New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 21, 2026 Michael Jawer is author of Sensitive Soul: The Unseen Role of Emotion in Extraordinary States. He is coauthor, with Dr. Marc Micozzi, of two books: Your Emotional Type: Key to the Therapies That Will Work for You as well as The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotions: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense. His websites are https://michaeljawer.com/ and http://www.youremotionaltype.com/. In this reboot from 2020, Michael presents his view that emotions are a relatively unexplored dimension of parapsychological functioning. He discusses the psychological parameter of boundary thickness and thinness. Jawer covers a range of topics including PTSD, synesthesia, environmental sensitivity, prodigies and savants, as well as emotional awareness in animals. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). (Recorded on November 21, 2020)
The Psychic Function of Emotions with Michael Jawer
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
By Noah Hawley
April 20, 2026 (The Atlantic)
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Explore the May 2026 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.
In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.
From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism
On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.
So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and a comedian on board. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.
Alexandra Petri: The 10 things the Bezoses are almost certainly grateful for each morning
Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”
Recommended Reading
- The FBI Director Is MIASarah Fitzpatrick
- What I Saw Inside the Kennedy CenterJosef Palermo
- Ukraine Has Finally Given Up on TrumpPhillips Payson O’Brien
“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.
That’s how the weekend started. Here’s how it ended: My wife broke her wrist slipping on wet grass, and both children and I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. This is not a joke. One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two. Suffice it to say we have never been back to Campfire, nor have we ever been invited.
At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.
Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.
Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?
Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth.
Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post
Though we didn’t know it at the time, Bezos’s first marriage would be over a few weeks later. My defining impression of his wife that weekend was sadness, even though Bezos made a big show of performing the role of family man. In hindsight, it is that performance that sticks with me. The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.
Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
Adam Serwer: How America chose not to hold the powerful to account
This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.
Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.
Thomas Chatterton Williams: The very powerful men who think introspection is dumb
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.
Elizabeth Bruenig: The conservative attack on empathy
I finally met Bezos on the last day of Campfire, at lunch, after my wife had broken her wrist. I went over to thank him for having us, and he asked how our Campfire experience had been. I told him that it was great, but that unfortunately my wife had broken her wrist that morning when she slipped on the wet grass while kicking a ball with our 6-year-old son.
The night before, we’d all stood by the pool at the beach club watching a cadre of synchronized swimmers execute a flawless water routine. I had spoken with a famous novelist, who said, “I just don’t understand why I’m here.” A famous rock star was about to start an acoustic set. The famous chef had made paella. Somewhere deep under my skin, a brutal pox was beginning to form.
The next morning, my wife fell, and I found myself in a black SUV with a team of private-security contractors, who whisked us to the back entrance of a Santa Barbara emergency room, where she was seen and treated right away. We made it back in time to watch the Supreme Court justice Zoom in from Washington, D.C.
How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.
But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.
A few hours later, on the private plane home, a famous movie producer offered my wife a blanket. My children’s faces were covered in spots. Under my fingernails, red welts were beginning to rise.
The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.
“I’m finished,” yells Daniel Plainview, perched happily on the polished floor of his own celestial kingdom. Though he has just committed a crime, he has never felt so free.
This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Everything Is Free and Nothing Matters.”
About the Author
Noah Hawley is the creator of the FX series Fargo and Alien: Earth, and the author of the novel Anthem.
Politics Is Always Downstream of Sex
Jeff Schechtman 04/21/26 (whowhatwhy.org)
What Swalwell, Gonzales, Trump, and Epstein all share — and what Washington keeps pretending to forget about the nature of men in power.
Long before there were political consultants, opposition researchers, or 24-hour news cycles, writers and poets understood something essential about men in power: The higher they climb, the more exposed they become — not to their enemies, but to themselves.
