Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption of which will lead to sickness, misery, and death. I’ve called him plainly incompetent, ignorant of how science works, and incapable of leading the agency in which he’s been put in charge.
But what if all of that is wrong and he’s just a grifting charlatan? I have to wonder if that is the case, reading about his public admiration for Mom’s Meals, a company that delivers cheap, ready-made meals for people on Medicaid and Medicare.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.
He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.
“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.
That whole “without additives” is doing a great deal of vague work for Kennedy. Look, as the saying goes, even a broken Kennedy is right twice a day, and his public and vocal crusade against ultra-processed foods is not without merit. He’s called such food “poison” in past weeks and, while he’s being a bit dramatic in saying so, he’s not wrong that American diets are generally trash and contribute to a bunch of health concerns. And, to the point, ultra-processed foods are a big part of the problem.
Which makes it more than a bit jarring to see him pimp this company that makes food which is, you guessed it, ultra-processed.
The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.
“It is perfectly possible to make meals like this with real foods and no ultra-processing additives but every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,” Nestle said. “What’s so sad is that they don’t have to be this way. Other companies are able to produce much better products, but of course they cost more.”
Now, to be clear, Mom’s Meals’ food products do not contain the artificial food coloring that Kennedy has also railed against. But that is a far cry from claiming that these meals don’t have any additives and aren’t processed foods. They absolutely are, though I expect Kennedy to play word games as to what “ultra-processed” means. It’s his way.
But the end result of all of this is we can believe one of two realities. Either Kennedy is a combination of so poor a communicator and so incompetent on matters of health to make all of this yet another blunder in his role at HHS…or he’s just completely full of shit and doesn’t actually care about any of this further than what it does for his own grasp on power and/or money.
Either way, well, it’s pretty freaking terrible and a flat-out lie to say this company makes the kind of food Kennedy himself has advocated for all these years.
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund and by our sponsor, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership. In our bonus chat Mike talks with DTSP Executive Director David Sullivan to talk about their new Safe Framework Specification, which is an official ISO standard (available for free download) which will help everyone better understand best practices and concepts around online trust & safety work.
The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.
ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.
Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.
Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.
The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after President Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.
In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.
“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”
In the past, when law enforcement sought IRS data to support its investigations, agencies would give the IRS the full legal name of the target, an address on file and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal inquiry. Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time, former IRS officials said.
Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, said the privacy laws allowing federal investigators to obtain taxpayer data have never “been read to open the door to the sharing of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tax records for a broad-based enforcement initiative.”
A spokesperson for the White House said the planned use of IRS data was legal and a means of fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of “illegal criminal aliens.”
Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.
The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.
“If this program is implemented in its current form, it’s extremely likely that incorrect addresses will be given to DHS and individuals will be wrongly targeted,” said an IRS engineer who examined the blueprints and who, like other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The dispute that ended in De Mello’s ouster was the culmination of months of pressure on the IRS to turn over massive amounts of data in ways that would redefine the relationship between the agency and law enforcement and reduce taxpayers’ privacy, records and interviews show.
In one meeting in late March between senior IRS and DHS officials, a top ICE official made a suggestion: Why doesn’t Homeland Security simply provide the name and state of its targets and have the IRS return the addresses of everyone who matches that criteria?
The IRS lawyers were stunned. They feared they could face criminal liability if they handed over the addresses of individuals who were not under a criminal investigation. The conversation and news of deeper collaboration with ICE so disturbed career staff that it led to a series of departures in late March and early April across the IRS’ legal, IT and privacy offices.
They were “pushing the boundaries of the law,” one official said. “Everyone at IRS felt the same way.”
The Blueprint
The technical blueprint obtained by ProPublica shows that engineers at the agency are preparing to give DHS what it wants: a system that enables massive automated data sharing. The goal is to launch the new system before the end of July, two people familiar with the matter said.
The DHS effort to obtain IRS data comes as top immigration enforcement leaders face escalating White House pressure to deport some 3,000 people per day, according to reports.
One federal agent tasked with assisting ICE on deportations said recent operations have been hamstrung by outdated addresses. Better information could dramatically speed up arrests. “Some of the leads that they were giving us were old,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “They’re like from two administrations ago.”
