On May 17th, the 58th season of 60 Minutes ends. And it may be the end of 60 Minutes as we know it.

(Paid subscribers get early access to this article.)

Inside CBS News, the expectation — based on multiple reports — is that once the season is over, the guardrails come off. The changes that were held back can finally begin. And those changes turn the most successful, most durable, most trusted brand in television news upside down.

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Something unusual is happening.

Not just on the battlefield, but in the way Americans are being told about it — or, more accurately, not being told.

There’s a report from CNN’s Reliable Sources on how the Trump administration went quiet on the status of a missing U.S. airman. At the same time, it has sharply limited the flow of domestic information about the conflict itself, even by the standards of modern American wars. And in a move that raises even more questions, the administration has reportedly asked commercial satellite companies not to release imagery of Iran — and they’re complying.

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In the case of the airman, there was good news Saturday night. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the service member had been rescued.

But the relative silence on the matter — and the comparatively limited information the administration is giving about the war — are noticeable. So are the conflicting statements coming from the president himself. For weeks leading up to the shooting down of the U.S. jet, Trump had been proclaiming that the Air Force had total control of the skies and that “they weren’t even shooting at us.”

Taken individually, the tightening of those information streams is not entirely unprecedented. The United States has always controlled war news in wartime. From World War II to the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, every administration has shaped what the public sees and when it sees it. Sometimes that meant censorship. Sometimes it meant managed access. Sometimes it meant embedding reporters inside military units while keeping them away from the broader picture.

But this time feels different. Not because information is being shaped, but because it’s being withheld — and because the world has changed around that decision.

In earlier wars, if Washington went quiet, the story slowed down. There were fewer alternative sources, fewer ways for independent observers to piece together what was happening in real time. The government’s version of events might have been incomplete or slanted, but it was still the central narrative.

That’s no longer true.

Now, when the U.S. government pulls back, the information doesn’t stop. It just reroutes. Social media fills with videos, claims, and counterclaims. Foreign governments — including adversaries — step in to shape the narrative. Analysts, hobbyists, and independent researchers begin assembling their own versions of events from whatever data they can find.

And that creates a vacuum — but it doesn’t stay empty for long.

If anything, it fills faster than ever. Just not necessarily with information coming from the United States. And not necessarily with trustworthy information.

That may be the most important shift here. Americans are increasingly in a position where, to understand a U.S. military operation, they have to look outside their own government — and sometimes outside their own country. They’re watching satellite images posted by private firms. They’re reading statements from foreign officials. They’re trying to piece together the story from fragments that may or may not be reliable.

At the same time, efforts to limit the release of satellite imagery suggest an awareness of that shift — and an attempt to slow it down. But that’s a very different challenge than managing a press pool or shaping a briefing. It means trying to control a global, decentralized flow of information that no single government fully owns anymore.

To be clear, the details of any specific situation may change by the time you read this. Wartime information is fluid. Facts emerge, get corrected, and sometimes get replaced entirely. That’s always been true.

For decades, Americans understood war largely through the lens of their own institutions. Even when that information was incomplete or filtered, it came from a familiar place. There was a baseline assumption — sometimes justified, sometimes not — that the U.S. government would eventually tell its version of the story, and that version would anchor public understanding.

If that assumption starts to break down, something else takes its place.

Not clarity. Not necessarily truth. Just… more voices. More fragments. More competing narratives, arriving faster than anyone can fully verify them. We’re already seeing what kind of damage that can do to a society.

And once that happens, the question isn’t just what’s happening in the war.

It’s who gets to define what Americans think is happening at all.

If you want to understand where this is heading — not just the war, but the way information itself is being controlled, shaped, and sometimes withheld — that’s what I’m doing here. This isn’t daily noise. It’s pattern recognition. Paid subscribers make that possible, and get early access to everything I publish.

You can also hear more of these conversations on the Disciples of Democracy podcast, where I join my friend Jack Messenger for deeper dives into protecting the America we love.

Audacy. iHeartMedia. Different companies, same pattern. Jobs cut across markets. Shows disappearing. People finding out in real time that their careers just ended.

Like far too many people in this business, I have personal experience with this. Last June, I got caught in a round from Audacy. It felt like a body blow — that cold feeling when you realize why the boss is suddenly scheduling a Zoom call before you even get to the office.

I had spent more than a decade at KNX. Not just spent, but enjoyed. Improved. Learned how to be better. For someone who started in music radio, after KFI and KNX, I felt like I’d built something real as a broadcast journalist. Work that mattered. Work that had weight.

Then it was gone. Just like that.

It felt like losing a limb. And underneath that, a harder realization: the market for getting back in was shrinking, no matter how strong your reputation was.

I’ve also been on the other side of the desk. I’ve been the manager in that meeting. I’ve told people their job was gone, their division was closing, their contract wasn’t being renewed. They were being set off on an ice floe.

You want to believe it’s just as painful on that side, but it isn’t. The truth is more basic than that. The instinct to survive overrides everything else. Better to be the one delivering the news than receiving it.

If you’ve been in radio long enough, none of this feels shocking anymore.

There was a time when layoffs stopped everything. They were rare. Disruptive. Worth talking about.

Now they come in waves. Quiet. Routine. Packaged as percentages of a workforce.

And that tells you more about the industry than any single round of cuts ever could.

On the surface, the explanation is familiar. Revenue pressure. Audience shifts. Digital competition. Companies adjusting to “new realities.” All of that is true. It’s just not the whole story.

This isn’t a temporary correction. It’s not a bad quarter. It’s not something that turns around with the next ratings book or the next election cycle.

It’s structural.

The industry has been moving in one direction for years — toward fewer people, fewer local voices, and more centralized control. The layoffs aren’t a reaction to that shift. They are the shift.

Every round does the same thing. Fewer people in the building. More content shared across markets. More control concentrated at the top. And every round makes the next one easier.

You always think, “They can’t cut more than this.” But they do.

There’s a kind of grim ingenuity to it — an industry that borrowed heavily, now figuring out how to survive by consuming itself.

If you’re a listener, you can hear it.

Stations that once sounded distinct start to blur together. Familiar voices disappear. Shows get replaced with something close, but not quite right. A little flatter. A little more interchangeable.

It’s what happens when you try to maintain scale while cutting costs. You make fewer things and distribute them everywhere.

From a business standpoint, it works.

From a listener standpoint, something essential gets stripped out.

Inside these companies, there’s another shift that doesn’t get talked about much.

When layoffs become routine, they stop being disruptive. They become normal. People feel it. They see the pattern. They understand that stability isn’t part of the deal anymore — not for anyone.

That changes how people work. It changes how they think. It changes what they’re willing to risk, and what they’re not. And eventually, it changes what comes out over the air.

The constant layoffs affect everyone — the on-air talent, the salespeople, the managers.

You hear it in the product. It gets thinner. Less confident. Less connected.

That hurts revenue. That hurts ratings. So they cut again.

You’ll hear the usual language. It’s now a corporate hymn with its own number. “Positioning for the future.” “Focusing on growth areas.” Digital. Podcasting. New revenue streams.

Some of that is real. None of it changes the trajectory.

The layoffs are the visible part. The painful part. But they’re not the deeper story. The deeper story is that they keep happening.

And the people in a position to change it aren’t acting like it’s going to stop.

I’ve been in those rooms. I’ve heard the conversations that don’t make it outside the building. The spreadsheets, the strategy decks, the quiet decisions made long before anyone gets that calendar invite.

There’s more to this story than what gets reported.

That’s the work I’m doing here — pulling back the curtain on how this industry actually operates, and where it’s headed next. I’ll be writing about some of those decisions — how they’re made, and what they mean for what you hear on the air — in the coming weeks.

If you want more of that — the inside view, the real conversations, the things people in this business say when the mic is off — consider becoming a paid subscriber to Archer’s Line.

Because the public version of this story only goes so far.

Prefer to listen? The audio version is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

I have to be careful making that crack about old men. I’m one of them.

On the other hand, I have something in common with only one U.S. president: I was born after 1960.

That’s Barack Obama. He’s the only one.

Among the other living presidents — current and former — all were born in the 1940s. That’s a long stretch of leadership dominated by Baby Boomers and older.

And it shows.

The median age of Americans is in the late 30s. But the typical president takes office in their late 50s, 60s, even 70s. Lately, it’s skewing even older. Both Biden and Trump have served in their late 70s and beyond.

But the real story isn’t just that Obama is the only president born after 1960. It’s that no Gen X president has ever been elected. Not one.

You’ll hear the argument — we need experience, we need wisdom.

Fine. Then be consistent.

That argument didn’t carry much weight about Biden among Republicans. It doesn’t carry much weight about Trump among Democrats. It’s selective. It’s convenient.

And let’s be honest — someone in their 50s isn’t lacking wisdom. Neither is someone in their 40s, especially when the country itself is much younger.

So at what point should leadership start to look like the people it represents?

The same question applies elsewhere. Women make up more than half the population. Still no woman president. That’s no longer a small oversight. It’s a glaring absence when you compare the U.S. to other Western nations.

Now, eventually, the calendar will solve part of this. Time moves forward whether politics does or not. That’s the unbending nature of the time-space continuum we live in. We will get more presidents born after 1960.

But here’s the catch.

By the time that happens, will they be considered old?

Will we still be governed by people shaped by a world two or three generations removed from the one most Americans actually live in?

To be clear, this isn’t an argument against older leaders. Some will absolutely be the best choice — more qualified, steadier, better suited for the moment. But sometimes they won’t be.

And right now, the system leans heavily in one direction.

Look at Congress. The average Senator is around 65. The average House member is pushing 60. Both far older than the country they represent, where the median is 38.

That disconnect may be part of why younger voters check out.

If you’re in your 30s or 40s, you look at the system and wonder: when does it become our turn?

And if the answer keeps feeling like “not anytime soon,” it’s not hard to see why some people stop showing up.

Let me know what you think. And it’s okay if you’re over the median. Like me.