It runs through Shakespeare’s kings undone not by their rivals but by their own nature — Antony losing an empire for Cleopatra, Macbeth’s ambition inseparable from Lady Macbeth’s hold on him. Through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where the man who destroys her life is not a villain but simply a powerful man who wanted what he wanted and never imagined the cost would be his to pay. Through the blues, where desire and ruin have always been understood as the same song. Through every novel about ambition that doubles, always, as a story about what ambition cannot contain.
The Greeks built an entire dramatic tradition around the idea that greatness and catastrophic vulnerability are not opposites. They are the same force, wearing different faces on different days.
We just don’t talk about it that way when it happens in Washington.
Last week, Eric Swalwell (D-CA) resigned from Congress after multiple women detailed experiences ranging from unwanted sexual advances to allegations of rape, ending both his seven-term congressional career and what had been a serious campaign for governor of California.
Tony Gonzales (R-TX), followed him out the door, having admitted to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide. Two men, two parties, one week, one ancient story.
The temptation is to frame this politically — another #MeToo moment, a bipartisan reckoning, a lesson about workplace power dynamics. And all of that is true, but none of it is really the point.
The point is something far older and far less comfortable: Men of a certain ambition carry within them a complexity about women that the whole architecture of modern political life is designed to suppress, but suppression is not the same as resolution. That complexity waits. It finds its moment. And when it does, it is rarely subtle.
We tell ourselves these stories are about weakness, hypocrisy, the abuse of power, the exploitation of vulnerable women by men who should know better. And they are. But what they are more fundamentally about is harder to say and harder still to fix, because it isn’t really about bad men behaving badly. It’s about the nature of men — specifically men in the particular hothouse of political ambition — and the way that nature doesn’t transform when you win the election or get the corner office. It intensifies.
The hunger that drove the ambition doesn’t dissolve once the ambition is satisfied. It looks for a new object. And in positions of power, the normal friction that keeps most men in most circumstances from acting on every impulse is simply… removed. The feedback loops go quiet. The word “no” gets said less often, and then less often still, until some men stop hearing it altogether.
This is not an excuse. It is a description of a mechanism.
What makes Jeffrey Epstein different — what makes him genuinely singular in the entire history of powerful men and their appetites — is that he saw this mechanism clearly and decided to build a business around it.
Not a criminal enterprise that happened to involve sex. A deliberate, sophisticated operation premised entirely on a single insight that no one before him had ever quite thought to monetize:
That the most powerful men in the world are, in the domain of desire, the most exploitable. That lust is the one lever that doesn’t care about your net worth or your security detail or your carefully managed public image.
But here is what has never quite been said about Epstein: He was, in his way, a genius. A dark and predatory one, but a genius nonetheless.
He understood the interior lives of ambitious men better than their therapists, their wives, their chiefs of staff — better, it seems, than the men understood themselves.
He grasped something these men only half-consciously believed: that desire was the spoils of their ambition. That they had worked and schemed and clawed their way to the top, and that this — this — was part of what they had earned. Maybe Trump said it best in the infamous Access Hollywood tape, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Most powerful men feel that pull and suppress it, or sublimate it, or simply live with it. Epstein saw the suppression and offered the alternative. He didn’t seduce these men with money or access or ideology. He gave them permission.
And in the process, with the precision of a venture capitalist and the patience of a spider, he extracted from them the two things they valued most: their power and their money. Nobody in recent history had ever thought to build that business. Nobody had ever seen it quite that clearly.
That is what makes Epstein not just a criminal but a case study in applied psychology at the highest level. If he had been a decade older and operating on the East Coast political circuit, Swalwell’s name would almost certainly be somewhere in those files. The profile fits that precisely.
The women in these stories are too often treated as variables — the accusers, the destabilizing forces, the October surprises. But they are something else entirely. They are the one feedback mechanism that exists completely outside the bubble. They cannot be managed, spun, or consolidated. When they speak — and they always eventually speak — they aren’t breaking a story so much as restoring a reality that power had temporarily suspended.
Don Draper, a fictional stand-in for the Swalwells and Weinsteins of the world, got away with it for a decade. He got away with it because the culture had constructed, with great care and considerable investment, a world in which the desires of powerful men were simply the weather — ambient, inevitable, not subject to comment or consequence.
