A bunch of assholes walk into a room and go, “We’re making an AI powered publishing house, we’ll put out more books faster than anyone else!“ And the investors go “Oh wow!“ and give them millions of dollars.

It now no longer matters to the assholes if their plan works. They already got paid.

Their paychecks don’t come from the end users, they come from the rounds of funding pumped into them. And the money keeps coming as long as they can keep the grift going. Not in drips and drops from actual consumers buying stuff, but in big fat chunks from investment groups and accelerators.

Governing with the notion that elections alone will not keep authoritarians at bay means taking seriously the question of how to use power while you have it, ideally how to build that power *beyond just winning elections* to make sure that progressive policies endure and reactionary harms mitigated

“This is beyond McCarthyism. Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke,” the ACLU said. “The Trump administration’s actions, paired with ABC’s capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”

It's always useful to remember that JD Vance examined the public data in 2016 and concluded that he believed victims like Katie Johnson who stated that Trump was a serial sexual assaulter.

"Katie Johnson" (a pseudonym) reportedly dropped her lawsuits because of multiple death threats.

I like this one. Brendon Carr in 2019