One goes into newslettering with such high hopes. “I’ll get it out on the regular,” you say, with the air of “I’m going to the gym every other day!” But, at least for me, pulling that off when there’s paying work to be done is, let’s say, a challenge.
So we’re lowering the bar. For now, this newsletter will be a final-Friday-of-the-month situation, and the bulk of it what we’re calling “Clearing the Cache,” or me sharing what I’ve read, reported, and so on this month that I find worth amplifying to you.
Senator Ted Cruz offered an illuminating peek into how legislation can get done in President Donald Trump’s Washington while speaking at Politico’s AI & Tech Summit. Cruz pointed to a Trump tweet (this is America, and we’re exercising our right to still call it that) on the importance of the federal government auctioning the 600 MHz spectrum. Should you think Trump woke up that morning and said, “Let’s post on 5G today!,” Cruz assures us that wasn’t the case. “There had been four months of vigorous lobbying at the White House; I had been at the White House over and over again trying to get that tweet to come out,” said the Texan. Here’s where things get strategic: “And so when my colleagues are saying, ‘we need all the exceptions’”—the details here aren’t super important; it’s enough to know Cruz didn’t want said exceptions—“I had a printed out copy of the tweet. I said, ‘That’s very interesting. The President of the United States disagrees with you.’”
Democrats are still attempting to figure out what to do about the fact that a lot of the fundraising emails and texts on the left are of the cut-and-paste the-sky-is-falling variety. Haley Bash of Donor Organizer Hub and Josh Nelson of Civic Shout offer an assessment, one month in, of ActBlue’s attempt to curb “exploitation” of their ubiquitous fundraising platform.
Here’s a deviation from the blandly generic donation request: David Hogg, March for Our Lives co-founder and until recently a DNC vice-chair, writes to say that “if anything ever happens to me…I want you to politicize the hell out of it. Immediately.”
The murder of Charlie Kirk served as a reminder of how much of mainstream American life is now shaped by cultural forces many Americans only lightly understand, from the oddball meme riffs said to be etched on the bullet casings of his murderer to the immense role “Charlie” played in the lives of many young people, unbeknownst to many of their parents. It echoes how National Security Archives director Tom Blanton has talked about government secrets as “dark matter,” or (in my words, not his), “information that, while invisible to the public, shapes the world around us.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s strategy in the age of Trump? Being a very online troll.
Semafor's Ben Smith presents “David Sacks’ rules for success in Trump’s Washington,” like having a popular podcast. (Trump back in July highlighted Sacks’ co-hosting of “All-In” as key to him getting hired as ‘AI & crypto czar’: “Everybody I knew saw that podcast.”) Presented with a robust piece of explanatory journalism, Sacks says he wonders where the catch is.
If you thought Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr sounded much like Trump re: the quieting of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” you’d be correct.
Elsewhere in things-Republicans-used-to-be-against, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky says he’s not all that comfortable with the federal government grabbing a share of Intel. “It’s always a mistake to say,” said Paul on CNBC, “‘all right, we’ll tolerate a little socialism.’”
The Washington Post has a look at how Palantir’s winning in Washington these days. As Trump put it this summer, “We buy a lot of things from Palantir.” (The chatter in the defense-tech startup world: how do you compete with Palantir when Palantir’s entering into “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” hallowed ground?)
The U.S. now has, per a presidential executive order that concludes “the Government has lagged behind in usability and aesthetics,” a “National Design Studio” and to head it a Chief Design Officer of the United States. The first CDOUS: Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia. Erie Meyer points out that this sounds much like what the U.S. Digital Service was charged with doing before it got eaten by DOGE. (For that matter, 18F.)
Gebbia explains that it was Democrats’ approach to immigration that made him gravitate to Trump. (Meanwhile, Airbnb other co-founder Brian Chesky’s cohooting with the Obama Foundation on scholarships.)
Former Facebook policy chief Nick Clegg, of floating chair fame, tells The Guardian he was surprised by the “alacrity” with which the Gebbias of the world moved to align with Trump. More broadly, Clegg, also a one-time deputy prime minister in the UK, offers an assessment of Silicon Valley leaders’ weltanschauung: “Far from thinking they’re lucky, they think they’re hard done by.”
Japan’s government has, at long last, rid itself of the floppy disk, reports Reuters’ Rocky Swift. (Should you be on the younger side of the age spectrum, here’s a bit of history on “the unassuming floppy.”)
For New York Magazine, Noah Shachtman has a look at some of the turbulence inside the Anti-Defamation League, including an episode involving Elon Musk that led to “confused ADL employees [blowing] up the organization’s Slack channels.”