That world is gone, though not without a fight, and not completely. Barack Obama held it together. George W. Bush did, too. Which tells us this isn’t inevitable — it is, to use the clinical term, a failure of integration. An inability to hold the full complexity of one’s own nature without needing to act it out.
Literature has always known this. Stendhal knew it. Fitzgerald knew it. Roth made a career out of it. The powerful man undone not by his enemies but by the part of himself he never quite managed to govern — that story is as old as storytelling itself.
Washington just keeps acting surprised.
- Jeff SchechtmanJeff Schechtman’s career spans movies, radio stations, and podcasts. After spending twenty-five years in the motion picture industry as a producer and executive, he immersed himself in journalism, radio, and, more recently, the world of podcasts. To date, he has conducted over ten thousand interviews with authors, journalists, and thought leaders. Since March 2015, he has produced almost 500 podcasts for WhoWhatWhy.
Hands-on healing
Caravaggio: Basket of Fruit (c. 1599)
Lao Tzu on waiting for right action
God Makes an Endorsement
Russ Baker 04/20/26 (whowhatwhy.org)
Hope he sticks around and performs some miracles — we’ll need one to clean up the toxic mess Trump has created.
On Saturday, I saw this headline and teaser:
Trump Will Participate in a Marathon Bible Reading
He will read a passage from the Old Testament that his Christian supporters cite as a call to national repentance and divine blessing.
As debate persists over Donald Trump’s appropriation of Jesus for political purposes and over his feud with the pope — and as Pete Hegseth continually invokes Bible quotes (even a fake one from a Tarantino movie) for his holy war — one thing remains unsaid: Religion itself profoundly influences nearly every aspect of our secular lives.
And its status continues to be untouchable.
The New York Times article about Trump’s participation in a weeklong bible reading series — which its organizer labeled “a national reading of God’s law” — was, well, polite and precise, befitting a high-quality news organ. It cites biblical scholars. And notes:
President Trump has a complicated relationship with the Bible. He has often called it his favorite book, has posed with it for photographers outside a church and has sold his own edition for $60. But he has also struggled to name a favorite passage or even pick a favorite Testament between the two.
In other words, the problem is not religion; it is that Trump may himself not be as religious as he would like others to believe.
I get that religion offers solace for many. But we pay a price for our unwillingness to challenge the unscientific bases of those beliefs, and for treating religion as, pardon the pun, a sacred cow.
We nonbelievers are nonetheless thrilled by a pope who stands up to Trump. We see Leo XIV as more of a politician or humanitarian than someone representing an actual religion and its insistence on being the “true way,” complete with ancient and totally unproven specific beliefs, practices, and rituals.
This kind of secular approach to religious figures is not unusual: People can take sides between the state of Israel and various Muslim countries while ignoring the long-held religious beliefs that lie behind much of the current mayhem.
Those who deplore the idea that, in ancient as well as modern times, Jews seized land occupied by others because “God gave this land to me,” need to be aware of how much more land Arabs have seized in the name of Islam. And central Asian Turkic peoples seized what once was Anatolia and surrounding regions for the same reason.
Politicians, public figures, and news organizations will never be frank about this, partly for fear of consequences, and because religious beliefs and language are simply too ingrained in our culture, from “in God we trust” and “so help you, God” to “OMG.” And that especially dangerous expression “thoughts and prayers,” which, for many people, seems to mean that God, not science or gun control or peacemaking, will save loved ones.
None of this is new, of course. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180 AD), in his Meditations, quoted his mentor Diognetus, who urged him “not to believe the claims of miracle-mongers and charlatans about incantations and the expulsion of demons and the like.”
Cynics know that little has changed in all these millennia when it comes to the appeal of such beliefs. Accordingly, there’s no shortage of political and business interests ready to manipulate religious language and imagery to promote paradoxically demonic policies — policies that threaten the survival of this country and the very conditions that make human life possible on Earth.
