“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau

 

On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — got booted out of office by the Hungarian electorate. His defeat, says Marc Loustau [https://marcloust.substack.com/], Harvard PhD and fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, represents a playbook for defeating illiberalism. Orbán had rigged the electoral system so dramatically — giving the winner 1.5 votes for every vote the loser got — that when Péter Magyar got more than 55 percent of the vote, Orbán’s own system destroyed him. The gods must have their fun — Hungarian poetic justice.

 

Orbán’s cronies, Loustau reports, are fleeing to Dubai with their hot rod car collections and ill-gotten gains from sixteen years in power. But the mid- and upper-tier bureaucrats, Loustau warns, are still in office. Not having any other skills, they’re going to be difficult to dislodge. Making Hungary a functional democracy again won’t happen overnight.

 

The goal of Péter Magyar’s government, Loustau says, is to “make Hungary boring again.” That should be the lesson for the anti-Trumpists in his native America, Loustau says. Build the broadest possible coalition, never kick anyone out of it, and refuse to be drawn onto the deadly culture-war terrain. When Orbán banned the Budapest Pride parade to force Péter Magyar to take a stand on LGBTQ issues, Magyar flew to a Greek island. It was, Loustau says, the smartest move of the campaign. Make America boring again. The anti-Hollywood playbook for defeating illiberalism. Are you watching Gavin & Kamala?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Poetic Justice: Orbán’s System Destroyed Him: Orbán rigged Hungary’s electoral system to massively benefit the winner: if you get more than 55 percent of the vote, you get roughly 70 percent of parliamentary seats, and effectively 1.5 votes for every vote your opponent receives. He did this because he never imagined anyone could get above 50 percent against him. When Péter Magyar did — comfortably — Orbán’s own system gave Magyar a supermajority. Loustau’s verdict: it is rare that there is genuine poetic justice in life. This is one of those moments.

 

•       The Cronies Are Heading for Dubai: Sixteen years of a two-thirds majority in parliament allowed Orbán to pack every institution in Hungary with loyalists — friends, family, friends of friends — from top to bottom. In the end, this became part of his undoing: when you bleed out talent and fill institutions with cronies, you end up with an inept government. The most visible Orbán figures are now heading to Dubai with their hot rod car collections. But the mid-level “authoritarian cadre circles” burrowed into every institution will be much harder to remove. It will take years to restore functional public services.

 

•       Make Hungary Boring Again: The incoming government’s agenda, in Loustau’s formulation, is to make Hungary boring again. No more brinkmanship between Russia, Brussels, and Washington. No more geopolitical risk-taking. Hungary belongs in the EU, and if the EU likes anything, it is stultifying bureaucracy. That, paradoxically, may be the best thing for ordinary Hungarians. It does not signal the end of the far-right threat globally. So long as Putin is alive, Loustau argues, we must remain vigilant.

 

•       Magyar Goes to Greece: The Culture War Lesson: One of Orbán’s favourite tactics was to force opposition politicians to take a stand on LGBTQ issues. He bann

Make Hungary (and America) Boring Again: Marc Loustau on Why Orbán Lost and How to Defeat Trump

“Anyone that’s properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You’re not a passive victim — you’re an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare

 

Do we really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week [https://thatwa.st/] newsletter publisher Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] — who thinks all tech innovation results in human progress — thinks we do. No hands, no problem, Keith says. But I’m not sure. Especially given the powers-that-be giving us that no-hands job.

 

Keith welcomes the end of what he calls the “typed” and “touched” computing era — keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and all the manifold ways we have used our hands to interact with computers since the 1980s. That’s the outcome, he predicts, of the race to AGI. So far so good. But what happens if our no-hands AI future is controlled by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook? This week these four behemoths committed 00 billion to AI infrastructure investment in 2026 alone — 2 percent of all US GDP. These companies are racing to build (and own) the foundational mechanics of AGI.

 

That’s always how it’s been, Keith says, embracing our no-hands future. I’m less open-armed. What happens if we want our hands to fend off AGI? No, I’m not so keen on a no-hands job from Silicon Valley. Especially one couched in the altruism of human progress.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The End of the Hand-Driven Computing Era: Andrej Karpathy’s observation at Sequoia’s AI Ascent: he no longer uses his hands to do his work. He speaks to the computer; the computer acts; he judges and refines. The keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen — all the hand-driven interfaces that have defined computing since the 1980s are entering their twilight. Karpathy calls it “software 3.0”. Keith, two years ago, wrote an editorial called “eyes, hands, ears, and mouth” about the inclusion of other human attributes beyond hands. That prediction has arrived.

