SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, CEO of Dell Technologies Michael Dell, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and co-founder of Google Sergey Brin attend the Golden Age of American Innovation Summit on October 8, 2026 in Washington, DC.(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” said one Democratic strategist.
American voters’ antipathy toward Big Tech companies has become a central theme of campaigns in the 2026 midterm elections, according to an analysis published by The Guardian on Thursday.
The Guardian noted that hundreds of midterm campaign ads attacking data centers have aired over the past two months, with both Republicans and Democrats accusing one another of being pawns of the artificial intelligence industry.
“And it’s not only data centers,” The Guardian added. “The public anxiety over AI and distaste for the billionaires developing it, as well as backlash over encroaching tech like surveillance cameras, has turned the tech industry into a ubiquitous villain this election cycle.”
Silicon Valley has become a punching bag for politicians even as Big Tech moguls have been throwing record sums of money to elect politicians sympathetic to their needs.
Super political action committees (PACs) “funded by tech billionaires are among the top spenders in this election cycle,” The Guardian explained. “Leading the Future, formed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has raised more than $75 million to back tech-friendly candidates. [SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk has sunk $366 million into Republican causes, more than he spent on the 2024 presidential election.”
Much of the Big Tech money has been going toward Republican candidates this cycle, even though the industry has traditionally had close ties with elected Democrats.
Texas Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico in recent days has been trying to turn Big Tech money being spent against him into an advantage, highlighting in particular the outsize role that Musk is playing funding the campaign of his Republican rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
After Musk on Wednesday used his platform X to declare that “there is something deeply wrong with Talarico,” the Texas Democrat quickly returned fire.
“There is something deeply wrong with a political system,” Talarico wrote, “that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US senator.”
A report published by The Atlantic on Monday examined how the tech industry’s embrace of President Donald Trump during his second term has given Democrats an incentive to pummel the industry, particularly when polls show a bipartisan hostility to AI data centers.
In fact, Democratic strategists told The Atlantic that data centers have proven to be a top wedge issue capable of getting normally loyal GOP voters to think twice before voting for a Republican candidate.
“Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Democratic strategist Rob Flaherty told The Atlantic. “They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time.”
Democratic strategists started pushing the party to take a more populist approach toward the tech industry when polling data “showed surprising concern about AI” even in traditionally conservative rural districts, The Atlantic reported.
Rishi Bharwani, US director of tech regulation advocacy group Reset Tech, said much has changed since Democrats under former President Barack Obama embraced the industry as a positive force for society.
“What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire,” said Bharwani, “and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing. These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety.”
Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him UpClimate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Ed Sheeran performs at Madison Square Garden on December 12, 2025, in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)
“The Ed Sheeran debacle will be seen as a turning point in pop culture complicity” with Israel, said one Palestinian-American writer, who described it as “a clear ‘South Africa moment.’”
Singer Ed Sheeran hoped to sidestep controversy by letting rapper Macklemore be removed from his tour over his pro-Palestine remarks. Instead, he’s sparked what one writer said could be a “turning point” for how pop culture engages on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
Sheeran responded to the backlash on Tuesday by claiming he was helpless to stop Macklemore’s ouster, which followed the intervention of the pro-Israel New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who rallied other NFL venue owners to bar Sheeran’s Loop Tour if the “Thrift Shop” rapper continued to perform.
Pro-Israel groups petitioned for Macklemore to be removed from the tour after a performance earlier this month in which he said, “Free Palestine,” and performed his song “Hind’s Hall.” The song refers to anti-Israel protests at Columbia University in 2024 and is dedicated to the 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli forces. She was one of more than 20,000 children who have been killed as part of Israel’s military campaign there, according to a UN commission.
But the other four openers said they would not abide what they viewed as elites’ political censorship of an artist speaking out against what humanrights groups have described as a genocide in Gaza and an occupation of the West Bank that is considered illegal under international law.
Each one of the artists announced on Tuesday that they would no longer tour with Sheeran.
