Elon Musk has a problem

One of Musk's many sons (he's a determined, heedless procreator) turned out to be not a boy but a transgirl -- and he can't seem to face the facts. So his idea of trying to help MAGA win Senate and Congressional races this year is to charge Dem candidates with being pro-trans. 

Most of those Dems are only notional, unenthusiastic, supporters of gender equity; it's just noise to them. So when Musk beats them up, few tell the bully to F-off and most weave and dodge. (Amy Acton who is running to be Ohio's governor seems an actual trans-phobe; most of the rest of them are just politicians who are too ready to adjust to whatever they think constituents might like.)

Thing is, as Erin in the Morning reports, this is not really a winning pitch that Musk is buying with his millions. 

This week’s ad spend is largely driven by [Musk's] America PAC, which has dropped $100 million on anti-transgender ads targeting Democrats. “The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking because that’s been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, per AdImpact, which tracks political advertising,” Axios’s Mike Zapler reports. “On its face, the strategy is at odds with what voters say they want candidates to talk about. Concerns about the economy dominate; trans and LGBT issues barely register.”

Zapler’s point is correct. Anti-trans ads may scare Democratic candidates, but among the general public, polls consistently show that voters rank transgender issues among the lowest-priority issues they care about and vote on, with less than 1% of respondents naming “wokeness/transgender issues” as a top issue. Regardless of the public’s specific views on topics such as transgender people’s access to bathrooms or gender-affirming care for transgender youth, voters decide their ballots far more on issues such as housing affordability, gas prices, and jobs. 

Democrats who decide to capitulate on transgender issues in response to these ads, as some have, risk alienating their progressive base while gaining nothing from Republicans, who will simply move on to hitting them on another trans-related issue.

Nevertheless, anti-transgender advertisements will saturate the airwaves for the next two months as the election draws near. For transgender people, that means constant exposure to hateful messaging, running alongside the evening news and football and appearing on the internet without warning. These ads do incredible damage to unsuspecting viewers. They paint transgender people as predatory and disgusting to a national audience in a cheap attempt to win votes, and every viewing raises the temperature of the hate and abuse directed at a community that is already a target. 

Meanwhile, Democrats face a decision point of their own: capitulate and lend these ads credibility, or defend the transgender constituents being used as bait. So far, in some of the states Musk is targeting, they have chosen the former, and the ads have not stopped.

Musk is a sick puppy -- a damaged man with lots of money acting out his underlying fear that spewing his semen might not guarantee his immortality. You too will die in God's time, Elon; get over yourself. Life is better over here in the real world.

Nightmare or daydream for this moment?

Somehow I don't think this is how humanity's encounter with the smart machines we are building will turn out, but Politico's Matt Wuerker offers a nice fantasy.

 

Guess they found their preferred alignment.

LGBT+ Pride, Mongolian style

 

Our newly met friends in Ulaanbaatar sent along this short video from their recent Pride festival. There's a freshness and pure joy to their struggle -- too often delight has been leached out of our community here. But they know -- gay is good; they are good. Enjoy.

An insight into the pungent politics of endangering humanity

We live involuntarily in the same world with the ostentatiously vocal tech bros; it's not hard to think they often come off as more like shallow teenage boys than humanly useful geniuses. But amid the real world noise about Artificial Intelligence, it's worth teasing out exactly what some of them are doing in our ordinary politics.

The always annoying but frequently insightful Matt Yglesias reports on some grubby real world machinations in the AI business. Many workers and some tech barons are warning there should be more regulation -- but as always, the devil is in the details.

... [the company] OpenAI’s official position in its communications to its employees is that OpenAI is not behind the anti-regulation super PAC Leading the Future.

But nobody working professionally in American politics believes this.

Leading the Future is funded in large part by OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman and his wife. It was conceptualized, by all accounts, by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer... Unfortunately, his expertise in helping tech companies win regulatory fights in blue states — an endeavor I normally support — is in this particular case gravely endangering humanity.

Leading the Future has dumped huge amounts of money into primaries to try to defeat candidates who advocate for A.I. safety regulation. More than that, though, it’s trying to chill the whole topic. It exists not so much to spend money in the midterms as to convey to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer something like “nice anti-Trump thermostatic backlash you’ve got there … would be a shame if hundreds of millions of dollars came off the sidelines to be used against all your frontliners because party leaders embraced A.I. safety.”