 

•       $700 Billion: The CapEx Explosion: A post by @Signal framed the week’s numbers: $700 billion in AI infrastructure spending in 2026, equivalent to 2 percent of all US GDP. This kind of spending, the post observes, usually happens via governments or wars. This time, it’s four private companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — racing to build the foundational mechanics of AGI. Meta was punished by Wall Street for overspending; Google was rewarded because its numbers were strong enough to justify it. The same bet, two different verdicts, depending on your quarterly earnings.

 

•       Was the Internet Privately Built? The ARPANET Argument: Keith’s claim: innovation waves have always been privately financed. The railways, the telephone, the electricity grid, the commercial internet. Andrew’s counter: ARPANET was a massive government investment that created the protocols on which the internet runs. Keith’s response: ARPANET was a university bulletin board that created the precedent, not the infrastructure. Andrew’s response: that’s not exactly what ARPANET was. They agree that government research matters. They disagree on how much credit it deserves for what became the commercial internet.

 

•       The Revenge of the Idea Guy: Sam Altman’s line of the week. In the past, an idea person came up with a concept and then needed expensive engineers to build it. Many ideas never saw the light of day because the engineering cost was prohibitive. Now, anyone can speak an idea into existence. AI builds the plan, executes the work, and you judge and refine. That changes the economics of creativity, advertising, software development, and anything else that used to require specialist execution. The specialist is not dead — but specialists

Do We Really Want a No-Hands Job From Silicon Valley? Who Holds the Power in the Age of AGI

“Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — Jason Pack

 

Happy May Day! Today’s papers are leading with stories about Obamacare, a Gaza flotilla, and the price of oil. Everything but the story at both the front and back of our minds. Only the Wall Street Journal leads with Iran. Which is more than a bit odd, given that America is supposed to be at war there. Or is it? Jason Pack [https://www.disorder.fm/] — Middle East analyst, host of the Disorder [https://www.disorder.fm/] podcast, and our man in London — joins for a special May Day show on the most surreal conflict in recent memory.

 

Both sides, Pack argues, care more about the narrative war than about actual military strategy. The official word out of DC and Tehran is the same: we’re winning. But no military campaign in history has been won solely on the airwaves. Pack sees two sides that are doing their surreal best to ignore a war that they are both fighting. If you pretend it’s not happening, then maybe it isn’t. Don’t mention the war. On this May Day, everyone is Basil Fawlty.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Two Sides with No Strategy: Both Trump and the Iranian regime are more invested in the narrative war — the story of who is winning — than in having an actual endgame. Trump says the blockade will make the Iranians cry uncle. The Iranians say they are surviving and therefore winning. Neither has clearly stated what they want from this conflict: not on the nuclear file, not on territory, not on regime change. Pack’s verdict: he sees two sides that don’t even know what they want to get out of a war they’re both pretending is going well.

 

•       No Campaign Has Ever Been Won Solely from the Air: The American military has showcased extraordinary AI-enabled tactical capability in the Iran conflict. But war is about outcomes and strategy. Territory must be controlled. New leaders must be installed. These things cannot be done from altitude. The Israeli Twelve-Day War hit the head of the snake — the Iranian regime — but may have overplayed its hand. A Shia axis that was being systematically degraded could come back like a phoenix if the narrative of martyrdom and resistance is allowed to reconsolidate around shared injury.

 

•       Trump Does Projection: Pack’s most pointed observation: track what Trump accuses his adversaries of, and you learn what he is about to do. He says the blockade will make the Iranians cry uncle. Which means he is on the verge of backing down. The absolute worst outcome, Pack argues, would be Trump as the one who folds — not because America loses a war, but because it loses the credibility that underwrites the entire international order. His fear: that is exactly what is about to happen.