🇵🇸 All of Ed Sheeran’s scheduled supporting acts have quit his Loop tour after Macklemore was removed for declaring “Free Palestine” and condemning Israel’s genocide during two MetLife Stadium shows.
“Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed,” said the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Finneas, who has vocally supported the plight of Palestinians for several years. “I stand with Palestine and its people.”
The Irish singer Aaron Rowe likewise withdrew from his upcoming shows with Sheeran, though he acknowledged he did not “take the decision lightly.”
“Ed has been a friend to me and has changed my life. I could never thank him enough for this,” Rowe wrote on Instagram. “But as Irish people, we know all too well about genocide, forced famine, and violent occupation.”
“I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children,” he continued. “I would lose all respect for myself to carry on as normal.”
The Danish pop band Lukas Graham also dropped from the tour, with frontman Lukas Forchhammer writing that artists “should be able to speak about war, about civilians being killed, about children who deserve to grow up. Wherever they live. Whatever flag flies over them.”
Forchhammer addressed Kraft, a multibillionaire, who gloated after the fact about having Macklemore blackballed and denounced his expressions of support for Palestinians as “hate speech.”
“Money doesn’t give you the right to own the conversation,” Forchhammer wrote. “Nobody’s bank balance should decide who gets to speak or which suffering we’re allowed to acknowledge.”
The Irish folk group Beoga—which helped to found the Irish Artist for Palestine Movement—was even more direct, calling out Kraft’s extensive history of donating to pro-Israel groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has spent over $100 million attempting to influence the current election cycle, and supporting efforts to punish those who boycott Israeli products.
“It’s important that everyone knows that the real enemy is the Zionist lobby. They have worked tirelessly to silence artists who want to speak freely about a genocide happening before our eyes, for fear of retribution,” Beoga wrote. “Research how much Robert Kraft has done to fight the [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] (BDS) movement. That will give you a sense of what we’ve all been up against.”
“Up the workers. Free Palestine,” the group’s message concluded.
The exodus of Sheeran’s openers came as momentum built behind a “boycott” of his music spearheaded by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a group based in Ramallah in the West Bank, that helped to cofound the BDS movement.
The group called on Sheeran to “cancel his now compromised US tour” and said until then, artists, audience, and crew members should “boycott it.”
🗣️ Rep. AOC tells @hicharliecotton she is boycotting Ed Sheeran because she says he's complicit in Robert Kraft and other stadium owners' efforts to silence Macklemore. pic.twitter.com/zuISc3zaFs
In response to Sheeran’s explanation that he prefers not to publicly take sides on controversial political issues despite having opinions, the group noted his estimated net worth of more than $500 million and his massive platform as one of the world’s most recognized musicians.
“As South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,’” the group said. “Sheeran had an opportunity to take a stand in solidarity with Palestinians, like millions of other British and Irish citizens have done, and refuse to cave to the pressure… He has so far failed to meet this ethical duty. But it is not too late to reverse course.”
Some Western politicians have joined the backlash and amplified calls for a boycott.
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), considered a likely presidential candidate in 2028, told a reporter she’d be changing the radio station if Ed Sheeran’s music were to come on.
“When you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it’s become clear it’s not just about one music artist or two music artists,” AOC said. “This is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza.”
“But it doesn’t stop there,” she continued. “It could be speaking out about AI. It could be speaking out about any issue, that you can now just get a handful of stadium owners to ensure that an entire person’s career can be jeopardized if they speak out about any issue.”
Zarah Sultana, a member of the UK Parliament and co-founder of the left-wing Your Party, added that the artists who left Sheeran’s tour are “on the right side of history.”
“At this rate, Ed Sheeran is going to end up with Boy George opening for him,” she joked on social media, referring to the singer who released a song this summer in support of Israel’s assault on Gaza. “No one deserves to be subjected to that.”