For instance, oil companies back politicians who will always blame the mysterious ways of God — not scientifically proven global warming — for major climate-driven catastrophes.
The section of the Bible Trump will read from, presumably without a hint of irony, urges that people “turn from their wicked ways,” after which God “will heal their land.” (One of the others participating in the bible-reading series is a well-known advocate of homeschooling, where one assumes children’s minds are not wickedly poisoned with information about environmental and other scientific matters.)
Until recently, the legacy media treated Trump’s “I’m the Second Coming” act as yet another “there he goes again” novelty. But Trump is not the first apparent nonbeliever to successfully embrace religion to win and keep power.
Years ago, I interviewed George W. Bush’s “faith adviser,” who told me how he had first tried to pitch the faith vote to Bush’s father, with mixed results, then hit pay dirt with the younger Bush — who fully embraced a public pronouncement of his own commitment to Jesus as a ticket to success. (This led to the creation of several unintentionally campy pictures of a pious-faced Bush and Jesus together, and some actually depicting Bush as Jesus, or Jesus as Bush.)
As the younger Bush and his team mapped out a possible path to political success, they struggled with W’s paltry resume and well-deserved reputation as a party boy. The clever solution was to turn his weakness into strength — through a religious epiphany, which served to wipe clean his slate of behavior from before he saw the light, and also to attract a giant, untapped constituency.
It worked like a charm, perhaps because getting people to believe anything when they’re already susceptible to “taking things on faith” is a light lift.
Fast-forward to Trump — another “playboy” with not a hint of religious practice in his pre-political life. Candidate Trump’s wild success with evangelicals, Catholics, and religious Jews can be considered one of the greatest huckster shows of all time. Sadly, the legacy media has had trouble accurately reporting on this travesty because of its long-standing reluctance to look too closely at the intersection of political power and traditional religion.
***
But things may be changing. The god-awful reality of Trump’s presidency is ever so cautiously being acknowledged by a legacy media and a half-complicit establishment that grievously let its guard down and helped create our current mess. The state of his mind, the relentless deceit, the world-class danger of this man with his finger on the nuclear button is starting to seep into the headlines. Here’s an example:
Trump tests loyalty of Christian supporters as erratic behavior escalates (The Washington Post)
Here and there, perhaps sensing that even Trump’s more cultish followers are backing away, onetime fellow travelers and bandwagon drumbeaters are standing up to be counted and to say, at long last, “Enough is enough.”
Another bit of hopeful news, not widely reported from what I can see, is the decision by the California Supreme Court to disbar John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers who led the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It was this initiative that spiraled into the January 6 US Capitol riot.
And here’s yet another sign that a major reset might be coming: The Wisconsin Supreme Court — considered pivotal to the national political equation because Wisconsin is an electoral swing state — as recently as 2020 had a conservative majority. Since then it has been steadily swinging way, way, over. Yet another liberal judicial candidate just won a seat, expanding the liberal majority from 4–3 to 5–2.
Pushing Back Against Corporations
Of course, Trump’s presidency has been a huge gift to the wealthy and the corporations they control. In addition to cutting taxes for the wealthiest, this administration has backed away from regulating monopoly behavior and other abuses of the “free competition economy” that conservatives like to extol.
Which is why it’s great news that a jury has ruled in favor of (mostly Democratic) state attorneys general in deciding that the concert firm Live Nation and its Ticketmaster unit were colluding to drive up event ticket prices to extortionate levels.
Here’s a quick reprise of the players and the action: Trump meddled in a case against the company brought by the Department of Justice under President Biden, resulting in a settlement that went easy on Live Nation.
This did not sit well with state prosecutors. And it’s in the states where the power to defend individual rights resides until this administration is in our rearview mirror.