 

•       Pakistan: The Sleeping Giant: The story the world’s media has mostly not told: Pakistan’s role. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Pakistan has a large Shia minority and a complex relationship with Iran. It also has a complex relationship with China, with the Gulf states, and with the United States. Any escalation that involves Iran necessarily involves the question of what Pakistan does. Pack considers this one of the most under-covered dimensions of the conflict and one of the most consequential. The sleeping giant has not yet been asked to choose sides. That moment may be coming.

 

•       The First AI War: London Antisemitism and Russian Disinformation: Six antisemitic attacks in London in six weeks since the Iran war began. Pack’s argument: the disinformation driving radicalisation on social media is not purely Iranian. Russia and North Korea are seeding the most outlandish conspiracy theories about Jewish peo

May Day, May Day: Jason Pack on the Unhappy War in Iran We All Want to Ignore

“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon

 

To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful [https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-most-impactful-u-s-inventions-bf44040d] American inventions of all time:

 

1. Internet

2. Light bulb

3. Integrated circuit

4. Personal computer

5. Airplane

 

The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business historian John Steele Gordon [https://www.amazon.com/John-Steele-Gordon/e/B000AQ2SJS] validates the list. Gordon’s piece [https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/information-technology-us-4f3c71f3] for the WSJ series is titled “From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation.” His argument is that the United States was always in danger of falling apart and the telegraph saved the republic. Then radio, television, and even the now vilified internet knitted it even closer together.

 

Otto von Bismarck quipped that God looks after three things: fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Gordon agrees with the Prussian unifier of Germany. Nobody, he notes, has ever made money selling America short. As for the now venerable republic, he thinks it’s still in pretty good hands. The ever expanding national debt, however, is another matter. That certainly wouldn’t get onto Gordon’s top 250 most impactful American inventions.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Hanging by a Thread: The Communication Crisis at the Founding: George Washington’s fear was not philosophical: it was geographic. The original United States, stretching to the Mississippi, was larger than all of Western Europe. The trans-Appalachian West couldn’t get its commerce over the mountains — it had to go down the Mississippi, which was controlled by Spain. Washington said the West was hanging by a thread. Every subsequent expansion — to California in 1850, to Oregon and Washington — only deepened the crisis. The republic could not exist without communication. That is why the post office was almost constitutionally important in Washington’s time, and why the telegraph and the transatlantic cable were understood as national security technology, not merely as business.

 

•       The Atlantic Cable: Ten Days to Ten Seconds: In 1800, a transatlantic crossing took two months westbound and six weeks eastbound. By the 1850s, with steam, it was ten days either way. Cyrus Field — a paper merchant who knew nothing about cable technology — read about undersea cables and decided to lay one across the Atlantic Ocean. Gordon compares this to reading about Sputnik and deciding to go to Mars. It took six tries and ten years. William Thomson — Lord Kelvin — did the physics. The result: ten days to ten seconds. Basically simultaneous. The nineteenth century was right to call itself an age of miracles.

 

•       The Robber Barons Were Misunderstood: As early as the 1850s, the New York Times was calling Commodore Vanderbilt a “robber baron” — after the medieval German toll barons on the Rhine who wouldn’t let your boat pass without paying. Gordon’s verdict: the dead can’t sue, but they should. Vanderbilt built a faster, safer, cheaper transportation network than had existed before. He died the richest man in America in 1877, worth $105 million. Henry Ford did the same thing with the automobile: took a rich man’s toy invented in Germany and built one the average man could afford. Gordon sees Elon Musk’s reusable rocket in the same tradition. Nobody complained about their products. They complained about their wealth.

 

•       The Internet Is the Greatest American Invention: The Wall Street Journal’s ranking puts the Inte

God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America

“It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland

 

Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gangs encrypt your servers and hold your data hostage until you pay — cost victims somewhere between fifty and seventy-five billion dollars a year in damage. The hackers themselves pocket around a billion. As Anja Shortland [https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/anja-shortland], professor of political economy at King’s College London and author of Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware [https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Screens-Hackers-Heroes-Ransomware/dp/B0DGPHJKXZ], puts it: “it’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses.” The sunglasses are the ransom. The wrecked car is the damage to the rest of us.