In early March, immigrants rights groups sued the IRS hoping to block the plan, arguing that the memorandum of understanding between DHS and the IRS is illegal. But a judge in early May ruled against them, saying the broader agreement complied with Section 6103, the existing law regulating IRS data sharing. That opened the door for engineers to begin building the system.
The judge did not address the technical blueprint, which didn’t exist at the time of the ruling. But the case is pending, which means the new system could still come under legal review.
Until now, little was known about the push and pull between the two agencies or the exact technical mechanics behind the arrangement.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy even within the IRS, with details of its development withheld from regular communications. Several IRS engineers and lawyers have avoided working on the project out of concerns about personal legal risk.
Asked about the new system, a spokesperson for IRS parent agency the Treasury Department said the memorandum of understanding, often called an MOU, “has been litigated and determined to be a lawful application of Section 6103, which provides for information sharing by the IRS in precise circumstances associated with law enforcement requests.”
At a time when Trump is making threats to deport not only undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens, the scope of information-sharing with the IRS could continue to grow, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and sources familiar with the matter: DHS has been looking for ways to expand the agreement that could allow Homeland Security officials to seek IRS data on Americans being investigated for various crimes.
Last month, an ICE attorney proposed updating the MOU to authorize new data requests on people “associated with criminal activities which may include United States citizens or lawful permanent residents,” according to a document seen by ProPublica. The status of this proposal is unclear. De Mello, at the time, rejected it and called for senior Treasury Department leadership to personally sign off on such a significant change.
The White House described DHS’ work with the IRS as a good-faith effort to identify and deport those who are living in the country illegally.
“ProPublica continues to degrade their already terrible reputation by suggesting we should turn a blind eye to criminal illegal aliens present in the United States for the sake of trying to collect tax payments from them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement after receiving questions about the blueprint from ProPublica.
She pointed to the April MOU as giving the government the authority to create the new system and added, “This isn’t a surveillance system. … It’s part of President Trump’s promise to carry out the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens — the promise that the American people elected him on and he is committed to fulfilling.”
In a separate statement, a senior DHS official also cited the court’s approval of the MOU, saying that it “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”
How the System Works
The new system would represent a sea change, allowing law enforcement to request enormous swaths of confidential data in bulk through an automated, computerized process.
The system, according to the blueprint and interviews with IRS engineers, would work like this:
First, DHS would send the IRS a spreadsheet containing the names and previous addresses of the people it’s targeting. The request would include the date of a final removal order, a relevant criminal statute ICE is using to investigate the individual, and the tax period for which information is sought. If DHS fails to include any of this information, the system would reject the request.
The system then attempts to match the information provided by the DHS to a specific taxpayer identification number, which is the primary method by which the IRS identifies an individual in its databases.
If the system makes a match, it accesses the individual’s associated tax file and pulls the address listed during the most recent tax period. Then the system would produce a new spreadsheet enriched with taxpayer data that contains DHS’ targets’ last known addresses. The spreadsheet would include a record of names rejected for lack of required information and names for which it could not make a match.
Tax and privacy experts say they worry about how such a powerful yet crude platform could make dangerous mistakes. Because the search starts with a name instead of a taxpayer identification number, it risks returning the address of an innocent person with the same name as or a similar address to that of one of ICE’s targets. The proposed system assumes the data provided by DHS is accurate and that each targeted individual is the subject of a valid criminal investigation. In effect, the IRS has no way to independently check the bases of these requests, experts told ProPublica.
In addition, the blueprint does not limit the amount of data that can be transferred or how often DHS can request it. The system could easily be expanded to acquire all the information the IRS holds on taxpayers, said technical experts and IRS engineers who reviewed the documents. By shifting a single parameter, the program could return more information than just a target’s address, said an engineer familiar with the plan, including employer and familial relationships.
Engineers based at IRS offices in Lanham, Maryland, and Dallas are developing the blueprint.
“Gone Back on Its Word”
For decades, the American government has encouraged everyone who makes an income in the U.S. to pay taxes — regardless of immigration status — with an implicit promise that their information would be protected. Now that same data may be used to locate and deport noncitizens.