Jake Tapper ditched his studio and anchored The Lead from his office — campaign posters on the wall, big podcast mic on the desk, guests crammed onto a couch. Anderson Cooper broadcast AC360 from the middle of the newsroom, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, speaking into an oversized desk microphone.

The message CNN was apparently trying to send: we’re just like those cool indie podcasters you’ve been watching.

The internet responded with mockery. And frankly, it was deserved.

One independent YouTuber put it bluntly: “It’s kinda like rearranging furniture in a burning house. It shows they fundamentally don’t understand why audiences are leaving.”

Here’s the thing CNN seems to have missed: the aesthetic was never the point.

Joe Rogan didn’t build 30 million listeners because he sat in front of a microphone. He did it because he sat in front of a microphone and said what he actually thought for three hours. He wasn’t trying to pretend like he was a journalist.

You Can’t Art-Direct Authenticity

But here’s the real problem with this move, beyond the cringe factor: it makes CNN’s credibility problem worse, not better.

The podcast mic only works as a symbol when it means something real. When someone like me sits down in front of one, it signals no corporate handler, no PR layer, no executive telling me what I can and can’t say. The rougher the setup, the more the indie signal rings true.

The audience isn’t stupid. They understand the aesthetic is a byproduct of reality, not a substitute for it.

When CNN does the same thing, the symbol flips. Now it just means a major corporation is performing scrappiness. Slumming it.

It’s the media equivalent of a politician showing up to a diner in a flannel shirt and ordering a beer for the cameras. Everyone sees it for what it is. And the moment they see it, whatever authenticity you were reaching for evaporates.

Putting a podcast mic on Jake Tapper doesn’t change what CNN is. It just signals that CNN is embarrassed about what it is — and that’s far more damaging than dumbing down the studio set.

Radio Didn’t Survive by Trying to Look Like TV

There’s a useful historical parallel here.

When television arrived in American living rooms in the late 1940s and 1950s, it didn’t just compete with radio — it threatened to wipe it out. TV had pictures, spectacle, and visual drama. Radio couldn’t replicate any of it.

For a while, it looked like radio might die.

But it didn’t. It survived by doing something CNN isn’t doing right now: it figured out what it was actually good at, doubled down, and stopped trying to be television.

Radio leaned into intimacy — the voice in your ear, in your car, in your kitchen. It leaned into portability. It leaned into local and niche programming that national TV ignored. It found its lane and owned it. And no matter what the naysayers may bray, it owns it still.

Today, radio — and its descendant, the podcast — thrives for exactly that reason. It committed to being itself instead of becoming a pale imitation of something else.

CNN is making the opposite bet.

Instead of asking, what can we do that podcasters can’t? they’re asking, how can we look more like podcasters?

The Funding Contradiction

Here’s what makes this genuinely maddening: CNN is trying to look indie at the exact moment it’s gutting the things that justify its existence.

During the same week of Tapper’s office experiment, viewers saw correspondents across the Middle East — from Tel Aviv to Doha — feeding live reports back to Cooper in real time.

That’s the thing no one in a spare bedroom can replicate.

And yet, in that same broadcast, the network apparently decided the priority was making the anchor desk look like a home studio.

Think about what CNN actually has: the ability to deploy reporters to a dozen countries at once. Crews on the ground within hours. Legal resources to fight for access. Relationships built over decades. Archives going back generations.

None of that is replicable. All of it is expensive. And all of it is quietly being cut.

CNN has lost 45% of its primetime audience since 2017. In the 25–54 demo, it averaged just 102,000 primetime viewers in 2025.

An independent YouTuber with a webcam can hit those numbers.

That collapse didn’t happen because the studios looked too polished. It happened because audiences stopped trusting the product and found alternatives. A different desk doesn’t fix that.

The honest version of CNN’s strategy looks like this: cut the expensive things that make us different, and use cheap aesthetics to pretend we’re something we’re not.

That’s just liquidation with better lighting.

Lean In, Don’t Hollow Out

I say all of this as someone doing exactly the kind of independent media CNN is trying to imitate.

I’m not against the podcast format — I’m in it. But I got into it because I am independent, not because I think it matters what kind of microphone I’m talking into.

The path forward for television news isn’t to look cheaper. It’s to be worth the cost.

Go where no one else can go. Spend the money to be in the room when history happens. Put reporters on the ground and keep them there. Do the six-month investigation no solo creator can finish. Show people things they literally cannot see anywhere else — and trust that those things are worth watching.

Sadly, I don’t think the corporate owners are willing to do that. The balance sheets and shareholder profit are more important. They’ll say to me, “If you’re so smart, you do it.” Baby, if I could, I would.

The audience that left isn’t coming back because Jake Tapper’s desk looks more casual. But they might come back if CNN reminds them that there are things only CNN can show them.

That’s a pitch worth making. The cosplay isn’t.

I’d love to know what you think about what CNN is doing — and about TV’s drive to be more like an inexpensive podcast. Leave a comment below. And please share the article with your friends — I need your help to make Archer’s Line grow.

In the heads of millions of Americans opposed to Trump, there’s a hopeful scenario: his collapsing poll numbers lead to a Republican wipeout in the midterms, followed by a 2028 landslide so overwhelming that none of his maneuvering could keep him in power.

But even if that happens — then what? How long would it take to return to something like normal, at home and abroad?

One expert says: probably never. Because the damage — especially to international relationships — may be irreparable.

(This is an exclusive preview for paid subscribers.)

In the minds of our former allies, the lesson is simple: America is always one election away from chaos. One election away from a president, surrounded by yes-men, willing to threaten allies, start irrational conflicts, and tear up trade agreements.

In a piece on Salon, well worth your taking the time to read, political analyst Mike Lofgren argues that Trump has pushed the United States to a point where there is “no going back to the status quo ante” of previous administrations.

He points to actions and rhetoric involving Venezuela and Iran, talk of taking Greenland, making Canada a state, and demanding veto power over allied governments and policies. All of it has strained relationships that took decades to build.

Lofgren’s conclusion is blunt: this may be a point of no return — one that any future president, from either party, would struggle to navigate.

He writes:

Yet another future president might have retraced a path toward more balanced economic or security policies once the disadvantages of trade wars or diplomatic and military isolation became obvious.

But Trump, in large part through his feral nastiness and adolescent vulgarity, has made that sort of reversal all but impossible. A hypothetical president might have distanced himself from NATO, but it’s inconceivable that he would covet an alliance partner’s territory to the point where that government made plans to blow up the airfields in the coveted territory in case of invasion.

Lofgren also argues that long-standing treaties and alliances were already eroding — Trump simply accelerated that process.

He goes further:

Trump hates reading, as his spotty education and lack of general knowledge testify. That reflects his profound lack of intellectual curiosity.

He attempts to disguise this deficiency with endless boasting about himself and endless denigration of others. He is obsessed with popular media and showbiz and the shabby values they embody.

It is almost certain, to this observer anyway, that after the last hanging chad in Florida, after the rubble of the World Trade Center had cooled, after the first improvised roadside bomb exploded in Iraq, and after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Trump, or someone like him, was inevitable.

I find Lofgren’s analysis disturbing. Disheartening. Depressing.

But I can’t say he’s wrong.

And then there’s the damage at home. The pressure on the media. The reshaping of federal agencies. The loss of experienced government personnel in critical roles. The slow hollowing out of institutions that depend on expertise and continuity.

If there is a way back, it would require a fundamental rethinking of America’s role in the world. Possibly even stepping away from the idea of being the “leader of the free world” — a role we’ve already been retreating from.

It would mean humility.

And I don’t see that happening. Not at a national level. Not in any sustained way. It’s just not in our psyche.

The alternative is to double down — on strength, pressure, dominance. But that path comes with a cost. A heavy one. It would take even more money. More pressure. More strain on the system. Much like what happened in Russia. The Soviet Union didn’t collapse overnight. It strained under its own weight until it finally gave way.

In 1998, Russian analyst Igor Panarin predicted that the United States would fracture into multiple regions, driven by economic, social, and moral decline. He even outlined who might control what, with China playing a direct role.

He was wrong about the timeline. But the idea itself — the possibility of fragmentation — doesn’t feel as far-fetched as it once did.

It may be that the future of the United States is not a clean restoration of its past, but something more uncertain. More unstable. Less unified.

I desperately hope I’m wrong.

What do you think? Is there a way back? Let me know in the comments. And if this piece resonates, share it. It helps grow the reach of Archer’s Line.

And check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast with my friend Jack Messenger.

It usually starts the same way—with a target.

Not just an opponent, but something more than that. Illegitimate. Dangerous. Corrupt. A threat to the country itself.

You notice it at first in the words they use. Political rivals become enemies. Opposition becomes sabotage. Disagreement becomes disloyalty. The language shift starts slowly, then picks up weight and speed, and it becomes a semi barreling down the road and running over all those dangerous people without remorse.

Once that line gets crossed, things move faster than people expect. Because by then, enough people have already accepted the premise. Removing the opposition doesn’t feel like repression anymore. It feels justified. Even necessary. You can talk just enough people into it.

Take, for example, this post from the President of the United States.

Sounds like a big desire for a one-party state in America.

In the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks didn’t wake up one day and ban every other party. They chipped away at them. Marginalized them. Painted them as counter-revolutionary until just being associated with them carried risk. By the time Joseph Stalin locked in power, there wasn’t much left to eliminate. The structure was still there, but it had been hollowed out. One party remained—not because voters kept choosing it, but because there was nothing else to choose. Even after that, Stalin carried out brutal purges, as if to belabor the point that he was fully in charge and there was no hope for anything else. Only death ended his power.

In Nazi Germany, it happened faster, but the logic was the same. After the Reichstag Fire, the government claimed extraordinary powers in the name of survival. Those powers were used exactly how you’d expect—opponents arrested, all other parties liquidated, control consolidated. By the middle of 1933, Adolf Hitler had outlawed every other political organization. It was all framed as protection. Unity. Defense against enemies within. Enough people were convinced that they pretended not to notice the mass arrests, the disappearance of all their Jewish neighbors, and the establishment of concentration camps.

