You’ve likely seen that Mark Zuckerberg, newly re-branded as Donald Trump’s fluffy lap monkey, has announced that Facebook and Meta’s other properties are getting out of the content moderation business. They’ll move in the direction of “community notes,” semi-functional community moderation which Elon Musk pioneered at Twitter. What interested me much more was the Axios run-down of the news: “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are of one mind. The most powerful global information platforms should be governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.”

Who are we kidding here?

I’ve always been wary of the whole concept of “misinformation” in the context of corporate platform moderation. Not against precisely, but highly skeptical that you can actually come to such open and shut definitions at scale. But it’s all basically an impossible skein to untangle because of the unavoidable scourge of the platform monopolies themselves. These are private companies, not any kind of actual public square. Let them do whatever they want. Don’t do them the favor of granting the premise that their advertising and data platform is a public good. And yet the freedom to spin up untrammeled monopolies makes the conceit half true. There’s simply no extracting a “free speech” from these engines since they’re algorithms all the way down.

But again, who are we kidding here?

From TPM Reader JB …

Trump has promised to do a bunch of things on day 1. Why aren’t Democrats taking the worst of them and raising the cost of doing them? It is political malpractice. The easiest would be to say that Trump is going to pardon the cop killers of January 6. No deep thinking, no multi clause sentences,  no saying there was or wasn’t an insurrection, just that he is going to pardon the violent cop killers of January 6. Over and over. Let him split hairs. He can deny it. Then direct the press to the officers themselves.  That mob killed Capitol Hill police. Tell the press to go talk to the Capitol Hill police who were there on January 6. Then say he is anti-police. He is with the criminals. Over and over.

Next: Tulsi Gabbard loves Syrian dictators who gas their own people. This is who is going to keep us safe?

We don’t have to win everything, we just need to push back where he is soft. He is flooding the zone. We can do the same. Cop killers and dictators who gas people…those are his kind of people.

The group is one big eye roll.

Through the spiked Washington Post endorsement editorial to the recent spiked editorial cartoon, it’s been difficult to get a precise read on Jeff Bezos’s cozying up to Donald Trump. As I wrote back in late October, there are very rational reasons for Bezos to want to avoid being on Trump’s shit list. Above all else, Trump isn’t nice. Amazon is a phantasmagoria of anti-trust problems. Trump wouldn’t need to break a lot of norms to sic the Justice Department on it. Amazon is also a major, major federal contractor. Same applies there. There’s no right to government contracts. Then there’s something that doesn’t get discussed much. SpaceX now has a dominant hold on satellite deployment and owns and controls like half the operating satellites in near-Earth orbit. But Bezos’s BlueOrigin isn’t quite an also ran. It still has a shot at being a competitor to SpaceX and Bezos reportedly now focuses most of his energy there. He at least needs Trump’s friendship to have a shot at that.

In that context came news last night that Amazon has agreed to underwrite and license a documentary about the life of past and future First Lady Melania Trump.

The defeated often hearten themselves with the belief that the verdict of history will be on their side. The reality is that history seldom has a verdict. It’s not like a trial where an unchanging judgment is handed down. That whole concept is mostly wrongheaded, and when there is such a judgment it is always contingent, subject to perspectives of future people we can’t hope to understand.

Today we’re seeing some commemorate the January 6th, 2021 insurrection as a shameful chapter of the past while we see a more consequential replay of the formalization of the 2024 election which looks more like a present-day vindication. Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, resorted to chicanery and eventual violence to upend the results of that election and to overthrow the republic itself. He failed, managed to evade legal repercussions for his actions and is now returning to power as the result of a subsequent election. Those seeking to commemorate that day four years ago as a shameful chapter upon which we are now hoping to close the book seem to ignore that we are beginning a whole new book written by the author of that shameful chapter.

A better way to look at all of this is that we remain in an intense, sometimes violent and close to deadlocked struggle over the future of the country. It is no more done today or tomorrow than it was four years ago.

Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “purged” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

It’s some testament to our times that there was an immediate and big hunger among many people to find some way that Matthew Livelsberger’s suicide-cum-Cybertruck fireworks incident in Las Vegas was tied in some way to the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in New Orleans. The chances of that being the case now seem increasingly remote. I have yet to see any clear theory of what “message” Livelsberger was trying to send by torching his rented Cybertruck in front of a Trump building. But a pretty dark picture is emerging of the man himself, which provides some background for the ideation if not the “message” itself. Livelsberger appears to have been a hardcore Trump supporter and, in the description of at least one person who knew him, a chronic rage case who was abusive to multiple partners.

A small update on the Cybertruck incident in Vegas, since I discussed it in today’s Backchannel. The 37-year-old active-duty soldier in the vehicle apparently shot himself in the head moments before the car ignited. He was also, according to his uncle, a big Trump supporter. Needless to say (or I hope it’s needless to say), this makes the motive for this incident pretty hard to make sense of. Given the apparent suicide and other outlandish parts of what happened it seems obvious that mental health issues likely played some role. But this goes a bit beyond making bad decisions or having a general suicidal ideation. Even in the context of some distorted reasoning, what was the message? What was the point? I’ve seen a number of people propose that the dead soldier may have been angry about Trump’s new fealty to Musk. On its face this struck me as the kind of over-ornate theory you’d come up with if you’re spending too much time on social media and had too much time on your hands. But the truth is I haven’t been able to come up with any more plausible theory.