So, again, if you work at OpenAI and believe that collective action is needed to address this problem, you have to understand that your company’s executives are massive stumbling blocks. 

Putting out fake statements distancing the company from Leading the Future is worse than doing nothing. You and your colleagues need to work together to demand that the company cease and desist from this effort to chill federal regulation. If the company won’t do it, you need to walk.

By contrast, while I would never in a million years say that [the AI company]Anthropic’s conduct as a company is beyond reproach or above suspicion — that’s the whole reason we need actual regulation here and not just to root for the “good guys” to win the race — their political conduct is consistent with the view that collective action is desirable.

Yglesias makes some prescriptions for reining in the many dangers that may be arising from the AI our tech barons are racing to build. I don't know if he is really onto something. But I do know that understanding the entanglement of the tech moguls with very conventional US political incentives has to be a big part of curbing the worst potentials of AI.

One more win for English speakers?

I have no qualifications whatsoever for chiming in on the current AI freak out. The tech boys seem on the verge of setting something loose that might bring tremendous benefits -- or extinguish us all. And they can't say which eventuality is most likely. 

Hell of a civilization we've built here when we have to ask whether human inventions will kill us all for fun and profit! (Though, it's not the first time -- once there was Hiroshima...) But here we are. And we're all subjects in their science experiment.

Anita Chabria writes an opinion column for the LA Times. I often can't believe she keeps her job. Maybe those writers have a good union? Her common sense seems to me the sort of reflection on this moment that we need. She asks what any sensible woman might ask:

... companies are hoping that these poorly understood but powerful machines can take over creating newer, even less understood but even more powerful AI systems — leaving humans largely in the dark about what they are creating and even what these beasts can and want to do.

The idea is that, because AI systems even right now are so fast and powerful, they can do the job of creating new versions of themselves at a pace and scale humans simply can’t.

Why, you ask, would this speed-without-understanding be a good thing? Isn’t it a bit like driving a race car while blindfolded?

Yes, yes it is.

But for-profit companies like making profit, and to do that, they want the most powerful product to sell.

Many in the industry are framing this recklessness as a necessity to prevent another country, China in particular, from creating a superintelligent AI system first. The Trump administration has so far grasped on to this greedy bit of misdirection like, well, oligarchs clinging to money.

Those who would prefer not to destroy humanity have urged international cooperation in the form of a slowdown while we figure out how to proceed safely.

We have no reason to believe China would not go along with this — in fact, China has more national-level AI regulation than the U.S. And humans have successfully controlled other technologies with catastrophic power, such as biological and nuclear weapons, through cooperation.

Does it matter which country creates the AI that kills humanity? The logic here seems to be that if anyone is going to cause a mass extinction event, it had better be an English-speaking AI, because it would be a huge loss to America if the planet were destroyed by one speaking a foreign language. ...

May Day 2026

Here in the Bay Area belly of the beast, the menace created by the tech bosses is not a new revelation. The tech workers are one of humanity's lines of defense. I doubt many think that is what they volunteered for. But here we all are.

Who has got "the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it"?

Lots of people whose opinions I value find Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo a pompous ass. Sometimes I agree. But, because I also seem hard wired to try to understand the present in the context of what I know about the past, I sometimes also find his thoughts worth pondering. He turns a historical lens on the current mainstream Democratic Party, an entity that seems way out of touch with many of its voters.

I think he is onto something:

... while Chuck Schumer and the consultants may suck, it’s probably not really about them. It’s about something more fundamental, a crisis of liberal democracy which we have to try to solve even though we only dimly understand it. Yes of course there are theories and one or the other of them are probably partly right. But this isn’t about criticizing theorists. It’s about living in history, when the things really driving change are seldom that clear to those living amidst the change.

The danger here is that we collectively fall into a kind of self-disgust which I see all the time. Our leaders suck. We suck. We’re weak and hapless. The political faction or movement I belong to sucks. 

These all flow rather naturally from most of the mainstream media narratives about whatever challenges Democrats are facing at a given moment. And this is of course enervating. Or it can be. And it can promote conflict which is not necessarily productive conflict.