China took a quieter route. The Chinese Communist Party didn’t have to dismantle a system of opposition—it built a system where real opposition never had room to exist in the first place. No dramatic purge, no singular breaking point. Just control, established early and maintained consistently, until the absence of alternatives became normal. The earlier days were brutal, marked by purges, and loosing an insanity among the youth for “great leaps forward.” But the control of China’s one party is no less entrenched today.

Iran fits the pattern too. After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic didn't immediately crush every other faction. But by 1981, the systematic elimination of rival political forces was underway — arrests, executions, exile. The Guardian Council was enshrined as a filter, ensuring that anyone who ran for office had already been vetted for ideological compliance. Elections still happen, but the field has been pruned so carefully, for so long, that what remains isn't a choice — it's a selection from pre-approved options. The revolution promised liberation from a Shah. It delivered a different kind of authoritarianism.

We’ve looked at the Soviet Union, but what about modern Russia? It moved more slowly. Vladimir Putin came on the scene as a popular personality, built on stability after the chaos of the 1990s. But the consolidation began early — television networks brought to heel, oligarchs who funded opposition suddenly facing prosecution, regional governors replaced with Kremlin appointments. Opposition figures didn't disappear all at once. They were discredited, then marginalized, then sometimes jailed, sometimes poisoned, sometimes found dead under circumstances nobody in power felt the need to explain. Alexei Navalny spent years documenting the corruption, building something that looked like a real opposition movement — and he ended up dead in an Arctic penal colony. Russia still holds elections. Putin still wins them. Overwhelmingly, every time. That's not a coincidence.

Different paths all leading to the same destination.

A system where power doesn’t—and can’t—change hands. Where accountability fades. Where bad decisions stack up because nobody inside the system has a platform to say, “This is wrong.”

One-party states don’t hold together because they’re strong. They hold together because contrary views are squeezed out. Because it knows it can’t withstand dissent.

The pattern is hard to miss. First you delegitimize the opposition. Then you recast them as a threat to the state. You convince people that getting rid of them is the only way to preserve the country. And then you do that—through laws, through pressure, through whatever mechanisms are available.

Elections might still happen. Ballots might still be cast. But without real competition, it’s just theater.

Because democracy isn’t just voting. It’s real choice. The possibility that power can actually change hands. Peacefully. The way it used to be done in America.

Take that away, and something fundamental breaks.

And history is pretty consistent on what comes next: once a country crosses that line, getting back is hard—and it’s rarely peaceful.

What do you think? How did that post strike you? Let me know in the comments.

And if you want to go deeper, check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast with my friend Jack Messenger—we get into what it actually takes to hold onto a system like this.

You may recall scenes from Mad Men — tobacco executives sitting in a smoke-filled room, complaining about government rulings that their product was dangerous, all while coughing up a storm.

Their excuse was the same as drug dealers’: people chose to smoke. They said the science wasn’t settled. They said they weren’t responsible for what happened after someone lit up. They were just providing a service.

Then the documents came out.

Internal research. Behavioral studies. Evidence that addiction wasn’t a side effect — it was part of the design. The lawsuits followed, then the settlements. And eventually, the warning labels showed up on every pack.

We may be at the beginning of that same arc with social media.

A court has now said that Meta Platforms can be held liable for designing a product that hooks users and keeps them there. Appeals are coming. But the legal theory is what matters, and it’s now on the table.

Addiction by design.

That phrase changes everything. If it holds, it doesn’t stop with one company. It doesn’t stop with Facebook or Instagram. It reaches TikTok, Snap Inc., YouTube, and anything else built to capture attention and stretch it out as long as possible.

The comparison to tobacco is right on the money. The only difference is that designers know far more about human behavior than they did in tobacco’s heyday.

Design the product. Study the user. Optimize for dependence. Deny the harm. Repeat.

The algorithm is all.

There are sure to be more lawsuits — maybe decades of them. Everything social media is built on becomes a target: architecture, infinite scroll, autoplay. Recommendation engines tuned not for truth or value, but for time spent.

I can imagine a warning label — not on a pack of cigarettes, but on your screen:

“Warning: This platform is designed to be habit-forming.”

It sounds absurd until you remember that people once thought cigarette warnings were absurd too.

There are a lot of people who think that’s a good idea. I’m one of them. Users should be informed about the risks of the products they use.

But there’s another permutation that should make us pause our scroll for a minute.

Once a court says these platforms are responsible for what their systems amplify, someone else will notice.

Government.

Specifically, a government that has shown a strong interest in shaping narratives — elevating some, suppressing others.

If a company can be held liable for pushing harmful material, the next question comes fast: who decides what counts as harmful?

That’s where this gets dangerous.

An administration doesn’t need to pass a law telling platforms what to promote. It just needs leverage. Legal exposure creates that leverage. Regulators can lean. Lawmakers can threaten. Agencies can hint. Social media companies called into the smoky boardroom and told: adjust your algorithms. Or else.

Under the second Trump administration, it’s not hard to imagine how that pressure gets applied. We’ve already seen the language. Coverage he doesn’t like is “fake news.” Reporting he disagrees with is “distortion.” Entire networks are accused of working against the country — “enemies of the people.”

Many bend the knee, choosing corporate deals and profits over the First Amendment.

Now connect that to a legal environment where amplification equals liability.

You don’t need direct censorship. You don’t need to shut anything down. You just need platforms to decide it’s safer not to show certain things.

And once that calculation sets in, the feed changes. Certain stories travel a little less far. Certain voices don’t trend. Certain topics don’t surface.

That’s how these shifts happen. Not all at once. Not with a single ruling or a single law, but with incentives that slowly reshape behavior until the new system feels like the only system that ever existed.

And it will feel normal.

Experts who study closed systems have long noted something unsettling: even when propaganda is obvious, it still works if there’s nothing to compare it to. In places like North Korea, the message holds because it’s the only message people ever hear.

Could social media drift in that direction? Could something as simple as a warning label be co-opted into something else entirely?

That’s the real question: What gets written on the label — and who gets to decide what it warns against.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. And please share the article. More reach helps support my work.

Long before television flickered into American living rooms, before Walter Cronkite became “the most trusted man in America,” before even the idea of a nightly newscast had fully taken shape, there was radio — immediate, intimate, and, at its best, revolutionary.

And at the center of that revolution was CBS News Radio. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as networks were still figuring out what they were, CBS began to treat news not as filler between entertainment programs, but as something central to its identity. That was not the industry standard at the time. News on the radio was often sponsored, shaped by advertisers, and delivered in a tone that felt more like a bulletin than journalism.

CBS saw something else. It saw the possibility of building a national audience around credibility — around the idea that when something happened, you could turn on the radio and hear it clearly, directly, and with authority.

It would become home to what many consider the first true national radio newscast.

That shift didn’t happen by accident. It happened because CBS made a series of decisions that seem obvious now but at the time were radical. The network moved away from sponsored news, funding its news division internally, giving it a degree of independence that competitors didn’t match. It invested in reporters, not just announcers, people who could write well and say it into a microphone. It built out a system of correspondents around the country and around the world. And it leaned into the one thing radio could do better than anything else at the time: bring you there. Not summarize the story after the fact, but let you hear it unfold.

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Those decisions transformed radio news from something passive into something immersive — and set a template every broadcast news operation that followed would borrow from, whether they admitted it or not.

By the time World War II began, CBS News Radio had become something entirely new: a real-time window into global events. That transformation is inseparable from one name — Edward R. Murrow. Murrow didn’t just report the news. He changed how it sounded and what audiences expected from it.

From London, during the Blitz, his broadcasts carried the reality of war directly into American homes. You could hear the bombs. You could hear the pauses, the restraint, the quiet authority in his voice as he described what was happening around him. It wasn’t dramatic for the sake of drama. It was precise. It was human. And it was trusted.

Murrow built a team — reporters like William L. Shirer and Eric Sevareid — who extended that approach across Europe, creating something that had never really existed before: a global broadcast news operation with a consistent voice and standard.

That standard became the blueprint. The idea that news should be gathered by trained correspondents, verified, written clearly, and delivered in a way that respected the audience’s intelligence — that idea didn’t come out of nowhere. It was built, piece by piece, on CBS radio. The cadence of the writing. The discipline of the reporting. The separation, however imperfect, between news and promotion. These choices created trust. When Americans tuned in during the war, they weren’t just listening for updates. They were listening for understanding. That distinction still defines good broadcast journalism today.

And then came television. When CBS made the move into TV news in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it didn’t start from scratch. It didn’t have to. The language, the structure, the philosophy — all of it had already been worked out first on radio.

Murrow himself made the transition, bringing those same standards with him. Programs like See It Now carried that DNA directly onto the screen, proving that the core of broadcast journalism wasn’t the medium. It was the method, the discipline, and the voice. Television added pictures, but the foundation — the reason people trusted what they were seeing — had been built years earlier, in sound.

When people talk about the golden age of television news, they tend to start with Cronkite, or with the big network broadcasts of the 1960s. But those didn’t emerge in a vacuum. They were the next step in a process that began with CBS News Radio — with a network that decided news was worth doing well, worth investing in, and worth protecting from the forces that would inevitably try to shape it. Without that foundation, there is no CBS News as we came to know it. No standard for what a national broadcast should sound like. No expectation of authority, clarity, and trust.

And maybe that’s why what’s happening now hits differently. Because when you understand what CBS News Radio was — not just a distribution system, but the origin point for an entire way of doing journalism — its decline signals the erosion of a foundation. The quiet dismantling of something that, for nearly a century, helped define what it meant for a nation to be informed.

And as media fragments further — and voices willing to question power or challenge the government are pushed to the margins — something else disappears with it. Not just a network. A standard.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, looking into the future, once wrote that one day the United States would be mainly remembered for one thing: that it was the first nation-state to land humans on the Moon.

That was supposed to be permanent. A defining line in history.

But these days, there are Americans who aren’t aware of that fact. And a disturbing number who still insist it was fake. That alone tells you something has shifted — not just in knowledge, but in confidence, in the sense that big things actually happened and still matter.