Similarly, it is state officials who are challenging Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN. Federal agencies tasked with protecting consumers and guarding against anticompetitive monopolies are keeping hands off — reflecting the crony-capitalist allegiances of Trump himself, who loves how his tech billionaire friends, Larry Ellison and son David, are turning CBS, once a showcase of independent, hard-hitting journalism, into a Trump-friendly network.
Meanwhile, more than 3,000 Hollywood pros have signed an open letter protesting the Paramount deal as a threat to creative competition and jobs.
***
The assault on honest reporting and journalism’s defense of the public interest continues with an audacious effort backed by the billionaire Peter “Antichrist” Thiel to put news organizations before a “tribunal.”
Related: The Church of Silicon: Peter Thiel’s Gospel of Unfettered Power
The new development is called Objection, a platform offering, for a fee, to judge whether one should believe a piece of journalism. The staff will include ex-intelligence agents who will supposedly dig into the facts behind the story, which will then be submitted to an “AI jury” to give a virtual thumbs-up or -down.
Judicious use of anonymous sources, a necessary normal aspect of investigative journalism, especially during periods of intimidation, like now, would lower the trust score — unless journalists submit their source’s identity for the AI to assess. Riiiight.
Other tools of the public interest are under attack.
Ever heard of the Wayback Machine? It’s a website run by a nonprofit that saves snapshots of websites over time. It has incalculable practical and historical value. Anyone who has ever tried to see some webpage that is no longer findable by standard search methods knows what a treasure the WM is. Journalists, historical researchers, and ordinary citizens alike are huge fans. I am, and have had the pleasure of visiting the headquarters of the parent Internet Archive and taking its public tour, and getting to know the energetic, dedicated director of the Wayback Machine, Mark Graham.
Now, the Wayback Machine is threatened. A growing number of publishers, justifiably concerned about web crawling bots scraping and appropriating their content for use by AI, are blocking them — and this has hit the Wayback Machine’s crawlers too.
I don’t know the solution, but the Wayback Machine is a marvel of unsurpassed value to public discourse and must be allowed to continue functioning. I’m sure there is a way to protect intellectual property and block AI misappropriation while leaving the Wayback Machine free to perform its indispensable service.
RFK JR: We Told You So
Do you remember back when the legacy media treated the then-Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his views as fringe nonsense to be ignored, little more than a distraction and a laugh? I do! I was worried that this character — like Trump himself — would be dismissed at our considerable peril.
That’s why, in my columns, and at WhoWhatWhy, the independent news organization I founded, we took an early interest.
Related: RFK Jr.’s Panel of Health Hoaxers, Hucksters & Hustlers
Related: But Wait, Folks, There’s More: Anti-Vaxxers and Snake Oilers Are a Team
Related: Building Herd Immunity to Truth: More on RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vax Crusade
Month after month we hammered on the issue of RFK’s largely unfounded health claims, when he was nothing more than an irritant in Democratic primaries. Of course, now we all know how he parlayed his ill-informed rants on serious health issues into becoming the country’s health-policy czar.
This week, the dangerous mess he has created was the topic of congressional hearings. Ever an evasive character, RFK has been busy slip-sliding away from all kinds of assertions. For example, after persuading many parents not to vaccinate their children for measles — with fatal consequences — he now, as The New York Times described,
testified that the measles vaccine is safe and effective “for most people” and agreed it was safer than getting measles. Under questioning, he also allowed that the vaccine might have saved the lives of two unvaccinated children who died of measles in Texas earlier this year.
That Kennedy allowed the vaccine “might have saved two lives” isn’t much of an admission. So far, he has avoided any responsibility for the epidemic of measles raging across America. (This year alone, as of April 16: 1,748 cases.) When lawmakers try to get him to admit it, they don’t seem to know how to respond to his mindless evasions.
Like this excuse: “There’s a world epidemic,” as if the problem is so big he can’t be expected to solve it. No one who’s questioned him so far has pointed out that there’s a world epidemic for the same reason there’s one in the US — no vaccinations. And this world epidemic endangers children in the US — another good reason to get vaccinated!
It’s not like the disease can’t be prevented!