And yet just because it’s happening in [much of Europe] and in countless other similarly situated countries doesn’t mean we can say, “Welp, it’s bigger than us. That’s just how it is. Nothing we can do about it.” 

Obviously the challenge is still the same for any of us who believe in liberal democracy, in freedom and general human flourishing. In fact the challenge is probably greater because it’s not just some incidental thing that’s going to be solved in time for the next election — better consultants, no politicians over 65, politicians who will fight. It’s big and goes beyond any single person’s mistakes or individual excellence. 

And this is what I mean by a dual approach, the necessity of not falling into a kind of cheap and demoralizing self-critique while also recognizing that it is very much our responsibility to have the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it. 

In a way it requires us to understand our situation both from outside of history, looking at it from the long view, and also very much inside it, in the moment, with every action and option on the table, with every decision mattering because we don’t know how the future turns out.

We know we can still be agents in our own lives. We're in a moment in which many women especially are being reminded that we are need not be bound by what others think we are capable of. That's what Gloria Steinem came to mean to millions over a long political life. That's what Dolly Parton meant -- to some of the same millions as well as others looking to different cultural reference points. 

People make fun of the gray haired biddies of the "Resistance," but we're right to notice and try to arrest the democratic backsliding which is the MAGA/Trump regime. We've witnessed both a lot of BS and a lot of progress toward freedoms over our lives. We don't want to go back. 

In November, we'll vote and get out the vote. We'll accompany targets of Trump's anti-immigrant racial pogrom to court. We'll rally if we must. This is our country and the world those who come after will inherit. We won't give up on it.  

We can begin to understand what it might require to "get over it"

This is just so much to the point, I find I can't retreat into needed rest without amplifying it. Just as in January, Minnesota is showing the way in envisioning how a healthy community recovers from MAGA violence.

Journalist Lisa Needham writes: 

Justice for ICE’s victims requires truth and reconciliation ... Moving on as if it didn’t happen is not an option.

... For communities crushed by President Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, there isn’t a world where people simply get over it. ... It’s a difficult and delicate thing to ask people to remember the hurt they suffered, even more so when the federal government that inflicted it remains in power. Speaking out against the administration has proven to be a dangerous, even deadly, affair, so the Truth Council (which was created by Gov. Walz after the occupation ended) partnered with The Advocates for Human Rights to create a process for collecting the stories of survivors and witnesses.

... Everyone knows some of these stories. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are indelible, as is the memory of five-year-old Liam Ramos’s abduction. But thousands of Minnesotans suffered at the hands of ICE, in ways ranging from abject cruelty to outright violence. The Truth Council is charged with documenting “the harms and abuses” experienced by Minnesotans, and the first public meeting last week was full of these brief stories, tiny sharp remembrances of pain and humiliation: 

    •    “An elder who needed new dentures was too scared to leave her home to access dental care. So she ate baba or kanji with little protein for months on end because she couldn’t chew her food without new dentures.” 

    •    “The mother taken at her child’s bus stop has an anaphylactic peanut allergy and ICE denied her food for six days because the federal government could not be bothered to provide a meal free of the allergen.” 

    •    “A convoy of SUVs filled with agents sped through an intersection where our kids were climbing on their buses to go home, raced towards the school and halted in front of the main entrance” 

    •    “She taught her mother how to crawl up into the attic space and hide in case federal agents came to their door for questioning.”

The Council is also tasked with making findings about how to “prevent the recurrence of unlawful or harmful conduct by federal agents.” Sarah Lopez, the policy director of Unidos Minnesota, relayed a story — which actually did receive media coverage at the time — that stands out as emblematic of the petty, relentless viciousness of ICE agents: 

“In Willmar, four agents sat down at lunch at El Tapatio,” she said. “And that evening, after the family closed early, agents followed them out and detained the owners of the restaurant and the dishwasher.” 

Imagine being one of those agents. Imagine going to a small family restaurant and being fed and cared for, only to turn around and arrest those same people later that day. Imagine how warped and broken you have to be to behave that way. 

... Along with the accounts of victims, survivors, and witnesses, it’s also important to remember the ICE agents at the center of stories like this. The Truth Council doesn’t exist only to amplify those voices, but also to document the behavior of the federal agents who terrorized the state.