Which makes what’s happening right now in low-Earth orbit all the more troubling.

The International Space Station — the aging, football-field-sized marvel that has hosted nearly 300 people over more than 25 years of continuous human habitation — is on its way out. Its planned retirement is 2030. And what’s supposed to replace it is, at least for now, more concept than reality: computer renderings, startup promises, and a NASA process that has moved slowly enough to raise real doubts about whether anything will be ready in time.

Meanwhile, the world doesn’t pause.

China finished building its own space station — Tiangong — in 2022. It’s operational. It’s staffed. And it’s already becoming a platform other countries can align with, technologically and politically.

And above all of this sits the larger promise — and the larger question — of returning to the Moon.

The United States has a plan. It’s called Artemis. It runs through NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, the Orion capsule, and a lunar lander being built by SpaceX. On paper, it’s ambitious: astronauts orbiting the Moon, then landing, then building a sustained presence.

In reality, it’s been slow, complicated, and increasingly uncertain.

The first crewed mission, Artemis II, has already been pushed back multiple times by technical problems — hydrogen leaks, helium issues, system failures — the kind of problems that come with trying to stitch together legacy hardware and new systems into something that has to work perfectly the first time.

The landing itself has slipped even further. What was once supposed to happen years ago has now been pushed into the late 2020s.

And the biggest technical hurdle — the SpaceX lander — depends on something that has never been done before: large-scale orbital refueling, requiring a chain of launches just to make a single mission possible.

All of that would be manageable if the direction were clear and stable.

But it isn’t.

Funding questions, political turnover, shifting priorities — all of it feeds into the same underlying uncertainty: how committed is the United States, really, to getting back to the Moon on any predictable timeline?

Because space programs don’t run on intention. They run on continuity. And right now, continuity is exactly what’s in doubt.

In the meantime, China is moving forward with its own lunar ambitions — robotic missions now, crewed missions not far behind. The timeline is tightening in a way that should feel familiar.

The early space race wasn’t defined by who had the best long-term plan. It was defined by who got there first — first satellite, first human in orbit, first spacewalk. The Soviet Union racked up those early wins. They shaped global perception. They carried political weight far beyond the technical achievements themselves.

The United States eventually answered with Apollo. That became the lasting image.

But history doesn’t guarantee a repeat performance.

If China lands astronauts on the Moon before the United States returns, it won’t erase Apollo. But it will reframe it. The story shifts from leadership to legacy — from present tense to past. The pioneers of entire industries are often remembered only in footnotes once someone else defines what comes next.

And that shift may already be starting, closer to home.

The U.S. plan is to hand off low-Earth orbit to commercial players — companies like Axiom Space, Vast, and Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef. But those companies are still early, still waiting on NASA to define the rules, still dependent on government support to make the economics work at all.

If the ISS is retired before something new is ready, the United States could lose its continuous human presence in space — something it has maintained for more than 25 years.

Low-Earth orbit is where the next phase of space activity takes shape — technically, economically, strategically. Lose your foothold there, and you’re not just pausing progress. You’re handing the initiative to someone else.

And right now, the only fully operational platform in orbit would be China’s.

There’s a harder truth running through all of this. We talk about commercialization, about private industry stepping in, about a new space economy. But that future still depends on government direction, funding, and follow-through. Without that, it doesn’t materialize.

For decades, the United States hasn’t just been the country that got to the Moon first. It’s been the country that stayed in space — continuously, visibly, without interruption.

That presence has been so constant it feels permanent.

But it isn’t.

And if that continuity breaks — in orbit, or on the path back to the Moon — then Clarke’s prediction starts to narrow even further.

First to the Moon, but not first back. First to the Moon, but not first to build a permanent presence. First to the Moon, but not first to truly make something of it.

And maybe, before long, not leading the space in between.

What do you think? Does the United States still have the will to lead in space — or are we already slipping behind? Leave a comment below. And if this piece made you think, share it. That’s what keeps this work independent.

There’s a part of the airport meltdown story that isn’t getting enough attention. Not the long lines, not the unpaid TSA workers, not the ICE agents showing up where they don’t belong. The part that matters is simpler than all of that: there was a way out, and it was sitting on the president’s desk.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune brought Donald Trump a proposal that would have funded the entire Department of Homeland Security — including the TSA — while carving out one exception: ICE. It wasn’t everything Republicans wanted, and it wasn’t everything Democrats wanted. It was something rarer in Washington: a functional compromise. Fund the TSA, pay the workers, get the lines moving again, and buy time to negotiate the rest. End the visible crisis immediately.

Trump rejected it.

That decision is the story, because what’s happening at airports right now isn’t some unavoidable breakdown, and it isn’t complicated. TSA workers have been missing paychecks for weeks. Some have quit, others are calling out, and when staffing collapses, the system collapses with it. Security lines stretch for hours. Airports are telling travelers to show up four hours early just to make a flight. That’s not a mystery. That’s what happens when you stop paying the people who run airport security.

And now, beginning today, ICE is in airports — with conflicting explanations coming from the administration. ICE will man security lines. No, ICE will be at the exits. No, they’ll conduct immigration checks. No, they won’t. Actually, maybe they will.

All of it adding even more confusion to an already strained system.

And yet, instead of fixing the TSA staffing breakdown — immediately and cleanly — Trump escalated it. He tied any broader deal to a voter ID bill that doesn’t have the votes to pass. He told Republicans to stay in Washington and hold the line. He sent ICE agents into airports to “help” manage a crisis they aren’t trained to solve. A staffing problem became a spectacle.

Then he went on social media and blamed Democrats. Explicitly. Repeatedly.

That’s the pattern: create leverage, refuse the off-ramp, escalate the damage, blame the other side.

Because if you step back and look at it coldly, the logic is hard to miss. A clean TSA funding bill would have ended the airport crisis almost overnight. No more three-hour lines, no more unpaid workers walking off the job, no more national embarrassment playing out in real time. The story disappears, and with it, the pressure.

But chaos does something a solution doesn’t. It creates visuals — crowded terminals, missed flights, angry passengers — a system that looks broken. And a broken system is useful if your goal isn’t to fix it, but to frame it. To point at the damage and say: this is what happens when the other side won’t give me what I want.

So the crisis continues. Not because there isn’t a path out, but because the path out was rejected.

That’s the part you’re not supposed to focus on. Not the lines, not the delays, not even the ICE agents standing in for airport security.

The decision.

A solution was offered. It would have worked. He said no.

I’d love to know what you think. Leave a comment below, please share this article with your friends, and help expand my reach. Also, check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast with my friend Jack Messenger.

In a meeting with some radio and TV colleagues yesterday, something came up that stuck with me.

People don’t trust the media like they used to.

That’s not new. We all know that. The numbers have been heading in that direction for years. Confidence in television news is down. I see it as a result of a decades-long political assault by people who worked the ref, but then went into overdrive in the Trump era.

Insults. Encouraging physical assaults. And now, the federal government is using its power to threaten licenses unless the outlets toe the party line. And sadly, some media institutions are now in the hands of some of the leaders of that assault, and even the ones who aren’t are being cowed into docility.

Trust in digital outlets is fragmented. Social media has turned information into a battleground where everything feels contested, suspect, or manipulated. Everyone, right, left, wherever, can choose their own silos where the opposing view, if one is even offered, is caricatured and straw-manned to death.

But there’s one place where the erosion hasn’t gone as far.

Radio.

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Among the major news platforms, broadcast radio — especially news radio — still holds onto a level of trust that the others have largely lost. It’s not universal, and it’s not what it used to be. But it’s there. Listeners still turn it on in the car, in the kitchen, on the job, and believe that what they’re hearing is, at least, an honest attempt to tell them what’s happening.

It also makes what just happened to CBS News Radio more significant than it might look at first glance.

CBS News Radio is shutting down. Nearly a century of national reporting infrastructure — gone. Seven hundred affiliated stations losing a pipeline to vetted, sourced, professional reporting from Washington and around the world.

That doesn’t shut down those stations. They’ll still be on the air tomorrow. The mics will still be hot. The newscasts will still run. But something underneath them has changed.

If you wanted to weaken one of the last broadly trusted sources of news in the country, you wouldn’t necessarily have to eliminate it outright.

You’d just have to make it harder to function.

You’d take away pieces of the infrastructure that support it. The national reporting backbone. The shared resources. The institutional memory. You’d leave the shell intact — the stations, the formats, the familiar voices — but you’d thin out what’s feeding them.

Not all at once. Just enough that over time, the quality shifts. The depth narrows. The connection to the larger world gets a little weaker. Quietly.

There are other forces at work here, of course. The economics of media are brutal. Advertising has fractured. Audiences have splintered. Corporate owners have taken on massive debt and cut wherever they can. Streaming and digital platforms reward a different kind of content — faster, louder, more reactive, less resource-intensive.

All of that is real.

But it’s also true that the most trusted forms of journalism are often the least aligned with those incentives. They’re slower. More deliberate. More expensive. Harder to scale. Harder to monetize.

And easier to neglect.

There was a time when broadcast networks understood the news was vitally important in a democracy. So the news divisions weren’t as profit-driven as the entertainment side. They were willing to take some loss because that was for the public good, the trade-off for being licensed to use the public airwaves.

But slowly and surely, that changed. Now, the news is just another product line for the media company. Not a service — a commodity.

There are people in this country openly arguing that the media needs to be brought into alignment. That it should be less adversarial, more supportive, more in step with those in power. You don’t have to look very far to hear those arguments.

And you can see how that pressure plays out. Major broadcast groups like Nexstar and Tegna have received rapid regulatory approval for expansion, even as their leadership signals a willingness to operate in ways that are more accommodating to those in power. Whether that’s explicit alignment or simply reading the room, the direction is clear.

If that’s the goal — whether explicitly or just as a byproduct of other decisions — radio would be an obvious place to start.

Not because it’s the biggest platform. But because it’s one of the last ones people still trust.

ABC’s radio network is still there. Other sources still exist. This isn’t the end of national radio news.