“For years, the IRS has told immigrants that it only cares that they pay their taxes,” said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is seeking to block the data-sharing agreement in federal court. “By agreeing to share taxpayer data with ICE on a mass basis, the IRS has gone back on its word.”
The push to share IRS data with DHS emerged while Elon Musk’s DOGE reshaped the engineering staff of the IRS. Sam Corcos, a Silicon Valley startup founder with no government experience, pushed out more than 50 IRS engineers and restructured the agency’s engineering priorities while he was the senior DOGE official at the agency. He later became chief information officer at Treasury. He has also led a separate IRS effort to create a master database using products from Silicon Valley giant Palantir Technologies, enabling the government to link and search large swaths of data.
Corcos didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House said DOGE is not part of the DHS-IRS pact.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees the IRS, told ProPublica the system being built was ripe for abuse. It “would allow an outside agency unprecedented access to IRS records for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, opening the door to endless fishing expeditions,” he said.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the department’s internal watchdog, is already probing efforts by Trump and DOGEto obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, ProPublica reported in April.
The Trump administration continues to add government agencies to its deportation drive.
DOGE and DHS are also working to build a national citizenship database, NPR reported last month. The database links information from the Social Security Administration and the DHS, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing state and local election officials to verify U.S. citizenship.
And in May, a senior Treasury Department official directed 250 IRS criminal investigative agents to help deportation operations, a significant shift for two agencies that historically have had separate missions.
Even during the (relatively more sane) first Trump administration, it was clear there just weren’t enough dangerous criminals residing in this country illegally to back up Trump’s bloated, fact-free “invasion” claims. Statistics continually show migrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens while doing other useful things like paying taxes and providing an incredibly reliable workforce.
This time around, the pretense of ejecting dangerous criminals from our country was abandoned pretty quickly. While the government may occasionally claim someone being sent to a foreign gulag is one of the bad guys, for the most part our extrajudicial rendering program is largely based on bogus gang tie assumptions and the administration’s willingness to constantly violate constitutional rights until it’s finally forced to stop.
Trump’s budget bill adds another $30+ billion to ICE’s bottom line, hoping to ensure that the agency will finally be able to achieve the administration’s bigoted wet dream of 3,000 arrests per day. Numerous other federal agencies, including the DEA, US Marshals Service, ATF, and FBI, have been directed to prioritize assisting in immigration enforcement. And the Department of Homeland Security isn’t all that concerned about all the other crime it’s supposed to be keeping tabs on, as this lengthy, extremely harrowing report on the current state of ICE under Trump by Nick Miroff of The Atlantic points out.
At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”
Serious crimes are no longer worthy of ICE’s attention. Nor are they apparently worthy of the larger investigative unit operated by the DHS itself, which tends to handle more of the human trafficking and child exploitation cases. Along with rerouted agents from other federal law enforcement agencies, HSI is now just supplying warm bodies to help ICE reach its 3,000 arrests per day quota.
HSI agents have been told to shift their focus to civil immigration enforcement and assisting ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations], effectively relegating them to be junior partners in Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Some agents and officials told me they suspect HSI is paying a price for wanting to distance itself from immigration enforcement.
“Their personnel are being picked off the investigative squads, and there’s only so many people to go around,” another former ICE official told me. “There are national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed.”
This is all on top of existing problems that have been made worse by the administration’s focus on immigration enforcement. ICE has never been popular, but morale is falling off a cliff now that officers are expected to work 60-80 hours a week doing things like “chasing day workers across Home Deport parking lots.”
Officers are also seeing plenty of resistance from people who aren’t targets of their enforcement efforts, which has only encouraged more of them to cover up identifying markings, as well as their faces, when performing mass arrests of people who are, for the most part, working hard at their place of employment.
Injecting billions of dollars into ICE isn’t going to fix the morale problem. All it will do is give it bigger problems to deal with while presumably adding even more untrained officers to the mix, which just means the morale problem will spread to the new hires as soon as they realize what they’re in for. And while Trump may send out the occasional “THANK YOU!!!” via social media, this is the day-to-day reality for ICE officers as they try to meet the administration’s 3,000 arrests per day quota.
