taps into a vast Cold War missile stockpile.
Due process: What it means in U.S. law & its implications for migrant rights tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/rep… As the United States edges up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, the core principle of due process - that the government must act with accountability and in accordance with the rule of law – is being strongly tested. #Tucson #Arizona
What did the ancient Stoics think was included within the cardinal virtue of prudence? Here's a short video looking at what Arius Didymus tells us in his Epitome of Stoic Ethics, where he identifies six distinct subordinate virtues encompassed by prudence
Stoic Philosophy makes virtue absolutely central to ethics. If you want to be happy, tranquil, and free, the Stoics think, you must cultivate virtue. Among t...
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Victory is deadly to any coalition that agrees on what they want to destroy, and violently disagree on what they want to build. Once victory is attained, some of those groups are going to get what they want, which means other groups are going to absolutely *eat shit*.
2/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Worse (for Trumpism) is that his coalition's affect is purely libidinal, a roaring mob of ragged tribes of swivel-eyed loons who believe they are doing battle with the "deep state," "Jewish space-lasers" and "antifa super-soldiers," and are primed to see shadowy cabals everywhere:
pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/tha…
For Trump, the only point of this coalition is to help him amass wealth and power, and so he has established himself as the ultimate arbiter of its conflicts.
3/
Pluralistic: Conservatives are fringe outliers – and leftists could learn from them (16 June 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you're the leader of a warring MAGA faction, your top winning move is to figure out how getting your way can personally benefit Trump.
Which is why the Epstein scandal has knocked Trump so badly off balance: his coalition partners are unwilling to accept the idea that Epstein's death is a nothingburger, that the Epstein files are a hoax, that Ghislaine Maxwell is the victim of Democratic cabal lawfare.
4/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
They're insisting that Trump go public with all the messy details of Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, even though Trump has made it abundantly clear that this would be personally disadvantageous to him, likely because of evidence that he sexually assaulted Epstein's underage victims.
5/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As Trump flails about in a bid to prevent an Epstein-driven MAGA crackup, more cracks are appearing. One of these runs straight through the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, which became a generationally important powerhouse under Biden, intervening to prevent monopoly formation and to break up existing monopolies in a way not seen since the 1960s.
6/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There's a strong antitrust wing in the MAGA coalition, the so-called "right populists," many of whom associated themselves with Biden's brilliant FTC chair, Lina Khan, dubbing themselves "Khan-servatives." For Trump - who never met a predatory corporate monster he didn't love - these MAGA trustbusters are useful idiots, because they let him practice "boss-politics antitrust":
pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the…
7/
Pluralistic: Boss politics antitrust (12 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Every major corporation in the US is a flagrant violator of antitrust law (thanks to decades of comatose enforcers). What's more, every major corporation in the US is hoping to violate *more* antitrust laws, primarily through illegal, anticompetitive mergers. For Trump, this presents a golden opportunity: given that there are so many guilty companies out there in the world, he can selectively prosecute the ones that he wants to make an example of and/or extract tribute from.
8/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is what happened with the Colbert cancellation: Paramount wanted permission to complete a obviously illegal, anticompetitive merger with Skydance. Trump launched a bullshit suit against Paramount for not being sufficiently mean to Kamala Harris during the election. Paramount settled this suit - which Trump had a 0% chance of winning - for $16m, which is to say, they gave Trump a $16m bribe under the flimsiest of pretexts.
9/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Then, when Colbert made fun of them for doing this and Trump squawked, Paramount fired Colbert and cancelled his show. Finally, the merger was approved, on condition that Trump be allowed to place a political minder within CBS's news organization who would prevent them from publishing statements that Trump disliked in either his personal or governmental capacity.
10/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is as blatant a violation of the First Amendment as the Paramount suit was, but if Paramount goes along with it, who's got standing to challenge the deal?
That's where this all gets interesting: Donald Trump isn't the first president to hit on this strategy. Richard Nixon (AKA Trump beta 0.9) ordered his Justice Department to walk away from a case blocking one of International Telephone and Telegraph's illegal mergers because ITT had donated $400,000 to the RNC.