But the field is smaller today than it was yesterday. One less pillar. One less shared resource. One less layer of support holding up hundreds of local newsrooms across the country.

That’s how these things change.

Not with a single decisive moment. Not with a clear line where everything is one way on one side and something else on the other. It happens incrementally.

A network goes away. A bureau closes. A beat disappears. A position isn’t replaced. A service that used to be there just… isn’t anymore.

And the system adjusts.

Listeners still get news. Stations still fill time. The surface looks mostly the same. Until, at some point, it doesn’t.

I keep thinking about that conversation yesterday. About the idea that even after everything — the fragmentation, the distrust, the noise — there’s still this one medium that people, more often than not, believe.

And how that medium just lost part of what made it work.

Trust doesn’t vanish overnight.

It erodes.

And so does the infrastructure that supports it.

I’d love to know what you think, whether you’ve worked as a journalist or just journalist-adjacent. Leave a comment below. Share the article with your friends. The wider the reach, the more you help support my work. Thank you!

If you worked in radio news, you know it immediately. That CBS News Radio musical sting — brassy, authoritative, urgent — punching in at the top of every hour like a declaration. This is important. Pay attention. At KNX in Los Angeles, where I spent ten years of my life, that sting was as much a part of the station’s DNA as our own sounder. It told listeners they were connected to something larger than a local newsroom. They were plugged into a national news infrastructure that stretched back nearly a century, all the way to Edward R. Murrow crouching over a microphone in a bombed-out London building, bringing World War II into American living rooms in real time.

That sound goes silent on May 22nd.

CBS News announced today that it is shutting down CBS News Radio, eliminating all positions within the division and cutting off roughly 700 affiliated stations across the country. The closure comes alongside layoffs affecting about six percent of the entire CBS News workforce — the second round of cuts in six months — as new CBS News chief Bari Weiss and president Tom Cibrowski reposition the organization around streaming, digital, and what they diplomatically call “the video podcast ecosystem.” Not to mention being much more MAGA-friendly and pleasing to Donald Trump.

The memo to staff called it a “difficult day.” That’s one way to put it.

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I’d call it the end of an idea — that a broadcast network had an obligation to reach people wherever they were, in whatever they were doing, and that “wherever” included the car, the job site, the kitchen radio, the dashboard of a truck on the 405 at 7 in the morning.

CBS News Radio traces its roots to 1927. Nearly a hundred years of unbroken service, of feeding local affiliates the kind of polished, sourced, network-quality reporting that small and mid-size stations could never produce on their own. Its flagship program, “World News Roundup,” is the longest-running newscast in American history. Think about that for a moment. It outlasted the Cold War, the moon landing, Watergate, 9/11, and a global pandemic. It survived the rise of television, the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine, the consolidation of terrestrial radio, and the invention of the internet. It did not survive David Ellison and Bari Weiss.

At KNX, the CBS News Radio relationship was structural, not decorative. The network fed us national and international content that gave our local all-news operation genuine scope. When something broke in Washington or overseas, we didn’t have to wing it or rip from the wires and hope. We had the sting, and behind the sting, we had reporters with credentials and access and institutional memory. The sting was a promise to the listener: we sent someone there.

There’s something worth sitting with about the particular way CBS News Radio is dying. It’s not being killed by a single catastrophic failure. There’s no scandal, no journalistic meltdown, no obvious moment of recklessness. It’s being killed by “challenging economic realities” and the seductive math of digital metrics — the idea that reach means nothing if it doesn’t generate a click, a stream, a subscription. That hundreds of radio stations and millions of listeners who’ve relied on this service for decades are simply, in the cold logic of platform pivots, the wrong kind of audience.

This is how institutional journalism ends now. Not with a bang but with a memo that uses the phrase “new places” six times and promises investment in “formats aligned with the video podcast ecosystem.” The people who built something real, who showed up every day and fed the machine, get a thanks-for-your-service note and sixty days’ notice.

There will be people who say this was inevitable. That radio has been dying for years. That younger audiences aren’t listening to AM/FM anymore, that the whole over-the-air apparatus is a legacy technology on life support. And look — some of that is true. The industry has real structural problems, a lot of which are due to big corporations taking on insupportable debt to buy up as many stations as they could, and then running them on the cheap. I’m not naive about that.

But CBS News Radio wasn’t just surviving. It was serving. There’s a difference. Hundreds of stations, many of them in markets that can’t afford their own Washington correspondents, were getting national news content that made them better. Listeners in those markets were more informed. The ecosystem worked. It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t generating the kind of engagement numbers that make venture capitalists salivate, but it was doing the thing journalism is supposed to do.

I keep coming back to the sting.

Those of us who worked in radio news have a strange relationship with sound. The right music cue does something to your nervous system. The KNX sounder made me feel the weight of the job every time it ran. The CBS sting made me feel connected to something bigger — to a tradition, to standards, to the idea that there were other journalists in other cities doing the same work at the same moment, all of us feeding the same public.

On May 22nd, when the clock ticks to the top of the hour on 700 radio stations across the country, that sting won’t be there.

Just not that sting. There will also be the absence of compelling, professional, award-winning national and world news reporting. And the absence of a connection for local markets to the bigger picture of what’s happening in the nation. A lesson in action of what our free press-loving founding fathers believed — that a democratic republic where the government governs with the consent of the people must have an informed populace.

I’ll miss it more than I can properly explain to people who weren’t there. But then, that’s always the problem with the end of something that mattered. A century of reporting replaced by a content strategy. The people who know exactly what’s been lost are the ones who were already inside it.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. Please share this article with your friends. The more Archer’s🏹Line grows, the more I can continue to do my work.

The other day, we did a wellness check on the First Amendment. But democracy in America itself needs a wellness check. We can see movement inside the house, but no one’s opening the door.

This week, a group of political scientists in Sweden who have spent more than a decade building the world’s most comprehensive democracy database put a number on what a lot of us have been feeling but couldn’t quite put into words. The Varieties of Democracy Institute — V-Dem, out of the University of Gothenburg — released its annual report, and the section on the United States reads less like an academic assessment and more like a chart from a patient who came in looking fine and left with a serious diagnosis.

The title of this year’s report is “25 Years of Autocratization — Democracy Trumped?” The question mark in the subtitle is doing a lot of work.

What the Numbers Say

For the first time in more than twenty years, there are more autocracies than democracies on the planet. We have crossed a threshold.

The level of democracy for the average world citizen is back to 1985. Two and a half decades of democratic progress, erased.

The United States got special attention in the report — and not the good kind. V-Dem identified the country as undergoing the fastest democratic backsliding in American history. In one year, the U.S. Liberal Democracy Index score fell 24 percent. Our world ranking dropped from 20th to 51st. The level of democracy is now back to where it was in 1965 — the year most analysts consider the real beginning of American democracy as we understand it.

Sixty years of progress, gone in a year.

The hardest hit category: legislative constraints on the executive branch, which lost a third of its value and hit its lowest point in over a century.

Staffan Lindberg, the institute’s founder, said the quiet part out loud after the report dropped. He told reporters that, at the current pace, the United States will stop qualifying as a democracy before summer. Not a liberal democracy — a democracy, period. He goes on to say, “It would mean that the rule of law, the constraints of the executive — that they would be gone to such an extent that we can no longer talk about even a constitutional republic.”

It’s Not Just V-Dem

Here’s the thing about dismissing one organization’s findings: you can’t dismiss all of them.

The Century Foundation’s new Democracy Meter gave the U.S. a 79 out of 100 for 2024, then dropped it to 57 for 2025. In one year. Their authors say U.S. democracy is now at greater risk than at any time since Watergate, possibly approaching its pre-Civil Rights era low. That’s nearly a 28 percent drop, well into what they categorize as authoritarianism.

Freedom House, which has tracked global freedom since 1941, says the U.S. has fallen 11 points over 13 years on its index, and now sits behind 53 other countries on freedom. Global freedom declined for the 19th consecutive year.

Three organizations. Three methodologies. Same diagnosis.

(All the links are below.)

The First Domino

V-Dem has documented what happens to free expression during democratic backsliding across dozens of countries, and the pattern is consistent. Media suppression is the first move. Always. Lindberg calls government censorship of the press “the preferred weapon of choice” for leaders steering countries away from democracy. Half of all autocratizing countries are also ramping up state disinformation at the same time.

V-Dem’s researchers say the logic of the Trump administration’s early actions follows what they call “the script” — tightening executive control over independent agencies, weakening congressional and judicial oversight, and going after civil society and the press.

A Parallel Worth Sitting With

The Weimar Republic, Germany’s democracy after World War I, had one of the most progressive constitutions in the world when it was founded in 1919. Free press. Free speech. Universal suffrage. Equal rights. On paper, it was a model.

It didn’t collapse overnight. Conservative forces hostile to democracy were embedded in the power structure from day one. The parties that believed in the republic tolerated them in the name of stability. That tolerance proved catastrophic. The Nazi Party never even won a majority, just over 30 percent in the republic’s last free election. But the mainstream kept making concessions, each one seeming reasonable on its own, each one corrosive taken all together. The people who thought they could manage Hitler, contain him, use him — they were all wrong.

I want to be clear here: The United States in 2026 is not Weimar Germany. American institutions are older and more deeply rooted. The parallel is not about destination. It’s about the mechanics — the way erosion moves quietly and then quickly, the way concessions that feel pragmatic in the moment eventually become irreversible.

The Weimar Republic didn’t fall because of one dramatic moment. It fell because enough people, for long enough, decided not to make it their problem.

What the Data Also Shows

Here’s what gets lost when the alarm takes over: democratic backsliding can be reversed. V-Dem documents ten countries where it’s happening right now. Brazil went further toward the edge than the United States has gone — and pulled back. Poland reversed years of erosion after an election. In most countries where democratization took hold, the first thing that improved was press freedom. The domino that falls first also rises first.

U.S. elections, for now, remain free. The decentralized structure of our elections — run by states, not Washington — has so far shielded them from the worst. But the administration is already laying the groundwork to change that, using false claims of voter fraud to argue for federal control. The 2026 midterms are the next critical test.

