Surviving in a Pit of Vipers

I don’t know if these are actually vipers, but it looked really cool.

I spent most of 2025 working on a catalogue of abuses of executive power under the Trump administration, which got me revved up to try to do something about it. I’m making plans for how to return to that, so first let me mention, as part of a roundup of news items, one particularly egregious example.

Pete Hegseth is using the Pentagon budget, your tax dollars, to build his own personal troll army.

Everything Else Is Public Relations

The news just broke recently that a coterie of online military “influencers” has quietly been put on the Pentagon’s civilian payroll, which seems like a way to pay them to put an administration-friendly spin on military news.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material….

Those involved include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, people familiar with the matter said. Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a “.civ” suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors….

In an article published last month by the conservative Daily Caller, Maness argues that Hegseth’s team needs to root out “disloyal” career employees in the department.

You may not recognize most of these names, but I remember Kurt Schlichter, who is pretty much a straight-up fascist who fantasizes about using “the law to ensure blue [state] submission” and “imprison dissenters.”

These writers have not just been providing an administration-friendly spin. They’re giving their readers or listeners a Pete Hegseth-friendly spin, including echoing his beefs with other people in the administration.

Pounds’s secret work for the Pentagon calls into question the motivations of several of her posts, such as when she took a jab at then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a Hegseth nemesis. It also raises serious questions about Secretary Pete Hegseth’s cozy relationship with outspoken conservative social media influencers, and whether it breaches serious ethical norms.

Hegseth has gone to great lengths to limit and muzzle many members of the traditional Pentagon press corps. But secretly employing a shadowy, rabidly online personality for the apparent purpose of going after your enemies is a remarkable illustration of the kind of steps Hegseth appears willing to take to fight internecine political wars.

This follows Hegseth’s attempt to rein in the Pentagon press corps by requiring them to sign a pledge not to “report on information—classified or otherwise—that had not been approved by Hegseth for release”—in other words, a pledge not to engage in journalism. In the words of a famous saying (falsely attributed to George Orwell), “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

Hegseth then replaced independent reporters with a group of conservative flunkies. More recently, he fired the editors of Stars and Stripes in an effort to end the military newspaper’s editorial independence.

Oh, and he’s merely following in the footsteps of his boss. Donald Trump is out waving around FCC threats against the press again, complaining about reporting on polls that show him sinking in popularity and an NBC anchor fact-checking him. It’s another good case for reining in the FCC or maybe just ending it.

The upshot is that this administration is attempting to control every source of the flow of information to the public, particularly about military affairs.

I wonder why they might want to do that?

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The War of the Monkey’s Paw

Oh, here’s why.

Pete Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway, the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said, as he tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war in Iran….

Dan Lamothe, the Post reporter who broke the story, wrote on X that “independent journalism is not a crime” and that such reporting was necessary when officials withhold details about a war funded by taxpayers….

Still, Donald Trump on Monday morning in effect said the war was won.

“Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD!” the president wrote on Truth Social. “They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country.” He accused Iran’s government of killing more than 100,000 protesters and said its leaders “must be tried for war crimes against humanity.”

Neither Trump nor Parnell explained how that squares with what four of the Pentagon’s own commanders had put in writing: that they can’t sustain the war effort as ordered.

The generals were right to issue these warnings. The problem with assuming you can win a war just by dropping the most bombs is what happens if you’ve dropped all your bombs, and you haven’t won the war, so you have to drop more of them until you start to run out. That’s where we are now.

The massive expenditure of US munitions in the Middle East is increasingly worrying Asian allies and frustrating Pentagon officials overseeing the Indo-Pacific, who fear that the prolonged war with Iran could undermine US readiness for a conflict with China as it continues to step up military pressure across the region….

South Korea and other US partners in Asia, including Japan and Taiwan, rely on Washington as the dominant supplier of major conventional weapons and are reckoning with years-long backlogs….

In December, Beijing staged its largest-ever military drill around Taiwan, encircling the democratically governed island with ships and aircraft. Nearly $30 billion in US arms approved for sale to Taiwan have yet to be delivered, including $882 million worth of Patriot missiles, according to Taiwan Security Monitor.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been loath to admit the extent of the damage Iran has managed to do to our bases in the Middle East, which apparently were not prepared for this.

The more we learn about the attacks on the US Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged.

Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus….

The idea that the US could not prevent and defend against a predictable attack on a Fleet Headquarters—and our sailors stationed there—is quite startling. It likely is just as alarming to our allies.

The depth of NSA Bahrain’s impact became clear as the stories of scarcities of parts, food, mail and supplies to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln hit the news. Before long, pieces of the puzzle began falling into place as to the connection between ship supplies and the lack of a familiar resupply source.

We’ve had the Pig War and the War of Jenkins’ Ear, so let’s call this one the “War of the Monkey’s Paw.” We Iran hawks finally got what we said we wanted, but the monkey’s paw twitched, and we got it in the stupidest and most incompetent way.

But why bother getting the ammunition and supplies to actually bomb and defeat the enemy, when you can just fantasize about it with AI slop?

The video, posted to the president’s Truth Social account, appears to show oil storage tanks and refineries erupting in flames from the perspective of someone filming from inside a helicopter above the carnage, with an accompanying message describing the scene as “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens” and signed as “President DJT.”

But a US official said no such attack had taken place, with Kharg Island not being among the locations targeted overnight in what has been the first exchange of fire between American and Iranian forces in weeks.

Fantasizing seems to be President Trump’s main coping method. You can see that in how he’s trying to claim victory in the absurdly self-defeating new trade war he just started—for no reason and with no warning or provocation—against Canada.

This is going to hurt American companies, badly, but Trump will claim victory because he renamed a lake.

President Donald Trump ordered Lake Ontario to be renamed Lake America, the latest broadside in his escalating feud with Canada….

While Trump can change the lake’s name for US government purposes, states and private companies—including those responsible for consumer maps—can decide whether to follow suit.

Placing symbolism over reality is an eternal temptation, particularly in politics and especially in this administration.

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Surviving in a Pit of Vipers

In describing the Trump administration’s machination against the press, it might seem like the pro-Trump “MAGA” media world would be thriving. But it’s not. That’s partly because it’s a pit of vipers, as you can see in the news about conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (about whom I have reluctantly commented once or twice) being deported to the UK—after he lustily cheered on Trump’s deportations of everyone else.

See Will Sommer on why the MAGA media, rather than rallying to Milo’s defense, is cheering on his deportation, and conservative bottom-feeder Laura Loomer is claiming credit for it. Sommer argues “it’s because Yiannopoulos was clear-eyed about the circus that much of right-wing media has become.” Milo knew it was all a con and gleefully exposed the hypocrisy of other conservative provocateurs—one who was having an affair, one who Yiannopoulos claims is secretly gay, one who was skating out on child support.

They’re happy to see him go, and I’ll admit to a bit of schadenfreude myself—leavened by the realization that this is how authoritarian movements always work. It’s always a pit of vipers, with vicious jockeying for power between the opposing factions.

Moreover, this is just one part of a much bigger story: the wide-scale destruction of the right-leaning media and its intellectual infrastructure, such as it was, including some of the places I used to write for.

See, for example, an overview of declining audiences for some top conservative figures.

Experts point to a number of reasons for the changes, including the difficulty in stoking political outrage while Republicans control Washington, along with a quieter midterm season. All content creators are also subject to the whims of algorithms, like on X, which can change without explanation and impact their reach. A fresh generation of influencers, such as Clavicular and the YouTube creator Asmongold, have also siphoned away viewers by speaking about politics alongside other topics like gaming and relationships.

Mr. Fuentes, for instance, saw notable gains in 2025 and early 2026 but is now trending down. “It seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop-off in views from 2025,” Mr. Fuentes wrote in an email. “Seems as though 2025 was the anomaly either due to organic interest or potentially artificial boosting,” he added….

Views for mainstream news websites are also down, the group found. But many right-wing websites have seen larger declines, including The Blaze and The Federalist.

Note that line about artificial boosting. There has been some quiet speculation (and a little reporting) about how the demise of the Orbán regime in Hungary may have choked off funds used to prop up sympathetic nationalist conservatives back in the US.

This highlights something I’ve been warning about for a while, which is that Trumpism is bad for the right-of-center media in general, because Donald Trump doesn’t need intellectuals, all he needs is sycophants. Many of the conservatives who boosted MAGA have found that it is fickle. Having lifted them up, it can just as quickly push them back down. Only the lowest of the low have prospered relative to their previous, well-deserved obscurity. (I remember when Loomer was dismissed as a pathetic tryhard, and now she has the ear of the president.)

That has left a lot of us, unfortunately, in a kind of Uncanny Valley where we’re not firmly on “the left” ideologically, so we don’t fit into their institutions, but we’re not MAGA, so we have no prospects on the right. I can think of only three writers in this category who have really been lifted up to a higher level professionally in the last ten years: Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic, and David French at the New York Times. For the rest of us, it’s a constant struggle.

That’s something I’m finding after my campaign as I go to restart my writing work—that even some of the opportunities I was working on last year have since reduced in scope. And this is happening just as we really need people who will be both alert to the authoritarian assault from the right and clear-eyed about the “democratic socialists” and their own ecosystem of crazy provocateurs.

So one quick request before the last item in this update. I’m doing a short burst of fundraising to get this newsletter back on track and give me time to retool and launch some new projects. I’m working on a master plan for how to revive and ampify a voice for sanity in insane time. So please offer your support.

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The Sea of Slopulism

Speaking of seeing the insanity on all sides, I recommend a good piece from Catherine Rampell on a disturbing surge in bipartisan support for price controls.

A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans would like the government to pass price controls, defined as “laws that limit the amount that companies can raise prices, or charge for products and services.” Even a majority of Republicans (54 percent) favor the idea….

Indeed, both Republicans like President Donald Trump and Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have championed government-established limits on prices as a magic bullet for making Americans’ lives better.

There is zero historical or economic analysis to support their contention that this would make things better. But who needs evidence when you have public opinion?

In fact, I have heard directly from political strategists who believe that radical or heterodox things like price controls should be incorporated into candidates’ economic pitches precisely because they poll well.

The problem is, they’re not quite as popular once people actually experience them.

I really hope I don’t have to remind you why this is such an awful idea.

She goes on to survey a sea of “slopulism” and concludes:

Right now I fear we’re in a sort of economic policymaking race to the bottom. The experts have been ejected by both parties, often replaced with political operatives masquerading as scholars. Their job seems to be to reverse-engineer fake scholarship “proving” the wisdom of whatever policy already polls well. Nobody wants to be the one who tells voters a favorite quick-fix policy won’t work or has tradeoffs.

And brother, I can now tell you all about that from first-hand experience, which I will do in the next installment of my series about what I learned running for office.

For now, suffice to say that we don’t have a political problem or even a moral problem in this country, so much as we have an epistemological problem.