11/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
(Yes, this is small ball compared to Donald Trump's scams, but again, Nixon was just the beta test.)
This enraged Congress (remember when Congress used to get enraged) that Sen John Tunney introduced legislation that gives broad swathes of the public standing to challenge the DOJ when they appear to take bribes in exchange for favorable antitrust rulings. Under the Tunney Act, merger settlements that are "against the public interest" can be halted by a federal judge.
12/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Which brings me back to the MAGA coalition crackup. Last week, there was an attempted coup in the DOJ's Antitrust Division:
thebignewsletter.com/p/an-atte…
13/
An Attempted Coup at the Antitrust Division
Matt Stoller (BIG by Matt Stoller)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
At issue was one of those "Kahnservative" antitrust enforcements. Right after the Trump inauguration, HPE and Juniper Networks, two of the biggest enterprise WLAN companies, announced a $14b merger, which was immediately opposed by Trump's new DOJ antitrust enforcers. Trustbuster took this as a sign that Trump was going to let his "right populist" wing hold the whip-hand over corporatist parts of his coalition.
14/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But by June, the DOJ moved to settle the case, dropping the announcement after close-of-business on a Friday, which is as close as the government is legally allowed to come to simply not mentioning it at all. The merger would proceed with the most pro-forma, nonsensical, weaksauce conditions. HPE's shares shot up by 11% and some insider trader made a killing exercising a gazillion HPE call options just before the announcement dropped:
twitter.com/unusual_whales/sta…
15/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
One of Trump's mouthiest coalition members, the MAGA influencer Mike Davis, had been a vocal opponent of the merger, but after it sailed through, we learned that he'd gotten a seven-figure job with HPE to serve as their fixer with the Trump administration:
cbsnews.com/amp/news/top-trump…
AG Pam Bondi's Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle overruled the DOJ's antitrust boss, Gail Slater (a former JD Vance staffer) and accepted the bullshit HPE deal.
16/
Tension over antitrust division crops up inside Trump administration, sources say
Jennifer Jacobs (CBS News)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Various Trumpies spoke out against it, like Laura Loomer, who posted an outraged jeremiad against the merger deal, then deleted it (Loomer claimed that Mizelle had waded into the deal in order to help his wife, Judge Kathryn Mizelle, secure a seat on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals):
twitter.com/matthewstoller/sta…
Now, two of Gail Slater's top aides - Roger Alford and Bill Rinner - have been fired:
twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/st…
17/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As David Dayen writes for *The American Prospect*, this is a disturbing precedent, given all the antitrust cases currently being fought by the DoJ, involving Apple, Google, Visa, Livenation, Realpage, etc:
prospect.org/power/2025-07-29-…
But, Dayen says, the Tunney Act means that every one of these deals could be an opening for a Tunney Act challenge, which would include "communications between agents of the companies and employees of the United States."
18/
The Law That Could Blow Open Trump Antitrust Corruption
David Dayen (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It would force the judges in the case to determine "whether lobbying concerns took precedence over the public interest." And the judge who's overseeing the HPE/Juniper deal is a Biden appointee, Casey Pitts, who worked for a firm specializing in labor, environmental and civil rights cases.
19/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
So this is an opportunity to demonstrate that Trump's DOJ is a pay-for-play shop, something that will help the "right populist" side of the MAGA coalition whip up their supporters against the corporatist wing. This is a pretty good gambit, especially given how much parts of the MAGA coalition hate Big Tech:
jacobin.com/2025/07/big-tech-t…
20/
Big Tech Is Under Legal Fire in Trump’s Second Term
jacobin.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This isn't anywhere near as big as the Epstein scandal, but nevertheless, it's a situation in which Trump's own self-interest can only be served by doing something that his most vocal and easily enraged base *hate*. It's another fracture line in the coalition that a smart opposition (yeah, I know) could hammer on.
21/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
kickstarter.com/projects/docto…
eof/