Kehlani commented on Macklemore’s post. She experienced the same form of cancellation for her support of Palestinian rights. Julie Menin and Ritchie Torres pressured Eric Adams to cancel her concert in Central Park. pic.twitter.com/6lnHkTLsP1
Backlash against Sheeran has expanded across the entertainment industry as well, with performers including the children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel and popular musicians Kehlani, Tones and I, Zara Larsson, PinkPantheress, and others rallying in support of Macklemore.
And as the music news site Consequence of Sound reported, even some of Sheeran’s hardcore fans are revolting. Three prominent Sheeran fan accounts on X, which boast nearly 50,000 followers put together, spoke in solidarity with Macklemore and encouraged Sheeran to use his platform to take a stand, with some vowing to stop covering his tour until he does.
“We hope that Ed can… reflect on everything that happened and understand that, in the face of certain injustices, remaining silent or trying not to choose a side is also a stance,” wrote the Brazilian account @EdSheeranBrCom, which has more than 45,000 followers.
Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American journalist who co-founded The Electronic Intifada, said in a social media post that he believed that “the Ed Sheeran debacle will be seen as a turning point in pop culture complicity” with Israel, which has seen public support in the US crater since 2023, to the point where Americans, especially younger ones, now say they sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.
Likening it to the massive cultural boycott movement against apartheid during the 1980s, Abunimah said the cultural revolt against Sheeran was “a clear ‘South Africa moment.’”
Then-US President-elect Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Under pressure from companies owned by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the Trump administration announced this week that it will waive what it called “unnecessary environmental laws and regulations” in order to expedite the approval of commercial rocket launches.
The US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is proposing to waive numerous environmental review requirements and related federal laws that currently apply to commercial space launches, citing legal authority Congress granted to the secretary of transportation.
The proposed changes—on which the public has 30 days to comment—would make it much faster and easier for space profiteers to get permission to launch rockets or operate commercial spaceports in the United States by allowing the FAA to waive part or all of over a dozen laws and rules, including National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
“America won the first space race, and we can do it again—but only if we get government red tape out of the way,” US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Tuesday. “That’s why President [Donald] Trump has charged USDOT with unlocking the final frontier and reestablishing the United States’ dominance in space.”
Trump’s FAA announced today that it intends to exempt #space launches and spacecraft reentries from complying with environmental laws like the #EndangeredSpeciesAct. This will put untold species directly in harm’s way.You can be sure we’ll fight this obscene giveaway to special interests 🚀🚀
The USDOT said that other federal agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or the US military, may still be required to conduct environmental reviews under the law for launches on some federal property.
The proposal follows Trump’s August 2025 executive order, “Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry,” which critics charge was issued to benefit Musk, the world’s richest person, and his company SpaceX, which is seeking to dramatically increase launches and landings and has suffered a series of rocket explosions. Trump has boosted other companies—including X and Tesla—led by Musk, who served for a period last year as de facto head of the president’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Opponents warn that, if approved, the proposed changes mean that the FAA would generally no longer require environmental studies or consultations before issuing commercial space licenses.
“NASA has conducted space launches for decades in a responsible way, but now Trump wants to gut even the most basic environmental safeguards to enrich some of the world’s wealthiest people,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “We’ve seen real environmental damage from the exploding rocket toys of the superrich. You can be damn sure we’ll fight this obscene giveaway to special interests.”
In 2024, SpaceX was punished with a paltry $150,000 in fines for violating the Clean Water Act after it discharged tens of thousands of gallons of industrial waste from a launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas.
CBD and other green and Indigenous groups last month sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service in a bid to stop the Trump administration from handing over 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas to SpaceX in exchange for 683 acres elsewhere.
On Wednesday, CNBC revealed that six US lawmakers from both major parties—including five who sit on committees that regulate SpaceX—had or have family investments in the company, raising concerns over apparent conflicts of interest.
In addition to environmental concerns, Trump has also come under fire for militarizing space in contravention of the Outer Space Treaty—which the US has ratified—by launching the Space Force as an official service branch during his first term.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
It’s been an eventful year since Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Adam O’Neal for the prestigious job of Post Opinions editor. O’Neal was an unusual hire, a 33-year-old with little by way of managerial experience. But O’Neal had a redeeming quality: He was ready to shill for Bezos, and the man Bezos has been desperately wooing, President Donald Trump.