The Spinning You Feel Is Real

If your head has been spinning — if the pace of this moment feels designed to overwhelm — the data backs you up. Countries typically take a decade to decline as much as the United States has in a year.

V-Dem’s data goes back to 1789. Lindberg has studied all of it. What he told The Guardian is worth reading slowly: “What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”

Ever. In 237 years.

The wellness check shows vital signs — but they’re falling, and falling fast. We can see movement inside the house. The door is still closed. And the people whose job it is to measure these things are telling us, clearly and on the record, that the longer it stays closed, the harder it becomes to recognize what’s on the other side.

I want to know what you think. Is all hope lost, or can we turn it around? Leave your comments below. Also, check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast with my friend, Jack Messenger. A new episode is coming soon.

Here are the sources used:

1. V-Dem Democracy Report 2025 — v-dem.net

2. V-Dem Press Release: Restrictions to freedom of expression as democracy loses ground — v-dem.net

3. V-Dem peer-reviewed article in Democratization journal — tandfonline.com

4. University of Gothenburg: Democratic backsliding reaches western democracies — gu.se

5. Democracy Without Borders: Autocracies outnumber democracies for first time in 20 years — democracywithoutborders.org

6. Bette Dangerous: Autocratization in the USA — bettedangerous.com

7. The Century Foundation: Democracy Meter — tcf.org

8. Freedom House: Democracy in the United States — freedomhouse.org

9. Foreign Affairs: Warnings From Weimar — foreignaffairs.com

Eleven years ago, when I started my job at KNX in Los Angeles, it was a CBS station. There was a huge CBS News logo when you got off the elevators. I was proud to walk by it every day, because that was the network of a man I built a religious temple to in my head: Edward R. Murrow.

He was long gone by then, of course. Not just him, but his like — the whole tradition of hard-edged, power-speaking-to-truth broadcast journalism that he embodied had been slowly dissolved by the economics of cable and then finished off by social media. I was sad about that. But at least the legacy was still there. The name still meant something.

But even sadder still is that now, the legacy itself is being erased — deliberately, systematically, for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with politics and billionaire vanity.

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CBS Evening News, now anchored by Tony Dokoupil under the direction of David Ellison and editorial architect and anti-woke warrior Bari Weiss, drew fewer than 3.83 million viewers last week. ABC’s World News Tonight pulled in nearly 8.48 million over the same period. NBC Nightly News drew 6.51 million. Nearly half the audience that ABC draws is a collapse. And it is a direct result of a billionaire buying a news organization and remaking it in his own political image.

Here’s how it happened, and how fast: Ellison controls CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance. He brought in Weiss — the self-styled anti-establishment media critic who has made a career out of positioning herself as a corrective to liberal bias — to reshape the network’s editorial direction. Weiss installed Dokoupil as anchor. Dokoupil wasted no time signaling where things were headed. On his second day on the job, he offered what sources described as a salute to Marco Rubio. He gave soft coverage to the fifth anniversary of January 6th. That coverage reportedly drove out Scott MacFarlane, one of CBS’s top Justice Department correspondents — exactly the kind of reporter a serious news organization would fight to keep. Anderson Cooper left, too. Sources say he was put off by the network’s rightward lurch. Staff buyouts are now underway ahead of expected layoffs.

Dokoupil, to his credit, was at least candid about the mission when he took the job. Legacy media, he said, had failed average Americans by listening too much to academics and elites. Two weeks later, he was touring Dallas in Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ private helicopter. Make of that what you will.

What we’re watching now is the CBS playbook in action: keep it soft, keep it safe, don’t ask the hard questions. The network ran it on January 6th. It’s running it again on Iran. And viewers — whatever the new leadership may believe about the appetite for this kind of coverage — are noticing. They are changing the channel or turning it off entirely. The ratings don’t lie, even when the broadcasts do.

Edward R. Murrow once said that television can teach, illuminate, and inspire. But only, he warned, if human beings are determined to use it that way. Otherwise, he said, it’s merely wires and lights in a box.

What do you think? Can CBS News be turned around? Is this just another link in the chain in the collapse of broadcast news? Let me know in the comments below. Also, check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast with my friend Jack Messenger.

Every March 17th, the world celebrates St. Patrick.

The world puts on something green, raises a pint, and toasts St. Patrick — patron saint of Ireland, driver-out of snakes, explainer of the Trinity via small plants. It’s a great tradition. There’s just one small problem. The version we celebrate is mostly myth. The history is a lot messier.

To start with, there may have been two St. Patricks.

And historians have been arguing about it — bitterly, sometimes ridiculously, and in at least one case in court — for nearly a hundred years.

Let’s start with what we actually know — separating story from record, which turns out to be a lot less than the shamrock-and-snake industry would suggest.

Patrick, so the story goes, was kidnapped from Roman Britain — likely somewhere along the western coast of what is now England or Wales — by Irish pirates as a teenager, taken to Ireland, and made to tend sheep as a slave for six years. Then he heard voices, escaped, walked 200 miles, hitched a ride with some sailors, was shipwrecked near France, helped feed the crew when a herd of pigs appeared after he prayed, and eventually made it home.

Then he decided to go back.

This is the detail that separates Patrick from most of us. Most people, after escaping six years of slavery on a foreign island, would lie low for a while. Patrick became a priest, had more visions — including one where the Irish people begged him to return — and went back. He spent decades converting the island to Christianity. By his own account, he occasionally raised the dead to back him up. You know. For emphasis.

That’s the traditional story. Parts of it come from Patrick’s own writings. Parts come from much later accounts that read more like legend than record.

“Nothing is clearer than that Patrick grafted Christianity onto the pagan traditions with so much skill that he won people over before they fully understood the difference between the two.” — Scholar John O’Donovan, 1856, with the tone of someone who has just figured out a magic trick.

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Enter the second Patrick

Here’s where it gets interesting.

In 431 CE, the Pope sent a bishop named Palladius from Gaul (modern-day France) to Ireland, specifically to minister to Irish people who had already converted to Christianity. That matters because it means Christianity was already in Ireland before Patrick arrived. Patrick isn’t credited with showing up until 432.

So who was Palladius? A bishop. A missionary. A man sent by Rome to do roughly the job Patrick is famous for. And a 9th-century Irish text called the Book of Armagh describes Palladius as “Patrick by another name.”

Other old records add to the confusion. An 8th-century calendar of saints lists a feast day for an “Old Patrick… beloved foster father.” The Annals of Ulster notes “the repose of the elder Patrick, as some books state,” in 457. Two sets of records. Two sets of dates. Two men who may have been blended, over centuries, into one.

If that’s true, the St. Patrick we celebrate isn’t a person so much as a composite character.

In 1942, historian Thomas O’Rahilly made the case formally: there had been two missionaries, both named some version of “Patricius,” whose lives had been scrambled together. The theory sparked a real fight in academic circles — one that, by all accounts, got ugly and petty — and ended with an actual libel case against a journalist who had the nerve to make fun of it in print.

While we’re here — about those snakes

There were no snakes in Ireland for Patrick to drive out. There have never been native snakes in Ireland. The island was cut off from Britain after the last Ice Age before snakes could get there. This isn’t disputed. The snakes are a metaphor — most likely for paganism, or the Druids, depending on who you ask.

The shamrock is similarly shaky. It doesn’t appear in any early Patrick stories. The first record linking Patrick to the shamrock comes from 1684, when an English visitor noted that the Irish wore “shamroges, 3 leav’d grass” on Patrick’s Day and also, apparently, ate them. The idea that Patrick used it to explain the Trinity is a nice story, but no one wrote it down for over a thousand years.

And the green? Patrick’s original color was blue. The Order of St. Patrick, founded in 1783, used sky blue as its symbol. Green took over in the 17th century, when Irish nationalists adopted it to push back against British rule. The color we associate with Patrick is the color of rebellion.

The man probably wasn’t Irish, didn’t banish literal snakes, may not have used a shamrock, wasn’t originally linked to green, and might be two people. The legend filled in the rest.

So which Patrick are you celebrating?

Whether there was one Patrick or two, someone went back. That’s a story — whether truth or fiction — that teaches us something. Someone who had every reason to avoid Ireland — who had been enslaved there, who suffered there — felt called to return and did. The historian Thomas Cahill called him “the first missionary to people beyond the reach of Roman law,” and said the step he took was “as bold as Columbus’s, and a thousand times more humane.”

Patrick wrote honestly about his doubts, was embarrassed by his lack of formal education, and near the end of his life fired off a furious letter denouncing a British warlord who had raided Ireland and enslaved Irish Christians. Patrick knew what slavery felt like. He said so.

That’s the story. A flawed, stubborn man who went back to the place that had broken him and did something remarkable there.

The green beer is optional.

What do you think? Leave a comment below. And if you’re in need of some politics and/or outrage, check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast with my friend, Jack Messenger.

We need to do a wellness check on the First Amendment, because all my calls are going to voicemail.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr took to X this weekend to warn broadcasters that they’d better “correct course” on their Iran war coverage — or risk losing their licenses. His exact words: “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.”

It was a response to a long screed from President Trump complaining about war coverage — making the connection between the “correct course” and Trump’s desires.

On one level, legal experts are right that this is a hollow threat. TV licenses don’t even come up for renewal until 2028. The FCC hasn’t denied a license renewal in decades. Any attempt to pull a station’s license would trigger years of litigation, and any network worth its salt would mount a First Amendment case that would tie the government in knots.

So there’s really nothing to worry about, right?

Not so fast.

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What Carr is really saying

The legal enforceability isn’t the point. The intent is.

When a federal official — the chairman of the agency that literally controls whether your station stays on the air — tells you to “correct course” on your news coverage, he’s issuing a warning. And the message underneath the warning is simple: Report what the administration wants you to report, or face consequences.

Think about what that actually means. It means the administration believes that news networks should reflect the government’s version of events. Not investigate them. Not question them. Not provide independent analysis. Just... relay the official narrative.

