Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 22, 2026

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 22, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision

Josh Marshall, February 20, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.

We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate….

This is a case where the legal merits of the President’s action were just too transparently bogus even for this Court to manage and — critically — his actions and the theories undergirding his claims to the power were, for the Corrupt majority, inconvenient. The architect of the current Court — the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo — was behind the litigation that undid the tariffs. That tells you all you need to know. In this case Trump’s claim to power was neither in the interests of the Republican Party — the Court’s chief jurisprudential interest — nor any of their anti-constitutional doctrines. So of course they tossed it out. This may sound ungenerous. It’s simple reality.

Indeed, today’s decision is actually an indictment of the Court. These tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.

Part of the delay of this ruling is the fact that most major corporations were afraid to bring litigation because they didn’t want to go to war with the president. But that’s also an indictment of the Supreme Court’s corruption. Because they made clear early on that there was little, if any, limit they would impose on Trump’s criminality or use of government power to impose retribution on constitutionally protected speech or litigation. So that’s on the Court too. But it’s only part of the equation. The Court also allowed the tariffs to remain in place while the government appealed the appellate decision striking down the tariffs back in August. Let me repeat that: back in August, almost six months ago.

In other words, most of the time in which these illegal tariffs were in effect was because of that needless stay. The logic of the stay was that deference to President’s claim of illegal powers was more important than the harm created by hundreds of billions in unconstitutional taxes being imposed on American citizens. It’s a good example of what law professor Leah Litman — one of the most important voices on the Court’s corruption — earlier this morning called the Court’s corruption via “passivity,” empowering anti-constitutional actions through deciding not to act at all or encouraging endless delays it could easily put a stop to in the interests of the constitutional order….

The Supreme Court Fractures While Striking Down Trump’s Tariff Policy

Matt Ford, February 20, 2026 [The New Republic]

It may look like the justices made a clean break with the president, but the mess the conservative bloc made for itself raises some major questions….

The six-justice majority brought together the court’s three liberal members and three of their conservative colleagues: Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. But while they agreed on the outcome, they differed widely on the reasoning that led them there….

Roberts, on the other hand, argued alongside the other two conservatives that the tariffs were invalid under the “major questions doctrine.” Under that doctrine, the executive branch cannot invoke congressionally delegated powers in novel ways on matters of “vast economic and political significance” unless the courts decide that Congress has “spoken clearly” enough to authorize it.

In practice, the major questions doctrine has served one real purpose: It’s given the court’s conservative justices a freewheeling veto over Obama and Biden administration policies over the past decade. The doctrine has also received criticism in legal circles for its lack of a firm jurisprudential basis, for the uneven ways in which the court applies it, and for its vague and insubstantial nature. (What is a matter of “vast economic and political significance,” and what isn’t?)

While the differences between the justices may seem arcane, the implications for the court’s jurisprudence could be significant. The court’s conservatives missed a chance to bolster the doctrine’s legitimacy by applying it to a Republican president for the first time. Their failure also exposed fissures among the conservatives over the nature of the major questions doctrine itself….

We Won? The Supreme Court Checked Trump? That’s what happened, right?

Christopher Armitage, Feb 21, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

…The media frames the 6-3 vote as evidence of cracks forming between conservative justices. Look at what the split actually is. Three conservatives said IEEPA authorizes tariffs. Three said it does not because the statute does not use the word. Nobody on either side said the president lacks the authority to impose tariffs. The disagreement is over which form to fill out.

But the Court did not even strike down all the tariffs. It struck down roughly half. Everything imposed under Section 232 and Section 301 never went before the Court at all. Fifty percent on steel. Fifty percent on aluminum. Twenty-five percent on every imported car. Fifty percent on copper.(5) All still in effect. The effective tariff rate dropped from 16.9% to roughly 9.1%, and 9.1% is still the highest since 1946.(6) The Tax Foundation estimates the surviving tariffs alone will cost American households $400 a year and raise $635 billion over the next decade.(5) Not one headline I have found leads with the fact that half the tariffs survived untouched….

The Quiet Architect of Trump’s Global Trade War

[New York Times, via The Big Picture, February 20, 2026]

Jamieson Greer, a low-key lawyer from a working-class background, is rewriting the rules of the global economy at the president’s behest.

Trump EPA strips legal bedrock supporting clean energy

[Renewable Energy Magazine, via Clean Power Roundup, February 17, 2026]

President Donald J. Trump has announced the single largest deregulatory action in American history: the full revocation of the Obama-era “Endangerment Finding” and the consumer mandates that depend on it. The move could dismantle the legal justification for federal solar incentives and emissions standards.

Poll finds half of Americans describe Trump as ‘corrupt’ ‘racist’ and ‘cruel’

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo sent this in an email earlier today.

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

The Increasing Attacks on Francesca Albanese Presage a New Dark Age 

Chris Hedges, February 16, 2026

…Francesca was placed by the Trump administration on the Office of Foreign Assets Control list of the U.S. Treasury Department — normally used to sanction those accused of money laundering or being involved with terrorist organizations — six days after the release of her report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,” which documented the global corporations that make billions of dollars from the genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestinians.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control list — weaponized by the Trump administration to persecute Francesca and in violation of the diplomatic immunity granted to U.N. officials — bans her from entering the U.S. It prohibits any financial institution from having her as a client. A bank engages in financial transactions with Francesca is banned from operating in dollars, faces multimillion-dollar fines and is blocked from international payment systems. This has cut her off from global banking, leaving her unable to use credit cards or book a hotel in her name. Her assets in the U.S. are frozen. It has seen her medical insurance refuse to reimburse her for medical expenses. It has resulted in institutions, including U.S. universities, human rights groups and NGOs that once collaborated with her severing ties, fearing onerous U.S. penalties. The sanctions followed those imposed in February and June of last year on The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Karim Khan along with two judges for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant….

Credit cards cancelled, Google accounts closed: ICC judges on life under Trump sanctions 

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 02-19-2025]

A Fatal ICE Shooting Occurred in Texas Months Before Renee Good’s Killing

[New York Times 02-20-2025]

ICE Is Inside Your Phone 

[Glass Empires, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2025]

Unlock your phone and check how many apps have access to your location. Every one of them is broadcasting your precise GPS coordinates to thousands of private bidders every time they serve an ad, and the federal government is buying that data in bulk.