It’s remarkable how far Bezos has come since 2013, when he said he purchased the Post from the Graham family out of a sense of civic duty.
Bezos was still singing a similar tune nearly midway through Trump’s first term, telling Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner (4/28/18), “I would be humiliated to interfere” with the Post’s coverage. “I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red…. It would feel icky; it would feel gross.”
But days before the 2024 election, with Trump looking like he might return to the White House, Bezos apparently got over his queasiness and personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). “Trump was thrilled, advisers said, and later thanked Bezos,” the Wall Street Journal (7/2/26) reported.
Bezos followed up by declaring that Post Opinions would now promote “personal liberties and free markets,” while “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Coming a month into Trump’s second term, this came across as another gift to the president (FAIR.org, 2/28/25).
‘Unapologetically patriotic’
When Texas did a mid-census gerrymander in 2025, the Washington Post (8/20/25) urged Democrats to “hold the apocalyptic warnings about the end of democracy.” When Virginia followed suit in 2026, the Post‘s message (4/21/26) to Democrats was ” spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms.”
To lead the newly oriented Opinions page, Bezos tapped O’Neal, who had been a correspondent for the Economist, editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and executive editor at the conservative Dispatch for just one year.
In that last role—apparently O’Neal’s only newsroom managerial experience—he quickly alienated the Dispatch staff. “He was a competent editor who had no idea how to talk to another human being,” a former associate of O’Neal’s told Status (7/18/25):
He was tough on reporters, sure, but that’s common in newsrooms. He just couldn’t express even the most minor thing without being abrasive, hostile or raising his voice.
After being named to his post in June 2025, O’Neal declared that Post Opinions would be “unapologetically patriotic” and “communicate with optimism about this country.” This echoed Bezos, who declared a month into Trump’s second term, “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so.” Bezos was, of course, echoing Trump’s “America first” rhetoric.
O’Neal has demonstrated his patriotism by overseeing an editorial page that has backed Trump in destroying the East Wing of the White House (10/25/25), kidnapping the Venezuelan president (“one of the boldest moves a president has made in years”—1/3/26), militarily taking over DC (8/11/25; FAIR.org, 8/14/25), and unprecedented gerrymandering (8/20/25). (When Democrats responded in kind, the Post decried the “power grab”—4/21/26).
The Post’s pro-Trump boosterism under O’Neal has been so over the top, wrote Chris Lehmann (TheNation, 2/4/26), it’d “be a stretch for Pravda to pull off.”
“I try to avoid reading what the opinions section publishes,” a current Post staffer told Status (5/10/26). “I can’t tell if some of these arguments are being made in good faith or not. Sometimes it just seems like rage bait.”
‘Being reconciled is not enough’
Former Washington Post media writer Paul Farhi (Washingtonian, 2/9/26) described Bezos’ layoffs as “disfiguring…with whole sections and departments—sports, books, staff photography—wiped away, and devastating cuts inflicted on its Metro section and foreign bureaus.”
While O’Neal’s predecessor, David Shipley, did everything Bezos could have asked for—spiking the Post’s Harris endorsement and a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech moguls as Trump supplicants (FAIR.org, 1/7/25)—he did it without zeal, which Bezos found intolerable. “I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos wrote, in explaining Shipley’s February 2025 resignation.
Shipley had voiced concern over the direction Bezos was taking the Post, warning the billionaire that spiking the Harris endorsement days before the election and yanking Opinions rightward could turn off subscribers. “I don’t care,” Bezos replied (New York Times, 3/14/26). (Shipley proved correct; Bezos’ interventions led to over 375,000 Post readers canceling their subscriptions—NPR, 1/30/26.)