There’s a word for that. It’s called state media. (Okay, that’s two words, but you get the point.)

Here’s a concrete example of how the pressure works in practice. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump about Jeffrey Epstein last year, Trump responded by saying the network’s license should be taken away. Carr, his hand-picked FCC chair, has been more than happy to carry that water. Two major station groups — Nexstar and Sinclair — quietly pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show from their ABC affiliates. It’s worth noting that both companies had pending business before the FCC at the time. That’s not a coincidence. That’s compliance purchased through fear.

You don’t have to revoke a single license to get results. You just have to make broadcasters wonder if you might.

We’ve seen this movie before

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán didn’t need to nationalize the press outright. Friendly oligarchs bought up independent outlets one by one, while regulators made life difficult for the ones that remained. Within a few years, the vast majority of Hungarian media was either state-owned or reliably pro-government. Technically, it was all “private.” In practice, it was all state media. This is happening in America today.

In Turkey, Erdoğan used regulatory agencies and tax authorities to squeeze critical outlets until their owners — nervous about their other business interests — sold to government-connected buyers. The journalism didn’t disappear overnight. It just gradually became... safer. Less curious. Less confrontational. This is also happening here.

In Russia, the process was faster and less subtle. But the result was the same: a press that reported what the government wanted reported, and called everything else a “hoax.”

The pattern is always the same. You don’t have to ban the news. You just have to make independent reporting expensive enough — financially, legally, professionally — that outlets start doing the math. And some of them will decide the math doesn’t work in their favor.

The chilling effect is the weapon

The Radio Television Digital News Association called Carr a “bully with a briefcase,” and that’s exactly right. The briefcase is full of legal threats that probably can’t be enforced. But the bullying works anyway, because not every news director has the stomach for a multi-year federal licensing battle. Not every parent company wants that fight while simultaneously trying to close a merger that needs FCC approval.

Carr’s strategy, as media advocacy groups have pointed out, is to pressure outlets into self-censorship. You don’t need explicit government action if the press does the work for you.

The First Amendment doesn’t just protect against outright censorship. It protects against a government that uses the machinery of regulation to intimidate journalists into silence. As the RTDNA put it: “The First Amendment does not have a carve-out for news the FCC chair finds inconvenient.”

So what do we do with this?

The good news — and there is some — is that a lot of journalists are not backing down. Local news reporters are still covering the Iran war. Networks — at least, some of them — are still asking hard questions. The RTDNA said their members “have faced far worse and kept reporting.”

But we should be clear-eyed about what’s being attempted here. Brendan Carr isn’t just venting on social media. He’s the chair of a federal agency, and he’s using that platform to tell American broadcasters that their job is to agree with the government. Not fact-check it. Not hold it accountable. Agree with it. Cheerlead it. Praise it.

That’s a loyalty test.

And the moment we start grading broadcasters on whether they pass it, we’re not really in America anymore.

I'd love to know what you think. Is there still hope for a free press? Or have too many mainstream media outlets already bent the knee? Leave a comment below.

This is also a good moment to talk about why independent journalists need your support. I’m not beholden to a corporation. I don’t need Trump’s approval — or the FCC’s — to stay on the air. No mergers to protect. No licenses to lose.

So if you can, becoming a paid subscriber makes a real difference. And if that’s not in the budget right now, sharing this piece costs nothing — but it helps the algorithm, which helps me keep doing this work.

Either way, thank you for reading.

If you spend enough time reading history, a strange realization starts to creep in.

Human beings are very good at recording the past. We write books about it. We build museums. We make documentaries and podcasts and university courses explaining exactly what went wrong and why.

And then we go out and make the same mistakes all over again.

This pattern repeats so often that it raises an uncomfortable question. If the lessons of history are so clear — why do we keep ignoring them?

And here’s what really gets me. This isn’t a new observation. People have been complaining about it for thousands of years.

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Around 400 BCE, a Greek general named Thucydides sat down to write a history of the Peloponnesian War — the conflict between Athens and Sparta that tore the Greek world apart. He wasn’t writing it just to document what happened. He wrote it, he said, as “a possession for all time,” so that future generations could understand what happened and not have to learn it again, the hard way.

His assumption — baked right into the opening pages — was that human nature doesn’t really change. The same ambitions, the same miscalculations, the same dangerous overconfidence would keep producing the same kinds of disasters. He thought that if people just understood what had happened before, they could at least see it coming.

He was right about human nature. He was wrong about what we’d do with the information.

Even in his own book, the second half of the Peloponnesian War repeated the first, with new actors making much the same mistakes for the same reasons. The very people who should have known better — who lived through the early disasters — couldn’t stop themselves from repeating them. Thucydides watched it happen in real time.

About a century later, the historian Polybius was watching Rome expand across the Mediterranean and thinking similar thoughts. He believed that governments moved through predictable cycles — strength led to complacency, complacency to corruption, corruption to collapse, and then the whole thing started over. He wrote history specifically to teach political lessons, convinced that anyone who studied the past carefully enough could see what was coming.

The cycle kept spinning anyway.

Part of the answer is a lack of education. We’re seeing that in the U.S. right now. But here’s the thing: educated societies have made the same mistakes, over and over again.

So it’s not that people are stupid.

It’s that the forces driving political decisions tend to be much stronger than the lessons history is trying to teach.

The first force is short-term thinking.

Political leaders get rewarded for solving the crisis in front of them — not the one arriving ten or twenty years from now. Elections, media cycles, and public pressure all run on the clock of the present moment. The incentive is always: act fast, show strength, win today.

And as attention spans get shorter, the repetition gets faster.

History, by contrast, speaks slowly. It warns about patterns that unfold across decades. A small decision here, a consequence you won’t feel for years.

Our attention span is a Michael Bay movie. History is a Kubrick film.

So when a leader is standing in front of cameras facing a crisis that needs an answer right now, the distant warnings of history just don’t have the same pull.

The second force is generational amnesia.

People who live through disasters rarely forget them. Those who survived the Great Depression were cautious with money for the rest of their lives. My dad grew up in those years — and even if he’d had a million dollars in the bank, he’d still gripe about paying extra for the large fries.

People who fought in World War II understood the cost of global conflict in a way later generations could only imagine. A lot of those generals became the strongest advocates for peace. They knew what they were talking about.

But as time passes, the memory fades. A new generation grows up that didn’t live through it. To them, it’s abstract — a chapter in a textbook, a movie, a story their grandparents told.

The emotional weight disappears. What once felt like a warning starts to feel like a distant historical episode. Something sepia-tinged.

And once that happens, the same risks start to look acceptable again.

The Iraq War is a good example of this. In 2003, the United States invaded a country with no real plan for what would come after the fighting. Historians, military veterans, Middle East experts — many of them warned publicly that this looked a lot like Vietnam. One Middle East scholar, Sandra Mackey, wrote before the invasion: “The United States cannot wade unaware into Iraq as it once waded into Vietnam. The ghosts of Vietnam hover around Iraq.”

The administration’s answer was essentially: this time is different. Different technology. Different enemy. Different circumstances.

The war in Iraq was meant to demonstrate definitively that the United States had learned the lessons of Vietnam. What became clear is that something closer to the opposite was true.

And if you feel like the current conflict with Iran is repeating the history of the Iraq war, which echoed the Vietnam War, then you are indeed paying attention. Congratulations.

The third force is the nature of power itself.

People who rise to positions of power tend to believe they can succeed where others failed. And that belief isn’t entirely irrational — confidence, ambition, and a willingness to take risks are often exactly what pushed them into leadership in the first place.

But those same traits can create a dangerous illusion.

Leaders may study history. They may understand the mistakes others made. And still believe that their own judgment, their own circumstances, or their own brilliance will produce a different outcome.

History says one thing. Human confidence says another.

Confidence usually wins.

The 2008 financial crisis is another version of this story. Economists and housing advocates had been raising alarms for years. Four years before Lehman Brothers collapsed, a housing attorney named Ruhi Maker warned Federal Reserve officials directly that the nation’s housing bubble could cause “enormous economic damage” — even naming Lehman Brothers specifically as a risk. She wasn’t alone. Other consumer advocates and academics described themselves as “canaries in a coal mine.” They said the warning was out there. Nobody listened. The miners were sent in anyway.

The financial sector had convinced itself that this time, the instruments were too sophisticated for the old rules to apply. New models. New products. New era.

It wasn’t. Speculative bubbles collapse. They always have. The only thing that was new was the confidence that this one wouldn’t.

There’s also the power of a good story.

Human beings don’t naturally think in data and probability. We think in narratives. And a story about strength, destiny, justice, or national honor can feel a lot more compelling than a careful historical analysis.

If a decision fits the story people want to believe, the warnings of history become easy to dismiss. They start to sound pessimistic. Defeatist. Out of touch.

The story takes over.

And then there’s the last one, which might be the most powerful of all.

History never repeats itself in exactly the same way. The technology changes. The leaders change. The circumstances change. And every generation can point to some difference that seems to prove the old warnings no longer apply.

The weapons are different. The economy is different. The world is different.

So the conclusion feels almost irresistible: this time will be different.

Sometimes it is.

But often it isn’t.

Historians have a phrase for this. They say history doesn’t repeat itself — but it rhymes. The details change. The structure stays familiar.

A crisis escalates. Leaders convince themselves they can control it. Opponents react in ways nobody anticipated. What started as something manageable grows into something worse.

And by the time people recognize the pattern, they’re already deep inside it.

Thucydides saw this happen. Polybius saw it. Historians in every century since have seen it and written about it. The observation itself is 2,500 years old.

Which, when you think about it, is either darkly funny or deeply unsettling.

The uncomfortable truth is that history’s lessons aren’t hidden. They’re widely known. Entire libraries are filled with careful studies explaining how political disasters unfolded and how they might have been avoided.

The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge.

The problem is that the forces pushing societies toward bad decisions — fear, ambition, pride, political pressure, the pull of a compelling story, and sometimes just the flat-out incompetence (or apparent insanity) of the people in charge — are usually stronger than the quiet voice of historical experience.

History offers warnings.