“No one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” the [ICE] official told me. “The answer is just to keep banging the field”—which is what ICE calls rank-and-file officers—“and tell the field they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.”
And, just like the DOJ, ICE is losing lawyers left and right as people who actually know the law find it’s no longer possible to retain their morality and ethical standards while working for the Trump administration.
Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney who resigned from ICE’s legal department last month, told me he left because the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats. “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd said. He told me that he saw frustration among ICE attorneys whose cases were dismissed just so officer teams could grab their clients in the hallways for fast-track deportations that pad the stats. […] The hallway arrests sent the message that the immigration courts were just a convenient place to handcuff people. Some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving,” he said.
Nothing about this makes America any safer. It definitely doesn’t make it any greater, no matter what the hats and t-shirts and loudmouthed bigots wearing them might say. The administration isn’t interested in fighting crime. It’s only interested in silencing dissent, implementing martial law, padding its mass deportation stats, and eliminating as many non-white people from this country as possible.
What the administration has going for it is the fact that the law enforcement business tends to self-select wannabe fascists and gives bigots legal cover for their racist actions. Anyone left at ICE who isn’t in it for the racism will be replaced by people who are there explicitly for the opportunity to oppress minorities. The administration’s blind hatred is leading the blindly hateful to a future only people who still bleach their hoods religiously every Sunday will appreciate. We’re living through a particularly ugly chapter in American history right now. Let’s hope this will just be another thing we learn from, rather than something that’s just setting itself up for perpetual reruns.
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump train. Yes, there are the big name folks who everyone knows about and who didn’t really surprise anyone—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Elon Musk (pre-fallout)—but the more troubling trend has been watching younger entrepreneurs and VCs listen to their podcasts, read their posts and books, and slowly nod along to the idea that democracy is holding back innovation.
The logic might seem compelling at first: regulations slow us down, politicians don’t understand tech, wouldn’t it be better if someone who “gets it” could just cut through all the bureaucratic nonsense? But this line of thinking leads directly to the neoreactionary conclusion that what we really need is a “tech-friendly” strongman to sweep away democratic institutions and let the smart people (spoiler: they mean themselves) run things.
It seems like it might be useful to point out how incredibly dangerous and counterproductive that utter nonsense is. The idea of a benevolent dictator to get past the nonsense is appealing for those who can’t think more than a step or two ahead and consider what happens next.
Look, I get it. You’re building something cool. You heard the stories some are telling of the Biden admin looking to regulate crypto or AI (not that any such regulations ever actually appeared) and you think “ugh, too heavy handed, just let me code.” And then you hear Trump promising to “cut red tape” and “unleash American innovation,” and you think: Finally, someone who gets it, someone who will stay out of my way.
But before you start crafting your “make coding great again” hat, let’s have a little chat about why embracing fascism is probably the worst possible business strategy for anyone actually trying to build something innovative.
I know, I know. “Fascism” sounds hyperbolic. You’re not goose-stepping around your WeWork space. You just want lower taxes and fewer forms to fill out. And trust me, I’ve spent 25 years calling out idiotic tech policy proposals by clueless politicians, so the idea of getting an administration that will “free up” tech sounds appealing.
But here’s the thing: there’s a reason this “tech-friendly dictator” fantasy has been bubbling up in VC circles and startup accelerators for years. It’s not just about cutting red tape—it’s about the fundamental belief that techbros like themselves shouldn’t have to deal with the messy compromises that democracy itself requires. They’d rather sweep away all those pesky democratic institutions and let the “smart people” (spoiler: they mean themselves) run things.
The basic pitch is seductive: democracy is messy, slow, and often staffed by people who don’t understand technology. Wouldn’t it be better to have someone in charge who just… gets it?
No. No, it would not.
The Dictator’s Innovation Trap
Here’s what the “just let tech bros run everything” crowd fundamentally misunderstands about how innovation actually works: It requires exactly the kind of chaotic, unpredictable, open ecosystem that authoritarianism systematically destroys.