Replacing Shipley, O’Neal wasted little time in transforming Opinions’ editorial outlook, and its personnel. In his first email to the Opinions desk, O’Neal encouraged his colleagues to get with the program or quit, mimicking Bezos’ message to Shipley. “Simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” O’Neal wrote. “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”
The paper’s last full-time Black Opinions columnist, Karen Attiah, was fired in September 2025 (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; FAIR.org, 9/23/25). (Theodore R. Johnson of New America writes roughly once a week as a contributing columnist, but is not on staff.)
Jeff Bezos (CNBC, 5/20/26): “The [Washington] Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet.” Bezos could cover the Post‘s annual losses by spending 0.04% of his wealth—the equivalent of a typical US household spending $77 a year to maintain a fishtank. Bezos hollowed the Post out further in February when he laid off nearly half of the newsroom, in what “may have been the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation” (Washingtonian, 2/9/26).
Publicly, Bezos claimed he was doing this for the long-term viability of the paper. To be relevant, the Post has to be a “profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin (CNBC, 5/20/26). Otherwise, “it would be like poetry without rhyming.”
Privately, however, Bezos told Trump that Post employees “are terrible…. They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book Regime Change.
To make the Post more like his other companies, Bezos needed “hell yes” management, like Adam O’Neal (and former publisher Will Lewis).
O’Neal, in turn, needed fellow travelers, and seems to have hired exclusively MAGA-friendly columnists. According to media critic Adam Johnson (Real News Network, 5/22/26), the Post
purged its opinion page of its actually popular writers and replaced them with charmless Economist and Wall Street Journal also-rans so they can spew libertarian cliches [and] tedious anti-woke screeds.
‘A whole bunch of incredible miracles’
Jeff Bezos (Financial Times, 6/11/26): “Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plow, and we all got wealthier.” Actually, the invention of agriculture impoverished most people, resulting in humans losing 5–6 inches of height due to malnutrition (Discover, 5/87).
O’Neal’s fealty to Bezos is most blatant in Opinions’ approach to artificial intelligence.
“All of the things that I work on today have something to do with AI,” Bezos told the Financial Times (6/11/26). “We’re in the middle of multiple golden ages right now, certainly with AI,” he continued, sounding every bit the snake oil salesman. “I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of incredible miracles unfold here in the next decade.”
And Bezos is banking on these miracles to expand his empire on earth and in space. Despite being worth a quarter-trillion dollars, Bezos is presently scouring the globe to raise $100 billion for a new fund that plans to buy companies in industrial sectors and improve them using AI (Forbes, 3/19/26). Bezos’ latest effort aligns neatly with his new role as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a low-profile AI company that’s raised $18 billion in funding (Morning Brew, 6/12/26).
Meanwhile, Amazon—the company Bezos founded, where he remains the largest shareholder and executive chair—“recently placed a series of staggeringly expensive bets on artificial intelligence, audacious even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s ongoing trillion-dollar AI bacchanalia,” Bloomberg reported (5/14/26).
With so much on the line, Bezos has little patience for doomsayers who fear AI will cause mass job loss—the very thing Wall Street is salivating over. Sure, AI will be “shrinking the number of people needed by 10x,” Bezos told the Wall Street Journal (6/11/26). But the technology will in fact create “more than 10x” as many jobs, he said. The suggestion seems to be that more than 90% of us will soon be in hitherto unimagined job categories made possible by artificial intelligence. (Bezos’ fellow tech titans recently started following his lead and saying similar things about AI job losses.)
Despite Bezos’ rosy outlook, “the public isn’t so reassured,” the Journal reported (6/13/26) two days later, citing a Pew Research Center survey from March. “Only 17% of Americans say AI will have an overall positive effect on the US over the next 20 years.”
And the data centers needed to power AI fare little better. “Americans have changed their minds about data centers. Decisively,” reported the outlet Heatmap (6/2/26), which conducted a recent poll. “At least seven in 10 Americans would now oppose a data center being built near their home…a record low.”