That data pipeline is just one layer of a much wider system. In January 2026, an ICE agent pointed a smartphone at a woman standing on a public sidewalk in Portland, Maine and told her she was being entered into a database of domestic terrorists. She had done nothing but watch an enforcement operation from across the street. That same month, Google received an ICE subpoena demanding a student journalist’s credit card numbers, bank account information, and metadata, then complied the same day it notified him, leaving no meaningful window to challenge the demand in court.

These are not disconnected events. They are the first visible products of a surveillance apparatus that was assembled quietly over the past year, financed by more than $300 million in federal contracts and engineered to convert the ordinary digital life of anyone carrying a phone into a searchable government archive. Before ICE shows up on your block, it has already entered your device, where your apps record movement and behavior, route that information through commercial data markets, and feed it into immigration enforcement systems that assign scrutiny without regard to citizenship or consent….

That infrastructure was already advancing when, by September 2025, the department awarded Zignal Labs a $5.7 million, five-year contract for an AI monitoring system capable of processing more than eight billion social media posts per day across more than one hundred languages, technology also used by the Israeli military in Gaza. Zignal operates within a wider enforcement network that includes Clearview AI, ShadowDragon, Babel Street, and PenLink, all feeding into Palantir’s $30 million ImmigrationOS platform built to manage the end-to-end immigration lifecycle from identification to removal, while Stephen Miller holds a substantial financial stake in Palantir….

The US coup: one year on

Carole Cadwalladr [via The Big Picture, February 20, 2026]

The event that triggered my nervous system was Elon Musk’s DOGE illegally entering the US treasury and gaining access to the entire nation’s personal and financial data: a system-level hack on the entire US population. This was a power grab that could not be undone. Data is like a genie. It cannot be put back in the bottle. That one act – that was then replicated across the federal government – was the beginning of what I believed, still believe, is a technoauthoritarian state.

Social Security Workers Are Being Told to Hand Over Appointment Details to ICE 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

Reddit, Meta, and Google Voluntarily Gave DHS Info of Anti-ICE Users, Report Says 

[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

Guilt by Association: First ‘Antifa’ Case Sweeps Anti-Trump Activists Into One Terrorism Conspiracy

Josh Kovensky, February 16, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

…But as time passed, Lowrey began to understand this arrest was different. A rumor circulated the next day that a police officer had been shot at the demonstration, she told TPM; Batten’s mother saw a news story that afternoon saying that an officer had been shot and injured. For weeks, Lowrey found it to be nearly impossible to reach Batten. She had been placed in solitary confinement, Lowrey later learned, where she’d ultimately spend three months.

Batten and other defendants were initially charged on July 7 with attempted murder of a federal officer and use of a firearm. Federal prosecutors upgraded these charges after the White House directed prosecutors to embark on a sweeping crackdown on Trump’s political opponents in the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s killing. Prosecutors were now accusing her and others present at the demonstration of belonging to an “antifa” cell. Batten was facing charges of material support of terrorism, in addition to rioting and use of an explosive over protestors’ use of fireworks at the event. The case became national news, with Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice officials describing the incident as an “ambush” and citing it as justification for a broader crackdown on anti-administration protest activity.

The case, set to go to trial on Tuesday, Feb. 17, is the first terrorism prosecution of a supposed “antifa” group. Prosecutors have now charged 15 people involved with the demonstration and its aftermath with material support for terrorism, four of whom have pleaded guilty….

Trump State Department Official Has Called for Sterilizing ‘Feral’ Populations 

[NOTUS, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025] Rubio’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.

ICE operations increasingly resemble Israeli occupation. That’s no coincidence 

[+972 Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 02-17-2025]

Trump Deports SICK 2-MONTH OLD After ICE Prison Measles Outbreak 

[Status Coup, via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]

The “Board of Peace” Already Has a Corruption Problem 

Lucy Komisar [via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2025]

[NC: Important. While there is every reason to expect the Board of Peace to be corrupt, given its structure as a Trump enrichment/aggrandizement operation, Komisar identifies how Trump is building in even more ways to skim.]

ICE Expands Watchlist Effort 

Ken Klippenstein, Feb 17, 2026

Strategic Political Economy

Does limited liability protect the rich?

Richard Murphy, February 17, 2026 [Funding the Future]

Limited liability is treated as harmless legal plumbing, but it is one of the most powerful privileges granted to wealth in the UK and around the world. In this Funding the Future conversation with Professor Dan Plesch, we explore how corporate law shields shareholders from responsibility, fuels secrecy and tax abuse, and distorts democracy.

We explain where limited liability came from, why it now protects inequality, and what reforms could restore balance between corporations and society….

Dan and I have long shared concerns about corporate accountability. In this conversation, we tried to return to first principles and ask a simple question: how did we create an economic system in which those who control vast resources can avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions?

The answer, we concluded, lies in the corporate form itself….

We are constantly told that wealth reflects talent, innovation or hard work. But Dan and I both noted how much wealth is protected not by genius but by law.

Limited liability creates a structural privilege. It means those with capital are insulated from the risks they impose on others. Losses are socialised. Gains are privatised.

This matters because it undermines the moral argument at the heart of neoliberal economics. If markets truly rewarded merit, then responsibility would accompany reward. Instead, we have created a system where power is protected and accountability avoided.

And that protection feeds inequality. It allows the wealthy to accumulate more wealth, often at others’ expense, without facing equivalent risk….

Dan stressed he was not calling for the abolition of limited liability. Nor am I. Modern economies require corporate organisation. But reform is overdue.

We discussed several obvious directions.

First, there is a need for much greater transparency. Beneficial ownership registers must be complete, public and enforced. The chain of ownership within corporate groups must be visible.

Second, accountability is essential. Parent companies should be liable for the actions of subsidiaries in defined circumstances. Directors should face consequences when companies are deliberately stripped of assets. Full accounts on a country-by-country reporting basis must be on public record.

Third, there has to be balance. If business demands deregulation in labour or environmental law, we should ask whether it is prepared to relinquish limited liability in return. That simple test reveals how dependent corporate wealth is on state-granted privilege.

Fourth, there must be tax justice. When vast fortunes are protected by legal structures, taxing them is not envy. It is about restoring equilibrium between wealth and everyone else in society….

A perforated corporate veil

Cory Doctorow, February 20, 2026 [Pluralistic]

“Capitalist realism” is the idea that the world’s current economic and political arrangements are inevitable, and that any attempt to alter them is a) irrational; b) doomed; and c) dangerous. It’s the ideology of Margaret Thatcher’s maxim, “There is no alternative.”