Real innovation happens when companies have to compete on merit, not on who can kiss the leader’s ass most effectively. In a functioning democracy with actual rule of law, the best products have the opportunity to win. In an authoritarian system, the company that makes the dictator happy wins—and that’s it.
Think that sounds far-fetched? Look at how quickly Elon Musk’s companies started getting favorable treatment once he became Trump’s Number One donor. And then look at how quickly Trump turned on Elon and threatened to pull all the subsidies his businesses get from the federal government as punishment over Elon criticizing his budget plan. That’s not competition driving innovation—that’s cronyism driving mediocrity.
This isn’t theoretical. When political favor becomes more important than product quality, innovation dies. The companies that survive aren’t the ones building the best, most innovative products—they’re the ones best at navigating the whims of whoever’s in power.
The Brain Drain You’re Not Thinking About
Want to know what really kills innovation? Brain drain. And nothing drives brain drain like encroaching fascism.
And the brain drain has already started.
Foreign students are looking to study elsewhere rather than deal with visa uncertainty and hostile rhetoric. Many of America’s smartest researchers are being wooed to other countries that offer more stable funding and less political interference. International PhD students, postdocs, and visiting researchers—the people who often go on to start the most innovative companies—are increasingly choosing Canada, the UK, or other destinations over the US.
This isn’t just the H-1B visa holders that the Trump inner circle loves to demonize. It’s the entire global talent pool that has always seen America as the place where you could build something amazing without worrying about arbitrary political interference.
The United States became the global innovation leader in part because we attracted the best and brightest from around the world. They came here because we had something other countries didn’t: a stable, democratic system where merit mattered more than connections, where you could build something without worrying that tomorrow’s political winds might destroy everything you’ve worked for.
But that’s been trashed. In mere months.
History shows us what happens when countries drive away intellectual talent. When authoritarian regimes came to power in the past, they didn’t just drive out targeted groups—they drove out anyone who valued intellectual freedom and scientific integrity. The result? Countries like the United States got Einstein, Fermi, and a whole generation of brilliant minds who helped build the post-war economy.
You think the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world are going to want to move to a country run by a dictator? Even a supposedly “tech-friendly” one?
The Infrastructure You Take For Granted
You know what else makes innovation possible? Boring stuff like universities, research institutions, and a functioning legal system.
You know what authoritarian regimes love to do? Gut all of those things.
Think about where most breakthrough technologies actually come from. Not from some genius in a garage (though that’s a nice story). They come from decades of basic research funded by institutions that operate independently of political pressure. The internet you’re using to read this? That was DARPA. The GPS in your phone? Military research. The algorithms powering AI? University research.
Here’s how the ecosystem actually works: government funds basic research that has no obvious commercial application. Universities and research institutions build on that work, training graduate students who become the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs. Some of those students go on to start companies that turn basic research into products. Others stay in academia and continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Yes, eventually the private markets and companies take over the commercialization, but so much of the core infrastructure of innovation comes from elsewhere.
And none of this happens overnight. The internet took decades to go from ARPANET to the web. GPS took years of satellite launches and signal processing advances. The machine learning techniques powering today’s AI boom are built on decades of research in statistics, computer science, and neuroscience.
Fascists hate independent institutions. They see them as threats to their authority. So they defund them, politicize them, or just straight-up destroy them. And when they do, innovation dies—not immediately, but over the course of years as the pipeline of basic research dries up.
The Trust Problem
Here’s something else you might not have considered: innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, but institutional trust. People need to believe that contracts will be enforced, that property rights will be protected, that the rules won’t change arbitrarily based on the whims of whoever’s in charge.
Building a startup requires long-term thinking. You’re asking employees to bet their careers on your vision. You’re asking investors to put money into something that might not pay off for years. You’re asking customers to trust that your product will be supported and improved over time.
None of that works in an environment where the rules change based on political caprice.
You think venture capitalists are going to invest in your startup if they’re worried that next month’s political purge might decide that your industry is suddenly “unpatriotic”? You think customers are going to adopt your product if they’re concerned that using it might put them on some government enemies list? Biden may not have been the most tech friendly president, but he didn’t threaten to deport a tech CEO over a policy disagreement.