The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka asks, “Why Are Liberals Returning to Elon Musk’s X?”
The Census Bureau is looking for approval to ease the collection of some details on American life through “direct digital data feeds.” (via Marci Harris)
The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, reports the Washington Post, “usually puts his phone in a box when he gets home and rarely answers it after hours.”
The New Yorker’s Zach Hefland has a little-told story of how that magazine came to embrace the rigorous checking of facts only after getting burned: “In 1927, The New Yorker published a Profile of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay that was, to a large extent, made up.” (An aside: Hefland’s piece notes that one early assignment for the New Yorker’s factcheckers was a profile of Time co-founder Henry Luce. Do consider spending a moment on the fascinating story of that magazine’s other co-founder.)
Many on the American political left are feeling less than warm and fuzzy towards established media brands.
The Wall Street Journal is hiring a “talent coach” to work with reporters on social media and the like.
Craig Newmark says he’s never really bought into the idea that his craigslist cut the knees out from under American journalism, Poynter reports. Sure, it’s played a role, says Newmark, but “blaming one small website I made at home for the collapse of an entire American industry feels a little silly to me.”
Though a federal judge opted against requiring Google to sell off Chrome and other far-reaching remedies, the Justice Department’s antitrust division declared the ruling a partial win.
A senior Justice Department official who, per reporting, was central to signing off on the merger of HP Enterprise and Juniper Network over the objections of the department’s antitrust division (and Laura Loomer) is, Axios’s Mike Allen reports, heading out.
In a speech at Georgetown, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Gail Slater says that this is “a time for carefully opening up economic opportunity, not vindictively doling out punishment.”
Elsewhere on the anti-monopoly front, civil-rights lawyer Michelle Jawando—priors: the U.S. Senate, the Center for American Progress, Google—is the new-ish president of the Omidyar Network, one of the driving forces behind recent years’ revival of antitrust enthusiasms.
The FTC is calling its $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon for $2.5 billion in its “dark patterns” case a historic win. Some advocates say it’s a sliver of what Amazon made from the practices, while others say, hey, it’s not nothing.
Former FTC Chair Lina Khan isn’t going anywhere, reports the New York Times’ David McCabe. Indeed, in a full-throated speech at a recent anti-monopoly conference in D.C., Khan warned of “a slow-rolling crisis of elite impunity in America today.”
Elsewhere, Khan has campaigned with New York City mayoral longshot-turned-good-bet Zohran Mamdani, who’s warning that the advent of dynamic pricing means that “most New Yorkers will be priced out” of tickets to the upcoming World Cup, while showing off his chest trap.
The Supreme Court has kicked the can on whether a president can fire FTC commissioners willy-nilly; it’ll hear the case in December.
Some in the legal field aren’t thrilled with the way the new edition of “The Bluebook” handles AI citations. One associate professor at the University of Louisville pronounces it “bonkers.”
Andrew Yang, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, tells the story of a CNN focus group finding that “Americans don’t like the future.”
Hoping that Americans do like paying less for cellphone data, Yang is starting Noble Mobile, “the only mobile plan that pays you to use your phone less.”
The Winklevoss brothers have of late mounted opposition to the idea of Brian Quintenz, the head of policy for Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto wing, taking over as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, after seemingly deciding he was part of the old way of doing business. It looks to be working. In parallel, the one remaining sitting CFTC commissioner is making plain that she’s quite pro-crypto (tweeting “CRYPTO SPRINT,” for example). All that comes as the CFTC plans a sit-down with the jurisdictionally competitive SEC to hash over the topic.
“Eric Trump wasn’t always a crypto bro. He says banks made him this way.“
The current incarnation of the CFTC, meanwhile, has opened the door to the prediction-market platform Polymarket operating legally in the United States once again. Bettors on the site give it a 95+ percent chance of coming back to the U.S. before the new year.
A deal over the future ownership of TikTok still “remains far from complete,” as the American Enterprise Institute’s Jack Landman Goldsmith argues that “the administration’s serial refusal to enforce the TikTok ban[is] blatantly unlawful.”
Chaotic Era takes a look inside the strategy that has resulted in Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna popping up on your podcast feed at a rate of about once a week. An aside: one possible reason we’re seeing politicians podcasting with abandon is that it’s fun in a job that isn’t always that.
Meanwhile, Kentucky congressman Tom Massie—with Khanna, at the moment one of Washington’s foremost odd couples—finds his own fun in farm tech. Here’s Massie’s “self propelled chicken tractor” — basically a “mobile playpen” for, yes, chickens. There’s even an app. Alas, no using it from the House floor, though. Massie says he has to be within 20 feet to connect, to make sure “no one can hack it.”
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.