Human nature offers momentum.

And momentum has a way of carrying people forward — even when they can see the cliff ahead.

The strangest part? We remember the past pretty well.

We just don’t always let it change what we do next.

What do you think? Are we repeating history in Iran? Leave your thoughts and comments below.

A major AI story slipped under the radar this week. It deserves attention.

Palantir Technologies and Nvidia quietly announced something they’re calling a “Sovereign AI Operating System.”

The basic idea is this: they’ve built a complete hardware and software package — using Nvidia’s most powerful chips — that lets governments run advanced AI entirely on their own servers, completely in-house. No outside cloud providers. No third-party oversight. The government controls the data, the models, and the whole operation from top to bottom.

They’re marketing this as “data sovereignty,” which sounds reasonable enough on its face. Who wouldn’t want to control their own data? But let’s think about who this is actually being built for, and what they’re already doing with it.

Palantir isn’t some neutral tech company. It was built from day one as a government surveillance contractor. Its software is already running inside the Defense Department, the intelligence community, and immigration enforcement agencies. Under the current administration, those agencies have been on a tear. ICE is using AI tools to identify, track, and detain immigrants. DHS has dramatically expanded its domestic monitoring. The direction of travel here is not subtle.

And now Palantir and Nvidia are handing that same government a ready-to-run AI system designed specifically — their words — for “the most complex and sensitive environments.” Environments where someone needs total, unaccountable control over data.

Here’s a detail that tells you everything about where the incentives sit right now: the Pentagon recently cut off Anthropic — one of the biggest AI companies in the country — after Anthropic refused to let its AI be used for autonomous lethal weapons or mass domestic surveillance. They said no, and they lost the contract. The companies that said yes kept the business.

That’s the market being built right now.

We’ve Seen This Before

There’s no historical precedent for AI-powered surveillance at this scale. But the impulse behind it? That’s as old as authoritarian government itself.

The clearest example most people know is East Germany’s Stasi. For forty years, from 1950 until the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi ran what many historians consider the most thorough surveillance operation ever imposed on a civilian population. By 1989, the Stasi employed over 91,000 full-time staff and had recruited roughly 173,000 civilian informants — about one in every 63 East Germans was actively spying on their neighbors, coworkers, and family members. Their explicit goal, stated plainly in internal documents, was to “know everything about everyone.”

Think about what that took. An army of human beings. Physical surveillance. Intercepted mail. Bugs in apartments. The Stasi even collected “scent samples” from individuals — literally wiping cloth on objects people had touched — to be stored in jars so trained dogs could track them later. They maintained files on an estimated six million East German citizens — more than one third of the entire population.

And yet, for all of that effort, for all of those informants and filing cabinets and resources, the system eventually collapsed. The sheer human cost of maintaining it became unsustainable. Running a surveillance state on informants and paper files has natural limits.

Here’s what’s different now. One U.S. government server today could store so much data that if printed out, it would fill 42 trillion filing cabinets — compared to the 48,000 cabinets the entire Stasi archive required. What took East Germany decades to build, and required one in sixty citizens to maintain, can now be replicated and vastly exceeded by a small team with the right software. That’s exactly what Palantir and Nvidia just made easier.

The Stasi needed an army.

This only needs a contract.

What the Fiction Warned Us About

Writers saw this coming long before the technology existed to make it real.

George Orwell published 1984 in 1949, writing from the wreckage of World War II, having watched both fascism and Stalinism up close. The novel depicts a totalitarian state that uses omnipresent surveillance and the constant rewriting of history to persecute individual thought itself. The government in the book doesn’t just watch what you do. It tries to control what you’re capable of thinking.

Orwell called it the Thought Police. He was describing the logical endpoint of a government that decides information itself is a threat.

What made 1984 so uncomfortable when it was published — and what makes it so relevant now — is that Orwell understood the surveillance state isn’t primarily about catching criminals. It’s about changing behavior. When people know they might be watched, they stop doing things that might attract attention. They stop organizing. They stop dissenting. They start self-censoring. The system doesn’t have to be watching you all the time. It just has to make you think it might be.

And if you’re thinking that this is happening in America right now, you’re not alone.

That’s the real power of total information control. Not that it catches everyone. It’s that it doesn’t have to.

Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report pushed the idea even further — a government that uses predictive systems to identify and punish people for crimes they haven’t committed yet. When Dick wrote it, that was science fiction. Today, law enforcement agencies are already using data analytics and AI to predict and prevent crimes — a practice known as predictive policing that’s been deployed in cities across the United States, and which critics say disproportionately targets communities of color based on historically biased data.

The fiction is becoming infrastructure.

The Architecture of Control

It’s worth being clear-eyed about what this actually is.

Every authoritarian government in history has needed two things to lock in power: a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on information. What Palantir and Nvidia just delivered is the architecture for both of those things — packaged in the language of national security, and being built right now with public money.

Surveillance, propaganda, and the control of information have always been part of an autocrat’s playbook. What’s changed is that new technologies make this repression more pervasive, more efficient, and far more subtle. The East German Stasi needed hundreds of thousands of human informants. China’s modern surveillance state runs on facial recognition cameras and AI. What Palantir and Nvidia are selling is the next step: a system so integrated, so self-contained, and so powerful that a government running it doesn’t need to rely on anyone or anything outside its own walls.

The Stasi wanted to know everything about everyone, and it took them forty years and an army of informants to get close. What Palantir and Nvidia are offering can do it faster, cheaper, and without anyone on the outside ever being able to audit it or push back.

Orwell imagined it. The Stasi built a version of it.

Now two of the most valuable companies in the world are selling it as a product.

This isn’t a future threat. It’s happening right now.

On Sunday, I’m publishing something related: why humans keep repeating the same historical mistakes, even when history screams warnings at us.

What do you think? Please leave a comment below, and share the article with your friends.

Tax Day is coming. And some Americans have decided they’re not paying.

Let me be clear: not paying your federal taxes is against the law. I’m not recommending it. If you try it, you’re looking at penalties, interest, wage garnishments, liens on your bank accounts, and in extreme cases, criminal charges. The IRS doesn’t care how principled your reasons are.

But here’s what I find worth paying attention to: a lot of people know all of that — and they’re doing it anyway.

Take Rachel Cohen. She’s a 31-year-old lawyer in Chicago who posted a video on Instagram saying she won’t be paying the $8,800 she owes in federal income taxes this year. The video got 140,000 likes. In the comments, plenty of people said they wanted to do the same. Others warned her about the consequences.

@cohen.489

Rachel Cohen on Instagram: "I love yall and I promise I know th…

“I’ve gotten a lot of people saying, ‘Rachel, this is illegal,’” she told The Guardian. “To which I say, with gentleness: ‘I am a competent attorney!’”

She’s not confused about the risks. She’s done the math. She says she doesn’t want her money going to the war in Iran, to operations in Gaza, or to ICE agents detaining her neighbors. She plans to put the $8,800 in a high-yield savings account instead.

“Of course I’m nervous and I’m scared,” she said. “But I’m doing an informed risk assessment and deciding to do this anyway, because I think that’s the level of severity the moment calls for.”

She’s not alone.

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee has existed since the early 1980s, quietly hosting trainings for people who want to withhold taxes as a form of protest. A few years ago, those sessions might have drawn a dozen people.

In January of this year, nearly 500 showed up.

Their website logged more than 110,000 unique visitors.

Lincoln Rice, who leads the organization, says interest spiked three times after Trump’s re-election: when DOGE began cutting federal agencies, after passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, and when the United States attacked Venezuela and seized its president in January.

This isn’t just a fringe curiosity anymore.

And it’s not new.

Tax resistance has deep roots in American history — deeper than most people realize.

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The Boston Tea Party was, at its core, a tax protest. Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay a tax that supported slavery and the Mexican-American War. His night in jail produced Civil Disobedience, the essay that later inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

During the Vietnam War, Joan Baez publicly refused to pay the portion of her taxes earmarked for weapons. Gloria Steinem did the same. At one point, an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 Americans refused to pay a telephone tax that funded the war.

The tradition never fully disappeared. It mostly moved to the margins — often practiced by Quakers and Mennonites who see war-tax resistance as a moral obligation.

A woman named Chrissy Kirchhoefer in St. Louis has been withholding part of her federal taxes since 1998, redirecting the money to community projects. During the Biden years, a new generation of younger activists began doing the same over U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Now, under Trump’s second term, the movement is growing again.

A group called National Tax Strike has emerged over the past year, producing guides for people who want to understand how tax resistance works — and what it might cost them.

Christina Thompson, a volunteer coordinator with the group, puts it this way:

“We are being told we have to go without affordable healthcare, affordable groceries, affordable housing, because we want to fund these forever wars that enrich a small portion of the country. I want people to ask a simple question: are your tax dollars making your life better?”

There is one more wrinkle.

The Trump administration has cut the IRS workforce by about 27 percent since last year. Some tax experts wonder whether the agency even has the capacity right now to chase down large numbers of protesters.

Lincoln Rice says his organization hasn’t recently heard of new resisters facing garnishments or bank levies. But that could change quickly.

And again, I want to stress this: the legal risk is real. Penalties and interest can add up fast. The IRS can seize bank accounts. In rare cases, people have lost homes over tax debt.

The fact that enforcement might be stretched thin today doesn’t mean it will stay that way.

But here’s what I keep coming back to.

When large numbers of people are willing to accept legal and financial consequences to make a political point, something deeper is going on. This is not just a policy disagreement. It looks more like moral distress.

That’s people who have looked at the usual channels — voting, calling representatives, showing up at rallies — and decided those aren’t enough. That they need to put something real on the line. What’s happening is so much of an outrage that they’re willing to lose money, lose their homes, even go to jail because they can’t morally take part.

You can agree or disagree with that choice. But it tells you something about where a lot of Americans think we are right now.

April 15 is five weeks away.

What do you think? Are you willing to go to jail or lose your home to protest what the Trump administration is doing with your tax dollars? Please leave a comment below. And check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast, and the podchunk version of Archer’s Line.