Authoritarian systems are fundamentally unpredictable. The rules change based on the leader’s mood, personal vendettas, or political needs. That’s the opposite of the stable, predictable environment that innovation requires. When political favor matters more than legal precedent, no one can plan for the future.
The Historical Precedent
Here’s the thing about fascism: it never ends well. Not for the countries that embrace it, not for the people who live under it, and definitely not for the entrepreneurs who think they can ride the tiger.
Every authoritarian regime in history has eventually turned on the business community that initially supported it. The oligarchs who think they can control the dictator always end up learning the hard way that the dictator controls them.
You think the tech bros who are currently sucking up to Trump are going to maintain their influence indefinitely? Just ask Elon Musk. One day you’re the world’s richest man and Trump’s “first buddy,” the next day you’re being publicly humiliated and threatened with the destruction of your business empire because you criticized his “one big beautiful bill” for being a disaster.
And that’s just the beginning. Historical patterns are clear: authoritarian leaders use business elites to consolidate power, then systematically eliminate them as independent actors. The German industrialists who bankrolled Hitler’s rise thought they could control him. The Russian oligarchs who backed Putin in the early days thought they could maintain their influence through personal relationships.
They were all wrong. Dictators don’t share power. They accumulate it. And when they’re done using you, they discard you—or worse.
The Choice
So here’s your choice: you can embrace the chaotic, messy, sometimes frustrating democratic system that has produced more innovation than any other system in human history. Or you can bet your company’s future on a dictator who eagerly promises to make everything simple and efficient mainly by ignoring the nuances and complexities of reality.
One of these has a track record of creating the richest, most innovative economy in human history. The other has a track record of destroying everything it touches—including those who support it early on.
Democracy isn’t perfect. It’s slow, it’s messy, it’s often staffed by people who don’t understand technology. But it’s also the only system that has consistently created the conditions for innovation to flourish: open competition, institutional independence, predictable rules, and the freedom to build something without worrying about political retaliation.
Fascism is really good at one thing: making everything worse.
If you’re really building something that matters, something that could change the world, you want that world to be one where merit matters more than loyalty, where competition drives progress, where the best ideas win regardless of who came up with them.
You want democracy. You just might not realize it yet.
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A company that used to at least pretend to be consumer-focused is now anything but. More recently, T-Mobile (just like Verizon) quickly folded to Trump administration demands that the company be more sexist and racist if the company wanted several pending mergers approved. And T-Mobile, as usual, was more than happy to coddle authoritarians in order to get what it wanted.
T-Mobile was looking for FCC and DOJ approval of two mergers, its acquisition of fiber-provider Lumos, and its merger with wireless provider U.S. Cellular. To grease both deals, T-Mobile General Counsel Mark Nelson made it clear he was more than happy to throw ethics in the trash in a recent FCC filing spotted by Ars Technica:
“As T-Mobile indicated earlier this year, we recognize that the legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI under federal law has changed and we remain fully committed to ensuring that T-Mobile does not have any policies or practices that enable invidious discrimination, whether in fulfillment of DEI or any other purpose. We have conducted a comprehensive review of T-Mobile’s policies, programs, and activities, and pursuant to this review, T-Mobile is ending its DEI-related policies as described below, not just in name, but in substance.”
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has consistently tried to (falsely) claim that any efforts to correct systemic racism or sexism are themselves inherently discriminatory against white people. Notice how eagerly Nelson is willing to parrot this sort of addle-brained dogshit white supremacist thinking.
The only Democrat left at the FCC, Anna Gomez, was correct to single out how pathetic T-Mobile has been in the Trump era:
“In yet another cynical bid to win FCC regulatory approval, T-Mobile is making a mockery of its professed commitment to eliminating discrimination, promoting fairness, and amplifying underrepresented voices. History will not be kind to this cowardly corporate capitulation.”
Of course, thanks to the rubber stamping of mindless consolidation during the Trump era, consumers have fewer choices than ever if they wanted to switch to a more ethical company. And thanks to the Trump destruction of consumer protection, regulators have less authority than ever to do anything about the increasingly bad behavior of large, unethical telecoms.