Opposition to data centers—and their insatiable demand for power and water—has become “The Most Bipartisan Issue Since Beer,” according to a New York Times headline (5/1/26).
‘Data centers don’t deserve so much hate’
Billionaire-owned paper warns that blocking data centers will only benefit billionaires. (Original headline: “Halting Data Center Construction Will Entrench Inequality”—Washington Post, 3/24/26.)
With the American people on one side of the AI divide, and Bezos and his fellow tech oligarchs on the other, O’Neal has rushed to his boss’s rescue (FAIR.org, 11/20/25). Here are some recent Opinions headlines (a couple have been subsequently altered):
“Halting Data Center Construction Will Entrench Inequality” (3/24/26)
“High Energy Bills? Blame the Trial Lawyers” (4/24/26)
“Blocking the Construction of Data Centers Is a National Security Risk” (5/28/26)
“AI Backlash Threatens to Hold Kids Back” (6/21/22)
“AI Is Sparking a Boom in Blue-Collar Jobs…” (6/22/26)
Beyond the dutiful headlines themselves, the editorials also fail to disclose Bezos’ AI ties—which is not unusual. “What the Post’s data-center cheerleading only intermittently mentions is its owner’s vested interest in the topic,” noted Paul Farhi (Washingtonian, 6/23/26), the Post’s former media reporter. “I was unable to find a single editorial or opinion column opposing [AI data centers’] construction over the past six months.”
One of O’Neal’s top deputies, James Hohmann, took things a step further (while also failing to note Bezos’ ties to AI). Hosting an episode (5/26/26) of Opinions’ new flagship podcast, Make It Make Sense—headlined “Why Data Centers Don’t Deserve So Much Hate”—Hohmann “described climate activists as a ‘cult’ and argued that the media is ‘guilty’ of fueling ‘hysteria’ over climate change,” Status (6/7/26) summarized. It’s a jarring listen; like the keys to a once-storied newspaper have been turned over to the manosphere.
Even as Bezos hollows out the rest of the Post, money is flowing to Make It Make Sense, which has a well-appointed new studio. So far, however, “the investment has produced an astonishingly small audience,” Status reported (5/11/26). “It does feel like this is just for an audience of one,” a former Post staffer told the outlet.
Bernie Sanders, ‘leading Luddite’
The Washington Post (3/25/26) calls Sen. Bernie Sanders “part of the lunatic fringe” because he wants “safeguards” on a technology whose developers routinely warn “could end humanity” (Nature, 4/21/26).
As grassroots fights against AI data centers spring up from coast to coast, opposition in the Senate is led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who introduced a bill to place a two-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers.
Already a bête noire of the Post (FAIR.org, 3/8/16), Sanders’s critique of data centers has led to a renewed thrashing. In a March editorial (3/25/26) headlined “Bernie Sanders Doubles Down on His Dumbest Idea,” the Post placed Sanders at “the lunatic fringe” of society for “throwing sand into the gears of progress.” The editorial also called Sanders “the leading Luddite of the 2020s.”
Two weeks later, the Post (4/8/26) returned to the “L” word, this time in an editorial that didn’t mention Sanders, but did associate opposition to data centers with domestic terrorism:
The mob-like movement against data centers that’s been gaining traction across the country took a dark turn this week. Indianapolis Councilor Ron Gibson (D), who supports a project to build such a facility in his district, woke up early Monday to the sound of 13 gunshots fired at his home. The gunman left a note on the lawmaker’s doorstep: “NO DATA CENTERS.”
No one was injured, but the incident illustrates how opposition to artificial intelligence can metastasize into an irrational frenzy. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that deranged Luddites turn to violence to fight the advancement of frontier technology.
Later that month, the Post’s editorial page was back to attacking Sanders. Under a scowling picture of the senator, a Post editorial (4/30/26) charged that Sanders
is as naive now as he was during the Cold War. Rarely, if ever, has the socialist met an enemy of the United States who he doesn’t think he can partner with to advance his agenda. The same impulse that led Sanders to cozy up to the Soviets, the Sandinistas and Fidel Castro in the 1980s was on display again Wednesday night at the Capitol as he invited two Chinese academics to urge Americans to slow-roll our pursuit of artificial intelligence.