Supporting Minnesotans in San Francisco, March 2026

But for every story of humiliation and harm at the hands of ICE goons, there were stories about Minnesotans coming together, demonstrating solidarity and resilience and resistance. And that’s part of the charge of the Truth Council as well, to “document how Minnesotans came together, supported one another, and persevered.”

What went down in Minnesota, what is going down in various forms all over the country, must be remembered, acknowledged, documented. Once again, Minnesota is showing the way to authentic healing which doesn't deny what has and is happening, but serves as a foundation to the new community we must build after MAGA. 

An unanticipated rupture ...

If anyone has wondered where I disappeared to, the picture tells the story:

Last Friday, at the end of a six mile walk in Golden Gate Park, I crashed onto my side on an asphalt road, broke my hip and cracked the head of the long leg bone, and embarked on a new exploration of both my pain tolerance and involuntary participant research into the US health care industry. After four days in a Kaiser hospital for surgery and immediate stabilization, I'm now in a rehab facility learning how to walk safely while healing.

All this is tiring. I'm giving myself what will probably be a ten day break from posting here. We, the American majority of the sane and the kind, have got this foul national situation in hand and we aren't going to let the bad guys keep us down ...

Where do we go from here?

Okay -- I can't make a case that this woman is going to win her campaign. (Maybe someone from Florida can show me I'm too pessimistic?) But that the Democratic voters of the Sunshine State chose her for their US Senate nominee is delicious and probably instructive.

 

The lady in pink wearing tennis shoes lets it all hang out. If winning is such an uphill slog, why not just tell the voters what you really think?

 

Obama political operative Dan Pfeiffer thinks he knows what he is seeing:

Despite being outspent by more than 10 to 1, Nixon beat [Lt. Colonel Alex] Vindman to become the Democratic nominee to take on Senator Ashley Moody.

And Nixon didn’t just beat him; she romped, winning by more than 11 points. ...

...  She is a dynamic candidate who ran on the exact message that has been resonating in Democratic primaries this cycle — a progressive, populist approach focused on lowering prices for working families.

...  Like Vindman, she made fighting a centerpiece of her identity — but it wasn’t just fighting Trump. Nixon was fighting for working people.

Embedded in Nixon’s success is a model for progressive populists. Candidates like [Wisconsin's Francesca] Hong ran up huge margins among younger, college-educated, and mostly white liberals, but struggled mightily with Black voters, who have historically resisted more liberal candidates in Democratic primaries.

Nixon did not. Like Hong, Nixon did very well in areas with college campuses and younger, more progressive voters. But [in the Florida state senate] she represents Jacksonville, in Duval County, and won that county — which has a large population of Black voters — by roughly 60 points. She also did well in the I-4 corridor and in Miami-Dade County, which also have significant numbers of Black voters.

There was a skinny Black guy with a funny name whose success Pfeiffer understood. That guy won, in part, by riding a popular wave of desire to move on beyond George W, Bush and also Democratic conventions. Might we, in Nixon, be seeing foreshadowing of the next wave, the one that comes after the Orange Man slinks from the scene?

Angie Nixon campaign: 

 

Do we choose to survive?

Erudite Partner is at it again. The syndication platform Tom Dispatch has moved to the Intercept and today publishes her latest: It’s Time to Rein in Lethal AI Drones. 

The dystopian future became the dystopian present last month when state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents went rogue and conducted a cyberattack of their own volition. Two experimental OpenAI agents escaped their supposedly sealed digital “sandbox” and hacked another AI-related company, Hugging Face.

... imagine lethal weapon-bearing AI agents escaping not an experimental sandbox, but the few constraints on their actions placed by the armies using them. Actually, no imagination is required. It’s happening already in Russia’s war against Ukraine.  ...

War -- death by independent machines raining from the sky -- is here and here to stay.

When the US Army releases publicity pictures like this one, they are playing to an impulse toward heroism which may have once served our species well, but which today threatens human survival. The Erudite Partner reminds us that international humanitarian law is in a race to keep up with lethal technology. Do we choose to survive?

Read Rebecca Gordon's latest here.