I’d like to say America will remember and T-Mobile executives will ultimately be held accountable for their lack of backbone by the public, press, and future administrations, but that’s clearly not how the United States works.
Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave me much pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alone we’ve witnessed an unprecedented wave of disruption across these platforms.
Government workers, locked out of their jobs, struggled to organize securely. Protestors, seeking to plan No Kings marches, wondered which app could be the most trusted. Inbound international travelers have been deleting their social apps for fear that immigration officers will search their phones. And during major disasters, like the tragic Texas floods and the LA fires, emergency responders and volunteers find their critical updates buried by algorithms that prioritize engagement over urgency. On a daily basis, countless online communities face arbitrary deplatforming, surveillance, and loss of their digital spaces without recourse or explanation.
These aren’t isolated incidents: they’re symptoms of a fundamental crisis in how we’ve allowed our digital communities to be governed. We’ve unwittingly accepted a system where massive corporations control the public sphere; algorithms optimize for advertising revenue rather than human connection, and we the people have no real agency over our digital existence.
We’ve Lost Our Way
I’ve spent decades building social technologies, including working at Odeo, the company that ultimately pivoted to become Twitter. There I was the social app’s first employee and de facto CTO until late 2006; and have since built numerous other community organizing platforms. I’ve watched with growing concern as our digital spaces have become increasingly toxic and hostile to genuine community needs. The promise of social media as we defined it in the early days—to connect and empower communities of people—has been subverted by a business model that treats human connection as a commodity to be monetized.
Today, if you run a Facebook Group with thousands of members, you have no real authority – your community exists at the whim of corporate policies you cannot influence. This is fundamentally at odds with how real-world communities have always operated. Your local gardening club, bowling league, or neighborhood association has democratic processes for leadership and decision-making. Why should our digital communities be any different?
It’s Time For a New Social Media Bill Of Digital Rights
I believe that the time has come for a new Social Media Bill of Digital Rights. Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections for our digital communities from corporate control and surveillance capitalism.
So what could such a Social Media Bill of Rights include?
The right to privacy & security: The ability to communicate and organize without fear of surveillance or exploitation.
The right to own and control your identity: People and their communities must own their digital identities, connections and data. And, as the owner of an account, you can exercise the right to be forgotten.
The right to choose and understand algorithms (transparency): Choosing the algorithms that shape your interactions: no more black box systems optimizing for engagement at the expense of community well-being.
The right to community self-governance: Crucially, communities of users need the right to self govern, setting their own rules for behavior which are contextually relevant to their community. (Note: this does not preclude developer governance.)
The right to full portability – the right to exit: The freedom to port your community in its entirety, to another app without losing your connections and content.
To determine whether these are the appropriate “Rights,” I’ve just launched a new podcast, Revolution.Social where I invite my guests, including the likes of Jack Dorsey, Cory Doctorow, Yoel Roth, Kara Swisher and Renee DiResta, to share their feedback and debate where we need to head next.
Architecting For A Better Future
The good news is that the technical foundations for a better future already exist through open protocols that work like the web itself – interconnected and controlled by no single entity.
The Fediverse, powered by ActivityPub, enables platforms like Mastodon to create interconnected communities free from corporate control.
Nostr provides a foundation for decentralized, encrypted communication that no one can shut down.
BlueSky is pioneering user choice in algorithms.
Signal demonstrates that private, secure communication is possible at scale.
Unlike the walled gardens of Meta, TikTok, and Twitter (now X), these open protocols allow communities to connect across platforms while maintaining control of their spaces. When you use email or browse the web, you don’t worry about which email provider or browser your friends use – it just works. Our social spaces should function the same way.
What’s missing is the bridge between these technical capabilities and the tools communities actually need to thrive. We need to move from closed, corporate platforms to open protocols that communities can shape and control. This isn’t just a technical challenge – it needs to become a social movement. We need to build systems that are co-designed with communities, that respect their autonomy, and that enable their authentic purposes.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as “rabble,” is an activist and technologist passionate about building commons-based social media apps that prioritize equity and sustainability.