Obviously this is very convenient if you are a current beneficiary of the status quo. “There is no alternative” is a thought-stopping demand dressed up as an observation. It means, “Don’t try and think of alternatives.”

The thing is, alternatives already exist and work very well. The Mondragon co-ops in Spain constitute a fully worked out, long-term stable economic alternative to traditional capitalist enterprises, employing more than 100,000 people and generating tangible, empirically measured benefits to workers, customers and the region:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

…Brazil’s liability system “represented a distributive choice: prioritizing Brazilian workers’ ability to enforce their rights over foreign capital’s interest in minimizing costs through corporate structuring.”

Pargendler (who teaches at Harvard Law) co-authored a paper with São Paulo Law’s Olívia Pasqualeto analyzing the impact that Brazil’s limited liability system had on capital formation and corporate conduct:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6105586 ….

Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs? 

[Federal Reserve Bank of New York, via Naked Capitalism 02-19-2025]

Small Business in the TINA Economy: Competing for the Scraps 

Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 02-19-2025]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israeli drone strike kills Lebanese man after threatening phone call

[Drop Site Daily, Feb 18, 2026]

A man identifying himself as a member of the Israeli military called 62-year-old Ahmad Tarmas in the town of Tallousa near the Israeli border on Monday, asking whether he wished to die alone or with his family, according to journalist Radwan Mortada, to which Tarmas responded “alone.” Tarmas then drove away so the strike would not hit his home in Nabatieh—moments later, an Israeli drone fired two missiles at his car, killing him. Mortada reported that similar “death call” assassinations have occurred across southern Lebanon, with victims warned by phone shortly before being struck by the Israeli army.

Oligarchy

The Epstein Files by Julie K. Brown

[Brown is The Miami Herald reporter who broke open the Epstein case when the Herald published her series “Perversion of Justice” in December 2019, based on three years of investigation and interviews. Brown “convinced the lead detective and police chief in Palm Beach to talk publicly about the case for the first time” and “found about 80 victims, four of whom spoke to me on the record. Days after publication of investigators opened a new criminal case against Epstein…”]

Prince Andrew’s Arrest 

The Epstein Files by Julie K. Brown [via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]

Billionaires’ Low Taxes Are Becoming a Problem for the Economy

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, February 20, 2026]

Tax avoidance by the superwealthy is an economic issue as well as a political one. The top 1% now holds 32% of U.S. wealth while paying historically low tax rates, creating concentration risk that could crater the entire economy in the next market correction.

Felonomics

Trump trademarks his name — if you name a public facility after Trump you will have to pay him

Heather Cox Richardson, Feb 16, 2026 [Letters from an American]

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.

After a Florida state lawmaker proposed putting Trump’s name on the Palm Beach International Airport, Jason Garcia of Seeking Rents today reported that the Florida legislature is currently pushing through measures to change the name of that airport to the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

One Generation Runs the Country. The Next Cashed In on Crypto

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, February 15, 2026]

The Trump sons have made billions in cryptocurrency while their father reshapes the regulatory landscape, but their investors didn’t always fare so well.  Nothing to see here…

Binance—Whose Founder Was Pardoned—Now Holds 87% Of Trump’s Stablecoin

[Forbes, via The Big Picture, February 15, 2026]

Binance holds about 87% of USD1, the stablecoin issued by a Trump family crypto venture—a greater concentration than any other major stablecoin has at a single exchange—underscoring the depth of the financial relationship between Binance, whose founder Trump pardoned in October, and World Liberty Financial, which already has added an estimated $1 billion to President Donald Trump’s net worth.

The Compliance Officer Who Flagged Epstein — And Lost Her Job

Veronica Riccobene & Freddy Brewster, Feb 13, 2026 [The Lever]

A former compliance officer for the international financial powerhouse Deutsche Bank told the Federal Bureau of Investigation she was fired in 2018 after raising concerns about suspicious banking activity from accounts owned by financier and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, as well as accounts linked to Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, adviser, and business partner. The allegations come from an FBI interview report included in the Justice Department’s latest release of Epstein-related documents.

The former anti-money laundering official detailed “mind boggling” cryptocurrency transactions between Kushner’s company and a Russian individual. She also claimed that she was punished after raising concerns about more than 100 politically-connected individuals who had been shielded from typical anti-money laundering reviews….

GOP bill would curb states’ interest-rate caps

Drop Site Daily: February 20, 2026

Sen. Bernie Moreno and Rep. Warren Davidson, both Republicans from Ohio, introduced the American Lending Fairness Act of 2026 to override a recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruling that upheld states’ authority to enforce their own usury caps on out-of-state lenders. The bill would effectively codify the “rent-a-bank” model—often used by institutions based in states like Delaware and South Dakota with no rate limits—allowing lenders to bypass stricter caps elsewhere. Both lawmakers have received millions in donations from finance, insurance, and real estate interests and industry groups including the American Financial Services Association. Critics say it would undercut state efforts such as Colorado’s 2023 law targeting high-cost lending and could enable a new surge in triple-digit interest loans. More on this can be found in the latest from The Lever, available here.

​​​​​​​

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

US Household Debt Hits Fresh Record 

[Trading Views, via Naked Capitalism 02-14-2025]

Neoliberalism is the politics of destruction

Richard Murphy, February 16, 2026 [Funding the Future]

In this video, I explain why neoliberalism is not a mistake but a system built to shift power from people to corporations. This politics of destruction delivers an economics of failure with underfunded public services, rising inequality and shrinking democracy. I also explain why fiscal rules like those promoted by Rachel Reeves reinforce this failure, and why a politics of care offers the best real alternative.

Health care crisis

Exclusive: Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation 

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 02-15-2025]

The Misleading Chartcrime That Killed the ACA Subsidies

[Healthcare Uncovered / Substack, via The Big Picture, February 15, 2026]

One bad chart made the rounds in Congress and helped justify gutting health insurance subsidies for millions of Americans. GOP leaders cited data from a Trump-aligned think tank to argue the ACA is “unaffordable”. Health economists say the numbers were spun and the full story tells the opposite.

Predatory finance

Box Spreads as a Borrowing Alternative to Margin Loans and SBLOCs

[Kitces, via The Big Picture, February 17, 2026]

Kitces breaks down how sophisticated investors are using options box spreads to borrow at near-Treasury rates — and why it’s becoming a serious alternative to margin loans and securities-backed lines of credit.