But this is a man who has tried to sell the idea that “nutrition and clean water, not vaccines” prevented measles in Samoa.
Kennedy’s concession that vaccines are “safe and effective for most” is not reassuring. Some suspect it was just for show.
Kennedy may be relying on his close ally Aaron Siri — a lawyer who makes a living suing vaccine manufacturers — to erode the idea that vaccines are safe with new “documentation” of vaccine injury that may be even less reliable than the discredited studies he’s cited in the past.
Siri is petitioning the Health Department to (1) add about 300 conditions to the table of injuries presumed eligible for compensation, and (2) sharply ease scrutiny of claims of injury.
These changes could make it much easier to document false claims of injury, create more lawsuits — and add to the dangerous vaccine hesitancy responsible for the current spread of disease.
The New York Times has suggested Kennedy will “revive his campaign to question the safety and effectiveness of the shots after the midterm elections.” The reaction of Kennedy’s lawyer to Trump’s new four-person team to lead the CDC, including two who support vaccination, offers a clue: Siri immediately attacked one of them, the conspicuously qualified Dr. Erica Schwartz. Siri said Schwartz “would likely be a disaster” and “lacks the basic ethics and morals to lead the CDC.”
Kennedy has turned into a liability for Trump, with high negatives, like — well, like almost all the people Trump appointed.
All that once glittered is revealed as fool’s gold.
SantaCon Actually Was a Con
Speaking of which, I note that SantaCon, the ultimate bro culture event and seasonal Christmas bar crawl, was a scam. Or at least the man behind it was a scammer, according to a federal indictment. He presented the specter of thousands of young drunk men (and women) staggering around Manhattan in Santa costumes as an opportunity to raise money for charity.
But, it is alleged, he ended up siphoning much of the proceeds for his personal use and a lavish lifestyle, featuring luxury vacations, Michelin-starred meals, and a high-end car. He spent $120,000 of the supposedly charitable funds on a fancy apartment, $100,000 at a Costa Rica resort (how do you even do that?), and dropped a bundle on renovating a lakefront property. On and on.
The SantaCon Con seems a perfect metaphor for Trump’s legacy: Find something that makes people feel good, sell them a myth, and scam them for personal ends. The main difference is that Mr. SantaCon might end up in prison, while our Supreme Court, in its wisdom, decided that virtually nothing Trump does can have consequences — for him.
- Russ Baker Russ Baker is Editor-in-Chief of WhoWhatWhy. He is an award-winning investigative journalist who specializes in exploring power dynamics behind major events.
Alan Watts on floating
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
~ Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled “philosophical entertainer”, known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Wikipedia
Born January 6, 1915, Chislehurst, United Kingdom
Died November 16, 1973 (age 58 years), Druid Heights
Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections
by Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield
April 13, 2026 (propublica.org)
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Reporting Highlights
- Safeguards Destroyed: In advance of this year’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election.
- Changing of Guard: At least 75 career staff are gone. Two dozen appointees, including many from the election denial movement, have been hired. Ten helped try to overturn the 2020 vote.
- Political Interference: Once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers, which they’ve already used to push forward unprecedented actions that critics say amount to partisan interference.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.
They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.
Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.
With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.
Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?
ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.
The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.Animation by Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski
Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.
At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.
What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.
Do you have information you can share about federal officials working on elections or any of the individuals in this article? Reporter Doug Bock Clark can be reached at doug.clark@propublica.org and on Signal at 678-243-0784. Reporter Jen Fifield can be reached at jen.fifield@propublica.org and on Signal at 480-476-0108. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.
Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms.
“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”
Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.
But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found.
ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.
Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr.
The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.
These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.
ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.
ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting.
The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.
“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”
Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.
A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls.
Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.
Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.
“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”Animation by Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski
The Dismantling
Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.
The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.
CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.
After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.
Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA.
Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas.
“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”
A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.
It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted.
The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes.
First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election.
A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”
However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.
“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”
The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.
Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)
Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics.
After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.
A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.
Continue reading Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections