Abolish the senses

Greetings all,

I’ll be honest, I’ve been struggling with how to get the newsletter going again in this already terrible new year. The president of Venezuela is sitting in a Brooklyn jail. The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post journalist. And of course Donald Trump has escalated ICE operations in Minnesota after an agent shot a suburban mother in the head, an action which the president condoned with a rationale that may as well have been AI-generated. ICE officers are now going “door to door” per JD Vance, asking for IDs, and brutalizing migrants and citizens alike. The president of the Minneapolis city council describes it as a military occupation.

The tech elite in Silicon Valley range from complicit to eager participants. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman was just revealed to be the single largest donor to Trump’s MAGA Inc. Super PAC, to which he gave $12.5 million. Second on the list was Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose firm has inked multiple deals with ICE. X owner Elon Musk has been rewarded for managing MAGA’s chief digital propaganda platform with another lucrative government contract. Musk himself began the new year by using the platform to spread white supremacist ideas, a trend more tech execs are embracing, and that’s helping to create the conditions for the federal invasion of an American city.

Maybe it’s the whiplash from making an earnest effort to take the holidays off and to attempt to “relax” and delete the social media apps from my phone and all that, and then returning to all this. (I can even isolate the precise moment the brief idyll was ruptured; I asked my wife, “When is your cousin coming over again?” and she replied, looking at a text, “He says we just kidnapped Maduro?”) Maybe it was because during said idyll an inchoate fantasy set in that maybe 2025 would be as bad as it’d get, that Trump might figure his shows of force and violence would suffice, and he’d confine himself to gaudy crypto grifts and self-dealing this year. Maybe it’s that after the US’s Maduro kidnapping, ICE’s killing of Renee Good, and the federal Minnesota occupation, all coming on the heels of last years’ abductions of foreign nationals, initial ICE deployments, and incursions into LA and Chicago, but it sure seems the ‘can it happen here’ question has already been definitively answered. It ...