The Bezzle and the Bull Market

Novel Investor, via The Big Picture, February 18, 2026]

A sharp essay on John Kenneth Galbraith’s concept of “the bezzle” — the gap between perceived and actual wealth that expands in every bull market and only becomes visible in the bust…. Fraud works better during long bull markets because of the almost consistent drip, drip, drip of good news.

The GOP Plot To Help Banks Jack Up Your Credit Card Bills

Freddy Brewster, Feb 19, 2026 [The Lever]

As states moved to cap sky-high interest rates, Republican lawmakers awash in finance industry campaign cash are spearheading legislation to outlaw those protections nationwide

Fraud Investigation is Believing Your Lying Eyes

[Bits About Money, via The Big Picture, February 18, 2026]

The mechanics of how fraud investigations actually work — pattern recognition, gut instinct, and following the paper trail until the numbers stop making sense.

The Hidden Plumbing of Stablecoins

[MIT Media Lab, via The Big Picture, February 21, 2026]

Financial and Technological Risks in the GENIUS Act Era US dollar stablecoins are increasingly used as payment and settlement instruments beyond cryptocurrency markets. With the enactment of the GENIUS Act in 2025, the United States established the first comprehensive federal framework governing their issuance, backing, and supervision. This paper evaluates the financial, technological, and regulatory risks that may arise as GENIUS-compliant stablecoins scale into mainstream use. MIT researchers identify systemic risks lurking in the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin infrastructure, from redemption surges to technological failures.

The 401(k) Takeover: Private Equity Muscles In on Retirement

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture, February 20, 2026]

Private equity firms are flooding into America’s $14 trillion retirement savings market, mirroring crypto’s 2024 election strategy to loosen regulations and gain access to ordinary workers’ nest eggs. Wall Street power players are squeezing into the US retirement industry. Its gatekeepers are succumbing.

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Epstein Class: Making Money Killing People is A-OK 

Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

The Quintessential Epstein Files Email

David Dayen, February 17, 2026 [The American Prospect]

Jeffrey Epstein and his friends standing up for Mary Jo White against Elizabeth Warren tells you everything about the class war at the heart of the files.

“You Up???” Inside Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein’s Disturbingly Close Friendship

[Vanity Fair, via The Big Picture, February 17, 2026]

The Epstein files reveal an 18-month alliance between Bannon and the disgraced financier built on mutual interest in shaping world events and politics, complete with hours of recorded interviews for a documentary that never materialized. The surprisingly cozy relationship between MAGA’s chief strategist and the convicted sex trafficker — including the texts.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Sinister Shadow Over West Asia

Kit Klarenberg, Feb 15, 2026 [Global Delinquents]

…Numerous declassified materials amply indicate Epstein was a journeyman intelligence asset, with connections to several ostensibly separate spying agencies. Tellingly, some heavily redacted communications contain references to Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF). These buildings are used by US intelligence and government agencies to exchange top secret information, and access requires the highest security clearance. In a secret January 2018 discussion with political strategist Steve Bannon, Epstein bragged how his sprawling New York mansion was “similar to a SCIF.”….

Epstein’s Pretzel: Mike Flynn’s Tough Spot — Pizzagate is being revived, once again, to protect the people involved in Epstein’s child trafficking ring.

Jim Stewartson, Feb 15, 2026 [MindWar]

On 11/3/16, a virulently antisemitic groyper named Jared Wyand invented what came to be known as Pizzagate by tweeting a list of made up “keywords” with instructions to search for them in John Podesta’s emails which had been hacked by Russian military intelligence and released on Wikileaks on the same day as the Access Hollywood video.

According to Wyand, by replacing the words in Podesta’s emails with a second meaning, a dark, traumatic tale of Clinton child trafficking networks could be constructed: “We are uncovering a child sex ring.”….

…On Saturday, 2/15/26, nearly a decade later, Mike Flynn posted the exact same “cheat sheet” to his 2.1 million followers, signaling in the clearest possible terms that he wants them to investigate Epstein as part of Pizzagate fiction, instead of in objective reality. This is a deliberate effort to obfuscate the truth and divert attention from Flynn, his friends—like Steve Bannon—and Donald Trump.

Files Showed Jeffrey Epstein Was a Guest at Conrad Black’s Lavish 60th Birthday Party for Barbara Amiel. The DOJ Just Deleted It.

Dougald Lamont, February 16, 2026

Trump pardoned convicted corporate criminal Conrad Black, who has been protecting Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for decades. Who else is protecting Conrad Black?

Struggling to navigate the Epstein files? Here is a visual guide

Hanna Duggal and Marium Ali, 10 Feb 2026 [aljazeera.com, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

The grift economy is going mainstream

Hanna Horvath, Feb 18, 2026 [Your Brain on Money

Prediction markets hit nearly $40 billion in volume in 2025, a 400% increase from the previous year. And Kalshi’s CEO has been quite honest about his ultimate vision: “The long-term goal is to financialize everything.”

Surging prediction markets face legal backlash in US: ‘Lines have been blurred’ 

Anna Betts [The Guardian. via scotusblog.com, February 20, 2026]

As prediction markets become more popular, debates are raging over the regulatory landscape, leading to legal battles. “At least 20 federal lawsuits have been filed nationwide, disputing whether companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket should be treated as federally regulated financial exchanges, as they maintain, or as gambling operations that should be regulated like state-licensed sportsbooks,” according to The Guardian. On these sites, “users in effect bet, or ‘trade,’ against one another rather than against an established ‘house,’ with platforms collecting transaction fees.” That’s why, so far at least, they haven’t been under the purview of state gaming regulators. Legal scholars told The Guardian that efforts to reclassify prediction markets as gambling operations “could ultimately reach the supreme court.”

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Imaging 30 nanometers thick slice of brain tissue took 326 days and found 150 million synapses

[Click through to see two awesome images]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-20-2025]

Aakash Gupta

@aakashgupta

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

Disrupting mainstream economics

Economic questions: the Paul Samuelson question

Richard Murphy, February 18, 2026 [Funding the Future]

…His merger of Keynesian macroeconomics with neoclassical microeconomics created what became known as the “neoclassical synthesis”, the framework that dominated economics teaching and policymaking for decades.

Yet here is the paradox: economics has never been more technically sophisticated than in Samuelson’s wake, and yet:

• Governments have repeatedly failed to prevent crises.
• Inequality has deepened.
• Environmental collapse is accelerating, and
• Public policy seems chronically confused about what economies are for.