 

Shortland is an expert in extortive crime — transactions where a legal entity has to make a deal with a criminal group under conditions of zero trust. She has studied kidnap for ransom, Somali piracy, art theft, and now the booming business of ransomware. What fascinates her is not the crime itself but the institutions that emerge in the space between the legal world and the criminal underworld: the insurance companies that price the risk, the negotiators who manage the transaction, the norms that make it possible for a corporation to pay a criminal gang and actually get its data back. In Russia, hacking Westerners isn’t even a crime. In North Korea, it’s an actual department with a small army of government employees. In Iran, it’s a foreign policy. Criminality, Shortland thus argues, is defined by whoever holds power.

 

The game-changer, she argues, is cryptocurrency. Without it, ransomware doesn’t work — you can’t move money anonymously at scale without it. Regulate cryptocurrency, and you take the profit motive out of most of what she studies. The irony is that the current American administration is amongst the most crypto-friendly in history. Meanwhile, AI — specifically Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, the hacking model that was leaked rather than released — is about to give criminals tools that only well-resourced banks and corporations can currently deploy defensively. So cybercrime will continue to boom. Expect a pile-up of wrecked cars on our information highway.

Five Takeaways

 

•       We Know You Can Pay a Million: The title of the UK edition of Shortland’s book is the most revealing line in ransomware. Criminal gangs don’t pick ransom figures arbitrarily. They spend weeks inside the victim’s systems, studying cash flow, cash reserves, and insurance coverage, before setting a demand on the painful side of affordable. The victim usually pays — because the alternative is losing access to patient records, customer data, or patents permanently. The hackers know this. The negotiation that follows is, in Shortland’s framing, a transaction between parties with zero trust and one thing in common: both want a deal.

 

•       In Russia, It’s Not a Crime: Ransomware is not a uniform global crime. In Russia, theft and extortion directed at Westerners is not considered a criminal act. In North Korea, hacking is organised as a government department — a state revenue stream, not a criminal enterprise. The line between crime and legitimacy is drawn by whoever holds power. This complicates any enforcement response: you cannot extradite a North Korean government employee. You cannot prosecute a Russian hacker in a Russian court. The only effective levers are diplomatic, financial, and technical — and all three are currently being weakened.

 

•       Insurance Orders Criminality: Shortland’s most counterintuitive argument: insurance companies are not passive bystanders in ransomware. T

We Know You Can Pay a Million: Anja Shortland Illuminates the Dark Screen of Ransomware

“Violence has been misdiagnosed. And there’s a misdiagnosis that has caused us to not be able to control it as we could.” — Dr. Gary Slutkin

 

Human violence appears ubiquitous. In Iran. In Gaza. In Ukraine. In Sudan. In American cities and homes. So widespread, indeed, that it seems naturally hardwired into us. Our species-being, so to speak.

 

But, for Dr. Gary Slutkin [https://cvg.org/], there is nothing inevitable about human violence. Slutkin — an epidemiologist who spent years fighting cholera, tuberculosis, and AIDS in Africa before focusing his medical mind on violence — argues that violence is neither a character flaw nor a moral failing. Rather than being baked into our natures, Slutkin sees violence as a contagious disease. It meets the clinical definition of a plague, he says. The more violent our homes, communities, media, politics, the more virally it spreads.

 

Slutkin’s new book, The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous Epidemic [https://www.amazon.com/End-Violence-Eliminating-Dangerous-Epidemic/dp/1637746156], makes the case that violence has been misdiagnosed for centuries. We analyse it as a crime problem, a character problem, an inter-state problem. So we punish, incarcerate and bomb. But none of these approaches confront the contagion. This can only be done, Slutkin argues, with what he calls “violence interrupters” — people from within the infected community who find the most at-risk individuals and cool things down before they escalate. Communities that have applied this approach have seen reductions in violence of 40 to 70 percent, Slutkin boasts, with Cherry Hill, one of Chicago’s most dangerous neighbourhoods, experiencing 450 days without a shooting.

 

There will be a time, he promises, when the plague of human violence will be mostly overcome. I hope Dr. Slutkin is correct. But suspect that his brave new violence-free world, like Huxley’s, might be simultaneously utopian and dystopian.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Violence Meets the Clinical Definition of a Contagious Disease: Slutkin is not speaking metaphorically. Violence meets the definition of a disease: characteristic signs and symptoms causing morbidity and mortality. It meets the definition of contagious: it causes more of itself. One violent event leads to another — in a home, in a community, in a region, in a war. The more you are exposed to it, the more likely you are to do it. This is the same mechanism as measles, as cholera, as COVID. Susceptibility varies — for violence, it has to do with how much you feel humiliated, how much social pain you carry, how much grievance a leader has taught you to feel. But the operating system is the same.