“Of course that’s what Beijing wants Washington to do,” the Post continued, in a brazen attempt to paint skepticism of AI data centers—a view held by most Americans—as anti-American.
The Post’s inflammatory editorial mentioned neither Bezos or Amazon, per usual.
The billionaire project
“It’s remarkable how brazen the paper is about shilling for the financial interests of its owner,” writes Nathan Robinson (The Nation, 4/21/26) . “Some of these headlines might as well read ‘Don’t Tax Jeff Bezos More,’ ‘Don’t Let Unions Threaten Jeff Bezos’ Control Over His Workers,’ ‘Don’t Stop Jeff Bezos From Building Data Centers in Your Town.’”
It’s not just Bezos’ financial interests that are advanced by O’Neal’s Opinions page, but also Bezos’ and his fellow billionaires’ broader ideological project (Real News Network, 5/22/26).
Under O’Neal’s watch, no tax on the wealthy seems to go uncensured. “The Post has weighed in on tax policy everywhere from Switzerland to Seattle, lambasting every attempt to reduce the grotesque inequality of our times,” Nathan Robinson wrote in a detailed review of the Post Opinions page for The Nation (4/21/26):
Almost no tax on the rich around the world escapes the paper’s notice—one might wonder why capital gains taxes in the Netherlands are a priority for a DC paper.
And no social program appears too small to earn O’Neal’s ire, not even diapers. In providing 400 free diapers to new parents, “California’s nanny state is taking infantilization to a new level,” decried a Post editorial (5/12/26).
But when government largesse flows to the rich, the Post is more open minded. The Trump administration’s request for another $200 billion for the Iran War, as well as a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget for next year, both received the Post’s blessing (3/21/26, 5/12/26). “Peace doesn’t come cheap,” the Post wrote.
Left unmentioned in the editorials is that Bezos’ empire—via his space company Blue Origin and Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS—holds billions of dollars worth of Pentagon contracts.
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Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
This article is republished from the Skwawkbox because they say it so well.
As expected, Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as the worst prime minister in modern British history.
One whose only ‘successes’ have been on behalf of billionaires and the genocidal colony. Who waged war on our rights and helped spill the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents. All to serve the interests of Israel and a club of billionaires who want each of us at their mercy.
We come to bury Starmer’s legacy, not to praise it, because it deserves no praise. Meanwhile, the state-corporate media is now busy nauseatingly whitewashing it.
Starmer’s ‘achievement’ of worst-ever comes after a decade in which each prime minister was awful and worse than his or her predecessor. Starmer was worse than the comically dire Liz Truss and more dishonest than toxic, murderous buffoon, Boris Johnson. That takes some doing and Starmer only had to be his awful self to manage it.
Starmer’s ‘success’
Starmer announced his departure still boasting that he had “changed our party” and ripped out the “poison of antisemitism”. That he had rescued Labour’s credibility.
In fact he has destroyed it, undoing two successive general elections under Corbyn where Labour exceeded Starmer’s vote share, one of them achieving Labour’s best result since the second world war. He also boasted of his eagerness for war.
Resisting mass murder is ‘terrorism‘. Not just that, but holding a sign opposing the terror classification is ‘terrorism’ too.
Our judicial system, which is always biased to support the rich and powerful, has been utterly corrupted. If the state doesn’t get the result it wants, it demands another trial. It replaces judges with stooges prepared to destroy their own reputations to support the state’s oppression.
Starmer has made the UK an authoritarian plague island in which doing right is punished and doing wrong is rewarded or ignored.
And even on the ‘bread and butter’ of power — protecting vulnerable people and the nation — Starmer has done nothing but ill.
Now, will his likely replacement be any better or is Andy Burnham also too weak, compromised or corrupted?
This article is republished from the Skwawkbox because they say it so well.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