Hence The Paul Samuelson Question: If economics can be expressed with great mathematical precision, why does it so often fail to guide governments toward stability, equality and genuine prosperity?….

New glossary entry: economics

Richard Murphy, February 15, 2026 [Funding the Future]

Economics is the study of how societies organise the creation, distribution, and use of resources so that people can live well together. It is not, as it is so often taught, a science of markets alone, nor a study of scarcity in isolation. It is about choices, power, institutions, and the care of people and planet over time.

First, economics is about provisioning. Every society must decide how food is grown, homes are built, health care is provided, knowledge is shared, and infrastructure is maintained. These are questions about real resources, whether they be labour, land, technology, or ecological limits. Money is a tool used to organise these activities, but not the purpose of them.

Second, economics is about distribution. Who gets what, on what terms, and with what consequences? Wages, profits, rents, taxes, and social security payments all reflect political choices about fairness and power. Most especially, markets do not deliver neutral outcomes; they embed rules about ownership, bargaining strength, and access to opportunity. It is the role of the state to create markets where they are required and to compensate for market failures when they happen.

Third, economics is about institutions. Governments, people, firms, trade unions, banks, regulators, and communities shape economic outcomes….

Fifth, economics is about care. An economy exists to meet human needs with dignity and security. Health care, education, child care, care for the elderly, care for others in need, and environmental stewardship are not peripheral activities; they are the foundation of well-being. When economics ignores care, it becomes an ideology that justifies inequality and ecological damage.

Finally, economics is not value-free. Every model embeds assumptions about what matters….

How the US Won Back Chip Manufacturing 

[China Talk, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2025]

We’re here for a CHIPS Act megapod, in person with Mike Schmidt and Todd Fisher, the director and founding CIO of the CHIPS Program Office, respectively.

We discuss…

• The mechanisms behind the success of the CHIPS Act,
• What CHIPS can teach us about other industrial policy challenges, like APIs and rare earths,
• What it takes to build a successful industrial policy implementation team,
• How the fear of “another Solyndra” is holding back US industrial policy,
• Chris Miller’s recent interest in revitalizing America’s chemical industry.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

The Billion Dollar Business Of Breaking Into Your Pocket

Ken Macon, February 18, 2026 [reclaimthenet.org]

A leaked dashboard screenshot reveals how commercial spyware silently installs via zero-click exploits to read encrypted messages and activate microphones.

We URGENTLY need a federal law forbidding AI from impersonating humans 

Gary Marcus [via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

Whack-a-mole: US academic fights to purge his AI deepfakes

[defenddemocracy.press 18/02/2026]

As deepfake videos of John Mearsheimer multiplied across YouTube, the American academic rushed to have them taken down, embarking on a grueling fight that laid bare the challenges of combating AI-driven impersonation.

The international relations scholar spent months pressing the Google-owned platform to remove hundreds of deepfakes, an uphill battle that stands as a cautionary tale for professionals vulnerable to disinformation and identity theft in the age of AI.

In recent months, Mearsheimer’s office at the University of Chicago identified 43 YouTube channels pushing AI fabrications using his likeness, some depicted him making contentious remarks about heated geopolitical rivalries….

The Existential AI Threat Is Here — and Some AI Leaders Are Fleeing

[Axios, via The Big Picture, February 17, 2026]

Some of the people building the most powerful AI systems are starting to quietly step away, spooked by what they’re seeing. When the builders get scared, maybe the rest of us should pay attention.

AI Chatbots Attacks May End the Internet as We Know It

“Scrapers can rotate addresses endlessly to harvest as much data as possible for LLM training, while we have finite bandwidth, compute, and volunteer time. The result is a war of attrition we didn’t choose – where keeping the site usable becomes a constant battle.”

The resources required to keep these marauding invaders at bay are another concern in the growing list of reasons to worry about AI. Websites may soon be forced to require hard proof of humanity from all visitors, such as insisting on users being signed in.

“The actors extracting the most value from large-scale crawling are largely insulated from the costs it creates, which are absorbed by publishers. They must respond by restricting access in order to survive,” writes researcher Audrey Hingle in her paper, Getting bots to respect boundaries.

“Over time,” Hingle continues, “this risks accelerating enclosure: more gated content, more limited access, and a web that is harder to participate in.”

The Digital Iron Dome: How the US and Israel Are Weaponizing Real-Time Networks 

[Futuredude substack, via Naked Capitalism 02-15-2025]

Monopoly Round-Up: Why the “AI God” Narrative is Actually a Corporate Power Grab

Matt Stoller, February 17, 2026 [BIG]

…Meanwhile Microsoft’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, predicted that “white-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” ….

There’s also a full-on bullying effort towards anyone who doesn’t buy these extraordinary claims. A group of writers loosely associated with Abundance and the ethical altruism cult seem to be the tip of the spear. Abundance co-author Derek Thompson demanded to know why any journalist might doubt the “spooky and unnerving and powerful” AI tools that have been recently unveiled. Economics commentator Noah Smith wrote a piece titled “You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth” in which he says that a sort of sentient AI is inevitably taking over, that “We will be well-cared-for pets.” The Argument’s Kelsey Piper demanded those who don’t believe that God is here should download Clause Code and play with it….

• Luiza Jarovsky, PhD @LuizaJarovsky Actually, Anthropic is training Claude with a ‘constitution’ that fosters a BIZARRE sense of AI entitlement and belittles human rights and rules….

…Moreover, the AI companies themselves aren’t acting like they’ve invented God. Anthropic is spending tens of millions of dollars to support Republican Senators who help their company, which wouldn’t be necessary if they had actually “gone exponential.” It’s likely that hundreds of millions, or even billions, are going to flood into politics from AI oligarchs, to protect their power. That makes no sense, unless this build-out isn’t inevitable….

So why push this set of stories now? I can think of a number of reasons. Wall Street has gone wobbly on the data center build-out, but if you’ve invented God or the Devil, that’s a great investment thesis. But another more important reason is to avoid the obviously necessary regulation that a democracy needs to manage this kind of innovation….

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

Kim Dotcom

@KimDotcom

Breaking

Palantir was allegedly hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super-user access and here’s what the hackers allegedly found: Peter Thiel and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale. They have thousands of hours of transcribed and searchable conversations of Donald Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk. They have backdoored the devices, cars and jets of world leaders and accumulated the biggest archive of blackmail material. Palantir is creating nuclear and bio weapon capabilities for Ukraine and is working closely with the CIA to defeat Russia. They believe they are one year away. They plan to achieve this by keeping Russia busy with meaningless peace negotiations. Palantir is responsible of the majority of Palestinian deaths in Gaza. They have developed the AI targeting for Israel. Palantir is an arm of the CIA and all data from international clients is copied into a CIA spy cloud

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

Marie17

@Marie17cf

Did this man just link an account from the Epstein Files to Charlie Kirk death?