It’s always good to remember that people who rent a car, drive it from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas and then light the car on fire and shoot themselvs in the head probably aren’t thinking in very linear ways or ways that are going to make sense to the rest of us. But it’s still pretty hard to figure.

For years there’s been a running conversation in the United States about whether the country is heading towards a second Civil War. That conversation often stumbles on the fact that America’s profound divides today don’t line up on any clear regional lines, despite what the maps of presidential election results might seem to show. Divisions are at best intra-regional. So any kind of replay of the 1860s is highly unlikely. But of course plenty of civil wars either had no clear regional breakdown or at least don’t start with one — the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Syrian Civil War. Before going further I should note that as a general matter I’m a “no” on this question of “are we headed to a second American civil war?” But events yesterday and those of last month suggest the possibility of something more realistic and still ominous.

Let’s quickly review the details: yesterday in New Orleans we had what appears to be an ISIS-inspired lone wolf terrorist attack. The FBI is now discounting initial suspicions that others might be involved. Events like these happened with some frequency in the U.S. for a number of years. But there’s been some respite, more or less since the Pandemic. Then a Tesla Cybertruck exploded in front of a Trump building in Las Vegas. The driver was killed and the car appeared to be filled with high-powered fireworks and gas canisters. It’s still not clear what this incident was about. That’s not remotely how you’d build a car bomb if you wanted to injure anyone. But it certainly doesn’t seem like an accident either.

Sometimes I will write a post that somewhere midway through the writing starts to feel bloated and overwritten and then, in a pique of writerly nausea, I decide several sentences can and should — no, must, yuck! — do the work of a stable of paragraphs. This post began as one of those posts.

2024 was a deeply disappointing year. It capped two or three years that all had the feeling of playing out bad hands — a presidency defined by the jagged aftermath of COVID (a first-in-half-a-century inflation shock being the jaggedest), an increasingly frail president who couldn’t easily be replaced without doing even more damage than having him run for reelection. This doesn’t address decisions that should have been and could have been made differently. I focus on these because they were based on earlier decisions or events which were either right at the time or very difficult to avoid. Again, that steely but trapped feeling of playing out bad hands.

In 2025 we all face the consequences of those failures. But we are equally liberated from much of that history. Everybody is being dealt a new hand. We can make decisions differently, with more clarity, with less paralyzing concern over sunk costs. If there’s a message of the Biden years, it’s that there’s no simply going back to whatever we thought was the system that more or less worked before Trump arrived on the scene. You have to go forward on the basis of all we’ve seen over the last decade.

My takeaway is what I alluded to in this November piece about being the party of institutions in an era of distrust: Less reflexive protectiveness of institutions and norms and none for ones that can’t concretely justify their necessity in the future rather than the past. Enough valorizing process over results. This isn’t always obvious and doesn’t always come without real risks. But everything involves risk. Caution carries risks. The Trumpists control everything. They are the status quo. They were in many ways already the status quo but they are now in such a way that there is just no murkenizing or hiding it. All the billionaires have arrayed themselves on Trump’s side of the playground and said they’re on his team. We can see who is in charge and who’s powerful and who is the establishment. I find this liberating.

I wanted to flag this article to you. It’s a fascinating look at right-wing South Korean YouTubers and President Yoon’s recent attempt to impose martial law in the country, which ended with Yoon being impeached and removed from power. It matches with bits and pieces of what I’ve been able to pick up in the English language press in South Korea as well as from various commentators who write in English on social media.

One big takeaway is that South Korea is similarly awash in right-wing and left-wing YouTubers who have similarly either destabilized trust in traditional media or taken advantage of that lack of trust, depending on whether you’re on Team Chicken or Team Egg. The trajectory there seems more recent. A lot of it is over just the last two or three years, while in the U.S. these trends date back significantly further. But the most interesting detail is that this world seems to be a big part of the answer to a question that still looms over the whole attempted coup, which is: “what was President Yoon thinking?”

This isn’t the Cold War where you could either be fearing a communist takeover or exploit those fears as a justification for a coup. While South Korea’s democratic era only goes back to the late 1980s, it’s deeply entrenched. And while there was a protracted political crisis of sorts in the country, it really wasn’t one that anyone imagined leading to a replay of things that happened in the country in the 1960s of 1970s. And this isn’t some statement of naiveté: how the whole thing played out vindicates this perspective. The country’s reaction to the attempt can best be described as a widespread “What the fuck?” Like not even, “this won’t stand!” or “we’ll defend our democracy!”, though those were there too. The immediate reaction to Yoon’s move was as much bafflement as fear or anger. The whole thing was so crazy and out of left field that people struggled to understand what Yoon had even been thinking. That’s why the attempted coup played out as it did and why Yoon is currently out of power and looking at likely treason charges.