 

•       Violence Has Been Misdiagnosed: For centuries, we have treated violence as a moral failing: a matter of bad people making bad choices. The response has been punishment, incarceration, war. None of these interrupt the contagion. In fact, incarceration concentrates the infection. The misdiagnosis has cost millions of lives. The correct diagnosis — epidemic disease spreading through exposure — changes everything. You don’t blame a cholera patient for drinking contaminated water. You don’t punish a COVID patient for breathing. You interrupt the spread. You treat the susceptibility. You cool it down.

 

•       Violence Interrupters: The Epidemic Control Playbook: Cure Violence Global trains and deploys violence interrupters: people from the same community, who speak the same language, who have often been involved in violence themselves. Their job is to find the most at-risk individuals — the ones most likely to shoot or be shot next — and intervene before the next event. The approach works. Communities that have applied it have seen reductions of 40 to 70 percent. O

The Deadliest of Plagues? Gary Slutkin on Violence as Our Most Contagious Disease

America is once again at war. Helen Benedict [https://www.helenbenedictauthor.com/] is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s House [https://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-House-Helen-Benedict/dp/1953534848], is set in the aftermath of the Iraq war. But it could, equally, be about the aftermath of Afghanistan. Or even Iran. “The war turned me into a monster,” veterans tell Benedict, again and again. “How am I supposed to face my wife, my children, when I know I’m a monster?”

 

On George W. Bush, Benedict is unambiguous. “He was a war criminal,” she says. On the Iraq war, she is equally clear: America went in on lies and killed nearly a million Iraqis, used depleted uranium in violation of international law. Today, Trump is repeating the same catastrophic playbook in Iran.

 

In The Soldier’s House, Benedict shows how Iraq turned some American soldiers into monsters. “War is morally corrosive — especially a war where the soldiers can find no justification for what they’re doing,” Benedict says. That’s the unintended consequence of even the most morally clean war. Expect the same in Iran. If Trump’s half peace becomes a George W. Bush total war.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       He Was a War Criminal: Benedict’s verdict on George W. Bush, stated flat and without hedge. He went to war on lies. He killed, depending on who’s counting, somewhere near a million Iraqis. The Americans and the British used depleted uranium in violation of international law — polluting the land and spreading poison, producing an epidemic of birth defects among Iraqi civilians and, some veterans claim, among their own children. The forgiveness of Bush — common on the left since Trump — is, in Benedict’s view, memory loss. He was not better than Trump. He was better in some things and just as bad in others. The bar is not very high.

 

•       The Other Half of the Story: The Iraq war produced reams of American writing about American soldiers. For years, nobody thought to write about how the civilians felt. Benedict’s novel is structured to correct that: Naima, the Iraqi widow, is given equal weight and depth as Jimmy, the American veteran. The point is to push back against the worldwide demonization and scapegoating of Muslim refugees by creating characters who are just as human as anyone we know — who could be your friend, your sister, yourself. She had soldiers and Iraqis read the manuscript to ensure accuracy on both sides.

 

•       Why Fiction, Not Nonfiction: Benedict had already written the nonfiction: The Lonely Soldier, three and a half years of research and interviewing. But no matter how intimate the interviews, she always felt she couldn’t get deep inside the experience. In interviews, people put up self-protective barriers: things they don’t want to remember, things they are ashamed of, things that are private. Fiction allows her to go where nonfiction cannot. Take everything learned in research. Apply imagination to it. Fill it out. Illustrate the interior experience of war from moment to moment. That is the territory of the novel, and nothing else.

 

•       Moral Injury: The War Turned Me Into a Monster: Benedict’s central subject across all her books on war is moral injury: the damage done to a person’s conscience when they do things they know, deep down, they had no right to do. A war without justification is maximally corrosive because the soldier can find no frame in which the violence makes sense. It just becomes about violence. Soldiers come home carrying that. It affects everyone who knows them. It affects towns, villages, countries. We bring the war home with us. Every poet who has written about war has said so. Benedict’s novels make it visi

How Iraq Turned Some American Soldiers into Monsters: Helen Benedict on the Unintended Consequences of War

“All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right-wing groups figure out a way to communicate with one another in a more instantaneous way — we are in big trouble.” — Steven J. Ross

 

It’s not just springtime for Hitler in America. It’s winter, summer and fall too. There is what the historian of American neo-Nazism, Steven J. Ross [https://dornsife.usc.edu/steven-ross/], defines as the “too many Führers Problem.” This, he says, is the central weakness of American neo-Nazism over eight decades. Every far-right leader from the 1940s onward demanded a united fascist movement — and every one of them insisted on being the Führer in charge of it. The result was the permanent fracture of the American far right. That is, until the latest wannabe Führer, Donald Trump, came along.

 

Last week, the Justice Department sided with the Ku Klux Klan. The Southern Poverty Law Center — the country’s main watchdog against antisemitism, racism, and far-right violence — was accused of running agents within radical right-wing organisations and using charitable funds for improper purposes. In his new book, The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy [https://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Against-Hate-Antisemitism/dp/1668011271], Ross says that this has all happened before.

 

The Secret War Against Hate tells the story of three undercover spy operations — run by the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League — that infiltrated every fascist, Nazi, and racist group in America from the 1940s through the 1970s. When government fails to protect its citizens, Ross suggests, it falls to citizens to protect themselves. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was obsessed with communists and mostly indifferent to antisemitism and racism. Rather than the solution, the G-Men were one more problem.

 

In May 1945, a few days before VE Day, the three spy chiefs — working in offices a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan — wrote the identical memo on the same day. If right-wing groups, fractured by the “too many Führers problem,” ever found a way to communicate instantaneously with one another, and if one of them ever peeled off into a mainstream political party, they warned, American democracy would be in big trouble. That was their “Too Many Führers Problem.” Springtime for an American Hitler. Today this problem is no longer a joke.

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Justice Department Sides with the KKK: The opening frame of the interview: last week, the Justice Department accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of running agents within radical right-wing groups and using charitable funds improperly. Ross’s argument: the same accusations were levelled at the undercover spy operations run by the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League from the 1940s onward. Those operations, which operated because government had abrogated its responsibility to protect minorities, foiled plot after plot. The FBI informants doing the same thing were never prosecuted. The pattern — government targeting the anti-hate watchdogs while ignoring actual hate — is not new.

 

•       J. Edgar Hoover: The Enemy Within: Hoover ran the FBI from the early 1920s until his death in 1972, and throughout that period he cared almost exclusively about communists. Correspondence with his Atlanta special agent-in-charge referred to the Anti-Defamation League as the “Anti-Deformation League.” Ross stops short of calling him an antisemite and racist — no burning gun — but says the correspondence smells like both. In 1940, the German-American Bund was operating freely in Los Angeles: the LA ports we

The Too Many Führers Problem: Steven J. Ross on the History of American Neo-Nazism

“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle

 

The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetfulness. That’s the warning in Vanishing Culture [https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-culture-a-new-book-on-the-loss-of-our-digital-memory/], a new series of essays published by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive [https://archive.org/]. In its concluding essay by Brewster Kahle [https://brewster.kahle.org/] — founder of the Internet Archive [https://archive.org/], member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the closest thing the web has to an official librarian — he makes the case for preserving the online library system.

 

“Our evolving digital age can be our next Carnegie moment or it can be a Library of Alexandria moment. It is up to us.”

 

Today’s internet library system, Kahle argues, is worse than the analogue one he grew up with. It’s faster, he acknowledges, but shallower. The 1976 Copyright Act means that rather than buying digital books, libraries can only rent access in surveillance environments controlled by a handful of corporations. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. So an entire generation is growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century.

 

“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free,” as the editor of Current Affairs put it. That is today’s internet. No laughter. Only forgetting.

Five Takeaways

 

•       Carnegie Moment or Alexandria Moment: The Internet Archive’s pamphlet Vanishing Culture opens with a choice. Andrew Carnegie invested in public libraries during the early twentieth century: every town in America got one, and by the time the US was thrust onto the world stage after World War II, an educated public was ready. The Library of Alexandria burned. Kahle’s argument: we are at the same fork in the road. The digital transition can be a Carnegie moment — everyone with access to all human knowledge — or it can be an Alexandria moment. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. The library system we have is worse, not better, than the one Kahle grew up with.

 

•       The 1976 Copyright Act as Original Sin: Copyright used to be opt-in: you had to put a ‘c’ on your work and register it. The 1976 Act made it opt-out: everything is copyrighted by default, forever, with terms that keep being extended. The consequences: Wikipedia had to be written from scratch because the encyclopedias already written couldn’t be shared openly. Academic papers are walled inside publisher systems, which is why arXiv exists. Libraries can no longer buy digital books — only rent access in surveillance environments. The bargain between publishers, libraries, authors, and the public that functioned for centuries has been dissolved by lobbyists writing copyright law.

 

•       The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Kahle’s most quotable line belongs to someone else — the editor of Current Affairs. But Kahle endorses it fully. An entire generation is now growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century. People are genuinely confused about whether the Holocaust happened — not because the information doesn’t exist, but because it’s behind a paywall. What is free on the internet is what serves the interests of the platforms: viral, emotional, algorithmically optimised, frequently false. The deep, sourced, accurate record costs money to access. That inversion is not an accident. It is the business model.

 

The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Brewster Kahle on the Internet of Forgetting

“White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is preference, inequality, and active bias in favor of white men?” — Steve Phillips

 

Are white men really smarter than other Americans? Some white men might think so, but few others are convinced. Especially the Stanford educated Steve Phillips [https://stevephillips.com/] whose new book, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? [https://www.amazon.com/Are-White-Men-Smarter-Everyone/dp/1641609362] is designed to “play offense” in the fight for American racial justice. The title of Phillips’s new book is, of course, a provocation. White men are 29 percent of the population, he tells us, but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all investment funds managed by money managers. Is that really because they’re smarter than everybody else? Or is it because the system is biased in favor of white dudes who graduated from Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.

 

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Phillips argues, there was, albeit all-too-briefly, broad agreement that systemic racism existed and needed to be addressed. Then came the 2024 election and the MAGA war against DEI. It’s time to fight back, Phillips says. Rather than defending affirmative action, Phillips says that the question is why, in the richest country in the world, white men hold 90 percent of the power when they are only 29 percent of the population. Until that mathematical inconsistency is explained, there’s no point in pretending that the arc of American history bends toward justice.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       29 Percent of the Population, 90 Percent of the Power: The book’s central data point. White men are 29 percent of the US population. They hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions. They receive 90 percent of venture capital funding. They manage 98 percent of all investment money in the country. Phillips’s argument: you don’t need to allege conscious racism to explain this. You just need to acknowledge that a system shaped by centuries of exclusion doesn’t self-correct. The question the title asks is the question nobody wants to answer: if the system is meritocratic, why do these numbers look like this? Either white men are smarter than everybody else, or the system is not meritocratic.

 

•       Playing Offense: The book began as a study of what happened to the post-George Floyd consensus. The broad agreement that systemic racism existed — widespread in June 2020 — dissolved within months. By 2024, the political momentum had reversed entirely. Phillips’s diagnosis: the left spent the intervening years playing defense — defending DEI, defending affirmative action, defending the language of equity. The result was a retreat. His prescription: stop defending programmes and start prosecuting the inequality. Make the other side explain the numbers. Reframe the question from “should we have DEI?” to “why do white men hold 90 percent of the power?”

 

•       The Biker Gang Analogy: To the objection — common from white Americans — that they personally didn’t create the racial wealth gap: Phillips offers the biker gang. A gang comes into someone’s house, takes all the resources, occupies the house, and passes it on to their children. The children can say: I didn’t do anything. But they inherited a structurally unequal situation. The GI Bill after World War II gave billions of dollars in wealth-building to white Americans while largely excluding people of color. The average white family has more than ten times the assets of the average black family. “I didn’t do it” is not the same as “I

Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America

The daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world. Hosted by Andrew Keen.

Keen On

Andrew Keen's Show

The daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world. Hosted by the writer and commentator Andrew Keen.

To subscribe: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keen-on/id1448694012

KEEN ON clips

Highlights from KEEN ON, the daily show about the big ideas, new technologies, books and people changing the world

Subscribe: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keen-on/id1448694012

Andrew Keen

Shows