Charlie Kirk’s Audit would have broke open the Delaware shell company. The same shell company used to pay Epstein for “business” . Why is this important?Its the same account that purchased Egyptian planes, security team (replaced 48 hours before Kirk’s death) were funded from when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. 2 of the BIG 6 from the Epstein Files were the masterminds of all the security planning the day Kirk died. ITS ALL CONNECTED

Selling You the Panopticon Wholesale

angryea, February 16, 2026 [Daily Kos]

Meta, apparently, intends to add facial recognition to its “smart” glasses.  Based on a leaked memo, it feels this is a good time to do such a move because the non-profits that would normally raise the alarm are too underfunded and focused on the Administration’s abuses to be much of a problem.  The memo, of course, is an admission that such a move would be problematic, and that they hope to make the feature a reality before opposition can be marshaled.

Collapse of independent news media

Gallup Will No Longer Measure Presidential Approval After 88 Years

[The Hill, via The Big Picture, February 16, 2026]

The most-cited barometer of presidential job performance since FDR is being retired. Gallup says it’s a strategic shift in research priorities. The timing — with Trump’s approval at a historic low of 36% — is purely coincidental, of course.

Climate and environmental crises

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-21-2025]

A Climate Supercomputer Is Getting New Bosses. It’s Not Clear Who.

www.nytimes.com/…

Trump admin is pulling supercomputers out of key weather and climate research center

Andrew Freedman, Feb 13, 2026 (CNN)

A leading American research lab is slated to lose its critical supercomputing facility, according to a letter released Thursday by the National Science Foundation.

The move is part of the Trump administration’s effort to disassemble the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, one of the world’s top weather and climate research centers, which the admin views as a source of climate change alarmism.

The computing center, which is slated to be turned over to an unspecified third party, runs weather and climate research models and is used by about 1,500 researchers from over 500 universities around the country. The work done on this supercomputer benefits the American people by leading to more accurate forecasts of extreme weather and climate events, aircraft turbulence and more….

Some Colorado officials view the move as part of a retribution campaign being waged by the White House that is designed to pressure Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, into granting clemency to Tina Peters, a former county election clerk who was convicted in a 2020 election-related data breach scheme. Peters is a prominent 2020 election denier….

Earth orbit is getting crowded. Can this map of 1 million routes around our planet help prevent satellite collisions?

Julian Dossett, February 10, 2026 [space.com]

…”If you want to know where a satellite is in a week, there’s no equation that can actually tell you where it’s going to be,” LLNL scientist Travis Yeager said in the release. “You have to step forward a little bit at a time.”

The amount of computing power required to track a million orbits over a six-year period in a simulated environment is significant. LLNL said they used 1.6 million CPU hours, which would take more than 182 years to process on a single computer. But using the lab’s Quartz and Ruby supercomputers, it only took three days to run the simulations….

Democrats’ political malpractice

There’s Only One Way to Eradicate Trumpism for Good — If accountability isn’t a central pillar of a post-Trump future, we will doom ourselves.

Jason Linkins, February 21, 2026 [The New Republic]

…both Trump’s rise and his return were preceded by Democratic administrations that showed little regard for civic accountability. The Obama administration made the conscious decision to make “looking forward, not backward” the order of the day, to the great relief of Wall Street crooks and war-on-terror torturers. Obama extended grace to those who capsized the economy, and kept showing extreme deference to them throughout his administration.

As The American Prospect’s David Dayen reported this week, an email from recently disgraced Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler to pedo-oligarch Jeffrey Epstein—in which she seeks advice on how to defend Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’d been stoking outrage about White’s constant granting of deferred prosecution agreements to corporate criminals—is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the Obama administration’s laxity. This vacuum of accountability was filled by Trump’s right-wing faux-populism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Much of this could have been headed off.

And while there were some significant areas in which Joe Biden seemed to learn from his former boss’s mistakes, the need for a more robust campaign of accountability was not one of them. Despite the ample reasons to launch investigations and obtain redress for past corruption, Attorney General Merrick Garland did little more than attempt to radiate an ambient virtue, perpetually endeavoring to shield his agency and the Biden administration from the perception that they were seeking purely political prosecutions. Not that this ever stopped Trump from crying foul about witch hunts! Garland’s first major investigation into Trump’s misconduct wasn’t launched until three days after Trump announced his reelection campaign—the very thing that the Biden administration should have been trying in earnest to prevent after the Senate failed in its duty to impeach him. Once Trump entered the safe harbor of a presidential candidacy, efforts to hold him responsible fizzled—and the Supreme Court all but crowned him king….

Resistance

Resistance101: Forging a New Movement for Palestine in Italy DOCUMENTARY (video)

Chris Hedges, Feb 21, 2026

As the genocide in Gaza has continued for almost three years, Italian dockworkers have risen up to do what our governments and international institutions refuse to.

How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks

[Vox, via The Big Picture, February 21, 2026]

What Brazil got right that America got wrong. Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and military actively constrained Bolsonaro’s authoritarian impulses when he tried the moves Trump is now executing—showing that institutional resistance is possible.

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

The Enduring Myths that Let the Trumpers Off Easy

[Going Deep with Russ Baker, Feb 15, 2026]

…One of the biggest failings of legacy media is that it is so much part of the system that it seems bound to accept, or at least not challenge, illogical beliefs that have long been part of this country’s sense of itself. These surely include an unquestioning embrace of religion despite its unscientific foundation, an insistence on the “specialness” of America or Americans, and our faith in capitalism as a balm for all that ails us.

Because of all this hewing to shibboleths, the legacy media cannot break free to call the game honestly.

It has to dance around a good bit, and that prevents it from leveling with its audience about how bad things really are, how sick or evil some powerful elements are, and how narrow a window of time we have to set things right.

Mark Twain famously said something along the lines of “a lie gets halfway around the world before truth can get its pants on.”

That is the real story of MAGA. All those influencers, all that outrage over immigrants and “woke” and the Obamas — all that burn and churn is FAKE. A relentless parade of untruths crafted to manipulate naive and poorly informed people — that’s the real story.

Lies are everywhere, created and disseminated by internet trolls and armies of bots and talking heads on propaganda outlets posing as reputable news sources. And a big chunk of the American public consumes these lies without healthy skepticism and with seemingly no interest in looking deeper.

Traditionally, a core function of the media has been to fact-check claims and burst bubbles….

Below, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) describes what happens to people grabbed by ICE — so many of whom are guilty of only minor crimes, or nothing at all:

@RepRaskin

• I just exercised my right as a Member of Congress to conduct an unannounced oversight visit of the ICE field facility in Baltimore. The staff I met with respected my right to visit, but what I saw was disgraceful. Kristi Noem has a budget of $75 billion she could use to ensure humane conditions, but we saw 60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets. Whether it’s for three days or seven days, nobody would want a member of their family warehoused there. The room set aside for dangerous criminals and violent offenders was empty. We’re demanding immediate answers and action.

Florida tries to make dissent illegal, sanction bigotry

Jordan Zakarin, Feb 18, 2026 [Progress Report]

…The most concerning of the proposed laws, SB 1632, wouldn’t just prohibit acknowledging diversity, it would essentially criminalize any political organization or activity that the cops don’t like.

The Ideologies Inconsistent with American Principles Act — a name that would make George Orwell blush — would give the Florida Department of Law Enforcement the power designate domestic and foreign terrorist organizations based on vague criteria vulnerable to political manipulation….

The Company Behind the ODNI Election Probe 

[The After-Action Report, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2025]

Goodbye and Good luck, David Brooks 

Robert Reich, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2025]

For four decades, big money has engulfed Washington and many state capitals — increasingly drowning out the voices of average Americans, filling the campaign coffers of candidates who’ll do its bidding, financing attacks on organized labor on immigrants and on trans people, Black people, and Latinos, and bankrolling a vast empire of right-wing hacks, pundits, and politicians.

That David Brooks, among the most thoughtful of all conservative pundits, has not seen or acknowledged this — despite his commendable interest in personal moral development and character — is a sign of how far even the moderate right has moved away from the reality most Americans live in every day.

Dead End: The Necrophilia of Elites (Not That Kind)

Jim Stewartson, Feb 16, 2026 [MindWar]

“By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism” —Erich Fromm

Why do politicians really attack “woke” ideas?

Richard Murphy, February 17, 2026 [Funding the Future]

“Woke” once meant awareness of injustice. Now it is used to mock compassion. This video explains how culture-war language protects wealth and power, and why reclaiming the language of care matters for democracy and economic justice….

Let’s be clear what woke originally meant when the word emerged in its current meaning. Woke meant being:

• alert to injustice,
• alert to racism,
• alert to exploitation,
• alert to inequality.

It was  about awareness of power. It was, in other words, all about political economy.

What has happened to the word since then? The right and much of the media have tried to change its meaning.  They now say, woke means

• caring about inequality,
• caring about minorities,
• caring about the environment,
• caring about things like social security,
• caring about the truth.

In  other words, woke now means, in their opinion, caring about other people, and that’s why they attack it. You could not come up with something more absurd than that….

The Pernicious Myth of Voter ID Laws: Stacey Abrams & Joyce Vance Explain (video)

Joyce Vance and Stacey Abrams, Feb 21, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

What could possibly be wrong with requiring people to show identification to register to vote and to vote? It turns out, a lot. It’s not about addressing voter fraud, because frankly, that’s just not a serious problem, no matter how many times Trump claims it is. ID requirements are about keeping Americans from voting—older Americans, students, Native Americans, people who can’t afford to pay the cost for one of the limited forms of ID that would count, married women, and, of course, Black voters….

This is the time to understand what’s really happening. Next time a friend or neighbor asks, “What’s wrong with needing to show your ID to vote?” I wanted you to be prepared to respond….

Civic republicanism

The Crisis, No. 17 — Towards imagination

Mike Brock, Feb 15, 2026 [Notes from the circus]

…The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States contains one word that has always mattered more than all the others.

Not “liberty.” Not “justice.” Not “union.”

Posterity.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The founders wrote the republic into existence for people who did not yet exist. That sentence — that single, extraordinary act of imagination — is the most radical thing in the entire founding. More radical than the declaration of rights. More radical than the separation of powers. More radical than the overthrow of the king.

Because the founders oriented the republic toward imagination. Toward the unborn. Toward the ones who would inherit the compass and carry it into territory the founders could not see. They did not write for themselves alone. They wrote for the third vertex that had not yet arrived — the new consciousness, the new observer, the child who would one day stand in the tension between memory and imagination and steer.

This is what Jefferson’s substitution meant — the replacement of property with the pursuit of happiness that No. 14 traced to its philosophical roots. Property orients toward memory. It is what you have accumulated, what you hold, what you defend against loss. Happiness orients toward imagination. It is what you are pursuing — the not-yet, the unbuilt, the becoming. Jefferson turned the compass. He pointed the republic toward imagination. Toward the children.

And the founders understood — could not have articulated it in these terms, but understood in their bones — that posterity is not a beneficiary. Posterity is the purpose. The republic does not exist to preserve what was built. The republic exists to make it possible for the ones who come after to keep building….

The Crisis, No. 16 -On the republic of Heaven

Mike Brock, Feb 15, 2026 [Notes from the circus]

Marco Rubio stood in Munich last week and called for the defense of Western civilization…. Rubio is not a historian. He is a politician in Munich wrapping himself in a word that sounds like a fact and functions like a weapon….

The Enlightenment, at its honest best, does not just dissolve the fixed observer. It replaces the observer with an agent. A being who inherits the capacity to create and who discovers, in that inheritance, an obligation. Not because a God commands it. Not because a tradition demands it. Because the structure of consciousness itself — the tension between memory and imagination, the pull between what was lost and what might be made — is not a stillness to be accepted. It is a dynamism to be navigated.

The Eastern tradition teaches us that there is no view from nowhere. Correct.

The Enlightenment teaches us that because there is no view from nowhere, someone must steer.

Watts brought us to the water. The corrective says: now build a ship….

So Heaven must be a republic. A place where no one stands outside. Where the beings who were created inherit the obligation to keep creating. Where the navigation is shared because the three-body problem cannot be solved by a sovereign — it can only be steered by participants. Where God does not reign. Where God does not observe. Where God disappears into the street because the street is where the republic lives — among the citizens, in the tension, steering together.

This is what Paine knew and could not say in these terms.

The American Revolution was not merely political. It was cosmological. The claim that human beings can govern themselves — without a king, without a sovereign, without an authority that stands outside the system and dictates its trajectory — is a claim about the structure of reality. It is the claim that the kingdom model is a lie. Not just a bad form of government. A lie about how the universe works. There is no position above the system. There is no sovereign perspective. There is no one who gets to see the whole trajectory and announce its destination. There are only citizens, standing somewhere, steering.

Monarchy was never just a political arrangement. It was a cosmology. The king ruled because God ruled, and God ruled from outside, and the whole chain of authority flowed from the view from nowhere downward through the stations of power. To overthrow the king was to overthrow the cosmology. To declare that Heaven itself must be reorganized.

The founders did this. Not perfectly. Not completely. Jefferson could write “all men are created equal” while enslaving human beings because the revolution was cosmological in principle and incomplete in practice. The republic was born in contradiction because the three-body problem does not resolve into cleanliness. You steer. You steer imperfectly. You do not get to stop steering because the course is impure….

Day One — Thinking from inside history

Mike Brock, Feb 16, 2026 [Notes from the circus]

…I want to talk about forgiveness.

Not the kind that absolves. Not the cheap kind that says let’s move on before the wound has been examined. The Crisis Papers exist precisely because that kind of forgiveness is a permission structure for repetition. You cannot forgive what you have not named, and you cannot name what you refuse to see.

But the naming is done. We have seen it. We have seen how the view from nowhere operates — in journalism, in economics, in technology, in the invocation of civilizational identity, in every domain where powerful men disguise their choices as descriptions of reality. We have seen who benefits. We have seen who pays. We have seen the triangle and the forces that seek to collapse it.

And now — having seen it — we must forgive ourselves for having allowed it.

I include myself. I built systems inside the machine. I worked in the architecture of the thing I am now critiquing. I did not see clearly enough, soon enough, and by the time I saw, damage had been done that I cannot undo. That is a fact about me and I carry it not as an excuse, but as intelligence. As knowledge of how the corruption enters. As fuel for the building that comes next.

You carry something similar. Maybe you voted for the wrong person. Maybe you stayed silent when you should have spoken. Maybe you watched the hollowing out of the public thing and told yourself it was someone else’s problem. Maybe you unsubscribed from difficult truths because they made you uncomfortable. Maybe you simply lived your life — raised your children, did your work, loved your people — and trusted that the republic would hold without your active participation.

It didn’t hold. Not entirely. And the guilt you feel about that — if you feel it — is not a punishment. It is a signal. It is your consciousness telling you that the orientation toward memory has delivered its message. You have looked at what was lost. You have reckoned with what you allowed. The memory has done its work.

Now turn.

Turn toward imagination. Toward what has not yet been built. Toward the world your children will need. Not because the past doesn’t matter — the past is half the triangle, and without it you navigate blind. But because staying in the past, living in the guilt, cataloging the failures without ever turning to face the future — that is its own form of the view from nowhere. It is observation without action. Diagnosis without treatment. Memory without imagination.

The republic needs you building, not mourning. Forgive yourself. Not so that you can forget. So that you can move….

The Plot Against America, One Year Later — How a dangerous ideology was exposed to the American people — and rejected.

Mike Brock, Feb 17, 2026 [Notes from the circus]

On February 17th, 2026, the Vice President of the United States went on Fox News and told Fox News that Fox News has the worst polling. The anchor — on his side, on his network, in his corner — quietly replied that she could show him other polls that say the same thing.

This is the most powerful government on earth. It is arguing with its own propaganda arm about whether the numbers are real. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is doing cold-water plunges in blue jeans with Kid Rock in official government videos. The regime’s flagship cultural event was a halftime show where the headliner appeared to be lip-syncing. The president demolished the East Wing of the White House to build himself a ballroom and appointed his 26-year-old former receptionist to the arts commission overseeing the project — swearing her in the same day the commission votes on whether to advance it. The president’s response to a sewage crisis on the Potomac is that he’ll fix it if the Democratic governors ask him “politely.”

This is not a government. This is a content house with nuclear weapons. And the content is getting worse.

And if you want the state of the republic rendered in a single image: the president of the United States is demolishing the East Wing of the people’s house — the people’s house — to build himself a ballroom. Res publica means “the public thing.” He is tearing down the public thing, literally, to make room for a party. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop it. That we need a lawsuit to prevent the president from demolishing the White House for personal entertainment tells you everything about where we are….

A political coalition is a group of people who disagree about some things but share enough common ground to govern together. The New Deal coalition was like this. The Reagan coalition was like this. People with different priorities — labor and civil rights, or business and evangelicals — found enough overlapping interest to hold together across election cycles and govern.

MAGA is not this. MAGA is a collection of factions with fundamentally incompatible interests, held together by a single figure and — I will say this plainly — by mutual complicity. The tech oligarchs want deregulation and labor suppression. The populist base wants economic protection and immigration restriction. The libertarians want the state dismantled. The authoritarians want the state captured. The grifters want access. The true believers want transformation. These interests do not overlap. They contradict….

What shared principles hold MAGA together? What is the framework within which Elon Musk and a laid-off factory worker in Ohio find common ground? What ideological commitment unites Peter Thiel’s techno-monarchism with a grandmother in Georgia who wants her Social Security check?

There is none. The binding agent is not ideology. It is the man. And increasingly, it is something darker than the man — it is the web of mutual exposure that makes defection dangerous for everyone inside the coalition. When the binding agent is complicity rather than conviction, the coalition doesn’t have a repair mechanism. It has only two modes: total solidarity or total collapse. There is no middle gear. No deliberation. No compromise. Because compromise requires trust, and trust requires shared ground, and there is no shared ground. There is only shared vulnerability….

Vance attacking Fox News polling on Fox News is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom. The regime is at war with itself across every seam:

DOGE against the federal workforce — and by extension, against every Republican voter who works for the government or depends on its services. The tech oligarchs against the populist base that was promised economic relief and is watching billionaires gut the agencies that serve them. The deportation machine against the business interests that depend on immigrant labor. The tariff regime against the free-trade wing. The authoritarians against the constitutionalists. The loyalty purges against the competence requirements of actually running a government.

Each of these conflicts is structural. None of them can be resolved by presidential fiat, because resolving any one of them means choosing a side, and choosing a side means losing the faction you didn’t choose.

Jon Meacham discusses his new book, “American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union,” ranks bad presidents up to the worst one, with Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz (YouTube video)